.com - .bomb!

During the internets and world-wide webs rise, it went through fazes where things were going amazing for companies to times when companies were doing horrible. There were 5 phases of the internet to get to where it is now. The first stage was “an innocent beginning”. In this stage companies like IBM and CompuServ were starting up. Also, in this stage Al Gore invested in the information super highway. As of 1993 the WWW and HTTP have been around for a few years and companies like Microsoft are profiting. 1995 marks the start of the second phase, “boom”. During the boom phase things like Netscape, Yahoo, Amazon, and Spry came into the scene and were doing very well for themselves. The internet was a booming market with many new careers being created ever day. The next phase is “insanity”. It’s called insanity because the internet was still booming but companies that are doing exceptionally well start buying other companies. AOL bought CompuServ, Yahoo got Broadcast.com for 5.7 billion, and while all this is happening more and more companies like Info space are going public. There was so much going on with the internet at that time it was very hectic. After insanity however, came “bust”. Many companies like Marchfirst, Pets.com, DrKoop.com and Freezone go bust. The stock market takes a hard downturn with all this as you could imagine. Many companies go bankrupt in 2001 like exodus communications. Finally, the last phase is “the slow crawl back”, which is where the internet works its way back up after having such a strong start then falling off drastically.

Visit from Erik Hanberg

Having s guest speaker was a nice chance for the class. Erik Hanberg seemed like he knew what he was talking about and had the experience which made his presentation interesting. He talked a lot about his books and more importantly, how he publicized them. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to publicize his books he did it himself. He posted the first chapter of the book online which he would then offer to sell to anyone who was interested via his email. Through that system he has done well foe himself selling books. His presentation was mostly on the point that you can run an entire small business almost entirely by yourself on the internet. All you need to do is learn how to make a website and how to sell something that people will have interest in. Being successful in an online business takes years to accomplish because of the shear number of websites out there but it’s a great way to get a business up and running. Erik Hanberg used his email as a way for people to contact him if they were interested in his books. When he got an email, he would then print a book for them instead of having to print a large number. He printed on demand. Finally, he talked about a podcast channel he created in the Tacoma area. He created a few podcasts that would be useful in Tacoma and soon other people came to him with podcast ideas, so he created a channel for all the podcasts. He said it hasn’t been profitable yet but as it gains awareness it should.