People have been sketching user interfaces since the birth of the web (possibly even before) but the sketches usually stay locked away in old notebooks and discarded bar napkins in Austin, Texas. Many of the websites we use started out as scrawlings, and with people like Jakob Nielsen and Bill Buxton spreading the gospel of faster, cheaper paper prototypes, “next year’s Twitter” may already exist on paper.
http://deeplinking.net/paper-web/
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Dot-com pioneers--where are they now?
February 1, 2008 1:11 PM PST
Dot-com pioneers--where are they now?
Posted by Josh Lowensohn
In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.
About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.
AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.
Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.
AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.
Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.
Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.
CBS MarketWatch, now known simply as MarketWatch, was partially owned by Viacom until News Corp.-owned Dow Jones snatched it up in early 2005. The media company continues to provide written and video content, both on the Web and on TV.
CMGI (College Marketing Group Information) was founded in the mid-1980s, and had an IPO in 1994 as CMG Information Services. The venture capital company continued to grow, and stock prices soared up until the dot-com bubble burst, taking the company with it.
CNET Networks, parent of News.com, started out producing TV shows about technology and later expanded into creating online content, ranging from video games to a technology news service and blog network. The company has expanded into several major global markets both in China and the U.K. Recently, a group of investors led by Jana Partners announced an intention to try to take over a majority of seats on its board of directors.
CompuServe is one of the better known dot-com pioneers, and also one of the oldest. It's best known for its role as an ISP, which brought it popularity in the early 1990s before tanking due to customer dissatisfaction with bad modem hardware and poorly written software. It was quickly snatched up by Worldcom in 1998 before getting flipped to AOL only 24 hours later. CompuServe remains an ISP with a news portal serving up stories from Netscape.com.
E*Trade. This financial services company started from a company called TradePlus before moving its operations onto the Net in 1991 under the E*Trade brand. The company went public five years later and managed to survive the dot-com bubble burst. But it has struggled as of late, along with many companies in the financial industry.
EarthLink is another ISP that managed to survive the dot-com burst. The company started out in 1994 providing dial-up service, and continues to offer it and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) phone services using DSL, satellite and cable. The company's also managed to branch out into telephone services with its popular MVNO Helio.
eBay. A pioneer in online auctions, eBay is now a more diverse company--and it also faces growing competition from Amazon.com, along with what one analyst calls "buyer fatigue" following years of revenue leaps. In January, longtime CEO Meg Whitman said she'd soon be handing the reins to John Donahoe, head of eBay Marketplaces.
Excite@Home was the result of one of the largest mergers of the dot-com era: the popular portal Excite.com and broadband infrastructure builder AtHome. The plan was to create a company that provided the pipes and the content (similar to AOL), but combining two successful companies turned out to create one dud and Excite@Home sold off the Excite portal in 2001.
Expedia was one of the first Web services to offer travel arrangements for airfare. It was created by Microsoft in 1996 before branching off as its own company three years later. In 2001 came a purchase by InterActiveCorp (then USA Networks), which holds a handful of travel and entertainment sites. The site continues to be one of the best-known online travel services.
Games.com is best known for its various handoffs, including one between Atari and Games Inc. for over a million dollars. The site now serves as a portal to AOL's gaming offerings, many of which are casual, and can be played in a Web browser free of charge.
iVillage was created as a media company providing content aimed mostly at women. Created in 1995 by some former America Online employees, the company continued to grow. Four years later, the company went public. Despite share prices soaring in the beginning, they quickly bottomed out. After merging with Women.com in 2001, iVillage's offerings began to thrive again, and in mid-2006 NBC Universal picked it up for $600 million.
Lycos is best known for its search engine roots. Now a Web portal too, Lycos underwent huge growth after its launch in 1994. It was enough to attract the attention of Spanish company Terra Networks, who snatched it up in 2000. Four years later, Daum Communications became the new (and current) owners. Lycos continues to roll out new services like Mix.
Monster.com shares a similar title with Craigslist in serving up classifieds for jobs. The service launched in 1999 as a merged solution from two former job classifieds competitors, the Online Career Center and the Monster Board, from which Monster.com gets its moniker. It has localized sites for nearly 40 countries.
Netscape offered one of the first Web browsers that completely dominated the browser market in the mid-1990s before getting dominated by Microsoft's in-house browser, Internet Explorer (which came as the default browser in every copy of Windows). It was purchased by AOL in 1998 and now resides as a content portal and social news service that was later spun off from the Netscape brand and into Propeller. The last traces of the famous Netscape Navigator browser now reside in a customized variation of Mozilla Firefox, whose support is slated to be discontinued next month.
Overstock.com has always played second cousin to competitor Amazon.com. The service was founded in 1997 as D2: Discounts Direct, but the brand didn't stick and was later changed to Overstock. It may be best known among investors for its IPO failure and subsequent loss in sales, but consumers are likely to associate it with the company's ads featuring spokesmodel Sabine Ehrenfeld. The company continues to sell a wide range of goods, though it has yet to turn a profit.
Pets.com was a vertical of the Amazon.com model, focusing purely on pet goods and known well for its sock puppet mascot. Despite the killer advertising campaign, the company had bad timing with the burst of the dot-com bubble, and couldn't stay afloat.
Priceline.com offers discount travel services including airfare, hotels, and cars. After launching in 1998, the site expanded into several other areas, including long-distance calling, home loans, and car sales before re-focusing on travel. The company is well known for its mascot, William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and movies. Priceline continues to do well, with a recovering stock price and profits from licensing its purchase technology to eBay.
Shockwave.com is a games site that's been offering casual games since 1998. The site merged with the Atom Corporation in 2001, and was later picked up by MTV (by parent company Viacom) for $200 million. Despite the Shockwave moniker, most of the games utilize Adobe Flash.
Webvan. Flush with millions of dollars raised from venture capitalists, Internet-only supermarkets like Webvan spent huge sums to build high-tech warehouses and flashy Web sites, and to hire armies of deliverymen. In the end, the wild spending broke them. The concept lives on, though, with established supermarket chains and online companies like NetGrocer.com.
News.com's Scott Ard, Elinor Mills, Greg Sandoval, and Jon Skillings contributed to this report.
Dot-com pioneers--where are they now?
Posted by Josh Lowensohn
In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.
About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.
AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.
Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.
AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.
Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.
Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.
CBS MarketWatch, now known simply as MarketWatch, was partially owned by Viacom until News Corp.-owned Dow Jones snatched it up in early 2005. The media company continues to provide written and video content, both on the Web and on TV.
CMGI (College Marketing Group Information) was founded in the mid-1980s, and had an IPO in 1994 as CMG Information Services. The venture capital company continued to grow, and stock prices soared up until the dot-com bubble burst, taking the company with it.
CNET Networks, parent of News.com, started out producing TV shows about technology and later expanded into creating online content, ranging from video games to a technology news service and blog network. The company has expanded into several major global markets both in China and the U.K. Recently, a group of investors led by Jana Partners announced an intention to try to take over a majority of seats on its board of directors.
CompuServe is one of the better known dot-com pioneers, and also one of the oldest. It's best known for its role as an ISP, which brought it popularity in the early 1990s before tanking due to customer dissatisfaction with bad modem hardware and poorly written software. It was quickly snatched up by Worldcom in 1998 before getting flipped to AOL only 24 hours later. CompuServe remains an ISP with a news portal serving up stories from Netscape.com.
E*Trade. This financial services company started from a company called TradePlus before moving its operations onto the Net in 1991 under the E*Trade brand. The company went public five years later and managed to survive the dot-com bubble burst. But it has struggled as of late, along with many companies in the financial industry.
EarthLink is another ISP that managed to survive the dot-com burst. The company started out in 1994 providing dial-up service, and continues to offer it and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) phone services using DSL, satellite and cable. The company's also managed to branch out into telephone services with its popular MVNO Helio.
eBay. A pioneer in online auctions, eBay is now a more diverse company--and it also faces growing competition from Amazon.com, along with what one analyst calls "buyer fatigue" following years of revenue leaps. In January, longtime CEO Meg Whitman said she'd soon be handing the reins to John Donahoe, head of eBay Marketplaces.
Excite@Home was the result of one of the largest mergers of the dot-com era: the popular portal Excite.com and broadband infrastructure builder AtHome. The plan was to create a company that provided the pipes and the content (similar to AOL), but combining two successful companies turned out to create one dud and Excite@Home sold off the Excite portal in 2001.
Expedia was one of the first Web services to offer travel arrangements for airfare. It was created by Microsoft in 1996 before branching off as its own company three years later. In 2001 came a purchase by InterActiveCorp (then USA Networks), which holds a handful of travel and entertainment sites. The site continues to be one of the best-known online travel services.
Games.com is best known for its various handoffs, including one between Atari and Games Inc. for over a million dollars. The site now serves as a portal to AOL's gaming offerings, many of which are casual, and can be played in a Web browser free of charge.
iVillage was created as a media company providing content aimed mostly at women. Created in 1995 by some former America Online employees, the company continued to grow. Four years later, the company went public. Despite share prices soaring in the beginning, they quickly bottomed out. After merging with Women.com in 2001, iVillage's offerings began to thrive again, and in mid-2006 NBC Universal picked it up for $600 million.
Lycos is best known for its search engine roots. Now a Web portal too, Lycos underwent huge growth after its launch in 1994. It was enough to attract the attention of Spanish company Terra Networks, who snatched it up in 2000. Four years later, Daum Communications became the new (and current) owners. Lycos continues to roll out new services like Mix.
Monster.com shares a similar title with Craigslist in serving up classifieds for jobs. The service launched in 1999 as a merged solution from two former job classifieds competitors, the Online Career Center and the Monster Board, from which Monster.com gets its moniker. It has localized sites for nearly 40 countries.
Netscape offered one of the first Web browsers that completely dominated the browser market in the mid-1990s before getting dominated by Microsoft's in-house browser, Internet Explorer (which came as the default browser in every copy of Windows). It was purchased by AOL in 1998 and now resides as a content portal and social news service that was later spun off from the Netscape brand and into Propeller. The last traces of the famous Netscape Navigator browser now reside in a customized variation of Mozilla Firefox, whose support is slated to be discontinued next month.
Overstock.com has always played second cousin to competitor Amazon.com. The service was founded in 1997 as D2: Discounts Direct, but the brand didn't stick and was later changed to Overstock. It may be best known among investors for its IPO failure and subsequent loss in sales, but consumers are likely to associate it with the company's ads featuring spokesmodel Sabine Ehrenfeld. The company continues to sell a wide range of goods, though it has yet to turn a profit.
Pets.com was a vertical of the Amazon.com model, focusing purely on pet goods and known well for its sock puppet mascot. Despite the killer advertising campaign, the company had bad timing with the burst of the dot-com bubble, and couldn't stay afloat.
Priceline.com offers discount travel services including airfare, hotels, and cars. After launching in 1998, the site expanded into several other areas, including long-distance calling, home loans, and car sales before re-focusing on travel. The company is well known for its mascot, William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and movies. Priceline continues to do well, with a recovering stock price and profits from licensing its purchase technology to eBay.
Shockwave.com is a games site that's been offering casual games since 1998. The site merged with the Atom Corporation in 2001, and was later picked up by MTV (by parent company Viacom) for $200 million. Despite the Shockwave moniker, most of the games utilize Adobe Flash.
Webvan. Flush with millions of dollars raised from venture capitalists, Internet-only supermarkets like Webvan spent huge sums to build high-tech warehouses and flashy Web sites, and to hire armies of deliverymen. In the end, the wild spending broke them. The concept lives on, though, with established supermarket chains and online companies like NetGrocer.com.
News.com's Scott Ard, Elinor Mills, Greg Sandoval, and Jon Skillings contributed to this report.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Universities With the Best Free Online Courses
No tuition money? No problem! There are many top universities that offer free courses online. This list ranks some of the best free university courses for people who want to enhance personal knowledge or advance in their current field.
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu)
If you are looking for a wide range of free courses online, MIT is your best option. There are more than 1,800 free courses offered through the school's OpenCourseWare project. Courses are in audio, video and text format and can be translated into a number of different languages. People from all over the world use OpenCourseWare and 96 percent of visitors say they would recommend the site to someone else.
2. Open University (open.ac.uk)
The Open University is the UK's largest academic institution. The school's OpenLearn website gives everyone free access to undergraduate and graduate level course materials from The Open University. Courses cover a broad range of topics, such as arts and history, business, education, IT and computing, mathematics and statistics, science, health and technology.
3. Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu)
Carnegie Mellon University offers a huge collection of free online courses and course materials through a program known as the Open Learning Initiative. OLI courses are set up to allow anyone at the introductory college level to learn about a particular subject without the help of a formal instructor. Course options include, but are not limited to, statistics, biology, chemistry, economics, French and physics.
4. Tufts University (tufts.edu)
Like MIT, Tufts University has OpenCourseWare that is free to everyone. Courses are sorted by school (School of Medicine, School of Arts and Sciences, etc.) and include lecture notes, assignments and other supplementary materials.
5. Stanford (stanford.edu)
Stanford University, one of the world's leading academic institutions, has joined forces with iTunes U to provide access to Stanford courses, lectures, interviews and more. Courses can be downloaded and played on your iPod, PC, or Mac and can also be burned to a CD. If you don't have iTunes, you can download it here for free.
6. University of California, Berkeley (berkeley.edu)
UC Berkley has been offering live and on-demand webcasts of select courses since 2001. There are now hundreds of current and archived UC Berkley courses available as podcasts and webcasts. Courses cover a wide range of subjects, including biology, astronomy, chemistry, computer programming, engineering, psychology, legal studies and philosophy.
7. Utah State University (usu.edu)
Utah State University also provides access to an oleo of free online courses. Study options include everything from Latin and anthropology to physics and theatre arts. The text based courses are comprehensive and can be downloaded as a zip file or viewed directly on the site.
8. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (kutztownsbdc.org)
Kutztown University's Small Business Development Center offers the largest collection of free business and entrepreneurial courses available on the web. Course topics include accounting, finance, government, business law, marketing and sales. Interactive case studies, comprehensive text, slides, graphics and streaming audio all help to demonstrate the concepts presented in each course.
9. University of Southern Queensland (usq.edu.au)
The University of Southern Queensland in Australia provides free access to a number of different courses through their OpenCourseWare initiative. Courses from each of the five faculties are available and cover a broad range of topics, including communication, technology, science, career planning, teaching and multimedia creation.
10. University of California, Irvine (uci.edu)
UC Irvine recently joined the OCW Consortium to begin providing free university level courses online. Right now, there are only a handful of options to choose from, but the list is growing. Current courses cover topics like capital markets, financial planning, human resources and e-marketing. Course materials typically include syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Cool online app that turns videos into cartoons and create animated avatars and more
beFunky - Awesome online app that lets you turn videos into cartoons, create animated painting out your pictures, create animated avatars and more. Read more: beFunky - Cartoonize Your Photos and Videos (incl. video demo).
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