The story behind ww.com / camarades.com.

This is all done from memory without any fact checking,
chances are I'm misremembering stuff or leaving out
important pieces, in that case please forgive me, it's late!

I may revisit this at some point to correct and revise it.

Personal note, I'm a high school drop-out, have been coding
since roughly 1978 (when I was 13 or so) and if it weren't
for a few very nice people would have never ever gotten
where I am today. Piet Tacx gave me a job in the mailroom
of a bank in Amsterdam when I was 18, had no house and no
income, another (Eddy de Leeuw) gave me my first 'real'
programming job for that same bank simply because he
got totally sick and tired of telling me that he wasn't
going to hire me. He literally gave me one chance, go to
'Volmac', learn Cobol in the next three months and don't
bother coming back if you don't succeed. (it took only a
month and I passed with the minimal grade because they
suspected me of cheating because I aced the tests...).

So, on to the story of the live webcam:

In the dark ages of the web one of my former partners (Michael
Erkelens) bet me for a bar of chocolate that I couldn't come up
with a way to make 'animated gifs' 'live'. I figured it had to
be possible somehow and in one of those famous allnighters
produced a very primitive version of the first streaming
webcam software. Basically it produced an endless animated
gif, which the browser dutifully downloaded and animated. It
wasn't much to look at but it was years ahead of the competition.

That first black and white image showed a crossroads in Hoofddorp
near schiphol airport.

Before long we found a way to do it with jpegs (which gave a
tremendous boost in quality), this must have been somewhere
around '95 or so. With every iteration of the software the
quality, speed or features improved and before long the
software was sold on a license basis to lots of companies.

As a demonstration I set up a little box with two relays
controlling a fan and a lamp. The fan blew a mobile of
small paper cranes around my desk and the lamp would light
up the scene, to create a bit of variation and proof that
the thing was real and not just some elaborate hoax (in
spite of that there were still plenty of people claiming
that it must be a hoax...).

The first real breakthrough came when Gilbert Cattoire who
was working for a French media company spotted the software
and suggested Yves St. Laurent should use it to broadcast
their annual fashion show. This was quite the event for me,
going to paris with my trusty SGI hardware in the back of the
car and being treated to the finest french hotels and cuisine :)

In turn, this webcast was spotted by someone working for
NetNitco, an American ISP who had contacts with NASA. The
next thing we knew we were transmitting the launches and
flights of two space shuttle missions. One of these was
to repair the Hubble space telescope.

Suddenly the live webcam software started selling like
hotcakes, and we went from a 1 man 1 woman show to
several employees. Licenses were sold to just about
every large ISP and webcams started popping up all over
the place. Rembert Oldenboom did a first rough port to
the windows platform (up to here it was strictly SGI)
which opened up a big market, the first commercially
available colour webcams were reaching the market but
people did not have software.

The Michael mentioned above became a partner in the
company and suggested we give away the software. This
scared me very much, after all, our livelihood depended
on selling those licenses but I relented and we started
giving the software away. This was somewhere in December
of '97. Another new partner in the business, Taco Scargo
came up with the idea of making a 'live index' so that
the page where we linked to our customers would not show
so many dead links. From there it was a small step to
make it a condition that if you wanted to use the free
software your webcam *had* to be in the live index and
on the 1st of March '98 Camarades.com was born.

The next night the server was a smoking slag heap, over
10,000 downloads that first night and no way were we
prepared to handle the traffic. With a lot of help
from friends in various places we managed to weather
this first crisis and we invested a ton of money in
a large dell server (which was already too small a
couple of weeks later when it was delivered).

A downside of this free webcam business was that it
seemed to attract a different kind of audience than
what we had hoped for and we had to establish 24
hour oversight in order to not end up with a porn
site instead of a webcam site. (even today this is
still a problem, I recall clearly the first time
we had someone strip on the site and we all went
like 'What?, did I see that right?', so much for our
naivity I guess...).

A full time designer (Jonathan Kraij) was hired who
made the site look good and came up with the idea
of 'chico', our little webcam like mascotte.

We attracted some investors but this was quite a rocky
ride, one of them basically wanted to leverage his
investment into a large amount of cash within a
few weeks of buying in (he did get us an advertising
deal with 24x7 though), another used his shares and
some smarts and a crooked notary public to gain
control of a joint venture and sold the software
source code to a German porn company. This was a
busy year for the lawyers, we learned a lot about
how not to do business. Around this time our contacts
with Logitech started to warm up, and their
subsidiary (spotlife) had a look at us for a potential
takeover. For years (even after spotlife died) logitech
sent us tons of traffic from people that were looking
to getting software with their new and shiny webcams.

In the meantime we had opened up an office in Toronto
because we were literally kicked off the international
backbone because we were saturating it with traffic,
keep in mind that up to this point most of the
content on the internet was static and we were pumping
video over that line, at some point we had more than
1200 live cameras online at any time of the day, each
of those serving a large number of viewers.

Toronto offered room for expansion, front street was
only a block away and we managed to get some bandwidth
on a fibre-optic line that had just been installed
with a company run by friends of ours.

This worked well for about a year and a half, the site
got remade by Julian Kreho and kept on growing. At
some point in this period we were roughly in the
top 300 or so of all the sites active at the time,
but you have to keep in mind that the web was a
*lot* smaller then than it is today (I think we
had about 100,000 uniques per day).

Then the internet started creaking, in december of
'99 or so I had my first warning when a cheque
from 24x7 was late. I didn't like it one bit because
24x7 was all of our turnover at this point (the license
business had dried up completely once we started giving
away the software) so behind the scenes we started to
work on what is now known as the 'freemium' model, a
basic service that would give everything that we did
already away for free with a premium package that you
had to pay for. Still, the speed with which the walls
came crashing down was more than I had bargained for,
and with our half baked version ready 24x7 media went
bust leaving us with 0 income. We had to lay off a lot
of the people that worked for us and I really hated that
bit of it, it certainly wasn't their fault.

Somehow we managed to survive this period, but it
certainly was pretty scary. Every month we ended up with
a few more paying subscribers than the month before, and
after half a year or so we were back on a fairly solid
financial footing.

We even managed to save a bit and when ww.com came up
for auction on Ebay we managed to buy it for a bunch
of cash, I always thought camarades.com was an ok
name (and a nice pun) but it was too long and too
hard to spell, ww.com is *much* easier to remember
(it stands for webcam world).

I sold my house to buy out my partners and emigrated to
Canada with my wife & kid, we ended up on St. Josephs
Island in rural Ontario and ran the seriously downsized
business from our house there over a bunch of modems
that were bonded to give us reasonably fast internet
access.

After several years of trying to get our permanent
resident status we gave up on that and moved back
to the Netherlands.

Since then it has been an uphill battle, the company
is still making some money, not enough to make it the
full time interest of two people so we used what little
money we still had to restart our lives here and have
invested some of the savings in to other companies and
projects, some of which are doing well and others
which are doing not so well.

Since december '08 we've been busy working our way to
a complete revamping of the site, new software, a
new website layout but this is a major project and
it will still take some effort and time before it
is completed.

The take home lessons from all this for me are that
timing really is everything and that it is better to
not have done a deal than to have done the wrong deal.

Your partners are a bigger deciding factor than the
product and you have to make sure that *everybody*
plays by the rules.

Also that it is better to hire people that may not have
the qualifications but that are willing to learn than
people with lots of papers and no desire to give
their 100%.

I'm grateful and honoured to have worked with so many
people over the years, I remember everybody and most
of them - with a very few exceptions - fondly.

In no particular order, Camarades / WW.com was made
possible by the efforts of:

- Mirka Jucha
- Michael Erkelens
- Bianca Bode
- Jonathan Kraij
- Bob Arends
- Taco Scargo
- Andre Mozes
- Nick Hurst
- Julian Kreho
- Keir Mierle
- Lennart Driehuis
- Marco van der Does
- Rembert Oldenboom
- Nubia Godon
- Tanya Battaglia
- Mina Stauber
- Jeffrey (last name escapes me atm)
- Ratko Vidakovic
- Paul Mokbel
- Tim Boling
- Jacques Mattheij

And probably others who I don't recall right now.