IdeaCafe Celebrates its 20th Anniversary!

20 Milestones of the Past 20 Years

Idea Cafe was born two decades ago, on August 15, 1995. Amazon, eBay, craigslist, and Match.com all went live that same year. In fact in 1995, only 16 million people with a dead-slow internet connection were online, less than half a percent of the human race (for comparison - today, it’s 3 billion of us which is 40 percent of the planet).

However not many of the Internet pioneers who started back in 1995 are still around. Remember Pets.Com? Now at the age of twenty, we are proud to be among the oldest existing small business communities on the internet continuing to serve up a fresh, "Fun Approach to Serious Business"(sm) for people like you who think for themselves, work for themselves, and like their work to be fun.

Over the years, we at Idea Cafe have been inventive and rebellious – just like you, our audience. Knowing what you have to deal with and the kinds of challenges you face, we`ve always strived to carry you forward to new entrepreneurial adventures.

Those two decades were definitely exciting times for the both internet and Idea Cafe. Probably no other technology has caught on so fast, built so many new businesses, and demolished so many old ones.

Let’s take a look at some of the great moments of the history of internet for the past 20 years:

1995       -  Amazon, craigslist, Match.com, and eBay launch; Microsoft releases first version of Internet Explorer

1996       -  Hotmail launches. Hotmail was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail) and it was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Later it was acquired by Microsoft.

1997       -  Netflix launches as a DVD subscription service. Over time, Netflix was able to take advantage of the rapidly evolving mobile technology and ever-improving internet speeds to become one of the largest video distribution networks on the planet.

1999     -    Napster launches. This is the first peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service with a main focus on sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in MP3 format.

2000    -     40 million Americans say that have purchased a product online

2001    -     Wikipedia launches. It is the biggest Internet encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it.

 2003    -    Apple launches iTunes Music Store – the first software-based online digital media store

                 Skype, the most popular telecommunications application software, launches. It is used for sending instant text and video messages, exchanging files and images, and creating conference calls. What’s more, you can make video chat and voice calls from computers, tablets, and mobile devices via the Internet to other devices or telephones/smartphones.

                   WordPress blog publishing system is created. It is basically an open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It is now the world’s most popular CMS that is powering around a quarter of the world’s websites.

                   LinkedIn launches. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service. It is mainly used for professional networking. As of March 2015, LinkedIn reports more than 364 million acquired users in more than 200 countries

2004   -        Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook. Since its creation, Facebook has grown into a worldwide network.  There are now over 1.28 billion people and 30 million brands using Facebook each quarter.

                    Google goes public

2005   -         Broadband connections surpass dial-up connections;

                    YouTube is founded. The video-sharing site rapidly evolved from a small platform to a vital part of our lives. Today, YouTube is the world's most popular online video site, with users watching 4 billion hours worth of video each month, and uploading 72 hours worth of video every minute.

Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has grown from a site devoted to amateur videos to one that distributes original content.

2006   -          Twitter launches. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks used today that has changed the media, politics and business. Many will report they hear their news first on Twitter- stories of natural disasters, sports scores, the death of a celebrity and more are shared first on Twitter. Twitter has also had an impact on business as brands find a new way to reach their fans where they are already- in social media and on their smartphones.

2007   -           Apple puts the first iPhone on sale and it had been sold … fast. An interesting fact is that everybody knew it was coming. The iPhone is considered one of Apple’s worst-kept secrets, but still the most anticipated gadget of all time. Nobody, not even Apple, predicted how the iPhone would change the way we look at phones forever.

2010  -           Pinterest launches. Pinterest is a social website that allows users to create virtual ‘pin boards’ to collect and save different images divided into categories: fashion, photography, home décor, cooking, etc. It’s like an online scrapbook of your favorite things.

                    Instagram launches too. Instagram is a mobile app for sharing photos and videos. In many respects, Instagram’s platform has been unique from the start. Once a user takes a photo, they can choose a filter to customize the image and capture the moment perfectly. The filters help you rework an amateur or mediocre mobile photo to make it look artistic and professional. From the very beginning, Instagram was set to be a success story. In fact, it had 1 million users just 2 months after its launch and it kept on growing ever since. Instagram knew how to continually improve itself adding new features and new photo effects.   

                    Wikileaks releases US diplomatic cables

2014-2015 -    We are preparing for the "Internet of things," in which billions of ordinary objects can be connected and controlled online.

It is amazing, isn’t it. In a matter of very few years, the Internet has become a very powerful platform that has changed forever the way we do business, and the way we communicate.