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A brief history

Our creation tale includes a father and son chatting during a televised Mets game and cold November evenings on a Berkeley, Calif., balcony. It includes a staff that began with four people and grew to more than 200 computer programmers, writers, editors and their managers trying to find a way to distill the essence of the online world into a handy daily guide. In truth, it is a story that has only just begun as CMP Media Inc. continues to plan to make NetGuide Live an ever more complete and useful guide to the online world.

Before its debut in August 1996, NetGuide Live was known throughout CMP Media Inc.'s Manhasset, N.Y., offices as Project Gulliver. Yes, that's an allusion to a Palo Alto, Calif.-based outfit that employs a term coined by the great Jonathan Swift. But it's also an expression of how big and world-striding the project has become.

When the germ of the Gulliver idea appeared--one story is that CMP Personal Computing Group Vice President Drake Lundell kicked the notion around with his son David, then a student at Cornell University, while they had a couple of beers and watched the Mets on television--CMP had plenty of company in seeing the huge, novel publishing opportunity offered by the World Wide Web. Not only were rivals like Ziff-Davis, IDG, and Mecklermedia aroused, but a host of university-based search-and-browse services like Yahoo (the Palo Alto outfit), Lycos, and Webcrawler were swinging into action.

The company's first response was creation of NetGuide magazine, initially given the mission of becoming the TV Guide to the Net medium. But as it became clear how fast the Web was growing beyond the ability of a print publication to serve as a guide, CMP,
which had already begun developing its TechWeb site as an online showcase for its magazines, decided to take the NetGuide concept online. Project Gulliver was born.

Pushed by Drake Lundell, Personal Computing Group Editorial Director Fred Langa, NetGuide Publisher Beth Haggerty, and Director of Strategic Development Fred Davis, the project took further shape in the second half of 1995 with CMP's hiring of former MacWeek and NextWORLD editor Dan Ruby, and acquisition of Woodwind Technologies, a company founded by veteran software developer Michael Hauser. With the company choosing to develop the project in the San Francisco area to take advantage of the region's rich technological and computer-focused editorial resources, the project accelerated in the fall when Davis, Ruby and Hauser assembled a strike team to nail down the project's basic components. The team met at Davis's Berkeley Hills home, with sessions frequently convening on a balcony with a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay.

With a thumbs-up from the company, the team expanded rapidly, taking on organizational wizard Graciela Eulate as office manager and grabbing several editors from daily journalism and book and magazine publishing. CMP stalwart Newt Barrett was named NetGuide Live publisher in April 1996. Software and systems dynamo Ted Shelton was appointed the site's executive producer in July. By August 1996, the staff included more than 60 editors, nearly 100 writers (most working at home), and about 40 sales and marketing, technical, design, and support staff.


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