We are all familiar with tales of dot.com disaster. They have become a parable of our times - a tragi-comic, Wap-enabled soap opera with all the requisite ingredients, including excess, greed, ineptitude and bruised egos.
And be honest: sometimes it was hard not to feel a frisson of schadenfreude at the thought of some of the blue-eyed boys and girls of the internet boom having to return their new VW Beetles to dealers and cancel the Home House memberships.
But the caricature of the failed dot.com has become such an established part of the landscape that it comes as something of a shock to find that in the face of all the doom and gloom, internet companies are still being set up.
Admittedly, they are typically of a much smaller scale than in the dot.com boom of two years ago. But how does it square with what has become the conventional wisdom - that most, if not all, dot.coms are doomed? Has the industry found a new and realistic level from which it can move forward? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or is this a false dawn, with green shoots of recovery that are as misleading as those identified by Norman Lamont just as the UK last plunged into recession?
In fact, there may be a case for cautious optimism. There are now 14m people in the UK who use the internet from home, according to NetValue, and the net has not only transformed the way in which we communicate and find information, it is also having a major impact on industries such as travel and banking.
Meanwhile, the froth in the industry has been blown away, with the megalomaniac pan-European expansion plans and mandatory peaktime TV advertising campaigns discredited. Additionally, the dot.com whizzkids have either been through a salutary growing-up process, or shown the door and replaced by those with conventional management skills.
For new internet ventures, the cull over the past 18 months has helpfully removed startup rivals, while the corporates have cut their digital ventures adrift. Anecdotal reports suggest that venture capitalists have been so burnt by the crash that they are dismissing internet ventures out of hand. For those that can find the money, there is a clear field.
For a few hardy souls, the fact that sentiment is so firmly against the internet - and bearing in mind that the mantra of the successful investor is "buy low, sell high" - this could be the right time to make that move into the digital "space".
SingToTheWorld.com
The karaoke website Singtotheworld.com was launched in July by Steve Bennett, the founder of Jungle.com, and Robert Southall, a Midlands karaoke DJ.
Bennett sold Jungle to GUS for £37m in September last year, which might go some way to explaining his continued faith in the internet, and is backing Singtotheworld himself.
"I didn't get burnt the first time round," he says. "Underlying everything [the internet] is a great new channel _ So long as you can find the money, there are opportunities out there.
"Rob approached me with the idea and said: 'Is this possible?' I asked my techie guys to look into it and we found it was. We researched the market and found there weren't any rivals. It is not going to make millions _ but it is an interesting concept [and] I wanted to show you can build a website and make money out of it pretty quickly."
Visitors to the site can sing along to streamed karaoke backing tracks, with a month's subscription costing £5.99. Alternatively, they can buy the music on CDG, a CD format that supports graphics and requires a special player, which, along with other equipment, can be bought through the site.
Bennett's aim is for the business to turn over £2m in its first year and be profitable in 12 months' time. Singtotheworld had about 250 subscribers at the end of its first month.
Fjord
Mark Curtis and Mike Beeston, veterans of the web agency market, are setting up the London office of Fjord, a "relationship capital" company that will sell consulting services and relationship-building applications. Underpinning it is the concept that a value can and should be placed on the enhancement of relationships with customers, employees, suppliers and partners.
Curtis and Beeston, who sold their web agency CHBi to Razorfish in 1998 and led Razorfish's London office, left earlier this year when the US company - an icon of the dot.com boom - became a casualty of the downturn.
After a three-month break - Beeston at his sheep farm in Devon, Curtis cycling across the Pyrenees - they returned with the outline of the new venture, which is backed by Spray, a Swedish company, and also has an office in Stockholm.
Curtis says: "We feel very confident that there are many businesses to be built in digital and the space around digital. The world is changing because of digital, maybe not at the pace and in all the ways predicted, but changes are happening."
The key change brought about by digital communications is an increase in connectedness, says Curtis. "For service-oriented organisations, it's the way in which employees and customers interact that can do more damage or good for your company than anything else. Increasingly, the context of that is digital."
Fjord will have a two-pronged offer. As well as con sulting, it will build on the mobile expertise of the Stockholm office, which has developed applications such as SMS games and services licensed to mobile operators as a way of building traffic and interactivity. In London, the focus will be on consulting to companies that have a high degree of interaction with their customers, such as banking and travel.
With the downturn still fresh in their minds, the approach will be cautious. Beeston says: "A lot of the digital services companies became too weighed down with the need to feed a lot of different mouths _ We are wary of that. We don't think the market is going to be any easier this side of Christmas but there's a feeling that the market will begin to consolidate in time for next spring."
The Gourmet supermarket
The Gourmet Supermarket, a luxury and specialist foods e-tailer, went live at the beginning of July, offering gourmet foods ranging from specialist cheeses and wines to caviar (Iranian Beluga at £550 for 250g), as well as foods for people on vegan, diabetic and gluten-free diets.
It is backed by Innovative Foods, an East Yorkshire-based dessert manufacturer, and is targeting two niche, but under-serviced, markets, says Eric Hartley, its marketing director. Although there is a demand for gourmet items, there is insufficient local demand in all but the most affluent areas for supermarkets and delicatessens to stock them. Similarly, those with special diets are not properly catered for by the major supermarkets.
The success of Tesco's service has shown that there is a market for online food shopping in the UK, says Hartley.
In contrast to the typical dot.com of two years ago, The Gourmet Supermarket's ambitions are modest. Hartley says: "Our plans are smaller and realistic. We are not talking tens of thousands of orders a week: we are talking thousands. But in small business terms, that's still a healthy business."
There is a deliberate policy to remain as "virtual" as possible, with even category management outsourced. There are 7,000 products but stock is pared back to a minimum.
Delivery, which costs £5 plus a supplement for a timed slot, is handled by Parcelforce, selected because it offers evening delivery, which is vital for the young-ish, affluent target market.
Cozai
The web agency market has been hit hard by the dot.com downturn but that hasn't stopped Jon Pollard, Aaron Savage, David Smith and Alexander Williams from setting up a new one, Cozai, with offices in London and Los Angeles.
Having all left jobs within weeks of each another, the four - who worked at various stages at Bluewave, one of the bigger UK independents - came together. Pollard, the chief operating officer, says: "We thought 'if we don't do it now, we probably never will'."
Launching their agency - which is self-funded - represents an opportunity to do things differently, says Pollard: "Between us we had a lot of experience _ and we didn't feel that the way we'd experienced things being done was quite the way they should be.
"A lot of agencies did take on people in huge numbers _ it pushes the cost base up, which means that in a market in which there's more competition and less work, everyone's actually trying to put their prices up.
"[Also] there's an attitude issue among many agencies, basically to think that they know better than the client what the client wanted."
Cozai will aim to do things differently, says Pollard. "We want to be able to sell to the client the principle that we will manage everything properly. The number of full-time people in the agency will be relatively small, supplemented with a group of contractors and freelancers."
Cozai has completed its first project, working on the relaunch of Orbitune, the Japanese web radio broadcaster, and through its Los Angeles office it hopes to tap into the film and music industries, which are among the few spending more on digital communications.
