From: Adam Rifkin -4K (adam@XeNT.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 18:48:02 PDT
I was just curious who the company behind www.gnutella.wego.com was, so
I went rifling through some press releases. Since this was written in
December, I assume that WeGo has now raised $17 million in financing.
Their one sentence pitch is: we provide portal profits for nonprofit
organizations.
Now, you're going to love the conclusion Rohit just came up with:
WEGO THINKS THAT GNUTELLA IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION, AND THEY'RE
HOSTING IT AS A DEMONSTRATION OF THEIR "PORTAL" SERVICES
Someone correct me if I'm wrong: Nullsoft *never* shipped code for
Gnutella. Everything out there is a hack that reverse engineered the
original .exe file that was wiped from the AOL servers after a day, and
there is no place that is "The" official place maintaining Gnutella source.
Sure, there are umpteen reverse-engineered Gnutellas on sourceforge, and
freshmeat makes available version after version, but there is nothing we
can call "The" Gnutella.
This is sick. Open source movements are supposed to be more organized
than this, aren't they? Where's the bazaar?
Also, it's incredible to me that people who are downloading and using
the various Gnutella .exe's think they're getting something that is
(1) secure and (2) anonymous. Evil Gnutella reverse engineers could have
stumbled on the ultimate Trojan Horse for slurping down the hard drives
of unsuspecting folks who are just innocently trying to steal music and
porn files.
> http://www.mercurycenter.com/archives/reprints/1299/mitchell12051999.htm
>
> Non-profits get a hand on Web design
> December 5, 1999
>
> BY JAMES J. MITCHELL
> Mercury News Staff Writer
>
> UNTIL early October, the College Democrats of America got 30,000 to
> 40,000 hits a week on its Web page. Since then, the page has been
> averaging about 150,000 hits a week -- so many, says Director of
> Communications Noah Schubert, We thought there must be an error
> somewhere. The reason for the jump wasn't necessarily a surge in
> youthful interest in the race between Bill Bradley and Al Gore. Schubert
> credits a free, easy-to-customize set of Web design tools created by
> WeGo.com, a Palo Alto start-up that caters to non-profit organizations.
>
> The CDA's new Web site -- www.collegedems.org -- has facilitated
> communication between the national organization, local chapters and
> members and encouraged participation, and it has been instrumental in
> the creation of 25 new chapters, Schubert says.
>
> MAKING non-profits and associations more efficient and successful
> through better use of the Internet is a mission for Kir S. Kahlon and
> Anjai Gandhi, two of the founders of WeGo.com and alumni of UC Berkeley,
> Harvard Business School and Bain & Co., a management consulting firm.
>
> We've both been in non-profits and the private sector and see a huge
> resource gap between the dot.coms and the dot.orgs, says Kahlon, the
> company's CEO. We want to help bridge the divide. WeGo.com is giving
> non-profits the same type of technology companies pay $100,000 to
> achieve, Kahlon says. Thanks to WeGo.com's easy-to-use templates, people
> with no knowledge of HTML can design and change their Web pages easily.
>
> The goal, said Gandhi, is to help organizations that don't have computer
> professionals on their staffs.
>
> As an average computer user, with no HTML skills and no
> Web-creation-tool skills, for me it has been fairly intuitive, and I see
> that with our partners, says Bo Ravn, international programs specialist
> for the international secretariat of Youth for Understanding, a student
> exchange organization (www.youthforunderstanding.org).
>
> It was a pretty short job to take what WeGo had put together and
> integrate it into our site, says James Radack, a senior director of the
> National Mental Health Association (www.nmha.org). His group now creates
> Web sites for its affiliates or makes existing sites more useful. This
> will mushroom out into the community beyond our national organization.
> It's exciting that people can do these things on a local level as well
> as at a national level.
>
> EVEN though WeGo.com hopes to help many of this country's 3 million
> non-profits, the company itself plans to be a profit-making venture. It
> expects to get revenues from affinity marketing and from setting up
> buying clubs.
>
> Affinity marketing, already used by some credit card companies and
> retailers such as Amazon.com, would allow non-profits to get a
> commission -- which would be split with WeGo.com --if their supporters
> use certain services or buy certain products.
>
> Members of a buying club -- which, for example, one day might include
> some 80,000 students in the CDA -- can purchase products such as PCs or
> telephone service at a discount because of their mass buying power.
> WeGo.com would get a slice of the savings.
>
> WeGo.com has raised nearly $2 million in funding and says local venture
> capitalists are about to invest $15 million in the company.
>
> From the early experience of organizations like the CDA and Youth for
> Understanding, it's clear that WeGo.com can make a big difference to
> non-profits at little cost and hassle. If the company can make a profit
> too, so much the better.
---- Adam@4K-Associates.comWeGo has no idea what they're sitting on. They think they're hosting a disabled wheelchair user group or something. -- Rohit Khare
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