WHAT’S CLICKING
BANKRUPTCY BYTES: Phase2 Media Inc., an online marketing and advertising agency, last week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection in Manhattan. Court records indicate the company had liabilities of $19.7 million and assets of $18.1 million as of April 30. Hachette Filipacchi Interactions S.A. of France is listed as one of several entities with at least 5 percent voting power in the company, based in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. Top unsecured creditors include: Sports Illustrated, with a claim of $1.2 million; Hachette Filipacchi Interactions, $671,000; Priceline.com, $313,000; Doubleclick Inc., $212,000; MySimon Inc., $156,000 and Delia’s former iTurf Inc. spinoff, $133,000.
HOOKING ‘EM YOUNG: Rock-and-style icon David Bowie went live July 12 with an Internet radio station called KTOJ, or Kick Out the Jammies. The station targets the perhaps-someday-lucrative baby market, on Bowie Radio which went live in April on the BowieNet Web site, at davidbowie.com. Bowie came up with the idea while compiling tapes to play while his daughter Alexandra was being bathed or fed. The station — whose name is a reference to seminal punk band MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” collection — offers an eclectic mix for the infant-and-toddler set, from “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Purple People Eater,” to the Rolling Stones and Stephen Sondheim. Bowie, whose daughter turns one in August, is well known for his eclectic musical tastes, which have spurred him to narrate a version of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” for children and record “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby, as well as to metamorphose through his numerous rock incarnations.
CIAO, CYBERFASHION: Leveraging its resources as a leading Milan fashion consultant, Pambianconews.com has launched the first Italian, all fashion news Web site. There’s no streaming video of runway shows or fashion spreads at the destination that went live in May — just news and analysis, in both Italian and English. Content runs from real-time stock quotes and breaking news to market analysis and corporate contacts.
“We follow more than 250 companies from Gap to Gucci, from the U.S. to Japan,” said David Pambianco, content manager of the site and son of Carlo Pambianco, founder and president of the 25-year-old eponymous consultant. The dot-com’s foundation is its Fashion Index: a database compiling daily, quarterly and annual indices of those fashion firms — and of fashion industries in various countries — according to sectors like luxury, apparel, textile, and large-capitalization and small-cap businesses.
Pambianco invested about $400,000 of its own funds to launch the dot-com, which is available free but may begin to charge for content such as executive search information or archived data.
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DOT’S ALL: The Internet keeps making strange bedfellows. Earthlink, the number-two Internet service provider in the U.S. behind America Online, agreed this month to offer its high-speed Internet cable service to customers of rival AOL Time Warner — the country’s top ISP — in Columbus, Ohio, and Syracuse, N.Y. The two firms said they expect to make the service available in a substantial number of Time Warner’s cable operations by Dec. 31….How closely is Big Brother eyeing employees of the country’s online workforce? Perhaps less watchfully than many had thought, given all the hype over high-tech monitoring devices. A report released this month by Denver-based Privacy Foundation showed about one-third of the U.S. online workforce, or 14 million people, has their Internet or e-mail use under constant surveillance. The finding was based on a study of publicly traded firms that supply Internet monitoring software….Wireless culture and commerce may be slow taking off stateside, but in Japan, 61 percent of cybersurfers log on at home from mobile phones, versus the 59 percent who go online from PCs in their households. The data, conveyed in an Internet White Book published this summer by Impress Corp., also showed there are now 32 million regular ‘Net users in Japan, up 68 percent from 19 million a year ago….The Brits are also streaming online, as 1.5 million U.K. homes have added ‘Net connections since February, according to British telecommunications regulator Oftel. Approximately 10 million British homes are now online, after four million new surfers caught a cyber-wave in 2000.