Salon.com > John Geirland

Missing the eBay point

Wed, 15 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

I'm the son of swap meet habitués. As a child I spent weekend after weekend in pebbly, dilapidated drive-in theaters teaming with restless buyers in search of bric-a-brac and booty. Even though I hated the scene, I still couldn't resist the opportunity to squander a week's allowance on a bag of plastic vomit.

Now thanks to eBay, the hugely successful online auction site, I can bid on plastic vomit (or a remote control fart machine -- item No. 488929976) against folks all over the world. EBay is more than just another Silicon Valley dorm-room-to-boardroom success story. Few Internet companies have had such a dramatic impact on people's lives and livelihoods. All the more reason why David Bunnell's new book, "The eBay Phenomenon," is such a disappointment.

Bunnell is a legend in computer journalism -- the founder of PC Magazine, Macworld and New Media, and the CEO of Upside magazine. So readers might be predisposed to take what he has to say seriously. And to be fair, "The eBay Phenomenon," co-authored with business writer Richard Luecke, looks more like a primer aimed at the business crowd than a serious journalistic exercise. The book does a workmanlike job of describing how the eBay site functions and of recounting the company's humble beginnings in founder Pierre Omidyar's apartment in 1995. Bunnell also deftly explicates eBay's business model and its positioning within the "demand-based or dynamic pricing" segment of the e-commerce sector.

Nude amateur hour

Thu, 26 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

Looking for pictures of nude soccer moms, accountants and students? Try Voyeurweb, the self-billed "highest frequented amateur photo site on Planet Earth." The site is a popular destination for the Web's ordinary folk -- if ordinary includes wanting to post pictures of oneself totally nude or engaged in explicit sex. The site is bursting with photos, the message boards are cascading and the chat room is lively around the clock. One 50-something female contributor named "jewels" affectionately refers to the destination as "our own little breakfast club."

Launched four years ago, Voyeurweb is the brainchild of 42-year-old Igor Shoemaker, an entrepreneur who says he holds citizenship in four countries including the U.S. and Germany. (He won't reveal the other two, "in case I need somewhere to run to.") A former top marketing executive at one of the biggest software vendors in the world (again, he won't say which), Igor quit his job after one too many reorganizations and took time off to pursue other interests. He surfed the Web and was struck by the way most Web sites treated content like a "one-way street." "Why are you using the Web?" he'd rant. "Why don't you just Fed Ex me the CD?" Convinced that content should be an interactive experience, he decided to ask "netizens to help me to build a site with their photos."

“Sex and Rockets”

Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It's been nearly three decades since Thomas Pynchon pondered the psychic connections between sex, rockets and the Kabala in his convoluted novel "Gravity's Rainbow." But even that was 30 years after Jack Parsons embraced that oddly compelling trinity -- as a self-taught chemist and co-founder of Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who devoted much of his life to magic and following the occult mage Aleister Crowley.

Parsons is the captivating subject of a new biography called "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons," published by quirky Feral House, which bills itself as the "publisher that refuses to be domesticated." (The author is listed as John Carter, although Feral says Carter is the pseudonym of a writer who has withheld his name so as not to jeopardize his job.) It's not the most artfully written book, but the story is so fascinating it transcends the author's rather pedestrian style. And, unlike the many accounts of Parsons' life you can find online, "Sex and Rockets" provides a fairly objective telling of the story that seems to have intrigued many an occultist writer.

Hold the phone

Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

If Robert Tercek has it right, ground zero for media convergence won't be the morphing of your PC and television. The ultimate convergence appliance will be the battered cell phone buried in your purse or briefcase -- or at least a future generation of it. Tercek, 36, is so convinced of the centrality of wireless mobile devices in our content future that he is leaving a cushy position as senior vice president of digital media for Sony Pictures Entertainment to become president of Packet Video Networks, the content division for PacketVideo.

PacketVideo was formed last year by James Carol and James Brailean with investments from Siemens and Intel. The plan is to market technologies that allow content providers to stream video and other rich media to cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless mobile devices. The San Diego startup, which holds six video-compression patents, recently collaborated with Sony to deliver movie trailers to cell phones at 14.4 kbps wireless network speeds.

The accidental entertainer

Mon, 15 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Canadians like Mike Myers and Jim Carrey have presided over the entertainment world of the 1990s. Born and raised near Toronto, Rob Burgess, 42, may well carry that tradition into the 2000s -- at least in the nascent world of online entertainment. Unlike his show biz counterparts, Burgess is a software exec -- the CEO of Macromedia, a 3-D graphics company he is credited with transforming from a moribund, money-losing victim of the collapsing CD-ROM market into a profitable producer of animation tools for an increasing lively Web.

Last July, Burgess' company launched Shockwave.com, a Web entertainment hub featuring animated games and cartoons like Comedy Central's "South Park," Showtime's "WhirlGirl," and -- in an exclusive deal signed last week -- Spiderman creator Stan Lee's Seventh Portal. Shockwave.com has quickly become one of the most popular game and animation sites around; it averages 2.1 million page views per day and registered over 5 million visitors in its first three months.

Gambling on the Webcast

Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Hollywood's best-funded and most controversial online entertainment start-up needed a new chief technical officer -- someone who could strengthen its management lineup as it heads into what will be a closely watched IPO. When the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) tapped Greg Carpenter, 37, for the job in August, it recruited someone who brings more than just streaming media expertise to the table.

A tech-head who has long worked at the edge of new developments in broadband and the digital distribution of music, the Indiana-born Carpenter is also a former aerospace engineer, pro golfer (2 handicap) and Hollywood raconteur who palled around with Arsenio Hall and Jim Carrey at the Comedy Store in the mid-1980s. Not only that; he's a part-time hog farm flooring manufacturer. ("There's more technology involved than you'd think," he says.)

During his six years in Redmond, Carpenter was a key figure in Microsoft's effort to develop Internet tools. His job was to get the moribund interactive television group "technically geared to the Internet delivery space."

Short attention span theater

Wed, 21 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Mika Salmi believes the Web suffers from an acute case of attention-deficit disorder. His company, AtomFilms, is one of many entertainment sites hoping to make a living streaming short films, video clips, animation and claymation to a distractable, multi-tasking Web audience. It is part of the transformation of the Web into what Warner Bros. Online executive vice president Jim Banister calls "short attention span theater."

"Here's a category [short films] that has been under-marketed and not seen by a lot of the public," Salmi explains over a burger and fries at the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank, Calif. (The restaurant gained minor fame in the indie film business when, early in his career, David Lynch reputedly had a chocolate shake at this Bob's every day for four years.) We are a couple blocks from the offices of Warner Bros. Online, which recently joined former Universal Pictures chief Frank Biondi and Arts Alliance in London to invest in Salmi's company. "People are in a very active environment on the Web," says Salmi, a tall Finn who was previously a business development executive at streaming media company RealNetworks. "They're leaning forward toward the computer, not leaning back on their couch with a clicker. They want things that are going to be very quick."