In the early days of the internet, websites hosted light content that gave basic information about a company or a product.
Mr Townsend draws an unfavourable comparison with the early days of the web.Even so, devising a website "was a relatively easy design challenge compared with this".
DoubleClick, an online-marketing firm from the early days of serving simple banner ads to websites, was sold this week in a deal worth more than $1 billion to a private-equity firm, Hellman & Friedman.
Wan Tao, one of China's first "patriotic hackers" (nationalists who in the early days of China's internet hacked into websites of foreign governments on their own initiative), offers a convenient alternative culprit: "underground hackers", or black-market operators who either sell their services or strike out on their own in hopes of finding a buyer.
But many companies were unconvinced of the need for a website in the early days of the internet, just as some took their time to cotton on to mobile apps.
In the early days of Grooveshark, we had no "product" -- no website, no code, no anything.
It's early days, of course, the company doesn't even have its own website yet, but today news comes of a tie-up with Chinese mobile phone retailer D.Phone that begins to hint at how this might just work.
Emaze's vision reminds me of the early days of another Israeli company, Wix, which set out to create a website authoring tool that was "As easy as PowerPoint, and as powerful as Flash".
In the early days of tech blogging in particular, comments were a value-add to a website.
In the early days of DDoS, cybercrime gangs had used them to extort cash from websites run by betting and gambling firms that could not afford to be knocked offline, said Darren Anstee, a senior analyst at Arbor.
To celebrate its 20th birthday, the Internet Archive has now launched GifCities, a search engine that lets you relive those early days of the internet and search for those vintage GIFs that adorned virtually any website in 1996.
