idealab!¹ is, according to themselves, "The Creative Capital Start-up Factory for Internet Businesses", in other words, a company that enables its "child" companies to lose awful amounts of money on the exciting and profitable field of e-commerce.

The website is at <URL:http://www.idealab.com/>. At the moment, the main page has a picture of a pile of papers that have names like .tv, eToys, GoTo.com, Netzero... uh, a lot of companies that are probably familiar with those who have been watching the recent downfall of net commerce.

Apparently they don't like critique either: Fucked Company parodied their front page image (with text "FuckedLab") and IdeaLab! threatened to sue them over that (Reported by Slashdot, 2000-07-26).

¹ They insist the exclamation mark is part of the name, and apparently the lack of capitalization is part of the scheme too...