Each of the VC Watch columns presents a snapshot of a hot new company or venture capital firm, but when you’re living on Internet time, they’re fast moving targets whose radar cross section is constantly changing on our screens. So it’s time to refresh the cache and bring you up to date on the notable changes that have occurred with the companies we’ve covered in the past quarter.
FogDog (8/19/99) has made the most notable progress of all the companies covered in the past quarter, filing its S-1 IPO registration on Sept. 27 to raise as much as $60 million. In addition, Nike bought a 12% interest pre-IPO stake in FogDog with the right to buy as many as 6.2 million shares of common stock at $1.03 each. Although an offering price has not been set yet, Nike’s price is expected to be far below the expected price which for Internet IPOs is most often between $10 and $20.
The underwriting is led by CS First Boston with secondary positions by JP Morgan, Thomas Weisel and Warburg Dillon Read. According to FogDog’s S-1, they lost $6.648 million over the past six months on revenues of $1.084 million.
In exchange for the sweetheart stock deal, FogDog gets an exclusive marketing relationship allowing it to be the only Internet e-tailer to sell the entire Nike line. After Mar. 31, 2000, Nike has the right to sell through other Web outlets.
In addition, in keeping with their growth-by-acquisition strategy discussed in our Aug. 19 VC Watch column, FogDog announced on Sept. 7 that it would acquire another sports web site, Sports Universe which specializes in X games gear.
eCompanies (8/31/99) announced two fundings, eHobbies and eWork on Sept. 1 and Sept. 7 respectively. Neither of the companies was willing to talk about the financing or the deal and thus were not covered in detail by VC Watch.
Direct Hit (8/12/99) announced on Sept. 27 that it had signed deals to provide its popularity-based search capabilities to Go2Net and InfoSpace.
RealNames (8/10/99) announced deals to license its plain word naming to Infoseek (Aug. 24) and British Telecom (Sept. 22).
Remarq (7/30/99) announced Aug. 3 it would provide its discussion group services to Juno Online Services (JWEB).
Onebox.com (7/27/99) said on Sept. 21 it will create a co-branded Web service for unified messaging services for members of ZDNet (ZDZ).
Onvia.com (7/22/99) announced Aug. 17 it would be offering access to its members to Bloomberg.com’s Small Business center.
Virtual Vineyards (7/8/99) bought wine.com (announced Sept. 14) for a reported $3.3 million. The purchase was mostly for the domain name. In an annoying bit of clueless flackery, the news release on their Web site contains neither a date nor the sale amount.
WineShopper.com (7/6/99) signed a deal with the Wine Spectator magazine on Sept. 15 to link WineShopper visitors to Spectator wine reviews and a limited selection of articles chosen by the magazine.
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