Dot.Bomb

For a period of nine months - up until the spring of 2000 - Britain dot.com fever. The two young founders of lastminute.com saw their eighteen-month-old company, which has still not made a penny in profits, launch on the stock market at a valuation of 750 million pounds. Clickmango.com raised a million pounds in half an hour to sell health products and cosmetics online. Rumours abounded of youthful entrepreneurs closing dot.com start-up deals in lifts. Old-style industrial giants with huge turnovers and workforces were edged out of the FTSE 100 by internet newcomers employing handfuls of people and often losing a fortune. And then, just as swiftly, the bubble burst. As New York's NASDAQ index began to head downwards, London's hi-tech stocks soon followed. Boo.com, the flashiest internet site of all, went through 100 million pounds in a matter of months in its mission to sell designer sports gear over the Net. Soon, business analysts were talking about 'bum-rates', and even the most glamorous start-ups were learning they couldn't defy the oldest laws of business.;But why had the sober world of investment finance, not to mention private investors in their thousands, fallen so comprehensively for the febrile future promised by the dot.coms? Now, Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's respected Internet and Business Correspondent, who covered the whole dot.com boom and had the closest access to its major piayers, has written the full story of this remarkable episode in recent British history. He traces the beginnings of the internet bubble back to the United States, and tells the little-known tales of Britain's now-forgotten Net pioneers. He reveals extraordinary true stories behind the household names of the boom - how the huge success of Freeserve, for example, sprang from sums scrawled on a paper napkin on a train speeding towards London. He follows the hype and glitz of the dot.com launches all the way through to the debris of deserted offices whose tenants had simply burned through all their cash and gone bust. And he analyses the extent to which, despite the ongoing litany of highprofile dot.com high-profile dot.com disasters, the internet has transformed British business forever.