Word: bohnett
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Some kids fixate on toy cars or trucks or guns. When David Bohnett, founder of the surprise smash-hit Website GeoCities www.geocities.com) was a little boy, his obsession was the telephone. "I still think phones are the coolest," he says. He remembers when touch-tone phones first came to Hinsdale, Ill., his hometown. "I told my parents I'd give up my allowance if they got one," he says...
...Bohnett's phone-mania is the Rosebud that explains why GeoCities has grown into the biggest (dare I use the word?) community on the Web. He understands that community is mostly about communicating--and he figured out a way to facilitate both online. Think of him as the Web equivalent of William Levitt, the postwar developer who built affordable homes in suburbs like Levittown, Long Island. Bohnett's was the first Website to supply free home pages, and the tools to build them, to all comers. To date, nearly 1.7 million users have signed up and are publishing their home...
Doling out freebies online is more than simple largesse, of course. The plan is to turn a profit real soon. Bohnett is, after all, an M.B.A.-packing capitalist. Like other entrepreneurs who have struggled with the How-Do-I-Make-Money-Online riddle, he figured that the first step was to attract a crowd. He started doing that in January 1995, when he got a friend to hang a camera out of the window of his Beverly Hills office and transmit to the Web live images of a bus-stop bench on Wilshire Boulevard. Oprah featured it and Bohnett...
...neighborhoods grew quickly and without any zoning ordinances to speak of. "Our only rule was that your home page had to be consistent with the neighborhood," says Bohnett. In other words, if your site is in the "Pines" section of "Silicon Valley"--which happens to be dedicated to software browsers--your page is supposed to be about software browsers. Volunteer police squads and GeoCities staff members try to root out the occasional pirates, hate-mongers and pornographers, with modest success...
...part of the rescue operation launched after City Investing Co., a New York conglomerate experienced in resurrecting ailing companies, completed buying 34% of the chain for $29 million in 1980. Last January the new management filed a $100 million lawsuit against 28 former company officials, including Battistone and Bohnett, charging that they had inflated profits and expanded the chain too rapidly...