Chowrangi

World Wide Web is surely a huge huge place. Billions of web pages are there. Billions of people are there. Millions of unique products and services are there. But most of its a clutter and the regurgitation of the original and innovative ideas. If it were not for some of the heavyweights, WWW might not have seen the success, it enjoys now.

For the majority of people, web starts from Google. It has become a de facto window of the web. Everyone knows about it and everyone uses it. This all owe to the brilliance of Google Executives. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. What was a small project out of Stanford by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has now grown into a giant, and CEO Schmidt has also a fair share in this success. After taking the search engine and online advertising by storm with out a competitor in site, Google is now acquiring in every direction.

The charismatic and media-darling Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs is yet another virtual idol. After creating MAC frenzy, i-pod craze, he has now launched iphone, which is said to change the way people use internet on the mobile devices. He has also got a fair contribution in promoting the legal music download and legal TV and movie download.

Peer-to-Peer technology is what has grabbed the world’s attention. BitTorrent is spearheading this technology, which drives more than a third of all Web traffic. KaZaA, eMule and eDonkey are way behind the BitTorrent. BitTorrent is the brainchild of match wizard and programming wunderkind Bram Cohen, whose technology is adept at handling the large files, which is the key for P2P systems.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist has inflicted a gut-wrenching blow upon the old media. His bland website, which ends in .org domain and employees just 23 people has snatched almost $65 billion from the newspaper in terms of offline advertising in just San Francisco Bay Area, and rest of US is similar. This site draws 14.1 million visitors each month on average and is ranked at 52nd most viewed website in the world.

Another biggie is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon which is not just an online bookstore any more. Along with books, CDs, he also now deals in toys, shirts and power tools. Another bigwig is Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, who brought together social networking with the news. Digg has plenty of clout on the internet. Digg’s lets users to submit articles and also allows them to dig or bury the articles. The value of Digg is $60 million.

Why can’t we in Pakistan develop such sites?

Other posts by Commoner

• Punjab Heats Up - November 19th, 2008
• Eyeball to Eyeball - November 18th, 2008
• No Surprises There - November 18th, 2008
• Yousuf Ready to Leave "Power" - November 18th, 2008
• OGRA Website Hacked By Indian Hackers - November 17th, 2008
• Friends Of Pakistan Again Disappoints - November 17th, 2008
• New But Old Dimensions - November 17th, 2008
• After the Loan - November 16th, 2008
• Locals Lashkars Against Taliban - November 16th, 2008
• Swat Keeps on Smouldering - November 15th, 2008