Dot Commers Pick A Tech Wreck Dry, With Style
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday April 13, 2001
The dot commers turned out for a funeral this week. There was a dude in grey suit pants and a black muscle tee. A young woman stabbing at a hand-held computer. A guy in a leather jacket with a slogan that read optimistically: ``Beyond the Millennium".
GlobalFreeway, a free Internet service backed by British dot com Planet Edge, only just made it that far. ``I have no doubt that GlobalFreeway will provide a serious alternative to the current market leaders like Telstra Big Pond and OzEmail," said Planet Edge boss Rakesh Kumar in a press release, dated November 22, 1999.
On Wednesday about 100 bidders many from surviving software and Internet hopefuls squeezed into a liquidation auction at the company's former office on the Pacific Highway at Chatswood.
Among the near-new computers and office furniture on offer lay an old receipt from a network equipment supplier: ``Ericsson would formally like to acknowledge the payment received by Planet Edge on the 25th February 2000 for the amount of $7,047,870.85."
Most of the expensive gear had already been disposed of, no doubt going towards GlobalFreeway's estimated debts of $50 million.
But there were still bargains to be had the dot commers weren't there for the mourning. Software programmer Christian Vella, dressed in an orange baseball cap and khaki Clam Diggers, paid $3,900 for a heavy-duty Compaq server worth $6,000 to $8,000 new. It will be put to work in 29-year-old Mr Vella's tech company, Dload. Another buyer paid $7,700 for a PABX telephone system that was bought eight months ago for $37,000. A three-metre black granite board table went for $600.
The leather boardroom chairs, which fetched $110 each, ``look like they've had no use whatsoever," yelled auctioneer Steven Laws from Gray Eisdell Timms.
The dot com deathroll has brought boom times to valuers and auctioneers such as Grays and its rivals, Dominion Valuers and Hymans Auctions. They are taking calls almost every week from broke technology companies. On the day of GlobalFreeway's auction, children's Web site kidslife.com.au announced ``with great sadness ... that the current proprietors of the business are no longer financially able to support the Web site". Kidslife and GlobalFreeway join scores of other casualties including RushTV, eisa, kgrind, allmybills, agriculture.com, ezishop.net, Scape and Seafood Online.com
Ian Hyman, boss of Hymans Auctions, has been involved with about a dozen dot com disasters, including software distributor Dataflow, e-commerce site GSTpay and Australia's original dot com, LibertyOne.
``Over the last five months we've seen signs of an increase in those assets coming from organisations going into liquidation and voluntary administration," he said. ``There's no doubt there's been a significant increase."
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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