From dot-com to dot boom

1994 to 2000 observed a massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet due to advances in digital connectivity. Computer was no longer a luxury but a necessity. Many online shopping companies emerged and this gave birth to an economy that was based on information technology. A dot-com refers to a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that bears a top-level domain “.com”. With Bill Gates’ forecast of an approaching “Internet Tidal Wave”, and the surge of share prices of Internet Netscape from an opening US$28 to $75 within hours when it went public in August 1995, people became speculated about the prospect of making money on Internet dot.coms. Online shopping was then widely perceived as a new way of doing business, and excited investors blindly bet on dot-com stocks and paid significantly more than their fundamental value. It was this big discrepancy between perceived value and actual worth, together with an absence of practical business plans and experienced CEOs in the dot-coms, that created a market bubble that doomed to burst in March, 2000. Though technology companies of a market value of 5 trillion did erase in the following 2 years, and thousands of IT workers went jobless, I think such bubble burst has served its function in bettering the environment for e-commerce. Buying online is a big business and to get big takes time. Construction period must be allowed to let pioneers remedy their mis- steps and mistakes. Share prices of Internet firms have to be evaluated on their actual profits or sales rather than just a proposed future. Today, companies like Amazon that survived the burst have become household names, and the World Wide Web stands as the greatest publishing platform in history. The end of the dot-com boom is definitely not the end of dot- com.

startup.com reflection

Startup.com is a 107-minute documentary released on 1 June 2001 in USA which is presented by D A Pennebaker. It records the birth and failure of the dot-com start-up media company “govWorks.com”, a bona fide realization of the rise and fall of the American dream. This film is inspirational as it shows how powerful creativity can be. We can start a business with just an idea, and we can fuel the growth of computer technology by devising new use it can offer. The dot com bubble is so promising at the time of filming as it offers so many hopes to the users. As what govWorks.com has claimed, it is more than a company. Being a collection interface for municipal governments, via the launching of virtual tool stores, on-line wedding registries, and cashiers for parking tickets, the mission of this dot-com media is to help people. Yet, entrepreneurship is something more than ideology. Though Tuzman and Herman, the co-founders of govWorks.com, have been great friends since high school, and have continuously polished their idea in building up their dot com company, their blood, sweat and tears still end up in a failure. At the time of dot com boom, it was easy to borrow venture capital based solely on a computer technology idea. Thus, Tuzman and Herman met little difficulty in raising 50 million USD from funds to invest on their on-line revenue collection interface idea. Their employee crew grew from 30 to 233 in just nine months, and Tuzman invited his friend Chieh Cheung to be a third partner. It is exactly the non-commitment of this third partner, together with the under-performance of the actual mechanics of their website, foretell the decline of the company. A burglary into their company that results in a loss of technical details, forms the last straw to bring about the death of govWorks.com So, from concept to company, it really involves many down-to-earth factors other than creativity.

epic 2015 reflection

EPIC 2015, a flash movie filmed by Robin Sloan in 2004 for the Museum of Media History, is a prophecy on online media. At the time of production, Internet was just at its infancy stage but the movie presents itself as a history development recap of the Net through 2015. It is in fact a future history of the Internet. Yet, the pre-vision is scarily accurate. A forecast of what could happen turns out to be something that is actually going on. All milestones, except the merging of Google with Amazon to form Googlezon, more or less spring up. We are indeed living in a world of EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct. Benefitted by the development of Information Technology, we now have IPod emerges as a portable media player and multi-purpose pocket computer that functions as a personal tailored portal of music, images, videos, and online contacts. Google, as forecasted, materializes to be the most popular gateway for searching. The coverage of “Google Grid” is possibly extended over the entire world which makes real time message exchange feasible. This boosts the growth of online news and poses a great threat to the traditional print form of a newspaper. Today, printed copies of newspaper are really preferred by elite officers and businessmen while the young generation and general public usually choose a soft copy subscription. Improvement in convenience and application is also witnessed these years. The availability of high data transmission rate and cloud computing enable Net users to exchange and store up massive amounts of data easily while Google map can provide real-time geographical directions. Easy-to- use tools like Blogger and social network platforms like Facebook are open to everyone for sharing personal thoughts and images. Google, through tracking these users’ history of search terms, can build up a detailed profile of the Net users, and contribute to a Personalized Information Construct. Say, Digg, is a news aggregator that offers selected stories according to the favoritism of the Internet audience. Yet, the collection of such information can be a breach of personal privacy and so official regulations are in force to avoid over-sharing. For instance, Facebook has implemented a customizable set of privacy controls to allow its users to shield their information from uninvited individuals.