Morocco was a success, and almost a thousand people turned up for the launch of the country's first web portal.
"When we had our launch event on Friday, it was on a par with any western country: you could feel the impact," says Jessica Kogan, director of global marketing for Orientation.com. "We're pretty excited about what we're doing. It's so big, it's hard to appreciate how many things it's going to bring to the lives of our users...."
Kogan, a perky 27-year-old American, has spent nine years in New York, picking up an MBA in corporate identity and marketing and working in television and new media. At the Hill & Knowlton consultancy she worked on high-profile launches, including Boo.com. At Orientation.com, which she joined last year, her job is to launch web portals. She's tackling Argentina and Egypt next, and thinking about Moldova, the Baltic countries, the Dominican Republic and Panama.
Orientation.com has launched six regional and 22 national portals, and Kogan says they want at least 50.
This "bottom up" approach to world domination contrasts with the usual approach of the biggest companies: start in the US, by far the biggest market, then expand into the UK and Japan. The UK provides a bridge into Europe, and Japan into Asia, which leaves most of Eastern Europe and Africa way down the list.
How long will Bulgaria, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates have to wait before America Online and Yahoo! get around to them? All five already have portals on Orientation's network.
Rolling out portals in some places is tough for a variety of reasons. One is language. Orientation India, for example, is available in both Hindi and English, while Orientation Haiti is in English and Creole.
Orientation Morocco will soon be available in English, French, and Arabic. "We try to be very authentic," says Kogan, "which is part of our long-term positioning."
Orientation now operates in 11 languages, which Kogan says has involved creating computer codes for languages that didn't have them, such as Bangla [Bengali], Creole and Swahili.
The network started in Hong Kong in 1994 with The Black Box, a small software company run by an expatriate American, Jay Tindall. Its products included When Disaster Strikes, an educational CD-rom based on Reuters' material, and Beyond the Nine Dragons, an adventure/travel CD-rom about the Mekong River.
In 1994, Black Box also produced one of Hong Kong's first websites, and two years later, it launched Orientation: Asia's Web Directory, the first comprehensive regional directory for Asia. This was followed by Rubani: Africa's Web Directory in 1997, and things took off from there.
So why are Kogan and Orientation.com now based in the USA? "Finance," she says. "The company moved to New York because it was much easier and much quicker to raise funds there."
Cash was important because the Orientation sites are not designed to make money. Tindall's design was black (from The Black Box and its Black Magic authoring software), and left no space for advertising. The priority was to get market share: income from advertising and e-commerce could come later.
However, "our [business] model's not capital intensive. We operate on a franchise or license model", says Kogan. "We partner with local ISPs [internet service providers] and provide them with technology and a co-ordinated identity, but they take on the financial burden." Local news agencies, writers and publishers, also provide local content, though Orientation does have strategic global partners. The most important include the BBC World News Service, Lonely Planet (known for its travel guides), and the United Nations.
The UN's Sustainable Development Networking Programme [SDNP] supplied the first internet service to 40 developing nations with the aim of encouraging economic growth. But let's not get too carried away with the idea of empowering the downtrodden masses. Orientation's users are, I suggest, mainly rich tourists, corporate travellers and expatriates.
"Our main market is students," grins Kogan. "Kids are shockingly sophisticated about the net: they get it right away. Our primary aim now is to outreach to local businesses and corporate travellers, but we're in the coolest - or hottest - travel destinations, and the travel industry loves it."
Orientation's long-term view is that its portals will cater for their local markets as net use grows from today's minuscule levels. Kogan argues that there's also a value in providing unbiased information "as best we can, in its truest form. We haven't got any censors on our site, and I can tell you authoritatively that we never will."
After listening to Kogan, I suspect that Orientation.com is a sitting duck. Companies like Yahoo! and America Online will sooner or later want portals in every country in the world, and the fastest way to get them will be to take over Orientation.com.
"I'll bet Tim Koogle has you in his sights right now," I say.
"Koogle?"
"Koogle! Runs Yahoo!"
"Oh, I forget his name a lot," says Kogan, and changes the subject.
Becoming a takeover victim might be unfortunate but should make Orientation.com fabulously rich. It's a dilemma that would trouble most of us, perhaps. But not for very long.
