By far the most pretentious section of my site. Now you’re warned.
I also call this section “Niels Brinch, the early years” for added pretentiousness ;)
1995 – In the beginning there was light
And the light was flowing at incredible speeds through cables allowing my 9600 baud modem to access the internet. I created my first website. It had it all:
- Background midi music
- Marquee in the top, cheerfully scrolling from side to side
- A spinning @ logo!
- A background image that took 2 minutes to load, actually resembling the one on this blog.
- 3 links to chat sites (remember Geocities, anyone?)
- An “Under construction” sign.
1997 – Free stuff!
Around this time, I invested in my very own domain name and it felt great. It was “surfree.dk” which provided links to all sorts of free stuff, such as web hotels and emails.
It was amazing back then that anyone would offer anything for free. Now we take it for granted.
It was around the same time that I wrote a small book in Danish about finding free stuff and building a web site with it. It was called Byg en gratis hjemmeside (Build a free website) and if I remember correctly, I sold around 400 copies through my own online marketing.
1998 – More is more
I was under the impression that more sites are better than less sites. I built a network of no less than 30 different sites and called it NB-NET. Try to guess what NB is an abbreviation for. Basically, I went to The CGI Resource Index and installed and adapted virtually every type of perl script into a site.
1999 – As it turns out, less is more.
I had learned that quality was more important than quantity. With a buddy of mine, I started Gyxi which provided some free services:
A manually maintained search index.- A free email service like Hotmail.
- Jokes with a “fun” newsletter written by me!
- Free hosting with 50 MB space and a sub domain.
- A news service, which was parsing news sites and presenting headlines. This was before the concept of RSS existed. The newspapers didn’t think it was such a good idea and had some lawyers scare us into closing it down.
At the same time, I was running a banner exchange called “Freexchange”. Notice that I cleverly re-used the ‘e’ (just as I had re-used the ‘f’ in Surfree)
A less than fully satisfied customer humorously dubbed it “Freakschange”.
(the above is an old banner ad for the email service)
2000 – The first business
The banner exchange evolved into an affiliate program where we were buying banner ads and selling them to larger agencies, such as Doubleclick and TradeDoubler. We ran several services, including “ClickBurst” (which we closed because BurstMedia was unhappy with our choice of name) and “The Advertist”.
When the Internet ‘bubble’ burst in 2001, the customers stopped coming in and we decided to close the service. There was still enough money left for me to spend it on an unforgettable trip to Egypt.
2003 – An education
I graduated from a Danish education within the area of software engineering. The end project was an elaborate Java based game server framework which I’m very proud of. The project itself was the game server design. It was later developed into an actual game server based on our design and used by one of the largest media companies in Denmark for a web based multiplayer chat game for kids.
While studying, I was programming software for Nokia phones.
2004 – A job
After studying, I got a job in “Dansk Web Bureau”, which later evolved into Capevo, where I’m happy to still be working today. We specialize in web based digital form solutions for Danish governmental organizations. That’s specialization if anything is!
2007 – Upload Baaaaag
I started a service called Upload Bag where people could upload images that would be converted into a gallery and videos that would automatically be converted to be playable on a website.
The service is closed now. It had a few thousand daily unique visitors, but unfortunately people kept uploading a lot of porn. I made a separate section for that content, but so much illegal content was uploaded that it was too much for me to manage and I chose to close the service.
2009 – Bangladesh
As part of my job in Capevo, I was living in Bangladesh, managing a small software company, which was a joint venture between Capevo and LeadSoft.
2011 – Back in Denmark
The future
I’m working on a fun little hobby project, hopefully I’ll be able to properly launch it within this year.
(the above is a peek at a work in progress for an upcoming service)
