THE BUSINESS OF PORTALS One of the major prizes for America Online in its planned $4.2 billion purchase of Netscape is the browser maker's Netcenter Web site, or portal, and its nine million subscribers.
Portals are the latest revenue-generating scheme to sweep the Internet. The theory is that if you attract enough visitors by making your Web site a gateway to the untamed and uncharted Internet, advertisers will write large checks in your company's name.
AOL already has its own portal - the Internet base camp to more than 14 million users - but it is geared toward consumers. Netcenter tends to draw a more corporate and techno-savvy crowd.
The AOL and Netcenter portals rank among the most-visited sites on the Web. They threaten to dwarf competitors, most of which must adopt a niche strategy or perish. But one upstart ready to give the market a go is Portera Systems, which in February plans to launch a "business portal for mobile professionals" on a subscription basis.
Kevin McDonald, Portera's marketing vice president, says the Portera site (www.portera.com) will feature three elements for mobile professional users and the mid-market customers it also is targeting: enterprise applications; business content; and electronic commerce functionality.
Let's say you're a sales exec headed for a big meeting and you need travel info. You can use a hosted application on Portera's site to access your meeting information via hyperlinks. Click on the meeting link and Portera will provide you with the weather in the city you're visiting, as well as directions to the meeting site.
"That's the big difference between us and Netcenter," McDonald says. "Our portal is a fully functioning application."
The company already has content and service deals with SportsLine USA, Standard & Poor's ComStock, Weathernews and GoldenWare Travel Technologies.
This is the second incarnation for Portera, which was founded in 1996 as Netiva Software, a vendor of database development tools. The firm's expensive, proprietary software fared poorly against development tools from vendors such as Sybase and SuperCede.
Portera is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' Java Fund, Institutional Venture Partners and RRE Investors, and is located in Campbell, Calif.
QUIT BLAMING THE INTERNET All Web users have experienced the pain of staring at that little hourglass on their screen for minutes on end. For Web sites, the user's wait could result in the loss of impatient customers. And while it's true that slowdowns related to traffic congestion on the 'Net may be unavoidable, most firms that do a lot of business online could improve performance of their Web sites if they only knew where to begin.
That's what Keynote Systems hopes to provide the answer to with its new service designed to analyze, from the user's perspective, the performance of heavily trafficked Web sites.
Keynote's Full Page Component service uses agents running on ISP servers to measure users' experiences downloading content from Web sites. This information can then be used by Web site managers to tune their sites for optimal performance.
The service measures DNS lookup time, connection setup time, HTML download time and component-download time.
Full Page Component is available on a monthly or annual subscription basis. Prices range from $295 to $695 per month per URL.
You know what 'Net Buzz wants for Christmas, and it's not likely that Santa is going to come through. So send your best Internet news, rumor and gossip to Chris Nerney at (508) 820-7451 or cnerney@nww.com.
