What is the connection between Seattle's Kingdome implosion, the Playboy mansion and the Spirit of Innovation? Read Episode 10 for more.

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, UNITED STATES, June 27, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ -- The year was 2000. The Internet is now embedded into American culture. Email is starting to replace personal postage mail. Business and individuals register domains for their websites. There is a battle to grab up domain names before they become unavailable. Microsoft’s Windows Media streaming technology is growing in popularity and they want to claim this vertical market. There is a perfect opportunity to do so with an upcoming historic event.

Seattle is planning on imploding its famous sports center called the Kingdome. Microsoft streaming media division already has a collection of previous world-famous videos. So now there was an event close to Microsoft’s home office that could show off Windows Media.

Meanwhile in Salt Lake City, the company that hosted ImageMind’s streaming servers went out of business. This effected all businesses that parked their servers in this hosting farm. There were spotted rumors of tech companies running out of funds, but many people did not pay close attention. This was the first signs of the upcoming DOT COM crash that would closed down many tech companies.

John F Cruz, founder of ImageMind, found a new server farm. Oddly it was a trucking company, who had plenty of bandwidth and server rack space. They were starting a hosting service. Cruz was driving in his car, with a new streaming server in the passenger seat when the call came in.

It was the Product Manager that had met early at the Internet Awards ceremony hosted at the California Playboy mansion. The event included tours of the Playboy grounds and famous grotto by one of the Playboy bunnies, with whom Cruz later took a picture. The NetShow Product Manager briefed Cruz about the upcoming implosion and offered Cruz a commission to develop a streaming site to celebrate the event featuring NetShow.

Cruz accepted and designed a website portal called “Implode a Friend”. The concept was similar to Video Express Vault that Cruz had previously designed for ImageMind. Visitors could select from the various world-famous implosion videos from a drop-down list, then add a personal text message. The portal would then email the selected implosion streaming video inside a colorful graphical email. The email would flash “You’ve Just Been Imploded” and the video would then automatically start to stream.

Cruz designed the system to grow traffic geometrically. Anyone receiving a “You Just Been Imploded” email could click a button which took them directly to the Implosion website portal. Typically, most visitors would send four or five implosion videos to their friends. Then, after watching the video, they would go to the site and send four or five videos to their own group of friends.

It turned out that implosion videos were popular. The visitor traffic grew so quickly that the video files were moved to one of Microsoft’s largest server farm partners. The Implode a Friend website was a success and Microsoft congratulated Cruz and his team. Out of all the vendors Microsoft had at its disposal, the fact that they called John Cruz spoke volumes.

But serious challenges were right around the corner. More tech companies were shutting down for lack of funding. It was the beginning of what would be the DOT COM bubble crash.

Some of the startup tech companies successfully sold to larger companies. Mark Cuban sold his audio streaming sports service. Hotmail, which had no revenue but had a large user base was able to eventually sell for $800 million to Microsoft.

Cruz was approached to sell Video Express Mail from one of his investors, but Cruz declined stating the product was not finished. That was a mistake. Cruz could have walked away a millionaire. Instead, Cruz was faced with his New Jersey Software Distribution company refusing to make payment due.

That company closed keeping any profits and shipped remaining inventory back to ImageMind. ImageMind’s investors pulled out predicting the DOT COM crash. These combinations of events was too much for ImageMind and now it was a matter of business survival.

Did Cruz have any more ideas that would save ImageMind? Look for details in the next episode of The Spirit of Innovation, One Man’s Journey. Leave comments at www.imagemind.com

Benton
ImageMind
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