Net Results: I have a bright orange T-shirt that I only bring out for special events and this week sees one of those momentous occasions when the dresser drawer slides open and it emerges.
Formal wear it isn't, but it has its own little sartorial statement to make. Printed across the front of the shirt in angular white lettering is this: "I got £80 million in venture capital for my .com idea and all I have left is this lousy T-shirt".
It usually gets a laugh, particularly from the techies and the venture capitalists (VCs), but I realised this week as it emerged once again that even techies and VCs didn't seem to know why the shirt is particularly funny.
To my surprise, the exact reference point of the shirt - for yes, there is indeed one beyond the generic geek humour - has slipped away into the mists of internet history. Not even the orange colour or the typeface rings bells any more.
OK, let me put you out of your misery. Think one URL: boo.com.
Coming back to you now? Not merely the poster child of the UK internet industry, this was the three-storey billboard of the UK internet industry, the 800 pound trendily-dressed gorilla, the big kahuna.
Boo.com was the orange-coloured fashion website with the funky white typeface and was THE internet star - for better or worse - for a two-year stretch during which founders Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander (the latter name inevitably prefaced by the phrase "former fashion model") annoyingly seemed to be everywhere. The duo were, we were endlessly told, net retail gurus who at first could do no wrong, then were seen to have done everything wrong.
From 1998 to 2000, the company burned through a phenomenal $80 million (€63.3 million) in VC funding given to them by the crème de la crème of the finance world, none of which wanted to lose out on this next big thing or a sexy new medium called the internet.
Goldman Sachs, the Benetton family and JP Morgan were among the investors who wrote out cheques and transferred the funds and let it be spent on lavish parties, first-class air travel and generally silly behaviour that came to be one of the more embarrassing excesses of the dotcom era (anyone remember the £100,000 (€145,462) inflatable boardroom that went for £300 at clickmango.com's liquidation sale?).
The reason for the T-shirt's reappearance is that, five years ago this week, this internet phenomenon, which always seemed in every way possible to annoy more than captivate, collapsed. Liquidators KPMG were summoned to oversee the death throes.
The company, which by now had eight worldwide offices, 400 employees and had spent millions on advertising, only made £200,000 in its final two months of operation. As the Guardian notes in a profile this week, the company actually needed £30 million to stay afloat.
Meanwhile, out on the net's bulletin board sites and e-mail lists, a sniggerfest began that didn't end until we saw the demise of some of the biggest dotcom names at home and abroad.
Many of them kept right on partying while the economic ship sank. Curiously, even as the wider economy tanked, VCs kept pushing money into dotcoms for a good year, as if they were somehow more resilient rather than - as one would expect of youthful ventures run by freshly minted MBAs, engineers and English literature graduates who'd taught themselves HTML over the summer - more vulnerable.
I find it interesting that a name such as boo.com, that once sizzled in the net world (even if from notoriety rather than success), has faded so quickly from general memory, rendering my T-shirt mildly amusing rather than sharply sarcastic. Alas.
But alternatively, look at how the whole net world has been transformed since the boo.com crash in 2000. Yes, many companies failed, much money was lost, some who were older forgot to be wiser, and some who were younger learned their real-life business lessons the hard way.
However, for the rest of us, the web hasn't gone away. So much has since been transformed. Websites are now a given rather than a hip business strategy. Buying things online is a normal activity rather than one that made you seem rather daring. My mom recently asked me how to go about selling some old furniture on eBay since all her friends are doing it.
Undoubtedly that is why boo.com is gone and mostly forgotten. Selling and buying online no longer seems exciting. Grandparents have usernames and passwords and are busy clicking and buying.
So was boo.com before its time? Of course not. Hubris has no temporal limits.
(I must reveal that my T-shirt was one of the evil brainchildren of my fellow columnist Danny O'Brien; while it is no longer available, many more equally geeky shirts are at http://www.ntkmart.co.uk/).
klillington@irish-times.ie weblog: http:weblog.techno- culture.com
