Remember when a half-baked business plan, a 5-minute logo, and absolutely no revenue model besides “uhm, I dunno, sell ads, maybe?” got you millions in VC funding, a sweet Silicon (V)alley office, massive parties, and puzzled looks from everyone who wanted to know what the hell a “dotcom” was?

Mmm. The good old days. Until the bubble burst, of course, but between 1997 and early 2000, the Party Was On. Everyone got into the game. Actual entrepreneurs, fake entrepreneurs, Stanford MBAs and engineering students, caterers … the long tail was pretty damn long.

Advertising agencies got into the Good Times too.

Join me on a trip back to an era where a brand was only as good as how much cash they blew on a Super Bowl spot, a time where my Mom wondered what the hell that “period-see-oh-em” thing at the end of every commercial was, a time that my non-industry friends burned with jealousy but were able to point and laugh when things came to a crashing halt.

In no particular order…

We’ve decided to fire gerbils out of this cannon…

Thanks to the team at Cliff Freeman and Partners, when we finally discover that the gerbils are actually in charge, we may be in some trouble. This spot debuted in 1998. The gerbils were PISSED.

He’s got money coming out the wazoo.

Best. E*Trade. Spot. Ever. This still makes me giggle.

Well, we just wasted $2 million bucks.

Indeed you did. Wasn’t really funny then, not funny now. Note to current and future creatives – proudly joking about how much money you burned is probably not a brand-building concept. Also, while Hewlett-Packard started in a garage, I don’t think there were many monkeys present.

Don’t let anybody tell you it’s easy.

This one has a special place in my heart; I know from personal experience that herding cats is not easy.

Computer stuff explained.

A single-word domain name that makes the product self-explanatory. Enough cash for a Super Bowl spot. Approachable, friendly founders. But … it’s the SUPER BOWL! How much money was wasted on this local-spot-for-a-non-chain-restaurant-that-has-Senior-Tuesdays-every-week-esque shit?

Because pets can’t drive.

No dotcom spot round-up is complete without at least one mention of the pets.com sock puppet.

But we don’t know diddly about making ads.

No shit, guys. That’s why you hire experts.

Along with a fantastic group of industry experts, I’m an Advisory Board member of ad:tech San Francisco’s Startup Spotlight Series. We’ll be hearing presentations and choosing a winner from these finalists next week, which we selected over the past couple of months.

Social

1. Involver: Suite of applications for brands to create and manage Facebook marketing efforts
2. GraphEffect: Single platform for managing advertising and marketing programs
3. Compass Labs: Scalable, targeted social advertising campaigns
4. Payvment: Transactional and promotional Facebook pages

Mobile

1. Punchcard: Allows local brands to track and incentivize customers
2. ShopSavvy: Quickly research, locate, and buy products at point of sale
3. Fiksu: Mobile application user acquisition platform
4. Gravity Jack: Design and development of augmented reality solutions

Video

1. SeaWell Networks: Manage and optimize ABR streaming video, cross-device and cross-platform
2. Encoding.com: Self-service video encoding application
3. Addroid: Production of in-banner video ads
4. DOTSTUDIOZ: Online video monetization

Data and Targeting

1. Stipple: Connects pictures with commerce and information
2. Cloudwords: On-demand language management platform
3. MixRank: Media planning and competitive intelligence software
4. Magnetic: Search retargeting

The Judges

Gayle Meyers

Ben Parr

Tim Chang

This Guy

Noah Elkin

Mike Geiger

Watch the emergence of my inner Simon Cowell while I judge the Social and Mobile entries on April 3rd (3:45-4:45pm) and April 4th (2-3pm) at ad:tech San Francisco.

Here’s the thing.

It’s 2012. Everyone and their momma (even mine) has a smartphone. No one knows what a “travel agent” is. Big box stores are closing, newspapers are being left behind, books are digital. The Internet is indeed serious business.

And even in a world where thoughts travel at the speed of light, everyone is impatient. If your Netflix selection (not that there’s much…) doesn’t load immediately, you drop to your knees and wonder why the Bandwidth Gods hate you. If Facebook won’t post that photo of your cat, your eyes narrow as you curse Mark Zuckerberg’s entire family line.

One method of increasing speed — it’s really only increasing the appearance of speed, but that’s another story for another blog post — is the browser cache. Hated by developers, unknown by civilians, the browser cache stores local copies of sites you visit on your computer. The next time you visit the site, instead of reaching out into the ether, the pages load locally. If you’re reading this, you’re all like “DUH, dude,” but bear with me a second here.

Unless you work in this industry in some capacity, you have no idea that the word cache is a technical term. You’re all like:

Cache? Is that some kinda French word, like hors d’oeuvres?

As such, I’ve heard civilians or newbies talk about clearing their cachet.

No.

The line must be drawn here. This far, no further.

Do us all a favor, Valued Reader — the next time you hear someone mispronounce this word, be kind and tell them How To Pronounce Cache.

Thank you kindly.

Once a week, offline and online, someone makes the mistake of engaging me in a conversation about HTML5. “Holy crap,” they say, faces etched with the excitement of a kid on Christmahanakwanzika morning, “we gotta get us some of that HTML5 stuff! Man, have you seen [latest site]? It must have been really expensive and hard to build, HTML5 being a brand new programming language, and stuff.”

Please. Make. It. Stop.

HTML5 adds a few new tags to HTML. Just because that cool site you read about in Fast Company uses lots of non-Flash animation doesn’t mean it’s HTML5. JavaScript (jQuery, really, because who writes JS without it?) and CSS, people. JavaScript and CSS.

Instead of my default response, which consists of eyerolling, loud Al-Gore-debating-Bush sighs, and thinly-veiled threats of physical violence, I decided to build a quick tool to answer the eternal question — Is This HTML5 Or Not?

Here’s how it works:

• Submitted URLs are sent to a backend service via AJAX
• PHP uses cURL to grab HTML from the provided URL, and checks the HTTP status codes to determine errors and passwords
• Simple DOM Parser searches for some HTML5 specific tags (video, audio, canvas, etc) and Flash-specific tags (embed, object, presence of “swfobject” string)
• JSON is returned to the browser, and some admittedly poorly-written JavaScript parses it and changes the display based on the data

I make no claims that this thing is in any way accurate. It’s been tested, but, you know…