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Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Does anyone still say "e-commerce"? How 1999

CNET News.com is running this story celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the "first" secure Internet retail transaction, apparently performed on a proprietary shopping service called NetMarket.
Few remember or have ever even heard of the Web retailer, but on Aug. 11, 1994, the college grads that founded NetMarket in Nashua, N.H., claimed they had conducted the very first secure retail transaction on the Web.

They said the first item purchased via a Web site protected by commercially available data encryption technology was the CD "Ten Summoner's Tales" by Sting, according to former NetMarket founder Daniel Kohn. One of Kohn's Swarthmore College classmates purchased the CD with his credit card for $12.48, plus shipping costs, exactly 10 years ago on Wednesday, according to a New York Times article that chronicled the transaction and credited the company with making e-commerce history.
Now, NetMarket is a true blast from the past for me. When I worked for Davidson (aka CUC Software, Cendant Software, Havas Interactive, Knowledge Adventure, Universal Interactive, and now "nothing"), we had to put the third-party installer for NetMarket on all of our CDs. This thing broke more often than it worked and caused endless tech support calls--not to mention that when it did work, it put a shortcut to a shopping site on the desktop of a machine which was probably a dedicated childrens' educational gaming box. "What do you mean, little Jimmy just pointed and clicked and bought thirty CDs?"
|| Andrew, 10:15 AM || ||

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