| « Going Down the Road | Jamieko » |
GTV and Me
Link: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1544289,00.html
As some of you may know, before going to Japan I spent nearly 2 years trying to start up a dot com company called GTV.com with a guy named Ken Mayer. GTV now stands for "Global Technology Ventures" but originally it was for "Global Television". The idea was to provide a simple, easy to use service for everyday people to upload video to the net for the world to see. Does any of that sound familiar? In 2000 when we started on this venture there really weren't any other companies providing a similar service. Unfortunately, 2000 also marked the year when the dot com bubble burst and nobody was willing to invest anymore in start up companies.
So in an effort to attract investors, we had to switch the focus of GTV away from what we really wanted to do and chased after whatever seemed like it might bring in some funding. At first we looked at video conferencing, then video instant messaging, then cell phone text messaging and finally AIM-YAHOO-MSN etc. interoberable instant messaging services for companies. So essentially we switched from doing something really fun, unique and interesting to something very dry, common and dull. To a certain extent this plan worked, and while I'm no longer involved with GTV, as far as I can tell it's still around today providing instant messaging services to corporations.
So why am I writing about this now? Well as you may have heard, popular new video upload service YouTube was just purchased by Google for 1.65 billion dollars. There's no way to ever know for sure, but had GTV stayed on its original course and built the service that was in our blueprints that 1.65 billion could have quite possibly been mine! Don't believe me? Well you can still see some traces of our old prototype websites on archive.org, here and here.
Oh well, that's life I guess. I better get back to looking through the "Help Wanted" ads. Maybe there's a Denny's somewhere that needs a new waiter.
8 comments
Oh Jamie - I am so sorry to hear that you are out $1.6 Billion. G(oogle)TV sounds much more appealing than "GooTube." Maybe it would help if you made a list as to how you would spend $1.6 Billion if you had it? And I mean spend - not just squirrel it away somewhere. 
To be honest, I only owned about 2% of GTV. That means had we gotten the same deal as YouTube, I would have only made a paltry 33 million dollars.Still, I could probably buy a lot of model trains and robot dogs with that kind of cash.
What a coincident. I am listening on teh the net CHUM FM's programme and I sumbld into your web site. Very lively writting and glad to know taht you appreciate Hong Kong which I am resdiing in. I did spend eight years in Canada, two of which in whoops. too many typos. guess i won'tbe making a living as a typist. 
Wow. I thought you were joking, so I followed the links. I even clicked on the "Member Directory" just to make sure, but it was "Not in Archive." And to think that I felt honoured when the creator of avoidinglife.com adopted my old car Thumper. Imagine how I feel now that I realize that a co-founder of the original GTV drove my ex-car for a few months . . . ! 
Heya Jaime! I just realized you finally removed your list of links to fellow Aomoi JETs. D'oh. I used to use that part of your site as a way to check up on my fellow Aomoricans. You don't still happen to have all those links that you've recently removed from your site do ya? If so, would you mind e-mailing 'em to me? It'd be much appreciated. 
I know that this is unrelated to the post, but did you go to the JET conference this weekend, Jamie? If so, how did it go? Even though I have been back to Canada in 2003, I still wanted to go and meet some like minded people. 
Comment feed for this post