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Where Are They Now - Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Old Ideas for New Businesses

Silicon Beat (via VentureWire) mentions that Reply, a start-up "which gives you a form to fill out online and then goes out and tries to find what you're looking for," just snared $17 million from BA Venture Partners. Talk about Web 2.0! We've seen this concept before and it even had a strikingly similar name: Respond. Respond.com came on the scene circa 1999 and had an all-star cast of backers including former Netscape chief Jim Barksdale, Benchmark's Bill Gurley, and John Hummer of Hummer Winblad. AOL and Morgan Stanley were also involved. Web users could submit a query -- "Could you please find me a first edition of Huckleberry Finn?" -- and Respond would connect them with sellers of that book. Battered and bruised by the tech bust, however, Respond was eventually sold for parts to TEOCO, a company run by Atul Jain, the brother of InfoSpace's controversial founder Naveen Jain. Respond still exists, though it is now more explicitly positioned as a lead-generation engine for local businesses. As we've said before, one of the more striking aspects of the Web 2.0 is the familiarity of its business models - we've seen many of them before. Some of the early... Continue...