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It isn't pets.com but it's close.

I remember boo.com - I knew one of it's technical guys. I thought it was a dumb idea then and I still do.

However if you visit http://www.boo.com/ you'll see that the boo is apparently back. But not, as it's just a placeholder for a new service which seems to be extremely slow in arriving.

This is scary: http://www.boo.com/ BOO is BACK!

I remember boo.com. The chiefs of that startup were hyping it quite a lot even by the standards of the roaring nineties. They had zero market testing and had people building 3D virtualizations of clothing and clubwear by hand. They were burning lots of money very very fast and the chiefs were roundtripping from Scandinavia to London and NYC every odd day and doing nothing much more than partying with VIPs.
I generally was very upbeat at the time but even then thought that boo.com was doing some insane stunts and cutting it to thin for my taste. They were the first ones to incinerate on reentry afer their high-fly and they very well deseved to be the first. BTW: Their sad and sorry remains still exist.
I do still think the original concept would work. It just can't work the way they aproached it.

boo.com did a similar thing in London for its relaunch, they plastered pesky little stickers all over Camden Town.

Fly posting is illegal under the Town and Country Act and carries fines of up to £1,000 per offending poster - or in this case, sticker... ouch, now that could really add up.

Those figures are nothing though, the old Boo.com managed to eat through a whopping £178 million ($250m, yup a quater of a billion bucks) in funding in 3-4 months. Man... what were they spending it on?

I can remember when boo.com did their relaunch, they covered Camden (in London) with these little stickers. They were everywhere, lampposts, dustbins, trees, etc. This was all part of their "modern urbanist" image.

Camden Borough Council was well pissed off because each one had some crazy adhesive on them. It took them about three months and god knows how many thousand pounds to clear them off all. For fly posting you can get fined £1000 per poster... or sticker in this case, boo.com could face a £60m charge easily... which is more than their market cap :)

Is there something fundamentally different about online businesses that mean that they seem to feel that they can avoid the law? Without meaning to put them down, it does seem like a disproportionate number of them have run into conflict with the legal system, and especially when it comes to the area of copyright.

Whilst we all agree that copyright needs to adapt to the new paradigm of online digital music, it does seem like "dot-coms" are jumping the gun and attempting to implement systems which are patently illegal under current laws rather than doing the sensible thing and lobbying for changes in the law. After all, what sensible company would risk the troubles that Napster and MP3.com have suffered?

Maybe it's because of the shortcomings in the viability of the "dot-com" model, in which profitability comes from selling equity rather than from making a real profit. With such an abstract model anyway, companies may feel that they have little to lose in taking the big risks of breaking the law. After all, if it wins, it could win big. And if it fails, well they'd probably have run out of money within a year or two anyway, like other companies have done recently.

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Jon E. Erikson

Ever hear of Boo.com?

;-?