June 20, 1996 7:15 p.m. ET
Goldhaber marks return to industry at Net startup
By _Erica Schroeder_
Ex-Kaleida chief Nat Goldhaber will announce next week his latest venture, a
startup that's focused on Internet commerce.
CyberGold Inc. is attempting to draw Internet users and vendors together by
combining electronic commerce with advertising and marketing. The company has
developed a technology that allows users to develop a profile of advertising
that interests them while filtering out products and services they don't want.
The technology offers users an incentive to delve into ads rather than just
view them, offering "CyberCoin" rewards to people who read further into
advertising and marketing materials, such as a discount or free goods and
services. CyberGold charges advertisers for the level at which users view the
ads or for increasingly targeted ads, said a company spokeswoman.
The first version of the product, expected to be rolled out in September,
will require users to go to the CyberGold site. But officials expect future
versions of the software to be embedded in other sites. CyberGold has received
support from several credit card companies as well as PC makers, who plan to
use the service to sell products, said officials.
The CyberGold site is based on Sybase Inc. SQL database software running on
Sun Microsystems Computer Co. workstations. It will use Netscape
Communications Corp.'s namesake browser but will support other browsers, said
officials. The software will begin beta testing next month.
The company, based in Berkeley, Calif., currently has 25 employees and is
privately owned.
Goldhaber, who headed Kaleida from its inception in 1991, ran into
difficulties as the highly touted IBM-Apple joint venture saw its ScriptX
cross-platform multimedia authoring platform slip past numerous ship dates.
Goldhaber left the company in 1993 and was replaced by IBM veteran Michael
Braun.
Kaleida closed its doors earlier this year.