The Daily Aztec

Issue date: 2/21/08 Section: Science & Technology

Media Credit: Screengrab by Glenn Connelly / Photo Editor With more and more popular and succesful Web sites come duplicate sites that may lead to another major NASDAQ crash.

I magine the feeling of losing 80 percent of your net worth in just a few months.
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ Composite hit an all time intraday high of 5,133. Soaring technology companies became extinct and vibrant technology hubs became ghost towns virtually overnight.
One area that gained notoriety for its rapid deterioration of prominent technology companies was SoMa, the area South of Market in San Francisco.
While many people wrote off the dot-com industry as a thing of the past, existing and emerging technology companies began to transform how they operate.
This transformation is characterized by the phrase Web 2.0. It gained popularity in September 2005 after the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Emerging Technology Conference. The term represents blogs, wikis, social networking sites, text messaging or any other modern form of technology that distributes information and encourages community and user-generated content.
Kim Kimozie, a publicist with Simply Hired, which is a Bay Area Web 2.0 job search engine, is quick to distinguish many differences between what is taking place now with Web 2.0 and what took place seven years ago with the dot-com crash.
Foremost is the realization that in the late '90s, startup technology companies needed millions of dollars to grow, and an irrational rush to the public markets in the form of initial public offering's pushed stock market values to unrealistic levels. However, today, the Web infrastructure gives anyone the opportunity to build a successful Internet startup with very little outside capital.
What is even more promising is that companies are being driven by consumers whereas the high-flying start-ups of the past were being forced onto consumers.
While optimism is high among many people, others point out some striking similarities between what is happening now and what took place 10 years ago.
Observers cite the recent $650 million News Corp acquisition of MySpace, the $1.65 billion Google purchase of YouTube and the $2.6 billion shell out by eBay for Skype - all irrational acquisition valuations. They compare these acquisitions to the year 1999 when 117 of 457 IPO's doubled in price on their first day of trading.

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