To Boldly Go.

• Author: GRAHAM, SANDY

STARTEK PROFITS MORE THAN DOUBLED LAST YEAR. NOW IT'S REALLY TAKING OFF.

There's near-gridlock on Interstate 25 at the Park Meadows exit, and parking-space paucity at Cherry Creek. Stressed holiday shoppers lugging armloads of bags trudge from store to store and mall to mall, from Grand Junction to Greeley.

1. Emmet Stephenson, Jr., bless his creative little heart, would like to spare us that December drudgery.

Stephenson, chairman of Denver-based StarTek Inc., is the mastermind behind one of the latest and most elaborate World Wide Web shopping sites, gifts.com. Launched in late October by StarTek and Reader's Digest Association Inc. (NYSE: RDA, RDB), gifts.com lures shoppers with a broad array of quality items and a search engine that will even help locate suggestions for dear old Aunt Mabel, who has everything. (And, if you like, it will send you an e-mail reminder when Aunt Mabel's birthday rolls around.)

"My daughter, who thinks I'm the hardest person in the world to shop for, went to the test site and put in my hobbies, age and amount she wanted to spend," said Stephenson. "It came up with two ideas she thought were wonderful. So it works."

Does it work well enough to help keep StarTek on its path of stellar, double-digit earnings growth? Wall Street seems to think so: After the Reader's Digest-StarTek announcement in September, StarTek's stock, traded on the Big Board, shot from $37 to $55 a share. A year earlier, it had been in the $8 range.

"Gifts.com has a very memorable URL that should be very top-of-mind with consumers, and therefore be less costly to develop," said Adam Waldo, vice president and North American business services analyst in the Chicago office of Credit Suisse First Boston.

Waldo believes that the ultimate winners in Internet-based commerce will be divisions of well-managed, forward-thinking existing companies with high profits and cash flow -- such as StarTek and Reader's Digest -- not newcomers like Amazon.com: "When you ask, 'who wins in the longrun, Wal-Mart or Amazon.com,' we think it's Wal-Mart," he said.

StarTek owns 19.9% of gifts.com, Reader's Digest the remainder. The online gift-buying market is expected to grow to $1.8 billion in sales by 2003, according to Forrester Research. StarTek and Reader's Digest plan to capture 10% to 15% of that market with gifts.com, executives say. Waldo conservatively values StarTek's interest in the joint venture at $15 a share, and carries a target price of $55 a share...