The India connection to dot com's 25th birthday

18th March 2010
The India connection to dot com's 25th birthday

Vinod Khosla, Infosys, Indian-co--founded Snapfish in  honorees shortlist

25 years ago, this week, the Internet received its first .com registration: On March 15, 1985, symbolics.com was the first .com registered in what had yet to be labelled the "world wide web." While it took nearly a decade for the domain -- and the consumer Internet -- to take off, today there are over 80 million .com websites and the domain is a prominent feature of one of our culture's most iconic developments. The .com domain remains at the centre of nearly every major Internet trend. According to Internet infrastructure services company, VeriSign's Internet Profiling Service there are 11.9 million e-commerce and online business websites, 1.8 million sports-related sites and 4.3 million entertainment-related sites with a .com web address. Verisign has launched a special website to celebrate 25 years of dot com http://www.25yearsof.com/ 

 The site shortlists 75 pioneers of the dot com era – 25 of whom will be honoured in San Francisco on May 26. Among pioneers listed are three with an India connection: Internet investor Vinod Khosla who co-founded Sun Microsystems; Infosys which was founded before dot com ( in 1981) and went on to become a $ 4 bn Indian  IT player and Snapfish, the world’s first and still the largest, photo finishing web service – co founded by Indian Bala Parthasarathy, who still heads the business after it was taken over by Hewlett Packard in 2004.

Observers suggest, over the next three years alone, the Internet will see the number of users increase by 500 million to 2.2 billion worldwide, and devices accessing the Internet increase from 1.6 billion devices to 2.7 billion devices. And with the emergence of innovations like smart grids, electronic health care and radio frequency ID (RFID) tags, the Internet and associated technology systems will undergo profound changes in the next decade. VeriSign has embarked on a new initiative called Project Apollo. This initiative will dramatically strengthen and scale the .com infrastructure by the year 2020. VeriSign's 2020 technology roadmap calls for it to grow capacity 1,000 times today's level of 4 trillion queries to manage 4 quadrillion queries per day to support normal and peak attack volumes based on what the company has experienced as well as Internet attack trends.

See our video spot for a special dot com clip 
March 18 2010