David Wetherell is the CEO and chairman of CMGI Inc., one of the world's largest Internet holding firms. Via one of the first Internet-based venture capital firms, a CMGI subsidiary entitled @Ventures, Wetherell began investing in Internet start-ups in 1995. By the beginning of 2000, he held stakes in more than 45 leading e-commerce and Internet technology firms, including search engine gia…
White papers are reports written by industry professionals and academics, all of whom are experts in their chosen field, on just about any imaginable topic. In the world of e-commerce, topics often include data management, computer programming, network security, customer service, business-to-business issues, the Internet economy, Web site development, directory services, naming and addressing, ent…
Margaret Whitman is CEO of eBay.com, the world's leading online auction site, with more than 8,000 product categories and 22 million registered users. She joined eBay in March of 1998, to assist founder Pierre Omidyar in managing the growth of his booming business. Omidyar came up with the idea for eBay.com after his girlfriend, a Pez candy dispenser collector, expressed her wish to contact…
Wide Area Networks, or WANs, connect a geographically diverse group of computers within a state, country, or even across several states or countries. WANs typically are connected by telephone lines, other types of communication lines, or radio waves. Quite often, smaller local area networks (LANs) are linked together to form a WAN. This is accomplished via dedicated private lines, leased from tele…
Wildcards are symbols that can be used to represent other values or characters during a search for files or other information on a computer system. They also can be used to search for Web sites with search engines—programs that comb the World Wide Web to look for relevant Web sites, based on keywords or phrases entered by a user. The ability to use a wildcard depends on a computer's …
David Winer is the founder and CEO of User-Land Software, a Burlingame, California-based developer of Internet tools. A member of the World Wide Web Consortium's board of advisors, since 1998 Winer has worked with Microsoft Corp. to create a standard protocol for extensible markup language (XML), which many Internet experts believe will revolutionize the way computers communicate and the wa…
The number of women on the Internet grew from 15 percent of all U.S. Internet users in 1995 to only 17 percent in 1997 and 26 percent in 1998. However, as the Internet became a more mainstream media outlet in the late 1990s, particularly in the U.S., more women began to seek online access. Roughly 60 percent of new Internet users in 1999 were women, and by year's end, the number of women …
The e-commerce workforce is a large, indistinct mass of working people that overlaps and blends gradually into other sectors of the economy, such as information technology, manufacturing, and retail. As the 21st century began, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and other government agencies were taking the first halting steps to track the size and extent of the American e-commerce …
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) comprises one of 16 specialized international agencies affiliated with the United Nations (UN). WIPO oversees the enforcement of 21 international treaties concerning the protection of intellectual property. By 2000, it possessed 175 member nations and an international staff of 760. WIPO is funded primarily th…
The World Wide Web is one of several utilities—including e-mail, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Telnet and Usenet—that form the Internet. Based on a 1989 proposal from Tim Berners-Lee, it was developed at the European Center for Nuclear Research as a way to share information about nuclear physics. At the heart of the Web is a system of many Web serversȁ…
While not a governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was the leading organization devoted to setting a path for the Web's development, settling disputes related to emerging technologies and practices, and implementing standards that companies, organizations, governments, and individuals overwhelmingly adopt. As such, the W3C carries enormous power, even if it chooses to exercise …
Worms are destructive, self-replicating computer viruses that spread via e-mail. Once a user activates a worm—usually by opening an infected file attachment—the virus makes copies of itself and sends them to some or all of the e-mail addresses in the user's address book. The ability to spread rapidly makes worms especially dangerous, since much damage can be done before infect…
Stephen "Woz" Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950, in San Jose, California. He grew up in Sunnyvale, California, which is located in the Santa Clara Valley. This area became a center of high-technology research and development in the 1950s and 1960s and acquired the nickname, Silicon Valley. Wozniak's father was an aerospace engineer at Lockheed. Although Wozniak shared the sa…
Palo Alto, California-based X.com served as one of the first online banking sites from its launch in December 1999 through October of 2001, when founder Elon Musk decided to shut down its operations. The firm merged with online payment services provider PayPal in March of 2000, and those operations are what remain of X.com. The largest Internet-based payment network in the world, PayPal offers its…
By the early 2000s, Extensible Markup Language (XML) was fast emerging as the lingua franca of the World Wide Web, augmenting and superseding Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the dominant language for encoding content since the Web's inception. HTML was increasingly viewed as too basic and inflexible to effectively transmit and format new forms of Web information, particularly the highly s…
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was widely used to determine how information was displayed on Web pages in the early 2000s. HTML is very similar to Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and a subset of SGML called eXtensible Markup Language (XML). While HTML determines how information is displayed on a Web page, XML deals with the actual information that gets displayed. Its importance to th…
As one of the early Internet search engines, Yahoo! enjoyed the benefits of being first to market as it evolved from a search engine to an Internet portal. Yahoo! became a strong Internet brand in its first year of operation. It was the first search engine to develop a commercial look and one of the first to attract online advertisers. While the company has developed alternative revenue streams, i…
A native of Taiwan, Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in March of 1995 at the age of 27. What began in 1993 as an effort by two Stanford University doctoral students—Yang and his partner David Filo—to catalog their favorite World Wide Web sites eventually evolved into the world's busiest Internet portal. By the year 2000, the site was logging more than 100 million visitors ev…
A subsidiary of Reuters Enterprise, which is a unit of Reuters PLC, Yankee Group is a leading market researcher focused on Internet-related industries such as e-commerce, telecommunications, and wireless. Employees total roughly 200. The Boston, Massachusetts-based firm offers more than 30 different analysis and consulting services covering areas such as The firm's more than 500 clients rec…
The phrase "Y2K bug" stood for the range of potentially adverse effects on computer systems of the rollover from the year 1999 to 2000. Within that definition, however, there were a wide range of questions, concerns, and solutions. The two-digit date-storage system posed its problem in the computer's recognition of time and its logical implications. Computers that already assu…
Before the company was dismantled and its separate businesses sold off, Ziff-Davis Inc. reached its target audience of techies through three media: print, cable TV, and the Internet. The company's magazine publishing business produced a range of computer and technologically oriented magazines for the business and consumer market. Ziff-Davis's online service ZDNet went live on the Int…
