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• Comp: Call for Questions

  NMK is running a competition to see who can submit the best new media history question for our 1010 Quiz Night. If you're the company know it all you need to enter this comp! more

Quiz Night Questions in Full

September 9 saw the NMK 1010 New Media History Quiz Night at the Wax Bar, Central London. Nine teams listened to Mike Butcher from netimperative slur (rather difficult) new media history questions

September 9 saw the NMK 1010 New Media History Quiz Night at the Wax Bar, Central London. Nine teams listened to Mike Butcher from netimperative slur (rather difficult) new media history questions.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the night, or are interested in seeing all the questions in full, here they are:

Round 1: Who’s who?

1. Who from the Royal National Institute for the Blind developed the standard font used for digital TV?
Dr John Gill

2. What is the name of the Guardian’s New Media Editor?
Owen Gibson

3. Who is widely credited with the development of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocol on which the Internet runs? He is commonly referred to as the "Father of the Internet" and his name has become synonymous to the way in which people use the Web. (Clue: It's not Tim Berners-Lee)
Vinton Cerf

4. Who was the President of the UK Board of Trade in 1995, who also announced the UK Internet Awareness Campaign?
Michael Heseltine

5. Who were the two key founders of pioneering agency Webmedia?
Steve Bowbrick and Ivan Pope (half point per name)

Round 2: Multiple Choice

1. Where was the world’s first web cam installed and why?

• a. It was installed in the Trojan room at the computer science labs of Cambridge University in 1991 by a couple of students who pointed it at a coffee pot.
• b. The North Pole in 1991 for a NJ school experiment to see if Father Christmas really does exist.
• c. In Silicon Valley in 1991 by Microsoft’s tech team to spy on Bill Gates.

(They connected the cam to their local network so they could then watch the pot. The coffee pot was on a different floor so the cam meant they didn't have to keep running up and down to check whether it was full or not. Another pair of students connected the cam to the net in 1993, thus creating the world's first webcam.)

2. Which MP seriously proposed that the solution to spam was for everybody to include his or her postcode in the domain of his or her email address e.g. petername@aol.SW1A4BG.co.uk?

• a. Geoff Hoon, MP for Ashfield
• b. Derek Wyatt, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey
• c. Claire Ward, MP for Watford

3. To the nearest hundred thousand, how many users a day did the Yahoo Guide attract in 1995?

• a. 600,000
• b. 900,000
• c. 800,000

4. In what year did Monster launch in the UK?

• a. 1996
• b. 1994
• c. 1995

5. In 1996 Demon offered webspace to dial-up customers who were paying £10 a month. How much webspace did they provide per customer?

• a. 5mb
• b. 5.5mb
• c. 10mb

Round 3: Acronyms

1. What does PLATO mean?
Programmed Learning and Tutorial Instruction

2. What does CDI mean?
Compact Disk Interactive

3. What does DVD mean?
Digital Versatile Disc

4. What does URL mean?
Uniform Resource Locator

5. What does MP3 mean?
Motion Picture, Layer 3

Round 4: Companies

1. Which interactive agency was the very first to build a label website for EMI Records?
Abbey Road Interactive

2. What was the name of the Brighton based new media company that developed all of the interactive components for Big Brother, and is now part of Endemol?
Victoria Real

3. What is a Google Dance?
A Google Dance is what happens when Google updates its servers across the network. It causes some search results to jump about in the listings, thus giving the appearance that they are dancing up and down.

4. Where was the legendary 1999 Double-Click Christmas Party held?
Cafe de Paris

5. Boo.com were known as the 3 "C"s company. What do each of the 3 "C"s stand for and why?
Champagne, Concorde and Charlie. Because that's what they allegedly spent most of the £178m on before they collapsed.

Round 5: Email

1. Who introduced the ‘@’ sign as the locator in email addresses?
Ray Tomlinson (While working for Bolt Beranek and Newman, the company selected by the U.S. Defence Department to build ARPANET).

2. What does "[NM]" mean when it's written at the front of the subject line of an email, IM, BBS, community or forum posting?
That the message contains No Message, just the content in the subject line (thus meaning that the recipient doesn't have to open the email/message - helping people scan and read email or forum conversations much faster).

3. Alexander Graham Bell's first phone call to Mr. Watson was: "Come here, I want you!". The content of the first email message was:

• a. QWERTYUIOP
• b. Is this working?
• c. Free Viagra Sign Up Here

4. What did CompuServe try to do in November 1995 that the US Federal Election Commission said ‘violated restrictions on campaign contributions’?
Give US Election Candidates free email accounts

5. How do you ‘shout’ in email and chat rooms?
TYPE IN CAPITALS!!!!!!!

Round 6: Communities and networks

1. What were online communities originally called?
Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs

2. What was the name of BT’s computer wide games network that piloted in 1996?
Wireplay

3. Who founded and launched Electric Minds in 1995?
Howard Rheingold

4. What was the name of the community spin-off website from BBC2’s Attachments?
Seethru

5. When Popbitch started in 1999 founder Neil Stephenson used a pseudonym to protect his professional reputation. What was it?
Professor Tentacle

Round 7: Ecommerce

1. In 2003 70m Europeans made online purchases. On average, how much was each person’s total spend?

• a. £134.00
• b. £285.00
• c. £562.00

2. What high street bank was the first to reveal an interactive TV banking service in 1995?
NatWest

3. 4 years ago, 16 DotCom companies rushed to spend millions of dollars on a TV commercial during the 2000 Superbowl! How many of them can you name? (one point per company)
AutoTrader.com, DowJones.com, HotJobs.com, Monster.com, Kforce.com OurBeginning.com, WebMD.com, LifeMinders.com, Pets.com, E-Trade.com Computer.com, Netpliance.com, Epidemic.com, OnMoney.com, Britannica.com, LastMinuteTravel.com

4. Who said "It was Brent's idea and I actually told him it was not a very good one when I heard it."
Martha Lane-Fox

5. Who founded eBay in 1995?
Pierre Omidyar

Spelling

1. Name Google’s founders and spell their names.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

2. Name Boo.com’s founders and spell their names.
Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander.

3. Name the Chief executive of the BT Group.
Ben Verwaayen

4. Name the UK Chief Executive of Wanadoo.
Eric Abensur

5. Name the person Steve Job’s co-founded Apple with
Steve Woznick

Round 9: Digital Music

1. Last month UK music fans downloaded a record number of tracks, making music downloading a serious rival to CDs as a platform for distributing singles. To the closest thousand how many tracks were downloaded?
500,000 tracks

2. Name the Irish act who released their single exclusively on the internet last week in an attempt to top the new download chart.
Westlife

3. How many tracks has itunes UK sold since its launch earlier this year?
a. 100m, b. 115m, c.125m

4. MSN launched its digital music store ‘MSN Music’ in the states last week, how many US cents does a single cost?
99c

5. MSN already offers an online music store in six European countries. Name the company the service is offered in partnership with.
0D2

Round 10: Domain names

Explain what the following domain names are for:

1. .cn
China

2. .coop
Cooperative

3. .pro
Certified professional

4. .aero
Air transport company

5. .by
Belarus

Tie Breaker

How long did "Release Me" by Engelbert Humperdink stay in the UK charts?
56 weeks

Results

In reverse order:

Team Last – 15 ½ points
Team Xav – 15 ½ points
Team Sarah, Alex and Alex – 16 points
Team Banana Splits – 17 ½ points
Team Ecademy Playground – 20 points
Team Recollective - 20 ½ points
Team The Industry Sub Standard – 22 2/3 points
Team Past It (the New Media Leather Boys) – 24 points
Winners: Team E-consultancy – 26 ½ points.

Take a look at the original event listing here.