Isenberg students open online business

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

Making a foray into the world of Web-based commerce, the staff of eCommunityGuide.com keep tabs on business in their new office in Hadley. The entrepreneurial School of Management students include (from left) Daniel Petruzella, John Kostek, Josh Greenwald and Peter A. Gelinas. (Stan Sherer photo)

he best-laid plans of five students have resulted in a new Hadley-based business, eCommunityGuide.com.

     On Dec. 15, under the wing of Mass Ventures, the group launched a network of Web sites that serve local communities. "We'd like to offer a community guide to every community in New England," said co-founder Josh Greenwald, a graduate student in the Isenberg School of Management. "It's a great service. A lot of communities don't have community Web sites or they just have 'loss leaders,' showcases for a particular firm. We want to provide the infrastructure, so that they only have to provide the content."

     The network currently has pages for Amherst, Hadley, Hatfield, Northampton and South Hadley. Each town's home page features a photo of a local landmark, a description of the town, and 16 "channels," or subject areas, to choose from, such as "dining guide," "education," "home & garden," "visitor's guide" and "real estate."

     Each channel has further subcategories to choose from. Visitors can send electronic postcards via e-mail, find listings of local attractions, like art galleries, parks, museums, night clubs and theaters, and look up the address and phone number of any restaurant in town.

     The sites are interactive and include bulletin boards for community members to post messages.

     "We're calling this our charter network," Greenwald said. "We plan to include five more communities by mid February: Southampton, Easthampton, Belchertown, Sunderland and Deerfield. We're hoping to grow to cover the area that the [Daily Hampshire] Gazette covers. After that, at some point, we would ultimately like to license our technology to other media sources outside the Pioneer Valley. The key is comprehensive, localized content."

     Greenwald credits founder Peter Gelinas, a junior Marketing major, with the inspiration for the business.
"Peter originated Hadley Online. He had a tremendous amount of success with that." Gelinas put up that Web site in 1997. Hadley Online was heavily used, attracting as many as 2,500 visits per week in a town of 4,500 people.

     "The number of visits jumped out at us," Gelinas said. When Gelinas met Greenwald and other students through a networking event at the Mass Ventures Five College Entrepreneur Program, also known as the Entreclub, he found them to be enthusiastic about the amount of interest the service had generated.

     Gelinas and Greenwald banded together with John Kostek, a junior in Finance and Operations Management, and MBA students Dan Petruzella and Joseph Klement to enter the Mass Ventures Five College Entrepreneur competition in the spring of 2000. When they won second place, which included $2,500 and consulting services from MassVentures, PricewaterhouseCoopers and others, they began to bring their ideas to the screen.

     "One of the things that the panel of judges said was, 'We think your idea is great; prove it, though.' So we're hoping to do that and attract some investors to do this thing throughout New England," Greenwald said.

     "We have a partnership with the GazetteNet, who is providing our content," he said. "There is a very limited advertising pool that local merchants have to spend. We want to offer the most compelling product that we can. We don't see ourselves as an impersonal third party. We're part of the community. That's very important."

     The business's electronic address is www.ecommunityguide.com.