Dot.Bomb

For a heady nine months, until the spring of 2000, Britain had dot.com fever. Lastminute.com’s youthful founders saw their fledgling company soar to a valuation of £750 million, and Martha Lane Fox became a media star. Clickmango.com raised £3 million in just days to sell helth products online. Old-style industrial giantswere edged out of the FTSE 100 by e-commerce newcomers employing handfuls of people and losing a fortune… And then, just as swiftly, the bubble burst. London’s hi-tech stocks followed New York’s Nasdaq downwards. Boo.com, the flashiest website of all, went through £100 million in mere months in its mission to see designer sports gear. Financial analysts talked about ‘burn-rate’, and even the most glamorous start-ups couldn’t defy the oldest law of business. Why did it all go so horribly wrong? Now, Rory Cellan-Jones tells the full story of this brief, fabulous, often farcical epoch, from our own now-forgotten Net pioneers to the exclusive few who really did make untold riches – like the man who thought up Freeserve – and follows the destinies of the dot.coms all the way from the glitzy launch to the deserted offices after all the cash had been burned through. Dot.Bomb is the compulsive tale of a never-to-be-repeated time when it seemed anyone could become an instant millionaire – at the click of a mouse.