The '4anything.com' Web site

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Watching the Internet explode around him, Vincent Schiavone quietly began buying domain names that began with the number four: 4wine.com, 4babies.com, 4soccer.com, 4anything.com.

On Monday — three years after the Philadelphia entrepreneur began buying ``4'' domains — Schiavone will officially launch 4anything.com, adding yet another portal to burgeoning market led by companies like Yahoo! Inc. and Excite Inc.

``The Internet, as hot as it is, is really still in its infancy,'' said Schiavone on Tuesday at an Internet commerce conference in San Francisco. ``We want to lead the second wave of portals.''

Portals are the entry points for users to venture onto the Internet. Consumers use them to find a wealth of online services such as free e-mail, news, chat and personalized functions like stock quotes, local weather and sports.

In the prosperous world of the Internet, portals have seen big payoffs. They make money selling advertisements, and by pointing customers to businesses. New York-based Jupiter Communications estimates that online retail sales generated by portal sites will represent $2.4 billion out of the $13 billion total projected this year.

As the market has evolved, companies such as Yahoo! and America Online Inc. have become dominant, becoming among the most visited sites on the Internet. Others, such as Excite Inc., have been acquired by companies eager to tap into the portals' power..

Most of the established portals are geared toward the average Web surfer, offering a wide range of options. Now a new era of more sophisticated portals — dozens of them — are searching out a much more targeted audience.

``When people first come on the Internet, they are so overwhelmed by all the information that these big established portals serve a very important function as a funnel. But as users become more savvy, they realize these portals have editorial slants, or are simply too broad, for what they need,'' said Jonathan Yarmis, an eMarketWorld executive vice president from Richmond, Virginia.

For example, Long Island, N.Y., cousins Andrew, 32, and Steven, 26, Deitch scraped together $10,000 to launch FreewebCentral specifically for business visitors.

The medical section doesn't focus on self help tips. Instead, they publish drug databases and the full text of scientific journal articles. The stock area includes a ticker tape, global clocks and a stock split calendar.

The most popular spot is a link to unclaimed bank, dividend and tuition accounts gathered from state comptrollers.

At 4anything.com, Schiavone said his users are going to be consumers who don't want the obscure and bizarre items buried deep in the Web.