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Dot-com Boom's Biggest Duds, From Flooz to iSmell
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com looks back on some of the boom's biggest busts, and catches up with once-optimistic inventors. A creator of the unfortunately named iSmell, a USB device meant to 'print' smells transmitted by websites or videogames, says, 'It was a heartbreaking experience, because we had put so much into it.' The digital currency known as Flooz crashed and burned when a ring of thieves defrauded the company out of $300,000 using stolen credit cards. Microsoft flushed iLoo down the crapper. CueCat, meanwhile, got a second life as a bar-code reader that doesn't pick up personal information. 'The cat got butchered, but it has spawned a cottage industry,' says the device's inventor."
so how many people had like 45 of those things?
Is there a way to get to the actual article without the extremely annoying shenanigans they insist on putting me through?
iSmell? I thought that was the smelloscope, able to smell anything from far away in the galaxy....come to think of it, i dont think it will be invented for another 1000 years, give or take a few (thanks professor farnsworth!)
How can they forget Boo.com? The way that management team burned money epitomized the dotcom era. It wasn't surprising at all that their site was an obnoxious, pretentious, bloated piece of junk. The good thing about the bust was that it shook out and humbled all these artsy "we know what's best for the user" types that ran Boo.com.
I miss the days when new product announcements read like jokes and saying "the Internet will make bricks and mortar obsolete" wasn't a joke. Now the best we've got is "Oh look, Google made a calendar that works with your email."
There was also a company started during the dotcom boom which delivered candy right to your front door (The name eludes me). Only problem was that consumers were using it to buy single bars of candy, and the shipping costed to much for the company to stay alive. A good idea though. Reminds me of when I could order groceries online, but that was cancelled due to the lack of popularity. I suppose America isn't ready to take the final step to pure laziness.
Slashdot, the only place where intellectuals can act like idiots... and still sound intellectual.
any list of tech duds that doesn't include the venerable iOpener is.. well, incomplete.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think about Kozmo.com, and how I used to have a sandwich, Razor scooter, and porn video delivered to my door in under 30 minutes, and a single tear rolls down my cheek.
Just kidding about the porn and the scooter. If a lot of people had actually done that, they might have stayed in business. I did order a lot of $5 sandwiches though. They lost money on every delivery, trying to build "mindshare" or some silly thing. I knew it couldn't last. Alas, I do miss them though.
I actually miss PointCast, particularly the screensaver featuring live data that was pushed to it. Most of the other features of PointCast are easily found in any number of RSS readers these days... but I have yet to find an RSS screensaver as functional as the PointCast screensaver.
PointCast was just ahead of it's time... it really needed the always-on high speed home connections that only really became widespread years after it went under.
Heh, I half expected "Wii" to be on the list, alongside all the other unmarketable names like iSmell and Flooz. Of course, lets hope that these ventures failed not because of their silly names, but because they didn't offer a suitable product to the market.
Once upon a time, "marketing" just meant letting people know your product existed, while telling them why they might want to buy it. Nowadays (and also during the dot-com "boom") a lot of the marketing just seems to be more and more distracting and counterproductive... a very, very lost art.
Pets.com, and Webvan.
Priceline almost went bust - remember how they used to sell all sorts of stuff, including groceries at Jewel grocery stores.
(Side note: I wonder what the going rate for jewel.com is. But I digress.)
And frankly, I can't believe Peapod is still running.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Google search link to get around WSJ's freakin Flash thingy
/karmawhoring
I still have that very issue of Wired Magazine that the iSmell was publisized in from like 6 years ago.. I remember being so fond of it because (if i remember porperly) it was a Spumco project. And I wanted so badly for that to become a reality. Viva la Spumco!!!! (and Ren and Stimpy too)
Can you think of a profitable online multimedia industry that could enhance its products by synchronizing a smell track? They should have set up a comarketing deal.
A foul up at the iSmell datacenter led every customers device to smell like Uranus.
During the last year of the dot-com boom I worked in midtown Manhattan (in the Empire State Building, actually). My co-workers loved to order junk from Kozmo.com; I indulged occasionally myself. Even if you ordered a candy bar and a Coke, they'd send a guy on a bike across town with it!
Ridiculous business model. But as I liked to say, "If venture capitalists want to subsidize this, that's fine with me!"
One morning I ordered a disposable Polaroid camera from Kozmo. A couple hours later, I noticed that the website was no longer accessible. In fact, the company had shut down minutes after I placed my order! I never got my camera. Kozmo still owes me $10!
These guys are penny ante losers. I want to know the REALLY BIG losers.
I remember seeing some TV show back around 1992, some analysts from Bolt Beranek & Newman said they had a bet in their office about what company would be the first to lose $1 Billion in cash by investing it in the Internet. He called it by some stupid name like "a Gigalapse."
I've remembered that bet for quite a few years, and whenever I hear a big loss, I always see if it comes up to a billion. I've seen a few companies lose hundreds of millions, but nobody's come close to a billion that I know of. But surely it will happen someday, sooner than we think. For all we know, Microsoft or Google might have lost a billion in some bad internet investment and buried it somewhere in their P&L where nobody is looking.
They also forgot Value America. Similar to the CyberRebate.com which was mentioned in the article, except even less thought through than that... they pretty much gave stuff away for practically nothing. I can't even describe how much cheap stuff I got from them at half price or less.
Value America was a textbook case of the dot bomb. Literally... the book "dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath" describes the rise and fall of Value America.
Time Warner. They bought AOL and never looked forward since.
I was one of their last customers -- I never got the order I placed the day they went under.
Oh well. It was nice having VCs subsidize our candy bars for a while there.
The iloo was a joke that became an urban legend. There was never actually a plan to make such a thing.
How ya like dat?
I considered Time Warner as a candidate for the "Gigalapse" but I could not identify $1billion in real cash money that evaporated. It was all stock swaps, just paper money that evaporated.
Remember around 1997 or 1998 when every other yahoo in your area with a dialup modem and too much free time was collecting links to stores around your area and making those glorified bookmark collections and calling them an "Online Mall"?
Ok, maybe I'm the only one.
Zonk, Why would you post a link that requires javascript to get anything other than a blank page??? It just wastes our time !!! ##@@!!!##@@
Story sounds interesting but are you going to vouch for the link and come over to fix a hacked system?? If not, then either mention the link is script only or don't bother to post it.
disappointed
Why bother with a tiny little article from WSJ when you have an entire website dedicated to dot-bomb companies? FuckedCompany.com was a big hit during the dot-bomb era, everyone I knew used the site to make bets on which company would get screwed next. They should be the ones authoring the story. They probably have all the great insider information on all the dot-bombs. If it weren't for NDAs, they could probably publish a top selling book with all that rumor-mill information they've got stored away.
Because when they shut down I still had several movies of theirs!!! haha!
Online grocery ordering and delivery is doing quite well in the UK still. Though its generally provided by the existing companies off the back of their own stores, rather than new enterprises (maybe except for Waitrose, who are closely linked with a separate delivery company).
At least provide some idea of what it was for those of us who weren't in the loop at the time.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
I think those that owned stock in Time Warner may disagree.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
slashdot!
the only site that makes money by allowing subscribers to view stories before ddosing them!
slashdot's editors must be stopped. consider the jihad
One of the biggest, most stunning crash & burns ever. They ended up going out of business something like $60 million in debt. Amazing.
t ml/agillion
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit.sh
I worked for Sprockets.com for a couple months as technical support while I learned web development elsewhere.
As best I could tell, Sprockets was completely fake. The goal was to build a new-media friendly collaboration tool. Emphasis was on appearance and real development work was outsourced to Israeli programmers who could barely keep up with...well they just sucked. I never saw a deliverable and never had any responsibilities.
We had four in-house developers, fresh college kids who mostly goofed around and laughed at their non-responsibilities. When I showed up to work at 11am, the infrastructure team bluntly offered me a free cellphone. They also threw stock at me like toilet paper.
I bailed on Sprockets to take a real development job at double salary, but about a year later I got a letter in the mail saying Sprockets was defunct and I could come to the office to take whatever I wanted. Fait accompli...venture capital=profit. I can't believe they got away with it, but my feeling is this was pre-planned from the start and they broke no actual laws. They knew what they were doing.
Call it VC raiding. Anybody who wasted venture capital should probably be jealous (and my future employer did exactly that.)
It should be noted that this minor "cottage industry" success appeared despite efforts to the contrary by Mr. Philyaw (or whatever name he calls himself now or the future). Referring to the device as "butchered" is telling.
As an aside, it's interesting that he now operates a "patent holding company" and changed his name. Even more so is his choice of name. The guy's a class act all the way.
Show me a single TW stockholder who lost 1Billion in cash on the AOL acquisition and I'll grant them the Gigalapse. I couldn't find any.
Also, the grandparent post is technically inaccurate -- AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around.
It's not that I'm lazy, I just find going to the supermarket a frustrating, inefficient and depressing experience. Perhaps the original idea was just ahead of it's time?
This would mean AOL/TW is ineligible for the Gigalapse award. AOL lost money acquiring old tech (TV, publishing), where I'm looking for a money lost on an internet investment.
You see, it isn't easy getting a clear winner on this bet.
Ah. That's why I just got a blank page. I had a feeling it might be, but couldn't be arsed to turn on javascript just to find out. Don't they know that even MS recommend browsing with javascript disabled?
If the iLoo and the iSmell people had got together they would have created a right old stink. This has to be a joke, right? It reminds me of the time I first marvelled at the ability to take my mobile phone into the crapper, then thought better of it.
etoys.com
Disclaimer: I am the logistics - and database agent of etoy.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
sitting in my desk drawer at work
i have a business plan to make money off of it
1. sit on pets.com sock puppet
2. ?????
3. profit
where ?????=wait for the years to build, the nostalgia to set in, and its value to climb, ready for sale on ebay
it's a sure thing, no way my plan can lose money
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Other dot-bombs may have been flashier, but WebVan was the undisputed heavyweight king: they ran through over one billion-with-a-b dollars in venture funding before going under.
Anyone can lose a few million dollars in VC money. Losing a billion take serious style.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Time Warner. They bought AOL and never looked forward since.
Yep. This is the same Time Warner that bought Atari, then got upset when the people working there claimed the 2600 wouldn't last forever and that they were already working on it successor. Time Warner is a rich company with no knowledge of how technology works. They just buy out other companies that seem like fashionable cash cows at the time.
Teh site uses teh Javascripts, it must be full of teh spyware!!!!!111111oneoneoneeleven
cyberrebate.com - "Distributions to creditors (including rebate claimants) are being mailed beginning April 22, 2005. Creditors will receive $.08802 per dollar of allowed claims" The check is in the mail!!
pets.com - Bounces you to petsmart.com. Wonder how much PetsMart had to pay for the DNS rights? I'm guessing 2 barks and a milkbone.
webvan.com - DNS error. Legend has it this company actually burned through $1 billion.
peapod.com - Still alive in ChiTown, Milwaukee, and SE Wisco. Go peapod!!
carsdirect.com - Still alive but appears to be simply a car dealer referral service, not the once vaunted "direct seller". Never hit that sweet IPO - it was withdrawn as the bubble burst.
imotors.com - They built small factories to refurbish and re-warranty used cars which were delivered to customers. The factories are gone - now they're just an information broker apparently.
flooz.com - WTF? Random placeholder page?
boo.com - A splash page lives on and claims a new site is launching in 2006. Register your email address to receive updates. "The boo is back! Shh..." Oh joy!
kozmo.com - DNS error.
priceline.com - Still around of course.
agillion.com - Essentially blank page save the link to blogger.com
sprockets.com - Now a musical composing, scoring, and production service.
cuecat.com - An online obituary. Are they hoping this gets search-engine-indexed into posterity?
i2 - Supply chain software. Still here, but stock price is at $17, down from the 5-year high of $643. Look out below!
eToys - Still around.
idealab - Famous incubator - carsdirect, petsmart.com, etoys, etc - still around.
eCompanies - Famous incubator - still around.
and ignorance down
That was classic intercourse!
Peapod still delivers in Boston, and they're tied to one of the major grocery store chains here.
The ______ Agenda
When the bubble burst, telco stocks were also thrown out the window and in many cases still haven't made up the lost ground. Capital losses on those stocks would have easily topped the $1B mark.
BTW: I know stocks prices are not the same as cash but accountants and bankers think a bit differently.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Kliener Perkin's little darling - Buy fiber and lets give T1's and T3's to every floor in every office building in every city and run it all from the same hub. Wait.. they have to sell it to actual customers? And you have to go through other providers? RUN!
Biggest busts, it said! What a disappointment the site turned out to be.
Basically the ideas of adding smells to other media is eternal. I even had some scratch and sniff books at a time.
The logic is simple. Smells are important, the smell of fresh coffee or baking bread really wakes me up and tells me it is morning. The smell of wet grass after a thunderstorm would really make a picture of such a scene come to life.
The problem? Well it just don't work. Smells linger. So long after the movie has passed on to another scene the smell would still be there. Anyway do you really want to smell the rotting corpses? I cleaned up after the bodies have been removed and it ain't a pleasant experience.
Frankly I see this device as a game. See how many time it passes by in your lifetime.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Amazon has a lousy location (try stopping by to just have a browse and see the book and scim through it) BUT has infinite space. Well almost.
If you got even a small chain of stores you need to stock a copy of a book in everyone of them if you want to sell it.
Amazon can stock 1 copy and sell it across a continent.
Internet stores make sense for goods where there is an awfull lot of choice but little specific demand and enough profit/costs to keep shipping costs down.
Yet I don't see bookstores closing down. Yes they are having a hardtime but the older people can tell you that bookstores have always had a hard time.
But for lots of other things online doesn't make as much sense. Computer hardware has the same wide choice but I prefer talking to a person to make sure I get advice. Granted I shop at a small store where they know you and have in the past been warned that a new vid card would overload my PSU.
Maybe the US is different but in europe the small savings don't make up for the lack of customer service and delays especially if something goes wrong.
Offcourse there are people like you but might I suggest something? Are you perhaps just a modern version of the catalog shopper?
Holland has two catalog companies that send a thick book with products from wich people order.
The net in paper if you like.
They been around for ages and were never a threath to real shops.
Yes there are exceptions but just go down to the highstreet on a saturday. Hope you can stand crowds.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I nominate Anna Nichole Smith for marrying the rich oil man and her step-son for litigating her to the Supreme Court.
Works a treat - for $NZ10 - $15 (depending on order size) delivered. The guy even brings it into the house and drops the bags in the kitchen.
The website is very well thought out too. It saves frequently purchased items so after a couple of shops, you can do a shop by zipping through your list rather than scanning the whole inventory.
Signed
One happy, and very lazy, customer.
Ted Turner.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Man, I was gonna laugh at this but my pedantic side got the best of me and I just can't do it.
CH4, or methane, is odorless. If you are "smelling" methane, then what you are really smelling is one of two things: H2S (rotton eggs) or Mercaptins.
They add mercaptins to CH4 (or natural gas) so you can smell it. Easy leak detection and all...
my feeling is this was pre-planned from the start and they broke no actual laws. They knew what they were doing.
If they knew from the start what they were doing (taking investors' money and pissing it away), then the law they broke is that against fraud - "A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain". Even if their goal was not to embezzle millions but only to enjoy the easy life for a while and put "Internet start up" on their CV's, it was still fraud if they did it intentionally.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I think I personally like CNET's list more:
1. Webvan
2. Pets.com
3. Kozmo.com
4. Flooz.com
5. eToys.com
6. Boo.com
7. MVP.com
8. Go.com
9. Kibu.com
10. GovWorks.com
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
90s gave birth to many successes and failures in our past but does any one know why many went belly up?
Does anyone remember Hotline Software? It was supposed to create new way to share files with peers. Hotline Software ended up in a legal battle between the investors and it's creator.
One of the many successes of the era was Phatgames.com and it's many spawns. It was started by Ben Cathers.
And did we really learn from our mistakes?
\
No photographs/videos of this in action?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Now that was one of my favorites. You had this little advertizement bar that appeared on the bottom of your screen, and got paid for however many hours it was up. Nevermind that you could run it at night while you slept. You also got additional cash for getting others to sign up under you. My roomate and I put together a little program we called 'TakeAdvantage' that was basically a small gui for breaking what pathetic blocks they put in place to prevent one person from signing themselves up 20 times. hundred dollar checks every month for nothing? Sweet. Whatshotnow was another great one. You got points for filling out surveys, and you could use those points on free junk at their website. Ghostmouse let you fill out surveys (everything is awesome!) for hours at a time while you slept or were at class. I'll never understand how they thought these business models could work. Ditto that with the 'new' Napster.
Time Warner was bought by AOL, not the other way around. It was an Apple-buys-NeXT type aquisition in the end, in the sense that ultimately the TW people took over AOL, but it was AOL's money given to TW shareholders, not vice-versa.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
and are owned by the John Lewis Partnership
Surprisingly, that's not as many big busts as I thought their would be.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Schlumberger bought Sema in Feb 2001 for 5.2B$ and sold it in Sep 2003 for 1.5 B$.
-3.7 B$ in 2.5 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlumberger_Limited
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
Keeping in mind this was while the mac was still just a 'macintosh' and the only product with the name 'pod' in it was a multi-million dollar NASA project. If only they could have seen ahead to how good that name really is when applied to the consumer-whore public.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
First it takes you to a Flash ad, then you get sent directly to the main page instead of to the article... Screw this for a lark. Here's the full article, without all of the annoyances:
The Best of the Worst
By KATHERINE MEYER
May 3, 2006
What were they thinking?
The Internet spawned so many weird gizmos and bad business ideas that mocking dot-com duds became something of a sport in the post-bubble era. But some ideas still stand out for pure silliness. These are products and services that attracted lots of publicity -- and, in some cases, millions of dollars in funding -- before folding.
In the earlier days of the Web, "nobody seemed to care if there was a real business there," said Alan Meckler, chief executive of Jupitermedia Corp. and Internet industry pundit.
If It Seems Too Good to Be True
Take CyberRebate.com, which thought it could make money by giving stuff away for free. The online retailer, founded in 1998, sold an assortment of goods at heavily marked up prices (some items going for up to 10 times their retail values), but promised customers a hefty rebate that often amounted to 100% of the purchase price.
For example, CyberRebate charged about $1,100 for a 13-inch RCA television that normally retailed for a few hundred dollars. Buyers could get a full refund of the purchase price as long as they jumped through some hoops -- rebate forms had to be submitted by a deadline, and checks came 10 to 14 weeks later. CyberRebate banked on the idea that some percentage of buyers would forget to fill out the rebate form, or fail to do so in time, leaving the company to pocket the money.
But selling items at such wildly inflated prices just about guaranteed customers would go out of their way to get their rebates, quickly sinking CyberRebate into heavy debt. The company, founded by law school student Joel Granik, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2001, listing liabilities of $83.4 million. Much of that debt was owed to consumers who were promised rebates but hadn't received them.
Both Mr. Granik and his business partner, Joseph Lichter, settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $40,000 in August 2004 and were barred from running a rebate-based business. Some rebate claimants eventually received partial reimbursement of about nine cents for every dollar, according to a statement on CyberRebate's Web site.
Money Matters
Then there was Flooz.com, which tried to create a form of digital currency. Similar to the also-ill-fated Beenz.com, users could purchase "flooz" and give it to others as a sort of virtual gift certificate. Flooz could only be spent at participating online retailers, which included BarnesandNoble.com and J. Crew.
The company managed to raise over $50 million in funding from 1999-2001 and even signed on comedian Whoopi Goldberg as a celebrity spokeswoman before bad times hit.
According to Flooz founder and Chief Executive Robert Levitan, who previously co-founded women's Web site iVillage, the beginning of the end came in spring 2001. That's when Flooz's corporate clients began to cut back on orders for gift certificates to be used in promotional giveaways -- a revenue stream Flooz was counting on -- amid the softening economy. Then a ring of thieves in Russia and the Philippines charged about $300,000 in Flooz to stolen credit cards. The online piggy bank officially declared itself broke in August 2001.
Several other online-payment companies also failed, though PayPal survived, largely because it positioned itself as a money-transfer service. PayPal's offerings became particularly popular with online auction users, and that company was acquired by eBay Inc. in 2002.
"I would have wanted a different outcome," said Mr. Levitan, who has since moved on to start-up Pando Networks Inc., which aims to simplify the sen
The Best of the Worst
By KATHERINE MEYER
May 3, 2006
What were they thinking?
The Internet spawned so many weird gizmos and bad business ideas that mocking dot-com duds became something of a sport in the post-bubble era. But some ideas still stand out for pure silliness. These are products and services that attracted lots of publicity -- and, in some cases, millions of dollars in funding -- before folding.
In the earlier days of the Web, "nobody seemed to care if there was a real business there," said Alan Meckler, chief executive of Jupitermedia Corp. and Internet industry pundit.
If It Seems Too Good to Be True
Take CyberRebate.com, which thought it could make money by giving stuff away for free. The online retailer, founded in 1998, sold an assortment of goods at heavily marked up prices (some items going for up to 10 times their retail values), but promised customers a hefty rebate that often amounted to 100% of the purchase price.
For example, CyberRebate charged about $1,100 for a 13-inch RCA television that normally retailed for a few hundred dollars. Buyers could get a full refund of the purchase price as long as they jumped through some hoops -- rebate forms had to be submitted by a deadline, and checks came 10 to 14 weeks later. CyberRebate banked on the idea that some percentage of buyers would forget to fill out the rebate form, or fail to do so in time, leaving the company to pocket the money.
But selling items at such wildly inflated prices just about guaranteed customers would go out of their way to get their rebates, quickly sinking CyberRebate into heavy debt. The company, founded by law school student Joel Granik, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2001, listing liabilities of $83.4 million. Much of that debt was owed to consumers who were promised rebates but hadn't received them.
Both Mr. Granik and his business partner, Joseph Lichter, settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $40,000 in August 2004 and were barred from running a rebate-based business. Some rebate claimants eventually received partial reimbursement of about nine cents for every dollar, according to a statement on CyberRebate's Web site.
Money Matters
Then there was Flooz.com, which tried to create a form of digital currency. Similar to the also-ill-fated Beenz.com, users could purchase "flooz" and give it to others as a sort of virtual gift certificate. Flooz could only be spent at participating online retailers, which included BarnesandNoble.com and J. Crew.
The company managed to raise over $50 million in funding from 1999-2001 and even signed on comedian Whoopi Goldberg as a celebrity spokeswoman before bad times hit.
According to Flooz founder and Chief Executive Robert Levitan, who previously co-founded women's Web site iVillage, the beginning of the end came in spring 2001. That's when Flooz's corporate clients began to cut back on orders for gift certificates to be used in promotional giveaways -- a revenue stream Flooz was counting on -- amid the softening economy. Then a ring of thieves in Russia and the Philippines charged about $300,000 in Flooz to stolen credit cards. The online piggy bank officially declared itself broke in August 2001.
Several other online-payment companies also failed, though PayPal survived, largely because it positioned itself as a money-transfer service. PayPal's offerings became particularly popular with online auction users, and that company was acquired by eBay Inc. in 2002.
"I would have wanted a different outcome," said Mr. Levitan, who has since moved on to start-up Pando Networks Inc., which aims to simplify the sending of email attachments. "But I am proud of what we accomplished."
The Sweet Smell of iSmell
The "iSmell," a product created by the now-defunct Digiscents Inc. in 1999, promised to enhance the Web surfing experience by engaging users' senses of smell.
By plugging iSmell into the computer through a USB port, the device would generate diffe
Me: Hey Mom... I'm poor as hell right now and need some help.
Mom (Thinking that sending money may be a bad idea): I'll send you a peapod and get you through the month.
Me: Oh dude, thank you so much, I was just busy boiling my shoe leather to try and see if it would provide sustanence....
A day or so later, a whole giant load of macaroni and cheese, milk, eggs, and spaghetti appears. Not luxury, but enough to get by on.
Go peapod! My poverty would be a little less tolerable without you (and my mom.)
Me, I recently ordered a cucumber, a banana, and a sausage, but got 3 dildoes instead!
The problem is that they added the popular "i" (for internet) like other people did, but this made their product sound like "I Smell."p.What they should have done is add the OTHE popular geeky letter, "e" for "electronic"... then it would have been the SmellE.
This space available.
I could not find where M$ suggest surfing with JS disabled. Can you post a link?
I just grow my own :) :)
Actually I do find gardening a lot of fun and the food does taste better. Of course I live in Florida so some things are really easy to grow. Want any limes? While some things like lettuce will only grow in the winter
The town I live in well over 100,000 people but it is also spread out so no one delivers anything. On the good side we do have Publix which tends to have good products and are one of the 100 best companies in US to work for. The also have a good selection of organic and ethnic foods. Heck they even have okay sushi at some of the stores.
I actually went to one grocery store in the UK when I was on a trip. It was okay. The big thing I remember is they sold 3 liter bottles of coke which I had never seen in the US and the Kit-Kat bars where a strange shape.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
PointCast, launched in 1996, reportedly spurned an offer from News Corp. -- which wanted to buy the start-up for up to $450 million -- in hopes of making it big
True, hindsight is 20/20 but really $450M isn't big enough? How would you make more than that in an IPO? No wonder most companies went bust. Stupid kids.
Lists of dotcom era flops. How many times will this issue come up in every major publication? It's kind of like "I love the (variable decade)" on VH1; the occaisional trip down memory lane is enjoyable, but it seems like we have another one of these every few months. Is there some sort of underlying psychological problem whereby we have to convince ourselves that these ideas were bad? It's kind of like we're all trying to convince ourselves that we're better off, despite the economic down turn, because we don't have as many silly ideas kicking around.
In 2000 they were around $250 per share..... and today
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=LNUX&t=my
(in at 1.78 btw)
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
It's worse than that. I get this huge interstitial ad page that's Flash-only. There is no Flash plugin so far as I can find for AMD64 on Linux, so I simply cannot view the site.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
The PointCast business model in a nutshell:
Provide free client software for download, that maintains a constant connection to the PointCast service, even (especially) when the machine is otherwise idle. When the constant traffic from all of these (unattended) machines brings a corporate network to its knees, offer the victim an "enterprise server" product that caches the PointCast traffic locally, thereby restoring their external network bandwidth to what it was before. Oh, and while you're at it, charge your customers many thousands of dollars for this "service".
Or, if your IT department is at all on the ball, they just block access to PointCast, and remove the software from all machines in the company. I gotta tell you, selling an expensive "solution" to a problem your company created isn't going to get you in the good graces of corporate clients.
Try here.. I believe #1, "Set Internet Explorer security level to High" is the recommendation that disables JavaScript.
Use the power of the market. Browse without ActiveX, use ffox's javascript restrictions, refuse to take cookies for anything but shopping-cart sites, use flashblock. That makes it profitable to build better websites, and helps run the crappy websites that require bad security on the user PC go out of business. You can be part of the solution, and all you have to do is ignore shitty sites!
Here Here !!!! Totally Agree !!!! :)
But even the MS link above actually wants two JS accesses allowed ??? Strange that Logic and Consistancy do not seem to apply very many places, isn't it??
:(
I bought a car (BMW Z3) through them during their initial period (when they still did everything themselves) and got the car for a good bit less than invoice. Since it was a car with no rebates and a low manufacturer to dealer kickback, I got a pretty good deal. What I really liked: I went to the dealership to pick up my car and signed two pieces of paper and drove off. I spent about 20 minutes there, and ten of them were devoted to the "talk-through" in the car where they explain all the features.
I was in the market for another car last summer and checked them out again. As you surmise, they are more of a dealer referral site now. However, they will still give you an upfront quote and handle all the paperwork. We wound up buying our PT cruiser through Cars Direct, and again paid under invoice. Of course it wasn't as good a deal as the first time around (because Daimler/Chrysler has significant kickbacks).
Anyway, if you want to buy a new car, and want to get in and out of the dealership in minimum time without the hassle of negotiating, it's not a bad bet. (Note: I'm not affiliated with Cars Direct in any way, just a satisfied customer.)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
...was Eazel. They went through $20 million and all they ended up with was a semi-decent file manager and a building full of used Aerons.
I still shed a tear when I think about the demise of Kozmo, though. Now THAT was a great service. A movie and a pint of Ben & Jerry's right to your door, whenever you wanted. *sigh*
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It wasn't only an American phenomenon. I worked in a Dotcom in Germany back then where our biggest customer was a German company My Media. Innovative, eh? They burned through 200 million in two years (We built a health and lifestyle portal for them) by holding business meetings on chartered yachts in the Seychelles. When they went down, so did we.
They final month before the office was vacated saw the guys smoking weed in front of the webcam, my boss doing coke in the toilets and our isp bill at enormous rates as the guys spent the whole day downloading stuff from Napster and fighting with the sysadmin who was trying to save a bankrupt company from losing even more money.
The best part about it is that we can still do the same things only on a shoestring budget. Lot's of ideas floating about and lot's of interest groups implementing them as spinoffs and after-hour projects.
:-)
And it's nearly as much fun.
That's the big upside of IT and open source. It costs nothing and evolves so quickly that stuff costing millions a few years ago are available as a free Web 2.0 solution nowadays. The Age of Cyberpunk, that's what it is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Okay, let's see a show of hands of all those people who read this article just to see if their employer was listed. I'm a little disappointed that my company wasn't quite bad enough to be listed as an all-time worst.
... then a good glass of wine at a bar ... then a cheap beer ... then a Big Mac... and finally 10 of them could buy something off the Dollar menu. :)
My favorite memory is keeping a list of what a single share of our stock was worth. At one point, it was worth a decent bottle of wine
-Peter
The Museum of Bad Ideas. Special Craptastic exhibit for a limited run.
Gah, i remember paid to surf, remember like it was yesterday.. AllAdvantage pioneered the biz back in 1999, when i was 12. I used programs like MyAdvantage that moved the mouse and surfed the web for me while i slept.. It was awesome getting checks every month for not doing antyhing. Then Emulators came out and you could emulate 100 accounts at time without even having the bar on your screen, just a little icon in the systray. AA spawned a bunch of other companies, like CashFiesta, DesktopDollars, GetPaid4, Spedia, Paid2Surf, CoolWallstreet, Weegoo, Dollar Web many many more.. I made emulators and referral generators in VB to get as much as i could..
Then came DimeClicks, Allclicks, CJ, BeFree, those Get Paid to Click websites.. Host banners on your site and get users to click.. Just emulate impressions with proxies and then emulate Clicks the same way.. got lots of cash and checks from dime-clicks.. There were whole #chans on IRC dedicated to cheating Paid2Surf and PaidToClick... like #cheatzrus #soa #soangels.. mmmm nostalgia haha
well most of the companies arent alive anymore, or if they are they are hard to cheat.. you can probably cheat the porn websites. ha. but there is one good thing that came out of it.. i learned to program and loved it..
http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/foocat/
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Online grocery shopping & delivery will take off like a scared rocket once bird flu hits our shores.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I personally loved 800.com. I think they singlehandedly got me about 50 dvd's for free with no rebates and free shipping. More.com was another favorite. Buy any item and get free shipping. I'll have a pack of gum please.
Wasn't beeenz.com supposed to be the new online currency? [I might have that name/domain wrong - but it was something about beenx with a Z].
Why is this kind of story so popular? How many times has a similar list of embarassing dot com failures shown up on Slashdot already? Three or four times?
I remember a shopping site a while back, I suppose trying to have some unique twist to attract customers, would sell all of their items massively overpriced but you could haggle with a robot thing(a chat bot I guess) and if you were lucky you could get prices slightly higher than those on Amazon.
I wish I remembered what the name was, I doubt it's still around though. I think I found out about it in an old Wired magazine.
When I discovered this I was in high school. I worked as a office guy in our Navy ROTC unit mostly doing secretarial sort of bs.
:-(
I installed that on all 4 of the computers in our office and it was a big hit. These retired Navy guys liked watching the int'l events page and their stocks on the screen. It was quite interesting.
Now adays though I just don't care as much. "Too Much Information" has a real world meaning to me now
Libertas in infinitum