Video Game Empire

Chapter 515: America Online Community

In another time and space, the "Navigator" browser launched by Netscape became an instant hit. In fact, there are many deep-seated reasons. First, in 1992, Gore first proposed the "Information Superhighway Plan" in the US Congress. With the success of his and Clinton partners in the White House, the US government immediately began to vigorously promote the plan, and by 1994, it was in a state of chaos.

And Mark Anderson in early 1993, at the University of Urbana-Champaign's Supercomputer Center, developed a graphical browser "Mosaic" for information retrieval on the World Wide Web. After the "Mosaic" browser was developed, there was no publicity, but it was placed on the campus forum of the University of Urbana-Champaign for everyone to download freely.

But it quickly swept across campuses across the University of Illinois system. At this time, the retrieval system of the University of Minnesota announced that it was ready to start charging. So a large number of web servers started to use the free World Wide Web() technology instead.

As a result, "mosaic", as an important tool for World Wide Web retrieval, quickly spread from the campus of the University of Urbana-Champaign to the entire United States. But after all, it is just a random work of a few students, and the performance is still relatively crude and rough, and the upgraded version has not been improved later.

So when Mark Anderson set up his own company and developed the "Navigator", a more sophisticated and powerful commercial graphics browser, it quickly took over the mantle of the "Mosaic" browser and became popular in the United States. killer app.

Many say it was the "navigator" browser that opened the door to the era of the commercial Internet. But in turn, it was the foundation of America's early Internet boom. Only laid the foundation for the "Navigator" browser to become a legend.

In fact, the author of the world's first graphical browser was not Mark Anderson. But four students from Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. They developed a graphical browser called Mosaic, which came out a year before Mosaic. And the technical level of this graphical browser. Also excellent.

The information technology industry of Finland, a small Nordic country, has always been very strong. Nokia, a brand familiar to countless Chinese, is a company from Finland. For the computer software industry, Finland's greatest contribution to the world is to cultivate a man named Linus Torvalds. The world's most famous open source operating system was first developed by him!

However, Finland is not the United States after all, and 1992 coincided with a severe recession in the global economy. There is a large amount of venture capital in Silicon Valley in the United States, so the development of high-tech industries such as computer, Internet, and biopharmaceuticals in the United States has not been greatly affected. Still a thriving trend.

Not so in Finland, where four students at Helsinki University of Technology could not find the investment to commercialize their browser in the context of the recession. Otherwise, the entire development history of the Internet may be rewritten, and another information technology company that is as world-renowned as Nokia may be born in Finland.

Therefore, in many cases, technological leadership is not a panacea, and strong capital is needed to boost it. And the current Oriental Group naturally possesses both capital and technology.

This "Navigator" browser was developed by the World Wide Web Technology R&D Team of the Oriental Research Institute. After three versions of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5, it finally matured on the fourth version 1.0, and then began to be put on the market.

Under the vigorous promotion of the Oriental Research Institute, the development of the World Wide Web ( ) is still relatively rapid. From last year to present. In less than a year, the number of World Wide Web servers worldwide has exceeded 500. And new servers are still being put on the market continuously.

And the contribution of the "Navigator" browser should not be underestimated. Before the "Navigator" browser hit the market. The World Wide Web accounts for a measly 0.5% of all global Internet traffic. And after the "Navigator" browser came out. The communication rate has risen to 4.2% within a few months.

Version 1.0 of the "Navigator" browser is now released. is a free trial version. Although the development team of the entire "Navigator" browser has been transferred from the Oriental Research Institute to the company. But as early as the "Navigator" browser came out, the Oriental Research Institute signed a pre-installation agreement with the "Navigator" browser relying on its cooperative relationship with major computer manufacturers around the world.

Therefore, most of the new PCs on the market have the icon of the "Navigator" browser on the graphics desktop. After seeing this icon, users will inevitably click to take a look. If the user has activated the Internet service, the browser will automatically connect to the navigation website opened by the company.

This navigation site lists all the sites that the company's technicians can find by category. Yes, this is another time and space of Yahoo's starting model. To know that there is no such great artifact as Google on the Internet today, if you want to browse a website, you must first know its URL.

The URL is usually a long string of letters, numbers and symbols, and it is difficult for ordinary people to memorize them all. Therefore, on the "Navigator" browser of version 1.0, a favorite function was specially developed. After browsing a certain website, users can add it to their favorites if they are interested, and they can directly find this URL from the favorites next time.

Of course, in the early days of Internet development, it was not easy for netizens to find a new website without the help of Google. The company's navigation page is very considerate for everyone to solve this problem.

You just need to go to the navigation page to find almost all the valid URLs on the World Wide Web. Of course, this is also related to the beginning of the current World Wide Web. The default homepage of the "Navigator" browser - the navigation page, has collected nearly 800 websites by category, almost covering all the effective websites on the World Wide Web. website!

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Li Xuan attended the company's cocktail party. After returning to the hotel, I decided to turn on the computer and log on to the company's "AOL Community". Take a look at how this online community is growing! Li Xuan did not log in with the client on the computer, but opened the "Navigator" browser. Ready to land on the web version of the online community that just completed development not long ago.

The default home page of the "Navigator" browser is the navigation website developed by the company, and the domain name is "" (ask). The English translation of the word "navigator" is actually "". But the term was too long to remember, so the company deliberately chose a simpler domain name as the URL for navigating the site.

In the future, simple and easy-to-remember domain names like "" will definitely be robbed. Li Xuan remembered that the domain names "" (shopping) and "" (candy) cost millions of dollars, and the most expensive domain name in history was "". The transaction price is as high as 13 million US dollars.

But in this age of the World Wide Web, no one has yet discovered the business opportunity of cybersquatting. The Oriental Group registered a large number of domain names first, such as "", "", "" and so on. Of course, Li Xuan is by no means selling money for the sake of changing hands in the future. With his current net worth, this petty profit has long been disregarded.

The move of the Oriental Group is just to defend the domain names related to its own business in advance. If it is said that "" is squatted by others and then sold to other companies with similar business to the Oriental Group, it is definitely a troublesome thing for the Oriental Group!

The original home page of the "Navigator" browser was just a blank page, and now it defaults to this navigation site. It was just added not long ago. The most prominent position on the website is a button with a "" mark. Li Xuan clicked on it with the mouse, and the browser immediately opened a brand new "AOL" login page.

After Li Xuan entered his account name and password, he successfully logged in to the web version of AOL. compared to the client version. The newly developed web version is more concise. After nearly three years of development, "AOL Community" has already been very rich in content.

For example, users can browse the latest global information in real time in the community, and today's headlines. It was South African Airways Flight 295 that crashed, killing all 159 people on board. Li Xuan clicked on this news link. In addition to the text report, a photo of the wreckage of the plane was distributed on the page. But due to the slow internet speed. It took half a minute for the photos to be fully refreshed.

This is the charm of World Wide Web technology, it can transmit pictures, voice, video and other files in addition to plain text files. It's just that with the current network speed, it is obviously not very reliable to transmit video. After the photos are compressed by a specific algorithm, the capacity can be reduced to hundreds of kilograms, or even tens of kilograms, and online browsing can be fully realized.

Li Xuan's attention was not all focused on this sad news, but more on the static advertisement of Coca-Cola below the news! At the company's celebration party before, the company's Derek Owen, when introducing the development of the "AOL community" to Li Xuan, mentioned that the company started to try online advertising for the first time last month!

So Li Xuan tried to click on the picture of the Coca-Cola advertisement, and the browser opened a new webpage again, which was the website of the Coca-Cola Company. In fact, a newly emerging business of the company is to create a beautiful and atmospheric website for major well-known companies!

The official website of the Coca-Cola Company that caught Li Xuan's eyes is quite rich in information. In addition to the introduction about the development history of the Coca-Cola Company, there are various activities that the Coca-Cola Company is carrying out in the global market.

The company now has more than 850,000 users, but less than 900,000. If it is calculated by three people per family, the potential population of landing "America Online Community" is as high as 2.5 million, which already accounts for 1% of the population of the United States, which is naturally enough to attract interest from many companies.

In fact, as early as last year, some merchants began to approach the company to advertise on the "America Online Community". But the company was not moved at that time, because all the people who came to negotiate were some small companies with no name.

The Internet is an emerging industry, and the company is one of the pioneers. To a certain extent, the level of advertisers also represents the level of the company. For example, the advertisements you see on websites such as iQiyi and Youku are mostly run by well-known companies. On those small video sites that provide pirated versions, the most advertisements you see may be a cartoon head of a girl with a half-breasted girl with the words "click me" next to it.

While advertisers are choosing Internet companies, Internet companies are also choosing advertisers. Only when the grades of the two parties match each other, can the maximum benefit emerge, otherwise it may damage the brand image of both parties.

For the first time the company put out an advertisement, it only chose to cooperate with Coca-Cola, Aikang, and Oriental Games. Two of them are world-renowned brands under the Oriental Group, the only one from outside the group, and the most well-known beverage company in the world.

In order to seize the online service market as much as possible, the company adopted the method of reducing service fees, which naturally caused great pressure on the company's financial health. Therefore, Derek Owen had to find ways to open up new sources of revenue for the company.

Of course, the company is not completely abandoning online service fees. Ordinary free users can only log in to the "AOL Community" from the night before to 9 am the next day. Because this period is non-working hours, the Internet in the United States is relatively idle. Companies can buy network bandwidth from telecom operators at relatively low prices.

But after nine o'clock in the morning, when a large number of office computers began to connect to the network, the Internet became crowded across the United States. If users want to surf the Internet freely and without any restrictions 24 hours a day, they must pay an additional fee of $20 per month to become a premium member of the company.

In addition to this part of user-paid revenue, as well as the budding advertising revenue, "AOL" also provides some other value-added services. For example, the company has established partnerships with major U.S. airlines to launch online ticket booking services. In addition, there are online car rental, online reservation of hotel rooms and so on.

In order to facilitate customers to retrieve ticketing, hotel and other data information from time to time, the company has spent a lot of money to build a powerful online database. From the perspective of the current input-output ratio, the company's investment is undoubtedly a huge loss~www.readwn.com~ The value-added income generated by 850,000 users alone cannot make up for the company's investment for this purpose. cost. But the company is investing in the future. When other companies have not yet discovered the business opportunities that may appear in the Internet age, the company has begun to set up barriers for latecomers!

Li Xuan opened the game menu again, which provided dozens of online mini-games including shooting, puzzle, and adventure. The capacity of these free mini games is not large, only a few hundred kilograms. It only takes one or two minutes to complete the download, and it has the basis for online trial play.

During the download period, the advertisement displayed on the game frame on the screen is a new game, "Sim City", which is about to be launched by Dongfang Games. This is the blockbuster production of Dongfang Game Company at the end of this year. Players will build a brand new city from scratch as mayor in the game! (To be continued.)

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