Tag Archives: Santa Monica

About 1878 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Message Pending: Unified Communications

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For Sunny Trinh and his colleagues at 9 Fish Surfboards, in Santa Monica, Calif., a day at the beach qualifies as product research. The problem is, with four co-owners and two minority partners, sometimes everyone’s out riding the waves. “We sort of have office hours,” Trinh says. “But being surfers, sometimes none of us are in the office.” And when customers called with orders or questions, there was no one to pick up the phone. Trinh went searching for solutions online, and wound up selecting RingCentral, a virtual phone system with several key features to help 9 Fish run its business more efficiently. “Now, when someone calls our 877 number, it gets forwarded to several cell phones,” he says. “Whoever’s available can answer.” In addition, Trinh says, “We can get voicemails e-mailed to us. Another nice feature is Internet fax: we can get faxes anywhere without worrying about being near a fax machine, and send Word or Acrobat documents as faxes direct from our computers.” Even better, he says, incoming faxes arrive as PDF documents, which the surfers can read directly on their cell phones, and easily forward to anyone else who needs them. Bringing it all together For small companies like 9 Fish, outsourced unified communications systems such as RingCentral can help make a frequently empty office run like a big one where there’s always staff on hand and the fax machine is always humming. And that’s just the beginning. “Unified communications is an attempt to take all these different communications we use — voice, e-mail, instant message, video mail, conferencing and videoconferencing, and make them easier to understand and easier to work with,” says Greg Brashier, vice president of marketing at VirtualPBX, a unified communications provider. So far, he says, unified communications technology has tended to center around phone service, as RingCentral and VirtualPBX do, or around e-mail, as Microsoft’s Unified Communications efforts do. In time, he believes the channels will completely converge. In the meanwhile, the best strategy is to evaluate which of unified communications’ capabilities can contribute the most to your business and select accordingly. Here are some of the most powerful features: 1. Find you wherever you are. Unified communications systems can try several numbers, simultaneously, or one after another. That means whether you’re in your office, your living room, or out somewhere with a cell phone, the call will reach you. 2. Find whoever is available. A phone call can go out to a group of people simultaneously, as it does for 9 Fish. Or it can work in a queue. “Suppose you have a sales department with five people: a vice president, two trainees and two really good sellers,” Brashier says. “You can set up the system to try whichever of them is available, not on the phone, not out of the office and not away from their desks, in the order that you select, for instance the two top sellers, then the interns, then the VP.” 3. Make sure you get the message. If you don’t answer any of your various phones or cell phone, a good unified communications system will route the call to one central voicemail where you can easily retrieve it. And it will give you a variety of options for doing so: by e-mail or a text message, via a website, or by the traditional method of phoning in and listening. “You do it the way you want,” Brashier says. 4. Manage faxes from your computer, cell phone or handheld. If you send and receive a lot of faxes, unified communications can simplify your work by routing the faxes to and from your computer, cell phone or handheld device, without ever needing to bother with a fax machine. You can also post the fax on the Web as a PDF document, for others to access as they need. 5. Integrate with other applications. Right now, Brashier says, VirtualPBX integrates with an iGoogle gadget that will display the number of the person calling when your phone rings. And the company plans other integrations as well. “We’re working on an interface that will automatically open a CRM package when the phone rings, identify the caller and open his or her account history,” Brashier says. Whoever answers the call will do so with the relevant information already displayed. All for one and one for all Do all companies need unified communications systems? No, and if all you really want is a phone system, there are more affordable ways to get one, Brashier notes. “If you have, say, 100 people in one location, it’s more cost-effective in the long run to buy a hardware PBX, and keep faxes and e-mails separate,” he says. “Although, that will change as hosted VoIP systems develop.” In the meantime, Trinh advises carefully evaluating communications needs before you buy. “Cash flow is critical for most small companies, so don’t waste money on features you don’t need,” he says. In his case, he adds, the system 9 Fish chose precisely fits their needs. “We use most of the features we have available, and the cost is quite reasonable,” he says. And, it lets 9 Fish’s owners run their business exactly the way they want to. “Now we can get an order and take care of it while we’re at the beach. We can run our business from the beach.” That makes all the difference, he says. After all, wanting to stay surfers was what inspired them to start 9 Fish in the first place. SIDEBAR: Unified Communications Providers: Here are some of the unified communications providers available today: RingCentral – This affordable solution offers a wide range of features, including fax-back, real-time call control, click-to-call, and many others. Virtual PBX – Offers many business-directed features, such as queuing and routing based on skills, dynamic operator assignment (the “operator” can be rotated within a group of people) and conferencing. Microsoft Unified Communications – Microsoft combines Office Communications Server, Office Live Communicator, Exchange Server and Office Live Meeting to create a unified communications system that includes VoIP but centers around Exchange. GrandCentral – Google acquired this popular unified communications service in July 2007. Officially, the new Google version of the service is still in beta and its initial offering of limited invitations was used up at this writing. You can, however, “reserve” a number when they become available again.

About 2000 days ago Business Software

Make Mine To Go – Mobile Software-as-a-Service

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It was only a matter of time before two big trends in business computing collided, Web-based software and hand-held devices. Today, more software companies are putting their Web-based business applications, also called software-as-a-service (SaaS) on a widening number of mobile devices, including the Blackberry, iPhone, and handhelds that use the Microsoft and Palm mobile operating systems. Some of the latest versions of SaaS applications look and work the same no matter whether users tap into them from a mobile device, desktop, or laptop. Other software vendors offer SaaS apps on hand-held devices with somewhat less than 100 percent of the functions that are available to users logging on through standard PCs or laptops. Vendor developments Initially, software vendors partnered with middleware or value-added suppliers who created special interfaces to put SaaS offering onto mobile devices. But during the past year, vendors have started designing their own solutions. Some examples: NetSuite — When Apple unveiled the iPhone last summer, NetSuite simultaneously announced that its suite of Web-based business apps was 100 percent compatible with the new hand-held, thanks mainly to the fact that the pocket-sized device uses the same Safari browser as the Mac. NetSuite also uses three partners — iEnterprise, Antenna, and Explore Consulting — to port its SaaS products to other handhelds, says Mini Peiris, NetSuite’s vice president of product management. Salesforce.com — For years, Salesforce.com relied on middleware and other partners to create interfaces to put its customer relationship management (CRM) and other popular business software on customers’ Blackberry and Palm devices. In 2006, the SaaS pioneer acquired one of those vendors, Sendia, and has been actively marketing the technology, which works on Blackberry, Trio and Windows Mobile devices. According to Chuck Dietrich, vice president and general manager of Salesforce Mobile, the company’s SaaS apps also work on the iPhone. In November, the company began rolling out Salesforce Mobile, a technology that lets even non-technical mobile device users log on and, in a matter of minutes, set up and send applications to a sales team or other group. “In the mobile space that’s usually a Herculean effort that involves a lot of customization,” Dietrich says. “This takes the complexity out of mobile.” SAP — SAP hasn’t officially announced plans to put its Business ByDesign SaaS applications for small and mid-sized businesses on mobile devices. However, at the product launch last September, the German-based enterprise computing giant demonstrated how the software could work on a hand-held scanner with a credit card reader, similar to the kind that a field sales rep or service technician would use. Productivity boost Putting SaaS on mobile devices has been a boon to small business executives like Brian Kearne, chief financial officer of Circle of Friends, a Santa Monica, Calif., a children’s hair and skin care product maker. Initially, Kearne bought an iPhone for his own personal use. “To our happy surprise, we fired up the Web browser and we could access all of our business stuff on NetSuite,” Kearne says. Today, four of the company’s 12 employees access NetSuite via the iPhone, and No. 5 may be coming soon. “It’s definitely a productivity saver and allows people to be in touch with their critical business data while they’re on the road,” he says.

About 2456 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Letting Go of Your Landline

It was late one night at the offices of Shopper Shuttle, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based transportation service that serves the tourist trade. Co-founder Camille Alcasid had an epiphany. In the middle of rearranging the office for a new employee, she asked herself a question: Why do we need all these wires? “After untangling the first couple of devices, it became obvious to me,” says Alcasid. “We need to move things around without hassles.” That moment started an avalanche of wireless activity. Today, the computers in the office are wireless; the company’s Private Branch Exchange phone system is online; and, of course, all employees are on call via cell phones. An increasing number of businesses are following in Shopper Shuttle’s footsteps. A study by Insight Research Corp., of Boonton, N.J., forecasts that the number of business landlines will steadily decrease through the end of the decade, from 54 million lines today to 44 million by the year 2010. These traditional circuit switched lines will be replaced by newer, less expensive technologies, including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), cellular, VoWLAN VoIP, the latter being VoIP over a Wi-Fi wireless network. According to Infonetics Research, wireless LAN (local area network) equipment sales are at $654 million and are expected to continue well through 2009. Wires are so 20th century. Here’s how to get your business out of the stone ages: THE BOTTOM LINE The first step is to look at the impact on your bottom line. Computers will require a wireless modem (though many already have them built in) and a wireless router. The router is the gatekeeper to the Internet: all your office equipment communicates with the router, while the router communicates with the World Wide Web. A wide variety of routers are available at your local electronics store. Finally, the high-speed Internet connection is available through AT&T, Verizon and other local phone service companies, and can run $30 or more a month. And before you put down that money, think about if you really need to go wireless. “If mobility isn’t important to your business, you may be wasting your time worrying about a wireless network,” says Microsoft online editor Monte Enbysk. “But more and more businesses today have workers who don’t camp out in offices all day.” THE INFRASTRUCTURE If you decide to go forward, a wire from the router (the only wire in the office) will connect to the wall’s cable or DSL outlet. The router should be placed high, like on a bookshelf, and near the center of the office. The next step in the transformation is to convert your office computers to laptops. Desktop computers can also have wireless modems, but tying your computer to a desk seems to defeat the purpose of having a wireless office in the first place. Make sure the new computers have a built-in (internal) wireless card. External wireless cards are available, but internal ones require no assembly – just press a button and it will pick up on all the available wireless routers in the area. Converting to laptops also enables your employees to have wireless offices wherever they may go, since their modems would pick up on any wireless router available worldwide. Be aware that the days of free wireless connections are pretty much over – most airports and hotels now charge a nominal amount for their once pro-bono service. HANGING UP For most companies, the biggest concern in going wireless is usually the phone line. With the number of companies foregoing the landline, virtually all cell phone carriers offer business plans that support multiple phones. Business plans are different than traditional plans because they offer feature helpful extras, typically including pooled anytime minutes, which reduce the cost of calling during business hours by taking a company’s minutes as a unit, rather than by individual phones; unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling plans, which allow a company to “network” its cells; call forwarding and call waiting, two staples of phone communication; and even conference calling. Be aware that some plans require everyone to have the exact same type of phone – at least initially. Also, looser plans, such as “calling circles,” enable everyone to call each other for unlimited minutes every month. Replacing the fax is a little trickier, but still a practical alternative to keeping your antiquated large machine.  This may be the easiest problem to solve. Low-cost programs such as Send 2 Fax and Mighty Fax  make it easy to receive faxes through the Internet. They can be saved and printed out for signatures or archival purposes. Sending faxes is more complicated, as the act requires a scanner. But scanners typically cost under $100, though super-compact ones will cost more. It may be worth the money to get a tiny scanner if you’re getting rid of the fax machine. The desired document must be scanned into the computer and sent to the recipient over the Internet line. Purchased software can help you with this, too, though PC and Mac owners can use Microsoft Office or Outlook and other default e-mail software to fax items as well. SOCIAL SECURITY Finally, experts say wireless equipment is about twice as vulnerable to hacker attacks as landline equipment. Many can be avoided by adding a network key: a simple password system that helps prevent interlopers from stealing your bandwidth or, worse, your information. Matthew Gast, author of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, says on O’Reilly Media’s Wireless Devcenter that it’s smart to be cautious, but not afraid of going wireless. “Although wireless LAN security can seem challenging because of the press it has generated, most of the challenges can be addressed by reasonable security precautions,” he writes.

About 2456 days ago Search Engine Optimization

Top Tips for Boosting Your Search Engine Ranking

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Who doesn’t want to be listed first in a search engine list of results? Such prominence usually leads to increased sales and higher visibility in your industry. So how do you get there? It’s not easy. It requires some savvy on the methodology of search rankings. These tips and tricks should help to make your website stand out from the other 50 billion Web pages crowding the Internet: Let them know you’re there “Your first move should be to register your site on DMOZ.org, the Internet directory that search engines use to add new listings to their databases,” says Sandra Jimenez, a partner in Santa Monica, Calif.-based Westside Websites, a Web development firm. Essentially, if DMOZ.org doesn’t know you’re out there, it’s likely the search engines won’t, either — unless you contact each one and register individually. Registering on DMOZ.org is free. Make keywords count “Purchasing the right keyword ad buy through Google Adwords (and Yahoo) will immediately expose your site to your target audience and help improve your ranking,” says Jimenez. “In addition to exposure on Google itself, your founded will also appear on the websites that are carrying Google ads.” That said, be sure to choose your keywords wisely — and use them liberally. Say you’re a mechanic named Rudy who wants to advertise online. Instead of giving your homepage the generic title “Rudy’s Repairs,” use the more specific “Rudy’s Automotive Repairs. ” The keyword “automotive” will likely boost your chances of being listed correctly and prominently on a search results page when users type in “automotive repairs,” sans Rudy, for example. Keyword density is also important. Search engines look for a repetition of keywords on a single page or across your site when matching a page to a search request. Therefore, it is important to repeat your keywords frequently in your site’s visible content (articles or product tags) and source code, including in image descriptions (ALT tags), meta tags, and comment tags. Go directly to Google While DMOZ.org allows the search engines to know about you, they’ll have more information when you go direct. Every search engine includes a link that will allow you to add your site’s URL and keywords to their index. If you have a multi-page site, add the URL of each page, along with the keywords it contains. Update constantly Adding new content to your website on a regular basis will cause search engines to resubmit the site or page to their databases. This frequent re-indexing means that your content will be listed in the search results more quickly and prominently, because frequent changes are an indication that a URL is not a stale or dead link. “One easy way to add content is through a blog or news section. And submitting an RSS feed to a search engine is a sure-fire way to increase ranking attention,” Jimenez says. Get linked Since Google and other major search engines give priority to pages that are heavily linked to by other sites, it’s important, and worth the effort, to try to get your URL onto as many other major websites as possible. Links containing your specific keywords — “Rudy’s Automotive Repairs” — will rank higher than links that merely say “click here.” Pay up Search engines offer paid advertising that will get your link on more pages, resulting in a higher ranking. The most common method is through pay-per-click ads listed above and to the right of unpaid listings. Companies are charged a fixed amount whenever a user clicks on the ad. Prices vary according to search engine and keyword popularity, but as a rule, the more you spend, the more prominently your site will appear.

About 2456 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Ways to Make Your Laptop Battery Last Longer

It’s happened to many an entrepreneur. You board a five-hour flight from, say San Francisco to New York, with plans to finish the stack of work tucked into your laptop case. An airplane is often a great place to be productive, thanks to the absence of nagging colleagues, e-mail, ringing phones, memos, and faxes at 30,000 feet — provided the technology you need is in working order Sometimes, you barely make it over South Dakota before your computer warns you it’s about to “hibernate” as you’re battery power is at just five percent. Now how exactly do you plan to finish that sales report before you land? Energy management has been a problem since the earliest days of mobile computing. Drains on a battery include virtually every component on your laptop, including the screen, the hard drive, the CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, and other peripherals. The biggest culprit? DVD movies, which cause the screen to run at full power for the life of the movie. Unfortunately, there is no magic-bullet solution. But there is something you can do aside from lugging a spare battery. The following are a few tips for squeezing more juice out of your laptop: Dim the lights You’ll certainly need to see your screen, but just how bright do you need it to be? Screens lighted at full strength eat up 15 percent more battery life than if your battery was at 50 percent brightness, says Dell. So, be sure to squeeze more life out of your laptop by reducing the brightness of your monitor a great deal. Limit your entertainment The battery will drain faster if there’s a spinning disc in your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, such as a game, music CD or DVD movie. Some games offer you the choice to install to the hard drive, so choose this option, as you’ll get more life out of your laptop than using the CD-ROM or DVD player, which are massive battery consumers. With other entertainment, your best power value is to work from the hard drive. Unplug everything Make sure you have no devices plugged into the laptop that can drain its power, such as a Webcam, USB thumb-stick, or wireless PC card. According to Dell, connected peripherals can impact battery life by up to 12 percent (depending on the peripheral), so get used to the touchpad instead of using an external mouse when you’re away from an electrical outlet. What eats up the most battery power? Wireless connectivity, such as Wi-Fi and WWAN, so be sure to turn this feature off if you don’t need it (not an issue for airplanes where this should be turned off). Reduce power consumption Camille Alcasid, who runs Westside Websites, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based development firm, recommends changing the “Power Options” found on Windows XP. Users can find it in the Control Panel and use it to manually reduce the power consumption of your laptop. “Typically, you want to be able to work on a spreadsheet or word processing,” says Alcasid. “By reducing consumption by a third, you can still use those options and extend your life.” You can also set alarms to go off when the battery is about to die (for example, at five percent) so you can safely save your information before powering down. Charge up In the better-safe-than-sorry category, it’s worth noting that air travelers should make a point of recharging the battery before a flight. Find an electrical outlet while you’re waiting for your flight at the gate, a restaurant, or airline lounge.

About 2548 days ago E-Commerce

TV Advertising For the Rest of Us

The surfer glides across the face of a curling blue wave, a soothing guitar strumming in the background. The words performance, quality, and innovation flash across the screen, followed by a montage of attractive, suntanned men and women–each clutching a shiny new surfboard. The message is clear: Wouldn’t you like one of these boards too? The 30-second television spot, produced by Channel Islands Surfboards last fall, aired 432 times in the greater Santa Barbara area on six national cable channels, including ESPN and MTV. Channel Islands, the board of choice for perennial world champion Kelly Slater and other pros, had just opened a new retail store and wanted to spread the word. The TV ads did the trick, sparking a late-season rush that helped Channel Islands nearly double its expected retail sales for the final three months of 2005. Best of all was the campaign’s price tag: $3,000. “I still laugh when I think about how easy and affordable it was,” says Terri Merrick, who runs the company with her husband, Al. There’s a revolution going on in television advertising, led by an enterprising start-up called Spot Runner, which is making the fabled 30-second spot available to marketers of all sizes at prices starting at $499. The Los Angeles-based company, which was founded in March 2004 and went live last January, is the most recent creation of serial entrepreneurs Nick Grouf and David Waxman. During the Internet boom, the duo founded Firefly, which made tools for online collaboration, and PeoplePC, an early Internet service provider. Both companies, which were sold to Microsoft and EarthLink, respectively, harnessed the democratizing powers of the Internet, says Waxman. Now, with Spot Runner, he and Grouf have taken aim at making the power of Madison Avenue available to businesses of all sizes. Working with a team of advertising veterans, Spot Runner has created a library of thousands of professionally produced television commercials, complete with slick photography, music, and graphics. Using Spot Runner’s Web-based technology, marketers can go online, select the ad template they like, and customize it to suit the needs of their business. Once the spot has been produced, Spot Runner’s technology makes it easy to create a media plan. The company keeps an up-to-the-minute inventory of the blocks of time available on networks and cable channels nationwide–time slots that are a lot less expensive than you might think. Most 30-second time slots cost less than $100; the price can be as little as $10 in smaller markets. Using this tool, you can lay out an entire ad campaign with just a few mouse clicks. For Channel Islands, putting the campaign together was a simple three-step process. Using keywords such as “wave” and “surf,” Merrick scrolled through Spot Runner’s catalog to find a template to build her ad around. Spot Runner works with independent videographers and is constantly updating its library; for an extra fee, it will produce custom videos from scratch. Channel Islands paid an extra $99–for a total of about $600–to insert several custom images of its surfboards and an invitation to visit its new retail store into the ad. Spot in hand, Merrick moved on to selecting where and when her new commercial would run. Again using the Spot Runner interface, Merrick clicked on a calendar to see what time slots were available on what networks and how much they cost. For her first 12-week campaign, Merrick worked with a budget of about $2,500 to choose time slots and cable stations. Then, with a final click, she launched Channel Islands’ first foray into TV advertising. Total time from start to airtime: five days. Merrick was impressed by Spot Runner’s selection of pre-shot video clips, but advertising executives who make their living producing commercials say that the canned nature of the commercials could turn off potential customers. “The ads come across like they’re from the yellow pages,” says Tim Tennant, CEO of Conductor, an ad agency in Santa Monica, California, that won several awards last year for its AXE deodorant commercials. Chuck Porter, founder of Miami ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, says the $499 price is right, but wonders if Channel Islands’ ad sets it apart from other marketers. “This is the same clip-art footage that auto dealers and lawyers have been using for years,” Porter says. Nevertheless, Merrick has been pleased with the results of her campaign. “We finally found a way to reach the parents who buy boards for their kids,” she says. When she dabbled with local newspaper and radio ads in the past, she found them to be expensive and ineffective. “The ads were always kind of hokey,” she says, “and didn’t reflect the quality of our product.” Now, she says, new customers come into the Channel Islands store raving about the company’s TV commercial. Indeed, Merrick is now preparing to roll out an even more ambitious, $10,000 campaign with Spot Runner this summer. The commercial, which will be updated to showcase Channel Islands’ newest boards, will be shown on family networks like Disney, in addition to the usual sports channels. Merrick is also thinking about running the ad in San Diego and other surfing hotbeds. “I never knew advertising could be so painless,” she says. Inc.com Darren Dahl discusses new trends in TV advertising at www.inc.com/video.

About 3826 days ago Business Software

This Year’s Model

The Fourth Annual Inc Web Awards: Transformations Company: Edmunds.com, in Santa Monica, Calif. URL: www.edmunds.com What we liked: A slow-growing 30-year-old publisher embraces the Web’s real-time advantage and becomes a leading site for automotive information The folks at Edmunds.com admit that their early Internet goals were, to put it mildly, off course. In the mid 1990s, Edmund Publications viewed the Internet as just another place to promote its respected auto-buying guides. Today the Web drives the entire business. Meanwhile, its print line appears headed the way of the minivan: still available, still reliable, but no longer a consumer favorite or a company priority. “The books are a nice part of our heritage,” says company president Jeremy P. Anwyl. “But they’re not a major focus.” In fact, books now account for less than 1% of the company’s revenues. The 1999 name change — from Edmund Publications Corp. to Edmunds.com — says it all. Like the venerable guidebooks, one for used cars and one for new cars, the Edmunds Web site offers a wealth of independent ratings, reviews, and pricing data for every make and model. But the two books — which average 450 pages — are published annually; Edmunds.com, with 800,000 pages, gets daily updates. The site also brims with interactive features: a tool for comparing up to eight vehicles side by side; a 500,000-member consumer forum; a searchable database of dealers; and calculators for estimating actual sale prices, ownership costs, and loan rates. And the information on Edmunds.com is free. That’s because the $50-million company makes its money primarily through ads placed by manufacturers and parts dealers, as well as through car-stereo retailers, insurance companies, commercial lenders, and other auto-related businesses. The books, by contrast, bring in only their cover price. Founded in New York in 1966, Edmund Publications chugged along for 22 years, selling its guides to consumers, libraries, and credit unions. It was consistently profitable but never grew much. In 1988 the then-three-person company was sold to Peter Steinlauf. Shortly afterward the changes began. Steinlauf kept the company name but moved it to car-happy California to explore new publishing options. First up was a CD-ROM, but the product proved short-lived. Then, in 1994, Steinlauf tried offering car- pricing data on demand through a pre-Web, text-only “gopher” site called the Electronic Newsstand. The service included invoice prices, which showed what dealers pay manufacturers for specific cars. At the time, that was tough-to-find information that could be a powerful negotiating lever. As word of the free listings spread by E-mail, car-pricing requests so overwhelmed the Electronic Newsstand that its owners told Edmund Publications to hit the road. The company did so, launching its own Web site. Despite their earlier brush with Internet popularity, executives at first viewed the site as a way for consumers to sample Edmund Publications’ print products. But they soon spotted lucrative opportunities, including steering likely customers to sales sites like AutoWeb and Autobytel and taking a bounty for every lead. Best of all, the company’s pricing information — always months out of date in the printed guides by the time they reached bookstores — could be kept current. AUTO FOCUS: Jeremy Anwyl leads Edmunds’s transition from a slow-growth print publisher to a Web dynamo with many revenue streams and a reputation as the go-to guys for car buyers.

About 4252 days ago E-Commerce

Lucrative Expletive

(Or how Phil Kaplan, founder of FuckedCompany, learned to stop worrying and love the dot-bomb) Caroline Beddie had no idea what she was in for. Not a clue. The spunky 38-year-old had been a waitress at Ye Olde Kingshead, a tavern in Santa Monica, Calif., for more than a decade, and she thought she’d seen it all: the coiffed celebrities; the stargazers and wanna-bes; the surfers who consumed a little too much Bass Ale. But nothing could have prepared her for the night last January when Phil Kaplan, better known as “Pud,” showed up. Kaplan is the 25-year-old founder of FuckedCompany.com, a Web site that for the past year and a half has chronicled the daily machinations of the dot-com bust. A few days before, as Kaplan prepared to leave his base in New York City, he alerted visitors to the site that he would be visiting L.A. and stopping in for a drink at the Kingshead. Did anyone want to join him? You could say that again. “It was absolutely mobbed,” Beddie laughs. “And they were all there to see him. He was like their local hero. They would ask in these discreet, hushed tones, ‘Is that him? Is that Phil? Do you know which one he is?” The Kingshead is no stranger to stars, says Beddie. Tom Cruise pops by every once in a while, and on the walls hang pictures of prior guests Rod Stewart, the band Oasis, President Reagan before he was President Reagan, Tom Hanks. “But this night,” Beddie says, “everybody ignored the pictures because they were so desperate to meet this Philip person — to build up the courage after a few pints to talk to this guy. All night long, it was ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ I just kept saying, ‘He’s that tall guy at the bar, wearing a denim suit, hanging out and talking to people and signing autographs.’ I mean, people were waiting in line to meet him.” In the line was Kaplan’s aunt, Marlen Mertz. She had wandered over to the Kingshead from her nearby home, hoping to get a moment with her nephew. “It was amazing,” Mertz says, still slightly bemused by it all. “I felt like it was the Beatles! It was almost cultish. When I told people I was his aunt, I became famous, too!” ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVISORY: This article contains frank language, ribald slang, and a prosperous dot-com, which some readers may find disturbing. At the center of all of the brouhaha was Phil Kap- lan and his no-holds-barred Web site that, since its whimsical inception on Memorial Day weekend 2000, has detailed the tortuous ins and outs — mostly outs — of the dot-com debacle. As the site’s own “What Is It?” page proclaims, FuckedCompany “has pretty much turned into the source for news about dot-com companies. Bad news, that is.” The site now attracts some 4 million unique visitors a month, according to Kaplan, and has attained a cultlike following among the pink-slipped or otherwise dot-com disenchanted. It has also become a must-browse for headhunters, journalists, and Internet analysts — not to mention the just plain curious. For one, there’s that name, which is nothing if not attention getting, as if daring one to indulge in a guilty pleasure. Even Kaplan’s nom de Web, Pud, is obscene slang. “The site’s name is so direct and in your face,” says Anna Wheatley, editor of the AlleyCat News, a magazine that covers the business of New York City’s Silicon Alley. “It’s entertaining, if something of a gladiator sport. It’s terrible that you’re being entertained by carnage, a deathwatch. But what he has done so successfully is to make business into a form of entertainment. And Philip has turned himself into a personality, an entertainer. He is totally capturing the zeitgeist now. Totally! And I think he knows it.” Kaplan’s 15 minutes of fame have been extended by the mass media. In the past year, he’s been featured in the New York Post, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Industry Standard, and New York magazine, to name but a few. Kaplan has also made TV appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and CBS’s The Early Show, which hosted Kaplan last January after the Women.com site named him Internet Bachelor of the Year. “FuckedCompany is a site for people in the trenches,” says Kaplan. “It punishes the CEOs and the founders who have laid off so many people. The only people who don’t like the site are the founders — and, good, because they deserve it. All of the depressed, laid-off dot-commers love the site.” “Rock On, Pud” FuckedCompany is also a solid business of its own. Kaplan brings in revenues from banner advertising and online sales of merchandise that includes FuckedCompany T-shirts, mouse pads, and coffee mugs. Kaplan also says he reels in some $90,000 a month from 1,200 subscribers, who pay to search through unfiltered tips about layoffs and barricaded doors at dot-coms. Kaplan estimates that he receives some 400 unsolicited tips a day — often from programmers on the front lines. They’re the nameless souls who played with Nerf guns, worried about their sites’ “stickiness,” and populated the cubicles of Internet start-ups. Today their tips — often made anonymously with online pseudonyms like techdude, dottedeyes, and notagoy — provide the core of FuckedCompany’s database. And Kaplan talks back to them, which is key to FuckedCompany’s mystique, not to mention its sheer drawing power. He regularly starts message threads on his site, and he also E-mails 65,000 of his fans a free newsletter — signed by his alter ego, Pud — that has become increasingly full of what Kaplan calls “personal stuff.” On May 29, for example, Pud wrote, “Today is fuckedcompany’s 1-year anniversary! Woohoo! Hope everyone had a good Memorial Day. As for me, I woke up at around 3:00 pm, watched TV for a few hours, ordered Chinese delivery which never came, just finished about a million bowls of raisin bran, still wearing my bathrobe, ready for sleep again. Okay so Thursday night, I went on a blind date. I was all excited cuz I hadn’t been outside in weeks, recovering from strep throat and just being a loser in general.” After describing the disastrous date, in which he was “coughing all over the place, sweating, spilling crap on myself, trying to act normal,” Kaplan signs off, “i will forever suck. anyway … rock … on, pud.” “The site’s name is so direct and in your face. It’s entertaining, if something of a gladiator sport. It’s terrible that you’re being entertained by carnage, a deathwatch. But what he has done so successfully is to make business into a form of entertainment. And Philip has turned himself into a personality. He is totally capturing the zeitgeist now.” –Anna Wheatley, editor of Alleycat News

About 4466 days ago E-Commerce

Upstarts: Internet Salvage

Cleaning Up from the Dot-Com Mess Online companies are falling left and right. But for some start-ups that spells opportunity It’s been almost a year since the Nasdaq crashed last April, and the results haven’t been pretty. Anyone who has invested in Internet companies, worked for one, or simply enjoyed shopping online has probably had a disappointment or two. Some 210 dot-coms closed up shop during the year 2000, according to a report by Webmergers.com. That desperate gasp you hear emanating from places like the San Francisco Bay area and New York’s Silicon Alley is the sound of Internet hopefuls running out of money. Of course, not everyone is suffering. In fact, the spate of deaths in the Internet world is fertilizing a new crop of start-ups. Look at it this way: when an epidemic hits, you need doctors to tend to the sick and undertakers to bury the dead. New companies like NetCatalyst are aiming for the Internet first-aid niche, while others like Bid4Assets.com are standing by to take care of the dot-coms that won’t make it to the hospital. Life support Long before last April, Ronald Posner knew that a dot-com shakeout was coming. Too many start-ups were getting funding too quickly, without enough due diligence. That’s what prodded Posner and cofounder Chris Karkenny to start NetCatalyst in August 1999. Posner, then 56, was a venture capitalist and former CEO of five software companies. Karkenny, 32, was running an Internet incubator. They believed, Posner says, that “when the downturn did come, there would be a lot of good companies looking for partners” — that is, hoping to be acquired by a stronger company. Billing itself as a “liquidity engineer,” NetCatalyst is not a plumber but an investment bank, with some management consulting thrown in. Its target customer is a high-tech company whose venture capitalists have turned off the spigot or a business that has realized that attaining the nirvana of a public offering is no longer a possibility. (“Internet companies that have hit a road bump,” as NetCatalyst’s Web site delicately puts it.) NetCatalyst’s aim is to help such companies get back on the road by finding an acquirer, a merger partner, or a new investor. When necessary, though, NetCatalyst will also supply some management advice to get an ailing company into better shape before shopping it around. If NetCatalyst manages to match a company with a new partner, its fee is usually 3% to 10% of the acquisition or investment amount. The company also charges time-based fees for its management-consulting services, which generally total less than $100,000. What companies like NetCatalyst can provide is “a fresh set of eyes” to find efficiencies and help a dot-com reposition itself in the market, says Emily Meehan, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. Many Internet companies have relied on incubators and venture-capital firms for capital and guidance. Now, says Meehan, “that help is totally drying up.” It’s hard to put a number on the potential market for NetCatalyst’s services, given that the number of failing dot-coms is still unknown. But researchers at Gartner Group estimate that as many as 60% of business-to-consumer Internet start-ups founded in the past three years will be gone by 2005. And even if the dot-com epidemic abates, says Karkenny, Internet mergers and acquisitions will undoubtedly continue. One early NetCatalyst client was Alert-IPO.com, an Internet business that tracks initial public offerings. The company hired NetCatalyst early last year while debating whether to seek a large round of venture capital, says Karkenny. NetCatalyst’s recommendation: bring in more experienced management and look for a strategic partner instead of VC money. Within 90 days, NetCatalyst engineered Alert-IPO’s acquisition by Internet.com, a portal consolidator that has rolled up more than 67 Web sites since 1995. In a year and a half of operations, NetCatalyst, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., has worked with approximately 30 companies as an acquisition or investment intermediary. Its revenues for 2000 totaled some $2 million in cash, which doesn’t include the more than $10 million in equity that the company has garnered from some of its deals. Increasingly, says Posner, NetCatalyst finds itself being retained by venture-capital firms whose Internet portfolio companies need attention — fast. “They may have investments in 30 to 40 companies and don’t have the resources internally to deal with more than 4 or 5,” says Posner. “They’re turning to people like us.” NetCatalyst is picky about choosing which dot-coms to take on, though. Posner says he looks for companies that are fundamentally healthy, despite cash-flow problems, with a technical advantage or a business model that differentiates them from the rest of the marketplace. And if the company is down to its last nickel, forget it. “We don’t do dot-bombs,” says Karkenny. “If they have less than three months’ worth of cash, we don’t get involved at all.” Last rites Those unlucky Internet companies that fail to make NetCatalyst’s cut might consider the services of Bid4Assets.com. Launched in November 1999 as a site aimed at unloading goods ranging from bad loans to items seized in bankruptcy, Bid4Assets has found a serendipitously lucrative niche in selling the assets of defunct dot-coms. “This wasn’t in our business plan,” admits vice-president of strategic development David Marchick. “We didn’t really see it coming until about September.” But now as much as 20% of the business’s revenues come from liquidating Internet companies, and interest in Bid4Assets’ services is growing, says Marchick. “We have conversations with between 10 and 20 Internet companies per week,” he says. Based in Silver Spring, Md., Bid4Assets auctions items both online and off. Bidders for the assets of the recently deceased Value America, based in Charlottesville, Va., came from 16 states, says Marchick. “That would never have happened with a live auction,” he adds. Unlike Overstock.com, its best-known competitor in the dot-com scavenger business, Bid4Assets tends to sell to businesses rather than to consumers. About 40% of the time, Bid4Assets buys assets directly from failing Internet companies and resells them. In other cases it acts as a broker, usually collecting 10% of sales, plus a premium. Liquidating dot-coms brings some special challenges. A brick-and-mortar business usually has buildings, equipment, inventory, or other tangible property that can be sold off. Internet companies, which tend to be more virtual, often have a different range of assets. As of mid-December, Bid4Assets was offering intellectual-property rights from the now defunct Zodo.com, an entertainment-content site, including the company’s trademark application, its business plan, and its prototype site. (At press time, one bidder had offered $1,000.) Another recent auction involved computer equipment, office equipment, and furniture from the failed Value America, all of which sold for about $300,000. Other typical dot-com assets might include domain names, software, and licenses. Bid4Assets sells retail inventory only occasionally. “Assets from Internet companies are perishable,” says Marchick. “They’re like fruit.” So Bid4Assets tries to act fast, auctioning items within a week or two. “If you hold on to a server for six months, its value drops exponentially,” he explains. Intangible assets like domain names are short-lived, too. Even if a site has tons of traffic, once it shuts down, “within two months no one goes there,” Marchick says. There’s likely to be no shortage of troubled dot-coms in the near future. But what happens when the shakeout is over? Marchick says that he isn’t worried. By then another industry will be in a downturn, with Bid4Assets ready to scoop up the remains. “That’s kind of how it works in bankruptcy,” he says. Emily Barker is a senior staff writer at Inc. Cyber-kvetching The downturn among online companies has launched a slew of Web sites for the downsized and the people who love them to complain or commiserate or both. And — surprise! — some of those sites are even making money. Here are some of the loudest voices. FuckedCompany.com, in New York City, publishes a list of troubled Internet companies, based on reports that founder Philip Kaplan collects from disgruntled dot-commers. What spawned it: Last June, Kaplan, the founder and CEO of a small Web-design company, put up the site as a joke for his friends. He got back from vacation a week later to find his answering machine full of calls from reporters. Tone: Gleeful schadenfreude. Kaplan even runs a pool that lets users bet on which Internet company will be the next to fail. Revenue sources: Advertising; job listings; merchandise, including T-shirts and coffee mugs. NetSlaves.com, in Yonkers, N.Y., posts essays, rants, and other contributions from tech workers. The offerings provide a virtual underground guide to the Internet workplace. What spawned it: Founders Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin started the site in 1998 to relieve their burnout after a series of frustrating Internet jobs. Tone: Grassroots subversion with a high-tech twist. Stories on sweatshop recruiters, articles on drug use in dot-coms, and gift suggestions for the special geek on your list. Revenue sources: Advertising, plus sales from Lessard and Baldwin’s 1999 book, NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web, which was launched on the site and has sold 50,000 copies so far. Another book is in the works. Startupfailures.com, in Castro Valley, Calif., offers advice and a community that help entrepreneurs bounce back after their companies have failed. What spawned it: Last February, after his third start-up in a row tanked, founder Nicholas Hall came up with the idea of starting a Web site for guys like him. Tone: Helpful encouragement of the “You get right back in there and keep trying” variety. Hall refers whiners to FuckedCompany.com. “I didn’t want to have that karma,” he says. Revenue sources: Sponsorships, plus off-line business coaching, speaking engagements, and workshops. Q&A Opportunities Abound Seth Freeman, managing director of EM Capital/EM Management Inc., a San Francisco consulting firm that specializes in turnarounds, talks about some of the opportunities that he sees in the Internet shakeout. Inc.: What can turnaround experts do for distressed dot-coms? Freeman: Venture capitalists, private-equity funds, and banks are beginning to use turnaround managers to evaluate their portfolio companies. And that leads to another opportunity for turnaround people: performing a planned wind down or asset sale that delivers as much value as possible. Inc.: What are the challenges of working with Internet companies? Freeman: There’s a perception among turnaround specialists that with dot-coms leverageable assets don’t exist. There hasn’t been much understanding of how to value and use intellectual property as collateral. Also, the ability to appraise the value of a dot-com brand name is still developing. Inc.: What are the opportunities for new turnaround companies? Freeman: You’re going to see firms set up to work as advisers to Internet “vulture” funds. Those are run by people who would like to buy either the assets or the ongoing companies at a discount. For that, they’ll require new-economy-savvy consultants. Inc.: How long will such an opportunity last? Freeman: I think it’s permanent. We’re going to continue to see new Internet start-ups. And many of those will fail. Q&A So What’s to Sell? How is liquidating an Internet company different from dissolving any other type of company? Jeffrey Wolf, a bankruptcy specialist at the law firm of Greenberg Traurig, in Boston, who represents Bid4Assets.com and other more traditional liquidation companies in many of their transactions, explains. Inc.: What are the opportunities for liquidators in the dot-com downturn? Wolf: Clearly, there will be a lot of failed dot-coms. The real question is, What is there to liquidate? Many dot-coms have no inventory. Obviously, there are the minimal physical assets, like office equipment, used computers, and the like. Then there are the intangible assets: the technology, the licenses, the customer lists, the domain names, and any intellectual property. And each one of those unfortunately comes with its own liquidation difficulties. For instance, customer lists, which everyone at one time supposed would be a very valuable asset, have become difficult to liquidate because of privacy concerns. Inc.: Sounds as if the opportunities for liquidators could be pretty small, then. Wolf: Yes and no. If liquidators can find efficient, cost-effective ways to dispose of companies’ assets, there could be a lot of opportunity, especially for online liquidations. Since the cost structure of an Internet-based auction is theoretically very low, the net results will be higher. Inc.: What’s the competition like? Wolf: Some companies have tried to liquidate themselves over eBay and other online auction sites. And some of the traditional liquidators are experimenting with dot-com liquidations. I don’t know how successful they’ll be without partnering with an experienced online player. The investment criteria of a traditional liquidator may not justify spending a lot of time or expense in that area. I think the traditional liquidators will have plenty of brick-and-mortar retailers to work with very shortly and will not necessarily be focusing on the dot-com sector. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4891 days ago E-Commerce

Upstarts: Convenience Cuisine

What’s Cooking On-line? If you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from, you might try the Internet The Web’s next killer app? Think arugula. A host of entrepreneurs are convinced that, just as the on-line arena has changed the way we communicate, shop, and invest, it will change the way we seek sustenance as well. “People have to eat three times a day, but even on the brink of the new millennium, nobody has found a way to get more free time,” remarks David Hodess, the 37-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cooking.com, one of the new players catering to today’s time-starved — and just plain starved — consumers. Along with former Disney Store executive Hodess, refugees from Microsoft and PepsiCo, as well as such high-profile venture capitalists as John Doerr, are staking their money and their good names on new sites that promise to point and click consumers to their next meal. What to have for dinner tonight? The next five nights? That dinner party you’ve scheduled for Saturday? Both Hodess’s Cooking.com, in Santa Monica, Calif., and another on-line start-up, Tavolo, in San Rafael, Calif., offer thousands of gourmet products and wares that can help answer those questions. Each site is financed with $50 million in seed funds and is as much an information resource as a culinary E-tailer. Click on either site’s weekly menu planner for week-at-a-glance menu suggestions, with printer-friendly recipes. In addition, both sites offer various foodie bells and whistles. Tavolo’s site (www.tavolo.com) has features that convert recipes from standard to metric measurements, tailor recipes to the number of people being served, and create a shopping list based on your weekly menu. Cooking.com has an on-line glossary for boning up on the history of cognac or determining the precise definition of a zapotilla. But customizable recipes and on-line glossaries are just the marketing bait. What these sites really want to do is sell you stuff. “Providing a free recipe certainly has value for the consumer,” says Ken Cassar, an electronic-commerce analyst with Jupiter Communications, an Internet consulting company in New York City. “But it’s also a great opportunity to sell mortars and pestles.” As Tavolo founder and CEO Kevin Applebaum is fond of noting, with $55 billion in total sales (both on-line and on terra firma), the market for cooking products and gourmet foods represents a huge category. The leading national retailer of cooking supplies — Williams-Sonoma — has a market share of less than 1%. But Applebaum, who honed his marketing skills at PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, also knows he’s not alone in spotting cooking sites’ potential. Numerous national retailers, from Macy’s to the aforementioned Williams-Sonoma, are also chasing the ever-expanding on-line opportunity. So is the ubiquitous Martha Stewart, whose Web site, launched in 1997, is in the process of receiving a $25-million tune-up, courtesy of new investor Kleiner Perkins and its general partner, John Doerr. The real challenge for all the gourmet sites, says another Jupiter Communications analyst, Michael May, will be to get the people who purchase gourmet food and wares on-line to go from buying gifts to buying for themselves. The majority of the $200 million in on-line sales of small appliances and gourmet-food items last year occurred during the fourth quarter, for holiday gifts, notes May. Arugula-artichoke-with-roasted-garlic pesto pasta sauce may make for a terrific gift, but it isn’t what people are buying for their own dinner tables — at least not tonight. Cyberconsumption Food and kitchen supplies may not be the biggest on-line shopping category at the moment (books currently hold that honor), but according to Jupiter Communications, they’re where the growth will be between now and 2003. Odds are, Peapod and its ilk will eventually outpace their Amazonian counterparts. Projected on-line consumer spending, by category 1999 2003 % change (in billions) Groceries $0.2 $7.5 3,650% Housewares $0.1 $1.5 1,400% Specialty gifts* $0.1 $1.0 900% Music $0.3 $2.6 766% Apparel $0.8 $6.7 738% Videos $0.2 $1.1 450% Toys $0.3 $1.6 433% Electronics $0.4 $2.1 425% Flowers $0.2 $0.8 300% Books $1.3 $4.9 278% *Gourmet food makes up a significant percentage of this category. Source: Online Consumer Spending Forecast, Jupiter Communications, September 1999. Party of 10? Click Here Sure, much of the on-line cooking sector caters to aspiring chefs. But what if you and the kitchen aren’t on speaking terms? And you happen to like it that way? Take heart. A crop of new sites seek to gratify the pantry-phobic as well. Feel like takeout tonight? San Francisco-based Food.com offers on-line ordering — and, more important, local delivery — from more than 13,000 restaurants nationwide. Feeding your face is merely a matter of entering your zip code and navigating menu offerings. Since restaurants are notoriously low-tech, the company’s server in Seattle translates on-line orders into a fax or a phone call, which is then sent to participating eateries, a service for which Food.com reaps a $400 setup fee, a $50-a-month retainer, and 5% of each order. For those who’d rather dine out, at least two new companies offer on-line reservations. Both foodline.com, in New York City, and OpenTable.com, in San Francisco, are attempting to replace the traditional phone-and-paper-based restaurant-reservation system with a Web-based one. They charge participating restaurants about $200 a month in service and transaction fees (and in OpenTable.com’s case, a $1,000 setup fee). Currently serving a handful of cities, both plan to be nationwide and to ultimately link their service directly into the restaurants’ individual point-of-sale systems. They also hope to personalize the diner’s experience. “Imagine being able to remember that Mr. Jones is allergic to shellfish or sending a promotional E-mail to your top 100 August diners,” rhapsodizes former lawyer Paul Lightfoot, Foodline.com’s 29-year-old CEO. CookExpress.com, launched in January 1999, offers an on-line option that’s between cooking from scratch and dining out: a gourmet, ready-to-cook meal sent to your home by FedEx. Founder Darby Williams, 46 — another Microsoft escapee — calls CookExpress.com a “smarter way to cook.” Three-part meals (for example, roasted salmon with herb-caper sauce, potato-olive salad, and baby arugula), each requiring less than 30 minutes to fix, are delivered to your door (currently just in the Bay Area, where CookExpress.com is based) or by overnight delivery nationwide. Prices range from $8 to $15 per serving, plus a single $4.95 local delivery charge or a shipping cost of $12.95 to $16.95 (based on the number of meals). Yeah, but is the stuff fresh? To mollify those squeamish about the idea of filet mignon that arrived through a delivery service (albeit packed in high-tech gelatin ice), the company has devised a system of labeling each package with color-coded dots that change color if the food hasn’t remained chilled. The packaging also indicates how long the food inside should stay fresh (usually two days). Williams boasts that the company has the potential to be a billion-dollar enterprise within five years. He plans to expand the CookExpress.com same-day service into at least 30 U.S. markets as well as another 6 to 8 markets outside the United States — each worth $25 million in his estimation. He also hopes to add a retail component to his distribution. The logistical complexity of such an undertaking actually appeals to Williams, although, he readily concedes, “had I been in the food business before, I probably never would have done this.” Child in the Wild Julia Child is cooking. So who better to ask about the marriage of virtual and victual reality? And, surprise! She’s all for it, having become Web-friendly and computer-adept herself during her many years of bringing haute cuisine to the masses. Contributing writer Alessandra Bianchi caught up with the culinary grande dame at her home in Cambridge, Mass. Inc.: Do computers and cooking mix? Child: They certainly do. It’s marvelous what computers can do for you when you’re cooking. In fact, A La Carte Communications, the producer of my new television series with Jacques Pepin, has a site, Alacartetv.com, and it has everything on there! You can get TV schedules, cookbooks, even précis of our upcoming shows. Inc.: Do you use a computer in your work? Child: Yes, I have had a computer since they first came out. I use it for writing. I used to do my books in longhand, but word processing is so much easier, for a clear copy and for cleaning up. Recently, I started using the Web to find books — cookbooks from London, for example — and it was a snap. It’s tremendously useful for getting products, too. By clicking on www.fromages.com, you can get real French cheese directly from France, even though you’re a person and not a company! Inc.: But would a serious chef log on to the Web for advice, recipes, and menu planning? Child: Perhaps not now. But eventually, quite possibly. Now it’s fairly primitive, and a good chef would already have a recipe in his or her own library. The cooking information on the Web isn’t always complete or easy to find. For example, if you look up fava beans on a search engine, you don’t get much. But the Web sites are particularly good for beginners. One thing the sites haven’t entirely worked out is how you pay for the research you do. Eventually, it will be wonderful. Inc.: What do you think the development of cooking Web sites says about our culture? Child: I think it shows we’re a progressive culture embracing new ideas. It’s incredible, really. Of course, it helps to know what you’re looking for. But what’s happening on the Web is marvelous for cooking.