It might have been harder for twenty-something brothers Robert Jr. and Dean Rositano to set up Simply Interactive, launched yesterday at PC Expo, to sell Web training CDs to novice users, if their father wasn’t Robert Rositano, founding partner of Internet giant Netcom On-Line Comunications Services Inc. With Rositano Sr. and Warren J. Kaplan – Netcoms former executive VP and board member – heading up the business side of Simply Interactive, the San Jose, California-based firm has raised $11m in private funding and promises to raise another $15m in the next few months. The Rositano family invested about $4m in the company, a few million came from the scarf-purveying Hermes family and none came from venture capitalists. Following the path of Netcom, which was the first major publicly traded Internet company, Kaplan said yesterday that Simply Interactive may file an IPO before the end of the year. Kaplan is the man who raised more than $280m for Netcom in three stock offerings. Simply Interactive’s first product, Internet the City, is an interactive CD-ROM with chatty guides to help Web newcomers wind their way through the Internet, represented by a virtual city. A light version of the CD was launched yesterday and the full version, which will include Netscape Navigator, will ship in the fall for about $50. But Simply Interactive says it wants to follow a marketing strategy similar to America Online’s where users are overwhelmed with free disks and CDs, and so it’ll give away a lot of its light versions to tempt users to purchase the real thing. It plans to have a large retail presence but is also in OEM talks with PC and modem firms. It has yet to announce an Internet access provider to enable its full version, but we think Daddy’s old company, Netcom, would be an obvious choice. Expect more announcements from Simply Interactive regarding the other side of its business – intranets – in a few weeks.
