This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

Back in the heady dot-com days of 1999, any parent who didn't want to brave the holiday season parking lots knew what to do: Get online and buy those Christmas presents at eToys.com. Unlike Toys-R-Us, which had recently gone online itself, eToys seemed to know what it was doing. It offered a vast array of toys at reasonable prices, and it got them to you on time as promised.

But by March 2001, you were back to the Toys-R-Us option -- by then allied with Amazon.com, and doing online retailing the right way. In the end, eToys proved no more durable than the Furby -- much sought-after, priced up by speculators and hype, only to ultimately end up in the backyard, broken and ignored.

eToys went up fast and crashed hard, (not unlike a pogo stick), and in many ways it remains a textbook example of the excesses and "irrational exuberance" of the dot-com era.

Mega hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. certainly likes insurance plays. The most recent deal: the $575 million buyout of the James River Group (NASDAQ: JRVR).

The firm provides property and casualty insurance coverage across 48 states. In fiscal Q1, earnings increased 49% to $10.1 million.

But with D.E. Shaw's heft, James River should scale its business even more.

I had a chance to interview Gene Mueller, who is a managing partner at Mueller Carey Companies and an expert on insurance. According to him:

"In this proposed deal, investors reacted poorly on day one to slightly below-market pricing. But of course, not every deal that's signed actually closes on the same terms. Here, there doesn't appear to be a meaningful no-shop clause, and no financing contingency, indicating that the buyer, investment manager D.E. Shaw, may be looking at a financial play. Despite a termination fee of some $7MM, that would be only a little over 1% of the deal price. Hard to predict, but maybe this is just a toe in the water for the target. James River is a very well-run company, so I would expect others to take close look at the proposed pricing. I would say stay tuned on this one."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.