Techies generate buzz with Web-reading discovery

JOHN DORSCHNER
jdorschner@herald.com

Marc Fest was just looking for a way to make his job easier. As a Germany freelance writer living on Miami Beach, he scanned many publications daily on the Internet to find story ideas. But the Web sites were slow to load, and so he came up with a little programming device to speed things up. He called it Quickbrowse.

David Sine and Marc Fest devised a browser to quickly browse articles.

That was the beginning of what his partner, David Sine, calls ``a wild roller coaster ride.''

The programming has received glowing praise from Thailand to Little Rock. Andrew Tobias, a noted investor and author of 10 books, has invested in the project. A reader of Redherring.com, a tech publication, has suggested Quickbrowse could be sold for up to $30 million within a year.

Fest's creation is a quintessential example of what's happening with the super-heated Internet economy at the end of the millennium, in which any bit of programming can become a bonanza if it catches investors' fancy. Or become a bust if it doesn't.

Fest says he understands that, a year from now, he could once again be a journalist struggling to make ends meet.

``It's exciting,'' he says with severe understatement. ``But there's an uncertainty.''

Marc Fest, 33, perfected his English and learned about computer programming as an exchange student at a New Jersey high school. After moving back to Germany and becoming a journalist, he met ``my better half,'' David Sine, during a trip to Key West and that caused him to move to Florida three years ago.

They live in an apartment on South Beach and have a small office in another apartment building two blocks away.

Fest earns his living by writing profiles and tech stories for German-language publications.

In December 1998, he created Quickbrowse. Using Perl, a Web-based programming language, he designed a template -- a visual copy -- that showed all the publications on the Internet that he wanted to troll each morning.

Quickbrowse allows him to click on the headlines of the stories he wants to read, and when he's done, he clicks on an icon on the top of the screen, and after a few seconds, a second template appears with all the stories he has selected.

No need to wander from site to site, no need to wait as each story loads -- it's all done automatically.

Since Perl is a Web-based application, it had to be located on an Internet server. So, from the beginning, Quickbrowse was available to anyone. In February, Fest sent e-mails to journalist colleagues suggesting they try it.

On March 3, a newspaper halfway round the world, the Bangkok Post, plugged Quickbrowse as ``Internet site of the week.''

Elated, Fest mentioned the Thailand article to a friend, Andrew Tobias. They had known each other for a couple of years, and Fest had designed Tobias' Web site, http://www.andrewtobias.com/.

Tobias responded instantly. ``Oh, I want to have a stake in that!''

To Fest, that was a revelation, for Tobias was no casual investor. Besides writing a number of books on how to make money, Tobias is known for having done well in everything from the stock market to Broadway plays. (He boasts he made a 30-fold profit after putting $25,000 into Nunsense.) He is also treasurer of the Democratic National Committee.

Tobias says he realized that with the rapidly expanding amounts of information on the Web, he and many other people needed a simple way to access and organize what they wanted on a regular basis.

``There is real potential here,'' Tobias told his German friend.

Fest: ``Until he opened my eyes, I wasn't aware I had anything.''

Tobias invested ``in the five figures'' and found another investor to do the same. For this, Fest and Sine were able to get Quickbrowse on a dedicated server in San Antonio (at $300 a month) and buy new IBM laptops, plus a Hewlett-Packard, to start working on improving Quickbrowse's programming.

Tobias had suggestions to make it easier to operate, and Fest began working on them. Among other things, he set up an e-mail alternative, in which the desired information could be delivered daily in one long electronic letter.

Altogether, Fest estimates, he has put in ``thousands of hours'' programming and improving Quickbrowse.

``Now I understand why they say pizza is the food at Internet companies. You can eat it with one hand while you keep working.''

Meanwhile, the word was spreading among journalists. ``It's like getting a morning newspaper that has only the stuff you want to read,'' a Playboy columnist wrote.

``The mother of all browser windows,'' said The New York Post.

U.S. News and World Report, Irish Times, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and about.com have also recommended it.

``The buzz is getting wonderful,'' says Tobias.

Fest has a patent pending for Quickbrowse, but software can take two years to wind its way through the bureaucratic process before approval is given.

The question is what to do next. The site is a natural for adding advertising, but selling ads requires staff, which they don't have.

Investors have been approaching them, and Sine is beginning to learn the lingo of the Internet. A major Internet company has talked to them about a ``strategic alliance,'' in which the established firm would license Fest's software.

To get to the ``next level,'' Sine estimates that they will need $500,000 to $1 million from venture capitalists so that they could hire a chief executive and a team for marketing and programming.

``I'm aware I can't do all the things,'' says Fest.

Marketing people could start selling ads. Programmers could improve the design and operation. (``It's not idiot-simple,'' says Sine.) They also need more servers because the site (http://www.quickbrowse.com/) is getting 1,800 hits a day and climbing rapidly.

Sine is already practicing his speeches to sell venture capitalists: ``This could be as fundamentally important as an operating system! It literally changes the way you use the Web!''

Fest nods approvingly: ``He's in charge of vision.''

Dealing with venture capitalists has proved to be tricky for many programmers with good ideas, because investors can demand huge chunks of the company.

Tobias has volunteered to serve as an informal consultant and if the terms of any proposed venture-capital deal were too onerous, he might be willing to invest more to keep them going. Fest says Tobias already has ``a double-digit chunk'' of the company.