Internet History Podcast

It gets my goat that these days, the history of ecommerce begins and ends with Amazon. There were so many companies and big ideas that got us where we are today, and one of the most important companies was Open Market. Jeff Bussgang is here to tell us the (today) often overlooked story of the earliest days of trying to sell stuff on the web. Today, Jeff is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An exploration of what it was like to come of age in the early web era. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Plato was an online and interactive learning computer system developed in the 1960s at the University of Illinois. But in the early 1970s, Plato got truly networked, and the users took over. Plato had already pioneered such things as touch screen computing, but the kids introduced and pioneered concepts like forums, message boards, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, multiplayer games and even emoticons/emojis were pioneered on the Plato system.Buy The Friendly Orange Glow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bob Stein was the founder of Voyager, publisher of the first consumer CDROM titles, and, far and away the leader of the CDROM industry in the late 1980s and early 90s. Bob was also one of the founders of the Criterion Collection, as well as the publisher of the first electronic books.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You might know him as Rob Malda, or you might know him as CmdrTaco, but he was the founder of the great geek social website Slashdot. Slashdot recently turned 20 years old, Rob commemorated this in a great Medium post, and so I reached out to him to tell us the story of one of the first great social media websites. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dave Winer has been called the godfather of a lot of things. The godfather of blogging. The Godfather of Podcasting. One of the key people involved in the development of RSS. But as you’ll hear in this great and wide-ranging chat, Dave Winer is just a software developer who has never stopped tinkering, never lost his interest in coming up with new tools and new technologies. Dave was kind enough to sit down and go over his whole career, from the very earliest days of the PC era, to the present day. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SUMMARY:Nicole Laporte has a cover story in Fast Company magazine this month about Giphy, potentially the next big story in online advertising and marketing, as well as… search? Read her profile of Giphy here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Om Malik is, of course, a legend. One of the first journalists on the “tech beat” in the 1990s, one of the first bloggers to “turn pro,” one of the driving forces behind the Web 2.0 time period, and one of the most trusted analysts of the technology industry in general, today he is a venture capitalist at True Ventures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is generally considered the worst merger of all time, and certainly the crescendo event of the dotcom bubble era, today we take a look at the AOL/Time Warner merger, again with the excellent guys at the podcast Acquired. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Shen was employee #17 at Yahoo, where he eventually had a hand in, not only the birth of advertising as the primary business model for the web but, eventually, the development of digital ads into their more modern, interactive form. As you'll hear, David recounts the early days of Yahoo, surviving the dotcom bust and taking advertising beyond the simple banner ad.And he recounts all of this in his recently published new book: Takeover! The Inside Story of the Yahoo! Ad Revolution Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.