From the February 22, 2002 print edition

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In a high-tech world, the little guy survives, thrives

Marc Fest did not plan on starting a business.

"I did it to ease my daily journalism research," said the 30-something CEO of Miami Beach-based Quickbrowse.com and former correspondent for a Berlin newspaper. "I would go to 20 U.S. newspaper Web sites to find news to send back home."

Fest, who arrived in South Florida from Germany five years ago, said he spent about two hours each day looking for news before he created Quickbrowse in late 1998.

"I have been a `hobby geek' since 1984, when I spent a year in Millville, N.J., as an exchange student and took a programming class on an Apple II," he said. "I switched to Windows and created this program."

His creation is a tool that allows users to combine several Web pages into a single, continuously scrollable page for faster browsing. For those pages that users visit on a regular basis, Quickbrowse offers delivery service of the "stitched together" page. Or, if a user is looking at a site with a lot of links, it may be transformed into something that stitches all those linked pages into one page.

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Scoring scoops

Fest said it cut down his daily news gathering from two hours to 20 minutes.

"It allowed me to get some scoops because I was able to look at some smaller sites and report back to Germany before anybody else," he said.

In April 1999, the company officially formed and patents ­ still pending ­ were filed.

"I think there's a good chance [we'll be awarded patents] because we put a lot of effort into them," Fest said. "Our patent attorney ended up investing in us, and I am confident."

Other Quickbrowse investors include financial writer Andrew Tobias and Baroda Ventures, the investment company run by Geocities.com founder David Bohnett, which invested $250,000.

"I put in a little money to help get Marc started," Tobias said. "I was a little caught up in the dot.com craze, with visions of billions."

Eventually, other companies ­ including Octopus.com, backed by millions of dollars and Netscape founder Marc Andreesen; and Onepage.com, backed by the same millions and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ­ created tools that allowed users to combine Web pages.

"It was good to see the big names involved in this, but I thought my days were numbered," Fest said.

List of casualties

Today, Octopus.com is no more and Onepage.com no longer offers metabrowsing services. Other metabrowsers such as Calltheshots, iHarvest, dodots and Katiesoft are gone as well.

"[There was] great excitement when metabrowsers first hit the Web. But this is a case where if you build a better mousetrap, the world may not beat a path to your door," said attorney David G. Bates, co-chairman of the technology practice group in the West Palm Beach office of Gunster Yoakley. "The market decided they either were not willing to pay for a new mousetrap or simply did not hear about it."

Plus, Bates said, there were other problems.

"Metabrowsers faced more legal challenges than the U.S.'s treatment of Taliban prisoners," he said. "Claims of trademark infringement and dilution issues, copyright issues, tortious interference with contracts, trespass, implied license issues, unfair competition, false advertising and unjust enrichment. It became clear that the metabrowser industry would support a small army of lawyers.

"Some venture capitalists even stopped investing in business-to-business exchanges because of fears of metabrowsers, but then it just fizzled," Bates said. "They weren't generating revenues to justify it."

Quickbrowse charges $12.95 for a three-month subscription to the Web-based service, after a two-week free trial. The company says it has an 88 percent renewal rate.

"It's a revenue source that's working fine," said Fest, who is also looking into licensing the Quickbrowse technology to other companies.

"We only raised $460,000 [in two investment rounds] to get the company off the ground," Fest said. "I have to thank God for not getting more funding."

Said Tobias, "Now that Quickbrowse is the sole surviving metabrowser, I think there's a shot here for it to make a modest success."

Bates agreed that the company may be successful.

No binge, no purge

At the office of his "small and quirky company, two blocks off the beach," Fest still sits at the glass-top desk he bought at Office Depot.

"Even when everyone else was going on a binge, we weren't," he said. "We didn't do it because we were smart. We didn't have a choice."

Fest said he was recently approached by a company interested in acquiring Quickbrowse.

"I'm expecting a sale to become more and more likely for us, especially since we're the last metabrowser left, and our technology offers powerful applications for a variety of companies," he said.

E-mail editorial assistant Eileen Cukier at ECukier@bizjournals.com.

Copyright 2002 American City Business Journals Inc. Click for permission to reprint (PRC# 1.1663.555734)

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