B2B e-commerce Pioneer Bowstreet Charges Into Energy and Real Estate Vertical Markets.Business/Technology Editors PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 24, 2000 Bowstreet Provides XML XML in full Extensible Markup Language. Markup language developed to be a simplified and more structural version of SGML. It incorporates features of HTML (e.g., hypertext linking), but is designed to overcome some of HTML's limitations. Infrastructure For HoustonStreet.com and iProperty.com As They Redefine Basis of Competition in the Energy and Real Estate Industries Bowstreet (www.bowstreet.com), the leading provider of XML infrastructure for B2B (Business to Business) Refers to one business communicating with or selling to another. See B2B e-commerce, B2C and B2G. B2B - business to business Web marketplaces, today launched its campaign to automate dynamic and customized business-to-business e-commerce in vertical industries by signing up two new customers, Houston Street Exchange and iProperty.com. Houston Street Exchange operates the first Web portal See portal. and exchange for wholesale power trading, and iProperty.com is the leading developer of Web-based real estate technology. These customers represent Bowstreet's first major B2B inroads inroads Noun, pl make inroads into to start affecting or reducing: my gambling has made great inroads into my savings inroads npl to make inroads into [+ into the energy and real estate industries, and supplement previously announced Bowstreet customers in the consumer, e-commerce, technology and financial industries. HoustonStreet.com powers up with XML Houston Street Exchange, already one of the energy industry's most closely watched platforms for electricity trading (HoustonStreet.com), is emerging as the premier global exchange for broad-based energy trading. In fact, the trading arm for the Shell Oil, Texaco Inc. and Saudi Aramco Saudi Aramco, the state-owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia, is the largest oil corporation in the world and the world's largest in terms of proven crude oil reserves and production. alliance recently invested more than $6 million in Houston Street to develop one of the first Web exchanges for wholesale oil trading. The trading arm, Equiva Trading Company, will use HoustonStreet.com as its primary Web-based platform for trading with other oil market participants worldwide. Bowstreet is working with Houston Street to enable its Web-based power trading exchange with XML (Extensible Markup Language See XML. (language, text) Extensible Markup Language - (XML) An initiative from the W3C defining an "extremely simple" dialect of SGML suitable for use on the World-Wide Web. http://w3.org/XML/. ), the Internet's lingua franca for commerce. XML lets different companies with diverse information systems share business processes and data. XML also simplifies data sharing within a company. Houston Street will soon begin providing real-time XML data from the exchange to wholesale energy risk managers. Corporations can push the data across all of their business systems, dramatically streamlining their business processes and reducing costs. Houston Street drives this operating efficiency by enabling paperless data transfer, which also reduces errors caused by manual re-keying of data. "Nobody knows how to put XML to better use than Bowstreet," said Frank Getman, president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of HoustonStreet.com. "Together, we're a powerful combination delivering real customer benefits." Homebuyers settle down to customized homebuying The Bowstreet(TM) Web Automation Factory lets iProperty.com give 50,000 real estate agents the power to create customer-specific Web sites for each homebuyer and home seller. Each site will provide a unique marketplace of home listings, photos and customer-specific services from other companies, such as loans, title insurance and inspections. Using The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory, agents will be able to select, enable and disable any combination of these services. At the same time, agents will have a single "dashboard" view of all their pending deals, their stage of completion, the commissions at stake, and any alerts about past due action items. The system will enable real estate agents to better track their deals. It will shave weeks off the home-buying process while restoring a sense of control to the customer. iProperty's initial user base of real estate agents could instantly generate a minimum of 250,000 customized Web sites - one for each homebuyer and home seller - without programming. That type of demand would require a round-the-clock army of programmers using traditional hard-coded, monolithic Web development methods. "By engaging Bowstreet's Web Automation Factory, we're meeting the challenge of automating thousands of unique and complicated real estate transactions," said Doug Dayhoff, iProperty.com's chief executive officer. "In addition to accelerating the home-buying process, it enhances an agent's value as the concierge of the transaction." Bob Crowley, president and CEO of Bowstreet, said: "Bowstreet's Web Automation Factory is the quickest and most affordable way to set up custom interactions with customers, suppliers and partners in any vertical industry, and certainly across them. We're quickly staking a claim in each one." Bowstreet: The XML infrastructure for customized B2B Web marketplaces The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory is a system based on XML and directories that enables companies to instantly, affordably and exponentially broaden their market reach by creating dynamic and customized B2B Web marketplaces (or "business webs") that link customers, suppliers and partners. The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory is the first product to support the Directory Services Markup Language (DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) A set of XML tags that defines the contents of a directory. Developed by Bowstreet, Inc., Tewksbury, MA (www.bowstreet. ), a specification Bowstreet, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and the Sun-Netscape Alliance recently submitted to industry standards bodies. For more information on DSML, please visit www.dsml.org About Houston Street Exchange Designed by traders for traders, Houston Street Exchange represents the first Web portal for the trading of wholesale energy products. HoustonStreet.com provides an online trading Online Trading Making trades via the Internet. Notes: The use of online trading increased dramatically in the mid to late 1990's with the advent of high-speed computers and Internet connections. Stocks, bonds, options, futures, and currencies can all be traded online. engine that allows traders to buy and sell their energy products faster, more efficiently and more easily than they do today. Houston Street Exchange is headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire Portsmouth, New Hampshire is a city in Rockingham County, New Hampshire in the United States of America. It is the fourth-largest community in the county[1], with a population of 20,784 as of the 2000 census. , with offices in Houston, Texas. Houston Street Exchange is a majority-owned subsidiary majority-owned subsidiary A firm in which more than 50% of outstanding voting stock is owned by the parent company. of BayCorp Holdings, Ltd., (AMEX AMEX See: American Stock Exchange : MWH See watt-hour. ). For more information, visit Houston Street at www.houstonstreet.com. About iProperty.com iProperty.com is the leading developer of transaction management technology for the real estate industry. The company's Internet tools will integrate the real estate transaction from list to close, thus reducing the time to close on a residential property. Based in Bloomington, Ind., iProperty.com in November 1999 acquired RISCO, a Lenexa, Kansas-based Internet MLS See multilevel security. company. The acquisition created the nation's fourth-largest MLS provider serving more than 50,000 Realtors. About Bowstreet Bowstreet provides the XML infrastructure to automate the creation of dynamic and customized B2B Web marketplaces that enable new business models, extend companies' market reach and generate new revenue. These "business webs" link an infinite number infinite number a number so large as to be uncountable. Represented by 8, frequently obtained by 'dividing' by zero. of customers, suppliers and partners in minutes instead of months and at a fraction of the cost of today's Web development methods. Founded in January 1998, Bowstreet was ranked as one of the top e-commerce start-ups in the country at the Enterprise Outlook Conference, and has raised $30 million from five leading venture capital firms Name Location Founding date Managing Partners/Directors Specialty Capital managed 5AM Ventures Menlo Park, CA; Waltham, MA 2002 John Diekman, PhD (managing partner), Scott Rocklage, PhD (managing partner), Andrew Schwab (managing partner) life sciences $200M [1] : Charles River Ventures, Integral Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Matrix Partners and Pequot Capital Management. For more information, visit www.bowstreet.com or call 603-436-9100. Bowstreet is a trademark of Bowstreet.com, Inc. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. |
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