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Infojungle
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A very interesting story I picked up from the BBC website about a guy Joe Kraus who started Excite with a few of his friends long before Google came along. Excite merged with At Home and the combined corporation was worth around $7billion dollars in 1996. Exact At Home went bust with the dot com bubble but the founders left with some of their money intact luckily. He outlines a few lessons he learnt from the dot.com business world.
Lesson one is about timing in a technology business. Being early is the same as being wrong. I guess the guys at Excite sold out too early and their merged company ended up being blown away by the dotcom bubble burst.
Lesson two is about the power of the Internet. People continue to underestimate the power of the Internet even though it has a big influence on the way we communicate and transmit information. However, the Internet needs new business models to work effectively. Amazon.com found a way to generate 60% of its revenue by distributing economically to customers who seek not the best sellers but a very precise title probably very obscure to most people and most shops.
Google and Excite are free to use but use business plans that need the support of advertisers. Excite took a conventional view by targeting the top 100 companies in the USA whilst Google wrote algorithms that would make it viable for their company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.
Source/Full Story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4118770.stm
Lesson one is about timing in a technology business. Being early is the same as being wrong. I guess the guys at Excite sold out too early and their merged company ended up being blown away by the dotcom bubble burst.
Lesson two is about the power of the Internet. People continue to underestimate the power of the Internet even though it has a big influence on the way we communicate and transmit information. However, the Internet needs new business models to work effectively. Amazon.com found a way to generate 60% of its revenue by distributing economically to customers who seek not the best sellers but a very precise title probably very obscure to most people and most shops.
Google and Excite are free to use but use business plans that need the support of advertisers. Excite took a conventional view by targeting the top 100 companies in the USA whilst Google wrote algorithms that would make it viable for their company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.
Source/Full Story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4118770.stm
