From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media eCommerce Timeline

Compuserve is founded as a way to generate income from Golden United mainframe computers during non-business hours.

Comcast became the first commercial online service in the United States.

Larry Costello founds Antiquarian Databases International (ADI).

A Bulletin Board Service (BBS), ADI was the first operational online antiquarian bookselling site, and an extremely early venture in ecommerce, but it closed after only a few months.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the NSFNET Backbone Network, clearing the way for electronic commerce.

Richard Weatherford establishes Interloc, "the first successful online bookseller service."

Arguing that "our mission is to help booksellers find books for their own customers," Weatherford opened the database to booksellers only.

Psychologist, neural scientist and cognitive scientist James A. Anderson publishes "The BSB Model: A simple non-linear autoassociative network," M. Hassoun (Ed), Associative Neural Memories: Theory and Implementation (1993).

Anderson's neural networks have been applied to models of human concept formation, decision making, speech perception, and models of vision.

Anderson, J. A., Spoehr, K. T. and Bennett, D.J.  "A study in numerical perversity: Teaching arithmetic to a neural network,"  D.S. Levine and M. Aparicio (Eds.) Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference, (1994).

Tim O’Reilly launches the Global Network Navigator. This the first web portal and the first true commercial website. According to a statement by Tim O'Reilly, it contains the first online advertising. The Global Network Navigator will be sold to America Online in 1995.

Gary Kremen and Peng T. Ong start the online dating site Match.com.

"The initial business scope developed by this team included a possible subscription model, now common among personals services, and inclusion of diverse communities with high first trial and market leaders status, including women, technology professionals and the GLBT community. Fran Maier joined in late 1994 to lead the Match.com business unit where she significantly bolstered the strategy to make Match.com friendly and accessible to women (the men would then follow)" (Wikipedia article on Match.com).

Jim Sterne launches the first "Marketing on the Internet" seminar series.

This eight-city tour was intended to promote the possibilities of using the Internet for advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  change the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang select the name because they like the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL is akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They will create the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Commercial spamming starts when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegeluse bulk Usenet postings to advertise immigration law services. This is called the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings: "Green Card Lottery-Final One?"

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invents the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

Entepeneur Ariel Poler founds Internet Profiles Corporation ( I/PRO), the first commercial web analytics vendor, producer of the first log analyzer.

"The company emerged as the early market leader in the developing field of web usage measurement, partly because of its partnership with the venerable Neilsen Media Research . . . and Neilsen Media Services in . . . 1995." (Peters, Computerized Monitoring and Online Privacy [1999] 343).

WebtraffIQ.com develops the first commercial web page tagging system.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founds craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It will evolve into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist will eventually make a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com as an online bookstore. 

"The first book Amazon sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" (Wikipedia article on Amazon.com, accessed 03-20-2010).

Netscape Communications has a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

Pierre M. Omidyar founds eBay as a sole proprietorship.

Initially he conducted auctions under the name AuctionWeb, and advertised items for auction on USENET.

The used and antiquarian bookselling website Abebooks.com is launched.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, begin collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

Citation analysis, referenced in this database, was pioneered by Eugene Garfield beginning in 1955.

Nettracker.com produces the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger publish the Cluetrain Manifesto containing 95 theses:

“A powerful global conversation has begun.” “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies.” “Markets are conversations.” The manifesto is first published online, followed by a book.

Cognitive scientist / entrepeneur Jeffrey Stibel, physicist, psychologist, neural scientist  James A. Anderson, and others create a word sense disambiguator using George A. Miller's WordNet lexical database.

Stibel and others applied this technology in Simpli, "an early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter in a search term that was ambiguous (e.g., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas)."

"The technology was rooted in brain science and built by academics to model the way in which the mind stored and utilized language."

"Simpli was sold in 2000 to NetZero. Another company that leveraged the Simpli WordNet technology was purchased by Google and they continue to use the technology for search and advertising under the brand Google AdSense.

"In 2001, there was a buyout of the company and it was merged with another company called Search123. Most of the original members joined the new company. The company was later sold in 2004 to ValueClick, which continues to use the technology and search engine to this day" (Wikipedia article on Simpli, accessed 05-10-2009).

The Internet Society (ISOC) meets to discuss the growing spam problem.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google.

They described the technology in a paper entitled  "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, 107-117.

The first Google index included 26,000,000 web pages.

The MyFamily.com website is launched. with additional free sites beginning in March, 1999. The site generated 1 million registered users within its first 140 days. The company raised more than $90 million in venture capital from investors and changed its name on November 17, 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc., to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyHistory.com.

Reference: http://www.paulallen.net/my-companies, accessed 12-18-2008.

The U. S. Supreme Court rules that Internet domain names are property.

Magid M. Abraham and Gian M. Fulgoni found comScore with the objective of creating the first service to measure trends in e-commerce.

"At the time, no market research company measured online buying behavior. The two leading online measurement companies, Media Metrix and Nielsen NetRatings, were focused solely on tracking Internet users’ site visitation behavior, providing their clients with basic metrics on the size and demographic characteristics of site audiences.

"The panels these two companies used numbered in the tens of thousands. This was far too small a sample size to accurately measure e-commerce since, on average, only 5 percent of a site’s visitors converted into buyers in any month. A panel of at least a million people would be needed. That was a daunting challenge because no research company had ever built a panel of 100,000 people, let alone a million. However, since their experience at IRI had shown that marketers spend four times as many research dollars measuring consumers’ buying behavior as they spend measuring media ratings, Magid and Gian were confident that an attractive market existed for online browsing and buying information. They decided to take on the challenge by raising and willingly investing tens of millions of dollars to discover ways in which to successfully recruit millions of opt-in panelists and develop the technology needed to capture, warehouse and analyze massive quantities of online data" (http://www.comscore.com/About_comScore/comScore_History, accessed 05-12-2009).

John D. Leckenby of The University of Texas at Austin and Hairong Li of Michigan State University found the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD).

The inaugural issue of the journal

"defined Interactive Advertising as the 'paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.' This is most commonly performed through the Internet as a medium" (Wikipedia article on Interactive advertising, accessed 04-22-2009).

The dot-com bubble, thought to have begun with the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995, reaches its climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52.

After this date the dot-com bubble began to burst.

"Google Launches Self-Service Advertising Program

"Google's AdWords Program Offers Every Business a Fully Automated, Comprehensive and Quick Way to Start an Online Advertising Campaign /

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - October 23, 2000 - Google Inc., developer of the award-winning Google search engine, today announced the immediate availability of AdWords(TM), a new program that enables any advertiser to purchase individualized and affordable keyword advertising that appears instantly on the google.com search results page. The AdWords program is an extension of Google's premium sponsorship program announced in August. The expanded service is available on Google's homepage or at the AdWords link at http://adwords.google.com, where users will find all the necessary design and reporting tools to get an online advertising campaign started" (http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease39.html, accessed 06-09-2009).

Apple launches the iPod line of portable media players.

Jim Sterne founds the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.This began as a web analytics conference but expanded into onlline marketing optimization.

In 2009 the series currently reached audiences throughout the year in Toronto, Munich, San Jose, London, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Washington D.C. and Mexico City.

Apple opens the software based, online iTunes Store.

Brad Greenspan and eUniverse found MySpace.

"The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187, was S.877 of the 108th United States Congress), signed into law by President George W. Bush establishes the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.

"The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. This is also a play on the usual term for unsolicited email of this type, spam. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.

"The CAN-SPAM Act is commonly referred to as the "You-Can-Spam" Act because the bill explicitly legalizes most e-mail spam. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages. It also prevents states from enacting stronger anti-spam protections, and prohibits individuals who receive spam from suing spammers. The Act has been largely unenforced, despite a letter to the FTC from Senator Burns, who noted that "Enforcement is key regarding the CAN-SPAM legislation." In 2004 less than 1% of spam complied with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

"The law required the FTC to report back to Congress within 24 months of the effectiveness of the act.[4] No changes were recommended. It also requires the FTC to promulgate rules to shield consumers from unwanted mobile phone spam. On December 20, 2005 the FTC reported that the volume of spam has begun to level off, and due to enhanced anti-spam technologies, less was reaching consumer inboxes. A significant decrease in sexually-explicit e-mail was also reported.

"Later modifications changed the original CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 by (1) Adding a definition of the term "person"; (2) Modifying the term "sender"; (3) Clarifying that a sender may comply with the act by including a post office box or private mailbox and (4) Clarifying that to submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website" (Wikipedia article on CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, accessed 01-19-2010).

Chris Anderson publishes "The Long Tail" in Wired magazine.

In this article he described "the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

"A frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson's coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of "non-hit" items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

"Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

"The Long Tail concept has found a broad ground for application, research and experimentation. It is a common term in online business and the mass media, but also of importance in micro-finance (Grameen Bank, for example), user-driven innovation (Eric von Hippel), social network mechanisms (e.g., crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, Peer-to-peer), economic models, and marketing (viral marketing)" (Wikipedia article on The Long Tail, accessed 04-19-2009).

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launches the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

"a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

This was  the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that US$16.9 billion was spent on Internet marketing in the U.S. during this year. (PricewaterhouseCoopers website, accessed 05-10-2009).

Google announces the planned opening of the Google Video Store, "the first open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers."

Having initially registered the domain name for free, and then temporarily losing it to a con man, Gary Kremen wins a lawsuit and sells Sex.com for $14,000,000. This was the highest price obtained for a domain name at the time. Maybe ever?

Free file-sharing of digital music on the web exceeds the sale of digital music downloads by many fold: "Total music sales - including online - are off some 20 percent from five years ago. Songs traded freely over unlicensed Internet sites swamp the number of legal sales by thousands to one."

Apple launches iTunes U, a service that offers college-level lectures via podcasts.

Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Expedia launch the online real estate service company, Zillow.com.

"Zillow allows users to see the value of millions of homes across the United States, not just those up for sale. In addition to giving value estimates of homes, it offers several unique features including value changes of each home in a given time frame (such as 1, 5, or 10 years), aerial views of homes, and prices of homes in the area. Where it can access appropriate data, it also provides basic information on a given home, such as square footage and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Users can also get current estimates of homes if there was a significant change made, such as a recently remodeled kitchen. Zillow provides an application programming interface (API) and developer support network^.

"As a part of its API, Zillow assigns a numerical integer to each of the 70 million homes in its database, which is plainly visible as CGI parameters to the URLs to individual entries on its website. The identifier is not obfuscated and is assigned in sequence for each house or condo on the side of a street. Zillow reports on individual units, such as providing street address, latitude and longitude. When integrated with the features of a typical online reverse telephone directory and wiki-mapping services such as WikiMapia, it allows for nationwide "seating assignments" of U.S. neighborhoods for each house that has a listed phone number with a real human name" (Wikipedia article on Zillow.com.)

Apple iTunes Store surpasses one billion iTunes downloads.

Apple's iTunes Store is acknowledged as the biggest music retailer in the world, able to dictate its 99 cent per track retail price to music wholesalers.

MySpace, founded in August 2003, has 100,000,000 users.

Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec, a blender manufacturer, begins the Will it Blend? viral marketing campaign on the Internet.

Between downloads on YouTube and on the Will it Blend? website, the advertising program, featuring blending of many absurd items such as blending an iPhone, many of which are listed and linked-to in the Wikipedia article on Will it Blend?, became one of the most successful Internet marketing campaigns, surpassing 100,000,000 hits by May 2009.

Google and various print newspapers, including The New York Times, announce that they will test a modified version of Google's AdWords program to place advertisements in print newspapers.

Google completes the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

"A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology . . . . In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

"But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo."

MySpace has over 200,000,000 accounts. Within approximately one year it has gained 100,000,000 new accounts.

The revenue from AdWords, Google's flagship advertising product, is  $21,795,550,000 in 2008.

"AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes" (Wikipedia article on AdWords, accessed 06-09-2009).

By 2008 broadband technologies had spread to more than 90% of all residential Internet connections in the United States.

"When one considers a Nielsen’s study conducted in June 2008, which estimated the number of U.S. Internet users as 220,141,969, one can calculate that there are presently about 199 million people in the United States utilizing broadband technologies to surf the Web" (Wikipedia article on Internet marketing, accessed 05-10-2009).

Apple's iTunes Store has reportedly sold five billion songs.

Apple opens its online iTunes App Store. At launch it contains 522 Apps including 135 free programs.

Founded in 1995, craigslist, the leading classified advertising service in any medium, provides free local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries, generating more than 12 billion page views per month, used by more than 50 million people each month. Craigslist users self-publish more than 30 million new classified ads each month and more than 2 million new job listings each month. Each month craigslist also posts more than 100 million user postings in more than 100 topical forms. All of this it does with only 25 employees.

Because craigslist does not charge for classified advertising it has replaced a large portion of the classified advertising that historically was placed in print newspapers. By doing so it has substantially reduced the significant revenue that print newspapers historically generated from classified advertising. This has contributed to an overall reduction of profits for many print newspapers. Similarly, craigslist's policy of charging below-market rates for job listings has impacted that traditional source of newspaper revenue, and has impacted profits at physical employment agencies, and the more expensive online employment agencies.

Apple's iTunes App Store reports that it has sold 200,000,000 million downloads sinces its opening on July 10, 2008. The store now has 5500 Apps available for purchase.

Atlantic Records, a unit of Warner Music Group, reports that more than half its revenue comes from downloads and ringtones sold over the Internet, rather than CDs. This is the first major record label to record this change.

Having sold over a billion songs through the iTunes store in 2008, Apple announces that it has reached agreements with record companies to remove anticopying restrictions on all tunes in the iTunes store. It will also allow record companies to set a range of prices for the songs.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com unveils a larger version of the Amazon Kindle called the Kindle DX (for Deluxe). The larger model has a  "9.7-inch display with auto-rotation, high-speed wireless access to 275,000 books, 3.3 gigabytes of storage, or room for up to 3,500 books. Native support for PDF documents, with no panning, zooming or scrolling necessary" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/live-blogging-the-kindle-fest/).

The initial list price of the DX was $489, or $130 more than the previous model, the Kindle 2. The DX was available for sale in the summer of 2009.

In an interview in the Financial Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt

"reveals that Google seriously considered either buying a newspaper as a for-profit enterprise or hiring a pack of smart lawyers to reconfigure the paper as a nonprofit venture. He doesn't name which paper, of course, but the Financial Times reporters pointedly remind their readers that the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners offered Google its twenty percent stake in the New York Times. Ultimately, however, the company decided that going so far as owning an outlet that actually produced copy, rather than simply aggregating and organizing it, would be 'crossing the line' between a content company and a technology company. Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Vascellaro argues that this position is growing increasingly flimsy. After all, she writes, both YouTube and Google's Book Search project are awfully close to resembling content production.

"The real reason may be twofold. First, as Schmidt readily concedes, the targeted papers are either far too expensive or burdened with too much debt and liabilities. Second, the advertising model for general news reporting is obsolete, and Google's execs have decided instead to work with papers such as the Washington Post . . .to come up with a new model that can subsidize serious general news gathering. The days when general display ads would float on the page, contextually disconnected from the substance of the stories, are over. But who wants their ads tied to stories of Gitmo torture? Unless the business model radically changes, there will be no revenue stream that props up the most serious and important news stories.

"So what does Schmidt have in mind for the Washington Post? 'It seems to me that the newspaper that I read online should remember what I read. It should allow me to go deeper into the stories. It's that kind of a discussion that we're having.' In other words, the paper will store and archive a catalogue of the stories you read, steer more stories along those lines to your eyeballs, and keep you coming back for more by knowing what you're most interested in. Google already remembers what you search for, in order to more accurately match ads to your search screen. Now, it seems, Schmidt would like to apply this technique to news gathering" (http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/feeling-lucky/2009/05/21/google-almost-bought-paper, accessed 05-22-2009)

"Around 14.9 million U.S. households regularly buy books online. Among that group, 48 percent earn more than $70,000 a year and spend $28 a month on books, half of them online" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10253199-93.html, accessed 06-01-2009)

"SAN FRANCISCO — As the newspaper industry and its classified advertising business wither, one company appears to be doing extraordinarily well: Craigslist.

"The Internet classified ads company, which promotes its “relatively noncommercial nature” and “service mission” on its site, is projected to bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year, according to a new study from Classified Intelligence Report, a publication of AIM Group, a media and Web consultant firm in Orlando, Fla.

"That is a 23 percent jump over the revenue the firm estimated for 2008 and a huge increase since 2004, when the site was projected to bring in just $9 million. 'This is a down-market for just about everyone else but Craigslist,' said Jim Townsend, editorial director of AIM Group. The firm counted the number of paid ads on the site for a month and extrapolated an annual figure. It said its projections were conservative.

"By contrast, classified advertising in newspapers in the United States declined by 29 percent last year, its worst drop in history, according to the Newspaper Association of America" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/technology/internet/10craig.html?hpw, accessed 06-10-2009).

Microsoft and Yahoo! announce  10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine, currently second-largest in terms of query volume, will be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell advertisements on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding.

MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive Media, announces that it will acquire the "social music discovery service" iLike.

Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network presenting the findings of the Internet Observatory Report at the North American Network Operators Group NANOG47 in Dearborn, Michigan.

"• The report is believed to be the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s. The report offers analysis of two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers.

"• At its peak, the study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second and a total of more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic over the two-year life of the study.

"• The Internet Observatory Report includes a discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; and a concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends.

Key Findings:

"• Evolution of the Internet Core: Over the last five years, Internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional Internet core of 10 to 12 Tier-1 international transit providers. Today, the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenter / CDNs and consumer networks. Consequently, most Tier-1 networks have evolved their business models away from IP wholesale transit to focus on broader cloud / enterprise services, content hosting and VPNs.

"• Rise of the ‘Hyper Giants’: Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world. Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – “hyper giants” like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

"• Applications Migrate to the Web: Historically, Internet applications communicated across a panoply of application specific protocols and communication stacks. Today, the majority of Internet application traffic has migrated to an increasingly small number of web and video protocols, including video over web and Adobe Flash. Other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years.

"• A New Internet Ecosystem: Over the last five years, macroeconomic forces have radically transformed the global Internet commercial ecosystem. Economic changes, including the collapse of wholesale IP transit and the dramatic growth in advertisement-supported service, reversed decade-old business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers. A wave of innovation is ongoing, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs. This change in the Internet business ecosystem has significant ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research."

According to the report by Arbor Networks' 2009 Atlas Observatory Report Google accounts for 6 percent of all Internet traffic of every type. 

"And how many would have heard of a company called Carpathia Hosting? Its MegaUpload, MeaErotik, MegaClick and MegaVideo services have turned it into a company that now accounts for 1 percent of all Internet traffic, says Arbor, and this will doubtless grow. The important takeaway is that few of these companies had even been heard of two years ago, and very few of them are big telcos. To put all this into perspective, in 2007 Arbor found that the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic was accounted for by 30,000 entities, with fifty percent of traffic accounted for by around 10,000 companies.

"Only two years later that same fifty percent now runs through only 150 top 'content delivery networks' (CDNs), an astonishing consolidation made more remarkable by the fact that Internet traffic has grown significantly during that time.

" 'Up to 2007, The Internet meant connecting to lots of servers and data centres around the world,' notes Arbor's chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. Now there are barely 100 companies that matter. Traffic patterns tend to be hidden, mainly because the companies losing out - the traditional telcos and ISPs - don't exactly have an interest in advertising their waning status. The reason for their decline in importance is that Internet traffic is being driven by huge providers with access to content such as video.

" 'For 150 years, they [BT and other telcos] have had the same business model. Now everyone is trying to get away from being a dumb pipe.' Arbor's Atlas Internet Observatory report crunched traffic from 100 of the Internet's largest entities, accounting for 12 Terabytes of peak throughput, equivalent to about a quarter of the Internet's total at any one moment, said Labovitz.The importance of this is not simply that a small number of companies will account for a lot of traffic, but that these companies are increasingly what the Internet actually is. The Internet up to around 2007 was dominated by a hierarchy of companies, co-operating with one another to allow traffic to be passed from one to the other, regardless of size. The new Internet superpowers, in stark contrast, bypass a lot of this and use direct connections from one to the other. If a company is not part of this new core, it could find itself increasingly passed to the 'long tail', a polite way of saying they will be shoved to the fringe.  

Video, including video that runs over web/http, now accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic, and is one reason all these direct connections between large data centres are now necessary. IPv6 traffic remains tiny at only 0.03 percent of traffic, but is showing sudden and possibly rapid growth in recent months thanks to deployments by named hosters.  

"Interestingly, P2P is in rapid decline, falling from around 3 percent of all traffic in 2007 to only half a percent now. Again, downloaders appear to prefer direct connectivity for downloads, mostly through port 80 and the web" (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/14/internet-now-dominated-traffic-superpowers)

Apple announces that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.  

" 'Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,' said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. 'The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon ' " (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html, accessed 01-05-2010).

The web auction site ComicConnect.com sells the first edition of the first Superman comic book, Action Comics #1, for $1,000,000.

"ComicConnect.com, one of the industry’s leading online auction/consignment sites, just sold an extremely rare, top-condition copy of the world’s most coveted comic book for exactly $1,000,000. That figure is more than three times higher than the prior record-holder, also set by ComicConnect.com.

"That comic book, of course, is Action Comics #1, which marked the debut of Superman in 1938 and promptly changed the course of pop culture forever.

" 'This particular copy has been in a private collection for more than 15 years, and it’s likely to disappear again once it’s been turned over to its new owner. However, ComicConnect.com will allow the media to view it briefly in its New York City showroom (873 Broadway, Suite 201, 212-895-3999). The showroom is also home to ComicConnect.com’s affiliate, Metropolis Collectibles (metropoliscomics.com), the largest vintage comic book dealer in the world.

" 'It’s the Holy Grail of comic books,' says founder Stephen Fishler, one of the leading experts on collectible comics.

“ 'Before Action Comics #1, there was no such thing as a superhero or a man who could fly,' notes Fishler, who created the 10-point grading scale which today is used universally to evaluate the condition of comic books.

“ 'It’s the single most important event in comic book history,' adds ComicConnect.com co-owner and COO, Vincent Zurzolo.

"Only about 100 copies Action Comics #1 remain in existence, and of those 100, only two have received a grading of 8.0 (Very Fine) or higher. This particular book is one of them, making it among the rarest of the rare.

"Up until now, the record-holder was another Action Comics #1, this one with a grading of 6.0. It sold on ComicConnect.com for $317,200 in 2009.

"According to the Overstreet Price Guide to Comic Books—the industry bible—Action Comics #1 is indisputably the highest-valued comic book of all time. In second place is Detective Comics #27, which marked the first appearance of Batman in 1939. An Action Comics #1 graded 8.0 or higher is priced about 25% higher than a comparable Detective Comics #27" (http://www.comicconnect.com/, accessed 02-25-2010).

During the months of April, May, and June 2010 sales of ebooks (e-books) exceeded sales of hardcover physical books at Amazon.com. "In that time Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition."

The New York Times online, which reported this information, did not compare Amazon's sales of e-books versus their sales of paperback books during the same period, but indicated that  "paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books."

"Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. 'This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,' he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.  

"Still, the hardcover book is far from extinct. Industrywide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association."

The shift at Amazon is "astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months," Amazon's chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a news release, published in Amazon.com's Media Room.