They said they'd start a revolution, but the glorious day gave way to darkness

Jeff Bezos

Three years after the peak and subsequent crash of the inter- net market, Jeff Bezos is still a paper billionaire. Considering he is the founder of a so-called "e-tailer", Amazon, this is some feat. During the dot-com boom, virtually anyone with a half-baked idea to sell things on the internet received funding. But the crash, which claimed high-profile names such as WebVan and eToys, revealed Amazon as a genuine winner. Founded in Seattle in 1995 by Mr Bezos, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager, the business today makes a slim profit and is the internet's biggest brand with 27 million active customer accounts.

Henry Blodget

One much-criticised effect of the bubble was the speed and ease with which big, well-regarded investment banks became snake-oil salesmen. Having failed in journalism, Henry Blodget joined a small New York brokerage and was then snapped up by Merrill Lynch, where he became one of the big three internet "guru" analysts on Wall Street. In 1999 and 2000, as investors stampeded to buy dot-com stocks, Blodget's voice was egging them on. Investors from day traders to huge institutions hung on his every word.

But as the bubble burst, and investors got badly burnt, acclaim turned to blame. Mr Blodget was sued by a private investor who claimed one of Merrill's "buy" notes was misleading; Mr Blodget was revealed to have privately described one of his stock picks as a "piece of crap". That in turn gave way to a much wider series of probes into the true independence of investment banking research. Mr Blodget left Merrill in Decem- ber 2001 under a dark cloud.

Geoffrey Chamberlaine

There could have been few more unlikely dot-com champions than Geoffrey Chamberlaine. The 61-year-old had been plying his trade at the fringes of the City for a couple of decades before he stumbled into the tech boom via a few investments in computer games companies. Soon his stockbroking firm Durlacher was backing such successes as Autonomy and Demon Internet, and some rather more flash-in-the-pan dot coms like 365 Corporation and Nothing- ventured.com. At its peak Dur- lacher was valued at £2bn and was close to joining the FTSE 100. Today it is worth £7m. Mr Chamberlaine, along with his brother Graham, quit last May, though they took £2.7m in investments as a nest egg.

Julie Meyer

Only in the rationale-free days of the bubble could anyone have contemplated turning a monthly cocktail party into a multi-million-pound business proposition. That was what Julie Meyer, a mid-20s American living in London, had in mind for First Tuesday.

The concept was simple: orchestrate a regular drinks bash where bright young things with tenuous internet ideas could meet investors with money to burn.

First Tuesday started with all the right ingredients: the semi-impromptu meeting of "digerati" in a trendy Soho bar, the early successes of some of the entrepreneurs, the spreading of the format to different parts of the world. Unfortunately, the First Tuesday founders all fell out with each other and subscriptions fell off a cliff within weeks, taking the "company" with them.

Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten

If ever an episode of the year 2000 encapsulated all the worst parts of the dot-com frenzy, it was the rise and fall of Boo.com. Founded by two achingly fashionable Swedes with no business experience – Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander (above) – Boo.com was going to do for fashion what Amazon did for books.

It did nothing of the sort. After blinding everybody with science, the digital duo tapped into the mild sense of paranoia among JP Morgan managers that they had missed the internet boat. The investment bank showered millions on them, and the Swedes spent nearly all of this on Concorde flights and lavish parties. They were named by Fortune magazine as "Europe's coolest company" before selling a single Nike trainer. When the site finally started running, it was instantly obvious that the two had not "changed the rules of business". The company collapsed in grand style.

Charlie Muirhead

It was the perfect recipe: a bright 21-year-old, Charlie Muirhead; a business plan mentioning the word "internet"; high-profile investors like Reuters and Intel; and flattering media profiles of the "genius in jeans". That was Orchestream, a company which near the peak of the dot- com boom had limited revenues but a value of nearly £1bn. However, Mr Muirhead's business quickly went flat. Last year it admitted to financial irregularities and in December Orchestream was sold for just £7.9m. Mr Muirhead is now involved in another technology firm, the Reading-based Nexagent.

Frank Quattrone

The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Golf Tournament was hardly the place for an investment banker being investigated by the New York Attorney General. But Frank Quattrone is no regular banker. The 46-year-old made his name at Morgan Stanley when he backed Netscape, the internet search engine credited with starting the dot.com boom. He was headhunted first by Deutsche Bank and then by CSFB, pocketing $100m in the process. But at CSFB the wheels started coming off the money-making engine. Mr Quattrone is accused by investigators of "spinning" flotations, so favoured clients received hot stocks, and then destroying the email evidence. Last month CSFB placed him on administrative leave, giving him time to appear in the $6,000-a-head golf tournament.

John Pluthero

Calm, some even say shy, John Pluthero wasn't your typical internet tycoon. But in two years as head of Freeserve, he built the country's largest internet service provider, usurping BT. Pioneering free inter- net access, Freeserve quickly became a FTSE 100 company. After a failed bid by Germany's T-Online, Mr Pluthero eventually sold the firm in December 2000 to Wanadoo, the internet arm of France Telecom, for £1.65bn. Despite the crash in the internet market, Mr Pluthero's reputation remained intact, praised for sticking to what Freeserve set out to do. As a result, he was poached last year to help restructure the telecoms firm Energis, chaired by Conservative MP Archie Norman.

Juan Villalonga

"Flamboyant" hardly does credit to Juan Villalonga. The former boss of Spanish telecoms company Telefonica went on a gigantic spending spree in the boom times, acquiring the likes of internet firm Lycos and Dutch TV company Endemol. He had been hand-picked for the job by Spain's prime minister, but their friendship soured as rival politicians made capital out of Mr Villalonga's personal life: in 1999 he had left his wife and children for a former Mexican beauty queen. The final straw for many Telefonica executives came when he suggested that the company move from Madrid to Miami, where he then lived. Mr Villalonga is now caught up in various investigations into Telefonica's deals – some of which are now in poor health. Last week Terra Lycos, the internet firm controlled by Telefonica, wrote down €1.43bn, largely because of Lycos.

Celebrity corner

The sight of the internet bubble inflating proved just too tempting for some desperate celebrities. Fledgling dot coms could argue they needed the kudos of a famous name. But for the celebs, the whole thing brought only paper wealth that soon became worthless.

Hugh Scully of The Antiques Roadshow took on shares that were briefly worth £3m in the auction site QXL Joanna Lumley, meanwhile, became the pin-up girl for Clickmango, an ill-fated healthfood site. Charlie Dimmock sold a gardening website the right to use her name in its promotions. TV veteran Sir David Frost also hopped on the bandwagon by joining the board of Newsplayer, an online video-on-demand scheme that remains deeply troubled.

Mick Jagger lent his name to a series of web-related investments including Cyberia, supposedly the world's first internet café. He was in good company since George Soros and Lord Saatchi also piled in with financial backing.

Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods billionaire, was another celebrity investor in the dot-com freak show. Through his europ@web fund, the Frenchman invested in a string of basket cases in the making, including Boo.com.

The UK travel site Deckchair.com managed to pull in the star power of Sir Bob Geldof, but the point where it all went too far was when even the Queen got bitten by the bubble bug. Getmapping.com, an ambitious and still operating site, sought to provide aerial photography over the net. The stock declined from the day it listed on AIM, but for one short but glorious moment, Her Majesty's shrewd investment added another six-figure sum to her fortune.