Falling in Gov
What industry is turning the most heads now that dotcom doesn't equal success? It's e-government.
Meet the early days of e-government. "This is the beginning
of a great thing," Kaleil Isaza Tuzman says in
Startup.com, a 2001 film documentary. Tuzman, along with
buddy Tom Herman, founded GovWorks.com, one of the pioneering and
highest-profile players in the e-government space.
Startup.com chronicled the company's heady rise through
1999 and 2000, from clever concept tospectacular crash.
Despite the unfortunate end to GovWorks.com's story,
e-government is still very much a technology and business frontier.
It might be more civilized than the Old West, but it's just as
wide open and untamed. GovWorks.com hatched as an Internet portal
and epitomized the early, wide-eyed view of the multibillion-dollar
government horizon.
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"You go to GovWorks.com to do basically anything you do
with local government," says Tuzman in the film.
"It's a pretty tremendous market space." With no
positive revenue model, GovWorks.com didn't survive the dotcom
downfall. But Tuzman was right about one thing: E-government is a
fertile, immense market space. Go west, young entrepreneur, go
west.
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It's impossible to tie this market up into a neat package
because it sprawls out like a growing city. And you don't have
to be in the technology business to take advantange of these new
opportunities, because there are angles for every entrepreneur.
E-government is businesses that provide tech services to state
agencies. It's Web sites that let citizens pay fines online.
It's office-supply stores bidding for local contracts online.
It's entrepreneurs building Web sites for municipalities.
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Forrester Research estimates that 15 percent of federal, state
and local fees and taxes will be collected online by 2006. The
technology research and consulting firm also predicts that nearly
14,000 online service applications will roll out across the nation
by 2006, the majority coming from cities and towns. Some
governments plan to tackle technology issues on their own with
proprietary systems, but many will turn to private businesses that
offer to get them there.
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