By Alex Gove
Redherring.com
September 15, 1999

Occasionally, a journalist does something that is actually useful.

Smart money gets stupid over Idealab VC fund   Garage.com opens the door to $12 million in funding   Onvia.com ups risk by choosing debt

Take Mark Fest, a German reporter who has been based in Miami's South Beach for the past five years. A part-time programmer, Mr. Fest developed a program, offered as a free service, called Quickbrowse, which allows users to pull together many different Web pages and scroll through the results.

Mr. Fest's Web site greatly speeds up the process of skimming through numerous Web pages at once. But now he faces a different problem. Quickbrowse is generating no revenues, and the cost of a dedicated server is approximately $250 a month. Moreover, Mr. Fest says he wants to focus more on journalism.

	Teymour Boutros-Ghali says failures are invaluable lessons.   You can find the rare and unusual these days on eBay.   Bill Gates has become a model among his own kind for charitable giving.

It's a common dilemma for entrepreneurs: when a venture is not working out, how do you let go?

CLICK AND SAVE
Let me explain why I like Quickbrowse. Let's say you want to scan the business sections of several different newspapers at once. Quickbrowse can compile all of these pages into just one page, sparing you the time and trouble of clicking around. Or, perhaps you are an avid eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) shopper: Quickbrowse can assemble the pages of many different items for sale onto one page.

Mr. Fest developed the program because he needed to check through a number of American newspapers quickly. As a reporter for the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung as well as the German print magazine Online Today, he had to survey several of the same papers every day, and news clipping services could not provide him with the breadth of choices that he required.

Quickbrowse has been a boon to financial journalists like Andrew Tobias, who runs his own finance Web site. In fact, Mr. Tobias, who is also based in Miami, liked Quickbrowse so much that he bought 10 percent of the company. He has since increased his share to 30 percent.

Mr. Tobias acknowledges that Quickbrowse is somewhat kludgy, but he thinks that the company addresses a real need in the marketplace. In an email, he told me, "Quickbrowse already has people who are THRILLED [emphasis his] with it, whose lives have been made better and easier by it (in modest, but appreciated ways). That's a big deal. If it catches on, then I suspect there will be a way to realize some value from it, in addition to the satisfaction of getting all those nice thank yous."

QUICKBROWSE QUANDARY
Still, Quickbrowse faces some pretty imposing hurdles. Currently, only about 500 people use the service daily, and Mr. Fest does not think he could grow Quickbrowse by positioning it as a subscription service. In addition, the patents for which Quickbrowse has applied are still pending, and, given the fact that Quickbrowse is displaying other portals' pages, it is not clear whether Quickbrowse could offer its own advertising without opening itself up to numerous lawsuits.

This last issue must be especially frustrating for Mr. Fest, since his site gets so many hits, which would make it attractive to advertisers. Because Quickbrowse downloads many different pages into each Quickbrowse page, the average Quickbrowse user views ten pages. Thus, its per capita page view numbers could probably put many other sites' to shame.

The good-natured Mr. Fest, who up until recently was spending four to five hours a day on Quickbrowse's programming, jokes that "there was some excitement for a while that I would be the next Bill Gates, but that has dissipated somewhat." Now, he is more worried about surviving Hurricane Floyd. (He lives two blocks from the beach.)

Mr. Fest could use your advice. Should he simply shut down Quickbrowse and call it a day? Or can you (yes, you) suggest a graceful exit (strategy, that is) for Mr. Fest?

The winning entry gets a free autographed copy of Andrew Tobias's "The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need."

Quickbrowse

Is the glut of venture capital changing the way startups grow their business? Share your thoughts in our private companies forum.

	As of: 09/15/99 04:08 PST DJIA   + NASDAQ   + S&P 500   + AMEX   + TECH 250   2545.76   +7.06 IPO 100     3343.59 -36.54
Symbol Lookup