process didn't escape the usual offline hassles: They still had to submit signatures and receive their share certificates by regular mail.
Indeed, by most measures, the online offering was a failure. Though the city's largest bank, HSBC, attracted twice as many online subscriptions as it claims it had expected, in all, less than 10 percent of the total applications were taken over the Net.
"It will take longer for [online offerings] to reach a broader population and for more investors to adapt," says Kelvin Lee, head of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.
But who's going to prompt that change? Months after the first online offering, no one's clamoring for a second experiment in the new medium. As of December, none of the companies that had gone public since Mass Transit - nor any of the 33 approved for offering - had requested the e-IPO treatment. There are no mobs storming Hong Kong's Net. / Joanne Lee-Young
TURNABOUT
And Now for Something Completely Different
Mike Grossman and Kevin Talbot could help you secure instant approval on a loan of up to $100,000. But they'd rather not.
Both men head up sites that promise "real time" responses to applications for small-business loans. Both carefully recruited networks of prestigious lenders and crafted partnerships with portals like Bizzed.com to drive traffic to their sites. Now, both are working feverishly to move their companies past the business of brokering loans online.
Grossman, who heads LiveCapital, and Talbot, chief of PrimeStreet, cite similar reasons for their about-face: The tiny commissions their businesses took each time a loan was approved couldn't begin to cover the costs of luring customers to their sites. To make matters worse, many visitors never closed their loans online. Instead, they downloaded offers, then used them to negotiate better terms with their usual lenders. Similar troubles killed direct lender Mortgage.com last fall. Grossman puts the problem succinctly: "The old business model required us to lose money for a long time."
So, like many a Net exec in these tight-belt times, Talbot and Grossman are scrambling to redefine their companies. They've turned in similar directions - licensing their technology to lenders and also to online retailers like Staples.com, who want their business customers to be able to get instant credit to make big buys. For both companies, the main idea is to land a few deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each rather than a pile of loans worth a few hundred dollars each.
Talbot and Grossman consider themselves fortunate that their businesses closed major funding rounds before the market's collapse - $40 million for LiveCapital, $38 million for PrimeStreet. But they know they can't turn to the public markets for additional cash. So, PrimeStreet, which grew out of Royal Bank of Canada, has Goldman Sachs hunting down another $40 million. And LiveCapital is throwing ice on its burn rate - dropping nearly all marketing, along with a pricey deal for placement on Yahoo.
Neither company is far along the road to reinvention. Meanwhile, the sites continue to serve their original functions of putting credit applicants in touch with interested lenders. So far, their rhetoric has changed more than their accounts receivable. "We're lucky," says Grossman. "We read about so many dot-coms having troubles right now. But we're not a dot-com anymore. We're an infrastructure company." So goes the new Valley mantra. / Lori Patel
UNORTHODOX INSURANCE
Health, Auto ... and Alien Abduction
VIEW POP UP CHART - SORRY THIS CHART IS NO LONGER AVAILABLEGetting stalked by little green men? Relax. For less than $20, you can insure yourself against alien abduction at SirHuckleberry.com. The Amsterdam-based site also underwrites policies in case of apocalypse, bigamy or Prohibition.
Armageddon aside, most of SirHuckleberry's policies insure against ordinary catastrophes like air turbulence and short-lived marriages. Yet the site - which insists its policies are "perfectly authentic" - has paid out only a few claims. That may
