Zatso (continued) ...the board of directors resigned. Most of the staff had already been laid off, and we assumed that if we could actually launch 2.0, investors would return. But there was no launch. The 2.0 release would have looked like this:				go back
	Compared to the previous version, this was phenomenal. A designer named Charles Migos made it look like a luxury car, not just another crummy website. And it actually worked well, which given the premise (personalized video on the web), was surprising. Many companies wanted to know how to do this well. We had actually done it. What it was Zatso was a personalized streaming news service. It consisted of a personalization engine, written in Java and JHTML, a content management system, including an oracle database and an online video editing tool, and a story selection and viewing application (the public website). I worked on this last piece, debugging Java servlets and authoring XSLT templates to transform the XML that represented a user's storylists. My work on version 2.0 was the most exciting for me by far, consisting mainly of coding, bugfixing, and the occasional game of Quake. go back