Visit restaurants.com. Find an Italian restaurant in your neighborhood and examine the information provided.

Assuming you like Italian food, is the gift certificate a good deal? Restaurants.com was founded in 1999 as an all-purpose dining portal with meuns, video tours online, and a reservation feature. Like other dot-coms, the company was losing money. Not too many restaurants were willing to pay the fees in order to put their Web page on the restaurants.com site. The company was ready to pull the plug when its owner learned that CitySpree, which was selling dining certificates (coupons) online, was for sale in a bankruptcy auction. Realizing that Restaurants.com might have a better model for selling dining certificates online than did CitySpree, the owner purchased CitySpree.

This enabled him to change the company from “just another dining portal” to a gift-certificate seller.