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From Naysayer to Cheerleader
Dot-com critics become CEOs -- and other alarm:clock news from the land of private venture funding.

Spectators of the boom and bust cycle of the late '90s might recall a popular website called Fuckedcompany.com, which chronicled the implosions of flailing tech ventures. The site was the brainchild of Philip Kaplan (aka Pud), a misanthrope who rode the dot-com crash to stardom by pleasing Schadenfreude-junkies everywhere.

Now, in a sure indication that the tech start-up market is on the mend, Kaplan is CEO of his own venture-funded start-up called AdBrite, a self-service Internet ad network that brings together buyers and sellers of ad space. For advertisers, AdBrite offers a network of websites with available inventory. Publishers sign up at AdBrite to make themselves available to these advertisers. Publishers can set their own ad rates, and approve or reject every ad that's purchased for their site.

When you look at AdBrite's list of publishers, you won't recognize many them -- and this could be a good thing. Unlike some of its competitors, which boast ad networks with name-brand publishers, AdBrite tends to offer access to lesser-known sites, but many of these sites have huge traffic and a good audience. Given the rebirth of Internet advertising, the market seems big enough to support lots of players -- for now.

Helping to complete "Pud's" transformation to credibility is the fact that his venture investor is Sequoia, which invested $4 million and has funded in other credible ventures such as Google and Yahoo.

Another area that's attracting venture dollars into the tech start-up market is blog infrastructure, which is the tools and software used to create, publish, and promote blogs. Palo Alto, CA-based Five Across is touting a hosted blogging platform called Bubbler, which aims to make blog publishing easier and more media-rich.

One of the current challenges with blog publishing, at least for the average blogger, is figuring out how to easily upload different media formats to a blog. Bubbler allows posting of any kind of content into a blog, including audio, video, spreadsheets, and PDFs. Instead of updating blogs through a browser-based Web form, users post entries through a Bubbler desktop application. Five Across also plans to offer Bubbler as part of a workgroup suite that includes instant messaging and a group collaboration client. Adobe Ventures and Granite Ventures back the company.

If AdBrite and Bubbler are hot, Idiom Technologies is not. The Waltham, MA-based company sells software that helps managers of large corporate Web sites update content in multiple languages. At first blush, this appears to be a reasonable business, but venture capitalists have invested untold millions in this market with no return. Idiom has raised close to $50 million since its founding in 1998.

The pitch is that the Internet is global, so managing multilingual sites should be a big business. But most companies are decentralized and tend to let their country units manage their own sites, or they are like Google and just develop their own multilingual Web technology. The latest $6 million investment in Idiom strikes us as a bald attempt by its venture capitalists to keep the company afloat long enough for a sale so that they might recoup some of their losses. C'est la vie.