BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 23, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- STRATEGIES ONLINE EXTRA: Three Picks from Cirlab's Portfolio In the last 10 months, the European incubator has started 10 companies. Here's a look at a few of them: Hiugo is a portal for the mobile Net. Founder James O. Carter, a 36-year-old American, had the idea for the company while working on Web strategies for Telecom Italia's mobile division, TIM. He broke away in May to launch the company. For now, Hiugo is a Web site that offers synchronized services for the PC and the mobile phone. This permits users to customize their own Web pages, with personalized weather, contacts, agenda, and e-mail -- and to retrieve all of those services and information from a mobile phone. The mobile portal itself is hardly a novel idea. Phone companies throughout Europe are pushing their own services, most of them with the same abilities. And other startups, such as Sweden's Room33, are following Hiugo's path. To date, says Carter, Hiugo is up from 20 hits per day in May to 120,000 now -- all without advertising. "This is viral," he says. And employment at the company has risen to 15 people. The challenge is to make money. For that, Hiugo is planning to offer customized services for events. At trade shows, for example, the company will design mobile Web sites with maps, speech schedules, digital bulletin boards -- even matchmaking services. And for those capabilities, Hiugo is teaming up with another of Cirlab's startups, hi-flier. hi-flier was founded in Florence by Guido Braccini, a 27-year-old electronic engineer. The 10-person shop is developing so-called intelligent agents for the mobile Web. How will they work? Let's return to the trade show. There, an engineer working, say, for a bicycle manufacturer, needs to contact suppliers of chains, gears, cables, and brake pads. By answering questions on a menu, perhaps while he's still seated at his PC, the engineer forms a profile of his needs. Once he's at the trade show, his virtual agents, like so many matchmaking gnats, zip around in search of other people who provide the services he's looking for. The agents scout out both people's agendas and propose a time, date, and meeting place. If both users hit O.K., the meeting appears on their agendas. Like Hiugo, hi-flier is hardly alone in the field. In Japan, intelligent agents will be making a debut within months. Early on, the agents are more likely to be popular among the young -- kids at malls, for example, looking for fellow Blink 182 fans. Only after kids have test-driven the agents for a year or two will hi-flier and its competitors be pushing the little gnats into the business world. B2eyes.com is a medical portal, this one focused on a niche within a niche: the optical business in the Italian market. Headed by former McKinsey & Co. partner Francesco de Ferrari, the company looks to create and dominate a national niche market that the global giants are likely to leave uncovered. It's in these markets that Europe's different languages and cultures provide startups with some protection. And Italy, with a market of 60 million people, has enough heft to develop some national champs. Does that mean that if B2eyes.com catches on, it will be crossing borders and extending the eye-glasses portal to the rest of Europe and America? That's a long shot. More likely, if the startup can establish its brand in Italy, a bigger rival will pay liberally to snap it up. By Stephen Baker in Paris _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _					RELATED ITEMS EBIZ Contents for issue dated Oct. 23, 2000 Silicon D-Day (int'l edition) TABLE: A New Plan for the Old World (int'l edition) TABLE: Harnessing Silicon Valley Culture (int'l edition) ONLINE EXTRA: Profiles of Cirlab... ONLINE EXTRA: ...and some of its spin-offs Old-World Upstart (int'l edition) ONLINE EXTRA: Q&A with Icon Medialab CFO Rems Buchwaldt INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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