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Isenberg students open online business
By
Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff
Making a
foray into the world of Web-based commerce, the staff of
eCommunityGuide.com keep tabs on business in their new office
in Hadley. The entrepreneurial School of Management students
include (from left) Daniel Petruzella, John Kostek, Josh
Greenwald and Peter A. Gelinas. (Stan Sherer photo)
Thursday,
January 18, 2001 -- (HADLEY) - The best-laid plans of five
students have resulted in a new Hadley-based business,
eCommunityGuide.com.
On Dec. 15,
under the wing of Mass Ventures, the group launched a network
of Web sites that serve local communities. "We'd like to offer
a community guide to every community in New England," said
co-founder Josh Greenwald, a graduate student in the Isenberg
School of Management. "It's a great service. A lot of
communities don't have community Web sites or they just have
'loss leaders,' showcases for a particular firm. We want to
provide the infrastructure, so that they only have to provide
the content."
The network
currently has pages for Amherst, Hadley, Hatfield, Northampton
and South Hadley. Each town's home page features a photo of a
local landmark, a description of the town, and 16 "channels,"
or subject areas, to choose from, such as "dining guide,"
"education," "home & garden," "visitor's guide" and "real
estate."
Each channel
has further subcategories to choose from. Visitors can send
electronic postcards via e-mail, find listings of local
attractions, like art galleries, parks, museums, night clubs
and theaters, and look up the address and phone number of any
restaurant in town.
The sites are
interactive and include bulletin boards for community members
to post messages.
"We're
calling this our charter network," Greenwald said. "We plan to
include five more communities by mid February: Southampton,
Easthampton, Belchertown, Sunderland and Deerfield. We're
hoping to grow to cover the area that the [Daily Hampshire]
Gazette covers. After that, at some point, we would ultimately
like to license our technology to other media sources outside
the Pioneer Valley. The key is comprehensive, localized
content."
Greenwald
credits founder Peter Gelinas, a junior Marketing major, with
the inspiration for the business. "Peter originated Hadley
Online. He had a tremendous amount of success with that."
Gelinas put up that Web site in 1997. Hadley Online was
heavily used, attracting as many as 2,500 visits per week in a
town of 4,500 people.
"The number
of visits jumped out at us," Gelinas said. When Gelinas met
Greenwald and other students through a networking event at the
Mass Ventures Five College Entrepreneur Program, also known as
the Entreclub, he found them to be enthusiastic about the
amount of interest the service had generated.
Gelinas and
Greenwald banded together with John Kostek, a junior in
Finance and Operations Management, and MBA students Dan
Petruzella and Joseph Klement to enter the Mass Ventures Five
College Entrepreneur competition in the spring of 2000. When
they won second place, which included $2,500 and consulting
services from MassVentures, PricewaterhouseCoopers and others,
they began to bring their ideas to the screen.
"One of the
things that the panel of judges said was, 'We think your idea
is great; prove it, though.' So we're hoping to do that and
attract some investors to do this thing throughout New
England," Greenwald said.
"We have a
partnership with the GazetteNet, who is providing our
content," he said. "There is a very limited advertising pool
that local merchants have to spend. We want to offer the most
compelling product that we can. We don't see ourselves as an
impersonal third party. We're part of the community. That's
very important."
The
business's electronic address is
www.ecommunityguide.com.
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