Seeking to maximize opportunities created through increased bandwidth on the Internet, B2Bnetwork.com Inc. of New York launched a $30 million private equity placement last week.
The company has not retained a placement agent for the common stock offering. Previously, B2Bnetwork has raised two rounds of private equity, netting $1.8 million in two separate transactions, said Richard Rubinstein, president and co-founder of B2Bnetwork.
Rubinstein and his partner Louis Cattaruzza, chief executive, launched the venture in May 1996 in anticipation of multi-media becoming a prominent distribution method on the Internet. As bandwidth increases and begins to support more multi-media, B2B intends to exploit the interactive potential of the medium in order to create a site that can house community sites for a number of industries.
“Currently, each industry has numerous conferences where networking deals begin,” Rubinstein said. “We don’t mean to replace that, what we want to do is extend the reach and keep [deals] alive 365 days.”
To do so, the company has created a Web site that offers registered users various services including a calendar service that the user controls and can use to schedule meetings with other members.
Rubinstein said the company would initially target conference organizers as customers, with B2Bnetwork handling the back-end of the a site and the conference sponsor managing the front-end. B2Bnetwork has secured a variety of domain names that can be used by industry conference sponsors.
The program supporting the calendar feature is maintained and controlled by the user. The user can send the information to contacts, who are also on the system, without having to know that person’s e-mail address. Users will have to opportunity to send messages, with a maximum of 250 characters, seeking meetings with contacts met at conferences.
“You can then agree to meet, delegate the message [to a colleague], refuse the meeting or set up a conference call,” Rubinstein said.
The sector communities currently held are technology, chemical and mining, entertainment, media, finance, education, information technology, agriculture, transportation, insurance, health care, aerospace/defense, retail, real estate, energy, telecommunications, management, advertising and marketing, cosmetics, fashion and constructionconference.com.
Besides joint ventures on conferences, the company intends to launch its own online conference series by this fall. In addition, Rubinstein said the company plans to offer television shows and radio broadcasts that will feature the highlights of B2Bnetwork’s conferences.
The company uses Macromedia’s Flash technology on its site to show the interactive capabilities it will bring to the conferences.
“We will use the proceeds to go after, as judiciously as possible, all of these sectors and look to make deals with the major conference sponsors in the world,” Rubinstein said.
He cited a recent biotech conference the company sponsored, which received more than 250,000 hits from 69 countries, as an example of the reach B2Bnetwork conferences will offer.
“We offered top drawer content and used the Bloomberg studios to hold a live Q&A with industry experts with participants in Europe and the U.S.,” Rubinstein said.
The company changed its name from Worldwide Corporate Network Inc. on May 27 through a vote of the board of directors.
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