Net Site Hopes Bands, Clubs Will Tune In

Garages of Seattle, unite.

The jump for local bands from garage to nightclub may soon be easier with the creation of Wonderhorse.com.

The site, by University of Washington graduate students Kurt Weber, Nick Bowden and Matt Hillman, is designed to give bands, nightclubs and music fans a place on the Internet to check each other out and help build the local music scene.

Creating a match between clubs and bands has long been a problem, said Weber, who himself plays in a three-man punk-jazz (who knew the two could mix?) band called Moc Moc. Clubs don't know which groups to book and don't keep track of who brings in the crowds, he said. Music fans don't know who all is out there. And start-up bands without connections don't know how to get a club to take a chance on them.

"Right now, it's who you know, not how well you do," Weber said.

And so the idea was born. Wonderhorse plans to offer downloads of bands' music on the site (http://www.wonderhorse.com) for nightclubs and fans to preview. It is available to act as a central scheduling agent for the multitudes of clubs and bands that seem forever engaged in phone tag. It can collect reviews of local groups for whoever wanted to learn more. And Wonderhorse also can easily e-mail a band's regular fans to alert them to upcoming gigs.

Wonderhorse also plans to compile and send out monthly collections of music from area bands to fans, and sell band posters and T-shirts from the site, Weber said.

The group plans to start with Seattle and spread out to the top 30 markets in the country.

The Wonderhorse business plan came out of a software entrepreneurship class at the UW. The class marries elements of computer science with fundamentals of business to give students views to both sides of a start-up.

In its two years, the course has brought in local high-tech entrepreneurs, including Jeremy Jaech of Visio and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. It also has tapped the wallets behind many of Seattle's high-profile start-ups, including Alex Knight of Arch Venture Partners.

Weber has some basics of Internet commerce down cold. "For the first two years, we're going to lose a lot of money," he said. Getting a large user base will be the key, he said, noting that the database of people's music interests and contact information itself is valuable.

The group is competing in a business-plan competition held by the UW. It has passed the first round, with the second round of judging coming later this week.

The contest has two more rounds after that, with the prize being $50,000 in seed capital to the best plan.

Even if the team doesn't win, Weber plans to raise financing through angel investors or others, he said. He said it's an idea that links people to solve a problem in a grass-roots way.

"It's what the Internet is all about," he said.

Briefly: IBM is shelling out big bucks on small business. The company today launches a $100 million advertising campaign to evangelize its Internet offerings to small businesses. IBM offers products from helping companies build a Web site to consulting on online commerce. . . .

Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington professor, is joining Seattle-based Go2Net as the Internet company's chief technology officer. Etzioni was a co-founder of MetaCrawler, a comprehensive Internet search tool. The professor is coming full circle - MetaCrawler was acquired by Go2Net in 1997.

Inside Technology appears Tuesdays in the Business section of The Seattle Times. You can contact Helen Jung by phone, 206-464-2742; fax, 206-382-8879; or e-mail, hjung@seattletimes.com.