BY CARLA SINCLAIR AND MATT FRAUENFELDER

Marc Fest Quickbrowse Miami, Florida

Almost everyone has a "great idea" for a million-dollar Web site. Few people actually set that idea in motion. Fewer still attract attention from the investment community. But Marc Fest, a German- born freelance journalist working in Miami, was at press time on the verge of landing an eight-figure deal for his site, Quickbrowse. In recent months, the high-tech investment magazine Red Herring has called Quickbrowse "good acquisition bait"; the New York Post declared it to be the "mother of all browser windows"; and The Christian Science Monitor wrote that it "might be right up there with the lightbulb."

What is Quickbrowse, and why are financial journalists drooling over it like kids with a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts? It's a free service that ingeniously grabs the contents of any number of Web sites and lists them on a single page. Say you start each day by visiting Wired News, the Yahoo! What's New section, CNET, Slate, and Salon. You can create a Quickbrowse command that will load them all onto a single page with one click, or e-mail them to you at a specific time.

Fest, 33, developed Quickbrowse for himself, to skim a dozen newspapers every day in search of ideas for the stories he writes for a variety of German newspapers. At a party, he told famed financial adviser Andrew Tobias about the site. Fest says Tobias loved the idea and gave him "five figures" to develop the site and to help pay for Quickbrowse's $250 monthly Internet service bill. In exchange, Tobias got some equity in the newly formed company.

So far, Fest has talked with several venture capitalists and has signed a deal with a company that is looking for funding, but he's still paying his bills as a journalist. Fest needs money soon, because the server he uses is running at full capacity -- 400,000 monthly page views -- and he can't afford more bandwidth without a fat infusion of cash.

What's the first thing he would do with the capital? He answers without a second's hesitation: "This is a one-man show, run by a journalist, not a Web designer or programmer. I work on it till 4 a.m. I need to find a partner."