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Dot-com pioneers--where are they now?

In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.

About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.

AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.

Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.

AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.

Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.

Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.… Read more

Toy delivers 'date-rape' drug when ingested

The CNN article about the Aqua Dots product recall says:

U.S. safety officials have recalled about 4.2 million Chinese-made Aqua Dots bead toys that contain a chemical that has caused some children to vomit and become comatose after swallowing them.

We immediately did our own product recall, removing the unsafe toy from our house last night after our daughter went to bed. But how did this product get into our house in the first place?… Read more

'First Dot-com City' auctions off sign of the times

It's nowhere near Silicon Valley and it's likely that the residents who use "Google" as a verb are in the minority. But there's a town in Eastern Oregon that was once known as "America's First Dot-com City."

Halfway, Ore., a little town southwest of Hells Canyon, gained fame in 1999 when it agreed to publicly change its name for a year to Half.com in exchange for cold hard cash (said to be $100,000) and school computers. In an auction that ended Sunday on eBay, the town was able to squeeze … Read more

Vote: Battle of the nonviolent robots (Round 1, Part 2)

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Sweet Sixteen matchups here.

These robots don't want to fight. That's why you have to pick the winners. Here's part two of the first round of our grand tournament, featuring robots from the movies and TV. All you have to do is vote for the winners.

Voting is open from now until next Monday, September 10. Check back then for the results of this round, exciting second-round matchups, and a couple of surprises.

See last week's matchups and tournament rules … Read more

RIP Bolt.com: Social networking before we knew what it was

Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.

But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark … Read more

Seattle gets groceries from the Amazon(.com)

Amazon.com has a new online grocery service for Seattle residents called Amazon Fresh. Users can pick from an selection of grocery items and have them delivered to their home, or one of the local "pickup centers." The home delivery options come in two flavors--a predawn delivery in a temperature-controlled crate, and a scheduled in-person delivery within a one-hour time slot of your choice. The service is in part the next step to Amazon's "Food and Grocery" section, which contains nearly everything except foods that require refrigeration.

Online grocery shopping is not a new phenomenon. … Read more

.Mac users getting remote goodies this holiday

One of the more interesting takeaways from this morning's keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was the news that .Mac subscribers running Leopard would be able to enjoy a new remote desktop feature called "Back to my Mac." Users will be able to sort and scavenge through the contents of computers far away from their home network machines using Leopard's new finder and transfer files to and fro freely. The service works with any Mac running Leopard that's been set up with .Mac authorization.

During this morning's demo, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs … Read more

TV on the go, and nothing else

In this age of convergence and the uber-device, you'd think everyone was clamoring for the digital Swiss Army knife that has become such a cliche. But some of us are purists when it comes to electronic entertainment--especially when it comes to television. Not that we watch tons of TV, of course; we at Crave are strictly PBS types (cough).

For those who can't live without the same Seinfeld reruns they've already seen hundreds of times, Japan-based BlueDot has a mini-TV that's under 5 inches long and less than half an inch thick, with a 4-inch screen. … Read more

Picture Dots: You know, for kids

File this one under "cute, but not there yet." One of the new Web sites that was showcased at Tuesday's New York New Tech Meetup was PictureDots, which falls under one of my favorite categories of Web 2.0: borderline useless time-wasters. Basically, with PictureDots you can create your own connect-the-dots puzzles, share them with your friends online, or print them out for your favorite kids (of any age). Kind of a cool idea, especially when you think of the procrastination opportunities.

But there's a downside. It's cute, but it's not particularly efficient. You … Read more