Pointcast wasn't even the most egregious example of this type of bullshit company. Look at Blue Mountain Arts, the online greeting card company. These guys let you create a hokey greeting card and e-mail it to a friend. HTML greeting cards over email. Probably 2,000 lines of bad Perl CGI scripts and some decent artwork. They sold this company to Excite@Home for.... $780,000,000.
Granted, $430MM of it was paid in Excite@Home stock which was worthless in short order but still, the previous owners took $350MM in cash. Their grandchildren will never have to work.
Another awesome E@H acquisition: iMall.com. They provided little storefronts for people to sell Harley Davidson keychains and stuff like that. Selling price: $425MM in E@H stock.
There were a lot of folks who got out on the top with BS ideas that had me scratch my head. At least I used Blue Mountain, though I never figured out how they'd get anyone to pay for their service. This was well before the current "We'll sell the data exhaust from our free service" phase that current companies have. Maybe it was banner ads?
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/224981
Granted, $430MM of it was paid in Excite@Home stock which was worthless in short order but still, the previous owners took $350MM in cash. Their grandchildren will never have to work.
Another awesome E@H acquisition: iMall.com. They provided little storefronts for people to sell Harley Davidson keychains and stuff like that. Selling price: $425MM in E@H stock.