Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC 

 Case study 20 

 Brewster Kahle

(Founder, WAIS, Internet Archieve, Alexa Internet)

Brewster started WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet. WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Servers wherein you can search software’s. It was one of the predecessors to web search engines but Kahle sold WAIS to AOL in 1995. After WAIS he founded Alexa Internet. It tracked user browsing behavior and suggested related links using collaborative filtering. Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999. Kahle’s continue to run Archieve.

Kahle was a member of Thinking Machines team. He was on the project team. Soon Kahle leave Thinking Machines to start a startup called Bootstrap. The idea of WAIS came from figuring out how you would make of a machine that had 15 gigabytes of disk space and would have processors that you could run at a gigahertz. So they said to put them on the Net, they prototyped it. It was the first system that was trying to answers questions over the net. Dow Jones, KPMG Peat Marwick and Apple were involved in doing WAIS. They was one of the company to first think of the internet as a distribution system of software’s to give something a way and sell it. What was WAIS system was trying to get publishers online.

Kahle had his goal of building a great library. When WAIS became publishing online and was acquired by AOL he built two organizations at the same time which was Alexa Internet and Internet Archive, to archive everything that was in library. Alexa Internet was navigation system for the internet. Everything that Alexa ever collected would be donated to internet Archieve. The idea of Alexa was to help guide you around the net. They wanted to catalog the web, so you knew when you were and where you might go next, it came to be called collaborative filtering. 

Three things I’ve learn are first, you can do more than one startups like Kahle, as long as you have the patient, determination and perseverance to continue to build the company and you have your dreams. Second is, find a partner in business that will help you, which you are compatible with. Third, there are some places where in you can do your startup better because they have the facilities and services unlike the other country.