A small Internet start-up software company with big dreams of pumping up oil and gas industry performance through an e-business service is turning out the lights next month in Calgary after a four-year struggle to create a viable market.

Once-vaunted B2B (business-to-business) opportunities in the oilpatch failed to materialize for MyMarketWorks.com, which will now be officially joining dozens of other Alberta technology companies at repose in the dot-com graveyard.

“Our website is still up, but practically speaking, the business scaled back a year ago and has been in hibernation the last year,” says company founder Brad Gaulin. “We’re basically going to turn off the lights in the next month or so.”

The former petroleum engineer launched MyMarket Works.com at the zenith of the high-tech bubble, backed by $1.3 million in financing. At its peak, the 19-employee company boasted 80 small business clients and alliances with firms including Microsoft, Ericsson Canada, IBM Canada and Telus.

In the past year, the company refocused its marketing efforts away from small business clients, only to discover that larger firms were still months, if not years, away from being able to use the kind of data maintenance services it was offering.

Metaphorically speaking, most companies in the market for business-to-business services are looking for painkillers rather than vitamins, says Rob Beamish, managing director for the Technology Commercializ-ation and Incubation Program at Calgary Technologies Inc.

“We counsel our companies to look at the ‘bleeding-from-the-neck problems’ – the critical business issues or problems people desperately want to solve. That’s where the enduring market is,” says Beamish.

CTI is also now advising its start-up firms to try to avoid using the term “dot-com” in their business names, due to the stigma associated with the tech market crash.

“Nobody calls it e-commerce or B2B anymore,” agrees Gaulin. “You just go in and sell a solution to a problem.” Gaulin has now turned his attentions to another venture that’s leaving a better taste in his mouth – chocolate.

Along with a couple of partners, he’s working on a new chocolate business, “which is a total deviation from technology, but that’s why we like it,” he laughs. “I don’t have to explain to anyone why they should like chocolate.”

Because you might say, nobody knows the truffles he’s seen.