My family in Springfield
Once upon a time, in 1994, Rupert Murdoch bought a small Internet company called Delphi Internet Services. A small office was opened, on the lot, at 20th Century Fox, and some very forward thinking folks, Richard Montoya, Juliana & Ira Rubenstien, Liz Dubleman, Jesse Kanner, James Root, Shalom Mann, Nick Fenton, Christopher Fusco, Matt Jacobson, Mark Jeffrey, Bill Brody and John P. Roberts built some of the very first commercial entertainment websites on the new World Wide Web.
(Oh yea, I was there too.)
We build an online directory called iGuide, that News Corp could not figure out how to monetize, even though were were generating millions of page-views per week. It was a couple of years before the big IPOs started… D’oh!
Anyway, Fusco and I discovered this little company down in San Diego called “FutureSplash” that had this technology for creating vector animation in a web page.
Later, after News Corp folded iGuide back into the Marketing department of 20th Century Fox (Double D’oh!), Chris created the first commercial Entertainment site on the web with FutureSplash.
A few weeks later Macromedia bought the company, and renamed FutureSplash, Flash, D’oh!
The Simpson’s Movie Site brings me full circle… that team at News Corp was so ahead of everyone in the Entertainment space…. D’oh!
The Simpson’s Site Rules by the way… D’oh!
Tags: 20th Century Fox, Delphi Internet Services, iGuide, News Corp, Simpsons
