The Second Coming

By Oo Gin Lee

When I first became an IT journalist in 2000, my blood was pumping with adrenaline everyday. It was the height of the dot com boom, and money was a-plenty to fund Jeff Bezos and Jerry Yang wannabes. Heck, all you needed was a decent idea and a .com and watch your shares soar like the wind. Even Li Ka Shing wanted to be part of it, and he saw his shares in tom.com hit the roof. In fact, tom.com had nothing more than a .com in its name and the reputation of Hong Kong's most famous tycoon.

In my team of 6 at the Straits Times Tech & Science Desk, I was initially disappointed that I would not be reviewing the cool gadgets (that went to Steve Dawson, who now is with ESPN) nor the software (that was Francis Chin whose teenage son had a ball of a time with those free games!). Nope, I was tasked by my boss, Tarn How (famous playwright who wrote the screenplay for the first 2 seasons of Growing Up and now with some think tank organisation) to cover the dot commers.

My disappointment soon turned to elation as I began to see the importance of my role. I would make the dot commers famous. I would be their bridge to the world. Help them become millionaires. There was plenty of potential at that time. Patrick Grove of Catcha.com was sizzling hot with his local search engine. The team of cool and good looking dudes and gals from MTV left to start their music website SoundBuzz.com. Then there was earth9.com who wanted to create Habitats, much like what eCircles used to do. How about iteru.net, the guys who started sending SMS messages to huge screens at parties, way before StarHub even thought about Hub TV. Whoever said Singaporeans were uncreative need only look to the dot com era.

In those days, these millionaire wannabes were called Technopreuners and getting Incubated was the hip thing to do. (Incubation means getting funded and getting cheap office space so that your business could grow to a level where you are ready to hatch out of your protective shell) Dot commers were partying every night, meeting venture capitalists and networking with the whole world, including those from the brick-and-mortar traditionals who wanted to get a piece of the money-spinning action. Powering these dot com dreams was a local company called Edge Matrix, who provided the servers and stuff to host the web sites. You may not have heard of the company, but its founder and CEO Dinesh Bhatia hit the news for the wrong reasons years on. Whatever it was, there was plenty of excitement in the air.

I still remember my first break into the Prime pages of The Straits Times. After slogging out for months, I finally met these two good-looking girls who had just set-up an online lingerie store ala Victoria Secretes called efrenchkiss. One was an ex-beauty queen, the other a biz ad graduate. So my first big story, showed these two girls - beauty and brains - holding out a bra at page 4. Their smiles and lingerie filled the page. My words sadly only took up a few lines.

Anyway, as we all know, the dot com fantasy came crashing down one fine day, and with it, the dreams of millions were shattered. Patrick Grove, with his good looks, stopped appearing on the cover of a zillion managazines. He retreated for a while and then made a strong comeback by shifting to the magazine business. Catcha now publishes Juice, Stuff and other magazines. Also alive and kicking, and I suspect doing well, is efrenchkiss, whose website is still selling the sexy lingerie. I remember asking the gals why they sold panties and bras separately instead of a "set" and they shared that in truth, bras were just too expensive so gals had to mix and match! Soundbuzz as you know has made an amazing comeback by actually making people pay to buy music at their portal and signed some great partnerships witht he record labels. As for Edge Matrix and Iteru, their web domains are up for sale right now if you are keen. Earth9 never hit it off with their Habitat dreams but they went to become a leading web solutions company for Microsoft and many other big boys.

As for me. I left The Straits Times in 2002 to set-up my own writing business, mainly to look after my new baby. Thankfully, I still managed to get freelance writing assignments with the papers and IT magazines and the ink is still running in my blood. Unfortunately the demise of the dot com fantasy meant that IT became really boring. Super boring. I turned to reviewing games and gadgets. But now, I can feel my blood pumping again, I can feel the adrenaline flowing again. Now, the excitement is back. And it's called Web 2.0

Simply put, Web 2.0 is the new Web, with super cool applications and tools that you never thought would be possible. Let's start with Google. Back in 2000, Google was this wannabe search engine company who was taking on big guns like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Infoseek, and so on. I remeber telling my suit friends about Google. They poohed-poohed the name. Well, I guess Google had the last laugh. Google's success with online ads meant that it had the muscles and resources to spend some time developing some cool applications. Now with Google software, you can manage your digital picture library, get 2 GB free email, view planet Earth from outer space, earn money by placing ads on your own web-site, search your Outllook e-mail in a jiffy and much much more.

Google was the catalyst. More would follow. Skype, Bit Torrent, Mozilla Firefox are now all household names. Firefox has established itself as serious contender to Internet Explorer, and remains my personal preference for its tabbed browsing and zillion plug-ins.

There are many less well known but equally compelling ones. Jajah.com lets you make phone to phone calls for free. ScanR turns your mobile phone camera into a powerful business card and document scanner. Watch HBO, CNN and other cable TV channels on your PC with TVU

The new Web is here. Once again, I wake up in the morning with a sense of expectation, hoping to discover the next Web application that will blow my mind away. Some of these stuff doesn't even make business sense. It does sound familiar doesn't it? Yes, it's the Second Coming my friends.