Questions related to your career and the WWW

wiselike profile-audreyt
#1

Hi Audrey,
I have a few questions, mostly related to the 90s, your career as a young entrepreneur back then and with the World Wide Web beginnings.

  • You started your first start-up at 14 years old, right ? Can you tell us what was it ?
  • Afterwards, you created others start-ups, can you tell us more about it ? You sold all of them ?
  • You lived a few years in the Silicon Valley, is that right ? When was it and what did you do there exactly ?
  • Can you tell us about your first discovery of the World Wide Web ? How did you feel about it then and how did you contribute to its development ? What did you learn from this period ?
  • When did you realize you wanted to focus and work on governance, civic tech and democracy issues ? Something in particular triggered it ?
    Thank you very much for your time,Baptiste Condominas
    (edited)
#2
  1. It was called 資訊人 (“Inforist”, later renamed to “Inforian”).
  2. Please see the full CV at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tangaudrey
  3. As above. Also note that I telecommuted 100% during my 8 years working with silicon valley companies — I visited the valley from time to time but always lived in Taiwan.
  4. Please see https://sayit.archive.tw/2016-01-26-tout-numérique#s4145 and https://sayit.archive.tw/2016-01-25-artetv-tous-les-internets#s4211 for previous conversations on this topic.
  5. I was immersed — It’s difficult to say when did I start, because we talk about this all the time in our family. Please see https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Interview-with-Amalle-Guiton-lCNCYIqxLBr9yImZsXuRn for a full account.
#3

Thank you for your answers. But I’m not sure I understand well what Inforian was about. It was mainly a search engine ?

#4

Inforian (later known as pAsia) had a few things: A meta-search client named FusionSearch (later known as Quest), an e-commerce platform named CyberEye (later known as CoolBid), and after my departure an IM system named CICQ, and a social media community named 8d8d.com.