Saturday, July 31, 2010

The Dot-com boom is over

The year 2000 was the infamous end of the dot-com internet boom; the 10th March to be precise! The period preceding this event saw heavy prefix investing (basically any company with an e- prefixed or .com appended to it was bought up straight away). This occurred because the expectation of promise from the internet and the future potential seemed enormous with the reach and potential of world wide web. However the technology and economical momentum simply was not there and thats why most companies failed.

The consolidation and second wave in what can be termed to be the second internet boom is the web 2.0 craze that is occurring at the moment: twitter, facebook, blogger, youtube, google, yahoo, ... The difference this time is that the technology has reached the tipping point. Economically online advertising now accounts for over $20 Billion worth in industry. A whole set of industry has grown around building and managing the huge datasets and data processing requirements of web 2.0 - this in turn is now supported by real profits of .com companies - and this is where the major difference to the previous boom. The simples business model - online advertising - actually works, online shopping works and finally some very cool new business models such as localised group buying emerged. Reasons: other than the technological advances and standardisation, the consumer trust issue has completely changed.

In my next posts, I intend to discuss web 2.0 criticisms and what they mean. I also intend to write several blog posts about the wayback machine! Any comments, please email or comment, thanks.