Creating a Dot Com in 24 Hours

June 14, 2004 5:25 PM

The 24 Hour Dot Com. Two Swedish students at the 'Wizards of OS' conference in Berlin decided to start a dot com, build it up, and cash in within twenty four hours. Their IRC logs make great reading to see how they bought the PR and 'product' together. The dot com has now 'IPOed' and is available to buy on eBay.
posted by wackybrit (8 comments total)

Impressive: their service seems to work pretty well. It's much the same search functionality as you get in Opera and Mozilla, but it's online which is more convenient.

I think in that time most of the companies I've worked for might just about get around to booking a meeting room for the pre-meeting to discuss the agenda for the requirements analysis meeting...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:53 AM on June 15, 2004

It's not clear to me what their service actually is. I type my in my search term and the name of a search engine and they take me there ? Why wouldn't I just bypass the middleman?

Is this performance art ?
posted by troutfishing at 6:02 AM on June 15, 2004

Theophile: you're joking right? It's more convenient to use a website to do something that your *browser* can do?
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:30 AM on June 15, 2004

RustyBrooks, who has demonstrated to me (on AskMetaFilter) that he knows more than a few things, has just confirmed to me that my initial impression here wasn't merely the result of my monolingualism-driven, age-related mental decline.
posted by troutfishing at 7:42 AM on June 15, 2004

Bah, not joking.

The default searches aren't that great, so I have to personalize it to get one-step searches of my preferred dictionaries and regional amazon etc; either by editing fiddly config files or using a standalone app.

So every time I change computers I have to set it up again, and for the last couple of moves I couldn't be bothered. Be much easier if it could be set up online and never touched again.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:42 AM on June 15, 2004

If someone's really going to pay $1850 for what seems to amount to about half a day's coding, setting up a website and entering some poor quality data then maybe the dot com lunacy is returning.

Selecting search engines from their list of 'supported' engine, I got "500 Internal Server Error" and two "Sorry that engine doesn't exist"s. At that point I gave up.
posted by daveg at 8:38 AM on June 15, 2004

I'm surprised that they didn't use the word "synergy" in their online auction once.
posted by crunchland at 8:45 AM on June 15, 2004

I'm surprised that they didn't use the word "synergy" in their online auction once.

Hey...that's a value added service, synergy is. You have to pay extra for that.
posted by dejah420 at 11:11 AM on June 16, 2004