Small Miami Beach company only survivor in metabrowsing field after large competitors have folded.
MIAMI BEACH, FL.- Jan 28, 2002 - Quickbrowse.com, Inc., a small Internet company
based in Miami Beach, Florida, is the only survivor in the once-hot field of "metabrowsing" after a
string of bigger rivals have folded.
Quickbrowse is credited with inventing Web-based metabrowsing in 1999, when founder Marc Fest created a tool enabling users to combine multiple Web pages into a single page for faster browsing. The new field soon became crowded with bigger players: Octopus.com received $11.5 million in funding and backing by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. Microsoft founder Paul Allen got behind Onepage.com with more then $12 million in funding. These two companies, together with others like Calltheshots.com, iHarvest.com and doDots.com, have since folded their operations (or ceased providing metabrowsing services, in the case of Onepage).
"We're practically a metabrowsing monopolist now," jokes Marc Fest, the founder and CEO of Quickbrowse.com. "There's no other place on the Web where users can go to combine frequently viewed pages into a single page and save time. The fact that we're still around really has everything to do with that we never got as big as our competitors. We're a very small operation, just two blocks off the beach here in South Beach. In hindsight, I'm grateful that we never received more than half a million dollar in funding. Had we gotten more, we would have inevitably scaled up our operations and would have had to go out of business once the investor dollars dried up. Now, on the other hand, we've started charging our users a subscription fee and actually make enough money to stay in business, grow our user base, and hey, maybe get bought by Microsoft once the economy improves or our several patents get approved. Our users are extremely loyal, more than 90% frequently renew their subscriptions ($12.95 for 3 months)."
Quickbrowse has recently licensed its Quickbrowse This technology to the New York New Media Association who has added metabrowsing to its online jobs board. The company is planning to start providing licensable metabrowsing features to be used by companies in email newsletters.
"Sometimes it seems ironic," says Fest. "After all, when I created Quickbrowse, I didn't intend it to be a business. I just wanted to help myself with my daily journalist research, because I was working as a news correspondent for German newspapers. Quickbrowse has always stayed somewhat quirky, because of these off-beat roots. When the bigger competitors started popping up, I used to get quite concerned. Some of them came up with very cool features, and in a way it's a shame that it's all gone now."
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Quickbrowse.com, Inc.
Quickbrowse (www.quickbrowse.com) was founded in 1999 and is credited with inventing "metabrowsing", a technology enabling users to combine multiple Web pages into a single page for faster viewing. Besides licensing its "Quickbrowse" technology to Web site operators, Quickbrowse offers a Web-based service at www.quickbrowse.com, enabling end-users to combine any Web sites they want into a single page to save time viewing information. It is the only Web service of this sort. Quickbrowse has been praised in more than 120 media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Newsweek and the Washington Post.
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Read the entire Quickbrowse story at www.quickbrowse.com/story/
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More Press about Quickbrowse.com:
http://www.quickbrowse.com/press
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Contact Information:
Marc Fest, CEO, Quickbrowse.com
festm@quickbrowse.com
Phone: (305) 604-9500
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