(FORTUNE Magazine) – FANTASTIC Zug, Switzerland

Peter Ohnemus knows it takes chutzpah to name your own company the Fantastic Corp. The executive even admits to having been embarrassed by the name. In early sales presentations, he would refer to the company as TFC. Then, during a meeting with the board of Deutsche Telekom, someone discovered what TFC stood for. Ohnemus feared he'd be laughed out of the room. Instead, telecom officials seemed taken by the hubris--and Ohnemus closed a critical sale. It's been Fantastic, not TFC, ever since.

Fantastic also pretty much describes its growth. Revenues of the company, founded in 1996 by Ohnemus and colleagues Lars Tvede and Frank Ewald, rose last year almost 450%, to $23 million. Fantastic's software streamlines the creation, transmission, and viewing of broadband content. And although the company, based in the Swiss city of Zug, lost $18 million last year and isn't expected to turn a profit until after 2002, investors bid its shares up more than 1,000% in the months following its September IPO on Frankfurt's Neuer Markt. The shares have fallen since, predictably, but remain more than 90% above their IPO price.

The central component of Fantastic's software platform--and its business strategy--is its Channel Management Center, or CMC, a software package that controls the way in which broadband multimedia are sent from content provider to viewer. The magic of Fantastic's system is that it uses Internet protocols and can broadcast over any kind of network, be it satellite, DSL, cable, digital terrestrial, or wireless.

Fantastic has focused on selling CMC to telecom providers, many of which are also cable and satellite operators. Clients include Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, and Telecom Italia, as well as Singapore Telecom and NTT. In the U.S., Lucent has been reselling Fantastic's products to local exchange carriers and upstart telecom companies. Once Fantastic sells a CMC system to a network operator, notes Ohnemus, it is in good shape: "We have their satellite, we have their phone network, and it gets embedded in their security protocols and everything else they do."

These telecom companies in turn help Fantastic sell the other components of its software platform. There's the Channel Editorial Center (CEC), used by Reuters, MTV, Dow Jones, and EuroSport to create broadband content and schedule it for broadcast. And finally there's Fantastic's MediaSurfer, a broadband browser that runs on any Internet-enabled device. In a demonstration, Fantastic even broadcast content into Electrolux's new Internet-enabled refrigerator.

The company is quickly gaining converts to its system. It partnered with Nokia to create a lightweight wireless set-top box and TV. After helping BMW build a prototype car that could download broadband broadcasts, Fantastic's software platform was selected as the transmission standard for Europe's multimedia car program. And Ohnemus has been working with PC manufacturers in Germany to sell computers that would come with Fantastic's MediaSurfer installed.

Fantastic's 370 employees are a youthful and hard-working bunch. The average employee is under 30, and sleeping bags are not an uncommon sight in the office. As a reward for all those long hours, the entire work force has been granted stock options; seven out of ten have also spent their own money to acquire shares. Perhaps because of his relatively advanced age--he's all of 35--Ohnemus has been feeling burned out, and recently stepped down as Fantastic's CEO. He remains vice chairman.

Even true believers like Ohnemus concede that Fantastic is no sure thing. Analysts have been impressed with its management and technological edge but say the company needs to gain more visibility, especially in the U.S. And while Claas Heise, head of product management for Deutsche Telekom's distribution channels, says he's happy with Fantastic's CMC, he complains that the company has priced its CEC too high.

And then there is the stock price. "It's not the kind of company that you bail on unless the valuation gets outrageous, which it did," says George Greig, who manages the William Blair International Growth fund. Today Fantastic is very much in control of its own destiny. If the company can continue to win market share, it may ultimately live up to its audacious name. And wouldn't that be...wonderful. --Jeremy Kahn

eTANGO Barcelona

Customer service? In Europe, the joke goes, that's "partly true," says Eric Erickson, a 33-year-old American living in Spain. Erickson hopes to kill that joke by changing the way European companies deal with their customers. Enter eTango Technology, which he co-founded in Barcelona last year with his 30-year-old brother, Jeffrey, and another American, named Scott Ermeti.

The company's sole product is called ebase, a database that a company can use to store answers to customer questions and streamline responses to customer e-mail. Once installed, the database continually updates the "frequently asked questions" portion of the company's Website. It allows customers to search for answers to their questions by keyword. If a question has never been asked before, it is routed electronically to a person who later places both question and answer in the database for reference.

The database also allows management to monitor the kinds of questions customers are asking, speeding the time it takes to respond to the market with new products and services. "This sort of application is prevalent in the U.S. but not in Europe," says Eric Erickson, eTango's president of business development.

eTango is an application service provider (ASP), which means that the ebase database is housed on eTango's own servers and linked through the Internet to the user's Website. It costs $1,000 to set ebase up, after which the user pays eTango a $795 subscription fee each month. That's not cheap, but it is significantly less than the $30,000 similar companies in the U.S. charge for a two-year license. And eTango's customers seem satisfied. "It saves me time, and at the end of the day it saves me money," says Brian O'Hare, a senior partner at Translink International, an international mergers and acquisitions advisory firm. Translink installed ebase to help manage research requests from clients.

To start, eTango is targeting e-tailers and pure Web companies, since they have the most pressing need for software to deal with customer e-mail. After that, Erickson says, eTango will sell to any company looking to provide online customer support. eTango's rollout of ebase is also geographic, beginning with the company's backyard, Spain, and then moving to Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

Since launching ebase in April, eTango has signed up a dozen customers. But with only four employees--the three founders and an office assistant--the company has been focused on raising capital, not selling product. The founders themselves put up the $200,000 eTango used for its seed capital, and as of June they were still seeking $5 million in venture capital. If the funding comes through, eTango's business plan calls for hiring up to 24 employees by the end of the year and an additional 32 next year.

The Ericksons, who grew up in Madison, Wis., have had good luck in Europe so far. In 1996 they left lucrative jobs--Eric was a director with the international ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi in Singapore and Jeff was a technical consultant for Pacific Gas & Electric--and headed to Spain, because both speak Spanish and because everyone else was going to London, Brussels, or Amsterdam. They picked Barcelona for its pro-business climate and because it is less expensive and less daunting than Madrid. The only drawback--Spain's Internet infrastructure has been slow to develop.

Once established in Barcelona, the Ericksons formed Boundless Networks, a Web consulting firm that designs complicated project-management software. Within a year they had six employees, a branch office in San Francisco, and a dozen clients. Though the company still operates at a slight loss, it has hardly been a failure. It was through their projects at Boundless Networks that the Ericksons met Ermeti and identified the need for better automation of customer service: enter eTango.

The Ericksons are planning to close Boundless Networks shortly and put all their efforts into eTango. They know this is a risky proposition; several American companies have similar products that they could roll out in Europe at any moment. But, if their luck holds, European customer service just might never be the same. And for that, we would all be thankful. --Jeremy Kahn

EDITIONS 00h00.COM Paris

Once upon a time, there was a successful executive at a prominent publishing house in Paris. He had an idea: Rather than just buy books online, he wanted to publish them that way too. So he found some business angels, escaped from the publishing fortress, and set up on his own. And now, says Jean-Pierre Arbon, Editions 00h00.com is "Europe's leading online publisher." Well, okay, it's the only one. For now.

How the tale ends is still unknown; Editions is very much a work in progress. But Arbon, who is president, is certain of two things. First, that traditional publishers are going to enter the field. And second, that when they do, he still wants to be leader of the pack.

It's an ambitious agenda for a privately held company that had all of $125,000 in revenues last year. One of the lessons of Web business has been that while old fogies can be slow to do the Internet thing, once they're in, they can use their brand recognition and customer base to clout online-only competitors. But Arbon thinks this is less of a risk in publishing, because online houses can offer products that complement rather than threaten traditional outlets. Online publishing, he argues, will do what the paperback did: expand the market for books and create a new form of subsidiary rights.

Here's how it works. Click on 00h00.com, then choose a book and pay for it. (Online books typically cost about two-thirds of the hardcover price.) A signal is sent to the server, which puts the book into what Arbon calls a "digital envelope," which will send it out as an e-mail attachment in PDF form. Print it out or download it into a personal organizer or e-book. Read.

Using an e-book, which is about the size of a paperback, Arbon displays a book on Microsoft that 00h00.com offers. The e-book's type can he made bigger or smaller, darker or lighter. Readers can underline passages and skip to the footnotes; and the footnotes are linked to sites. So if the author refers to, say, FORTUNE, the footnote will offer a FORTUNE link. Other books offer interactive mechanisms or background information on characters.

Since Editions opened for business in May 1998, the company has added about 600 titles to its list. Perhaps 150 are in the public domain; about 500 are licensed from traditional publishers; and 40 are original works. Consider, for example, Cracked Pumpkin, a volume of short stories by Hamid Skif, who is Algerian. Skif deliberately chose the online route because he knew his stories would never be allowed into Algeria in book form. At least this way some Algerians can get access to the work. An example of how online publishing can expand the idea of the book is In Kabul, by Julie Benoic, who lives in that benighted city. Benoic put together a volume of her experiences and sold it to Editions, which put it online. Every once in a while she adds material, essentially creating a new edition each time, without having to wait for the previous one to hit the remainder table.

The way Arbon sees it, online publishing means that "books have been dematerialized." But the reassuring thing is that he's still a book guy. His goal is not to kill the book but to broaden its possibilities, for both readers and authors. Toward that end, editions has signed agreements with Microsoft, Adobe, Palm, Rocket eBook, and Print on Demand so that it can deliver books through any medium--including paper.

Revenues are on track to reach $800,000 this year, and Arbon would like to be in the black by 2002. This is not a man who speaks the language of burn rate: Editions is run on a shoestring. The offices are modest and cramped, and the marketing strategy is to piggyback onto bigger sites through links on sites like FNAC, one of France's largest retailers, and Amazon's French site.

What's next? Expansion into other European languages. More titles. Arbon would also like to see a musical he has co-written (in English), Web Love Story, make it to Broadway. And, of course, to live happily ever after. --Cait Murphy

CDT Cambridge, England

Yes, we're living in an information economy. But we do still need a way to get at all that information. Which is why flat-panel displays are essential. Laptops, mobile phones, Palms--they're all unimaginable without those sleek, flat screens. But there's a problem: The liquid-crystal-display technology used to make most of them is complicated, expensive, and flawed.

The search for an LCD replacement has been on for years, not least among the Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese companies that now dominate flat-screen production. But one of the most promising alternatives was discovered in a physics laboratory at England's Cambridge University. Now Cambridge Display Technology, the little company born of that 1989 discovery, is almost ready for prime time. In about a year the first small flat screens using light-emitting polymers (a.k.a. plastics) will go on the market as mobile-phone displays. After that the possibilities are endless; LEPs can in theory be made into displays big enough for laptop computers, TVs, movie screens.

And here's the key: Unlike LCDs, which are assembled layer by layer in a complex process, LEP screens can be made by using a modified inkjet printer to spray liquid polymer onto a backplate of glass or plastic laced with conductive metal. "The paradigm is printing," says Richard Friend, a Cambridge physics professor and one of CDT's founders. "We're looking at a completely different cost model."

Understandably, Friend and his colleagues get very excited about this. "CDT controls the absolute fundamental patents for this stuff," says company president Daniel McCaughan. "Nobody can make light-emitting plastics without a license from us." Still, the path from patent to profits isn't going to be easy for CDT. It hasn't been so far.

The saga began with a lab experiment conducted by newly minted Cambridge Ph.D. Jeremy Burroughes (now the company's technical director), who was studying how to make electronic devices from plastic. One day Burroughes was running an electrical current through a layer of liquid plastic when, much to his surprise, he realized that the stuff was glowing. Burroughes and Friend, his advisor, knew they were on to something big. In 1992, armed with a European patent for "electroluminescent devices," Friend and several colleagues founded CDT.

The company, despite having such luminaries as Internet guru Esther Dyson and members of the rock group Genesis among its early investors, was not an instant success. "One of the problems we've had is, it's not a product; it's a technology," says Friend. So for years the company has struggled with how best to exploit that technology, initially harboring grandiose plans to develop and manufacture the polymer screens itself.

That changed when Danny Chapchal, a veteran software executive with no attachment to polymers, became CEO in 1996. He made signing development deals with big manufacturers a priority. Dutch electronics giant Philips was first, and others followed. CDT's closest partner is Japan's Seiko-Epson, with which it announced in June the development of the first full-color LEP display (just 2.5 inches square).

Chapchal also lined up serious funding, some from Intel but most from New York private equity firms Kelso & Co. and Hillman Capital, which together put up $16 million in 1999 and pledged another $15 million this May. Kelso and Hillman now have a majority stake in CDT and are putting their own management team in place: President and COO McCaughan was brought over from Nortel in January; as of May, Chapchal was out and the search was on for a high-profile CEO.

CDT's market potential is huge. "We're looking at a market where conservative estimates say light-emitting devices will take 10% of a $60 billion [display] market by 2004," says McCaughan. But competitors are lurking, including big guns like Du Pont and Kodak, and LCDs aren't going away anytime soon.

Still, says Barry Young, vice president of Texas-based research firm DisplaySearch, LEPs have potential. "If it's on plastic you now have the perfect display; something that can be curved, rolled up," he says. "You could roll up your TV." What? You don't want to roll up your TV? You will. Says CDT's McCaughan: "We have what is very much a see-it, want-it technology." --Justin Fox

IOBOX Helsinki

Jari Ovaskainen still misses the car--a midnight-blue Mercedes 300CE coupe. He loved its leather interior, its smooth ride, and the kick it gave him to race it around Helsinki's rain-slicked highways. But Ovaskainen sold the car in order to buy a dream. He used the money to help found Iobox. And though he now drives a simple Volkswagen, Ovaskainen has never been happier.

That's because he finds Iobox--the name is simply an abbreviation of the computer term "input and output box"--even more exciting than his old Mercedes. The company, based in Helsinki, has created a Web portal for cell-phone users. By signing up at Iobox's Website (www.iobox.com), users receive an e-mail account they can check from their mobile handsets. They can view news, sports scores, stock quotes, calendars, and weather information. They can also do "m-commerce" (mobile commerce), such as buying CDs or bidding on auctions. And just for fun, they can create their own graphic icons and compose original ringing tones for their phones.

Ovaskainen is fond of saying he wants Iobox to be the next Yahoo. He's off to a promising start. Since its founding in January 1999, more than a million customers have signed up for Iobox's service, half of them registering on Iobox's English-language Website. Another 6,500 join each day. Already well known on its home turf of Finland, Iobox recently launched marketing campaigns in Britain, Sweden, and Germany. And Iobox's customer base promises to expand as more cell-phone users switch to handsets with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) technology. "We are quite comfortable that we will be able to hit one million users by the end of the year," Ovaskainen says.

Profitability is tougher. Ovaskainen doesn't see that happening for at least another year, maybe two. But the company has managed to raise $16 million in venture capital, including $13 million in its latest round of financing from a syndicate led by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Capital Partners. It has begun to pull in revenue from hosting wireless Web services for other companies and charging cell-phone customers 9 cents for each message they receive. And it gets a slice of the m-commerce transactions taking place on its site. So far, Iobox has inked m-commerce deals with QXL.com, Britain's leading auction site, and Boxman, a popular online CD retailer from Sweden. It also has a pilot program with eBay's German site and partnerships with Yahoo Sweden, stock-ticker service FirstQuote, Oracle, and Nokia. Iobox declined to give revenue projections for the year or discuss whether it plans an IPO.

For a dot-com, Iobox's work force is unusually grown-up. Most of its 100 employees (half of them Finns, with the rest mostly British) are over 30. Many used to work at big-league telecommunications and consulting companies. Strolling through Iobox's offices, there isn't a foosball or billiard table in sight, just lots of people pecking away at keyboards: "We don't believe in mixing work life with play time," Ovaskainen says. English is the company's official language, though content and services are provided in the local language of each market.

That Iobox has been able to jump to an early lead in the market for wireless Internet service is largely due to Ovaskainen. While working at Andersen Consulting in the mid-1990s, he observed trends in wireless communications and realized there would be demand for a portal such as Iobox. He linked up with 28-year-old Henry Nilert, a former Credit Suisse First Boston financier who was also looking to start a new venture. With a little help from friends and the money from Ovaskainen's beloved Mercedes, they started the company. Iobox has taken the poll position in the race to build Europe's first wireless Web portal, but Ovaskainen's driving skills have deteriorated. He laments that in go-cart competitions, he's already been beaten several times. --Jeremy Kahn

EASYNET London

David Rowe, the 41-year-old founder and chief executive of Easynet, reckons the toughest job he ever had was launching a computer software venture in Poland in the early 1990s. But he's not about to pretend that his present assignment is a breeze. For a start, the company's share price has plummeted since the European tech-stock bubble burst in April. Then there's the uncomfortable fact that one of Easynet's core businesses--Internet access--is where the online margins are thinnest for European dot-coms.

So here's why Easynet--named "best European ISP" last year by the industry's association--just might be worth watching. Way back in 1996, when ISPs were widely assumed to be the road to Internet riches, Rowe reached the contrarian conclusion that he needed to convert Easynet, founded in 1994, into a telecom company. "It was possibly a world first for an ISP," recalls Rowe. The rationale was simple: By securing telecom operating licenses in Britain and France (and Rowe has his sights on Germany), Easynet has achieved substantial control over its communications infrastructure. That in turn has given the London-based group the platform to unroll a full portfolio of Internet products and services for around 10,000 corporate customers across Western Europe, from Web hosting and company intranets to online management of supply and distribution databases. And it's these business clients, rather than private ISP subscribers, that form the key to Easynet's fortunes, accounting for almost 70% of the group's $44.3 million in revenues last year. Rowe's ambition? "In five years' time, we would like to take over the world," he responds--and he doesn't sound as if he's joking.

Okay, anyone who figured out how to market bank-integration software to post-Communist Poles is clearly intrepid. But it's still hard to picture how Easynet, with a payroll of 500 employees and 1999 revenues of $44 million, can go head-to-head with the big boys in the Internet products and services sector. In Europe, the competition comes from the former state telecom monopolies; internationally, American giants UUNet and PsiNet lead the pack. These are no pushovers.

Rowe answers the skeptics by making two points. First, he says, Easynet's bantamweight status makes it better equipped than leviathans like British Telecom to tailor products and services to individual clients. And on that score, at least, a growing number of blue-chip Easynet customers, such as Rhone-Poulenc, Reed International, and Euronet, appear to agree.

Second, Rowe argues that because Easynet is "a genuinely European company, [we] are better suited to a European marketplace in terms of mentality" than the two major American players. That's a far weaker argument, especially as Rowe admits that Easynet still has a long way to travel in Europe before it catches UUNet and PsiNet. He won't produce figures but concedes that Easynet is "a long way behind" PsiNet in Germany and also trails UUNet in every country where the two operate. Only in France, where PsiNet lags behind Easynet, and Britain, where Easynet is moving up on PsiNet, does the company fulfill Rowe's objective of "punching above our weight."

So the jury's still out on whether a company with an operating loss last year of $1.08 million (compared with $785,600 in 1998), a share price that was trading at the end of June at less than a third of its $47 January peak, and a CEO who refuses to say when he'll turn a profit is truly a global contender. Right now, though, being a dot-com in Europe isn't about winning but about surviving, and because Rowe sensed future danger much earlier than other ISP startups, Easynet has a business model that has a better chance of escaping the coming carnage of European dot-coms. In the present climate of Internet doom, sound defenses are a strategy worth watching. --Richard Tomlinson

AIXTRON Aachen, Germany

A science-fiction writer could not have produced more futuristic-sounding jargon than that found in the annual report of Aixtron, a German company that makes machines that make compound semiconductors. The report mentions Planetary Reactors, gallium arsenite, blue lasers, and something called barium-strontium-titanate. Even the company's name, Aixtron, sounds as though it were ripped from a sci-fi novel.

But despite the exotic vocabulary, Aixtron is no fictional creation. It's a real business, making real money--$17 million in profit before taxes last year, on sales of $85 million. It's a hit with investors too. Aixtron's stock, listed on Frankfurt's Neuer Markt since 1997, was up 140% last year. The company's market cap is $4.3 billion.

Compared with most of Europe's new-economy companies, Aixtron is a grande dame. It was founded in 1983 as an outgrowth of research at the University of Aachen, where scientists were focused on the creation of compound semiconductors--wafers made from an amalgam of elements (such as metal gallium and arsenic) and used to create advanced computer chips. Compound semiconductors have several advantages over the more common silicon variety, among the most important of which being the ability to emit and absorb light. That makes them critical components in fiber-optic systems, solar cells, and liquid electronic display (LED) technology.

Aixtron produces machines called reactors; these create semiconductors by applying chemical compounds in a gaseous state to rotating metal disks, where the gas condenses to form ultrathin crystal layers. The company controls 53% of the world market for these machines, which sell for about $1.5 million. Its nearest competitor, an American company called Emcore, has a 25% market share.

There's little chance that Aixtron will lose its lead to an upstart. No new reactor companies have been founded since 1983. "The production of various compound semiconductors is a real black art, a dark science," says Alister Hibbert, a London-based money manager for the mutual fund company Invesco. "Aixtron has years of experience and tons of intellectual know-how."

Aixtron benefits from a highly diversified customer base, says co-CEO Kim Schindelhauer, the business half of Aixtron's executive tag-team (co-CEO Holger Jurgensen is the research guy). Half its revenues come from display technology companies, 25% from the telecom sector, and the remaining 25% from a variety of other high-tech industries. "We are not reliant on any one customer," Schindelhauer notes.

Aixtron's business is also geographically diverse, with 20% of its sales in Europe and 40% each from the U.S. and Asia. Customers include the likes of Agilent, Sharpe, NEC, Thompson, ITT, Nortel, Ericsson, and Philips. "Aixtron is positioned in a sweet spot, benefiting from very wide industry growth in both the device manufacturers and the wafer foundries," says Goldman Sachs analyst David Abraham. He and other analysts are especially excited about the possibility that one day soon, LEDs may replace standard light bulbs, creating a demand for billions of compound semiconductors.

Aixtron employs about 300 people worldwide, two-thirds of them in Germany. The rest work in sales offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Taiwan or in manufacturing facilities in Britain and Sweden. Most have academic backgrounds. The company tries to attract the best and brightest young university graduates by offering them the opportunity to, as Schindelhauer says, "work at the forefront of what is possible." In other words, for a physicist, this is a pretty cool place. But if that is not enough, Aixtron also offers all its employees stock options.

Which has been nice, since Aixtron's stock has been a stellar performer. It is now trading at 310 times estimated earnings. That has scared some investors away. But Aixtron's stock has been far less volatile than many of its Neuer Markt brethren. And, as money manager Hibbert says, "if Aixtron fulfills its potential, it will be much bigger than the $4.5 billion company that it is now." --Jeremy Kahn

INFOBANK Slough, England

A 50-year-old man called Sadd from the unhip English town of Slough (rhymes with "cow") may not seem a likely candidate for leadership of a new-economy starlet. But Graham Sadd, chief executive of Infobank, which sells corporate purchasing and supply software, may have hit on a product that will become as ubiquitous in business as the telephone. And in these uncertain times for Europe's dot-com startups, investors are intrigued by such real-world potential.

On the day FORTUNE met him, Sadd was just back from a 30-day fundraising slog around Europe and America that had netted Infobank 130 million [pounds] ($208 million) in capital from institutional investors. The deal was sealed less than 48 hours before the Nasdaq's Black Friday. "You could say I was delighted," says Sadd dryly. Sadd is happy to repeat the sales pitch that has lined up blue-chip investors like Goldman Sachs and Britain's Prudential Group.

At the most basic level, Infobank's core InTrade software can process all the tedious purchasing and payment of repeat business and office supplies, from fax paper to toilet rolls. The software saves money by eliminating the drudgery of order taking and freeing professional purchasers to concentrate on complex orders that require human judgment. Sadd believes that Infobank, founded in 1993, is positioned to be one of the top-five global players. Does he have a prayer, or is he blowing cybersmoke?

The company's performance outside America is likely to offer the first solid answer to that question. In January the U.S. infotech consultancy Meta Group ranked Infobank as the main purchasing software vendor in Europe, adding that none of the British company's competitors could match its InTrade software's depth. Infobank's 200 employees are steadily building a roster of heavyweight clients, including National Power, the British utility, and ICL, the British-based infotech multinational. In Asia, Infobank has distributors in Japan, Australia, India, and Singapore. Sadd notes that it's still "very early days." But considering the growth forecasts for business-to-business sales--Infobank's lifeblood--his optimism is not ludicrous. The Gartner Group, for example, predicts that Europe's and Asia's combined share of B2B sales will reach 58% in 2004, compared with 36% last year.

This being the new economy, there are caveats. Infobank is losing money, and Sadd doesn't expect to break even until the end of 2002. Last year the company lost more than $12 million on turnover of less than $600,000. Sadd concedes that Infobank's customers are still counted "in tens," rather than the thousands he craves. What's more, Infobank has only a toehold in the U.S., where Commerce One and Ariba currently dominate e-procurement. And finally, Infobank's share price has taken a battering. Since early March, when the shares hit $64, the stock has dived to the low teens. Sadd insists that the stock slump is "just a market trend" that does not reflect the company's prospects. In April he backed that judgment by switching Infobank's listing from Britain's second-tier Alternative Investment Market to the London Stock Exchange, where he hopes to attract more big-name shareholders.

Sadd's next move? Well, the day after seeing FORTUNE, he was heading down under to meet Infobank's Australian distributors. That's a long way to go to shake a few hands. But when you're convinced, as Sadd is, that "50 million companies worldwide" are potential customers for your product, you stop minding about the air miles. --Richard Tomlinson