Accoona

Bill Clinton has cashed in on appearances
By Andrew Zajac

In December 2004, former President Bill Clinton made a much-publicized appearance at a launch party in New York for Accoona, a new Internet search engine billing itself as a rival to Google.

Clinton’s presence at the gathering at Tavern on the Green in Central Park was a coup for the unheralded, privately held Accoona, which paid for the former president’s appearance by issuing options for 200,000 shares of stock to Clinton’s charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation. In 2006, the Clinton Foundation sold the shares for $700,000.

Another celebrity hired by Accoona, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, did not fare as well. Kasparov also was paid in stock options, but his agent said he has not exercised them because his financial advisers told him last year that the shares were worth less than their $1 option exercise price.

…Williams declined to say how many options Kasparov received but said the chess champion and one-time Russian presidential candidate was advised last year that exercising them “was not a good expenditure of Garry’s money. … Our financial guy said, `You will not make money buying those shares at $1.’ … He didn’t exercise his options.”

The markets seemed to agree. Twice in the last year, Accoona filed, and subsequently withdrew, plans for a public offering, once on London’s AIM market and more recently in the U.S. on the NASDAQ exchange.

Accoona’s prospectus for its aborted U.S. offering pointed to some of its difficulties. The company never had made a profit; a co-founder and major shareholder had pleaded guilty to a felony fraud charge; and Accoona’s key partner is a media company controlled by the Chinese government, which often is criticized for censoring the Internet.

Here is the full article.

I hope that they can bounce back. I tried Accoona a few times and their search engine is pretty neat. But I guess it is tough going up against the giant Google.