Catching Up With McNulty and Denny
Last we heard from Robert McNulty and Frank Denny, the former executives of once-troubled Shopping.com who had been running TheBigHub.com in San Antonio.
McNulty reemerged last week when a separate Newport Beach company that he founded last March, The Big Store Marketing Inc., formed an alliance with Irvine-based multilevel marketing firm PriceNet USA.com.
Under the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, Big Store will provide PriceNet with the back end technology for its online retailing operations.
But as far as I can tell from Big Store’s own Web site, there is little technology to be had. The splash screen only provides links back to TheBigHub, itself a simple patchwork of links to other Web sites.
Denny, an investor in TheBigStore, said it will go live “in the next several months.”
It’s unclear exactly what PriceNet sells, since you can only access the site if you’ve been referred by one of its salespeople.
Also last week, TheBigHub announced it had reached a three-year agreement for TheBigStore.com USA to buy $3.3 million worth of advertising on the site.
Although they are ostensibly separate companies, TheBigHub and TheBigStore both have McNulty and Denny as investors. On its Web site, TheBigStore calls itself an “affiliate” of TheBigHub, and the two companies even share the same domain server.
Last spring, TheBigHub’s stock went into a free-fall almost as soon as McNulty and Denny took over the company, and the company is on its fourth chief executive since then.
Last year, Corona del Mar-based Shopping.com, an Internet retailer, was at the center of a stock manipulation scandal involving Waldron & Co., the now-defunct Irvine brokerage that took Shopping.com public.
Denny took the reins of Shopping.com only after the scandal had played out and was the chief executive when the company was sold. McNulty was both a founder of the company and its first chief executive.
