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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."
I can't figure out why either company matters, what the hell this has to do with GNU, Linux, GNU/Linux, the F/OSS community, iPods, Eugenia from OS News, or Microsoft. It's not a MySQL story. Nobody's hammering the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox isn't even mentioned. And there's no question at the end like "what does this mean for Google's world domination plans?"
I'm sorry, man, I just don't know what to make of this article.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
I'm still pissed that I lost the money I invested in Infospace. Oh well, I hope to make a large return from the money I've invested in CherryOS and the Phantom console.
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.
It's OK. Post the exact same story. We're used to dupes.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I'm a (bitter) former InfoSpace employee.
I was a member of the famed wireless division, who was all laid off because we didn't make the company any money. This was after Jain et al took the company for a ride and nearly got us delisted. I disliked senior management, but my peers at the company were some of the best people I've ever known or worked with, and I still miss that environment.
Whenever Naveen or Anu (his wife) would get infront of the company and speak, I instantly felt slimy. I got the worst vibes from the man. He honestly thinks he's a fantastic person and was the best thing to ever happen for the company and anyone involved. I hope they have fun explaining to their children how they robbed their trust funds in their insider trading scandal.
Shortly after my last day in December 2003, the entire executive board was replaced. Now InfoSpace is posting good numbers and wireless makes money.
Coincidence? I think not.
The real reason there isn't the incredible outcry over conmen like Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, and the man linked is because people don't realize that they, too, are part of the "investor class." Many people think that Enron's failure resulted in nothing more than a few robber barons transplanted from the 19th century having to switch their Cuban cigars to Dominican; they don't realize that they are being hit in the pocketbook, and that people who invested large amounts their life's savings were taken for a ride.
As for investors not doing enough research, that's simply not true. If you will remember, it was a fairly large scandal a few months ago that stock analysts - people who are hired by brokerages to deliver an unbiased analysis - were rating stocks highly, but privately commenting that those stocks weren't worth the paper their certificates were printed on. The end result was that investors who did everything "right" and read all the research available were actually more likely to get ripped off than someone who simply picked stocks because they had a cool-sounding name.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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.
Of course, if the data was flat, rather than relational, the choices would have been Berkeley DB, Gnu DBM and NDBM, which all store data by hashes.
Binary trees are great for high-school projects. Now, trees are used in serious projects. Game AIs tend to use B+ and B* trees, for example. I'm pretty sure ReiserFS uses trees. One way to write a compiler parser is via an n-ary tree, because the memory and CPU requirements scale much nicer than hash tables. However, none of these are binary trees, they exploit some very specific characteristics of the data, and they aren't intended as a substitute for Oracle.
People do write their own database engines, but usually only for very specialized needs. I am sure there are plenty of applications out there which are simply not suitable for any existing engine, for reasons of speed, complexity, or whatever.
From what I understand, Infospace did not have such a need. From what others have said, I doubt anyone working there would have recognized such a need, if one HAD existed.
It is utter insanity to build a system that is inefficient and unsuitable as a replacement for something that is utterly different in nature. The guy probably swapped his Rottweiler guard dog for a guinea pig, too. Hey, they both make noises and the guinea pig IS cheaper!
I'll tell you why the Dot Com era went broke. It had nothing to do with technology or expectations. It had to do with rich idiots giving money to wannabe rich idiots so that they could all be fleeced and the consumers with them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You don't trust Bush and the current administration. You think you are (and you very well might be) smarter than them. Yet you trust them with your money more than you trust yourself.
Nice disconnect there.
Like most of the instant millionaires, [Jean-Remy] Facq and the others were not able to sell their stock for six months. But that didn't mean they couldn't start shopping.
... Not to be outdone, Facq two days later walked into a dealership and wrote a salesman a $1.1 million check to buy a Lamborghini Diablo and a Ferrari F50. "I just wanted to see the look on his face," Facq said ... Anything Facq wanted, he could have. Disappointed by the jewelry at Tiffany & Co. -- "I wanted something more pimpish" -- Facq designed enormous rings and commissioned a jeweler to make them. He called himself the "Lord of the Rings."
A month after InfoSpace went public, Facq ordered a $103,000 Dodge Viper. He shipped the Viper to Hawaii, where he commissioned an artist to paint its hood with a Hawaiian scene -- the sun setting over dolphins cavorting in blue waters. Tab for the paint job: $150,000
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Oh, honey, we can't even get rid of the dumb ones. How long did the HP board take to ditch Carly? Three years after the Compaq merger, and well after she screwed up everything else at HP too? Another example: I worked for a guy at [ConsumerProductCompany] who insisted we stick to the the original memory spec even though Moore's law told us we could count on twice the memory by release. Recoding to fit the tight space delayed ship long enough the original RAM was obsoleted, forcing us to redesign the memory controller, and all of which pushed the release late enough that Sony stomped us like a steamroller crushing baby chicks. That guy's now a CTO at another outfit. Hell, Apple alone endured a number of inept CEOs, including a guy who'd crawl under his desk when the going got rough.
And remember, the VCs funded all the dot-bombs five or six years ago and told them to spend like mad to get "first-mover advantage", so we're not necessarily talking the brightest bulbs on the tree here.
Long story short, if even the dumb CEOs get multiyear grace periods and chances to screw up again repeatedly, how do you expect to catch the sharks smart enough to cover up their schemes? Especially, I should note, when luminaries such as Gates and Ellison have both prospered and made their venture investors prosper while being accused of sharp trading. That'll tend to discourage scrutiny so long as the numbers remain rosy.
Long story short, whoever in the blogosphere wrote that fatuous thing you paraphrased is talking out his ass.