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History Repeats Itself – The Looming Internet Bubble Version 2 and Thinking of the Old Days
Wow, as I sit here tonight thinking about the bubble of 1999; I can’t but help to see similar signs of that time now in 2011. Linked In, Facebook, Pandora, and more are all heading towards public offerings. The valuations are again in the stratosphere, like in 1998 and 1999.
Are we doomed to repeat the past? Thinking back to that time, I’m realizing quite a few of my successes and my failures. What I did well, I did really well, what I did bad I did really well, to paraphrase Mae West.
So what have I learned:
- That we all need heros and mentors
- That it’s OK to fail, it’s how you handle it that matters more
- That walking away and taking a timed break will do your heart and passion good
- That you should celebrate your success when it happens and learn from what worked and what really didn’t
- That we need to build relationships, projects won’t sustain your business, relationships will
So here I go, I’m back to trying to learn from Bill Gross of Idea Lab again. Over 14 years ago he was my hero, on the cover of Inc. Magazine and launching a Start-Up Factory. He was my role model on what was possible in business. His start-up Idea Lab was the inspiration for the name of my second software development start-up Idea Avenue, Inc.
After recently connecting with someone that worked closely with him around that time, I find myself following him again. This time it’s his blog at www.billgross.com. I urge you to read it and learn about the man and his principals, then go to his business at UberMedia to learn what they are doing to help change the world, 140 characters at a time.
Here’s to sharing a great resource whom offers sage advice on everything from business to saving our planet.
Forbidden City, Beijing, China
, originally uploaded by Nocturnales.
Take a Tour Through Reality
So it’s not exact science, it’s still worth viewing.
911 – A moment of silence and remembrance
What We Saw on 9/11/01
more about “September 11, 2001: What We Saw by wt…“, posted with vodpod
A moment of silence and rememberance
A decade later – 1999 interview about Domain Names
Speculators Rush to Register Catchy Internet Domain Names.
Jun. 7 — Five years ago, Tucson resident Ehud Gavron posed a fairly casual question that turned out to be worth $1million.
Gavron’s friend and stockbroker Eric Wade kept switching Internet service providers. Each provider would assign Wade a new e-mail address, making it hard for Gavron to remember how to reach him.
He suggested that Wade get a permanent e-mail address that he could take along if he switched providers. In Internet jargon, he was suggesting that Wade register his own domain name, or dot com.
Neither of the two anticipated that a few years later there would be a dot com frenzy sweeping the Internet, with fortunes made and courts clogged by litigants. As many as 50,000 names are registered each week.
Speculators searched for and registered every catchy name they could think of. In some cases, they registered names already trademarked by other companies. Beanie Baby manufacturer Ty Inc., Mattel Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Porsche AG have filed suits in recent months over Web sites that the companies say come too close to their trademarks.
The Beanie Baby suit was filed in federal court in late April against Mesa resident Susan B. Joy over the site beaniecollectibles.com. The suit said that Joy sought to sell the domain name. The site beaniecollectibles.com has been taken down since the suit was filed, and Joy could not be reached for comment.
Sales of choice domain names have brought astronomical sums over the last year or so. The name altavista.com sold for $3.35million. A Dutch man received an offer of $5million for Linux.com, but sold the name for a lower undisclosed amount. Business.com brought in $150,000.
It costs an individual $70 to register a name for two years. Names are registered through Internic, www.networksolutions.com. The site provides a searchable database to determine whether a name already has been taken. Another site with information on unclaimed names, for a fee, is www.unclaimeddomains.com.
Gavron said it’s flattering that people think he had the vision to grab a hot property.
“I wish everybody would think that I was a genius,” he said.
That’s not the way it happened. Because Wade was a stockbroker, he and Gavron searched for something that would be appropriate. Stockbroker.com was gone. So were several others. Then they hit the jackpot.
“Wallstreet.com wasn’t taken,” Gavron said. Wade used the name for his e-mail. The two had no idea the name would prove valuable down the road. In fact, he bristles at being included among the domain speculators.
“At that time, there was no such thing as domain speculation,” Gavron said.
The two men talked about developing a financial site at Wallstreet.com but only got as far as taking on a third partner and putting up a stock ticker.
Without any advertising or real content, the Web page started getting significant numbers of stray visits from Web surfers.
The group got an inkling that they might have something valuable. But they still weren’t prepared for what happened.
When they were contacted by a pornography dealer who offered them $250,000 for the name, they finally realized what they had.
“If you have a back yard full of junk and someone comes along and offers you $1,000 for an old lawn mower, it might make you wonder what they know,” Gavron said.
The partners decided to auction off the name and set a minimum bid of $300,000.
Bidders offered thousands of shares from the initial public offering of an Internet company. One offered a percentage of a small phone company.
The winning bid was $1.03million from Players Only, an offshore gambling company, which comes to roughly $343,000 each.
Gavron, who owns Aces Research, a Tucson Internet provider, said the windfall is great, but he hasn’t quit his day job.
“I got to tell a lot of credit card companies that I won’t be doing business with them,” he said.
An individual domain name is everything that follows the www in a web address, Amazon.com, for example. They are not to be confused with Internet domains, or top-level domains, which are the portion of a Web address after the final period. Com is the commercial domain. Gov is government. Org is for organizations. Mil is for military. Domain speculation focuses on the dot coms, the individual names within the com domain, because that’s where the money is.
“There’s a gold rush going on out there, and dot coms are the real estate,” said Scottsdale entrepreneur Kevin J. Berk, who owns 17 domain names. Berk said his wife was a little unhappy at first when he spent about $1,000 registering the names.
“As an investment, it’s fairly cheap,” he said.
As an investment, it’s also fairly speculative, he adds. Several new top-level domains may be added that overlap the dot com domain. That would dilute the value of dot com names.
“If they create .store or .company, that will severely impact the value of dot coms,” Berk said.
Berk’s holdings include TvToYourPC.com, DownloadProgram.com and NetPayPerView.com. None of the names were registered for speculation, he said. He has plans to develop each into viable sites. But selling off a name or two makes a nice Plan B if he doesn’t develop it, or if an attractive offer comes along.
“I have to believe that in business, everything is for sale if the price is right,” he said.
Kathleen Forden is the founder and CEO of Chandler-based Limits Unknown, an Internet design and consulting firm. She owns a package of domain names built around the word local, including LocalUS.com, LocalNeighborhood.com and local combined with the two-letter abbreviation for all 50 states, LocalAZ.com, for example.
A few months ago she shopped the package of local names around but didn’t get any offers that she seriously entertained.
“At one point, that was my intention,” she said. “I was undercapitalized to develop them myself.” Since then, she has come up with some backers and has taken the names off the market.
Forden is working with a client trying to find a domain name for an art-related site, but art names have been picked clean. Art.com, ArtGallery.com, ArtMart.com are all taken. Forden and the client approached a couple of the people with attractive names to see if they were interested in selling. The asking price on one in particular was astronomical.
“It was laughable,” she said. “It was in the high five figures.”
Visit Arizona Central, the online edition of The Arizona Republic, on America Online (keyword: Arizona Central) or on the World Wide Web at http://www.azcentral.com
APA
Sidener, Jonathan. “Speculators Rush to Register Catchy Internet Domain Names.” Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. 1999. Retrieved September 11, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-54816910/speculators-rush-register-catchy.html
Don Tapscott: Re-Industrialize the Planet
(Thanks Gerd!)
“Re-Industrialize the Planet”. A quick summary:
* The web is creating a global infrastructure for collaboration (which leads to disruption and confusion)
* As a result, all of our institutions have come to the end of their life-cycle
* The current recession is a crucial punctuation point in human history – the point where we said that we need to reset, the point where the industrial economy has finally run out of gas
* This paradigm shift is creating a crisis of leadership
* The Digital Natives are inheriting this situation – and they think very differently
* Kids are now the authority on many issues
* We have 40 years to re-industrialize the planet
Nokia Augmented or Mixed Reality
This concept allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch.
Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.It’s hands-free and weightless compared to a tablet, no small screen problem as you have on a mobile phone – but is it truly useful?
Unlike most other AR apps we’ve seen lately, where the physical world is referenced by the AR – the two seem unrelated here. It takes all kinds, though, and who’s to say how AR will be used?(Also, isn’t this music a little creepy? It sounds bittersweet about the inevitable and yet slightly frightening future.)None the less, we’d love to get our hands on a prototype of this technology to test it – just as soon as it becomes real.
A library without the books
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said headmaster James Tracy. (Mark Wilson for The Boston Globe)
There are rolling hills and ivy-covered brick buildings. There are small classrooms, high-tech labs, and well-manicured fields. There’s even a clock tower with a massive bell that rings for special events.
Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.
This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’
Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.
10,000 Working Parents To Lose Health Insurance In Arizona
10,000 Working Parents To Lose Health Insurance In Arizona
Nearly 10,000 working parents will lose their health insurance this month in the wake of state budget cuts, leaving some families with nowhere to turn as they seek affordable coverage.
KidsCare Parents, a program that provides low-income families with inexpensive insurance, will end Sept. 30. The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, which administers the program, could not pay the $6 million annual cost following cuts by the Legislature. The state faces a $3 billion budget shortfall.
Michael Moore’s Capitalism Goes for Broke – TIME
“Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson to a friend in 1816. Now Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 took on the U.S. Army, and the entire military-executive-industrial establishment, brings his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, to the Venice Film Festival.
via time.com
Capitalism - A Love Story
His latest film may not be his best but the director of Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11 has come up with his universal theory of why everything stinks
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