Bay area tech incubator's here, but will it lay an egg?

TRIGAUX E-mail: Click here Archive

By ROBERT TRIGAUX

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 31, 2001

The Tampa Bay area's first, long-awaited and surely belated incubator for technology start-ups opened its doors Thursday to about 75 supporters and visitors. The TechVillage incubator, located near the University of Tampa, has no clients just yet. But some are sure to come knocking this fall.

Here's the $64,000 question: Is this area's first tech incubator the chicken or the egg?

Will it really help support and nurture new area technology start-ups? Or will it suffer the fate of many incubators elsewhere that have struggled or died since the tech bubble burst last year?

Reality check: Early this year, a Tampa planning report actually said that, with the right leadership, the city could rival Atlanta or the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina as a technology hub within two years.

That's not an expectation. That's a hallucination.

Typical of Tampa Bay's if-it's-in-here-it's-already-out-elsewherestyle, we missed most of the tech boom. Of course, given the dot-com meltdown, that may be a good thing.

"Incubators were as hip as city scooters in January," the Boston Globe wrote last fall. "Less than a year later, they're considered passe."

Technology incubators, which help young businesses with promising ideas by offering low-or-no-cost space and capital-raising and legal aid, first blossomed in Silicon Valley. They spread nationwide and got in trouble.

Internet Capital Group, based in Wayne, Pa., was the ultimate well-funded incubator. ICG managing director Tony Ibarguen was even recruited in late 1999 from Clearwater-based distributor Tech Data Corp.

The extra talent did not help. After trading as high as $40 a share in the past year, ICG now trades at about 65 cents.

Another incubator giant, the Boston area's CMGI Inc., traded near $50 a share a year ago. It got so cocky that it bought the naming rights to the New England Patriots football stadium. Now CMGI Stadium stands for a stock that hovers just above $1.60.

Let's not forget Idealab, the once high-flying builder of Internet businesses. This spring, it wound down its incubator in -- of all places -- Silicon Valley, telling employees it will no longer launch new companies there.

But plenty of more modest tech incubators are still around. Atlanta's got one. So does Research Triangle in Raleigh, N.C. And Florida? Incubators dot the state's countryside from Jacksonville, Gainesville and Orlando south to Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale.

Now the Tampa Bay area's bringing up the rear. In addition to the TechVillage incubator, a second tech incubator is slowly being assembled by the University of South Florida to support mostly USF-inspired entrepreneurship.

The two are independent but will try to coordinate and share resources as they can. The non-profit, no-frills TechVillage -- fittingly based in a former call center -- is the brainchild of local executives, public officials and some uncommon cooperation among area companies trying to lend a hand. When TechVillage recently appealed for some basic furniture, local business delivered.

Now the hard part starts. Can this late-to-arrive incubator gain wings and fly? Or will Tampa Bay end up with technology egg on its face?

Orlando's theme park giants must be dizzy.

In what would once be called heresy, a high-ranking executive at American Express Co. suggested at a recent Orlando tourism conference that the major theme parks should promote not just themselves, but small attractions as well.

That notion of cooperation prompted plenty of murmurs in the audience. But in a sign of tighter economic times, the executive was not run out of town on a rail.

A tourism slump has Orlando more open to fresh ideas.

The biggest concern: Disney World. In the January-March quarter, Disney World revenue fell $21-million, or about 2 percent, from a year ago. In the next quarter, ended June 30, Disney World revenue dropped by $100-million, or about 8 percent, from the same period of 2000.

That means Disney World suffered the biggest decline in the April-June quarter of any Disney operation. Granted, Disney World had strong attendance last year, so some decline is not too surprising.

But in the slower economy, what will it take to lure more tourists back to Orlando?

Short takes

SEMINOLE BINGO BUT NO SEMINOLE BANK: Last year, the Seminole Indian Tribe indicated it wanted to buy up the Independent Community Bank of Tequesta. But the Seminoles, which still own part of the bank, failed to sign the deal by a deadline set last Monday. No word on the change of heart . . .

BABY NEEDS NEW PAIR OF . . . ANALYSTS: Leave it to analysts who track the gambling business to suggest a slowing economy could press tax-starved communities to consider allowing casinos. "Many states legalized gaming during the last economic downturn as a way to grow their tax revenues and create jobs," says Bear Stearns' 490-page The North American Gaming Almanac. In Mississippi, where gulf coast casinos face a shrinking business, nobody wants Florida to get any ideas. After all, Floridians flock to Mississippi because their own state prohibits similar gambling, uh, opportunities . . .

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

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