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Dot.Bomb
When Britain got dot.com fever at the very end of the 20th century the City tore up the rule book. Lastminute.com soared to a stock-market valuation of 3750 million. Clickmango.com raised millions in days. Boo.com spent #100 million trying to sell designer sports gear on the Net. Old-style industrial giants with huge turnovers and workforces were edged out of the FTSE 100 by e-commerce newcomers losing a fortune. And then it all went horribly wrong, and even the most glamorous start-ups found they couldn't defy the laws of gravity. Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC's Internet Correspondent throughout the whole dot.com bubble (now it no longer has a dedicated Internet Correspondent at all), and was thus uniquely placed to cover the whole story at first-hand, from the first fledgling net pioneers and the launch of Freeserve through the fabulous fin-de-siecle spending of boo.com to the horribly messy crash that with hindsight seemed utterly inevitable. Originally published as current affairs, "Dot.bomb" - with the story brough up to date for this 2003 edition - now stands as both a business manual of how not to start a business, and a work of recent history.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 7, 2011
This book is ten years or more old now, but it still makes fascinating reading as it covers the Dot.Com boom, and subsequent bust, of the late 1990's.
The book is packed with some fantastic stories, and detailed backgrounds and insights, about UK Dot.Com start-ups with dreams of making millions (or billions) and in the majority of cases - seeing it all disappear.
From Oxford Graduates, to Schoolboys, Teachers to Journalists - it seemed everybody was getting into the Dot.Coms at the time.
Three of the most interesting stories cover Lastminute.com (still with us), Boo.com (definitely not still with us) and First Tuesday - an (in)famous business networking group that had visions of making millions connecting Venture Capitalists with Dot.Com Startups.
I found this a compelling read, very well written and still relevant today - with LinkedIn just being valued at what appears to be an absurdly high valuation given it's revenues, have any lessons been learnt?
The book is packed with some fantastic stories, and detailed backgrounds and insights, about UK Dot.Com start-ups with dreams of making millions (or billions) and in the majority of cases - seeing it all disappear.
From Oxford Graduates, to Schoolboys, Teachers to Journalists - it seemed everybody was getting into the Dot.Coms at the time.
Three of the most interesting stories cover Lastminute.com (still with us), Boo.com (definitely not still with us) and First Tuesday - an (in)famous business networking group that had visions of making millions connecting Venture Capitalists with Dot.Com Startups.
I found this a compelling read, very well written and still relevant today - with LinkedIn just being valued at what appears to be an absurdly high valuation given it's revenues, have any lessons been learnt?
December 5, 2010
A fun trip down memory and an excellent reminder of just how far we have come in the last few years.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews