Tag Archives: Lycos Inc.

Wi-Fi for the Masses

It looks like a large Styrofoam takeout container. The 14-pound box would fit into a backpack were it not for the two antennas, set well apart. It can withstand subfreezing temperatures and 165-mph winds; it’s even lightningproof. With the lid bolted down tightly, the box offers no clue as to what’s inside. But disassembled, it reveals intricate innards that look like nothing so much as a city viewed from a plane: A million tiny wires crisscross like streets and weave among square parks the size of your thumbnail. The magic of the box occurs when you mount it on the horizontal arm of a city lamppost, so that its long ears reach up to the sky. Install 30 of them per square mile (which isn’t hard, since an installer using a single tool can put up a unit in 15 minutes) and they immediately begin communicating with one another via radio waves. Data, the same information that flows through the wired Internet, begins traveling between them. Establish some hub connections to usher the data back onto the Net and you’ve created a wireless network that can transmit signals all over real, life-size cities–into parks, schools, juice joints, bars, offices, playgrounds, and homes. The boxes, known as routers or nodes, are made by Tropos Networks, a Silicon Valley upstart that’s landed in the middle of a burgeoning movement among U.S. cities to create municipal wireless networks, or metroscale Wi-Fi–essentially, an effort to deliver wireless bandwidth to the masses. Since Tropos began selling its equipment in 2002, dozens of municipalities have signed up. The Twin Cities suburb of Chaska, Minnesota, built a wireless network to cover its 16 square miles and serve all 18,000 of its residents. Corpus Christi, Texas, bought 300 Tropos nodes to cover 24 square miles and has since decided to expand to 147 square miles. As it rebuilds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans plans to cover the whole town with a Tropos network. This summer, Anaheim, California, will hit the switch, giving 325,000 citizens across 50 square miles ubiquitous broadband Internet access. Tropos-powered networks also are in the offing in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Launched with what Bill Gurley, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tropos investor, calls “four guys under 30 and an algorithm,” the Sunnyvale-based company spent less than $3 million getting its first product to market. Since then, it has grown into the leading equipment provider in this incipient market, with more than $15 million in revenue in 2005 and a projected $45 million in 2006. It has had roughly 350 customers to date–including some in far-flung locales such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Doha, Qatar–and partnerships with EarthLink, Google, Motorola, IBM, and others. Given its recent contracts, the company is well ahead of competing equipment makers. Yet Tropos faces some difficult tests before it can realize its vision. The new, large-scale projects in San Francisco and Philadelphia will get the technology out of dress rehearsal and in front of a major audience. These launches will be key to the company’s fate. As hundreds of other cities look on, contemplating whether to install their own cheap broadband, and as a phalanx of massive data carriers like Verizon and Comcast glower over what may be a new threat, Tropos will march out onstage. Says CEO Ron Sege: “The best thing we can do is make sure the big cities do well, for everyone to say, ‘Oh, my God, it works.” “What Stops the Internet From Being Everywhere?” In San Francisco, there is a new café every year that has “the best coffee in town.” At the moment, it’s Ritual, a chic place in the Mission District with leather couches, wireless Internet, and PowerBooks on every table. The two founding engineers of Tropos–Narasimha Chari, who goes by “Chari,” and Devabhaktuni “Sri” Srikrishna–are sitting at a small table, drinking lattes and reflecting on recent news. About a year ago, the mayor of San Francisco put out a request for proposals, looking for the optimum plan for “unwiring” the city–that is, for creating a citywide Wi-Fi network. Just the day before, out of a half-dozen contenders, the selection had been announced–and Sri and Chari’s list of big wins had gotten one municipal contract longer. But the two men, both 32, scarcely stopped to rest. That’s because each successive contract brings them closer to answering a question that’s intrigued them since they met as undergraduates at Caltech about 15 years ago: “What stops the Internet from being everywhere?” The magic of the box occurs when you mount it on a lamppost. Install 30 of them per square mile, and you’ve created a wireless network that can transmit data all over a city. The inquiry arose out of mutual concerns about India and other developing countries. As a brainy boy growing up in Calcutta, Chari would take long excursions through the city searching for textbooks containing just the kind of math and science materials you can download in seconds today from the Internet; he knew that connecting people in poor and remote regions could be a profound form of change. Sri, for his part, had a deep desire to be useful and an appetite for solving engineering problems. So while attending graduate school in the late 1990s (Sri at MIT, Chari at Harvard), the two men would hang out in the bars around Cambridge and talk about how to get the Internet everywhere on the planet. The intellectual challenge soon became as enticing as the moral one. It was a problem of cost efficiency: How could you bring the power of computer networks to villages hundreds of miles from the nearest cable TV, places where people can’t even afford phones? It was a technical problem, of bouncing signals around in the air over large areas and then back to the nearest data wires. And finally it was a problem of overcoming natural physical limitations: the distance transmitted signals could travel, for one, and the amount of stuff that can be sent simultaneously. “It’s just a very fascinating subject,” says Sri. “We never really set out to start a company.” Any solution had to be dirt cheap. Even in the United States, broadband is so expensive, both to provide and to purchase, that its growth has not kept up with consumer appetites. Today many rural areas around the country have no high-speed data services, simply because it costs so much to dig up the streets and lay wire. Jupiter Research, a market research firm, estimates that 35 percent of Internet users in exurban or rural areas can get only dial-up connections. In some cases, the necessary conduits reach town, but jackhammering the last bit of pavement to serve a smattering of houses is more of a burden than it’s worth. “There are some places where the economics are prohibitively expensive,” says Brian Blevins, a Verizon spokesperson. For Chari and Sri, the alternative to digging would have to be radio, and while drinking beer and poring over dense technical books, they came across a radio technology developed in the 1970s for military uses. The technology worked on battlefields, but its inventors and the engineers who came after assumed that it wouldn’t scale. Sri and Chari thought otherwise. They suspected that if you could program the nodes of these radio networks cleverly enough, teaching them to move information around quickly, you could make the network as big as you wanted. Their idea was a variation on the principle of the bucket brigade or steppingstones. If you can’t get the signal to reach all the way to the wired Internet, make it hop from one transmitter to another until it does. And give it some basic rules for finding the most efficient pathway there. Here at Ritual, for instance, e-mail data comes in over wires to a base station or router somewhere in the room and then heads through the air to the nearby laptop. Everyone in the café is just one hop from the wired Net. This configuration requires every user to be within about 100 feet of the device that’s plugged in, and it’s why wireless broadband is generally limited to offices and cafés. But what if you told that router to select another router for passing along its message, and told that router to select yet another after that? If you taught those routers to make efficient choices that wouldn’t require arduous processing, eventually the Internet would spill out into the streets. Sri and Chari got hold of some Wi-Fi gear–a cheap type of radio technology recently introduced to the enterprise market for office environments–and started playing with their routing ideas. They mounted antennas on cars and tooled around Cambridge, testing the performance of nodes programmed to obey their new steppingstone rules. “When we started doing this,” Chari says, “people laughed at us, saying Wi-Fi is an indoor technology. But our approach has always been, don’t take anyone’s word for it.” The two men soon realized that they were no longer solving a math problem: They were developing a product. So they picked up and left Boston for northern California. They hooked up with two friends of friends who understood finance and formed a company. It was not a particularly opportune time. “In 2001, we were out there looking for funding. It was awful,” says Chari. But Bill Gurley, whose firm, Benchmark Capital, invested early in companies such as eBay and Red Hat, liked their ideas. “I don’t think anyone at that time was thinking about municipal wireless,” Gurley recalls. “But what was keeping Wi-Fi from going outside?” Even in the united states, More than a third of Internet users in exurban or rural areas can get only dial-up connections. Well, nothing. In the United States, most towns already own the infrastructure for suspending 14-pound boxes in the sky: lampposts, traffic lights, telephone poles, city buildings. The Tropos routers themselves cost only about $3,500 each. So with 30 per square mile installed in a city like San Francisco, you’d spend about $5 million on boxes to serve more than 700,000 citizens. According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, building a fiber network costs $2,000 “per home passed,” in the industry’s argot; providing DSL costs a few hundred dollars. Compare both with Philadelphia’s estimate that the cost per home passed of its Wi-Fi network will be $30. On the user end of the equation, the hardware economics look even better. The Wi-Fi cards that early adopters were sliding into their laptops in 1999 went for about $2,000 apiece. Today the devices are preloaded into nearly all new computers and cost less than $10 each. Right now, as Chari and Sri drain their lattes at Ritual, there are an estimated 50 million Wi-Fi-ready computers out there. So Bill Gurley got onboard. He liked the open standards of Wi-Fi technology and how quickly the price on the user’s side was dropping. He loved Chari and Sri’s vision of teaching routers with limited range and capacity how to build bucket brigades and choose the most promising pathways, based on the condition of the network. “It’s very elegant,” Gurley says. He also liked the growth potential of the market and the focus on software. “As a venture capitalist, I love everything about the Tropos model,” he says. In January 2002, Benchmark Capital ponied up $2.2 million for the young company to work with. Other VC firms followed, including the Intel Communications Fund and Siemens Venture Capital. And so did Ron Sege. Good Enough Beats Best Ron Sege (pronounced seh-gee) is a tall stick of a guy with blue eyes and blond eyelashes, whose elaborately stitched jeans were meant for a younger man. At 49, he is on his second wife, his second batch of kids, and the fourth small company he intends to make large. In a sense, Sege is a Web 2.0 guy all around, bringing hard-earned experience to a young company with a still-unproven business model. As he puts it, “I’ve seen this movie before.” Sege began working in technology in the 1980s, but really hit his stride in the ’90s, as a manager at 3Com, the company that spawned Ethernet technology. 3Com had a few hundred employees when he perspective, good enough beats best,” he says. Ethernet, the protocol that allows office PCs to share databases and printers and storage in a small local network, was far from perfect. “But it was inexpensive, easy to use, and anybody could design to it.” Sege learned the beauty of this approach to business–float a quick and dirty product, let users and other product developers improve on it, and push it as a dominant shared platform. “Wi-Fi has many of the same attributes,” he says. After 3Com, Sege took a job as executive vice president of Lycos, one of the first Internet portals, where he helped engineer an Internet-bubble buying spree that included acquisitions of Matchmaker.com, Quote.com, and Wired Digital. “That was my media mogul period,” Sege says with a laugh. He left Lycos in 2001 and joined Ellacoya Networks, a company based in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that creates software to help broadband providers ease congestion in their networks. Bill Gurley, tipped off by a Benchmark partner who’d worked with Sege in the past, saw in the Ellacoya CEO someone who’d ridden small companies through significant growth and who understood a good deal about data networks. He contacted Sege and told him about Tropos. The company made sense to Sege. Taking off-the-shelf indoor base stations and sticking them up on power poles–that was a formula he understood. Sri and Chari had already come up with the tricks, the proprietary algorithms for handling data traffic and monitoring the system from one main PC, which would set Tropos apart from its direct competitors. (The company has 30 software patents and patents pending.) In 2004, Sege came onboard–”to do all the stuff not involved with writing software.” At first, that meant selling Tropos boxes and software to a small but eager market the start-up had identified: police and fire departments. After September 11, the consequences of poor emergency communications became painfully clear to city leaders nationwide, and many municipalities were attempting to do something about it. What few civilians realize is that their heroes with hoses and their men and women in blue have always relied on only one of their senses for passing information: their ears. They use the same two-way radio technology today that police departments adopted in the 1930s. Some forces have introduced computers into their cruisers for searching DMV or criminal databases, but these hookups are as slow as your first dial-up modem. Forget about downloading a mug shot. Maps, surveillance videos, traffic updates, real-time messaging? Impossible. What emergency responders need is broadband. And it has to be broadband that’s everywhere, broadband that moves. Tropos could deliver that. Sege traveled the country, giving presentations to police and fire departments, steadily signing up customers. Oklahoma City bought Tropos technology to build a network for its police department covering 620 square miles. In Milpitas, California, about 10 miles from the Tropos headquarters, a 40-node Tropos mesh allows police to look up DMV photos and monitor video surveillance of high-crime areas. So Sege and his team were surprised in the spring of 2004 when they got an order from Chaska, Minnesota, a Twin Cities suburb that wasn’t looking to serve its police force. The town’s city council wanted cheaper connectivity–for all of its residents, who were stuck paying $45 per month for high-speed access from Sprint and Time-Warner Cable. The goal was to provide broadband access for all of its citizens for no more than $20 a month. “Tropos was selling a system for public safety departments. Our IT guys thought, ‘Why couldn’t you do 3,000 connections instead of 300?” says Chaska’s city administrator, Dave Pokorney. For Tropos, this was exhilarating. Chaska had come up with this plan on its own, with no help from Tropos, which was focusing its efforts on public safety. The company had helped create networks designed to serve the general public, but only in parks or other circumscribed areas. Chaska was out ahead of them–and within three months, the city had a real-life metroscale network available to anyone in town. Sleeping Giants Everyone at Tropos agrees on what made the company take off. It happened in August of 2004, when Philadelphia, the largest municipality to date to do so, announced plans to blanket the city with Wi-Fi. The idea was to deliver cheap, and possibly free, broadband Internet access to the 1.5 million souls–digital haves and have-nots alike–who lived within the city’s 135 square miles. This was a bold, pioneering step, lauded by civic groups and techies around the country. But the news hit one party particularly hard: Verizon. At the time, the vast majority of Philadelphians who wanted fast connections to the Web had been coming to Verizon for DSL. Now the company would have a new competitor. The proverbial sleeping giant was caught off guard. It’s one thing to build a wireless network for 8,000 households in the suburbs of Minnesota. But it’s something else entirely to do so in one of the nation’s biggest metros. Verizon’s lobbyists marched straight to state lawmakers in Harrisburg and demanded action. And they got it. A telecommunications bill that had been lingering around the capital for more than a year suddenly came up for a vote, and it had a brand-new provision attached to it. The measure said that Pennsylvania cities intending to create high-speed data networks must give the dominant local phone company the right to build first. If the incumbent proceeded within 14 months, the city would be required to drop its plans. For the leaders of Philadelphia, that meant doing nothing for more than a year before getting their project under way. It also meant that cheaper service–some subsidized for the poor–would happen only at the whim of Verizon. But the prospect of an Internet cloud floating through every park and into the city’s overlooked neighborhoods had already intrigued many Philadelphians, and the state legislature’s intervention galvanized people to protect the idea. “The school district, the nonprofits that wanted to serve poor neighborhoods, even our tourism organizations saw the potential,” says Dianah Neff, Philadelphia’s chief information officer and a 14-year veteran of Silicon Valley businesses. “When the legislation came up, we put the pressure on. We had 3,000 people call, write, and e-mail the governor.” Tropos, which already had been tapped to install two pilot projects in public parks, watched the events unfold. Sege hired a Washington lobbying firm, which showed up in Harrisburg, attempting to sway leaders to spare local governments from restrictions. In late November 2004, just as the bill was approved, Philly’s Wi-Fi enthusiasts got a break. “It was almost like diving to get the catch in the end zone,” says Sege. The state agreed to exempt Philadelphia from the requirements. (All other Pennsylvania municipalities remain bound by it.) The way Sege sees it, Verizon’s in-your-face tactics were the best thing that had ever happened to the start-up. The giant telecom’s reaction made dozens of other cities take notice. If Verizon was so ruffled, people seemed to think, then Philadelphia must have been on to something interesting; the technology’s potential must be real. “The phone was ringing off the hook,” says Sege. Cities around the country, from Minneapolis to Tempe, Arizona, began announcing plans for wireless networks. Several months later, the technology was validated by another waking giant when Cisco announced it would begin building routers for muni Wi-Fi. Tropos sales went from 90 municipal clients in all of 2004 to 75 in just the first half of 2005. The next step in the Philadelphia project was to respond to the city’s RFP, and Tropos now had to get down to details. The company had the gear and the software for monitoring and troubleshooting the network, but there was a lot the small company was lacking. Customer service for one thing. And billing. And consumer sales. Rather than build those capabilities in-house, Sege began searching for an established Internet service provider with which to partner. EarthLink fit the bill. The ISP, based in Atlanta, had thrived as a middleman, buying wholesale dial tone, wrapping it up in an attractive brand, and selling it to Internet surfers. But as the world shifted to faster wires and fiber optics, EarthLink had little to offer. Unlike the phone companies, it owned no connections into the home. In January 2005, Bill Gurley paid a visit to EarthLink’s board of directors. He presented his case for a partnership, in which Tropos would provide infrastructure–the actual broadband network–and EarthLink would handle customer support and sales. In response to Gurley’s presentation, EarthLink sent a team to visit Chaska to see for themselves if the new technology worked. The group toured the town and climbed under tables testing the network’s reliability. They interviewed folks in bars. And they were sold on it. “Municipal Wi-Fi is really important for us,” says Donald Berryman, EarthLink’s president of municipal networks. “It’s one of the top three investments we’re making in future products. It can help us control our destiny because we’ll own the network.” Tropos and EarthLink have since landed deals with five cities and have proposals out to five more. But Will It Really Work? Not surprisingly, the Bells and other data-access providers haven’t backed down. Since the maneuver in Pennsylvania, giants like BellSouth and Comcast have fueled a fight against muni Wi-Fi across the country. Lawmakers in Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, and Oregon, among others, have proposed legislation to keep local governments from building their own networks or at least make it more difficult for them to do so. Fourteen states, including Florida and Colorado, have already passed restrictions. “We have not supported a ban on municipal networks,” says Verizon’s Brian Blevins. “But we’ve felt where there’s vibrant competition, the networks can undercut and disrupt a market that’s working very well.” Critics of muni Wi-Fi argue that if local governments participate in building broadband networks, they’ll exploit unfair tax and regulatory advantages, irresponsibly drain public coffers, and mismanage the services. To counter the legislative gambit, Sege and others have taken to evangelizing in Washington, D.C., and state capitals. They’ve made some progress. In June 2005, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced a federal bill in answer to the activity in the states. The Community Broadband Act of 2005, still in committee, would “preserve and protect the ability of local governments to provide broadband capability and services.” Says one Lautenberg staffer: “The senator doesn’t think there should be obstacles–we’re 16th in the world in terms of broadband penetration.” A bill awaiting a vote by the House, on the other hand, would create barriers–for instance, requiring cities to partner with a private company. A restriction like that, though seemingly innocuous, would have prevented Chaska from building its network. These policy struggles are not the only hurdles Tropos is facing as it lunges for profitability in 2007. There are big technical questions. It’s one thing to build a wireless network for 8,000 households in the suburbs of Minnesota. But it’s something else entirely to do so in one of the nation’s biggest metros. “Nobody’s demonstrated that you can have 135 miles of Wi-Fi,” says Julie Ask, a research director at Jupiter Research. Radio signal is notoriously unpredictable. When your cell phone drops out every time you round the corner of Elm Street, that’s because the mobile provider didn’t predict a problem there. Home devices from cordless phones to baby monitors might cause interference. Tempe, Arizona, where Tropos competitor Strix Systems provided 500 wireless routers, discovered that signal wasn’t getting through house walls beyond 150 yards from the routers. Many Tempe users found they needed an additional $100 device to receive and send data from indoors. Tropos could face similar problems. Dozens of municipalities have joined in, but there is not much of a record. “As a mayor, why wouldn’t you say, ‘I want to bridge the digital divide’?” says Ask. “EarthLink wants to point to Philadelphia and say, ‘Hey, it works,’ but until there’s proof…” After a city government invests $20 million, no users will be happy if their connections go down or their webpages load slowly. The last thing Tropos needs is for annoyed customers to head back to Verizon. Another looming question is what business models will work. Will consortia like the EarthLink-Tropos team for San Francisco prove easy for cities and profitable for the participating companies? Will the Bells hedge their bets and start offering their own systems? Will cities build their own public Internet utilities, just as many today deliver power without the help of private entities? In any of these scenarios, Tropos’ business doesn’t change. The Bells, the city governments, the ISPs–they’ll all need to buy boxes from someone. As experiments are made and the best models emerge, Sege insists that Tropos will stay relevant. First, of course, he has to deal with Philadelphia, which is building its 15-square-mile test area this summer and plans to roll out the full network in 2007. “I honestly believe that a lot of people are waiting to say, ‘We told you it wouldn’t work,” Sege says. Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff doesn’t seem to mind that tension. “There’s a lot of pressure on Tropos and EarthLink. But that’s to our benefit because they’re trying really hard,” she says. “It’s like you live in a fishbowl. It’s not just other cities, but the world that’s watching.” Martha Baer is co-author of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World. This is her first story for Inc.

Lucky or Smart

My career from ages 18 to 28: In 1991, as a college freshman, I had an idea for an online service offering “real life” education to college students: practical advice about jobs, personal finance, and health. I made the simple observations that no one was teaching us these subjects in the classroom, and that computers — rather than books or TVs — had become the primary medium of communication and entertainment. During my sophomore year, Dick Sabot, a very smart Oxford-trained Ph.D. in economics and the professor of a class in which I received a B-minus, agreed to collaborate with me on my concept. He did so not because I was his best student, but because he had had a near-death experience during which a higher power advised him to do “something different.” By 1994, when I graduated from college, our project had indeed become something different: an Internet start-up company we named Tripod. Using what little cash I could raise from friends and family, I hired a team of computer programmers. I did this because I did not know how to install a web browser on my own computer, which is a significant barrier if you plan to run an Internet company. Unbeknownst to me, and surely with some sort of anarchic motive, these lawless, long-haired, multi-pierced, tattooed, incredibly charming and smart hacker hooligans built a piece of software on Tripod that had nothing to do with offering practical advice to anyone. Instead, this software gave individuals the power to publish their own “personal homepages.” By 1995, the popularity of the Tripod Homepage Builder was growing rapidly and had far surpassed my original idea to offer college students “practical advice.” It occurred to me that I might have a business on my hands. Having never written a business plan, I went to the local library and checked out a book called — you guessed it — How to Write a Business Plan. In August 1995, Netscape went public and proved that Internet companies had value. Or at least proved that Wall Street investment bankers had convinced the stock-buying public that Internet companies had value. One month later, I was able to convince New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s most respected venture capital firms, to review the Tripod business plan. They agreed to do so only because Dick’s wife’s brother’s college roommate knew someone who knew someone at NEA. NEA liked the plan because it mentioned the Internet several hundred times. It provided $3 million in financing. By the beginning of 1996, one year after it was launched, the Tripod Homepage Builder had fundamentally changed the nature of consumer media. For the first time, anyone with access to a computer and a connection to the Internet could publish pretty much whatever they wanted; and anyone else with access to a computer and a connection to the Internet could view it. By the middle of 1997, Tripod had attracted nearly one million registered members. Tripod never posted a profit. Tripod generated barely any revenue. On December 30, 1997, in the middle of the stock-market bubble, I was offered $58 million for Tripod. On December 31, 1997, I agreed to sell Tripod in exchange for $58 million in stock of a publicly traded company named Lycos, which at the time was an Internet company only slightly more stable than Tripod. I agreed to a “lockup” that forbade me to sell all of my Lycos stock for two years. Over those two years, I watched the value of my Lycos stock increase tenfold. By December 31, 1999, at the height of the bubble and just a few months before the market crashed, I had sold nearly every share of my Lycos stock. I invested the majority of those proceeds in bonds and real estate because they were the only two investment vehicles I could thoroughly understand. And because I needed a house. By now, I hope my theme has become obvious. Luck is a part of life, and everyone, at one point or another, gets lucky. Luck is also a big part of business life and perhaps the biggest part of entrepreneurial life. At the very least, entrepreneurs must believe in luck. Ideally, they can recognize it when they see it. And over time, the best entrepreneurs can actually learn to create luck. Luck in business is different from regular old luck, like when you find $20 on the sidewalk. First of all, being lucky in business has an intoxicating underbelly called believing you’re smart. No one actually believes that he should take credit for finding $20 on the sidewalk. But when people get lucky in business, they are often convinced that it is not luck at all that brought them good fortune. They believe instead that their business venture succeeded thanks to their own blinding brilliance. The big challenge is that everyone — the press, your shareholders, your colleagues, your significant other, and your parents — will work hard to convince you otherwise. They will tell you, over and over again, that you are in fact a genius and should take complete credit for all the great things happening to your company. Why? Because to them, you are one of the following: A source of professional gain A source of financial gain A boss A lover Their pride and joy None of these relationships provide incentive for any of these people to tell you the cold hard truth about your entrepreneurial success: You may have gotten just plain lucky. The second difference between business luck and everyday luck is that luck in business can be created, whereas everyday luck cannot. You can’t will yourself to find $20 on the sidewalk. But you can create a company that gets lucky more often than the average company. Indeed, there is a pseudo-scientific formula for creating business luck. The key element is this: Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies. Why? Because lots of smart people will gather around companies with these qualities. As it turns out, precious few such companies exist. And the vast majority of human beings, and certainly most of the smart ones, are constitutionally caring creatures who would, if given the chance, prefer to spend their valuable time in a positive setting contributing to the betterment of society rather than in a negative setting contributing to its detriment. Shocking, I know, but true. And when smart, inspired people gather around a fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive company, they work very hard. And when smart, inspired people work very hard, serendipity ensues. Serendipity — the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance — causes lots of unexpected things to happen to a company. Some of these unexpected things are good. Some are bad. But because no one planned for the good things to happen, they appear as luck. In other words, the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure that a lot of things happen. It’s really that simple. Much of what makes a company fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive is contained not in the company’s business model, but in how the entrepreneur communicates the mission of the company. A company’s mission, communicated by the entrepreneur with charisma and passion, is what creates the environment that attracts smart people and gets them inspired in the first place. Which is exactly what gets the luck rolling. Tripod made what money it did by selling advertising to clients such as Ford and Visa. That was our business model. But Tripod’s mission, as I described it to my colleagues, was to revolutionize consumer media, allowing anyone to publish his or her views to the entire world using the Tripod Homepage Builder. Suddenly, almost overnight, the stories, viewpoints, and opinions of every individual, interest group, or culture could be made available for others to grapple with. “Tripod isn’t here just to make money,” I told my colleagues. “We are here to fight the most important battles on the frontier of the First Amendment!” Mezze, the restaurant group I later co-founded in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, serves food and drink to locals and to tourists from New York City and Boston. That’s our business model. But the mission of Mezze is larger: to set an example of quality and service for all the Berkshires’ retail establishments. I tell our staff that by working hard to refine Mezze, we raise the bar for everyone. And that by doing so, we will together attract more visitors to our small part of the world. Village Ventures, the venture capital firm I co-founded in 2000, makes money by taking advantage of the supply and demand imbalance that results from the concentration of venture capital in only a few large cities. That’s our business model. But the mission of Village Ventures is different: to enable entrepreneurs to start companies in the towns where they want to live. Rather than having to flee to Boston or San Francisco to find venture capital, entrepreneurs in Boise, Idaho, and Providence, R.I., can get capital from Village Ventures right in their own hometowns and build their companies in the same place they’d like to raise their families. Missions such as those of Tripod, Mezze, and Village Ventures create an aura of authenticity, which is the elixir that attracts smart people and inspires them. There is little authenticity in the modern business world. But it’s just the thing that people crave most in their work. When people find themselves aboard one of these vessels, they don’t want to get off. They form a fierce protective boundary around it and will do anything to keep the vessel afloat and its inhabitants alive. These people are liberated by finding not only a way to make money but also a way to feel good about it. This is what takes inspiration and turns it into hard work. And the results of smart people working hard are serendipity and luck. Marty Liebowitz, the vice chairman and chief investment officer of TIAA-CREF, one of the world’s largest pension funds, once said to me, “Thank God they created the word ‘muffin’ or I’d be eating a cupcake for breakfast.” Words are incredibly powerful, sometimes causing us to do things that we would never normally do. It is for just this reason that I harbor a tremendous amount of guilt about my place in entrepreneurial culture. I fear that perhaps thousands of well-intentioned people wasted hundreds of thousands of hours pursuing entrepreneurial projects in part because of what they read in the press about me. I created a sort of playboy persona for myself as the CEO of Tripod. Pictures of me skiing, mountain biking, drinking beer, skateboarding in the office, and attending meetings in shorts, Birkenstocks, and a baseball cap graced several major media outlets. From Forbes to ABC’s Nightline, from BusinessWeek to People, from MTV to Spin, the media broadcast images of me doing just about everything but working. I absolutely, completely, 100% sold myself to the media to promote Tripod. Together, we created this image of the Slacker CEO: an athletic, shaggy-haired, perpetually mellow 24-year-old making millions while barely lifting a finger. This image was broadcast not just in the United States but also to most of Europe. In five days during the summer of 1999, I jetted from Madrid to Milan, to Hamburg, to Paris, and finally to London, attending launch parties for Tripod Europe, staying in first-class hotels, and internationalizing the Slacker CEO myth of which I had become the archetypal example. Hell, who wouldn’t want to be an entrepreneur? I was a rock star. And I was the only person who knew it wasn’t true. Friends would ask me, “What’s it like to be a famous international Internet CEO?” “I’m not a famous international Internet CEO,” I would answer. “But I play one on TV.” Working with the media was the most important job I had at Tripod. Period. Twenty-four-year-old Bo Peabody, with his hip Internet company in the mountains, was a perfectly packaged pied piper for the story of the decade. I was not only Tripod’s poster child, I was shilling the whole goddamn Internet. And when it came to promoting these two things, the only self-respecting thing I ever did was turn down an interview on Montel. How noble. I’ve often kidded that 90 percent of Tripod’s value was in the amount of press we received in such a concentrated period of time. Sitting at a board meeting, lamenting our anemic revenue, I once joked to the board of directors that rather than actually running ads on the Tripod site, I’d sell potential advertising customers the opportunity that I might mention them in an article or wear their logo on my baseball cap. The board didn’t laugh. They asked me to look into whether or not this plan was possible. A lot was left out of all those articles. The hundred-hour workweeks. The anxiety attacks. The crashed cars and missed planes. The times I had to tell colleagues that we couldn’t make payroll. The years of a $12,000 salary. Night after night after night of pasta dinners and stress-relieving Advil “cocktails.” The countless meetings with absolute assholes who had no interest in learning about the Internet, the single most significant business innovation of their lifetimes. Pleading to venture capitalists for financing. Firing perfectly pleasant people when they didn’t perform. In the late nineties, this reality did not sell newspapers and magazines. Baseball caps and Birkenstocks did. Had I actually begun to believe what was being said about me in the press, I would never have sold Tripod when I did. I would have reasoned, instead, that I was in fact a genius, and that I should take complete credit for the great things happening to my company. Never mind that Tripod had little revenue, no profits, and an unproven business model; we should take this horse public! “Yeah,” I could have said, “I am smart, not lucky, and I can defy economic gravity. I am in control!” Wrong. Tripod was all hat and no cattle. Had we taken it public, we would most likely have failed, and everyone, including many unsuspecting individual in-vestors, would have lost a lot of money. I was not, however, completely immune to the media frenzy. Following the sale of Tripod to Lycos, what personal money I did not invest in bonds or real estate I invested in more than 20 Internet start-ups. Only five of these companies are still in business. The others are gone, along with a few million of my dollars. The quickest way to tank your company is to believe what you read in the press, especially if it happens to be about you. The vast majority of journalists are not interested in covering what is actually happening. They are interested in covering what they think people want to think is actually happening. Everything is sensationalized. In 1999 it was sensationalized on the positive side, and in 2002 it was sensationalized on the negative side. It’s never exactly accurate. As it turns out, accuracy can be quite boring. And quite boring does not sell newspapers and magazines. Learn to keep your ego in check. That’s how you’ll be able to distinguish the crucial difference between being lucky and being smart. Your ego is both the most dangerous and the most useful weapon in your entrepreneurial arsenal. When used wisely, ego helps entrepreneurs craft their mission, work hard, and keep faith in their companies, even in the face of heavy scrutiny. Ego also gives entrepreneurs the confidence to sell their start-ups to partners, customers, and investors, and the courage to act like famous international CEOs even when they know they really are just playing a role. And ego is the force that allows entrepreneurs to get comfortable with their powerlessness and learn to love the word “no” instead of panicking in the face of it. On the other hand, when allowed to run amok, ego keeps entrepreneurs from knowing what they don’t know and tempts them to believe their own press. Ego is also the culprit when entrepreneurs cling to their role as founder rather than turning their companies over to more capable managers. And ego is to blame when entrepreneurs can’t work with odd people who are clearly smarter than they are, or when they fail to remain calm and gracious in all business situations. Use your ego when it is called for, and check it at the door when you sense that it will get in the way. Unchecked egos are the most destructive force in business. I have often dreamed of a study that somehow measures the impact of ego on workplace productivity. The results, I imagine, would be staggering, with as much as a 50 percent increase in productivity resulting from the eradication of egos. In an ego-free company, all good ideas from all sources would be implemented. Managers would hire only people smarter than themselves, and would never spend valuable time worrying about who gets credit for what. Meetings would be shorter, as no one would feel the need to drone on in an effort to impress his colleagues and managers. In a business world devoid of egos, profits would rise, salaries would increase, and unemployment would plummet. In all seriousness: A number of the planet’s problems would be solved. But it will never happen. As it turns out, businesses consist of human beings, and most human beings have either tragically fragile egos or uncontrollably big ones. All we can do is make an effort to control our own egos. As hard as it may be, there are real incentives to do so. If I had let my ego go unchecked, I would never have let those crazy programmers put the Homepage Builder on Tripod. The Homepage Builder, after all, was not my idea. Moreover, it was the idea of people who were clearly smarter than I was. Someone who was insecure would have declared the Homepage Builder a distraction, a waste of time, inappropriate for the Tripod audience, too expensive, too risky, or any of the other excuses that those with fragile egos use to fortify their own power bases. But the fact is, the Homepage Builder was the foundation of Tripod’s success. The day we launched that little piece of software, we enrolled more members than in the entire previous month. It was like watching the Gold Rush all over again: The automated-membership counter ticked away as hundreds of strangers from all over the world signed up on Tripod and staked a claim to their little piece of Internet real estate. In the end, my original idea for Tripod — practical advice for college students — was completely consumed by the popularity of the Tripod Homepage Builder. At one point, Tripod was the eighth most trafficked site on the Internet. Our membership base spanned every age and more than 40 countries. Now, as part of the Terra Lycos network, Tripod has 40 million members, from virtually every country on the planet. Had I stuck religiously to my original idea, the best thing that could have happened to Tripod would have been my being fired as its CEO. More likely, it would have ended up on the pile of failed dot-com start-ups that now symbolize an age of ego and excess. Without the Homepage Builder, Tripod most likely would have failed, and my life would have taken a different direction. Without the success of Tripod under my belt, Village Ventures would probably not have received the funding and support it has. And without Village Ventures, the four other start-ups I helped found — Mezze, VoodooVox, Waterfront Media, and FilmFree Entertainment — would most likely not be flourishing to the degree they are. Was I lucky? You bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize that I was getting lucky. This article was adapted from Bo Peabody’s book, Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life (Random House, December). Peabody (bpeabody@villageventures.com) is the managing general partner of Village Ventures.

Why Disney and AT&T Went Astray in Dot-comland

Newspaper headlines are filled with reports describing the demise of dot-com firms. The rapid reversal of fortunes, however, has not been limited to pure-play Internet companies. Some of the largest losses on the Internet have occurred on the books of Fortune 500 companies. Consider this: Disney recently reported that it would take a charge of more than $790 million related to restructurings within its Internet group. This amount was dwarfed, however, by an even greater icon of U.S. business. AT& T reported that it would take a noncash charge totaling $2.7 billion related to its investment and control of Excite@Home. Both Disney and AT& T are seasoned companies that have weathered numerous business cycles. It would be easy to believe that their management teams were caught up in Internet hype, which led to these massive losses. A deeper examination, however, shows a more subtle cause. In both cases, high executive turnover combined with hand-waving business plans that had a high assumption-to-knowledge ratio led to faulty decision-making at both companies. Business plans for new ventures involve many assumptions; that comes with the territory. Creating a vision of the future and then working backwards to assess how to achieve it requires educated guesswork. Inevitably, many guesses turn out to have been wrong. That is why companies entering unfamiliar markets must continually test assumptions, adjust their tactics, and then readjust their assumptions in a never-ending forward march. That, in part, was where things went awry at AT& T and Disney: A prolonged game of musical chairs in the executive corridors led to translation errors in the business plan. Just as in the childhood game of telephone, where a message is passed between a number of people and the ultimate message is grossly distorted from the original message, assumptions in the business plan were translated into certainties. Take Disney first. In 1995 the company was looking to enter the brave new World Wide Web arena. The depth of Disney’ s ambitions was widely noted. Jim Cramer, founder of TheStreet.com, a financial news and analysis website, reported that “there was a period of a couple of years where Disney acted as if it were the king of the web.” Despite its ambitions, Disney’ s online operations began in a modest manner. The first version was called Disney Online and consisted of interactive websites for Disney properties. Some of these were instant hits. ABCNews.com, ESPN.com, Mr. Showbiz, and Disney.com were all considered niche successes. Disney then decided to create a broad-based portal. The reasons were clear. Although the Disney stock was in a mild upward trend, it did not have the explosive growth of broad portals such as Yahoo or AOL. The Disney management saw this move as a way to rapidly create shareholder value. In addition, it allowed Michael Eisner to convey a clear, simple Internet strategy. It was easy for executives to rally around this strategy, and Disney had the media assets to make it plausible. Moreover, by 1996 the only metric of significance to portal performance was Media Metrix – a website that measures online traffic. By themselves, the focused Disney media sites would never be able to achieve enough traffic to register on this rating. In 1998 Disney created the Buena Vista Internet Group by merging its assets sites with a search engine, Infoseek. The deal was structured so that Infoseek got $70 million in cash, a $139 million five-year note, at least $165 million in promotion, and Starwave (a web-development outfit valued at approximately $350 million). Disney got 43% of Infoseek’ s shares, along with warrants, that when exercised would give Disney a 50.5% stake. However, the success of this new venture hinged on one critical assumption – that at this time in the portal wars, Disney’ s ability to promote across its “offline” network was sufficient to leverage itself into a new brand, Go.com At that time, this seemed a plausible assumption. Most portals had grown without any advertising simply as a result of word-of-mouth, or as some might say, word-of-mouse. Although Yahoo had the fastest growth rate among portals, absolute traffic numbers for Excite.com, Lycos, Yahoo, and Infoseek weren’ t that far apart. In comparison to pure-play portals, Disney also had another huge advantage: It was a bricks-and-mortar company with a vast arsenal of off-line promotion possibilities including theme parks, cruise ships, and retail stores. A member of a prominent strategy consulting firm that evaluated Disney’ s Internet operations says it just wasn’ t known how off-line promotion would deliver Internet traffic but that there was no logical reason it couldn’ t. That was one of Disney’ s most significant assumptions. Disney acted on its strategy cautiously, seemingly testing its assumptions. The Go.com portal rolled out slowly with only a small number of features. Some observers saw the slow rollout as a mistake, considering the immense growth rates of its competitors – but it did show that Disney was going through initial testing of product features. Harry Motro, CEO of Infoseek, told consulting firm Forrester Research that heavy offline promotion wouldn’ t start until the following year. Disney was not planning a major media blitz for more than six months as it tested various product/promotion bundles. The Go.com portal was making progress. Forrester reported that “offline media helped boost GO Networks’ reach from 25% of online users in December 1998 to 33% in June 1999.” At the same time, Disney executives were rapidly defecting. With a stagnant stock price, especially in comparison to pure-play Internet companies, and the scarcity of experienced media executives, Disney was ground-zero for recruiters. Jim Cramer recently described his experience with Disney at that time. “People kept getting deposed and new rulers were installed with regularity.” Akther Ahmed, president of Xavient Technologies, said “having Disney on your resume was all you needed for an offer.” Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, acted to stop the defections. He bought the remainder of Infoseek and created a tracking stock in order to create Internet-style options-based compensation. Disney then began to marshal its massive “offline” assets to promote Go.com. The assumption that this would be effective had become a truism around the company. One former NBCi executive claims that the web-marketing notion that companies should “use offline assets to build online traffic” originated at Disney. By this time, however, the data was available to test this assumption. Go.com was getting some 50 million pageviews a day while Yahoo was getting more than 300 million daily pageviews and more. In addition, most of the Go.com traffic was coming from the Infoseek search engine, which was itself getting new competition from rivals such as Google.com and Dogpile.com. “If the slowdown in growth was known, Disney likely would have chosen a different organization of its assets and might have succeeded,” says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. “It likely wouldn’ t have stayed with the alternate (GO) brand.” Disney took another year to come to that realization. After months of heavy advertising, Go.com had little to show except for a $242 million operating loss. Following one last attempt to reposition Go.com into an “entertainment and leisure” destination site, Disney shut it down. Go.com continued to exist as a website, though in a much tamer form that primarily offered links to other Disney sites. On January 29, Disney announced that it would dissolve its online tracking stock, Disney Internet Group, converting its shares into common stock on the parent company as of March 20. Each outstanding share of the tracking stock was to be converted into a 0.19353 of a share of Disney common stock. As a result of the restructurings, a charge of $790 million was related to the write-off of intangible assets. Another $25-50 million in charges were attributed to severance and the write-off of fixed assets. Just as Disney’ s Go.com went astray, AT& T ran into serious trouble with Excite@Home. The company’ s long-standing profits from long-distance services were rapidly disintegrating, and it was looking for ways to capture a greater share of the consumer’ s wallet. One way to do this was to deliver both voice and Net access to consumers. Regulation prevented AT& T from getting direct access customers without going through the regional Bell companies, which still dominated the local phone services business. Cable access seemed like a promising way to reach the end consumer, and AT& T began a massive buying spree of cable properties. One of AT& T’ s most significant cable acquisitions was TCI, which owned a significant stake in Excite@Home and also used its exclusive high-speed Internet service by contract. By acquiring TCI, AT& T inherited the relationship. AT& T’ s management was primarily interested in gaining access to consumers and the Excite@Home assets just added value to the deal. AT& T made the assumption that this strategy would allow the company to create a content-access bundle that could get premium pricing. This was a foray into unknown territory for AT& T. According to Wharton professor G. Anandalingam, “It’ s okay to be opportunistic, but it’ s a very different matter to make the opportunism work.” AT& T repeatedly said that it did not want to be in the content business. Immediately, the assumption was put to a test on all these issues. Numerous counties, including Oregon’ s Multnomah County and Broward County in Florida, refused to transfer their local cable franchises over to AT& T. The accusation was the bundling of access-content, and the communities – and America Online – demanded that AT& T open its access channels to other content providers. AT& T, however, had a solid management team that understood this issue, led by Leo Hindery. A vice president at a large cable company who requests anonymity says that “TCI’ s CEO John Malone and Leo Hindery understood this assumption and how to navigate through it.” Hindery even made a speech at Stanford Graduate School of Business entitled “The Future of Content.” Through a variety of actions, Hindery made it known that AT& T would be better off selling access to its pipes to whatever content providers were willing to pay, rather than bundling proprietary content with access. The most plausible strategy seemed to be to divest the stake in Excite, a content portal, in order to allow open access to other content providers. Hindery then resigned to pursue personal interests. Malone was busy running Liberty Media and wasn’ t operationally near these issues. Also, the top leaders at Excite – Tom Jermoulak, followed soon after by George Bell – resigned. These events were followed by a continual departure of executives from AT& T and Excite@Home. The new management executed a plan that was based on a premium priced content-access bundle. Responding to America Online’ s acquisition of Time Warner, AT& T began to assemble its own broadband Internet service. It was as if an assumption that had already been proven wrong now was suddenly being acted upon, as if it were a given in the plan. AT& T offered to buy out the stakes of two minority partners in @Home, Comcast and Cox, at a 27% premium. AT& T also took over 74% of Excite@Home voting stock and consolidated financial statements which diluted its 2000 earnings by 20 cents a share. In addition, AT& T extended its own non-exclusive carriage of @Home to 2008, six years past the expiration of its exclusive carriage of @Home in June 2002. At the same time, it was stated that after June 2002, other Internet service providers and portals would share that space. Initial deals were struck with Mindspring and Earthlink. Not surprisingly, the value of Excite, already at a 52-week low, plummeted which showed up in AT& T’ s books. Ironically, Excite@Home took a $4.6 billion write-down of its assets from its content acquisitions. AT& T’ s 23% share of the noncash charge equaled $1.1 billion. Also, AT& T took another noncash charge of $1.6 billion because of the plummeting valuation of Excite@Home. A recent report in BusinessWeek Online offers a final footnote. “The end may be near for the once-mighty Excite Internet portal,” the publication writes. “Patti S. Hart, appointed chairman and CEO of Excite@Home on April 23, already is exploring opportunities to sell the money-losing Excite business and may shut it down in the next several months if no buyers emerge.” What overall conclusions may be drawn from these twin disaster stories? At Disney and AT& T, the companies began a careful process of entering unfamiliar territory by working their way through assumptions about the future. It appears, however, that accelerating executive departures led to translation errors in the operational plans. Assumptions were treated as realities, a formula that has often been known to lead to massive losses. The take-home lesson: Watch out for business plans with a high assumptions-to-knowledge ratio. They can get distorted as they pass through a rotating set of executives, and get you into a lot of trouble. All materials copyright Â© 2001 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The Business Portal

In my last column I talked about the importance of vertical portals (vortals) in creating communities of trade. But many readers asked how they could use the idea of a portal to get their own house in order before stepping out into the world of partner and supplier portals. In this article we will look at how the warp-speed developments on public Internet portals offer a set of clues to the beginnings of a radical new phase of computing, which will transform the entrepreneurial organization’s use of information in the early years of the coming century. Wall Street’s year-long mania with Internet shares has brought many new company names and business plans to view, none of which have received more intense attention than the Internet “portal” companies: Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite, and the “other” broad-based portal players, a diverse group including such prominent names as Netscape, AOL, AltaVista, and Microsoft. Many Web surfers now integrate portal visits into their online experience — but the concept of a portal is just as fascinating for entrepreneurs challenged with charting the future of their own information strategy with less than adequate resources to create highly customized desktop applications. It may seem unlikely that some of the hottest names on the World Wide Web are pointing the way to the next phase of information management for the wired corporation — particularly since much of the information content on these sites is fundamentally of little or no value to businesses. But the solution to many of the challenges that fast entrepreneurial companies face lies in the idea of the portal. While large enterprises may easily customize information management solutions and systems by using vast staffs of programmers and developers, small business has always found itself at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to deploying internal information systems. The result is a hodgepodge of desktop applications that often create as much frustration as they do benefit. What, if anything, can these public portals teach you about creating more effective information systems inside your organization? Let’s first look at why public portals have become so popular. The initial value proposition was simple: No one could hope to find anything in the vastness of the Web through “conventional” means. Offering a full-text index of Web content provided a great leap forward and a chance to take advantage of the new hyperlinking capabilities built into the Web. Next, portals became “navigation sites” as it became apparent that developing professional researcher skills to find weather information was not high on the average user’s priority list. To address user frustration and reduce the average “seek time” to obtain relevant information, navigation sites added the function of categorization — filtering popular sites and documents into preconfigured groups by the meaning of their content (sports, news, finance, etc.). Today these sites not only provide search functionality and navigation, they also offer community (e.g., Yahoo! Financial’s threaded discussions) and personalization of content by the user (My Excite Start Page). Face it, no one wants to surf 500 channels of broadcast television any more than they want to visit 500 Web sites to make a decision. This is the reason many popular public Web sites have a “My.com” version of their interfaces. Psychologists have long known that as the noise factor around us increases, our filtering mechanisms also increase — this is a basic survival skill. It is what scientists and engineers refer to as signal-to-noise ratio — the same principle that SETI uses to sniff out intelligent life by scanning the chaotic radio noise of the cosmos for a discernible pattern of intelligence. As the background noise of our world increases, we need to become better at identifying relatively weaker and weaker signals. Yet filtering, without an accompanying focus, can be a dangerous proposition – the equivalent of blinders on a raging plow horse. Search, navigation, and personalization: These make perfect sense on the World Wide Web, but are the needs of internal knowledge workers in your organization fundamentally different? Clearly not. How do you create this sort of rich environment without a programming staff of hundreds? It is here where corporate portals intervene and remove a world of pain for the entrepreneurial enterprise. Aside from the basic accounting systems that every business needs to have in place, the remainder of the information systems in a small business are highly individualized collections of content and applications. In the fast-paced and constantly understaffed world of small enterprise, there is no single, centralized, predetermined information system. In simple terms, individuals share the responsibility for defining the organization of business-critical information. By the time a formal IT group defines most applications, it is time to move on and redefine. On the other hand, as workers come and go, the continuity of their tasks is subject to enormous disruption since the hodgepodge of information systems they used to get their job done is virtually incomprehensible to anyone else. Corporate portals make it possible to both create personalized work environments without extensive IT support and share these work environments with coworkers. Corporate portals allow you to bring together information sources, applications, and Web resources from nearly any source and integrate these into a single comprehensive desktop. Imagine a customized instrument cluster holding all of the vital signs of your organization — markets, suppliers, customers — and you start to get the picture. Best of all, there are 40 separate corporate portal products on the market to pick from! With a corporate portal in place, anyone in the organization can create a personal view of the processes, tasks, customers, and market conditions that are most important to them. For example, a salesperson may create a sales portal that shows the current correspondence, inventory levels for outstanding orders, payment history, phone log, and the most recent press release for that customer. And it is all done with no programming other than clicking or dragging a mouse a few times. Most portal products also come with a large library of what are called gadgets, nuggets, or components, which are already programmed to work with most popular applications, from spreadsheets to databases. Users simply check off the components they want to use in their portal. (OK, there may be a bit of programming needed to set up the components so that they work with your applications, but this is done only once and is usually trivial compared with programming enterprise applications — most of which probably couldn’t come close to offering personalization anyway.) For the small- to medium-size business, a corporate portal can be heaven sent, providing users with a level of sophistication and integration that even the largest enterprises would envy. Thomas M. Koulopoulos is president of Boston-based Delphi Group and the author of five books. Â© 2000 Delphi Group

Types of Search Engines

Key to improving your Web site’s rank in the different search engines is to understand the basic criteria by which search engines index and then retrieve documents. There are two primary kinds of search services: 1. Search engines: These rely on “software spiders” to index Web sites. You submit your page to a search engine, and the spider will index your entire site. Theoretically, these spiders might find your site by accident, but odds are they won’t unless you go to them and tell them about your site by filling out their “Submit” page. Examples of search engines are AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos. 2. Directories: These rely on submissions from users and Web site owners to populate their indexes. Most directories add your site to their index, but generally they link only to your home page rather than indexing the full text of each page on your site. Examples of directories are Yahoo! and Open Directory. Search Service Type of Service AltaVista search engine AOL Search directory Excite search engine HotBot search engine Go.com search engine Google search engine Lycos directory MSN.com directory Snap.com directory Web Crawler search engine Yahoo! directory These 11 search services are the most popular on the Internet. They are where you should spend your time working to achieve top rankings. Copyright Â© 2000 iProspect.com

A New Chapter for E-Books

Inc.ubator Entrepreneurs are rediscovering the digital book. This time their start-ups might fly Ahem. A reading from Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: “The water was not quite up to her knees. The stuff her feet were sinking into felt like cold, lumpy jelly. …” Contemplate the absurdity of reading a chunky Stephen King novel — or anything longer than a stock quote, really — on a tiny handheld-computer screen. Reading a book is a visceral experience impossible to duplicate in liquid crystal display. In the early 1990s, companies like Voyager and Vertigo Development Group sold books on disk, but their products failed to catch on. Many readers’ computers didn’t have the CD-ROM drives necessary to “play” books on their screens. Besides, “you don’t curl up with your computer,” says Patrick Breen, former senior architect at Vertigo. And publishers were still typesetting manuscripts, making it a huge hassle to digitize a book. But now it looks as if E-books, despite the absurdity factor, might take off. The Internet’s distribution power, together with higher-resolution screens and powerful processors, have made the world a much friendlier place for electronic books than it was just five years ago. And publishers now create books on computers, so the files are already in digital form — “a complete revolution, and it happened between 1993 and 1996,” says Paul Hilts, technology editor for Publishers Weekly. Last fall, several E-book companies joined forces with Microsoft and, with the blessings of publishers like Simon & Schuster and Bertelsmann, defined a technical standard for publishers’ electronic files so that books can be read from desktop computers, dedicated reading devices (portable gizmos used solely for reading books), and handheld computers. That flexibility should help develop consumer confidence and thus a market, says Kevin Hause, a consumer-products analyst for IDC, in Mountain View, Calif. Hause projects that by 2004, electronic books and periodicals will be a $2.5-billion market — hardly pennies, but still just a fraction of today’s $25-billion market for good old-fashioned books. Pricing for reading devices has been a hurdle, but the costs are starting to drop. Last November the price of the Rocket eBook, a reading device from NuvoMedia, also in Mountain View, dropped to $199 from $499 a year earlier. Another company, SoftBook Press, in Menlo Park, Calif., has also brought reading devices to market. (In January, Gemstar International Group Ltd., in Pasadena, Calif., acquired NuvoMedia and SoftBook. Gemstar markets the VCR-programming system VCR Plus+. The E-book companies will remain separate entities.) Another E-book contender, Librius.com, in Bellevue, Wash., abandoned plans for its reading device last summer to focus on software after president Don Ledford realized that handhelds were going to swamp his Millennium Reader. “Everyone who’s in this business is in it for the content,” Ledford says. “Why struggle upstream to try and sell 20,000 units at cost so you can try and sell some books, when 10 to 20 million new handhelds are flowing in?” That’s where Peanutpress.com comes in. The Maynard, Mass., start-up offers free software, called Peanut Reader, for reading books on Palm OS or Windows CE handheld devices. Peanut Readers let readers flip through, dog-ear, and write all over books. To soothe publishers worried about readers “sharing” books without paying for them, E-book producers are developing encryptions and passwords that safeguard content. Such measures have convinced major publishers — like Random House and Simon & Schuster, which signed deals with Peanut — to join the smaller publishers that jumped in earlier. Peanut president Jeff Strobel, who cofounded the company in April 1998, says that by the end of last year, some 10,000 people had bought the company’s books, which cost the same as or less than a paperback. Strobel says revenues, currently in the six figures, increased sevenfold during 1999. Lending further legitimacy to the E-book market, Microsoft plans to release new reading software this year. Still, it remains to be seen whether readers will become as fond of E-books as they are of, say, that battered, beloved paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye. After all, it’s probably not wise to read your E-book in the bathtub. Search: “Red + Bumps” Got a weird rash? MotherNature.com has created what it believes is a compelling reason to eschew the mall pharmacy for E-commerce: online you don’t have to query a stranger behind a counter about rash remedies. Instead, Web surfers can find answers for themselves in online books from $500-million health-and-fitness publisher Rodale Inc. — all without leaving MotherNature.com. Jeffrey Steinberg, the online vitamin vendor’s chief marketing officer, believes that good content, such as that offered by health books from the Emmaus, Pa., publisher of Prevention magazine, will increase the site’s “conversion” rate — in other words, more visitors will become spenders. So last summer the Concord, Mass., start-up gave Rodale 8% equity in exchange for the rights to 150 Rodale books for the next 10 years, as well as direct-marketing access to the publisher’s database of 25 million magazine and book buyers. MotherNature.com programmers converted the books to digital form and cross-referenced them with the site’s products. When customers search for rash treatments in one of the books, for example, products containing calendula appear for sale in a frame to the left of the book text. Although he has no conversion data, Steinberg says the content gives MotherNature.com an edge over its competitors, which include VitaminShoppe.com and drugstore.com. Rodale also provides content to Women.com and Petsmart.com. This Way to My Library Imagine your own private library, only instead of having to build bookshelves and buy overstuffed leather chairs, you only need to log on to the Internet. That’s precisely the service Versaware Inc. hopes to provide. At the company’s eBookCity.com Web site, visitors build personal collections that include a free dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia plus many other free titles and competitively priced newer books. The books reside on Versaware servers, so the library doesn’t clutter a user’s hard drive, though downloading is an option at no extra cost. So far, the company — which employs some 400 people in India, Israel, and the United States — has added the E to more than 2,000 books. But these aren’t just any old texts. “There’s a misperception that merely digitizing content is adequate,” says Harry Fox, who cofounded the New York City -based company in 1997. “People are not going to prefer reading on a screen.” So Versaware jazzes up the content with sound, video, and a collection of 350,000 photos. Customers organize their books by category on separate shelves and can perform targeted searches on them. Someone interested in, say, the spawning habits of salmon can search for the fish on the science shelf and leave out the cookbooks. Once a book has been digitized, Fox says, Versaware can make money from it more than once by posting it on other sites. Case in point: Lycos hosts Versaware reference materials, like Funk & Wagnall’s multimedia encyclopedia, on the Lycos Research Center Web page. Lycos and Versaware share advertising revenues from the page. Lycos director of business development Tom Murphy says that surfers using the reference materials stick to the Lycos research pages 50% longer than they did before Lycos posted the Versaware content. Versaware, which in its third round of funding garnered $30 million, faces a significant competitor in NetLibrary Inc. The Boulder, Colo., start-up caters primarily to the higher-education and research market and has received $100 million in venture capital from investors that include Houghton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill. To date, Versaware has multimillion-dollar revenues but no profits. It makes most of its money converting textbooks into CDs for publishing companies, including McGraw-Hill. Jill Hecht Maxwell is a reporter at Inc. Technology. E-BOOK WHO’S WHO AND WHAT THEY DO These companies make dedicated reading devices or sell E-books on the Web Everybook: Plans to market a dedicated reader for professionals; $1,600; www.everybook.net Glassbook: Sells software; has a secure-distribution server for selling books online; free to $39; www.glassbook.com Librius.com: Offers free software; sells E-books at a price comparable to paperbacks; www.books2read.com netLibrary: Provides access to an online library; $30 a year; www.netlibrary.com NuvoMedia: Sells a dedicated reader; $199; www.nuvomedia.com peanutpress.com: Offers free software; sells E-books for handhelds; www.peanutpress.com SoftBook Press: Sells a dedicated reader and E-books; $599; www.softbookpress.com Versaware: Sells E-books; offers online library; free to $50; www.eBookCity.com

Traffic Will Make You Rich: The Word from the Experts

Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich REALITY CHECK: Selling well makes you rich. Traffic only provides eyeballs Cramer: Revenues are what will define things in the end, but people live and die by the Media Metrix site-traffic reports. Wall Street is obsessed with them. I swear to God, if you want to make big money in the stock market, go to Springfield High outside Philadelphia. Get a bunch of kids and say, “Surf this site all day long, and I’ll give you 20 Gs.” You’ll generate a huge amount of page views, which is what wins in the market today. Johnson: Sites like Blue Mountain Arts’ E-greeting-card site succeed because they provide something that attracts people, and in the Internet world that’s a useful model. It may make business-school people scratch their heads, but traffic to a portal gets a person to hit some other channel buttons and use other content. Morgan: A lot of companies, like Blue Mountain Arts, are specifically aggregating an audience, and they’ll figure out what to do with it later. The question is whether an audience used to doing things for free will ever pay for them. Randall: There is a common belief that you should basically spend an infinite amount of money to promote your site. What you’re starting to see is that at the end of the day, you have to have a real business model. Rich: Bottom line: you’ve got to have users and customers. Driving visitors to a site is not a guarantee for a viable business. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

Razzle-Dazzle Makes Web Sites Great: The Word from the Experts

Myth 4: Razzle-Dazzle Makes Web Sites Great REALITY CHECK: Bells and whistles are fun but not always functional Cramer: The look and feel of a site is meaningless. What matters is speed. People want to get in and get out. Until they get technology so that pictures and graphics don’t delay load time, all pictures should be banned. Eisenhardt: Fancy graphics and animation don’t buy you anything. There’s a minimum level of slickness you want to see when you go to a site, and people will probably add those features as broadband becomes more common, but I expect you’ll see a lot of diminishing returns as well. Hazard: Fancy front-end technology slows down the user experience. Ultimately, that will turn people off. I was shopping on toy sites from home the other night. One loaded in one second, and one loaded in 15. Guess which one I bought from? Leonsis: There are sites out there that are just functional. Look at Yahoo. It’s not fancy; it’s just gray and blue. Look at us at AOL. We’re pretty much a flat site. You want to make buying really fast and easy. No videos, no bells and whistles. Just get to the point. Mooney: This has been a big myth for the last couple of years. There’s a tremendous focus on the cool things you can do. Technology has gotten ahead of the concept in many cases. The more important thing is to know what people want. Peabody: As broadband becomes more common, you’ll have to have this stuff. But today it’s not to your advantage to have a lot of bells and whistles. Sites like that are sort of annoying. Rich: Stay true to what your customers value: more efficiency or a faster download. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

Brand Is Everything: The Word from the Experts

Myth 5: Brand is everything REALITY CHECK: Image is fine. Sales are better Eisenhardt: Just having a brand isn’t much. It doesn’t hold people when a competitor is only a click away — when it’s much easier to switch than it is in the physical world. CDNow had a brand in the music space, but that didn’t prevent customers from going to Amazon.com or Liquid Audio for music. In better companies, there is a real attention to metrics — a specialty of Yahoo, which is very good at monitoring key metrics and figuring out how to make money. Johnson: I don’t know if we’ve really made the big breakthroughs on the Web at this point. With motion pictures, it took 30 years before someone thought of doing a close-up. On the Internet we probably haven’t discovered the close-up yet. Mooney: We can tell which sites technicians have built and which have been built by people who understand retail. Retailers know where to put the most expensive stuff. They know how to trigger impulse buys. These formulations, fully developed for brick-and-mortar retail, haven’t been executed well on the Web yet. Peabody: Merchandising is absolutely the most critical component of any E-commerce company. People try to brand their sites, but it’s really more important to show an image of what you’ve got instead of asking customers to guess. If you let them guess, they’ll guess wrong. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

Community, Community, Community: The Word from the Experts

Myth 7: Community, community, community REALITY CHECK: Not every business begets a cult Anderson: There is a huge myth out there that anyone can build an on-line community. Take my bank. I’ve been doing on-line banking since before the Web was the Web. Now, all of a sudden, my bank wants to become my portal. It wants to load up the page with news and sports. Everybody is trying to be a portal, but not all are destined to succeed. Johnson: It’s easy to see the appeal in building a community. When you talk about communities, the three or four sites that come to mind are AOL, GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod, all of which have created great riches. Lots of people want a feeling of belonging, and the Web has given that to them, through personal home pages and chats. Randall: About a year ago there was a huge thing being made about building communities, and it is still big. But there are a lot of customers who are very functionally driven, who simply want to go to a merchant and buy something. They don’t want a community. Rich: It really comes down to being smart about your users and your core business. Adding a community to a site that doesn’t meet customer needs or that offers a shoddy product won’t help. Also, building a community is a very complex and costly proposition. It requires a well-thought-out strategy, not just a lot of technology and money. You can end up damaging your company and your brand if you don’t implement it properly. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

Tag Archives: Lycos Inc.

Wi-Fi for the Masses

Lucky or Smart

Why Disney and AT&T Went Astray in Dot-comland

The Business Portal

Types of Search Engines

A New Chapter for E-Books

Traffic Will Make You Rich: The Word from the Experts

Razzle-Dazzle Makes Web Sites Great: The Word from the Experts

Brand Is Everything: The Word from the Experts

Community, Community, Community: The Word from the Experts

Twitter Updates

CHANNELS

Tag Archives: Lycos Inc.

Popular Posts

CHANNELS