Real-time Group Communication with Java
While I'm at it, another trip back in time...
Some time in 1995, my friend Jan told me about this obscure new programming language called "Java". He said something about about a programming contest with a million dollar in prizes.Meanwhile, I had been kicking ideas around for making some sort of multi-medial, web-based IRC client.
We brought the two ideas together and spend the next 3 months building one of the first web-based Instant Messaging / Chat systems. It included chat, a shared whiteboard, a board game, and a survey tool. We ended up winning a $75,000 hardware prize in the contest and were invited to the JavaOne conference in San Francisco to demo our software. This was my introduction to the SF bay area, now one of my favorite places in the world. After the contest, I rewrote the system from scratch and tried to turn it into a business; but in the end, I just didn't have the business experience to pull it off, and ended up selling the code to Deutsche Telekom for next to nothing, and then focused on other things. But Franz and I wrote a paper about it.
