Published May 09, 2001
Turn back the clock. The Antidestination League wants to return to a decentralized World Wide Web.
Once there were descrete Web sites representing every sized company. Web Portals muscled in, mainly from big corporations, siphoning attention away to hand-picked content, often for a fee—a button-board for the thinking-impaired.
Now a group of entrepreneurs are focused upon replacing brand-name destination sites with self-organized distributed networks. Web users can once again be in direct contact with one another, bypassing the portals, so information can be more easily found and directly exchanged.
Looking to the past to shape the future, Multicity.com of Tysons Corner, VA, sells Web tools to others for the purposes of directly chatting, conducting informal auctions and polling. Multicity claims to have solicited 345,000 Web sites in its network as of February and contracts with VeriSign and Homestead.com.
Alain Hanash, Multicity cofounder with brother Patrick, proclaims, “It is the future of the Internet.” They and other open-network revolutionaries hand the peton to each and every Web site to which users interact. “Multicity is following the Internet principles of building a large, global network.” says Jim Lynch of Draper Atlantic Management who participated in the $16M funding. There’s an audience for both destination sites and open networks.
As visitors to a Web site, equipped with Multicity tools, launch chat sessions, they see a directory listing all the active chat sessions at other Multicity-equipped sites. Changing chat subjects is near-instantaneous with users on any continent. Multicity tools also help span cultural barriers by instantly translating to/from any of six written languages (70% accuracy).
Buyers and sellers are attracted to this formerly common approach, but in a new way. Finding one another is much easier in this open-networking plan and the participation cost is much more attractive—no charge. Do-it-yourself networkers are very enthusiastic; it works and transactions are profitable, especially for the high-bidders and sellers.
Rusty Braziel, founder of Altra Energy Technologies, a successful online exchange, has joined the antidestination entrepreneurs. His new software company, Netrana, offers Spot Dealmaker that links buyers and sellers with each other directly without the centralized auction site. Braziel discovered that direct exchanges work well for large-scale trading but are ineffective in three market segments: 1) those with a few participants, 2) those with unique products, and 3) sporadic traders.
Netrana plans to market its software to trade associations, intermediaries and online exchanges willing to be involved in spontaneous direct business-to-business deal making. “If I want to do business directly with a company, there’s no reason why it must be a member of the same online exchange,” says Mr. Braziel.
Netrana, based in Houston, TX, will charge for the client’s software and consultation to evaluate involvement in either or both a centralized market model or spot market model. Unlike so many start-up companies, Mr. Braziel says he’s not looking for venture funding. “I’d much prefer to fund the company with revenues,” he says. “It’s a radical notion, I admit.”
Open networks are not new. Efforts like Tribal Voice PowWow and CGMI had failed. However, these days bandwidth and computing power are rising simultaneously with the drop of per-megabyte cost of data storage. This combination empowers the individual home computer to do the heavy lifting formerly required by the centralized servers, namely to communicate and exchange information across the Internet. Examples to watch are OpenCola, XDegrees, InfraSearch and Project Juxtapose, to name a few.
In these peer-to-peer models, a database is retained as a pointer to all their topic-focused information. Yes, this does infer it to be a pseudo-destination site. But it’s a distributed one, more about access than control. The information is stored at other locations across the Internet, not in a central repository.