· GoTo/Overture (became Yahoo Search Marketing) – paid inclusion search engine that was renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing after it was purchased by Yahoo to compete with Google AdSense.

· CitySearch – local city guides, acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

· Commission Junction – affiliate marketing leader purchased by ValueClick.

· Insider Pages – Yellow Pages written by friends; a local search engine built around the concept that the best way to find a local business is through a personal recommendation. The Insider Pages community has written over 500,000 user-generated reviews of local businesses across the USA. The company was acquired by CitySearch/IAC in 2007.

· The DotTV Corporation – licensed the rights to the .tv domain, and sends the island nation of Tuvalu enough money from this license that it was able to join the United Nations. The company was acquired by VeriSign in 2001.

· eSolar – makes electricity generation from large scale solar thermal plants cost-competitive with fossil fuels. With mirrors that are 100 to 300 times smaller than conventional designs, eSolar’s product affords substantial advantages, including a 50 percent cost reduction. eSolar just received $10 million from Google and developed the solar power for the Google campus.

· Aptera Motors – is building lightweight, low cost composite electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles that are safe and reliable. By employing patent pending low cost composite manufacturing methods and cutting edge computational fluid dynamics, the company’s first car, the Aptera typ-1 will be available for under $30,000.

· Snap – is dedicated to getting users to results they really want faster. Snap.com delivers superior relevance and visual, rich and interactive search results to broadband users, and offers risk-free, flexible Cost-Per-Action advertising to advertisers. The company’s Snap Shots service is an open platform for delivering contextually relevant content such as stock quotes, streaming audio or video, product information and more, directly to users as they browse the web. (I have implemented Snap technology on this blog.)

· Tickets.com –a leading provider of tickets for sports and entertainment events worldwide.

· Compete – web analytics website that allows visitors to view and compare traffic to websites around the world (a site I use constantly).

· eToys.com – internet toy retailer, purchased by KB Toys.

· Picasa – a digital photo organizer for the PC that was widely reviewed as the best product on that platform. The company was acquired by Google in 2004.

· WeddingChannel.com – a central resource for couples about to get married. The site attracts millions of unique visitors each month and contains the bridal registries of a wide variety of retailers. WeddingChannel.com merged with The Knot in 2006.

· PayMyBills.com – online bill payment service acquired by PayTrust.

· Intranets.com – provided on-demand collaboration services — an “instant intranet” — for small businesses or departments and groups inside large organizations. By the time it was acquired by WebEx Communications in 2005, it had amassed over 300,000 paying subscribers and 10,000 corporate sites.

· NetZero – one of the first companies to offer free, ad-supported dial-up Internet services. It expanded its services with low-cost access in 2001. In that same year, it merged with Juno Online Services to form United Online. United Online is publicly traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange (Nasdaq: UNTD).

· HomesDirect – quickly became the largest online auction site for foreclosed properties with more than 10,000 homes sold per month. It was acquired by eBay in 2001.

· AirWave Wireless – a leading provider of specialized tools to centrally manage large, multi-vendor wireless LAN, mesh, and WiMAX networks.

· Free-PC – an opportunity to deliver free PCs to consumers, with the costs fully borne by advertising revenue. After providing free computers and Internet access to 20,000 customers in just a few short months, the company was acquired by eMachines.

· Energy Innovations – delivers cost-effective, grid-competitive solar electric power. It is currently developing the Sunflower, the first high-concentration PV system designed for commercial rooftop and adjacent ground-mounted applications.

· X-1 Technologies – changes the way corporate information is accessed and acted upon by end users. The company pioneered fast-as-you-type searching, intuitive interface, file and email previewing, the ability to save searches, and the ability to act on the found email or files. X1 is now available in both desktop and enterprise editions.

· New.net – provides more logical web address ending suffixes such as .travel and .shop. By partnering with Internet service providers to enable these new addresses to be recognized, the company sought to expand the market for web addresses and make it easier for users to find sites of interest. The company was acquired by Vendare Media (now Connexus) in 2004.

· Partsearch – a leading provider of Outsourced Parts Management (OPM) solutions.

· Infinia – improves the quality of life by changing how the world generates and uses energy. Having developed and delivered innovative Stirling engines and generators since 1985, the company’s technology is at the core of residential combined heat and power appliances currently being commercialized worldwide.

· Cooking.com – the leading online superstore for all things related to cooking.

· Desktop Factory – developed a breakthrough desktop 3D printer with capabilities similar to traditional rapid prototyping systems costing tens of thousands of dollars more. Combining high performance and low cost in a desktop size, this printer will allow three-dimensional printing to become pervasive in business, schools and homes.

· Perfect Market – an automated search engine marketing company that helps online publishers monetize content. The company maximizes the profitability of publishers’ pages by adjusting the amount spent with each traffic partner as calculated by Perfect Market’s proprietary algorithms through a closed loop feedback system. The high degree of automation provided by their patent-pending SEMgine™ technology is the key to profitably monetizing content that would otherwise remain invisible to Web searchers.

· InternetBrands – is a leading operator of media and e-commerce sites for “large ticket” consumer purchases, such as cars, real estate, mortgages, and travel. InternetBrands operates a portfolio of websites with 34 million visitors and 458 million page views in March 2008. In April, Internet Brands purchased five new websites, including FitDay.com. Some of the other InternetBrands websites include:

o CarsDirect

o Autos.com

o VacationHomes

o ApartmentRentals

o Loan

o CruiseReviews

o BikeForums

o Vamoose

o DVDtalk

o FamilyCorner

o FlyerTalk

o HorseTopia

o HuntingNet

o World66

o WikiTravel

o vBulletin (powers the Adoption.com Forums.)

o And many others.

IdeaLab was the simultaneous home to about 50 dot-coms at the height of the Internet bubble. After the burst of the bubble, Bill and IdeaLab went through some dark times. They had taken private placement funds at a $9 billion valuation, but then dropped in value to an estimated $500 million. Both sides eventually came to terms and dropped the suit.

After the dotcom crash Gross and IdeaLab shifted their focus to “big, impactful, change-the-world companies”. They felt it was going to take at least five years to get any company profitable, so they needed to focus on much bigger opportunities to make the effort worth while. Gross says, “We slowed our pace dramatically. We still had 20 ideas a month, but we just rejected 20 a month for six months, before we started one.”

Now, IdeaLab focuses on about 16 companies in a much more diverse portfolio. Bill is starting fewer new ventures, showing more restraint in which companies he starts, holding his companies longer, and trying to stay further out of the way of his management teams while they do their jobs.

IdeaLab has been a dream for a serial entrepreneur such as Bill Gross. He has all of the entrepreneurial tools he needs to create great businesses, and the business incubator allows him to spin of many ideas simultaneously. However, even with his phenomenal resources and talent, some of his businesses have failed. He has learned from these mistakes, and has modified the IdeaLab strategy.

Bill Gross said: “We found after starting fifty Internet companies after five years, the ones which succeeded were the ones with protect-able, intellectual property. It was not time to market, it was not how fast or lightweight the company was. It was how deep a reach, how proprietary, and what differentiation and barriers to entry those companies had so that others wouldn’t copy our idea. It led us to say–that building stuff was not bad. It wasn’t that assembly lines were a bad thing; it’s just that building things without protect-able differentiation is bad. We thought we should start companies in all our areas of expertise, as long as it meets the criteria of making an important difference to the world, that it meets the criteria of having fundamental demand, as well as meeting the criteria of company structure–protect-able, differentiable barriers to competitive entry. All our energy companies have that all in spades. In all aspects, they are large opportunities, with big potential impact, and also have patent protection and trade secrets that make it hard to copy the idea. We’ll continue to start Internet companies, too, but put them through the same test — big impact on the market, big potential, and intellectual property. “

What can I learn from Bill Gross as I create my new ventures? I am particularly impressed with his focus on social entrepreneurship, as many of his ventures make the world better, such as the clean energy companies. Life is to short to spend it just building businesses that make money. There are plenty of ideas and opportunities. I need to focus on those ideas that make a large social contribution in addition to making a profit.

I am impressed that Bill Gross and the IdeaLab team discipline themselves to toss out so many good ideas so that they can pursue the great ideas. I need to focus on fewer ideas that have the potential to be really big. I need to select ventures that have substantial demand, and have protect-able barriers of entry.

(Source: I gleaned information to write this blog entry from various sources, such as Wikipedia, the IdeaLab website, and news articles.)