Pierre Omidyar

This was supposed to be the year of the dotcoms, when online businesses were slated to overtake the traditional brick and mortar ones. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, many well-known dotcoms went belly up. And the others ended up with huge losses. But there is one type of online business that seems to be doing well—online auctions. The big daddy of online auctions is eBay.com, the first online auction site. And Pierre Omidyar is the man who had the idea and gave it life.

It all started when his wife (then fiancée) complained about the difficulty in finding people to trade (as in exchange) stuff in San Fransciso’s Bay area and how she wished this was possible over the Internet. And what started as a free service in 1995 as a weekend hobby, now earns $32 million and hosts about 23 million auctions a month!

Shawn Fanning

Popularly known as the Napster kid, Shawn Fanning, all of 19 years of age, is the pioneer of peer-to-peer computing over the Internet—a concept that lets you share files with other clients (PCs like yours) connected to the Internet, instead of having to download them from one central server.

Fanning—whose high school nickname was Napster—was only 18 when he wrote the code for his now popular music-file sharing Naspter program. He thought of it when he found lots of people complaining about the difficultly in finding MP3 files over the Internet, and decided to write a program that would let PC users share files amongst themselves instead of going through a central server.

There is a Napster server, which maintains a list of who has which files. Problems arose when the record companies and the recording artists began losing revenue in the bargain. There was also the issue of copyright infringement, by users merrily swapping music over the Net. So, the record companies went to court. As things stand today, a US court has ordered Napster to shut down. An appeal against this order is on. Meanwhile Bertelsmann—one of the recording companies that was suing Napster—tied up a deal with it, under which Napster will be turned into a subscription service, with Bertelsmann’s entire list of titles becoming available. Whatever be the next turn in this interesting saga, the new trend that Shawn Fanning kicked off of peer–to–peer computing is going to be with us for some time to come.