Chapter 515: American Online Community

In another time and space, the "Navigator" browser launched by Netscape was an instant hit, in fact, there are many deep-seated reasons. First of all, in 1992, Gore was the first to propose the "Information Superhighway Plan" in the US Congress. With his and Clinton's successful entry into the White House, the U.S. government immediately began to push the plan in a big way, and by 1994 it was at a climax.

In early 1993, at the Supercomputer Center of the University of Champaign, Marc Anderson developed the graphical browser "Mosaic" for information retrieval on the World Wide Web. After the completion of the development of the "Mosaic" browser, there was no publicity, but it was placed on the intramural forum of the University of Champagne for free download.

But it quickly swept through campuses throughout the University of Illinois system. At this time, the Gopher retrieval system of the University of Minnesota announced that it was ready to start charging. As a result, a large number of web servers began to use free World Wide Web (WWW) technology.

As a result, "mosaic", as an important tool for World Wide Web search, also quickly spread from the campus of the University of Champagne to the whole United States. But after all, it is just a casual work of a few students, and the performance is still relatively simple and rough, and it has not been improved and upgraded later.

So when Mark Anderson set up his own company and developed the "Navigator", a more sophisticated and powerful commercial graphics browser, it quickly took over the mantle of the "Mosaic" browser and became the killer application software that swept the United States.

Many say it's the "navigator" browser, which opened the door to the era of the commercial Internet. But on the flip side, it was the foundation of America's early Internet boom. The foundation of the Navigator browser became legendary.

In fact, the author of the world's first graphical browser was not Mark Anderson. Rather, four students from the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. They developed a graphical browser called Erwise, which came out a year before Mosaic. And the technical level of this graphical browser. It's also outstanding.

Finland, a small Nordic country, has always had a strong information technology industry. Nokia, a brand familiar to countless Chinese, is a company from Finland. Finland's greatest contribution to the world in the computer software industry was the training of a man named Linus Tovaz. Linux, the world's most famous open-source operating system, was first developed by him!

However, Finland is not the United States, and 1992 was a time when the global economy was in a severe recession. There is a large amount of venture capital in Silicon Valley in the United States, so the development of high-tech industries such as computers, the Internet, and biopharmaceuticals in the United States has not been greatly affected. It's still thriving.

This is not the case in Finland, where four students at Helsinki University of Technology have not been able to find the investment to commercialize their Erwise browser in the context of the recession. Otherwise, the entire history of the Internet could be rewritten, and Finland might have another information technology company as famous as Nokia.

Therefore, in many cases, technological leadership is not omnipotent, and strong capital is needed to boost it. And the current Eastern Bloc naturally has both capital and technology.

This "Navigator" browser was developed by the World Wide Web Technology R&D Group of the Oriental Research Institute. After going through three versions, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5, it finally matured on the fourth version 1.0, and then began to hit the market.

Under the vigorous promotion of the Oriental Research Institute, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) is still relatively rapid. From last year to now. In less than a year, there are more than 500 World Wide Web servers worldwide. And the new WWW server is still being put on the market.

And the contribution of the "Navigator" browser is not to be underestimated. Before the Navigator browser hit the market. The World Wide Web accounts for a measly 0.5 per cent of the total amount of data in global Internet communications. And after the advent of the "Navigator" browser. Within a few months, the communication ratio had risen to 4.2 percent.

Version 1.0 of the "Navigator" browser is now released. It's a free trial version. Although the entire team of developers of the "Navigator" browser has been transferred from the Oriental Research Institute to the company AOL. However, as early as the advent of the "Navigator" browser, the Oriental Research Institute relied on its cooperative relations with major computer manufacturers around the world and signed pre-installation agreements with them for the "Navigator" browser.

Therefore, most of the new PCs on the market have the icon of the "Navigator" browser on the graphic desktop. After seeing this icon, users will inevitably click on it curiously to take a look. If the user has activated the Internet service, the browser will automatically connect to the navigation website opened by AOL.

This navigation site is a categorized list of all the websites that AOL technicians can find. That's right, that's how Yahoo started in another space-time. You must know that there is no Google on the Internet now, and if you want to browse a website, you must first know its URL.

A web address is usually a long string of letters, numbers, and symbols, and it is difficult for the average person to memorize them all. Therefore, in version 1.0 of the "Navigator" browser, a favorites function has been specially developed. After browsing a website, users can add it to their favorites if they are interested, and the next time they can find the URL directly from the favorites.

Of course, in the early days of the Internet, it was not easy for netizens to find a new website without the help of Google. The navigation page of AOL company solves this problem very intimately.

You only need to go to the navigation page to find almost all the valid URLs on the World Wide Web. Of course, this is also related to the fact that the current World Wide Web has just begun to sprout, and the default home page of the "Navigator" browser - the navigation page, has collected nearly 800 websites by category so far, and almost all the effective websites on the World Wide Web have been included!

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Li Xuan attended the MCI company's cocktail party. After returning to the hotel, I decided to turn on my computer and log in to AOL's "American Online Community". Take a look at the development status of this online community! Li Xuan did not log in with the client on the computer, but opened the "Navigator" browser. Get ready to log in to the web-based online community that has just been developed.

The default homepage of the "Navigator" browser is the navigation website developed by AOL, and the domain name is "" (Q). The English translation of the word "navigator" is actually "Navigator". But the word was too long to remember, so AOL deliberately chose a simpler domain name to use as the URL for navigating the website.

In the future, a simple and easy-to-remember domain name like "" will definitely be robbed. Li Xuan remembers that the domain names of "(shopping)" and "(candy) are all sold for millions of dollars, and the domain name with the highest price in history". The sale price was as high as $13 million.

But in this era of the World Wide Web, no one has yet seen the opportunity to squatt domain names. The Eastern Bloc was the first to register a large number of domain names, such as "", "", "", etc. Of course, Li Xuan is by no means selling for money in the future, and with his current net worth, he has long been unable to look down on this small profit.

This move by the Eastern Group is nothing more than a defense of domain names related to its own business in advance. If it is said that "" is preemptively registered by someone else and then sold to other companies with a similar business to the Oriental Group, it is definitely a troublesome thing for the Eastern Group!

The "Navigator" browser's homepage, which used to be just a blank page, now defaults to this navigation site. It was added not long ago. The most prominent position on the top of the website is a button with the "AOL" logo. Li Xuan clicked on it with the mouse, and the browser immediately opened a new "AOL" login page.

After Li Xuan entered his account name and password, he successfully logged in to the web version of the American online community. Compared to the client version. The newly developed version of the web is a bit more concise. After nearly three years of development, the content inside the "American Online Community" has been very rich.

For example, users can browse the latest global information and today's headlines in real time in the community. It was the crash of South African Airways Flight 295, killing all 159 people on board. Li Xuan clicked on this news link. In addition to the text report, a photo of the wreckage of the plane was distributed on the page. However, due to the slow internet speed. It took half a minute for the photo to be fully refreshed.

This is the beauty of World Wide Web technology, which can transfer not only plain text files, but also pictures, voices, videos, and other files. It's just that with the current network speed, it is obviously not very reliable to want to transmit video. After the data compression of the photo by a specific algorithm, the capacity can be reduced to hundreds of K, or even tens of K, and it can be completely browsed online.

Li Xuan's attention was not all focused on this sad news, but more on the static ad for Coca-Cola under the news! At the previous celebration reception of MCI, Derek Owen, CEO of AOL, mentioned that AOL had tried online advertising for the first time last month when he introduced the development of the "American online community" to Li Xuan!

So Li Xuan tried to click on this Coca-Cola advertising image, and the browser opened a new web page again, which was the website of the Coca-Cola Company. In fact, one of AOL's recent emerging businesses is to make a beautiful and atmospheric website for major well-known companies!

The official website of the Coca-Cola Company that caught Li Xuan's eyes was relatively rich in information, in addition to the introduction of the development history of the Coca-Cola Company, there were various activities that the Coca-Cola Company was carrying out in the global market.

AOL now has more than 850,000 subscribers, but less than 900,000. If you calculate the number of people in each family of three, then the potential number of people who can log on to the "American Online Community" is as high as 2.5 million, which is already 1% of the population of the United States, which is naturally enough to attract the interest of many companies.

In fact, as early as last year, some merchants began to approach AOL to prepare to advertise on the "American Online Community". But AOL was not impressed at the time, because the people who came to negotiate were small companies with unknown origins.

As an emerging industry, AOL is one of the pioneers, and the grade of advertisers actually represents the grade of AOL to a certain extent. For example, most of the ads you see on websites such as iQiyi and Youku are placed by companies with names and surnames. And on those small video sites that offer pirated films, the most common ad you see is probably a cartoon portrait of a crisp-breasted woman with two words next to it, "Point me".

Advertisers are choosing Internet companies, and Internet companies are also choosing advertisers. Only when the grades of both parties match each other can the maximum benefit burst out, otherwise it may damage the brand image of both parties.

AOL launched its first advertisement, and only chose to cooperate with Coca-Cola, Aikang, and Oriental Games. Two of them are world-renowned brands owned by the Oriental Group, the only one from outside the group, and the world's most well-known beverage company.

In order to seize the online service market as much as possible, AOL has adopted the method of reducing service fees, which naturally puts great pressure on the company's financial health. Therefore, Derek Owen, the CEO, had to find ways to open up new sources of revenue for the company.

Of course, AOL is not completely abandoning online service fees, and ordinary free users can only log in to the "American Online Community" from the night before to 9 a.m. the next morning. Because this period is non-working time, the Internet in the United States is relatively idle. AOL can purchase network bandwidth from telecom operators at a relatively low price.

But when a large number of office computers began to connect to the Internet after 9 a.m., the Internet became crowded across the United States. AOL users who want to be free to access the Internet 24 hours a day without any restrictions must pay an additional fee of $20 per month to become a premium member of AOL.

In addition to this part of the user paid income, as well as the fledgling advertising revenue, there are also some other value-added services on the "American Online Community". For example, AOL has established partnerships with major airlines in the United States to launch an online booking service. In addition, there are things like online car rental, online hotel room booking, etc.

In order to facilitate customers to retrieve ticketing, hotel and other data information from time to time, AOL has spent a lot of money to build a powerful online database. If we only look at the input-output ratio at this stage, these investments of AOL are undoubtedly huge losses.

The value-added revenue generated by 850,000 users alone is far from compensating for the company's investment in this cost. But AOL is investing in the future, and when other companies have not yet discovered the business opportunities that may arise in the Internet era, AOL has begun to erect barriers for latecomers!

Li Xuan clicked on the game menu again, which provided dozens of online mini-games including shooting, puzzle, and adventure. These free mini-games are not large, only a few hundred K, and they can be downloaded in just a minute or two, which has the basis for online trials.

During the download period, the advertisement displayed on the game frame on the screen is a new game to be launched by Oriental Games Company - "SimCity". This is the blockbuster production of Oriental Games Company at the end of this year, and players will build a new city from scratch as the mayor in the game! )