Charles Arthur: What is the father of internet invention?

If necessity is the mother of internet inventions, who's the father? Revolutions on the internet rarely have anything to do with someone trying to make a fast buck out of somebody else's idea After the success of Alex Tew I got a lot of emails from people who, it so happened, had had exactly the same idea as him, only three months later. You're wondering: Alex Tew? Yes, you remember – the guy behind the Million Dollar Homepage. Ah, now you're remembering: back in January 2006 he became an overnight celebrity for his idea of selling each of a million pixels on a page for a dollar each. (Smart timing – the exchange rate has got a lot worse since then. Then it was the £568,000 homepage. Now it's worth about £44,000 less.) For months afterwards I was plagued with emails from people who wanted me to write about their idea, for a... [read full story]