dotcom

Company conducting electronic commerce primarily over the World Wide Web, and quite possibly with no physical stores. The term comes from the Internet domain name suffix ‘.com’ for commercial organizations.

The value of shares in dotcoms became greatly over-inflated in the late 1990s. The resulting bubble burst in 2000. A knock-on effect of the bursting of the dotcom bubble was the bursting of a similar, but even bigger, telecommunications bubble, which led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs at telecoms operators and equipment suppliers around the world.