From Berlin to Silicon Beach

German US correspondent in Florida is on his way to business success with a metabrowser

By Stefan Krempl

Actually, the only thing that Marc Fest, a journalist who emigrated from Berlin to the USA, wanted was to be able to spend more time on the beach. But with a small program, which combines several Web sites in a single browser window, he's now well on his way to becoming a business success in the land of unlimited opportunities: with Quickbrowse (www.quickbrowse.com), Fest has developed a new way to move around for surfers tired of clicking. Called "metabrowsing", it has caused a furor in the USA and has already found imitators.

The free-lance journalist took the plunge and crossed the Atlantic back in 1994. Shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, he studied political journalism and philosophy at the Free University, while writing on the side for taz and Zitty. Then he discovered a love for the country and its people as well as his partner, David Sine in Miami Beach. Fest started a career as a correspondent for newspapers and magazines in Germany just a few rows of houses away from the beach. His special area was stories about stars and starlets. "I love to interview people," admits Fest.

But, as a rule, his editorial day was not very glamorous. "Every day in my search for stories, I spent two hours picking through the same Web sites of 20 American newspapers," the author remembers. Faced with the daily round of clicking and waiting, it occurred to him that gathering the contents onto a single "master page" would make it much faster to get an overview. So, he scratched together his programming knowledge and at the beginning of 1999 developed the code for a service which presented all the important Web offerings on one long combination page. The results were impressive: "My daily research drudgery dropped from two hours to twenty minutes," remembers Fest. He had reached his goal, because now he was spending less time surfing in the Web and more time on the beach.

That might have been the end of the success story -- but in the US, where the marketing of ideas has always been easier than here in Germany, that was of course only the beginning: Fest had written the surfing aid in the programming language called Perl (www.perl.org). That meant that its application worked only on-line using a Web server, not alone on a PC. Seeing that the script was after all already in the Net, Fest used a mailing list to inform fellow journalists of the new tool. As a result, the "Bangkok Post" declared Quickbrowse the "Web Site of the Week" in March 1999, which came as a complete surprise.

Seeing this unexpected honor, the hope started to germinate in the hobby programmer that he had perhaps created something bigger than he realized with his software baby. He gave the news of the program to a friend, the finance expert Andrew Tobias, who immediately wanted to purchase shares in the company which had not even been founded yet. He convinced Fest to register a patent and to market the application professionally.

Everything happened very fast after that: the man who has moved from being a journalist to being an inventor celebrated in the magazines Yahoo Internet Life and even in the Wall Street Journal is now, together with his partner and Tobias, owner/partner of a small company. The company now has four employees and is currently in the process of putting together a management and marketing team. David Bohnett, the founder of the Web community GeoCities (www.geocities.com), put up the necessary small change for the search for a suitable team, which is becoming ever more difficult and more expensive in the USA: the angel-investor recently put a quarter of a million dollars into Quickbrowse and sits in the start up's advisory council.

The fact that Fest's company is located in Florida and not in Silicon Valley, the Mecca of the dot-com scene, seems to Bohnett to be actually an advantage, given the tight employee market. "It's easier to find good people here than it is in California," a belief Fest shares. Thus, he has been able to lure south a leading advertising expert from the BBDO Agency in New York. In addition, a founder scene is also currently arising in Miami Beach, which has an eye on the Latin American market in particular.

Professional marketing is indispensable for the success of Quickbrowse, because the idea has already found numerous imitators, and other start ups such as Call the Shots (www.calltheshots.com), Katiesoft (www.katiesoft.com), Octopus (www.octopus.com) and Yodlee (www.yodlee.com) all hope to be able to carve out a slice of the coming metabrowsing market for themselves. The providers of the new form of information presentation in the Web, which are ultimately a mixture of search machine, content aggregator and news portal, and which are also offering competition to such services as Yahoo and Excite, have made it their goal to make surfing easier and more personalized.

During the "PC Forum" industry conference in Arizona at the beginning of March, an additional company announced its entry into the race for the best navigation tool. Onepage (www.onepage.com) is being provided with capital by such well-known investors as Strauss Zelnick, boss of Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment. The company wants to develop a tool with the help of which the user can create a browser window tailored to his own personal interests, allowing him to view not only the Web news of his local newspaper or TV news headlines but also his own bank statements.

As inventor of the new trend in metabrowsing, Fest is sure that he will emerge victorious over the competition. Feeling completely comfortable in his new role as businessman, he sees the competitive advantage of Quickbrowse, which has recently been joined by the meta-search machine Quicksearch, in the application's simplicity of operation. There is however, one melancholy aspect to the way the sunny boy's life has become so hectic: wanting as he does to generate sales through the licensing of his service and through advertising displays, the management duties he now has take up so much time that he hardly has a chance to get down the beach and look out over the wide ocean.

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