Internet start-ups need the protection and services of an Internet holding company which can offer a fixed model of seed investment and management expertise, the 800-strong audience was told at this week's First Tuesday event. The gathering provides a platform for start-up companies to set out their stalls to the venture capital community.
Delivering the keynote address, Mr Sean Melly, ETel chief executive officer and entrepreneur, said his six Internet investments, which now share a collective value of $250 million (#261 million), bore many of the same characteristics at the start-up stage and required management expertise as well as capital to succeed.
Mr Melly told The Irish Times he is in the process of developing such a holding company, and is currently seeking a management team for the venture. It will be closely modelled on US giants, CMGI and Internet Capital Group, which hold minority equity stakes in some of the world's largest Net companies.
Mr Melly's ETel business, which specialises in obtaining telecommunications licences in the pre-liberalised central European market, ran into obstacles of its own this week when the Czech government issued a statement indicating it would delay the liberalisation of its telecoms market by two years.
However, Mr Melly said the report was misleading because deregulation is still on target to happen on December 31st this year, but the Czech government had just introduced later dates for specific components of liberalisation. This includes carrier pre-selection, where consumers can choose different operators for different types of service.
"This is just about the finer details of deregulation, and will not impact on us in any way. Carrier pre-selection makes no difference to us because we already use our own routers to redirect traffic."
ETel already delivers voice and Internet services in Prague to 400 corporate customers, and is in the process of building a second telecoms switching facility in second city, Berno. It has also expressed an interest in obtaining a wireless broadband local loop licence in Prague, and has just completed a feasibility study to build a fibre optic network throughout the city.
Start-up companies presenting at the First Tuesday event included Xartis.com, a 10-month-old Internet services company looking to raise more than £1 million (#1.27 million) for further expansion; weddingsireland.com, a year-old company seeking £500,000 to expand its wedding services site; anshe.com, specialising in bridging the gap between email and paper-based mail delivery, sought round-two funding of $50 million to take the company public; and UCD campus company PTV, which specialises in online content personalisation software, said it needed £1 million to bring it to a position of profitability in three years.
