THE San Jose Convention Centre turned into the Temple of the Geek Gods last week as Silicon Valley's digital gurus arrived to address the 40,000 faithful at the world's largest Internet extravaganza, Internet World 96.
With interest in the Net at fever pitch and new developments announced daily, this was the event of the moment.
Three years ago, the twice yearly conference needed only a single, room. Now it doubles in size every six months, accommodating over 1,000 companies this year. A scaled down version arrives in London at the end the month.
The week long event played host to computer luminaries like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Apple and Next founder, Steven Jobs, Oracle's flamboyant CEO, Larry Ellison, and Sun's, Bill Joy, an architect of Java, the hot new programming language which everyone wants to be fluent in.
But those who made the pilgrimage to hang on every word of their heroes had the added pleasure of learning some had feet of clay. For as the multitudes sat sipping free cups of coffee (the official Internet beverage), they watched Bill Gates mess up a simple Intranet demo amused Microsoft flunkies quickly came to his rescue and Larry Ellison forgot that you have to click on highlighted text to make a hypertext link.
As Ellison fumbled with a stalled demo, audience members shouted, "Click on the blue text!", and Ellison (one of the few techies who opts for Armani suits rather than old jeans and tshirts) sheepishly admitted, "I've humiliated myself in front of thousands!"
But his demonstration of the much publicised $500 Network Computer (NC), which he says Oracle will begin shipping in, September, wooed the crowd, drawing the only product demonstration applause of the day. The NC is an open platform machine which contains little memory, instead downloading software as needed from an external server.
Curiously, though, Oracle wasn't an exhibitor at the event, but that left room for some other company to squeeze into the packed display halls. After filling, the convention centre proper, exhibitors spilled over into the Civic Centre across the street, and into a billowing white tent next to the convention centre. In the unexpectedly hot weather - the mercury hit 90 and continued 4o climb on the opening day - vendors in the tents stewed and worried that the heat would shut down their computer systems.
Meanwhile, back in the main hall, visitors could stand at a glass wall and watch the blinking control boards of the massive mother computer system wiring the entire convention together, courtesy of IBM.
In fine Valley tradition, small companies were often as likely to draw crowds as the big players' (after all, today's start up may be tomorrow's Netscape.) And everyone wanted a piece of Netscape's time. Looking on with satisfaction was Netscape's PR manager, Irishwoman Jennifer O'Mahony who spent seven years with Apple before following her European boss Michael Spindler to Cupertino; when he became Apple's CEO. "At Netscape, I'm really inside the tornado," she said. "It's the fastest moving company I've ever been with."
"What's going on? Are they giving anything away?" asked one man as the crowds' milled around the Netscape stand. They, weren't - but free espresso, Italian sodas, popcorn, disks, pins, chocolate and frisbees were on offer elsewhere.
Some of the more interesting products at Internet World included Freeloader, an application that "surfs the Web while you sleep", collecting and storing information from pre selected sites for later retrieval off line. Pointcast drew a crowd watching a site demo. They maintain a site which provides continuously updated news.
Users can download free software at http://wwwpointcast.com which integrates with Netscape, browsers to provide an onscreen banner of continuous news. And developers were interested in the various programs that incorporate Java and allow Web sites to include interactive graphics movement and sound.
One of the rules of the exhibit was to take the prefix "cyber" and affix it to the word of your choice. Thus, visitors were invited to surf and recaffeinate at the large Cybercafe, to chat in multimedia cyberrooms, or download the software for a cyberwallet from the CyberCash site, which enables Net purchasing. Also in the main hall was the world's first cyberbank, Security First network bank, which only exists online.
At stand after stand, electronic commerce applications drew an eager business crowd, who were anxious to find out how to put into practice the impulse buy possibilities of cyberpurchasing.
The Web is clearly being seen as a business tool, either for active data search uses (search engine companies like Lycos and Digital's Alta Vista are actively moving into this area, in addition to maintaining their free Web search sites) or as part of company Intranets, internal Web sites that can only be accessed by company employees.
"Putting the Web to work" as how one company described Intranets. Another company's slogan indicated the youthful demographics of the Internet and Web company world: "Kick Ass, Solutions for a Wired World".
