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Dot Con: How Infospace Took Investors For A Ride
Jeff writes "On the subject of the dot com crash, the Seattle Times recently ran an outstanding three day series on the corruption at Infospace, with a follow up today on the company's continued relations with its founder, Naveen Jain. Sunday's cover photo of Jain's new office shows a birthday photo of himself and another self-portrait in the background. Only the reflecting pool is missing."
Their technical lead proudly described the amazing fast database system he'd written to handle full-text search, because none of the commercial DB engines could possibly be fast enough.
He was using binary search to look through what he was estimating would be about a million records on disk.
Perhaps it was a mistake to explain that using a hash table would find the correct record in an average of 1.5 disk hits, as opposed to the 19 that his system was taking, because they didn't offer me a job. Then, again, maybe it wasn't a mistake-- after all, I didn't end up working there.
I apologize for posting this AC, for obvious reasons.
.com imperative that I can't recall.
I first met Naveen Jain while he was still with Microsoft. It was 1995, and Naveen was telling a bunch of Time Inc. New Media honchos (the folks that brought the world Pathfinder - remember that? First commercial website?) that the Internet was _dead_.
It seems that Microsoft was intent on replacing all Internet technologies with its own "embraced and extended" versions. A binary version of HTML that allowed for 8 different types of hyperlinks. IRC, but with additional functions. That kind of thing. Pathfinder would be extinguished as the commercial Internet baby was stabbed in the cradle by the upcoming "Winternet". No kidding, he used that term.
The Time Inc. honchos ponied up a huge sum to get Pathfinder's url on the upcoming MSN. In classic Microsoft style, they took the money, and then hid the icon several levels of navigation down. No one ever saw it, but then again, MSN 1.0 had very few users anyway.
Naveen started Infospace, and I was sent on a fact-finding group mission to see if Pathfinder wanted to use their technology. Their office looked like a dump - they didn't have a data center, they had a huge mass of PCs piled almost randomly, hooked to the Internet. That was Infospace in '96/'97. They were so arrogant that they thought that'd impress the folks from Time Inc, who served Pathfinder on Sun (and only Sun), and had a datacenter that was a model of datacenters. I remember Time Inc. sysadmins' argument about whether the faraday cage was constructed correctly... but I digress.
At any rate, the best part of the tour was Jean-Remy showing off all of their home-grown technology. He claimed that _everything_ was home grown - database servers, DNS, web, even the operating system (!). In fact, he confided to me that he had "borrowed the best pieces of NT", including the kernel, in creating their home-grown operating system. And as others have said, he bragged endlessly about how his database was faster than Oracle.
As before, Time Inc. drank the Kool-Aid and signed up with Infospace - despite these kinds of issues - because they thought that they had to do so, for some stupid
Naveen Jain is an amazing huckster, I'll give him that. Pity that he escaped the SEC's special brand of torture.