Hotmail founder makes dot-com gaffe

NEWS Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia is blaming tough times in the US for the closure of his current online procurement services venture arzoo.com. Bhatia is something of a figurehead for Indian entrepreneurship. The demise of arzoo.com is a far cry from the success of his web-based email venture which spawned the free internet mail service he sold to Microsoft for an impressive $400m four years ago. Arzoo customers were charged a monthly fee, which was linked to how much they used the site and in return, software experts would try to out-bid each other in the provision of services to the customer. Today, a notice to site visitors says: "Even though our blue-chip beta customers liked our service, they have postponed their purchasing decision to either later this year or sometime next year. For a small company like ours, we cannot survive on promises of future purchase."