NetKing

» see netking.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yitzhak Rabin was shot in Tel Aviv on 4 November 1995. Within hours the Tamir-Cohen advertising agency, working with an internet entrepreneur named Arnon Katz, had put a page on the web with a memorial candle on it that visitors could light. Israel had almost no commercial web at that point, so this was one of the first things anybody in the country built that was meant to be visited by the public rather than by a research department.

The page kept going after the mourning ended, and by 1998 it had become a full portal under Alon Stadler, with a directory of Israeli sites and a wall of forums and chat rooms sitting under the news flashes. It ran the first internet survey conducted in Israel and carried partnerships with cable channels 3 and 4. Walla, which launched a month after the memorial page went up, and IOL were the other two names in Hebrew, and for a stretch in the late nineties it was genuinely a three-horse race.

September 1999 was the top. Discount Investments took 30 percent of the portal and Reshet Media took 25, valuing NetKing at 6.5 million dollars, and within weeks the company was announcing a children's portal with Noga Communications and Haim Saban's Saban International. This was the dot-com bubble at full extension, in a country whose entire online population would have fit inside one American metro area.

~ the record ~

~ the radio ~

In 1999 Yariv Ben Yehuda, who had come out of Galei Tzahal and was serving as the site's content VP, started building a radio station inside the portal. It launched in February 2000 under Limor Dahan, who had come from Galgalatz, and it was the first online radio service Israel had. Six channels at first, eight later, with original programming made for it.

From June 2000 the site also streamed a show called ANY1HOME, a house-with-cameras format where the residents could reach the outside world through internet chat. Hebrew Wikipedia carries that one without a source, so treat the detail as thinner than the rest. What is certain is that a portal part-owned by an ad agency was producing live radio and a camera-house show for dial-up subscribers in the first half of 2000, months before Big Brother reached American or British television.

~ the deal that did not close ~

In January 2001 Cellcom, the mobile operator, agreed to buy NetKing. A month later it withdrew, saying it lacked confidence in the technologies the company had developed. The portal closed immediately. Globes reported the ending on 11 February 2001, with the shareholding at that moment split between Tamir-Cohen on 33 percent, Discount Investments on 30, Reshet on 20 and WPP on 17.

The chief executive, Yonatan Ben-Artzi, told the paper there were no other live negotiations and blamed business disagreements among the shareholders rather than the market. The line quoted was flat and final: what we lost, we lost. Radio NetKing had already stopped broadcasting the previous Sunday.

~ the distance ~

In November 1995 I was eleven years old and three years away from my first modem. The assassination itself was on every television in Turkey for days, but the web that grew around it was not something I could see, because I did not have the web yet.

netking.co.il no longer resolves at all. netking.com is alive and belongs to a parking operation that fingerprints your browser and bounces you somewhere else, which is the standard afterlife for a short five-letter domain whose original owner stopped paying attention twenty-five years ago.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »