And so the takeover bids and share offers keep coming, with talk that Time-Warner is about to unload AOL to Microsoft, Google raising yet more billions of dollars, through to Trinity Mirror and DC Thomson, the Beano's publisher, each offering around £51 million to acquire the websites of the online recruitment company, HotGroup. It is almost as if the dot.com boom never went bust at all.
But there were lessons in what happened just over five years ago that many looking to invest in new technology-type companies would be shrewd to take on board.
Trinity Mirror, in particular, have had their fingers burnt in the past with the IC24 debacle. The IC24 Internet Service Provider (ISP) was launched among much fanfair across all of the newspaper group's outlets as the first dial-up ISP to offer 0800 freecall access.
It quickly drew a vast number of subscribers, poaching many from the then market leader Freeserve. However, as it used a freefone number, there was no immediate revenue from calls (which, at the time, was the main moneyspinner for Freeserve and its ilk).
There was a need for Trinity Mirror to offer a wealth of e-commerce opportunities on their websites to enable them to recoup the costs of connecting users to the web. However, the market wasn't developed enough and their members just opted to dial in using their free service and then choose to view other websites.
Trinity Mirror tried to sell the ISP in 2001 for £25 million. Then, they even called me in to see them in my then role as a "dot.com guru", to see if I could raise the cash to buy the company. I couldn't, and wouldn't, and in the end the site was sold for a fraction of that figure to Brightview, a company created to snap up ISPs at bargain basement prices.
It was a similar story when it came to the Telegraph Group's ill-fated UKMax.com search engine. This service was designed to knock Yahoo! off its perch as the UK's most popular search engine (as it was long before the launch of Google), by marketing itself as UK-only. At the time, my company, CyberBritain.com, was also doing the same thing, although we didn't have the luxury of acres of free advertising in a national newspaper.
As was the case in these situations, I got a phone call from an executive at the Telegraph telling me that they were going to sell UKMax at a knock down price and would I come in and chat about it. I visited both the Telegraph's offices and UKMax's own office in trendy Clerekenwell. There, I found some rather dispondent staff and a costume for Max their mascot. The CEO of the search engine pointed out that if we bought the company, we'd get the costume as well. Unsurprisingly, that didn't clinch the deal. We offered a few thousand for the domain name. They refused, believing they could get a better offer. The domain remians to this day in their hands, but unused.
But five years on, and broadband take-up has changed the entire outlook for web-based businesses - according to the latest figures, there are now more broadband connections (54 per cent) than dial-up, and almost 70 per cent of all internet users now use the web for some form of shopping or e-commerce purchases. And hence the increased interest in the sector.
But while the risks are less when you acquire an already successful web company, the returns are also lower, because quite obviously you start with a much larger investment, in the case of Hotgroup, probably up to £60 million when the bidding war ends. It might make some more sense for Trinity Mirror, Murdoch and other players to think about making some seed investments again.
I'd argue that the problems that hampered companies like mine, IC24, UKMax and many others aren't around any more. The internet has been proved, e-commerce works and broadband makes what dot.com pioneers envisioned five years ago become a workable reality.
For my own part, if I could get the investment today that my company received in the boom years, I'd be rich and so would be my investors. It's just a shame that the dot.com boom happened too early and the big media companies are still a little afraid of restarting it again just yet.
