Accoona Shrinks to Focus on Twing


New York Times
April 21, 2008
By Saul Hansell

Accoona is a Jersey City, N.J., Internet search company named after the Swahili phrase ?Hakuna Matata,? translated in the Disney movie The Lion King as meaning ?no worries.?

Even though he had just announced a big round of layoffs, Valentine J. Zammit, Accoona?s chief executive, was as cheerful as Pumbaa the warthog when he returned my call Monday afternoon.

Economic times are tough he said. Yes, the company is suspending development of its ExchangePlace division that had been working on a system to trade ?leads? inquiries by customers for mortgages and such. And yes, it is also seriously considering shuttering Accoona.com, the search engine that is the company?s original product. (It hired Bill Clinton to speak at its launch, amid great claims for its artificial intelligence technology.)

Still Mr. Zammit said he has great hopes for the company?s latest product: Twing, a search engine that combs through message boards and forums that was introduced last month.

?This is great what we are doing here,? he said. ?We are doing a wonderful thing.?

Mr. Zammit conceded that Accoona?s shift in direction involves significant layoffs, but he declined to say how many people are being let go. Last June, Accoona had 200 employees of which 40 worked on ExchangePlace. Now, Twing?s site lists only eight people working on the ?business and management team.?

Accoona is scaling back, Mr. Zammit said, in order to preserve its cash.

?It is very very difficult to raise money in this economy,? Mr. Zammit said. ?As a chief executive I decided to suspend development on one of my products, ExchangePlace, to preserve our cash through 2008 and 2009.?

Accoona has been trying to sell stock to investors for several years. It tried to offer shares in London. Then it dropped that bid and filed for a public offering in the United States. Last August, as I started making inquiries about Accoona?s ties to Marc Armand Rousso, a penny stock promoter who has pleaded guilty to money laundering and securities fraud, the underwriter Maxim Group, pulled out.

Accoona could never find another underwriter and it withdrew its public offering in December. Mr. Zammit, said the company has borrowed some money to stay in business, but he declined to say how much it borrowed or from whom.

What about the Accoona?s electronics business, built from a group of small Brooklyn-based online dealers it bought, which still provides the vast bulk of its revenue? That is a tough market too, Mr. Zammit said noting that Twing is now the main focus of the company.

Twing, he said, has been developed over the last year and serves people who want to see what is being said in discussion forums about a person or a product. He declined to discuss what distinguishes the service from other search engines.

?I do not know about technology enough to be able to explain it,? said Mr. Zammit, a former advertising industry executive who has been running Accoona for about a year.

Mr. Zammit implored me not to even mention Mr. Rousso, the stock promoter who is still a large shareholder. He said that Mr. Rousso has no contact with the company any more.

?We are a totally different business than we were a year ago, ? he said. ?Please don?t bring him into this.?

Somehow this reminds me of the lament of Pumba as he sings ?Hakuna Matata:?

I?m a sensitive soul though I seem thick-skinned
And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind
And oh, the shame
Thought of changin? my name
And I got downhearted

Yet I?m not so sure that in the real world this is such a ?problem-free philosophy.?

Accoona?s problems are not simply because of the slowdown in the economy. No, it has a mix of businesses and technologies that make sense only when you understand that it was created by a veteran stock promoter, seemingly most interested in designing a company in order to lure influential backers and ultimately public investors.

Mr. Zammit may well be doing the best he can to create a ?wonderful thing? at Accoona, but he is still digging out of the hole Mr. Rousso put him in.

Nice clip!

Bill Clinton gets $700K cash windfall

Friday, March 07, 2008; Posted: 01:51 PM

WASHINGTON, Mar 7, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Ethical questions have arisen about former U.S. President Bill Clinton's $700,000 sale of stock given him by a failing Internet company founded by a felon.

Clinton got the non-publicly traded Accoona Corp. stock in 2004, the year the company was created, as a gift for speaking at a company event, The Washington Times reported. Valued at 66 cents a share when issued, he sold the 200,000 shares at $3.50 per shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, while the company, backed by the Chinese government, was reporting losses in the tens of millions of dollars.

His wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, had not announced her intention to seek the Democratic presidential nomination when Clinton sold the stock and plowed the proceeds into the William J. Clinton Foundation, the newspaper said.

The sale was listed on the foundation's tax returns reviewed by the Times. Some ethics experts said they were troubled by the lack of disclosure about the buyer specifically, and the activities of former presidents' foundations generally.

Sheila Krumholtz of the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which studies political money and ethics, said former presidents aren't required to disclose donations and stock transactions to their foundations, but they should to avoid the appearance that money was buying special access.

Accoona, based in Jersey City, N.J., was co-founded by Armand Rousso, who pleaded guilty in 1999 to federal money laundering and other charges. The China Daily Information Co., a subsidiary of the Chinese-controlled newspaper China Daily, holds nearly a 7 percent stake in Accoona.

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Also more links:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/accoona/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/shansell/2007/08/22/

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/technology/accoona.php