Sun, 07 Aug 2005

Top Ten Dot-Com Flops

Curious, indeed, how the more things change, the more they remain the same. I'm now involved in grocery delivery, of a sort, although mine isn't really web driven. The number one flop was Webvan - online grocery ordering and deliveries.

It gets better: I lost a pile of money in 1998-99 on a sort of Internet currency I called iStamps - similar in a lot of way to Flop Number 4, Flooz. The iStamps business plan , websites and logo are still for sale, if anyone's interested... it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The most astounding thing about the dot-com boom was the obscene amount of money that was spent. Zealous venture capitalists fell over themselves to invest millions in Internet start-ups; dot-coms blew millions on spectacular marketing campaigns; new college graduates became instant millionaires (albeit on paper) and rushed out to spend it; and companies with unproven business models executed massive IPOs with sky-high stock prices. Of course, we all know what eventually happened to this world. Few of these companies actually made enough money to recoup that cash, and when their investors fled to the hills, these start-ups died dramatic deaths. These are the celebrity victims of the new-economy bust.

(link) [CNet]

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