 | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Adi Tatarko Alon Cohen |
| Industry | Remodeling Interior design |
| Employees | 1,700+ |
| URL | www |
| Users | 65 million (November 2021) [1] |
| Launched | February 2009 |
Houzz is an American website, online community and software for architecture; interior design and decorating; landscape design and home improvement. It was founded in 2009 and is based in Palo Alto, California.
Houzz was founded as an online platform in February 2009 by Adi Tatarko and her husband Alon Cohen, in response to the challenges they faced with their own home remodeling project. [2] They found it difficult to communicate their vision for their home, and to find the right professionals for their project. [3] Cohen coded the initial website himself, and they asked a few Bay Area architects to upload their portfolios, to give home renovators ideas for their projects. [4] The site spread by word-of-mouth and they began to receive emails from homeowners and home professionals outside the Bay Area asking them to open more categories on Houzz and expand to other areas. [2] [4] Houzz became a company in the fall of 2010. [4]
In November 2010, Houzz released an app for the iPad. [5] The Android version of the app was released in December 2012. [6] In July 2013, Houzz introduced the Real Cost Finder, an interactive tool that helps users plan home renovations and total costs. The tool is based on data collected from the Houzz community. [7]
In January 2014, Houzz announced that it had opened offices and hired local managers in the UK, Germany and Australia to accelerate its global expansion; 35% of the company's site traffic already came from outside the U.S. [8] In February, Houzz launched Site Designer, a free website building and publishing tool for home professionals. [9] In December, Houzz announced its expansion to the rest of Europe and into Asia, starting with Japan. [10] It was reported that the Houzz database contained millions of images of home interiors and exteriors. [11] [12]
In May 2015, Houzz introduced HouzzTV, showing homeowners' projects using design professionals. [13] [14] In August, Houzz made its first acquisition, acquiring gardening and home advice site GardenWeb from NBCUniversal. [15] In October, Houzz settled a privacy violation lawsuit for not providing the standard recorded notification that customers' and professionals' calls were being recorded for quality and training purposes. [16]
In January 2016, Houzz introduced Sketch for Android. [17] In February, Houzz introduced View in My Room within its app for iOS and Android that lets users virtually place products from the Houzz Marketplace in their homes before buying. [18] In March, Houzz announced that it had opened its Commerce API to third party partners, to make it easier for merchants to sell and manage their inventory on Houzz. [19] In May, Houzz won "Best App" at Google's inaugural Play Awards. [20] In September, Houzz launched Visual Match, a tool that "uses deep learning technology to analyze more than 11 million home photos on Houzz. Furniture and decor that looks similar to the six million products on the Houzz Marketplace is then surfaced for users to browse (and hopefully buy)." [21]
In May 2017, Houzz introduced a tool for its iPhone and iPad app, View in My Room 3D, that allows people to preview over 300,000 products in 3D within the context of their own rooms. [22] In July, Sketch was made available as a web app. [23] With the launch of iOS 11 from Apple in September, Houzz introduced an upgraded version of its 3D AR tool within its app for iPhone and iPad, with 500,000 products available to view. [24]
In February 2018, Houzz acquired IvyMark, a company that developed business management software and a community platform for interior designers and home design firms. [25] In March, the Houzz App for Android devices was updated with ARCore support, enabling users to "place virtual representations of furniture and other home decor items anywhere in their home to see how they would look." [26]
As of June 2019, the company had reportedly 40 million users. [27]
In April 2020, the company launched Houzz Pro software to help home professionals run their businesses. [28] As of May, Houzz had over 20 million photos of design ideas on its platform. [29]
By March 2021, the company reportedly had 2.7 million professionals in its professional services database. [30]
Houzz offers a home design photo database with millions of images of home interiors and exteriors. [11] Homeowners browse photos by room, style and location, and bookmark photos in personal collections the site calls ideabooks. [12] Users can click on an image to learn more about the designer, ask a question, and learn about products tagged in the photos. [31]
Houzz also has a directory of home improvement professionals who use the site to reach homeowners. The platform can be used for consumers to search through professionals for hire, view their previous projects, and ultimately hire them. [32] [33]
The company also develops Houzz Pro software, designed to help designers manage their projects, manage new business and handle their projects' financial details. [28]
The company's HouzzTV video series shows homeowners' projects being implemented with the help of design professionals. [14]
Bloomberg Businessweek called Houzz "An online antidote to the housing bust." [33] Architectural Digest wrote about how the app would encourage imagination. [34] TechCrunch wrote that the idea behind the company was well-executed. [35] The Mercury News wrote about the breadth of ideas for customers and their architects to collaborate with. [36] In 2012, The New York Times noted that the app was one of the few nongame apps on iOS that had a 5 star rating. [37]
Wrike, Inc. is an American project management application service provider based in San Jose, California. Wrike also has offices in Dallas, Tallinn, Nicosia, Dublin, Tokyo, Melbourne and Prague.
Songza was a free music streaming and recommendation service for Internet users in the United States and Canada.
Deezer is a French music streaming service founded in 2007. The company has been a subsidiary of Access Industries since 2016. Deezer is available via web and on various digital platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS and others.
Prezi is an American video and visual communications software company founded in 2009 in Hungary, with offices in San Francisco, Budapest and Riga as of 2020. According to Prezi, in 2021, the software company has more than 100 million users worldwide who have created approximately 400 million presentations. In 2019, they launched Prezi Video, a tool that allows for virtual presentations within the video screen of a live or recorded video. The word Prezi is the short form of "presentation" in Hungarian. As of January 2022, the company had around 300 employees in 13 countries.
LinkedIn Pulse was a news aggregation app originally developed for Android, iOS and HTML5 browsers, originally released in 2010. The app, in its original incarnation, was deprecated in 2015 and integrated into LinkedIn.
Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to "flip" through the articles, images, and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. The service can be accessed via web browser, or by a Flipboard application for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and via mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client software is available at no charge and is localized in 21 languages.
BlueStacks is an American technology company recognized for its creation of the BlueStacks App Player and other cloud-based cross-platform products. The BlueStacks App Player enables the execution of Android applications on computers running Microsoft Windows or macOS. The company's establishment traces back to 2009, founded by Jay Vaishnav, Suman Saraf, and Rosen Sharma.
Messenger is an American proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and released standalone Facebook Portal hardware for Messenger calling in 2018. In April 2015, Facebook launched a dedicated website interface, Messenger.com, and separated the messaging functionality from the main Facebook app, allowing users to use the web interface or download one of the standalone apps. In April 2020, Facebook released a Messenger desktop app for Windows and macOS.
News360 was a personalized news aggregation app for smartphones, tablets and the web. It attempted to learn a user's interests by analyzing their interaction with news stories on the app and using semantic analysis and natural language processing to create an Interest Graph and construct a unique feed of relevant content for each user. The app claims an audience of more than 4 million users.
Treehouse or (Teamtreehouse) is an online technology school that offers beginner to advanced courses in web design, web development, mobile development and game development. Its courses are aimed at beginners looking to learn computer coding skills for a career in the tech industry.
Burner is a mobile application for iOS and Android made by Ad Hoc Labs, Inc. that allows users to create temporary disposable phone numbers in the U.S. and Canada. The app allows smartphone users to have a phone number that is anonymous and can be thrown away, for purposes such as online ads, while traveling, for business projects, or for dating profiles. Burner is a product of Ad Hoc Labs, an Atwater Village, Los Angeles-based software startup.
Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.
Life360 Inc. is a San Francisco, California–based American information technology company that provides location-based services, including sharing and notifications, to consumers globally. Its main service is called Life360, a family social networking app released in 2008. It is a location-based service designed primarily to enable friends and family members to share their location with each other.
Secret was an iOS and Android app service that allowed people to share messages anonymously within their circle of friends, friends of friends, and publicly. It differs from other anonymous sharing apps such as PostSecret, Whisper, and Yik Yak in that it was intended for sharing primarily with friends, potentially making it more interesting and addictive for people reading the updates. It was founded by David Byttow, the former lead for Square Wallet, and Chrys Bader-Wechseler, a former Google product manager at Google+, Photovine and YouTube. Bader-Wechseler left the company in January 2015, with the stated reason that the company's shift away from beautiful design and towards more minimalistic design meant that he felt he was no longer the best person to be at the helm of the company. Byttow announced the shutdown of the app and the company on April 29, 2015.
Paribus is an American company and creator of the price tracking app of the same name, which syncs with a user's email account to scan for receipts and negotiates with online companies to refund the difference if there is a price drop shortly after a purchase.
This is a timeline of Pinterest, an Internet service that serves as a "visual discovery tool", as well as the eponymous company.
Sunrise is a discontinued electronic calendar application for mobile and desktop. The service was launched in 2013 by designers Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van. In October 2015, Microsoft announced that they had merged the Sunrise Calendar team into the larger Microsoft Outlook team where they will work closely with the Microsoft Outlook Mobile service.
Picsart is an Armenian-American technology company based in Miami, Florida and Yerevan, Armenia that develops the Picsart suite of online photo and video editing applications, with a social creative community. The platform allows users to take and edit pictures and videos, draw with layers, and share the images on Picsart and other social networks. It is one of the world's most popular apps, with reportedly more than 1 billion downloads across 180 countries.
Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The feature set of Figma focuses on user interface and user experience design, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration, utilising a variety of vector graphics editor and prototyping tools. The Figma mobile app for Android and iOS allows viewing and interacting with Figma prototypes in real-time on mobile and tablet devices.
Investing.com is a financial platform and news website; one of the top three global financial websites in the world. It offers market quotes, information about stocks, futures, options, analysis, commodities, and an economic calendar.