I met my wife in the middle of the dot con boom.
One of her friends, at the age of 21 was already a Millionaire… “on paper”.
He was a co-owner of a company developing three dimensional browser technologies.
They had received a significant investment of venture capital and were moving onto the next stage of their development, which, required further investment.
To this end they arranged a trip to the US to meet with a prospective investor.
With them they took a CD ROM containing demo’s of their product along with presentations etc. (Large USB flash drives were not around at that time).
Upon arrival at their prospective investors offices, they found the CD ROM would not play on any of their machines.
For some reason this was the only copy they had taken. They had not taken any of their own laptops either.
They returned empty handed.
Shortly afterwards the dot con bubble burst, and they never got another shot with an investment company.
A few months after that the company folded, his “paper Million’s” evaporated and he went to work for an I.T. company in London.
After that we kind of lost touch, though I’m sure he is doing well for himself, he was a very talented guy.
I thought it was a shame that his company folded, and learned a valuable lesson from the CD ROM incident!
I suppose it was a combination of inexperience and complacency that lead to that unfortunate end.
Perhaps their ideas were too far ahead of their time to be attractive to investors (graphics chips were not what they are today).
Certainly in subsequent years there have been no three dimensional browsers that I am aware of.
Perhaps it would have looked something like the Compiz desktop (soon to be released on Ubuntu)
Hi SiteLogic
Just a quick note to say that I am enjoying your Dot Con tales.
Keep up the good work.
Hi Steve,
Its been a while, see you disabled comments on your blog???
I have comments turned on generally but have selectively turned them off on articles where I get spam.
It seems SiteLogic is becoming a preier reource in scam prevention and detection
can you ever see such plugins becoming popular? Mac and Vista have similar features to this. 3D and snazzy GUIs have always seemed to flop. I prefer to stick with the basic.
Yes they will definitely be popular (IMO), but like you I will be sticking with the basics…
I’ll be sticking to the basics as well. When you’re using a PC for 10 hours a day you just want to get the job done as quickly as possible. For that reason I can’t stand using Vista on one of my laptops.
Ive not even seen Vista… I have XP and Linux, I mainly using Linux now….