Underneath the radar of the Internet bubble bursting, some smaller dot-coms have kept plugging along by making adjustments to what might be called the New New Reality.

Here what's happened to three that we've written about before -- Study24-7, Quickbrowse and Seedra, which was the top finisher in our 2000 Business Plan contest under the name Flowergarage.com.

Study24-7 is the brainstorm of two 20-something buddies. Three years ago, Craig Green and Brian Maser started in a cramped office in a North Dade company owned by Craig's dad.

Their idea was to pay college students to post class notes on their website, where they would then be offered free to other students. They figured they'd make a mint from advertisers seeking to reach their hot young demographics.

In the summer of '99, the guys attracted the attention of Fred Gibbons, a Silicon Valley pioneer and founder of Software Publishing Corp. Gibbons now teaches business courses in Stanford University's graduate school of engineering. Among his students were Jerry Yang and David Filo, who had a vague idea for an Internet site. Gibbons was one of the first investors in Yahoo.com.

Since then, he has served as a mentor to promising startups. When he chose Study24-7 in the summer of 1999, Green and Maser moved to Silicon Valley to learn from the master. ``We're getting in on the Gold Rush,'' Maser gushed.

The field of college notes was suddenly hot. Three competitors sprung up, and angry professors complained to the press that dot-coms were stealing their lectures and getting rich.

Study24-7 moved into fancy offices in Silicon Valley and poured $700,000 into a redesign of its website.

The problem -- a common one in dot-com dreamland -- is that the boom of banner ads never materialized. One by one, the competitors collapsed.

Green and Maser figured they better change their business model -- and their location. Since Silicon Valley rents were killing them and they decided they had learned all they could from the Stanford prof, they moved out -- Maser to Los Angeles to open a marketing office, Green back to Miami to run the basic operations out of the old office in his dad's warehouse.

For the past six months, they've been working on a new concept. The class notes will still be free, but participating students must first sign up for one of the site's sponsoring companies such as long-distance telephone or financial services.

``We've really wised up and come down to earth,'' Green says.

Marc Fest's idea also originally depended on advertising.

A German freelance journalist living in Miami Beach, he came up with a bit of programming that set up a reading list of websites he liked to check out. He'd click on the headlines of stories that interested him, and then they would load together in one long list. No constant clicking to open and close.

When Fest put his Quickbrowse software on the Web, he received heaps of praise, from Thailand to The Wall Street Journal. Investment writer Andrew Tobias backed Fest. So did TV weatherman Bryan Norcross and David Bohnett, a California Internet pioneer who developed Geo Cities.

This wasn't a big-time deal. Bohnett, the biggest investor, went in for only $250,000, money Fest used to hire programmers to improve the site. He recently raised another ``low-end six-figure sum,'' enough to keep three full-time employees and two freelance programmers chugging along.

``The main story is we survived the dot-com bloodbath,'' Fest says. ``In hindsight, it was good that we never got the huge office space and all that. We stayed small,'' working out of a small apartment on South Beach.

Like Study24-7, Fest has changed its business model because the ads never came.

Quickbrowse's website still offers the free programming, but Fest now focuses on selling the technology to other companies. He feels it's a natural for shopping sites, like Landsend.com. ``Let's say you want a red pullover, a green scarf and a yellow shirt. You can click on each, and collect all the information and pictures on one page -- sort of like an instant shopping cart.''

Fest's patent-pending technology could also be used for message boards. Instead of clicking on each message, opening, reading, then closing and going on to the next, a user could click first on all the messages he wants to read and then get them all displayed at once.

``This could be very useful,'' Fest says hopefully.
Flowergarage.com started a year ago, just a few weeks before the Internet Bubble burst.

Its founders were perfect -- Alex Muñoz-Suárez had a background in finance with J.P. Morgan, and his brother Tony ran Heaven Scent, a local flower shop -- a good combination to set up a business-to-business site linking global growers and American retailers.

`The main story is we survived the dot-com bloodbath. In hindsight, it was good that we never got the huge office space and all that. We stayed small.'

-- MARC FEST,

Quickbrowse founder

But because of timing, they had a hard time getting funded, and so they entered The Herald's business plan contest, finishing first in the judge's voting.

Even before they won, they had secured $1.6 million in funding -- a pittance compared to that received by earlier B2Bs, but enough to get them started.

They first hoped to launch their website in October, but there were delays. One was for a name change. Goodbye, Flowergarage.com; hello, Seedra, ``seed for growing, Ra for the Egyptian goddess of the sun,'' says Tony.

The site launched earlier this month.

Many B2B websites have been floundering, as firms have been reluctant to give up established relationships with middlemen for uncertain new links with the Net, but the brothers are hopeful because the flower business is extremely fragmented, with perhaps 2,000 growers and 60,000 retailers, and everyone is looking for any kind of edge.

It's an attractive enough field that they have at least three competitors, and the Muñoz-Suárez brothers know they've got a tough road ahead. So far, they've signed up 80 growers, from Holland to Ecuador, plus 300 retail shops. They have 25 persons working in seven locations.

They say the key is that they're not betting everything on the Net. Customers can also use a 1-800 number.