Quickbrowse a
quick hit Skimming 20 newspapers on the web over morning
coffee has become standard practice for anyone living on
Internet time - entrepreneurs, journalists, day traders, even
students.
Frustrated by all the discontinuous clicking around, Marc
Fest, a German stringer based in Miami Beach, took action in
January and wrote a simple web-based program called
Quickbrowse (www.quickbrowse.com) to speed the process.
Fest had no idea of the potential uptake - or the potential
upside. Not only is CNN headquarters in Atlanta training its
journalists to use the service, the New York Times inquired
about customizing it for internal use.
Through word of mouth Quickbrowse has acquired 30,000
registered users.
More importantly, 33-year-old Fest didn't anticipate the
speed at which investors looking for an Internet startup would
come after him.
His job is writing human interest stories for German
political newspapers. "I would read 30 local American
newspapers every day, which meant I picked up on stories a day
or two before they went national," the Berliner, who prefers
to write at the beach on his laptop, told The Post. "I told my
colleagues about it, just because it's useful."
The service is deceptively simple. The first time you log
on, you decide which papers or magazines or auctions they want
to see. Fest has bundled some of them into convenient groups,
such as Business News From 13 Newspapers and Computer News.
These are then downloaded in one very long browser window. You
scroll down, clicking on the interesting headlines, and these
stories are loaded on another page, in the background. When
you have finished you click over to this other page, which has
all the stories, again in one long page, which retains the
look and feel of each original publication.
Quickbrowse has a patent pending that stresses the
"continuous scrolling" element, which is considered very
intuitive. The service can also be delivered as an HTML e-mail
any time of day.
If it sounds like "Push" technology and the PointCast
debacle all over again, it isn't, because of the simplicity of
the execution. It caught the eye of Andrew Tobias, financial
writer - and treasurer of The Democratic National Committee -
who swooped and acquired a minority stake. Fest would only
reveal that Tobias paid "five figures."
Because Quickbrowse was written in Perl for use on the web,
he knew from the start that it was free, but he wasn't
expecting the resulting buzz.
"I know I could make some money from very targeted
advertising, since I can see from my server precisely what
people's interests are."
Fest signed a non-exclusive deal with some venture capital
middle men who proposed to find investors and take a cut of
the cash and some equity, but he soon had second thoughts. In
September, investment magazine The Red Herring ran a story on
Quickbrowse, inviting readers to offer suggestions for growing
the business.
"I started getting calls from investors, and e-mails-mails
from strangers saying 'Don't say yes to the first 10 million,'
and someone else said the company could be worth $30 million."
Some suggested going to Bill Gates, Yahoo!, or Sand Hill
Road [for investment], while some said stay below the radar
like messaging service ICQ did.
The mild mannered German says he just wants to get back to
his writing, but that it would be nice to be able to hire
someone to do the programming and designing - tasks he still
does himself.
"People act like I've just won the lottery, but when I
think about it, I don't know what I'd spend the money on. I
hate shopping."
.gif)
