Internet Summit Draws Dotcom Entrepreneurs

Although conditions haven't returned to the feverish levels of the dot-com boom, the Internet's business atmosphere is clearly heating up.

|QUOTE|The latest symptoms of the escalating exuberance bubbled up this week at an elite gathering called the Web 2.0 Summit - a 3-year-old event billed as a mere conference until the organizers renamed it this year to underscore its exclusive status.

The San Francisco shindig attracted so many movers and shakers that more than 250 Internet entrepreneurs jostled for a chance to show off their Web sites at a 90-minute session devoted to startups. The demand for on-stage presentations more than quadrupled from last year.

An advisory board winnowed this year's field of applicants to 13 lucky startups, which paid $10,000 apiece to take center stage. Each demonstration was limited to five minutes, a constraint that required some presenters to wrap things up before they had a chance to show off all their whiz-bang technology.

"It's a little nerve-racking, but it's very exciting," said Nicole Morris, who highlighted 3B.net, a London-based startup that provides tools to construct three-dimensional settings around Web pages.

|PIC1|Morris ended her five-minute pitch by reaching out to venture capitalists - a group of financiers that is becoming more aggressive about pursuing investment opportunities.

Through the first nine months of this year, venture capitalists had invested $455 million in Web startups, more than doubling the amount from the same time last year, according to research firm Dow Jones VentureOne.

Other summit presenters like Palo Alto-based Sharpcast.com, which already has raised more than $13.5 million in venture capital, seemed more interested in creating a buzz that would lure more users to their Web sites.

Still other entrepreneurs on the summit's stage might have been trying to follow the example of JotSpot and Upstartle, two Silicon Valley startups that presented at Web 2.0's two previous gatherings. Google Inc., already home to hundreds of millionaire employees, bought both of those companies for undisclosed sums this year.