Internet History Podcast

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Discover how Amazon navigated its startup phase with strategic beta testing and a simple design to gain market credibility. Uncover the hurdles they faced in early sales and the pivotal fundraising successes that fueled their growth. Learn about Amazon's shift from a middleman to a logistics powerhouse, revolutionizing warehousing to boost efficiency. The evolution of stock valuation during the 90s reflects investor excitement amid fierce e-commerce competition, all driven by Jeff Bezos's visionary leadership.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.