<story><title>Opening Remarks at the Securities Regulation Institute</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-clayton-012218</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yohann305</author><text>i was a bit too young to observe but has anyone here seen something similar when the internet craze came out?&lt;p&gt;1) Were public companies changing their names to reflect the &amp;quot;e&amp;quot;&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;i&amp;quot;? If so which ones?&lt;p&gt;2) Isn&amp;#x27;t the &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; from iPhone&amp;#x2F;iMac taken from the word &amp;quot;internet&amp;quot;? Okay it&amp;#x27;s a product and not a company name, but where does the distinction starts&amp;#x2F;ends?&lt;p&gt;Could we expect an incoming &amp;quot;bPhone&amp;quot; (blockchain) or cPhone(crypto), dPhone(decentralized) .. it actually sounds cool, right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>Yes, during the dotcom boom you could see a spectrum of behaviour, including at one edge companies that were almost purely a scam, basically &amp;quot;We&amp;#x27;re going to do this perfectly ordinary business, but _Internet_ so give us piles of cash&amp;quot; and at the other conventional businesses that really were heavily Internet related and only tweaked how they described their existing Internet work or moved that to the top of a document, such as Microsoft or Google.&lt;p&gt;In the middle somewhere a good example is Be Incorporated. During the 1990s Jean-Louis Gassee had founded this startup with VC money to pursue a new operating system and basically prove Apple (who he&amp;#x27;d previously worked for) wrong. By the end of the century JLG&amp;#x27;s funding was running out, the VCs didn&amp;#x27;t want any more risk, Apple had chosen to take back Steve Jobs instead of him, and it looked as though Be would go out of business shortly, but the dotcom book offered a &amp;quot;Hail Mary&amp;quot; play.&lt;p&gt;Be re-wrote its history and produced IPO paperwork that emphasised this as an Internet technology offering in the heart of the dotcom boom. Be&amp;#x27;s future was now in the promising (but it turns out in the end, totally irrelevant and now forgotten) Internet Appliance market, they pivoted from their previous work (developing a personal computer operating system nobody was using), they went from talking about TCP&amp;#x2F;IP as a specialist corner case few users would care about to prioritising it as the main focus of their system, and so on.&lt;p&gt;It didn&amp;#x27;t work, Be Inc. ceased business after burning all the IPO cash and laid off all its employees without shipping any significant new products. But without the dotcom boom, that would all have happened much earlier, when the VC money ran out. Ordinary people who foolishly purchased Be Inc. shares in the IPO or shortly afterwards lost their shirts, and the VCs got their money back.</text></comment>
<story><title>Opening Remarks at the Securities Regulation Institute</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-clayton-012218</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yohann305</author><text>i was a bit too young to observe but has anyone here seen something similar when the internet craze came out?&lt;p&gt;1) Were public companies changing their names to reflect the &amp;quot;e&amp;quot;&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;i&amp;quot;? If so which ones?&lt;p&gt;2) Isn&amp;#x27;t the &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; from iPhone&amp;#x2F;iMac taken from the word &amp;quot;internet&amp;quot;? Okay it&amp;#x27;s a product and not a company name, but where does the distinction starts&amp;#x2F;ends?&lt;p&gt;Could we expect an incoming &amp;quot;bPhone&amp;quot; (blockchain) or cPhone(crypto), dPhone(decentralized) .. it actually sounds cool, right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kitsune_</author><text>During the dot-com bubble you had a lot of companies that adopted &amp;#x27;digital super highway&amp;#x27; company names.&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;E.Digital_Corporation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;E.Digital_Corporation&lt;/a&gt;
Norris Communications &amp;gt; E.Digital_Corporation&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Broadcast.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Broadcast.com&lt;/a&gt;
Cameron Audio Networks &amp;gt; Broadcast.com&lt;p&gt;On top of that everyone and their mother founded companies that did &amp;#x27;something with the internet&amp;#x27; and all those companies had a &amp;#x27;.com&amp;#x27;, &amp;#x27;e&amp;#x27; or something similar in their names.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel like the &amp;#x27;i&amp;#x27; was mainly popularised with the iPod.</text></comment>