April 27, 2005

Disaster Relief

Continued from page 1

By Andrew Madden

The company, which claims more than 3 million unique visitors per month and that it has been profitable since 2003, joins other competitors such as Kayak.com, Mobissimo.com, and Yahoo’s FareChase in bringing the concept of comparison shopping to the travel space. SideStep currently scours over 100 travel sites to generate its side-by-side listings.

In the same way that SideStep hopes to co-exist with the giants of online travel, San Francisco-based StubHub, a matchmaker between buyers and sellers of sports and other entertainment tickets, is finding a way to successfully compete with eBay. The company, which sells tickets either at fixed prices or by auction, provides another example of a narrowly focused e-commerce company that is faring well against eBay's do everything, but do nothing great business.

StubHub claims its gross revenues in 2004 were $100 million and that net revenues were $25 million. By comparison, eBay’s ticket revenues were around $300 million, so StubHub has clearly carved out a nice business with room to grow. The company has partnered with a number of sports teams and splits revenues generated off ticket sales to their events.

But just like eBay, StubHub will have to learn to strictly monitor its transactions as the service grows. The company was smacked with negative publicity when it was sued for allowing tickets to the Oscar ceremonies to be sold on its service at $30,000 per seat.

Back in the less glamorous world of document management, we came across Mimeo, a company that provides online printing services and document collaboration. If you want to print 20 copies of that boring PowerPoint sales presentation you’ve been toiling over, you can upload and format the document online on Mimeo's servers and have the finished product sent to 20 different addresses via overnight FedEx.

The price is comparable to what you would pay if you stopped in at the local Kinko’s, which is Mimeo’s chief competition. The company also offers a collaboration service -- you could make that same PowerPoint file available to colleagues using a shared server provided by Mimeo.

Mimeo, which has offices in New York and Memphis, strikes us as one of these companies that's on to a good (not great) idea that takes forever to get off the ground. There's no shame in that game, but it's not usually one the venture capitalists intentionally play.  However, the investors aren’t giving up just yet. Mimeo recently raised another $5.8 million -- its fifth round of funding -- to expand its operations, and erstwhile competitor IKON Office Solutions recently shuttered its business document service unit, leaving Mimeo with a fresh set of customers to pursue.