ON TUESDAY, JULY 20, 1999, I was wandering around with dozens of friends in the Lobo Club of the Morrison Hotel. You had to wear black to get into the place. Barry O'Neill was there, wearing something pink on his black top. It was a meet-u of the trendiest cross-section of Dublin's cultural and corporate glitterati and only a few people knew what was on. But who cared? With free champagne, excellent finger food and good laughs, a lot of us thought it was going to be something related to DJ Paul Webb who was playing that evening. It turned out toe be the launch party for Rondomondo, Eircom's ill-fated online publishing venture. I will always remember is as the high-water mark of Ireland's dotcom excess. Two years later, Rondomondo was written off as a EUR 50m loss by Eircom. And right behind that company came dozens of others, some employing 100 people, as the dotcom industry flopped, tossing Oniva, Nua, and Ebeon into the scrapheap of history. In the meantime, a few of my friends started coding for a hostel booking engine and that evolved into Web Reservations International, now worth more than EUR 200m. And quietly along the side, Kevin Greene rolled his Cold Fusion code into eastern Europe, spawning AnotherFriend in languages not normally heard in his hometown of Limerick.
Things have changed in 10 years.
