Dot.Bomb: The Strange Death of Dot.Com Britain [Paperback]

'At times hilarious... captures perfectly the greed, conceit and plain stupidity of the time' - Daily Telegraph

Absorbing...a painstaking exhumation of the stock market's latest bout of irrational exuberance. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Dot.Bomb is entertaining, allowing readers to enjoy the rollercoaster ride without getting bogged down in technicalities. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

[He] conjures up nicely the time when every Fulham kitchen table had an envelope with a plan for justnannies.com (or whatever) scrawled on the back of it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

When Britain got dot.com fever at the very end of the 20th century the City tore up the rule book. Lastminute.com soared to a stock-market valuation of 3750 million. Clickmango.com raised millions in days. Boo.com spent #100 million trying to sell designer sports gear on the Net. Old-style industrial giants with huge turnovers and workforces were edged out of the FTSE 100 by e-commerce newcomers losing a fortune. And then it all went horribly wrong, and even the most glamorous start-ups found they couldn't defy the laws of gravity. Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC's Internet Correspondent throughout the whole dot.com bubble (now it no longer has a dedicated Internet Correspondent at all), and was thus uniquely placed to cover the whole story at first-hand, from the first fledgling net pioneers and the launch of Freeserve through the fabulous fin-de-siecle spending of boo.com to the horribly messy crash that with hindsight seemed utterly inevitable. Originally published as current affairs, "Dot.bomb" - with the story brough up to date for this 2003 edition - now stands as both a business manual of how not to start a business, and a work of recent history.

The dot com bubble came late to Britain, arriving with Freeserve’s flotation in July 1999 and evaporating soon after lastminute.com’ s explosive debut on the stock market the following March. But its brevity made the experience all the more intense for those who were determined to get a slice of this revolution. They were driven by the promise of instant riches but also by a belief that the old ways of doing business in Britain were being overturned, and now was the time to storm the barricades. As a BBC Business Correspondent I reported on these events for television news programmes, excited and invigorated by a story unlike any other I had covered. In the end, it all went pop – and that, in its way, was just as exciting.

Many of those I met during this time said they would love to write a book about what they were going through – but since they were spending eighteen hours a day either trying to raise the money to fund their dot com ideas or to keep their leaky vessels afloat, they just did not have the time. So I set out to tell their stories. There have been plenty of books about what happened in Silicon Valley – but nobody has written an account of how the dot com tide swept over Britain and what was left when it receded. This is an attempt to do just that. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Rory Cellan-Jones is Internet and Business Correspondent for the BBC. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.