The new e-business consortium
business-incubator.com
announced Friday that a start-up named nextweekend is the first
to use its services.
nextweekend aims to help individuals plan their leisure time
in ways that were not possible before the Internet
came along. It will be a direct competitor to the
highly successful travel and leisure site
lastminute.com.
A partnership between Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and Exodus,
business-incubator.com helps Internet start-ups in the
initial stages of their business. The consortium addresses
such issues as technical infrastructure, funding and building
a global customer base.
“One of the temptations with the Internet is to roll
everything out at once,” said Chris Moss, CEO of nextweekend.
“However, as with any business venture, success is very much
dependent on planning and execution. By working closely with
the business-incubator.com partners and pooling our
collective experiences, we anticipate being able to launch
successfully to the UK market early next year.”
One of the key features of business-incubator.com is the
provision of a secure, reduced-risk environment where
start-ups can test their e-commerce systems for three months
before launching a full e-business.
“In the Internet age, economic power will
reside in the hands of those with the best e-business
infrastructure, not to mention the best ideas,” said
Nigel Thomas, marketing manager for General Business,
Oracle UK.
“Just as most start-up businesses may have traditionally
gone to the bank for advice on how to start their business,
the business-incubator.com partners are in a position to offer
expert consultancy as well as hardware and software support
for the fledgling organisations of the Internet age.”
A business-incubator.com package, consisting of
a defined list of hardware, database software, network
infrastructure and web hosting facilities, costs around
£15,000 ($24,000) for a three month period, including
consultancy.