Word: internet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Pierre spotted me--the reporter's notebook was the tip-off--it was clear why I was drawing blanks. He looked nothing like the old photo I had dug up. He had abandoned his Internet-guru getup--the gawky glasses, the long ponytail--and now looked like any other well-dressed, thirtysomething Parisian. No car and driver. No p.r. entourage...
...sites running for the U.K., Canada and Australia. eBay is far ahead in those countries but vulnerable in places where it is less well known--and where one of its rivals could take hold first. "The battle grounds are France, Italy and Japan--the biggest prize, the second largest Internet market in the world," says Whitman...
...scene from a bad spy novel. There I was leaning against a kiosk on the Champs Elysees, furtively looking at a small black-and-white photo and trying to spot the elusive Pierre, an Internet legend who tries to stay out of the spotlight. I surveyed the tables at Fouquet's, the fashionable outdoor cafe where we had agreed to meet. No dice. How hard can it be to pick out a geek entrepreneur who's worth more than $5 billion...
...becoming a millionaire from a pre-eBay start-up, Omidyar was captivated by the still nascent Internet. Living in Silicon Valley, where companies were going public daily, he was troubled by how imperfectly the financial markets seemed to be operating. "Institutions and large investors had all the inside information," he says. "What I wanted to do was create a marketplace where everyone had access to the same information." Out of this democratic impulse, the clunky website that would eventually grow into eBay was born...
Omidyar had a typical programmer's view of the Net. He saw it as a freewheeling, authority-defying medium, and he was proud of his fledgling site's noncorporate orientation. "The first commercial efforts were from larger companies that were saying, 'Gee, we can use the Internet to sell stuff to people,'" he says. "Clearly, if you're coming from a democratic, libertarian point of view, having corporations just cram more products down people's throats doesn't seem like a lot of fun. I really wanted to give the individual the power to be a producer as well." eBay...