But the year-old eCompanies is known mainly for another breathless endeavor. Last December the company paid a whopping $7.5 million to a Houston entrepreneur for the Web address Business.com, more than double the previous ransom record, Compaq’s $3 million purchase of altavista.com. Winebaum, who left Michael Eisner’s side as head of Disney’s Internet group to start eCompanies, promises the investment will pay off. “As opposed to two spots on the Super Bowl, this is going to pay dividends forever,” he says. This week, Net users will be able to second-guess his decision for themselves, as Business.com launches after seven months of hiring and planning.
The new site takes a page from the five-year-old playbook of Yahoo: build a simple, clean directory of Web sites, then add features and serve advertisements around it. In the case of Business.com, the sites are limited to topics of interest to business folks: 25,000 categories across hundreds of industries, from chemicals to computers. There’s also news, industry profiles and analyst reports. Unlike on Yahoo, you won’t find movie trailers, says Editor-in-Chief Peter Gumbel, who oversees a staff of 50 librarians and researchers. But you will find a list of equipment makers that will help you get a film-production company up and running anywhere in the country. The site will also be tightly integrated with two other eCompanies start-ups, Change.com, where users can purchase the products they find on Business.com, and USBX.com, a forum for small business to pursue mergers and acquisitions.
It’s not, however, going to be entirely smooth surfing for the start-up. Business.com will face stiff competition from similar sites like Office.com, Dow Jones.com and Hoovers.com, which have all locked up deals with the major consumer portals and are already in a race to deliver their services over mobile devices. Then there’s Wall Street darling VerticalNet, which has created 56 individual online industry marketplaces like nursing.com and bakery online. Most of these incumbents see Business.com as a latecomer that has little new to offer.
Jake Winebaum insists it’s early in the game –only 5 percent of the business segment of the Net has been built. The so-called business Internet, he says, “represents the biggest media opportunity of them all, one that will dwarf what has occurred with the consumer Internet.” Winebaum wants Business.com to be the hub of that nascent network. It’s a tall hill to climb, but the office jocks at eCompanies think they’re in the shape to do it.
