Tuesday, November 02, 1999

Your Office.com Wins a Gold Star

Set in the swanky downtown Soho Grand Hotel, Office.com Internet-workers rubbed elbows as they drank custom martinis and learned more about this website, which aims to harness the potential of the Internet for the work world. While heavy rains poured outside, the heavy hors d'oeuvres and drinks aplenty kept guests busy on this Tuesday, November 2nd evening. People milled about the retro hotel lobby, bar and restaurant, shut down exclusively for this soiree, Steve Klein, chairman of iballs.com, and I discussed the depth of content at Office.com. When Greg Smith of Darwin Digital came over the conversation took on a provocative analysis of ad-effectiveness and other "shop talk" features of interactive marketers and consumers. Darwin did the online marketing for office.com, while Cliff Freeman, which just bought itself back from Saatchi & Saatchi, did the offline. Kurt Indvik, VP, publishing & conferences of DigiTrends.net walked into the restaurant as Jed Alpert of Sunshine Amalgamated and Allison Pollack of ImYourMusic.com (another Winstar company) were chatting it up. Louis Person (VP Technology) of Winstar beamed as he told me they're opening up an $80,000 sq. ft. data center in Brooklyn, which adds to their centers in Manhattan and 30,000 sq. ft center in San Francisco. Stephanie Agresta also had some news this night. She has been promoted to manager of account development for BarnesandNoble.com's B2B product. She also introduced me to Brian Buckley (VP business solutions) and John Rindlaub (VP offline mrktg). Just after Jeff Culter (SVP, GM) of Office.com spoke I said my "adieu" to Stephanie Fierman (VP marketing) and headed out into the torrential rains.