The premise for the new company, called @home, is that regular telephone lines do not have the bandwidth, a combination of speed and data capacity, to carry interactive services that include graphics and video. Cable, on the other hand, will be able to transmit 10 million digital bits a second, or nearly 1,000 times the speed of a PC modem over a regular telephone line.
Predictor: Doerr, John
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for The Austin American-Statesman, Laurie Flynn writes about investments in Internet companies, outlining the activities of one of the biggest venture capital firms of the time, which was headlined by John Doerr. Flynn writes: ”Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, a leading venture capital firm, last month joined Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable television provider, to finance a start-up to offer high-speed access to the Internet through existing cable systems. The premise for the new company, called @home, is that regular telephone lines do not have the bandwidth, a combination of speed and data capacity, to carry interactive services that include graphics and video. Cable, on the other hand, will be able to transmit 10 million digital bits a second, or nearly 1,000 times the speed of a PC modem over a regular telephone line. The new company is headed by William Randolph Hearst III, a Kleiner Perkins principal … ‘We’re going through a natural process of evolution; it is just that time is compressed,’ said John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, which was one of the original investors in Compaq Computer, Lotus Development and Sun Microsystems. ‘Things are happening very quickly.’ More recently, Kleiner Perkins was an original investor in American Online … and Netscape Communications … to date, Kleiner Perkins has invested about $50 million in Internet companies, including an initial stake in UUNet.”
Biography:John Doerr was hired at Intel, then a small, chip-making company, in 1974. He stayed there through the remainder of the ’70s. In 1980, he joined the high-tech venture capital partnership Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, where he helped nurture the growth of such Silicon Valley superstars as Sun, Intuit, and Netscape. In the late 1990s, he joined forces with Jim Barksdale to create TechNet Ð a bipartisan group designed to promote the new economy and the political profile of high-tech ideas. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: July 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Austin American-Statesman
Title, headline, chapter name: Serious Money Heading to Internet Companies
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=cd5c05b177a6a4c09351b4c920962992&_docnum=11&wchp=dGLbVtb-lSlAl&_md5=09c4a05b949fc0d8a1a3c9d4f61eb442
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Edwards, Elizabeth