Chip Roberson is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs will be blogging about their experiences. This is the third in the series of blogs from entrepreneurs.

It feels a lot like 1996 again. At that time, I was working for a telecommunications firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a French intern showed me how I could remotely explore his graduate school using a browser. It was very engaging, but the significance of what he was showing me didn’t sink in right away. However, after a bit of investigation, I realized the way business could communicate with consumers was about to change. As is often the case, technology was the instigator of change.

I had been on the Internet since 1987, and while the ability to communicate and share information was always there, it was often static, accessible only by the technorati or locked within the bounds of a company’s computer system. How the browser unlocked the Internet and threw open the doors to information has been well documented by others. What is important to examine, however, is the effect this new, dynamic communications channel had on corporate culture and processes.

One of my favorite books is Only the Paranoid Survive by the ex-CEO of Intel, Andy Grove. The rise of the browser was one of those inflection points that Grove so masterfully describes—one of those moments when a business leader looks up to notice “something has changed” and is confronted with the question of how to respond. Whether one’s business continues to grow or begins to wane depends on how it adapts at these inflection points.

In 1996, it took a while for businesses to adapt their processes to use the Web as a communications platform. I can remember the conversations I had with both the executives in our company and my colleagues at other companies, and all seemed slow to react. Most established companies had a significant amount of inertia to overcome, and several had justified skepticism about what they perceived as just another “new new thing.”

However, I think it is important to distinguish a new business model from a new business tool. Basing one’s business on a new technology is always risky, but augmenting one’s communication tools by exploring and utilizing a new technology is much less so.

Needless to say, those companies that were able to adapt and incorporated the Web into their communication systems generally saw the quickest return and gained some form of competitive advantage. I offer Dell as a good example of a company that saw the opportunity and adapted quickly and successfully in the second half of the 1990s.

Today, it feels a lot like 1996 again. My partner at ClickMarkets, Christine Mason McCaull, and I are now proponents of a new technology, social networking, that we believe is just as transformative as the browser. There is a saying, attributed to Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Well, that “information wants to be free.” I contend the rapid acceptance of the browser by the public supports Brand’s claim, as does the more recent rise of file sharing and now social networking. We are social animals who like to share the information we possess, whether by word of mouth, email, or social media.