Inventing the Internet

Barak Obama is now president elect of the United States and if you believe the media, he owes much of his success to something “invented” by a fellow democrat… Al Gore… and his magical internet.

Okay, we all know that Al Gore did not invent the internet. A whole slew of scientists and scholars invented the internet and the all important TCP/IP protocol. But, it was in a writing by Vinton Cerf where the term “internet” was first used in 1973, and, as a result, we still “Cerf” the internet today.

I highly doubt that when Vinton Cerf first wrote the word “internet” that it would become a global phenomenon and propel the World Wide Web to be a hub for the exchange of ideas, commerce, and social networking. But, it certainly has done just that.

And, the internet is far from being done expanding. The internet is still a baby in many ways. Most communications over the internet today are still asynchronous (e-mail, wall-to-wall, message boards). We’ve seen access expand from the colleges and universities to the workplace to becoming a revenue generation monster supporting entire businesses such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, 800flowers, Expedia, and the list goes on. As more people get high-speed access to the internet it will continue to expand. And, lately, it has jumped off the desktop and laptop to the phone.

The applications have also grown dramatically. First came static home pages for businesses and individuals. The logical growth from there was eCommerce and Business to Business commerce. Then the social networking boom that started connecting people for various reasons – professional contacts, dating, and long lost friends from high school or college.

Public Chalk is built to take on what we believe is the next growth spurt in internet applications, the community in real time. You live your life among groups of friends surrounding particular interests or events in real time. We are building Public Chalk to provide the ability to create the group of friends who are interested in a particular topic or event and allow that group to converse about that topic or event, share media, and plan from their PC or their iPhone… synchronously (real time). All the discussion will be archived for future reference and new topic will rise in the place of past topics.

Still wish we could say we invented the internet…

ETJ