EPISODE 44

You could almost hear "Howard" smile as he answered.

"Well, it's true that we have some backers."

"Okay," I said, finally realizing that "Howard" was going to make me work for the answer and that he was amused by the whole conversation.  That's my whole purpose in life, by the way.  I'm here to make people laugh.  "Howard" wasn't laughing yet, but he clearly was having a good time.  I began to think out loud, partly to keep the ideas straight in my mind, but also to keep "Howard" happy and on the line.

"So, there's nowhere near enough money to be made in fulfillment and it's pretty clear that you're not accepting advertising on the site.  I notice these things, 'Howard'.  The guy who signs my checks insists on it."

"Banners suck," he chimed in happily.

"Maybe so.  But the fact that you don't have any visible way of deriving any income stream from this enterprise is kind of unusual."

"Maybe we're altruists?" he teased.

Not fucking likely, I thought.  No, this was something different.  These guys were trading the data that they'd mined from the people who had logged on.  The currency they held was information.  You have to remember, nobody was making any money on the Web at this time.  Amazon.com would lose millions each year during the '90s, as would lots of other sites.  This was also a couple of years before the big bubble of the Internet had even begun to balloon.  The marketing practices of Internet commerce that we take for granted now hadn't evolved yet.  It was the fucking Wild West, with no rules and very, very few people seemed to actually know what the hell they were doing.  It was all a huge bluff and with that in mind, I decided that the only way to get "Howard" to tell me what I wanted to know was to bluff him. 

There were two types of data being gathered here.  The first was all of the names, addresses and other personal information that the site collected when a new user registered to use firefly.  That kind of information had been the standard stock and trade for decades in the world of direct response advertising.  I decide to lead with that one, although I suspected that these folks were onto something far more important.

"It's obvious," I said, hoping that I sounded as confident as I needed to, in spite of the fact that I only was just beginning to get a vague idea of what this whole deal was all about. 

“It is?”

"'Howard', you guys are selling the client data!" I announced triumphantly. 

"No way, man!  We never sell the users' personal profiles!  It says so on the form that everyone fills out when they first register with the site.  If we screwed around with that, we'd be open to thousands of lawsuits.  You're way off base there."

"I wasn't talking about that," I said quietly, realizing that I’d successfully flushed “Howard” out into the open.  It left only one logical alternative.  “You're selling the users' preferences.  You've created a fantastic version of the classic market research group here.  Your users tell you everything about their demographics when they sign up and then share with you all of the things they want to listen to.  Hell, you even test market stuff to them, like you did when the site recommended Nicholas Payton to me.  The site even followed up with me when I logged in later to ask what I thought of his work.  It's fucking genius!  The names of the users are irrelevant.  But where they live, how much money they make, whether they own their own homes, whether they rent...all that stuff gets cross referenced with the music they rate and this provides you with an overall picture of the potential buying habits of every demographic group that comes to your site."

"Good!"

"The only thing that I need to figure out now is, just who in the hell are you selling it to?"

I paused for a few seconds and then I unloaded it all on him.

"The recording companies don't give a shit.  They sign whoever they like according to whatever crazy formula they go by.  They've never listened to anyone’s advice before, so why should they care what an on-line focus group might tell them.  'Howard', you guys are selling all of this to the distributors, because unlike the labels, they can't afford to get stuck with someone else's product wasting away in their warehouses.  The labels produce the shit.  The wholesalers move it to the retailers, who are actually completely screwed if the distributors fuck up.  The buying public only fits into this equation in that they will purchase what they want from the choices that the distributors make.  So, here's what I figure.  I bet that you're advising the wholesalers as to which acts and specific recordings by those acts will make them the most money, based on the preferences that firefly.com's users provide.  Hell, I bet you even take them through your methodology in real detail before you try to close them on your service.  It's completely transparent and that's why the data is so valuable."

"Very good, Michael!  I can't confirm that, of course.  But that's damned good!"

"'Howard'," I whispered.  "I hope you guys make a million dollars each."

"We might," he answered, almost as quietly.  "I hope so anyway."

In April of 1998, Microsoft would buy Firefly for $40 million.  Firefly's database management technology was the big reason sited by Microsoft for the deal, although somewhat more cynical individuals groused that all Bill Gates wanted to get his hands on was Firefly's clients' names and addresses.  Either way, 'Howard' and his buddies got their payday.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on July 7th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 43

It took me a couple of days of making calls to track down the owners of firefly.com.  It turned out that the site was a joint venture by MIT and the Harvard Business School.  Under the direction of MIT Media LabAssociate Professor Pattie Maes, several of her most promising students began building the infrastructure for what eventually became firefly.com.  I ended up on the phone with one of those students.  He never would give me his name, which I thought was pretty strange.

"Just call me 'Howard', okay?" he told me after I'd pushed the issue as far as could be reasonably considered just this side of rude.

"So, you played around on the site?" the guy who called himself "Howard" asked me.

"I did!  I had a ball too."

"Tell me," he asked.

"I asked it to let me rate jazz artists and it started me with all of the guys I would have figured a questionnaire on jazz might include.  Monk, Miles, Trane, Ella, and you know...all of the rest."

"Was it easy for you to navigate?"

"Absolutely.  The 1-7 rating system was fun too."

"You know why, don't you?"

Well, I absolutely didn't know the answer to that question, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut, in the hope that he'd tell me.

"1-5 and 1-10 rating systems are what people expect, so anything that shakes that up is unusual and it forces people to think about their choices in a different way.  Also, the number 7 holds meanings for lots of people."

"The Seven Deadly Sins, seven days of the week, The Seven Samurai..."

"The seven words you can't say on television."

"Sure."

"Okay Michael, so you get that.  Now dig this.  We found that people like to rate music because it lets them reflect on the things they already know and like.  But you probably saw that there's a button that you can click on that will allow you to learn about the roots of a given musician, or even other musicians who have been influenced by him.  People who select this option don't realize it at the time, but when they do that, we’re taking advantage of the individual preferences that we're gathering from them.  While they're learning about musicians they may not know much about, our system is learning more about the music that they might be interested in, music that they may not even be aware exists.  Eventually, the system asks you if you'd like it to make some suggestions for you, based on what it's learned about you."

"I saw that," I replied.  "It recommended that I buy some recordings by a trumpet player named Nicholas Payton."

Payton was far from well known in 1995.  He'd played in drummer Elvin Jones' band and had also performed with pianist Marcus Roberts after Roberts had finished playing with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.  Payton had cut a record under his own name in '94, but it would be three more years before he would make a big splash by winning a Grammy for his excellent work with trumpet legend Doc Cheatham, just before Cheatham died in 1997.  But firefly had recommended that I go buy Payton's earliest release, "From This Moment", which I did.

"I loved the disc that the site recommended."

"Cool.  So what did you do next?"

"I went back and rated more music and asked for more recommendations."

"Glad you dig!" the guy said happily.

"I just want to know one more thing, ‘Howard’."

"Sure."

"Where's the money?"

"What do you mean?"

"The money, 'Howard'.  Where does the money come from to support all of this?  You folks have created a site that collects and dispenses an incredible amount of data.  That's not a cheap little enterprise to maintain.  Where do you get the money to keep this thing going?"

"Howard" was sphinxlike.  I couldn't even hear him breathing.

"Look," I insisted, "I see that you have a fulfillment page that links to a small retailer of CDs and that they'll ship the product out to the user.  But man, even if you were getting 15%, which I bet you're not, it still couldn't add up to much cash at all.”

I asked him again, "Come on, where's the money?"

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 30th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 42

I used to listen to National Public Radio a lot, particularly when I drove around in my car.  I was really into collecting bootleg recordings of the Grateful Dead at the time and so my car was littered with tapes and cassette cases.  Nothing sounds quite as anguished as the crunch of plastic cassette as you inadvertently step on it.  As I managed to dispatch many of my beloved tapes under the boot, so to speak, I was often unable to locate the tunes I wanted to hear and was forced to flip on the radio instead.  Luckily, the National Public Radio affiliate in the Upper Connecticut River Valley carried a great line-up of talk and news shows in the afternoon and I found myself slowly becoming addicted to them.

My favorite program was Fresh Air.  This show was produced out of Philadelphia, a point that was proudly proclaimed at the beginning of each broadcast by the show's host, Terry Gross.  While a few of my friends could be somewhat derisive about Ms. Gross, I really enjoyed her stuff.  One of my pals loved to imitate what he perceived to be Gross' standard line of questioning:

"So tell me, when did you first realize that you were a gay lion tamer?"

Sure, Terry could bring in some pretty off the wall guests, but she always made up for it with the others.  I recall being glued to an incredible interview with actor Peter O'Toole when he revealed that during the shooting of his first film, Lawrence of Arabia, he and the other actors forced to ride camels had developed patterns of sores and blisters on their nether regions that O’Toole felt defied even the most carefully considered description, for fear that it might be bleeped out of the broadcast.  He said that obtained a piece of foam rubber, which he wedged between his butt and the incredibly uncomfortable saddle that had been provided for him.  He discovered that it almost completely eliminated the chafing that he had been suffering and so he continued on the back of his beast in great style.  Other actors working on the set were curious as to why this rookie movie actor was able to outlast them on the set everyday.  Accordingly, one of the extras in the production took a peek at how O'Toole had been sitting in his saddle and caught a glimpse of the piece of foam rubber.  As word spread of the young actor's ingenuity, the relative size of O'Toole's piece of foam began to shrink.  After only a short time, O'Toole discovered that his prize had been whittled down considerably and that his fellow actors all seemed to ride a bit taller each day.  Eventually each of them ordered and received their own foam perches.  By the end of filming, the popularity of the innovation had spread to the Bedouin themselves, who adopted the practice of rigging their own saddles with foam rubber.  They dubbed O'Toole "The Father of the Sponge", an honorary title that must have amused the hell out of him.

I love little stories like that and so I made a point of listening to Fresh Air whenever I was driving around during the late afternoon.  On one particularly beautiful mid-summer day, I made the long haul from Burlington, having just finished an overnight trip to New York on Bosco's behalf.  My flight landed a little after 3 o'clock and I tuned in my radio to 107.9FM to pick up the show.  At the end of the broadcast, Terry had a guest on who she claimed was the one true expert on the World Wide Web.  Her first and only question to him was to name the 5 best sites on the Internet.

She had my attention.

After giving a fairly entertaining description of the Vatican's Web site, the guy brought up a remarkable little site called firefly.com.  The premise behind it was that you would log in and then be presented with several portals to areas that dealt with various genres of music.  Once you had selected your genre, you were given choices of reviewing individual artists, specific recording by those artists or their various works as performed by other musicians.

"It's incredibly cool!" he exclaimed.  "I'm a huge fan of Bartok's compositions, so I looked for recordings of my favorite compositions.  The site presented me with a list and then it asked me to rate each of them on a 1-7 scale, with 7 being the highest.  It's so cool!  It's fun too!  If you don't know the specific recording they've shown you, or if you're unfamiliar with the orchestra or chamber group, you indicate that you'd like to see a list of artists that either influenced them or whom they have influenced.  In doing so, you learn a ton about the music!

"But the best part is after you've made somewhere around 25 ratings, the site asks you if you'd like some recommendations for music that you might not know about.  It's completely interactive!  They know what you enjoy listening to, based on the selections and ratings you've already provided, so they give a few ideas of what to look for when you go out buying stuff for yourself."

The segment on firefly.com was very short, but in just 10 minutes I had finally learned what Bosco had been talking about.  There was a world of information being exchanged on the Web and if we could figure out how to gather it and resell it, we could make a hell of a lot of money.  I was very excited by the time I got back to the office in White River Junction, but I also had a pile of new questions to ask.  Bosco was pleased that I'd had my little breakthrough, but I was concerned when he gave me no clue of how we were going to harvest the data, or even what kind of data we were looking for, let alone how we would sell it, or to who. 

"Michael, I've been waiting for you to tell me that," he told me as he clicked the mouse on his desk and moved from site to site.  He was only vaguely aware of the images and text that popped up on his screen and when I told him to enter firefly.com into his browser, he seemed even less engaged.

"Maybe," he continued, "it might be a good idea to find out who these guys are at firefly."

"I'm on it!" I replied.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 23rd.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 41

Weeks and weeks passed and while I’d gotten pretty good at navigating my way around the Web, I still didn’t quite share Bosco’s fascination.  That didn’t mean that I wasn’t able to find some fun places to play.  CNN had a great news site that featured an area called Time Pathfinder.  Inside that part of the site, you could find all manner of Bulletin Boards that dealt with subjects that paralleled the news coverage that CNN offered.  My favorite was the political forum.  There, I met a very entertaining cast of characters who posted their various opinions on the issues of the day.  They were like me in one very important way too.  They were political junkies and they filled hundreds of pages on the site, speculating on the candidates and issues that would shape the upcoming GOP primaries and the General Election. 

And what a cast they were!  There was PatriotMan, a self-described former CIA agent.  His adherence to every conspiracy theory was legendary.  Hambone was a homophobic gentleman who would rail against the injustices of equal rights for anyone who refused to use the missionary position while making love…with the lights off.  Snowpea was his polar opposite, a very bright man who countered Hambone’s posts with his own reasoned arguments why gay and lesbian couples should be left alone to discover the joy and despair of love, unfettered by anyone else’s prejudice.  There was a very amusing fellow who took as his handle the name of the Guy Montag, the fireman from Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451.  Guy was a prophet of the 2^nd Amendment.  He was also a hawk on anything related to foreign policy and the military and one of the wittiest posters on the site.  His ability to turn a phrase made him friends on both the left and the right.   Another was a guy who went by the name of the nation’s first president.  GW, as he was also known, was a rare bird: a moderate Republican.  He had a very inclusive view of the world and he started a thread on the board called the Republican Rumpus Room.  Initially, I avoided it, figuring it was a hangout for rabid haters of President Bill Clinton, who I supported at the time.  Nothing could have been further from the truth though.  The Rumpus Room thread carried the following as its initial post:

The Rumpus Room is our online restaurant and bar, where all are welcome to this PFZ (Politics-Free Zone.) We may have our differences out there, but in here. . . we're all friendly. The bartender is Ramundo (an undergraduate student at Western Washington University and a great listener!).  We have also hired a serving wench named Nicole, who wears a sawed off t-shirt and some Daisy Dukes. We've completely restored the Bob Dornan Whine Cellar and for you cigar aficionados, we've added the Wayne Hayes Memorial Humidor for the storage of your favorite stogies. There is a new pool out back, with a patio full of deck chairs around it. You also might enjoy a stroll in the garden out back where the backyard smoker is always available to cure your favorite meats, fish, and poultry. Sit a spell, eat, drink and be merry. The kitchen is open 24/7and there is a great espresso machine for those who are interested...

Welcome all.... But be warned -- in here, the inmates are clearly in control!

You had to love a Republican who could poke fun at “B-1” BobDornan.  I became a fan of his “work” back in the 1980s, when Dornan, who was an extremely conservative US Rep. from Orange County, California, would take the podium during the “Special Orders” portion of the day on the House floor.  This was when the entire chamber would be empty, but the members were allowed to speak at length on any damn thing that came to their minds.  Dornan’s rambling talks could be extremely entertaining and I often made a point to try to be home, near a TV at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon to see if he was on C-SPAN.  If so, the workday was officially done as I would crack a beer and enjoy the show!  My favorite “B-1 Bob Moment” came in late ’95 when Dornan spoke to a meeting of Pat Robertson’s Conservative Coalition of America on the subject of mandatory term limits.

I recall him saying, “I can talk the talk and I walk the walk.  I’ve spent 17 years in Congress fighting for term limits!”

The crowd had roared their approval, unaware apparently of the wonderful irony contained in their hero’s words.

But the fact that GW, an ardent member of the GOP was so comfortable in his own skin that he could gently poke fun at the leaders in his own party was part of what made the Time On Line site so cool.  You could take on a persona (as I believe PatriotMan had), or you could just be yourself, like Guy Montag or GW.  I ended up visiting Guy, whose real name was Javier and we shared dinner and beers together many times where he lived in Northampton, Massachusetts.  He turned out to be a very nice person and I owe the World Wide Web a great debt for being the conduit for that friendship.  But in spite of all of that, I still couldn’t grasp what Bosco thought he was trying to do.  Clearly, I lacked what George Herbert Walker Bush once termed, “the vision thing”. 

One Monday, I came into the office and saw that all of our computer screens looked markedly different.  Bosco had hired a consultant to come in over the weekend and he had installed Windows on all of the desktop units.  My SE had been the only machine that could access the Web’s GUI interface.  Now Bosco wanted it for himself, Leah and a new salesman we had just hired the previous week to make the calls for Bosco’s studios.  I was officially out of the business of calling his hair replacement prospects it seemed.  My new job as a Web-head had begun in earnest.

The version of Windows back then, known not-so-affectionately as “Windows 3.X” wasn’t an operating system at all, but rather it was a shell that resided on the original Microsoft Digital Operating System, which Mr. Gates had cleverly named, MS-DOS.  In other words, while it looked like a lot like the Windows systems that we have all come to know, it didn’t really work like that at all.  It was very buggy and it failed quite often, leaving you staring at a blinking DOS prompt, or better yet – the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” that indicated that your entire system had crashed, threatening the integrity of everything that you had been working on.

Bosco however was very pleased.

“So what do you think?” he asked me as he looked over my shoulder.  I had been cruising around the Web, looking for sites that dealt with hair loss and hair replacement at the time. 

“I think it’s an apology from Bill Gates,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not being a Mac.”

“Michael,” Bosco said while shaking his head and smiling wearily, “You are the most eminently fire-able person I have ever met.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 16th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 40

Bosco called me into his office.

“What do you know about the Internet?” he asked.  It was the fall of 1995, so this was kind of a loaded question.  Not all that many people were really using it then.

“Not much,” I replied.  “I’ve been on a few news groups and a couple of bulletin boards.  It seems like a waste of time.”

Apparently, I have always been terrible at making meaningful predictions.  You must understand that in 1988, I had picked Dukakis over Bush.  I had also used my baseball prediction system to make a disastrous bet on the Mets to beat the Dodgers in the NLCS that same year.  As you may recall, that series went 7 games with LA winning and going on to beat the Oakland A’s 4-1 in the World Series.  Les Bernstein would eventually parlay my methodical theory of baseball prognostication into a profitable enterprise by betting against it. My record in analyzing the field of commerce had been equally spotty.  I sold the lousy 200 shares of stock I owned in Apple Computer for $14 per just prior to the crash in ’87.  I try very hard not to think about that last one too often.  As it would turn out, my judgment on the Internet would be the least savvy made by any semi-conscious individual during the 1990s.  Fortunately, I worked for a guy who had far better business instincts than I.  He also had far greater vision and significantly more courage.

“You’re the third or fourth person to tell me that in the past week, Michael.  But it doesn’t matter.  I have a new job for you.  Starting next week, I want you to learn everything there is to know about the Internet because we’re going to be running our business there.”

“But where will the money come from?”

“I don’t know yet.  But we’ll find it.”

I gave him a strange look, like a dog owner might give a puppy that has just taken a large dump on the living room carpet.

“You don’t buy it?” he smiled.  “Let me tell you something.  When I was a kid, we used to listen to the radio, just like our parents had all through the Second World War.  But when television came out, my parents didn’t know what in the hell it was for.  Don’t forget, there weren’t a lot of stations and they weren’t even on the air at predictable times.  We used to sit around in the afternoon after school, watching the test pattern, waiting.  We knew that at some point something would come on and we didn’t want to miss it.  Our parents thought we were nuts!  But we understood that something would happen and we had to be a part of it.

“Then, when there were three networks and all of those locals UHF channels, you kids took over the TV.  You knew, without ever being told, that there was always something else on another channel and so you flipped merrily between them all during the commercials.  We told you that you’d hurt your eyes by sitting so close to the tube.  We yelled at you to not flip the stations because we knew that you’d break the TV set.  But we were wrong.  Instinctively, your generation got television in a way that we never could.  You knew what it was for.

“So now we have cable and fuck knows how many networks and stations!  You surf through them like it was nothing and people like me still wonder if maybe, just maybe that still might break the TV set!  But you’ve gotten your own comeuppance!  The personal computer!  The kids going to grammar school right now know what to do with it.  Hell, my granddaughter knew how to turn it on and play her word and number games on the PC before she was two!  It’s intuitive!

“So now we have to figure out the Internet, Michael.  Because sure as hell, if we don’t, we’re going to be left even further behind. You get me?  You might not buy it right now, but everyone is going to be marketing their stuff on the Internet and the people who can figure out how to do it first are going to make a shitload of money.”

When you look back on it, you have to admit that Bosco had been remarkably forward thinking.  At around the time this conversation took place, there were fewer than 40 million people using the Internet, worldwide.  The United States was home to 25 million of those users, so when you consider that there were 260 million people living in the country at that time, less than 10% were on-line.  By 2012, 239 million people in the US were accessing the Internet and almost 100 million were doing so from their smart phones.  Facebook alone would attract more than five times the number of US users than had accessed the Internet just 16 years earlier.  None of this took into account what was happening around the rest of the planet.  By ’12, there were almost 2 billion other users.  China alone had over 400 million.  History sure as hell bore out Bosco’s view of the world. I’m still in awe of his ability to accurately divine the potential for the medium.

But in late 1995, this looked like anything but a sure thing.  The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was the basic technology that eventually helped to drive the popularity of the Internet.  By using icons and images, Xerox created the first system that also utilized windows and menus to open, close and manipulate files in 1973.  It would take 11 more years though before a commercially viable GUI based operating system would be developed for both home and office use.  That was the first generation Apple Macintosh.  I was a big fan of the early Macs and ended up buying a Mac SE in 1988.  Those machines were incredibly expensive at the time.  I recall that the SE retailed for around $4500.  I had a friend who worked with one of the first companies to write software exclusively for the Mac.  She lived in Montpelier and through her I was able to buy my Mac at “developer’s prices”, which meant that I only had to pony up $2500.  That was still a lot of money, but when you realize that I was still running that old Mac when I began to work with Bosco, almost 7 years later, it was a great investment.

At Bosco’s insistence, I brought my Mac into work sometime after the New Year and hooked it up to the dial-up modem that he’d purchased to begin our research into the Internet and the World Wide Web.  For those who never experienced the delights of a 14K connection (and to remind any of you who have blotted the experience from your memories), it could take a very, very long time to load pages on this now antiquated system.  Still, when Bosco and I began to wander quite aimlessly around from Web site to Web site on the Mac, we were struck by the enormous amount of material we found. 

Still, it was almost impossible for us to really take it all in, given how slowly everything moved on our dial-up connection, so we hired a guy named Jeff Glasson who was sort of a mad scientist when it came to computers and the Internet.  Jeff had a home office in Hanover, NH and what we were eventually able to divine was that he had found a way to tap into the data and telephone lines at Dartmouth College and had helped himself to their access.  He’d rigged up his own modem and was able to upload Web pages far faster than we had been able to at Bosco’s office.  He showed us how to use Web Crawler, an early search engine that was his personal favorite.  We’d plod around, looking at stuff, but I had to admit that I still really didn’t see where all of this was going, even if Bosco and Jeff appeared to be very excited about all of it.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 9th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.