Internet History Podcast

Summary

Dale Dougherty was the organizer of the world’s first ever web developers conference, the World Wide Web Wizards Workshop in July of 1993. This was where Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen first met. Dale is also the man who coined the term “Web 2.0” when he organized the first Web 2.0 Summit. But Dale was also the co-founder of the web’s first ever commercial website, Global Network Navigator, or GNN. Today, Dale is probably best known as the founder of Make Magazine, Maker Faires and the entire Maker Movement.

Direct download: 92._Founder_of_the_Worlds_First_Commercial_Website_Dale_Dougherty.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:38am EDT

Summary

If you'll remember in Episode 32, we explored the early digital media startups like Salon, Slate, Suck, Pathfinder, etc. One site that was mentioned, but did not get a lot of detail in that episode was Feed Magazine (aka, Feedmag.com, or Feed). The reason I couldn't go into much detail is because secondary sourcing about Feed is difficult to come by 20 years on. And that's what I was absolutely delighted to make contact with Stefanie Syman. Stefanie, along with Steven Johnson, was a co-founder of Feed, and she recounts the wonderful time period early on when two freelance writers could say, "Gee, why don't we just publish a magazine on the web?" It's a great story of the early Internet scene in New York City, and stay tuned to hear all the people who cut their teeth at Feed and went on to fabulous careers.

Direct download: 91._Co-Founder_of_Feed_Magazine_Stefanie_Syman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:49pm EDT

Summary

I don't think very many people, twenty years ago, would have imagined that maps, location technology and the like would prove to be so strategically important and structurally integral to the Internet and modern technology as we're coming to know it. One person who might have had the vision was Barry Glick, founding CEO of MapQuest. Barry was there in the early days when maps and computers first met, and he has stayed in the location tech industry through the emergence of GPS, mobile devices and now into the current future of driverless cars and the like.


Summary

Tom Hadfield was the founder of Soccernet, which is still the premiere soccer (football!) website in the world. But just as the title says, Tom began Soccernet when he was twelve or thirteen. So, certainly, Tom takes the cake, out of anyone we’ve spoken with so far, for having been in the Internet Game his entire life. Tom tells us the unique story of Soccernet’s founding and how it ended up with ESPN. As a bonus, since Tom is the first person we’ve spoken to from outside of North America, he’s also able to give us our first look at how the web took off in other parts of the world.

BTW, spread the word on the podcast via these links:

NPR’s Earbud.fm submission form.

ProductHunt podcast tool

Direct download: 89._How_Tom_Hadfield_Founded_Soccernet_At_Age_13.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:14pm EDT

Summary:

In the early 1990s, Brad Silverberg was one of the key champions of the Internet within Microsoft. As the first ever Senior Vice President of the Internet Platform and Tools Group, he essentially led Microsoft’s efforts to embrace the Internet and the Web beginning in late 1995. As the senior Vice President of the Personal-Systems Division, Brad also led the development of Windows, from the launch of Windows 3.0 through Windows 95, which he helped establish as Microsoft’s greatest ever product. Today, he is a venture capitalist with both Fuel Capital and Ignition Partners.

Direct download: 88._How_Microsoft_Went_Online_With_Brad_Silverberg.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:08am EDT

Summary:

One of the big trends of recent years in the tech space has been the rise of delivery startups like Instacart and Postmates and the like. In a way, this is a resurrection of an idea, if you remember famous 90s startups like WebVan, Peapod and Kozmo.com. So, I thought it would be interesting to speak with someone who founded a delivery startup back in the 90s. Tim DeMello was the founder of Streamline, a delivery startup which actually predated the dot-com era. We talk to Tim about the economics of home delivery businesses and find out what he thinks the prospects are for the current crop of delivery companies.

Direct download: 87._Tim_DeMello_Talks_Home_Delivery_Startups.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:09am EDT

Martin Nisenholtz is a digital media pioneer. He founded perhaps the first digital marketing group at Olgilvy and Mather all the way back in 1983. But from 1995 through 2012, he was first the President of New York Times Electronic Media and then CEO of New York Times Digital and then Senior Vice President of Digital Operations at the New York Times Company. Martin, is literally the guy who has been front and center in everything the Times has been doing in digital for the last 20 years. He headed the team the launched the first NYTimes.com website back in 1995, and he has helped steer all of their web and digital efforts all the way through to the present social and mobile era.

A screenshot of @Times on AOL here.

A screenshot of an early NYTimes.com homepage here.

Direct download: 86._Martin_Nisenholtz_of_The_New_York_Times.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:02pm EDT

Listen:

Evan Kirstel is a 20 year veteran of the wireless, broadband, cloud and social space. He is also absolutely the number one person to follow on Twitter if you like a daily dose of amazing articles and blog posts. Evan helps me frame just that: how the modern wireless industry developed, the various issues involved in the evolution of broadband, and where it all might be going.


Summary:

Chris Higgins is back! In this very fun episode we talk about Windows 95, command line computing, who is the Microsoft of tech today and how the Matrix is the perfect hacker/Internet movie.

Listen, we promised a bunch of things would be in the show notes, but sadly, we didn’t write them down. This is what I could remember. If there are others I forgot some, send them to me via email or a tweet.

Direct download: 84._Analysis_Ep._4__Clutching_Pearls__With_Chris_Higgins.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:24pm EDT

Summary:

Terry Jones was the founder and CEO of Travelocity. Perhaps the primary pioneer in the online travel space, Terry explains the unique challenges Travelocity faced when dealing with the airline industry, fending off competition from the likes of Microsoft (Expedia) along with giving us a pretty fascinating look at how the modern travel industry works.

Direct download: 83._Founder_of_Travelocity_Terry_Jones.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:58pm EDT

Summary:

Part 2 of eBay’s founding story. How, why and when eBay became the undisputed king of the online auction space.

Bibliography:

Direct download: 82._Ch._7.4_eBay_Wins_the_Auction_Wars.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:50am EDT

Summary:

Bruce Spector is another early web entrepreneur whose company would be acquired during the dotcom era. In this case, the company was WebCal and the acquirer was Yahoo. Bruce later went on to spearhead Yahoo's acquisitions during the late 90s, including two of the largest, Broadcast.com and Geocities.

Direct download: 81._Founder_of_WebCal_and__Turbo_Yahoo__Bruce_Spector.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:30am EDT

Summary:

There was a time, early on in the web era, where things were very much wide open. An entrepreneur could survey the scene and say, "No one has done a great sports site yet. Why don't I build one?"

Mike Levy did just that, taking on deep-pocketed incumbents like ESPN to build Sportsline (eventually, CBS Sportsline) into a lasting and powerful brand. Mike recounts Sportsline's initial incarnation as a dialup service, its partnerships early on with major sports celebrities, as well as being present for the foundations of the modern fantasy sports industry.

Direct download: 80._Founder_of_CBS_Sportsline_Mike_Levy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:44am EDT

Summary:

Glenn Fleishman is back to talk more about Amazon's founding mythologies, the recent controversies surrounding Amazon's work culture, and the effect the web revolution has had on publishing and journalism, but from the point of view of a writer.

The New York Times article we discuss extensively can be found here.

The David Halberstam book on the rise of modern media can be found here.

And the book that Glenn recommends can be found here.

Direct download: 79._Glenn_Fleishman_GlennF_Returns.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:54am EDT

Summary:

Most people agree that Yahoo the king of the dot-com-era search sites on the strength of its zany, friendly, ubiquitous brand. The woman responsible for building that brand was Karen Edwards. Karen recounts becoming the first dot-com company to advertise on tv, seeking out “near-surfers” and marketing an internet company in an era where many people didn’t know what the internet even was.

Direct download: 78._Yahoos_Master_Brand_Builder_Karen_Edwards.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:01am EDT

Summary:

How did we get from a place where people were completely skeptical of living their personal lives online to the "share everything" society we live in now? Well, companies like Webshots got us here. Webshots was the first site to organize and encourage public photo sharing online. Narendra Rocherolle was one of the founders of Webshots and in this episode, we talk a lot about the digital sharing habit and how it evolved. But we also get what I think is the most detailed and informative founder arcs we've yet heard. You'll learn how Webshots was founded, pivoted a couple of times, found success, had a successful exit... only to find its acquiring company in bankruptcy after the dot-com bust... only to have the founders themselves buy the company back and find success all over again.

Direct download: 77._Narendra_Rocherolle_narendra_of_Webshots_and_30_Boxes.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:36pm EDT

Summary:

Steve Goldberg was the first hire for Microsoft's Advertising division. He was present at the launch of such projects as MSNBC, Slate, Expedia and MSN, the portal. Steve goes into fascinating detail about Microsoft's relationship to the advertising industry, and Microsoft's strategic goals generally. But we also speak more broadly about online advertising, because Steve was one of the founders of the IAB, that online advertising trade association/standards body that, to this day, is such a guiding force for the industry.

Direct download: 76._Steve_Goldberg_of_Microsoft_and_the_IAB.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:27pm EDT

Summary:

Avram Miller was the co-founder of Intel Capital, and during the 90s, racked up some of the greatest venture fund successes of all time, backing such companies as Broadcast.com, Geocities, CNET and more. Crucially, for our purposes, Avram and Intel were also instrumental in the development of residential broadband. Just this week, we heard in the news how Comcast has more internet subscribers than tv subscribers for the very first time. Avram was key in—as he puts it—convincing the Cable industry that it wasn't just in the entertainment business but in the communications and technology business as well.

Please visit Avram's exceptional blog: Two Thirds Done.

Direct download: 75._Co-Founder_of_Intel_Capital_Avram_Miller.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:19pm EDT

Summary:

A conversation with Justin Frankel, creator of the Winamp application, which was arguably the software package responsible for popularizing the MP3.

Direct download: 74._Developer_of_Winamp_Justin_Frankel.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am EDT

This is the story of MP3, the technology that (revolutionized? upended? destroyed? transformed?) changed music forever. It is also a conversation with the man who is most responsible for developing MP3 technology, Karlheinz Brandenburg.

Direct download: 73.__Father__of_the_MP3_Karlheinz_Brandenburg.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:09pm EDT

Summary:

Owen Thomas is back on the show for another analysis episode, helping us establish the context for the dot-com era. You can listen to his previous episode here.

Note: Next week's episode will be dropping on Tuesday morning.

Direct download: 72._Owen_Thomas_Returns.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:55am EDT

Summary:

Get ready for one of the most fascinating entrepreneurial stories we've covered thus far on the show. Chris Cooper was the founder of Quote.com, which, as you'll see, powered the finance portals of everyone from the search engines to the online traders like E*TRADE. But, prior to that... let's just say Chris Cooper has done it all: degrees in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering; a job testing nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site; several years making his living as a professional gambler in Las Vegas; several years making his living manufacturing illegal drugs, Breaking Bad-style; a stint in prison where he learned to code; proprietor of a subscription-based BBS; and of course, founder of one of the web's first sources of financial information.

Direct download: 71._Founder_of_Quote.com_Chris_Cooper.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:46pm EDT

It turns out that almost exactly 9 years before Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone, there was another 3-in-1 device that was introduced to the world, and it just so happened that that device was also known as an iPhone.

But the company that brought the "first" iPhone to market, all the way back in 1998, was called InfoGear, not Apple.

This is the story.

Direct download: 70._The_Forgotten_Story_of_the_Original_iPhone_Released_in_1998.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:06pm EDT

Summary:

Today we’re going to go a bit backwards in our timeline, back to some of the issues we covered in our Chapter 5 episodes. All of the research I did on newspapers and their early attempts to experiment with digital media came from secondary sources. That is why I was excited to be introduced to Steve Yelvington on Twitter. Steve is a several-decades-long veteran of the newspaper industry as well as a true online and web pioneer. He gives us some great first-person perspective about how the news industry succeeded and failed in its attempts to address the challenges of the Internet Era.

We mention a recent blog post of his in our conversation. You can read that blog post here.

Direct download: 69._Steve_Yelvington_Discusses_Newspapers_and_the_Early_Web.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:34am EDT

Summary:

So far in our project, we've mostly spoken to people who were involved in startups that went public in the dot com era. But as I've said many times, that's only part of the story. I very much wanted to speak to someone involved with a successful startup that was acquired by a larger "portal" site. So, I reached out to Ted Barnett, who was one of the founders of the early web calendar site, When.com, which was eventually acquired by AOL. In this episode, we talk about the economics and strategic considerations of a 90s startup that found overnight success, but could not scale in a way that would allow it to continue to grow without hooking up with a larger, deeper-pocketed partner.

But Ted's career is so interesting and varied, we also got to delve into a bunch of other fascinating topics: what it was like to work at Apple in the late 80s, early 90s John Sculley-era; the pre-web "bubble" of pen-computing startups; working at AOL at the height of its late-90s powers; how a company like Kodak dealt with technological disruption completely decimating its 100-year old business; and even the current prospects for Virtual Reality technology.

Because our discussion with Ted paints such a well-rounded picture of a technology career lived in full... recounting how a young technologist can work their way up the ranks, all the way to founder and CEO... I would go so far as to say this is absolutely an essential listen for young people who are starting out in Tech today.

Direct download: 68._Founder_of_When.com_Ted_Barnett.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:01am EDT

Summary:

Maggie Mahar is an award-winning journalist who has written for Money magazine, Institutional Investor, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and in the 1990s, covered the markets for Barron’s Magazine. She is also the author of an excellent book, Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004, that has been extremely helpful for me as I begin to frame the episodes that will bring us into the dot-com “bubble” era. I reached out to her to see if she would help me kick around some of the ideas that her book raised… in order to wrap my mind the causes and context of the bubble. Of course, I recorded our conversation so that we can all start thinking about this era together.

Direct download: 67._Journalist_Maggie_Mahar_Discusses_the_Dot-Com_Bubble.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:57am EDT

...or, to be more strictly accurate, this episode covers the founding of AuctionWeb, the site that would become eBay. How Pierre Omidyar founded a company that brought auctions to the web and revolutionized what classified ads and ecommerce could be.

Direct download: 66._Ch._7.3_The_Founding_of_eBay.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:35pm EDT

Summary:

Direct download: 65._The__Book_Club__Episode.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:21pm EDT

Summary:

We continue our survey of the pioneering social/community sites by sitting down with David Bohnett, who, along with John Rezner, founded Geocities. David recounts how a lifelong passion for communications tech inspired the idea of Geocities, how and why the site grew to become one of the 5 most popular web destinations in the world by the late 90s, as well as the company's blockbuster sale to Yahoo.  We also marvel at how Geocities lives on, thanks to the passion and affection of the Geocities community.

Direct download: 64._Geocities_Founder_David_Bohnett.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:45am EDT

Summary:

One of the biggest names of the dot-com era was TheGlobe.com. It had one of the most successful and storied IPO's of it's day, and it was lead by two early-twenties co-founders, long before that sort of thing was common. Todd Krizelman (along with Stephan Paternot) was one of those co-founders, and in the offices of his current company, MediaRadar, he sat down with me to remember the founding story of one of the earliest and most innovative community sites on the web. We're exploring these community sites as a sort of survey of proto-social-media websites, and as you'll hear, TheGlobe was one of the most interesting.

If you're interested in reading more about this story, check out the book A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning.

Direct download: 63._TheGlobe_Co-Founder_Todd_Krizelman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:38am EDT

Summary:

Nancy Evans and Candice Carpenter founded iVillage in the mid 1990s. iVillage was one of the first community-focused sites on the early web, and grew to be one of the biggest of its ilk. Not only was iVillage a site and a company founded by women, but it was also among the first sites that targeted women as a demographic in the early web era. Nancy recounts for us the development of the company, the benefits and pitfalls involved in being one of the highest-flying companies of the dot com era, and gives us some powerful perspective about the role women have played from the very beginning of the web era.

Direct download: 62._iVillage_Co-Founder_Nancy_Evans.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:42am EDT

Summary:

It’s part two of our Amazon founding story. How did Amazon come to completely dominate e-commerce? How did Jeff Bezos’ “Get Big Fast” strategy evolve? How and why did Amazon become the quintessential “dot com” and dot-com-era stock? The answers are within. :)

Bibliography:

Direct download: 61._Ch_7.2_Amazons_Dominance_of_eCommerce.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 7:29pm EDT

Summary:

If you are a Californian, then you might know Steve Westly's name very well. After all, in the mid 2000s, Westly was elected Controller of California, essentially the Chief Financial officer of the state, and he also ran for Governor in 2006. In fact, if you listen to the end of this episode, he might again show up on a ballot for governor some time in the very near future. But before his time in California government and politics, Steve Westly was also one of the key early eBay executives, who was instrumental in transforming eBay from a niche hobyist website to the global auctions and commerce powerhouse we all know it as today. We've not yet gotten to eBay in our overall narrative yet, so think of this as a primer to wet your appetite for the story of eBay's founding, coming very soon. In the mean time, you're going to very much enjoy this conversation with eBay's Senior Vice President, Steve Westly.

Here's a recent story from the LA Times about Westly's potential run for Governor.


Summary:

As you know, we’ve been trying to cover from every angle, the innovations that ecommerce sites in general, and Amazon.com specifically, brought to the world. That is why I was thrilled to get to speak with Greg Linden, who was one of the Amazon engineers who was responsible for a lot of the personalization and data-driven innovations at Amazon, especially the recommendation engine. Greg explains in great detail the technological challenges involved, but also gives us a conceptual and almost philosophical background to the ways that harnessing data and deploying personalized systems can improve commerce.

If you want to read any of the blog posts Greg has done about his early Amazon days, go here.


Summary:

Robert Levitan has been involved in many pioneering tech companies. The two that I wanted to focus on were iVillage, one of the early web community sites, one of the very first sites to engage with women as a segment of the online audience, and arguably, one of the proto-social networking sites. Later, Robert was the founder of Flooz, the most prominent of the dot-com era companies to attempt digital payments and digital currency.

To learn more about Robert's new startup, check out: liveapp.com.

Direct download: 58._Robert_Levitan_of_iVillage_and_Flooz.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:35pm EDT

I lied about there not being a show this week. Except, it's not a show. It's more of a state-of-the-podcast address, celebrating (belatedly) our one year anniversary.

 

http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/donate/

 

Direct download: 57._I_Lied_-_The_Special_Requests_Episode.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:37am EDT

Summary:

Steve Kirsch is one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs we’ve been lucky enough to speak to on this show. Going back to the 1980s, he was the inventor of the optical mouse. Back in the days of desktop software suites, he brought FrameMaker to the world. He founded Abaca Technology, the spam filter company and OneId. And today he is the founder and CEO of a really interesting new startup called Token. But we wanted to speak to him about founding the search engine and web portal InfoSeek. Steve recounts all of this and more, in one of the more comprehensive conversations we’ve had with a truly serial web entrepreneur.

As you can hear from the plane noise in the background on the intro, I’ll be on the road for the next two weeks, so the next new episode will be March 30.

Direct download: 56._Infoseek_Founder_and_Inventor_of_the_Optical_Mouse_Steve_Kirsch.mp3
Category:Chapter 4 -- posted at: 10:18am EDT

Summary:

W. Joseph Campbell is a Professor in the School of Communication at American University. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. Just this year, he came out with an excellent new book called 1995: The Year the Future Began. As soon as I heard about this book, I read it, because, as you’ve heard if you’ve been listening to this show, 1995 was a seminal year, especially for Internet history. In fact, the conceit of this project, of course, is that the modern Internet Era began in 1995. So, I was thrilled to talk with Dr. Campbell about how 1995 became the year that the Internet entered the mainstream. We also talk about a lot of the other events from 1995 that made that year such a watershed of recent American history.

Direct download: 55._The_Watershed_Year_of_1995_with_W._Joseph_Campbell.mp3
Category:Misc. Episodes -- posted at: 10:48am EDT

Summary:

Michael Krupit first joined CDNow as the Chief Technology officer. He soon took over COO duties, and eventually rose to become CEO of the entire CDNow operation. Mike gives us the background on the early days of another early ecommerce pioneer, and he gives us some great insights into attempting to dominate a commerce niche as opposed to Amazon’s “everything store” strategy. But just as fascinating is the fact that around the years 2000-2001, Michael was right there in the thick of it when the MP3 and Napster revolutions first rocked the music industry. This is a fascinating discussion about first being the disruptor and then becoming the disrupted.

Direct download: 54._CDNow_CEO_Michael_Krupit.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 10:18am EDT

Summary:

Gary Kremen is another early internet legend. Kremen was one of the first people to recognize the opportunity that the Internet presented in terms of classifieds advertising. Seizing this opportunity, Kremen founded Match.com, to this day, still the largest player in the online dating space. But Kremen is also famous for the legendary struggle to control the Sex.com domain name, which Kremen registered, lost control of, regained control of (after a lengthy legal battle) attempted to turn into the adult version of Google and eventually sold on to other investors. This is one of the more colorful and fascinating interviews we’ve ever been able to feature on this show.

Direct download: 53._Match.com_and_Sex.com_Founder_Gary_Kremen.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 7:05pm EDT

Summary:

Finally, the long-promised foray into e-commerce, starting with… not the first… but practically the first… player in the space… and ironically enough, the 800 pound gorilla in the space to this day. Amazon. Dot com. We examine Jeff Bezos, the man. We consider Amazon, the idea. We look at e-commerce, the concept. It’s interesting. It’s groundbreaking. It’s available with free 2-day shipping for Prime members. Just kidding.

Bibliography:

Direct download: 52._Ch._7_Pt._1_-_The_Birth_of_Amazon.com.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 10:22am EDT

Summary:

You may know Glenn Fleishman from a bunch of things. He has written for Wired, Fortune, Popular Science, The New York Times, and PCWorld, and contributes regularly to The Economist, The Seattle Times, Macworld, etc. Also, in the last few years, he was the publisher of the Magazine, the iPad publication that we spoke to Chris Higgins about in previous episodes... and he hosted a very popular podcast called the New Disruptors. But for a brief time in the 1990s, he was also the catalog manager for Amazon.com, right around the time of the site launch. Not only was Glenn willing to give us the details on some of the early decisions and processes at Amazon, but he also goes into a frank assessment of Amazon strategy, what the prospects for the company looked like at the time... and even Jeff Bezos himself.

Direct download: 51._Glenn_Fleishman_GlennF_Discusses_Early_Amazon.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 10:09am EDT

Summary:

Shel Kaphan was the very first person hired by Jeff Bezos to launch Amazon.com. A lot of people consider Shel to be a co-founder in all but name, because he, along with Paul Davis, was largely responsible for the entire technical architecture that Amazon launched with, from the website, to the back-end systems that made selling books on the Internet possible. I was thrilled when Shel agreed to talk to me, because he does not give a lot of interviews, and I knew he could shed some light on some of the earliest Amazon details that absolutely no one else could. Shel gives us the background on everything from the commerce systems to the development of Amazon’s famous review and recommendation systems. This is such a fascinating, detailed look at Amazon’s very beginnings, I think that it reminds me of all the great details we got from Mosaic and Netscape engineering teams we spoke to in the earliest interviews for this project. Enjoy!

Direct download: 50._Amazons_Technical_Co-Founder_and_Employee_1_Shel_Kaphan.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 5:20pm EDT

Summary:

Bob Davis was not only the founder of the search engine/web portal known as Lycos, he was also the CEO, first employee, and for a time, the ONLY employee. Bob recounts how Lycos took technology from academia, turned it into a viable company, and became one of the "four horsemen" of the dot com era. Today, Bob is a partner at the venture capital firm, Highland Capital Partners.

Direct download: 49._Lycos_Founder_and_CEO_Bob_Davis_BobDavisHCP.mp3
Category:Chapter 4 -- posted at: 10:01am EDT

Summary:

Jane Slade joined Amazon.com's nascent customer service team when it was a couple of people, some computers, and one phone line. Over the coming years, she helped to build the customer service operations at Amazon into the enormous team it is today. Jane recalls for was what it was like in the early days and why keeping customer experience central to everything Amazon does is probably the key driver for the company's success.

Direct download: 48._Amazon_Director_Customer_Service_Strategy_Jane_Slade.mp3
Category:Chapter 7 -- posted at: 10:51am EDT

Summary:

Christina Warren is the Senior Tech Analyst for Mashable.com. She came on the podcast to talk with me about Amazon’s place in the tech universe, Jeff Bezos as an entrepreneur, and to break down what might be the four or five main business models for the internet. Be sure to look for Christina’s work on Mashable.com. You can also find her on Twitter at @film_girl. She also co-hosts a terrific podcast called Overtired.

The two articles we discuss on the episode are:

Amazon Bought This Man’s Company. Now He’s Coming for Them

Facebook is the New AOL


So, I ran across this quote from Star Trek television producer Rick Berman. He said, “Without porn and Star Trek, there would be no Internet.” That’s a notion that I have to say really kind of rang true to me, in a tonge and cheek sort of way. I mean, it’s something you hear all the time. The idea that pornography leads the way with any new technological innovation. That Porn is some x-large percentage of the overall internet Do you ever wonder how much of the internet is actually porn? If it’s such a large amount then wouldn’t it be worth investigating how porn has shaped the web and the internet generally? That’s sort of the thinking that led me to begin thinking about this episode.

Bibliography:

Direct download: 46._A_History_Of_Internet_Porn.mp3
Category:Chapter 6 -- posted at: 6:49pm EDT

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