Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length
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| Part of being Irish in America is a nostalgia for the old sod. The rich, dark dirt holds centuries of farming and famine and fighting. For millions of immigrants and generations of descendants, it is the essence of their heritage: the subject of great poets, the wealth of Irish kings.
And now, all of that can be had for a few dollars per pound, shipped to your doorstep with some shamrock seeds on the side. Straight from the Auld Sod Export Company in County Tipperary -- well, via a warehouse in this eastern Long Island town filled with 12-ounce plastic bags labeled ''Official Irish Dirt.'' Pat Burke, one of two Irishmen who founded the company last year to capitalize on the sentimental symbolism of Irish soil to Americans, said it had shipped $2 million worth to the United States since November, when it started its Web site, officialirishdirt.com. ''Every time we'd have a pint with the Yanks, or even the Irish who've moved to the States, they always got around to talking about, 'If only I had a bit of dirt, just to have the feel of the old country, just a little bit of Ireland to throw on the casket,' '' Mr. Burke, 27, a silver-tongued entrepreneur, said by telephone from Ireland. ''There's a saying that when the Irish came to America, they brought their churches, schools and music, but the only thing they couldn't bring was the soil. Now we can send it over to them at an affordable price,'' Mr. Burke said. Indeed, for the St. Patrick's Day season, the 12-ounce bag that normally goes for $15 is available at four bags for $20 through the rest of March, shamrock seeds included. One recent afternoon, a team of Hispanic employees was furiously preparing the bags, which carried the image of a little Irish farmer in a green vest and cap and were labeled ''Guaranteed Irish.'' Mr. Burke said the soil was often tossed atop coffins or sprinkled on grass over grave sites. Funeral directors and florists have ordered pounds of the stuff, as have wholesalers in China, who have indicated that their customers were attracted by the legend of Irish luck. He said he had persuaded the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to use his dirt and seeds in the bowl of shamrocks he planned to present to President Bush for St. Patrick's Day. ''We figure, if everyone's Irish on St. Pat's in America, that's a huge market,'' Mr. Burke said. For some, it is more than a novelty. An 87-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, originally from Galway, recently bought $100,000 worth of the dirt to fill in his American grave, yet undug. A native of County Cork spent $148,000 on seven tons to spread under the house he was having built in Massachusetts. ''He said he wanted a house built on Irish soil so he can feel like he is home in old Ireland when he walked around his house in Massachusetts,'' Mr. Burke said. Ken Biegeleisen, a Manhattan doctor, said he bought a bag in December after his mother-in-law died and put it next to her ashes on a shelf. ''We figured she'd like to have a little Irish soil near her.'' The company started digging up the dirt in September from a two-acre field it purchased in Cahir, a small Tipperary village, and has since bought or rented other plots to keep up with demand. Mr. Burke said his original notion, to gather dirt in each of Ireland's 32 counties and market it by county, proved too expensive. Mr. Burke, an agricultural scientist from County Tipperary, said he had devised and patented a method to treat the soil so it would satisfy agricultural and customs authorities' restrictions on imports and be free of pests or disease. The Department of Agriculture has issued a permit to import the Irish soil, said Melissa O'Dell, a spokeswoman with the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. She said the only other such permit is issued for Israeli soil. (HolyLandEarth.com offers Israeli dirt at $20 for a 16-ounce bag.) Some 40 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and Enterprise Ireland estimates annual sales of Irish gifts at more than $200 million. Mr. Burke and his business partner, Alan Jenkins, a 65-year-old from County Cork who owns a chain of gyms for women, are hardly alone in trying to capitalize on the nostalgia. Colleen Roberts said she has sold more than 100 bags of dirt since January from IrishFinds.com, her online gift shop. At BuyIreland.com, one can get a square foot of a field in ''rural Ireland'' for $49.99 -- or, at least, a deed, a map and photographs. On Irishsmoke.ie, $18 brings three pounds of Irish bog, also known as turf or peat, cut from Donegal fields, to burn in a fireplace or on a grill, something Jim Gallagher thought up one night when he ran out of charcoal during a barbecue and thought himself too drunk to drive to the store. ''I cut up some peat and put it in the barbecue, and everyone said, 'This is amazing,' '' recalled Mr. Gallagher, a native of Pleasantville, N.Y., now living in County Donegal, who also sells incense and torches that smell like peat. ''It's the aroma of home,'' he said by telephone from Ireland. Adrian Flannelly, who comments on Irish culture and politics on his New York radio program, initially thought the Irish soil idea ''seemed like one of the daftest things you could imagine.'' ''At least, it's not offensive like green beer and plastic hats and 'Kiss Me, I'm Irish' T-shirts,'' he said. ''It's like nonalcoholic beer: It may not do much for you, but it's not going to harm anyone.''
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1011 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Popularity Might Not Be Enough BYLINE: By DAN MITCHELL SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; WHAT'S ONLINE; Pg. 5 LENGTH: 692 words LET'S say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there? Probably too many for most people to even try, if the numbers run by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, are accurate. On his blog (lsvp.wordpress.com), Mr. Liew determined that even the type of site that can get the largest advertiser payments per user would have to be immensely popular before it made that kind of money. The analysis is ''sobering,'' wrote Tim O'Reilly, the chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books. ''This may be why more entrepreneurs are going for low-investment sites that don't need an exit but provide 'lifestyle businesses' for their owners,'' he wrote on Radar, his company's blog (radar.oreilly.com). That is, rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site -- say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts -- and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on. But to make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated. A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew's reckoning. And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million -- about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web. All of which is to say that even though advertisers are flocking online, there is still a long way to go before they start paying the kind of rates they pay to traditional media outlets. There are other options, of course, including charging for subscriptions, or, as Mr. O'Reilly pointed out, aggregation. He noted how outfits like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media create multiple sites, ''publishing blogs like they were books, with some expected to succeed and others to fail.'' And independent sites can be brought together in a network, like FM Publishing, which sells ads for dozens of sites.STEMMING THE VIDEO TIDE -- Online video may soon overwhelm the Internet, creating problems for Internet service providers and potentially for users. Help could come from new technology being developed for peer-to-peer networks, according to Wade Roush, writing for Technology Review (technologyreview.com). I.S.P.'s are wary of peer-to-peer networks not only because of their use for piracy, but also because they hog bandwidth and turn users into distributors of content who don't pay anything extra for the burdens they place on the system. But Mr. Roush examines new technologies that could make such networks more efficient and could allow I.S.P.'s to identify the biggest bandwidth users and charge them accordingly. That second idea might make advocates of ''network neutrality'' a little nervous, since it would let I.S.P.'s favor some content providers over others. But Hui Zhang, the computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who developed the technology, says such concerns are overblown. ''Of course, we don't want the service providers to dictate what they will carry on their infrastructure,'' he said. ''On the other hand, if P2P users benefit from transmitting and receiving more bits, the guys who are actually transporting those bits should be able to share in that.''SUPER SUERS -- It became even clearer this week that the Recording Industry Association of America isn't overly worried about the public relations aspects of its fight against file-sharers. In one case, according to court papers, five big record companies are suing a Florida man who is largely paralyzed from a stroke (recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com). In another, record companies are suing a Georgia family who say they cannot possibly have downloaded any music because they don't own a computer (vnunet.com). DAN MITCHELL URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (90%); VENTURE CAPITAL (90%); ONLINE CONTENT & INFORMATION SERVICES (90%); INTERNET & WWW (89%); INTERNET VIDEO (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (67%); COMPUTER NETWORKS (62%); INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS (60%); ASIAN AMERICANS (50%); PUBLISHING (78%) Terms not available from NYTimes GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (54%) LOAD-DATE: March 17, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Drawing (Drawing by Chris Gash) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1012 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Out to Make 6:31 A.M. Fashionable BYLINE: By TRACIE ROZHON SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; SATURDAY INTERVIEW; Pg. 3 LENGTH: 675 words Melissa Payner, the chief executive of Bluefly.com, a publicly traded company that calls itself ''the ultimate hook-up for the fashion obsessed,'' seems herself to be obsessed, or at least intent, on giving Bluefly an identity. With several racy advertisements under her designer belt, Ms. Payner vows to make her Web site for discount clothing the hippest, coolest place to shop. Although revenue increased 31 percent year over year in the fall of 2006, to $16.3 million, and gross profit increased by one-third in the same period, the company's operating loss doubled. The stock price seems to be stuck below $2 a share, but somebody likes it: the Soros Fund Management of George Soros still holds a sizable chunk. Ms. Payner says she has no knowledge of any attempt to buy Bluefly. A former chief executive of Spiegel, the catalog retailer, Ms. Payner, 48, talked recently about the perils of Web retailing, and of what she called the misperceptions about her own company. Following are excerpts:Q. What was your goal when you took over?A. My first job was to refocus the company, to develop a reason why people would want to come to Bluefly.Q. Bluefly's stock has fallen to about $1. Doesn't that worry you?A. The reason Bluefly survived the Internet crash was that the core idea was great: selling designer clothes at a value; we say usually at least 40 percent off. But there needed to be a real strategy, something to create an emotional connection, to engender brand loyalty. Q. Mr. Soros still has a big stake in Bluefly, but last June he cut his ownership to 39 percent, from 80 percent. What happened?A. The Soros team had been interested in the Internet start-ups and invested in Bluefly from the beginning. After I came aboard, we decided we wanted more cash to expand, and we ended up recapitalizing. Two other investors -- Maverick and Prentice -- each put up 24 percent and the Soros holdings now stand at 39 percent. Soros is still very interested in the company.Q. What has changed since the days of the start-ups?A. In the '80s, people bragged about how much they paid; they paid top dollar. In the '90s, people started bragging about how little they paid, what a bargain they got.Q. How do you stay on trend, while getting merchandise cheap enough to be called a bargain?A. We go to shows, and only buy what's right for the season. We want the same things the best department stores get. We'll then know enough to tell the designers ''These particular silhouettes won't sell; you can sell them to a discounter.'' Q. A discounter like T.J. Maxx?A. And like Loehmann's.Q. So how do you operate?A. We go into the market and buy every day. We post new buys on our site at 6:31 a.m. We list 150 styles a day, except during the launch. Then we do more. The spring launch took place on Feb. 28.Q. What are the hottest trends for spring?A. Navy and white is one. Eyelet and crochet is another.Q. But why would the designers let you sell their latest merchandise for less than the department stores at the same time? I understand that there is a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress on the site now that was selling in Bergdorf's at the end of last summer. That was presented to me as an example of how some of your merchandise is dated.A. Well, then, there are some brands, not a lot, but a few, where designers say, ''I will sell you my spring line in the following November.'' That's O.K. because it's such a strong brand we can put it into the resort category. If it's Diane von Furstenberg, why would we ever say no?Q. So why do you think some people think your fashions are passe, that you don't in fact carry the trendiest stuff? A. People must have their alarms set for 7 a.m., because that stuff disappears fast, and that may be why. Our e-mails are barely out, and the latest things are gone.Q. What's your average ticket price?A. About $105.Q. Has the number of shoppers gone up?A. Yes. Traffic is up 30 percent in the last year. I'm trying to manage a turnaround. The company never had a profitable year; that's why they hired me. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: RETAILERS (90%); INTERNET & WWW (90%); STARTUPS (86%); FASHION & APPAREL (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); INTERNET RETAILING (76%); COMPANY LOSSES (73%); COMPANY PROFITS (71%); MAIL ORDER RETAILING (68%); BRANDING (68%); BRAND EQUITY (64%) Retail Stores and Trade; Computers and the Internet; Sales; Company and Organization Profiles COMPANY: T J MAXX (50%) ORGANIZATION: Bluefly.com PERSON: GEORGE SOROS (84%) Melissa Payner; Tracie Rozhon LOAD-DATE: March 17, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: Melissa Payner DOCUMENT-TYPE: Interview PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1013 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Gas-Powered Footwear's Fate Shows Frustrations of Russian Inventors BYLINE: By ANDREW E. KRAMER SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; These Boots Were Made for 22 M.P.H.; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1384 words DATELINE: UFA, Russia Being a star engineering student at the top-notch science university here wasn't enough to exempt Viktor K. Gordeyev from his physical education class. Mr. Gordeyev, a specialist in airplane piston engines, sweated it out with everyone else, running laps in lumbering heavy boots in this town in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. He vowed to find an easier way. Eventually, he found one -- or at least came close. Mr. Gordeyev invented a gasoline-powered boot that looks like pogo sticks that strap to your shins, and they work on the same principle as the air-cushioned basketball shoe. But rather than being dismissed as a crackpot invention, his boots -- which use tiny pistons -- became classified as a Russian military secret until 1994. Now, they have been held up as a symbol of both Russia's deep and rich scientific traditions and the country's inability to convert that talent into useful -- and commercial -- merchandise outside of the weapons business. Many government officials, Russian scientists and economists are focusing these days on the need to generate new sources of growth to diversify the country's economy away from oil -- the unsteady source of Russia's recent prosperity. And there is a growing consensus that entrepreneurialism has promise but faces serious obstacles, including no vibrant mechanism to bring together venture capitalists, inventors and entrepreneurs to develop viable commercial products. In February, President Vladimir V. Putin implored the country's most prominent businesses to branch out and invest in innovation and science. German O. Gref, the minister of economic development, often says Russia's scientific base distinguishes it from other emerging market economies in India, China and Brazil, even though Russia is often compared to them. But as part of a series of pointed articles, the Russian edition of Popular Mechanics magazine argued that Mr. Gordeyev's thwarted attempt to commercialize the shoes is a symbol of the country's failure to tap its considerable scientific talent for profitable business ideas. The dream Mr. Gordeyev conceived in 1974 to run faster and jump higher without getting tired might never have become a popular option for commuters or even caught on as a sport. But unlike the Segway, the American-invented self-balancing scooter, it never had a chance. Instead, the boots became a military secret, as generals envisioned soldiers running swiftly and effortlessly alongside armored vehicles. The boots were declassified in 1994, and Mr. Gordeyev and his partners imagined growing rich by selling their invention to a lazy public. Instead, the company went out of business in 2006. Like the boots, Russian scientists are still trying to gain traction in the capitalist world. A company in Saratov making a novel transport airplane with no tail, called the ''flying saucer,'' never got off the ground. Russia also has other examples of good ideas later bungled in the process of commercialization. The Russian inventor of the Tetris video game was unable to patent his invention, and thus lost out on huge amounts of money. Russian engineers invented submersible pumps for oil wells, but failed to invest in their development; now Russian companies buy Western models from Halliburton. And, in contrast to the United States, venture capital firms and start-up companies in Russia have not congregated near technology universities. Russian computer programmers, successful in Silicon Valley, are best known at home for hacking. ''Venture capital firms are starting to work here, but as a rule, if something comes to their attention it is an exception,'' said Igor R. Belousov, a Hewlett-Packard executive who coordinates the company's research at Russian universities. Meanwhile, natural resources account for 80 percent of Russia's export revenue; crude oil and natural gas alone account for 65 percent. To encourage foreign companies to invest in cities rich in scientific talent, Mr. Gref's ministry is setting up technology parks with tax breaks in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk. In another example, Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of Parliament, said in February that his political party, United Russia, should help Russian inventors find markets for their ideas. The program is called the Idea Factory. Like so much else in Russia these days, it envisions a big role for the Kremlin in venture capital; some 30 committees would recommend scientists for state grants. That approach is not surprising, given the country's history of channeling industrial innovation into its military -- the first home of Mr. Gordeyev's shoes. For now, though, the boots remain a curiosity, without the wider distribution their owners hoped for. ''Everything that would happen in an engine happens when you step down'' in the boots, said Rustam D. Enikeev, the dean of the faculty of internal combustion at the Ufa State Aviation Technical University. A step down compresses air in the shoe as in a typical sneaker, said Mr. Enikeev, who was a designer on the project. But then, a tiny carburetor injects gasoline into the compressed air and a spark plug fires it off. Instead of fastening a seat belt, the institute's test runner, Marat D. Garipov, an assistant professor of engineering, strapped on shin belts at a recent demonstration. Then he flicked an ignition switch. Before running down a university corridor, he jumped in place a few times to warm up the engine. Mr. Garipov then ran laps for about 10 minutes, going about 12 miles per hour, with the two-stroke boots emitting small puffs of exhaust. A test runner once topped out at 21.7 miles per hour, despite the risk of being sent off-balance. The tanks in the shoes hold a third of a cup of gasoline each and will take the runner three miles; that means the boots get about 70 miles per gallon. But even after years of research, gasoline-assisted running remains dangerous. ''The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body,'' Mr. Garipov explains flatly. The two powerful engines tend to throw a wearer off balance or cause knees to buckle. Mr. Gordeyev, the inventor, now 61 and retired, disagrees that the boots are dangerous and still has visions of their mass adoption. ''We've been running in them for years and we haven't had one trauma,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''The latest version operates smoothly. It will become a device for moving humanity. It's a means of personal transportation.'' First, the institute tried to interest the Soviet Army. ''We ran in the corridor of the general staff building, in front of the generals'' and the minister of defense, Mr. Enikeev said. ''They liked it, and were even a little frightened.'' An order came down for the paratroop command to test the boots, and the design became classified. This gave the university access to government laboratories in Moscow, including those of the space agency. One result of the Russian space agency testing was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it, undermining the original rationale. Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this. After the shoes were declassified in 1994, when capitalism was beginning to sweep across Russia, the inventors decided to market the boot. A former student, Anfis G. Saibakov, formed a company called Ekomotor to design a user-friendly version. He imagined people might want to commute in the boots, as they do on bicycles or rollerblades. None of this happened. When Mr. Saibakov demonstrated the boots at Disney World in Florida in 1998, safety came up as a concern, he said, and the company lacked money to fine-tune the product. ''They don't have characteristics that would allow an ordinary person to use them,'' Mr. Saibakov said glumly, admitting that running in the shoes would always mean ''taking certain risks.'' ''They should work like a Kalashnikov,'' he said. ''Reliable in anybody's hands.'' Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By armand limnande section: Section mm; Column 0; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; Pg. 76 Length Download 4.36 Mb. Share with your friends:
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