Spring Internet World '98 Update

This year Ric and Doran once again journeyed into into the vast caverns of the Los Angeles Convention Center to make our annual pilgrimage to the Spring Internet World convention, looking to find out what the future (say the next 6 weeks) holds in store for us wired ones. This year, more than last, the convention was a relatively low-key affair. We were struck by how ordinary some of the products offered by the Big Names in the business. That said, there were a number of products by smaller companies that did indeed catch our attention. There was also a keynote by Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo and perhaps the prototype Web-entrepreneur. He stressed how the Internet has changed rapidly in the 2 years since his company's IPO, both in demographics and purpose. What was once primarily a research and education tool is quickly becoming a commerce-driven entity, with over a $1,000,000,000 of sales over it's wires last year. He also made an important point about looking to increased bandwidth to solve the Internet's latency (speed) problems by pointing out that, like CPU power, future developers will be more than willing to use up all of the new, increased resources. Featured Interviews: Dan Schafer, Builder.com - Kerry Chinn, Vice President of Product Assurance at Conversá - Kelaine Olvera, 3Com - Bill Cullifer, National Association of Webmasters - Jim Wolfsten, CollegeNet - Ross Leibowitz, VP of Engineering for Miros - Susan Scott, Executive Director of Truste - Todd Ridgeway, Live Picture - There were also a number of other products which caught our eyes, including: Skunk Technologies, makers of Entao, an 100% Java-based office suite of collaborative tools. Macromedia, with their DreamWeaver web page editor and Fireworks, a production tool for creating web graphics. DigitalCast, a Korean company looking to find a manufacturer for it's cool MPStation, a portable MP3 Audio player which can store up to an hour of CD-quality music or 8 hours of speech. As more and more music gets bought and sold over the Internet, this kind of player will possibly replace your walkman or portable CD player.