It all began with Sputnik. After the first artificial satellite was launched into space by the U.S.S.R. in 1957, not wanting to be left behind in the technological race, the U.S. counteracted with an aggressive development of its science and technology. U.S. President Eisenhower issued a directive for the creation of two agencies tasked to develop state-of-the-art space technology, communication networks and weaponry: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). ARPA coordinated with some of the most brilliant minds in the military and academe for the development of an experimental network of time-sharing computers, which was later to be called ARPANET. Before the creation of the ARPANET, different computers could be connected to each other through a hub, or a central computer. The challenge was to connect all of these central computers to each other through the means of a host-to-host network. It was in 1969 when the first host-to-host connection was established between and among four universities in the U.S. ARPANET’s first international connection was made in 1973 to Norway and England. From then on, the ARPANET served as the packet switch prototype for TCP/IP or Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the backbone of the internet as we know today.
ARPANET was originally conceptualized as a means to keep communications between key departments of the government open and free from interception in case of nuclear or space-based attacks. Through the years, internet technology gradually morphed from a purely text-based platform for the exchange of information and research sharing networks, into the World Wide Web utilizing Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and ushering in the era of electronic commerce.
Seeking to exploit this brand-new, almost limitless territory called the internet and to milk the proverbial cash cow, companies were born and operated in the virtual sphere --- the dot-coms. Confident that they could capitalize on profits by focusing on brand awareness first and reaping the rewards later, these dot-coms expended huge sums of money in advertising. The dot-coms relied too heavily on a cash windfall through venture capitalism and initial public offerings. This marketing strategy proved to be fatal for many dot-coms as the expected profits from its customer base were not enough to salvage the huge losses incurred. The bursting of the dot-com bubble (or the dot-bomb) put a number of internet-based companies out of business. Pets.com, said to be the most popular of the dot-com bombs, launched a wide-scale advertising campaign, even shelling out $1.2 million for a thirty-second commercial during the 2000 Super Bowl. Although the pets.com puppet enjoyed a cult status, the company itself faced liquidation in the latter part of 2000.
However, not everything ends with tragedy, as the launching of Sputnik showed us. Around fifty percent of the dot-com bombs survived or were restructured and bought by more established companies operating on traditional business models: Paypal and Skype were bought by eBay; Geocities was bought by Yahoo, a fellow dot-com bomb survivor; and Network Solutions was acquired by VeriSign which further trimmed out the fat by outsourcing peripheral services to companies operating in low-cost areas such as India and the Philippines.
Eight years have passed since the 2000 dot-com bubble phenomena and internet businesses are still sprouting up like mushrooms. The top three players today, as cited by TIME Magazine’s Josh Quittner, are Google, Facebook and Apple. These three behemoths, unlike your stereotypical Starbucks-toting, Gen-Y dot-com executives, operate on different principles on how to corner their respective share of the market. Google focuses on the sharing of information and tweaks its ever-expanding services to cover everything that you will ever use the internet for; Facebook focuses on social networking and interaction by providing virtual replacements for things that you can do in the flesh --- like poking, hugging, kissing, gaming, watching videos or listening to music; and Apple markets its products to ensure that consumers will use its platform to access different applications on the internet..
The most aggressive of the three, Google seems to be plotting a full-scale domination of the internet, acquiring rivals of Facebook and encroaching on Apple’s domain by developing cellular phone-based platforms for internet services. With $ 16.5 billion in revenues, Google is a formidable opponent capable of pureeing its competitors into mushroom soup at a mouse click. With its awesome power, Google should step into the shoes of Jim Carrey as the erstwhile-God in Bruce Almighty and ask itself this question: How would you handle the most awesome responsibility in the universe?
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An exercise in SEO. Keywords: state-of-the-art, weaponry, hub, prototype, God, cow, Starbucks, Philippines, mushroom soup, Jim Carrey.
ARPANET was originally conceptualized as a means to keep communications between key departments of the government open and free from interception in case of nuclear or space-based attacks. Through the years, internet technology gradually morphed from a purely text-based platform for the exchange of information and research sharing networks, into the World Wide Web utilizing Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and ushering in the era of electronic commerce.
Seeking to exploit this brand-new, almost limitless territory called the internet and to milk the proverbial cash cow, companies were born and operated in the virtual sphere --- the dot-coms. Confident that they could capitalize on profits by focusing on brand awareness first and reaping the rewards later, these dot-coms expended huge sums of money in advertising. The dot-coms relied too heavily on a cash windfall through venture capitalism and initial public offerings. This marketing strategy proved to be fatal for many dot-coms as the expected profits from its customer base were not enough to salvage the huge losses incurred. The bursting of the dot-com bubble (or the dot-bomb) put a number of internet-based companies out of business. Pets.com, said to be the most popular of the dot-com bombs, launched a wide-scale advertising campaign, even shelling out $1.2 million for a thirty-second commercial during the 2000 Super Bowl. Although the pets.com puppet enjoyed a cult status, the company itself faced liquidation in the latter part of 2000.
However, not everything ends with tragedy, as the launching of Sputnik showed us. Around fifty percent of the dot-com bombs survived or were restructured and bought by more established companies operating on traditional business models: Paypal and Skype were bought by eBay; Geocities was bought by Yahoo, a fellow dot-com bomb survivor; and Network Solutions was acquired by VeriSign which further trimmed out the fat by outsourcing peripheral services to companies operating in low-cost areas such as India and the Philippines.
Eight years have passed since the 2000 dot-com bubble phenomena and internet businesses are still sprouting up like mushrooms. The top three players today, as cited by TIME Magazine’s Josh Quittner, are Google, Facebook and Apple. These three behemoths, unlike your stereotypical Starbucks-toting, Gen-Y dot-com executives, operate on different principles on how to corner their respective share of the market. Google focuses on the sharing of information and tweaks its ever-expanding services to cover everything that you will ever use the internet for; Facebook focuses on social networking and interaction by providing virtual replacements for things that you can do in the flesh --- like poking, hugging, kissing, gaming, watching videos or listening to music; and Apple markets its products to ensure that consumers will use its platform to access different applications on the internet..
The most aggressive of the three, Google seems to be plotting a full-scale domination of the internet, acquiring rivals of Facebook and encroaching on Apple’s domain by developing cellular phone-based platforms for internet services. With $ 16.5 billion in revenues, Google is a formidable opponent capable of pureeing its competitors into mushroom soup at a mouse click. With its awesome power, Google should step into the shoes of Jim Carrey as the erstwhile-God in Bruce Almighty and ask itself this question: How would you handle the most awesome responsibility in the universe?
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An exercise in SEO. Keywords: state-of-the-art, weaponry, hub, prototype, God, cow, Starbucks, Philippines, mushroom soup, Jim Carrey.