A Bubble Tale to Make You Angry

The Seattle Times should get a Pulitzer for the series called "Dot-Con Job" -- a deep and scathing look at the sleaze that permeates a company called InfoSpace as it rose to prominence during the Internet bubble and then plummeted to almost nothing.

I came away infuriated, and convinced that some people should go to jail.

Comments

[Al]

This seems to go all the way to up through Wall Street. If the article is right, yes, there should be prosecutions.
The principals should be punished, but the people behind the failures of the checks and balances in Wall Street should be punished too.

This capitalism stuff works very well when the rules are followed and it breaks when there are hints of problems. Between, this, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, etc., it's about time some of the SarBox requirements are coming on line.

I think we're on the right track, but law enforcement should be going after these people. I don't know the status of the investigations, but the authorities should come down hard on this.

[Jozef Imrich]

If the trend for transparency among the business continues and is reflected
by the information on their websites, blogs, diaries the future looks rosier than the past:

Look Who's Blogging ... Business Blogging

[jojo]

You can fool most of the people most of the time...

As for the "authorties" proscecuting situations like this - you've got to be kidding. The "authorties" are part of the problem themselves.

[Lisa Williams]

This was a really well-done series about an important issue.

I sent an email to the two reporters asking if any reforms or new laws had been made that would make it more difficult for dishonest executives to cook up another InfoSpace today.

I suspect the answer is No. Enron could happen again tomorrow.

This is particularly important in light of the long-term trends towards people saving for retirement with 401ks based on stock...not to mention the current proposal to replace part of Social Security with the equivalent of a Wall Street-issued lottery ticket.

[Richard Silverstein]

My wife was one of the attorneys who labored on behalf of the Times to get access to the court documents needed to produce this series. It was a long hard slog but thankfully the State Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling & unsealed the documents. Otherwise, we wouldn't be reading about this story at all.

[greg giltrow]

Dan, we met a number of years ago when you interviewed me for a FREEP article on Comdex. Jim Voelker (new InfoSpace CEO) is a "Detroit guy" who I worked with in the early 80s. He will turn InfoSpace around and make it a legitimate business.

[Lisa Williams]

Richard, your wife has my thanks. Good job!

[unknown]

I used to work for Infospace and I can tell you one thing. Not only were stock holders lied to apparently, but the employees were CLEARLY lied to by Naveen. Had we, the employees, known this was going on, there would have been mass mutanty.

While he painted rosie picture to us, he continued to dump his stock leaving us out in the cold. He made his millions on OUR backs.

If I were Naveen I'd be afraid of one thing now. That the employees of Infospace past and present dont ban together and sue his pathetic butt.

I feel sorry for current Infospace employees. This is such old news, and having their named trudged through the mud like this helps no one. It's a different company by all accounts. The article should have more clearly painted that it was Naveen and his top level monks that did not, not the company as a whole.

How Naveen escaped jail time is beyond all reason.

[Glenn]

I, too, worked for Naveen Jain, by virue of my employer of four years being acquired by Infospace in 1999. My former company was destroyed just as Go2Net was. My personal experience with Infospace ended in bankruptcy (literally).
That was a bitter lesson I can only write off to experience. But the future apparently has even worse in store. Mr. Jain has "started a new company, Intelius, which provides public-records information on people." With the recent revelations of ChoicePoint, it is obvious that some people will stop at nothing to make money from your "public information". Mr Jain's sense of ethics is nill (or negative); I doubt he knows or cares for any distinction between public and private information.
If Martha Stewart belonged in jail, then this man certainly does. Instead, he'll be building his "first trillion dollar company" literally from our flesh and blood.