Dotcom prince aims to net another fortune as a cyber garbo
By Sue Lowe
January 24 2003
Life is rarely dull for the obscenely rich.
This week Sean Howard was a fireman, rushing from his multi-million-dollar
Double Island hideaway in far North Queensland to help save his
multi-million-dollar homestead next to Kosciuszko National Park.
In coming months, Mr Howard - Australia's most successful dotcom
entrepreneur - plans to spend time as a garbage man.
The man who took a cast-off email business from Kerry Packer and turned it
into Australia's second-biggest internet provider, OzEmail, now wants to
rid the world of the torrent of unsolicited and often lurid email, known as
spam.
He and fellow OzEmail investors Malcolm Turnbull and Trevor Kennedy have
taken "a seven figure" chunk of the $520 million booty they shared from the
sale of OzEmail to the ill-fated US giant WorldCom in 1998 and put it into
a start-up business that will filter the junk out of family email boxes.
Although Mr Howard has been an investor - and frequent loser - in a dozen
or more tech start-ups during the dotcom boom, Spamtrap.net - as the
company and product will be known - is his first personal venture since
OzEmail.
"There are a lot of exciting things being done on the internet. This isn't
one of them," he said. "We're doing something no one else really wants to
do - cleaning garbage."
But it is not just an act of goodwill. "We see it as a great business
opportunity, and plan to aggressively market it throughout Europe and the US."
He is "quietly bullish" that it could be the next OzEmail. It will be
launched first in Australia in mid-February.
Two years ago Mr Howard bought the up-market Double Island resort off Port
Douglas for $4.5 million. Last year he sold his $13 million pad in Neutral
Bay. But it seems life in the sun can be less than satisfying.
Asked what the motivation was for the risky tech venture, he said: "It
combats the boredom. We all have to do something with our lives, and this
is something that does some good."
Mr Howard was driven to the idea by his own irritation with junk mail. As
the user of one of the oldest email addresses in Australia - his original
OzEmail address - he is on a lot of spammer mailing lists. More than 30 per
cent of his email is spam.
A recent Federal Government inquiry into the economic damage being wreaked
by spam said that, on average, 20 per cent of the mail we receive is spam,
and the problem is escalating. Worldwide spam was a $17 billion problem for
internet users, it said.
Where existing anti-spam products fall down, Mr Howard said, was that users
had to download them, pay upfront and regularly upgrade them. For about $3
a month, Mr Howard's service will work by diverting email from a
subscriber's internet provider through a "trap" sitting on a separate
computer, so that only the "friendly" mail is sent on to the customer. It
will take a single simple change to a user's email settings.
The hard part has been developing a system with the intelligence to sort
the unwanted spam from the wanted mail.
http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/23/1042911494242.html
