Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Who Wants to Be an Internet Millionaire?—the show that combines the glamour of the Internet wealth with all the difficulty of a television game show. I’m your host Regis Philbin. Do you have what it takes to be an Internet millionaire? Let’s find out.

One of the lucky—excuse me—visionary contestants in our cubicle pit will have the chance to beome a millionaire tonight. And not just any kind of millionaire, but an Internet millionaire.

One of these gentlemen, oh excuse me Miss Simpson, will put these four things in the correct order and win a chance to come up to the center IPO circle and become an Internet Millionaire.

Here’s the question: In what order did these companies pirate the graphic user interface from one another?

Microsoft SRI Apple Xerox PARC

And our winner is Herman Pitzel with the slowest time of 1 minute, 13 seconds.

That’s right Pitzel, Parc snagged it from SRI, then Apple copied PARC, then Microsoft lifted it off Apple and actually made it profitable. Congratulations Mr. Pitzel! But remember, as you move up to the center IPO circle, you don’t want to be weighed down with the history of technology or innovation in this fast-moving Internet world.

Here is your first question:

If you’re not cut out to be a founder and you’re trying to hit the big time, do you:

1. Pick four companies likely to be bought and work for each of them for one year each. In other words, become a serial vester
2. become an independent consultant and take stock in as many companies as possible
3. day trade in your abundant spare time after your 80 hour work week designing business-to-business ecommerce sites
4. go into PR and marry a CEO

Excellent job Herman. All are good choices, but D is obviously the most time-effective.

Next question. To a venture capitalist, a dog merger is:

1. when their pet dog humps the neighbours dog
2. a joint venture between two pet portals
3. a beanie babie
4. merging two throw-away investments and selling them to an international company

That’s right Herman, D again! Oh, those poor unsuspecting international companies. Valley entrepreneurship is one place where you can take two wrongs and make a right. OK Herman, next question. You’re a CEO. You’ve got $250,000 left in the bank and your monthly burn rate is $300,000. Do you:

1. scrimp to make payroll
2. get a loan
3. promise AOL $17 million for exclusive placement on their site
4. buy a Ferrari

Exactly, D again! Appearing like you haven’t a care in the world is the best way to secure investment.

Fantastic! You’re at the $36,000 level Herman. But that’s nothing but grade school tuition to you Internet types. Are you going to take it and leave like a weak-kneed quitter?”

“No, Regis. I’m not leaving anything on the table. Let’s go for all the clams.”

“Alright then, here we go. Again, as a CEO, you are having difficulty raising a second round of funding, do you:

1. get the company logo redesigned
2. change the entire focus of the company
3. take out a superbowl ad
4. kick the founders out of the company and use their unvested shares to hire someone who was once a senior manager at a company that Yahoo bought”

“It’s seems too strange that every answer would be D, but I’m going to go with D again, Regis”

“Final answer Herman?

“Yes I’m sure”

“Well, congratulations Herman, you’re an Internet Millionaire! What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to be a venture capitalist.”

Regis turns back to the audience:

“Thank you and good night ladies and gentlemen. Please stay tuned for our next program: “Start up Widow,” where one lucky fiancée will get her founder beau to commit to marriage without a pre-nup. The winner will have her wedding right here on our stage.”

I spent a weekend at a recent Internet conference. Beyond the traditional networking opportunity and debate, the conference offered us a chance to see new companies do a song and dance, and pick our favourites by Applause-o-meter. The experience translated into something that was equal parts Home Shopping Channel, and Showtime at the Apollo. I half expected to see the Unknown Comic and a gong. It’s yet another sign of these fast moving Internet times. Everyone needs to give their conference participation a little zip or the audience will fall asleep, or jump on a cell phone faster than you can say “proprietary patent pending technology.”

Being the old-fashioned sort that I am, I thought it might be useful to ease conference going and return a certain level of decorum to the din.

With that in mind I offer a guide to effective conference participation:

1. In order to appear to be a worthwhile or important attendee, you must at all times have a pressing matter that calls your attention away to a communications device or another hallway conversation.
2. Unless you are Jesse Jackson, don’t try to pull off phrases like “our vision of turning bandwidth into brandwidth.”
3. If you are going to open your presentation with infomercial enthusiasm: “Hello Ladies and Gentlemen: this time last year I was a kickboxing instructor. You know what my biggest problem was …besides getting kicked and punched in the head?” then you had better follow up with something as impressive as getting kicked and punched in the head.
4. Have a quick, snappy response to the question “who are you with?” Answering, “myself” will not suffice.
5. If your company is presenting itself to the public for the first time at the conference, and is given only 6 minutes in which to do it, immediately explain the purpose of the company in the simplest language available. A pantomime will not do.
6. If in doubt about the specifics of your company or business model and you must entertain, simply hold a pep rally for money.
7. If you wish to give an assessment of an “average” consumer opinion, segue into an amusing anecdote about your wife, mother or child’s Internet experiences. Everyone in the room will nod silently in agreement, knowing that civilian women and children are the authorities when it comes to genuine life experiences.
8. Show no surprise that all of the speakers are white men. Mentioning this fact and chuckling while a Latino waiter fills your glass on stage shows extremely poor taste and gives an unfair impression of the homogeneity of the appointed authorities at the conference. After all, Ann Winblad will be speaking later.
9. If you are offered the opportunity to deliver a keynote address to the conference, and have nothing new to say, appear via some form of two-way satellite delivery.
10. If you are going to name your venture “the leader” in a particular realm, or hold a launch party for your web site, company or product, your credibilty will be greatly enhanced by actually having launched it.

(first published on the back page of New Media Magazine)

I originally put this together for a magazine best known for its annual chart designed to explain the business relationships between technology, media and entertainment sectors. Every year they’d hire frogdesign, who would come up with some new way of attaching arrows and circles, or boxes, or fish, or some other metaphor to attempt to make the whole scene easy to understand. It never helped me get to the truth of the matter, so in the midst of dot com insanity, I decided to create my own explanation of what was going on.

The great contribution to literature of our modern age is the charticle. How can any author resist its siren song?

Many publications (including the one in your hands) spend countless months analyzing and choosing influential and important individuals and companies in this fine eIndustry.

I have drawn from a few hours of careless thought, years of general observation and a small modicum of sodium pentathol to give you:

Heather’s Guide to the Internet Universe (a/k/a “The Other Chart”):

When one thinks about the icons of the technology business, many faces spring to mind: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell. Now there’s a new name to add to the list, but not a new face. Combining the anonymity and buzz of Internet upstarts like The Springfield Project with the ruthlessness and opportunism of the Valley’s favorite leadership role model–Attila the Hun–Kate Hunter has taken the scene by storm.

Hunter, the dancer who began her meteoric rise to fame and power as the backdrop for a series of 3Com advertisements, used the Palm campaign and her own marketing savvy to become one of the “hottest new visionaries” in the business, according to industry magazine Russian Brides and Market Cap.

Hunter has quickly become the most visible woman in technology, displacing another dancer, Kim Polese. Hunter knocked Polese off her oft-photographed pedestal and left Katrina Garnett in the dust. Garnett was one of the first women to boast both a room and company of her own in a little black number.

“Garnett had to pay for her own ad,” boasts Hunter. “And she wore a dress. She’s beginning to cover up even more,” referring to Garnett’s recent Forbes cover shot in a leather-vinyl dominatrix outfit. “My ass could kick her ass any day.”

Not content to be the most powerful woman in the technology business, Hunter has been dubbed the “Salome of Silicon Valley” because she is known to wander the halls of the Palm division shrieking “Bring me the head of St. John the Doerr.”

When she insisted she be given a Palm V to play with before stripping down for her now infamous “huddled fetus” billboard, 3Com understood that she was not just another nude model. Before the end of the shoot, the prodigy had already learned how to create her own to-do list. (3Com lore now debates whether the first was “moisturize” or “get dressed.”) Forseeing her role as a leading woman in technology, Hunter worked quickly. Before the ad campaign ended, she created a special feature list for her vision of the future female Palm market:

• Synchs with your menstrual cycle
• Detects single men within a 10-yard perimeter
• Does your colors digitally
• Alarm beeps every time you break The Rules
• Recipes!
• Makes counting calories fun
• Fits in your tiny, frail hand

Hunter then marshalled support from highly-respected female authorities to back-up the campaign she knew would be controversial.

“There is nothing as powerful as the female body. Kate is really the one in control in those billboards.”
–Camille Paglia

“The curled pose of the Divine recalls Giovanni’s Virgin Mother masterpiece. The young Pilot the Fifth’s glowing face springs forth from the canvas, illuminating the young Mother who caresses Him, while at the same time respectfully shielding her gaze from the face of God.”
–Sister Wendy, PBS Art Historian

“I know what it’s like to be a symbol. I’ve reclaimed my identity and so has whatsername.”
–Geri Halwell (a/k/a Ginger Spice)

At a sold-out Churchill Club appearance last night, 3Com CEO Eric introduced the woman many see as his inevitable successor: “Kate is a visionary who has shown us that there is a customer base of tens of millions of women out there. We now project increased revenues of $230 million next year for our Ladies Auxilliary Product Division. I am proud to announce that Kate will be leading the entire Palm Division of 3Com.”

“My background as a dancer and a model prepared me for the challenges of developing and communicating about innovative technology. I think that comes through in the new campaign we’re unveiling today: Hairy Palms,” Hunter announced. She used a special microphone that allowed her to speak from the same pose she made famous. Hunter has decided to keep her face a mystery, since it has worked so successfully for her thus far. “One of the things I love most about this business is the completely different backgrounds everyone has. It is truly a meritocracy.”

I was thinking over my entrepreneurial options. Interactive plush toys seem to have peaked. Collaborative filtering? Hmm. Needs too many programmers. So 1997.

After much pondering and a trip to my local Safeway late one night, I became convinced that the next big vertical portal is butter.com.

So I called up my virtual CTO (whom I met trading beanie babies on eBay) and we started planning.

It’s gonna be huge. Everybody knows butter. It’s ubiquitous. Everybody needs butter, loves butter. True, there’s a population that genuinely cares about cholesterol intake. Yes, our culture’s relationship with condiments is changing. But those thoughts just prove how many butter questions there are swirling around. So much information to sort through, to find. That’s the beauty of the vertical portal. Every reference, every possibility is organized for you. Especially ones you haven’t thought of.

How much butter was sold last year? How is the euro going to affect the price of butter? Where does Al Gore stand on butter? Butter.com is the place you can go to answer all of those burning questions.

Pluto Communications has found that over 92 percent of dinner recipes call for butter. Butter gets hundreds of millions of eyeballs, or (as we like to say) tongues per month. Butter has mindshare you just can’t buy.

The co-marketing opportunities are unparalleled. We have strategic alliances with asparagus and toast. Corn on the cob has promised us exclusive condiment placement for a mere $50,000. France has promised to make butter.com the nation’s default home page.

The URL will be on every package of Land O’ Lakes–every pat of butter that comes with your dinner roll. You might order a mashed potato but before you can dig in, you’ll see butter.com melting away into fluffy carbohydrate heaven. You order snacks at the movie theater; the woman behind the counter hands you your popcorn and asks: “you want some butter.com on that?”

We’re planning an affinity campaign, so that any site can become a butter partner. Churners™, we like to call them. If you recommend butter.com to a friend, you’ll get 10 butter pats. Send us a tongue that previously used margarine, or I-Can’t-Believe-it’s-not-Butter, you’ll get 15 pats of butter and a free butter.com dish.

Let me tell you, there’s a community crying out to interact with one another around butter. There’s no outlet for people’s butter experiences and they have a lot of feelings they want to share. And recipes. Butter.com’s Butterland ends that isolation and gives them a place to meet. We make honest connections easy with special chats that allow users to share their butter pain while protecting their privacy, courtesy of a Mrs. Butterworth or Aunt Jemima avatar.

To guarantee “stickiness,” we’ve developed a breakthrough technique. After a short 38 second download, a nifty little piece of technology turns your cursor into a pat of butter while you’re on our site. It even leaves a smear of oil behind it as you move your cursor across your screen. In fact, we’ve already had several inquiries from venture capitalists about spinning off this technology into its own licensing business. Butter.com has had a lot of interest from investors. They seem to like the fact that we’ve pinpointed a market in which Microsoft has no interest.

Show me the money you say? Juliachild.com will give us 75 cents for every basting brush our butter.com users buy. Sponsorship opportunities abound. We’ve got lick through you can’t beat! Pluto found that 100 percent of new car buyers also use butter! But, why worry about generating revenues? We’ll go public and gain a market cap that will let us buy some humdrum company to take care of that boring stuff.

Even with those challenges licked, you may still harbor some doubts. How could something as basic as butter be ready for the technological challenge of the broadband era?

I’ve got one word for you: hollandaise.com.

In this two-part downloadable article, I explain the different Internet content models from a copyright perspective, and analyze some of the implications for the future of the media/new media business. This piece was first published in the Silicon Alley Reporter, and then a revised version was published in Digital Mogul.

As with everything on this site, please email contact@subvert.com to request permission to license, reproduce or distribute.

Part 1 (pdf)

Part 2 (pdf)

I contributed to this piece along with many other early web pundits. It’s a satirical response to an early issue Wired published titled 101 Ways to Save Apple, back when folks liked to hypothesize that the company was going to die. I can’t remember the exact date it was published, but if you check out contributor links, you’ll get some idea from the number of echonyc, well.com, and aol member pages.