While the Internet was hailed by business leaders, activists, researchers, and policy makers alike for proliferating and democratizing information as never before, many observers remained cognizant of a danger inherent in such rapid and widespread movement of information; namely, the potential for misinformation to cause serious damage. Misinformation online assumes myriad forms, such as phony bus…
The concept of the Galactic Network was created by J.C.R. Licklider, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher and professor. Licklider's vision of a Galactic Network—a network of computers that allows users to gather data and access programs anywhere in the world—was detailed in a series of memos. The first, Man-Computer Symbiosis, was written in 1960 and deta…
Monster.com, the leading career-related Web site, was formed in January 1999 by the merger of two online recruiting companies, The Monster Board and the Online Career Center. Both companies were owned by New York-based recruitment firm TMP Worldwide, a publicly-traded company with nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue in 2001. Since 1999 Monster.com has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bui…
Gordon E. Moore is co-founder of Intel Corp., the world's largest maker of microprocessors and one of the five most profitable manufacturing companies of any business sector. Moore served as CEO of Intel from 1975 until 1987. His prediction, made in the mid-1960s, that computer chip capacity would double every year and a half eventually became known as "Moore's Law." It…
J. Stuart Moore is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient Corp., an Internet integration services provider—one of the leading such firms in the U.S.—whose clients include traditional businesses like WalMart and Staples, as well as Internet firms like iwon.com. Moore oversees the internal operations of Sapient, including employee recruiting and retention and corporate strategy, while Je…
Moore's Law was expounded in a 1965 Electronics Magazine article by Gordon Moore, who was then the research director at Fairchild Semiconductor. Moore noted that since the invention of the integrated circuit, the number of transistors per square inch on those circuits had doubled each year. Moore, who co-founded Intel Corp. in 1968, projected that this doubling would continue into the fores…
In 1993, The Motley Fool Inc. was established by brothers David and Tom Gardner and their friend, Erik Rydholm, as a 16-page newsletter offering investment information with a humorous twist. By the end of the decade, the newsletter operation had evolved into a multimedia personal finance company with a World Wide Web site, online store, a nationally syndicated newspaper column and radio show, a mo…
Motorola Inc. is known for its pioneering efforts in the car radio, pager, and cellular phone industries. With sales of $37.5 billion, it is the world's second largest manufacturer of mobile phones which, along with pagers and other communications devices, bring in nearly 33 percent of revenues. Semiconductors account for another 20 percent in sales. In the late 1990s, the Schaumburg, Illin…
By the mid-1990s the processing speed and memory capacity of computers had advanced considerably, enabling users to do more than ever before on their PCs. It became possible to run applications like video games that combined text, sounds, video, and graphic animation in exciting ways. The combination of these different media elements came to be known as multimedia. In addition to multimedia softwa…
Elon Musk founded Zip2 Corp., a Web-based city and community guide firm, in 1995 and X.com, a now defunct online financial services provider, in 1999. In February of 1999, Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq Computer Corp. for $305 million; it now helps to power the Alta Vista search engine owned by Compaq. Although he decided to shutter the original X.com banking and investment services operations inOctober…
MySimon.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of CNET Networks, is a leading comparison shopping site on the Internet. Through its proprietary Virtual Learning Agent (VLA) technology, users are able to shop for products at more than 2,000 online merchants—including online auctions and classified ads—and find the lowest prices. Orders can then be placed directly with the online sellers. MySi…
Napster achieved widespread celebrity as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that allowed people to trade compressed MP3 computer files for a wide range of popular music. Napster's browser software, which was installed on more than 40 percent of the world's personal computers in early 2001, enabled users to locate, share, and swap compressed MP3 music files. Users simply sent in a re…
Since the earliest days of advertising, it has been challenging for marketers to reach highly targeted groups with promotional messages about products and services. Printed publications represent one long-established channel for doing this. Television initially was very broad in its reach, and it was necessary for advertisers to time communications based on the groups that were most likely to watc…
Often referred to as the pulse of the New Economy, the Nasdaq Stock Market, operated by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), is divided into two separate markets: the Nasdaq National Market, comprised of over 4,000 of the largest and most heavily traded Nasdaq securities and featuring heavy financing, capitalization, and corporate governance standards for listed companies; and th…
The need for common standards is obvious to anyone who has ever traveled with an electric hair dryer and learned that it needed a special adapter to be used in Europe, or who once tried to purchase a typewriter ribbon only to find thirty or forty incompatible types from which to choose. The need for standards is even more apparent in electronic commerce, which presupposes the rapid, accurate, tech…
The National Information Infrastructure Protection Act (NIIPA), signed into law in October 1996, was a significant revision of U.S. computer crime law. It provides federal criminal liability for theft of trade secrets and for "anyone who intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage." The NIIPA is one of a…
A federal agency based in Washington, D.C., the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) is the primary governmental organization charged with safeguarding the infrastructure networks and systems of the United States from attack, including computer-generated attacks such as hacking and viruses. The NIPC, housed in the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), defends from…
Few Americans know of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). But to the extent that they use radio, television, cell phones, computers, and the Internet, or watch public television, listen to public radio, or travel by plane, the agency has a great impact on everyone's life. The NTIA, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, serves as the principal advi…
Computer-aided design expert Nicholas Negroponte is the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, a leading $35 million research facility funded by MIT itself and several governmental bodies, as well as by more than 175 corporations across the globe. The lab focuses its efforts on communications methods of the future. Its programs include Information and Entertai…
Ted Nelson is known for creating the term "hypertext." Although his Xanadu software project, conceived in the 1960s, had not yet come to fruition by the turn of the century, Nelson's ideas for developing an information handling system that would allow for a highly complex level of linked data had a profound impact on programmers throughout the personal computer (PC) and Intern…
Netcentives Inc. was founded in 1996 by MBA students Eric Tilenius and Elliot Ng. Two years later, the pair launched their ClickRewards program, which allowed members to earn ClickMiles for purchases made on participating merchant Web sites. In just a few short years, ClickRewards had grown to include more than 4 million members and was the only loyalty network that had exclusive contracts with 10…
Shorthand for Internet etiquette, netiquette was the key to civility on Internet newsgroups, e-mail, listservs, chat rooms, and other Internet communications. Like etiquette, there was no official enforcement of netiquette; rather, Internet users were generally expected to abide by these basic rules—and were likely to be castigated by fellow users if they deviated from them. The two key rea…
Netscape Communications Corp. was co-founded in 1994 by James H. (Jim) Clark and Marc Andreessen. Clark, a former associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, had founded Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1982. Having left SGI earlier in the year, Clark contacted Andreessen with a proposal to start a new company to develop an improved version of Mosaic. Mosaic was a graphical user …
When the value of a technology, product, or service depends upon the number of other entities using it, the phenomenon is called network externality. Direct network externalities involve the value aspect of things like telephone systems, computing platforms, and especially the Internet and e-commerce. Additionally, indirect externalities involve related items like devices (telephones, fax machines…
Computer networks, including the Internet, play critical roles in business and communications. Without them, it would be impossible for companies to engage in e-commerce and the vast majority of business systems would come to a complete standstill. Therefore, by enabling real-time relationships between many parties, networks in many ways become synonymous with the individuals and businesses they c…
