Data Circle

Boo.com may be revving up to make a return to our screens, if the latest message on its website is to be believed. Previously an Internet shopping site that burnt through an unbelievable amount of funding in just a few months (the exact amount is uncertain, but the lowest estimate I’ve seen is £50 million and most sources put it more in the £100+ million area), it was a symbol of the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s/early 2000.

Personally, I am somewhat sceptical about Boo.com’s relaunch because I think that the generic online shopping market (clothes, books, DVDs etc) is more or less sewn up and that any new business will have to look for a niche market in order to be successful (unless it already has an established brand name behind it, but I wouldn’t place Boo.com in that category). I don’t know what its unique selling point is or why I should buy from Boo.com instead of another company, although to be fair I imagine those details won’t come out until the site is launched properly.

For the full story about the original collapse of Boo.com, check out Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story, a book detailing the rise and fall of the Internet company.

Further reading

• Boo shuts down
• Boo.com to relaunch
• Old Bad Ideas 2.0

Man buys PS3, smashes it with sledgehammer

I honestly can’t believe that someone would do this as a publicity stunt, although I suppose forking out a few hundred dollars for a few days of world wide infamy on the Internet is probably worth it in some ways. I can imagine a lot of people who had queued up for several hours being rather annoyed though watching someone in front of them smashing up what was otherwise a perfectly good games console.

You can watch the full video on YouTube.

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about PHP

I’ve just come across this useful and somewhat insightful article on Yet Another Web Development Blog. Most of the tips are things that I’ve already used or knew about, but I hadn’t thought about storing IP addresses as integers or checking the DNS record of the domain of an email address before verifying it. The tips are definitely worth a look for anyone who regularly programs in PHP, especially if you write a lot of your own code for running websites (as I do).