Week12
- 2. The "dot-com bubble" The "dot-com bubble“ was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more recent Internet sector and related fields.
- 3. The Internet boom The Internet boom sometimes is meant to refer to the steady commercial growth of the Internet with the advent of the world wide web as exemplified by the first release of the Mosaic web browser in 1993 and continuing through the 1990s.
- 4. Internet-based companies The period was markeof a group of new Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. Companies were seeing their stock prices shoot up if they simply added an "e-" prefix to their name and/or a ".com" to the end, which one author called "prefix investing."d by the founding
- 5. The environment A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, market confidence that the companies would turn future profits, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an environment in which many investors were willing to overlook traditional metrics such as P/E ratio in favor of confidence in technological advancements.
- 6. History of the Internet - the Dotcom bubble The dotcom bubble started without the world wide web, and indeed in the beginning it didn't even recognize the Internet as important. Once Al Gore began talking about the "information superhighway" in the early 1990s, however, the "big end of town" - Hollywood, Silicon Valley, telecommunications carriers, cable companies, and media conglomerates, all began investing.
- 7. History of the Internet - the Dotcom bubble(2) Between April 1992 and July 1993 all of the major US business magazines had published major features on new communications and the "Information Superhighway". It's worth analyzing what these magazines and feature articles talked about. The first thing I noticed - not one of the feature articles I picked up mentioned the Internet. It wasn't on the business horizon of this brave new converged world of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They were more interested in interactive television.
- 8. History of the Internet - the Dotcom bubble(3) Business Week's July 12 1993 edition had a cover story "Media Mania・digital - interactive - multimedia - the rush is on". Time Warner's Gerard Levin talked of switching home televisions to "anything, anywhere". Electronic books and magazines were about to change the world. Interactive TV would get to 20% of US homes by the turn of the century.
- 9. History of the Internet - the Dotcom bubble(4) Gerard Levin was also in Newsweek's edition of May 31 1993. The cover story was a zillion dollar industry. The dotcom indifference to the number of zeroes in monetary figures seems to have had its origins about this time. Levin was going to get his bank balances on TV. Couch potatoes would be able to individualise the endings of movies and select camera angles for sporting events. Intelligent agents in the refrigerator would tell the car to remember that it was out of milk. (Strangely, we are still talking about these things a decade later).
- 10. References http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-the- dot-com-bubble.htm http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of %20the%20Internet/dotcom.html