Mondus, the much-hyped SME B2B exchange, is up and running today, emerging from a week of site maintenance purdah.

This will please sellers who pay Mondus a subscription fee. But closing the site for so long prompts the question: how much business is this exchange actually doing? Busy companies do not tend to close their doors for a week, do they?

Mondus is famous because:

• It was set up by two Rhodes scholars from Oxford University, who won a £1 million worth of funding from 3i in a Sunday Times-sponsored competition
  
  
• The company was named the third most important privately-owned e-business in Europe, in the Sunday Times' wildly inaccurate e-league table.
• SEAT Pagine Galle, the Italian directories company, invested $150m in the company -$100m to develop the site and $50m in shares. Considering the market this is a huge sum.

Mondus operates in France, Germany, the UK and Italy. ®