No one will take any satisfaction from watching UpMyStreet (www.upmystreet.co.uk) go down the tubes - especially when location-based services are supposed to be all the rage. Having survived the dotcom crash, the company, which provides information and services based on postcodes, ran out of cash last week, despite having received £12m from investors in 1999. It is now in administration, and is advertising in the financial press for any one interested in buying its assets.

One company very interested in acquiring the consumer side of UMS (about 70% of its assets) is MyVillage, which has been playing number two to UMS and is now poised to pounce - if the price is right. MyVillage (www.myvillage.com) received less than £1m in capital and claims to have been posting profits in recent months. Roifield Brown, who founded it in a backroom as a community notice board for Notting Hill in London before spreading nationwide, says he is interested only in the consumer side of UMS, and not in the contracting work it does for local councils.

If he could retain most of UMS's claimed 660,000 unique users a month, on top of MyVillage's 300,000, his company could be quids in. And with his main competitor out of the market, he would be left with a virtual monopoly. As every businessman knows, one is company, two is a crowd. Brown says that, if successful, he would retain the MyVillage name despite the strong brand that UMS has created through its postcode driven database of local services, statistics and community chat.

Whoever buys the assets of UMS - and there are companies sniffing around - they will be doing so when there are signs, albeit tentative, of a recovery in the bombed-out dotcom sector. There are plenty of undervalued companies around - and also a lot of money. However, investors are still nursing their losses from the dotcom collapse and are reluctant to part with it. Even if it is right up their street.