‘Dot-Coms’ Hope to End on a More Positive Note

Last year, companies of every stripe glued “.com” onto their names as if some sort of “new-economy” mojo would rub off.

Then the market went kaplooie, the venture capital dried up and dot-coms started to cramp their owners’ style. Today, those three little letters spell failure, and companies are lopping them off as fast as they once tacked them on.

“It’s like having a scarlet letter on your chest,” said Lance Trebesch, Los Angeles general manager for Viant Inc., an Internet services and consulting firm. “A lot of this is pure fear run amok. Someone should do a book on herd mentality.”

Many recently renamed companies say they aren’t trying to buffalo anyone but want to erase the erroneous perception that they are “traditional” dot-coms, shorthand these days for business-to-consumer Internet sites that spew red ink. Nearly all say their name changes are substantive, not merely cosmetic.

“We don’t sell books. We sell serious stuff for serious people,” said Matt Walton, chief executive of E Team, formerly ETeam.com, a Canoga Park company that makes emergency-management software. “Even if the dot-com world hadn’t collapsed so spectacularly, I still think we would have made this decision.”

Others are jettisoning last year’s business model along with last year’s name. GoPublicNow.com Inc. in Irvine, conceived as an online syndication network matching start-ups with investors, has added bricks-and-mortar financial services in morphing into GPN Network Inc.

“I call it ‘dot-com, be gone,’ ” GPN Chief Executive Bruce Berman said. “Our Web site was the best marketing tool I’ve ever seen, but we’ve expanded our business in this horrible ‘Let’s kill the dot-coms’ market and we’ve changed our name to reflect that.”

The shift raised the tiny, year-old firm’s profile, helping it land more clients in the last few weeks than it had in the previous three months, Berman said.

Of course, new stationery can’t paper over the fact that GPN has lost $1.5 million since its inception a year ago, bringing in minuscule revenue of $138,932 through the first nine months this year.

Investment firms say those flattened by last year’s dot-com bandwagon learned the hard way that a loser by any other name still stinks.

“Savvy investors don’t evaluate companies based on their names, no matter what’s in favor,” said Randall Kaplan, president of JUMP Investors, a Los Angeles investors network.

A year ago, the environment was reversed. As stock values of dot-coms exploded, even prototypically “old-economy” companies caught me-too disease and added the suffix.

Crops of newly dot-commed corporate signs bloomed along the roadways. Regional industry booster group Tech Coast Alliance, for example, proclaimed itself Tech Coast.com on the side of its Irvine headquarters. Revamped logos turned rooftops in technology clusters nationwide into dot-com mosaics.

That all changed in April when Wall Street suddenly soured on even the business-to-consumer sector.

“It’s not sexy anymore,” said Charles Martin, chief operating officer of EFresh.com, a Glendale online seafood broker contemplating a switch from dot-com to not-com. “Raising money and finding new customers is all about positioning yourself. It’s like hemlines. It’s what’s in vogue.”

There were also substantive reasons to ditch the suffix. Its very ubiquity made it of little use for branding.

Moreover, many companies that used to sell products solely for Web-based businesses added wireless and broadband applications. Worried that their dot-coms implied they had more limited prospects, they began dumping them early this year, even before Wall Street began pummeling money-losing e-commerce firms.

InfoSpace Inc., a Bellevue, Wash., software company, was among the earliest converts. The switch hardly spared it the market’s ire: Its shares have lost about 90% of their value, tumbling from a high of more than $126 in February to $10.25. But at least the new name doesn’t imply that the company sells directly to the public or only to Web-based clients, spokesman Mark Peterson said.

“It wasn’t market- or hype-driven,” he said about the change. “We didn’t have a stadium named after us.”

Industry observers say some tech companies--Amazon.com Inc., for example--can take or leave their dot-coms, while others are clearly identified with them.

“Yeah, I guess Buy.com wouldn’t work as just ‘Buy,’ ” Trebesch said, laughing.