Wired Launches HotWired Cyberstation Directly onto the Internet

"New thinking for a new medium" receives strong ad community support - sponsor slots are oversubscribed.

27 October 1994, San Francisco - Wired Ventures Ltd. today announced the launch of HotWired, its revolutionary new Web-based online service, pointcasting directly through the Internet, the fastest growing medium on the planet today.

HotWired's target audience is the digital community, the people driving the Digital Revolution through their creation and deployment of digital technologies.

The Net's first cyberstation, HotWired mixes hyperlinked text, video, and sound. It has attracted such strong support from clients and agencies that it went live with all its sponsor slots completely sold out, predominantly with blue-chip advertisers.

New thinking for a new medium, HotWired is context about the Digital Revolution and new art forms from the Second Renaissance, both tightly coupled to a remarkably sophisticated, yet easy-to-use conferencing system that explores the concerns and controversies of the digital community.

"Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level," said HotWired's editor-in-chief, Louis Rossetto (who is also the editor and publisher of Wired magazine). "HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic - live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet."

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them. While sharing an obvious genetic link to its parent, Wired magazine, HotWired posts all original content, designed specifically for the online environment.

HotWired's diverse channels range from news of the Digital Revolution (Signal), to evocative reporting from contributors submitting through the Net (EyeWitness), to discussion spaces including real-time chats and threaded discussions (Piazza), to the best in audio, visual, and kinetic arts (Renaissance 2.0).

"This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures," HotWired President Andrew Anker explained. "It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic."

That commercial dynamic includes classified and hyperlinked advertising. Free to its members, HotWired is a sponsored medium. And quite a list of sponsors it is, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Club Med, Metricom, MCI, Sprint, Xircom, Coors Brewing, Internet Shopping Network (offspring of Home Shopping Network), JBL, and Personal Library Software.

"We blew the doors off our expectations by assembling top technology and consumer-brand sponsors for our launch," said former Hal Riney VP Rick Boyce, HotWired's advertising director. "In the end, we were turning away advertisers - we just couldn't create the content fast enough."

(HotWired is sensitive to the Net community's aversion to invasive advertising. Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. And the privacy of users is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.)

HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design mantra was "war on bevelled edges.") HotWired designer Barbara Kuhr, partner of Wired Creative Director John Plunkett, delivered a stunningly clean, easy-to-navigate environment filled with fresh, world-beat colors.

HotWired is a technological tour de force. HotWired's engineering team, led by 21-year-old Brian Behlendorf, built the first graphic conferencing system designed exclusively for a commercial service on the World Wide Web.

"HotWired provides a forum for people to interact not only with each other but also with the content," said Jonathan Steuer, HotWired's information and technology architect. "It's an ever-changing community-in-progress, with facilities that are state-of-the-art, stimulating, and - ultimately - addictive."

HotWired can be accessed directly on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Its URL: http://www.hotwired.com/.

Backgrounder: The infobahn isn't coming, it's here.

The Internet, the World Wide Web, and Mosaic combine to form the hottest medium on the planet today.

While Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" - and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now - thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

The Internet is a metanetwork that joins together thousands of smaller networks. More than 3.2 million computers are attached directly to the Internet, an 86 percent increase over last year. Each of these hosts, in turn, is connected to between 3.5 and 7.5 other computers (according to whose estimates you want to believe). Those computers reach an estimated 11 million to 24 million people. And the pace is accelerating - 1 million new hosts were added in the first 6 months of 1994.

Until recently, the Internet had a major problem: it was user unfriendly, as ugly and unintuitive as DOS. Then last year along came the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser. The Web is a client/server architecture originally created to facilitate scientific discussion. Mosaic is a graphical interface that makes the Web as easy to use as a Macintosh. Now you can navigate the Net without needing to know any more than a 17-letter, oddly punctuated address.

The arrival of Mosaic is the start of the second phase of the online revolution. Since its release last year, over a million clients have been downloaded. By comparison, it took America Online 10 years to reach a million users. And while Internet traffic is growing at the astounding pace of 15 to 20 percent per month, Web traffic is growing even faster, at a rate of 36 percent per month.

Because it's so easy to use, with its direct connection to consumers (no need to use intermediaries like dial-up online services), its ability to present all data types - including text, sound, and video - and its rapidly expanding user base, Mosaic and the Web have suddenly made the Internet a very hot pointcasting medium.

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