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RIAA 1, Napster 0
Napster lost its first round in court. But with both sides of the lawsuit depending on the murky Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the war is far from over.
By Eric Boehlert
[05/09/00]

Technology: View from the top
Come on, Eileen
Napster CEO Eileen Richardson is walking on sunshine. But with lawsuits piling up, is she really dancing on a grave?
By Damien Cave
[05/08/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 33 Results
"Warning: Exiting womb" and other real-life dialog box alerts.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[05/06/00]

The lord of game developers
Peter Molyneux originated the "god game"; his newest production might be his greatest act of creation yet.
By Wagner James Au
[05/05/00]

Of greed, technolibertarianism and geek omnipotence
Paulina Borsook talks with Thomas Scoville about her new book, "Cyberselfish."
By Thomas Scoville
[05/04/00]

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The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush By Tom Ashbrook Houghton Mifflin 320 pages

Yes, we've heard the story; we've read it hundreds of times in the five short years since the commercial Web was born. Tom Ashbrook, author of "The Leap," is determined to tell it to us again. To his credit, he still manages to make it both interesting and inspiring -- and Lord knows we can't seem to lap up enough of this thoroughly 21st century success story. I'm guessing this one will be a hit.

"The Leap" is a curiously morbid document of just how painful the Internet start-up process can be. A friendlier version of Michael Wolff's "Burn Rate" (about the starting up of a start-up), "The Leap" is laden with less juicy bridge burning and more angst, along with a happier ending. Rather than a gossipy Internet tell-all, this book is a thoughtful record of the agonies of a midlife crisis; it just happens that instead of a torrid extramarital affair or a new convertible, Ashbrook pinned his new-life hopes on the Net.

In 1995, Ashbrook was a high-powered editor and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe; he was rapidly approaching age 40 when he began suffering a midcareer itch to get out and do something new. That new something, of course, was the Internet; his college friend Rolly Rouse, a twitchy genius type with a lot of big ideas, soon talked him into developing a business called BuildingBlocks. The vision: a CD-ROM to help homeowners conceive their "New American Dream Home" -- a product that its developers thought would inspire a renaissance of Victorian-style architecture, full of crenelation, ornate moldings and homey little details.

But it took lots of part-time days to build the "Dream Home" plan, and by then CD-ROMS were no longer hot; to revamp the business model and use 3-D modeling to create fancy home designs from scratch would have required expensive, memory-intensive technology. Besides, just as Ashbrook and Rouse started visiting venture capitalists, all the buzz was devoted to e-commerce. So they remodeled their original "Dream Home" and created an upscale shopping site -- an idea that won them $25 million in funding.

Today, you can visit BuildingBlocks' premier product at HomePortfolio.com. You can't use it to build new versions of your dream home on the fly, like some kind of Net-enabled game of Lincoln logs -- but you can pick up fancy couches and sleek chrome fixings and fireplace screens embedded with little tea lights. So much for the new Victorianism.

The grand scheme to turn modern architecture on its head was undermined by sobering market realities; as a result "The Leap" is, among other things, about the paring down of ambitious dreams.

Next page | If this ordinary Joe can make it, surely the rest of us can too!