web startups

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A short PCWorld news clip from WWDC 2007 in which Steve Jobs announces Safari as the development platform for iPhone apps. Developers could build web apps with access to calling, maps and email.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a hospital A&E is staffed by homeopaths who dilute everything, leaving patients with nothing.

A short That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon trade jibes over whose job is harder. It is a BBC comedy clip from 2009.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

David Heinemeier Hansson builds a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes, the demo that launched Rails' momentum.

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, gives an Authors@Google talk in 2007 about the webcomic and his background, followed by audience Q&A. Donald Knuth and Guido van Rossum ask questions during the session.

Steve Yegge is interviewed at Google's Kirkland office about the birth, growth and future of his Rhino on Rails project, a Rails clone on the Rhino JavaScript engine, and other web development topics.

A short 2009 amateur video showing an HP MediaSmart webcam whose face tracking follows a white face but fails to track a black face. The uploader presents it as humorous.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Neil and Laura Westwood pitch their Magic Whiteboard, reusable static-cling whiteboard sheets, to the investors on the BBC's Dragons' Den and win 100,000 pounds of investment.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School 2008 on building a profitable startup. He argues for bootstrapping and small, well-run companies instead of chasing investment and exits.

Paul Graham speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to create a successful startup. His talk emphasizes being good, not just avoiding being evil, as a strategic advantage.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get press coverage for a startup and how to respond to it.

Honda's 2003 'Cog' commercial for the Accord, a two-minute Rube Goldberg chain reaction of car parts. It was filmed practically rather than with CGI.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

The full webcast of SpaceX's Falcon 1 Flight 4, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, on 28 September 2008. It includes the crew's cheering and Elon Musk's statement afterward.

Cindy Gallop gives a 4-minute TED2009 talk arguing hardcore pornography has distorted how young men think about sex. She introduces her website MakeLoveNotPorn as a response.

A compilation of the first four iPhone commercials from the June 2007 launch. The ads walk through using the device and stress real web browsing.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

A short spoof of a nature documentary shows spiders building webs after being given various drugs. It is an early internet comedy classic.