Inktomi Corporation was a company that provided software for Internet service providers (ISPs). It was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart.
DoubleClick Inc. was an American advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to advertising agencies and mass media, serving businesses like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa Inc., Nike, Inc., and Carlsberg Group. The company's main product line was known as DART, which was intended to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and minimize unsold inventory for publishers.
Yahoo! Native is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
Infoseek was an American internet search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.
WebSideStory, Inc. (later Visual Sciences), was founded by Blaise Barrelet in 1996 as web analytics tool and link directory; its products were Hitbox and HBX. The company went public on September 28, 2004. In 2006, WebSideStory acquired high-end private data analysis and visualization software company Visual Sciences for $57 million. A year after the acquisition, WebSideStory rebranded itself as Visual Sciences, Inc. In January 2008 Visual Sciences, Inc. was acquired by Omniture for $394 million.
Vignette Corporation was a company that offered a suite of content management, web portal, collaboration, document management, and records management software. Targeted at the enterprise market, Vignette offered products under the name StoryServer that allowed non-technical users to create, edit and track content through workflows and publish it on the web. It provided integration for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and legacy systems, supporting Java EE and Microsoft.NET. Vignette's integrated development environment and application programming interface offered an alternative to conventional Common Gateway Interface/vi/Perl web development. StoryServer was used on many large websites including those of CNET, UnitedHealth Group, The Walt Disney Company, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox News, National Geographic Channel, Pharmacia & Upjohn, MetLife, BSkyB, the 2004 Summer Olympics, and NASA.
ListBot was a large email list hosting service originally created by Submit It! Inc., a privately held company based in Bedford, Massachusetts. In June 1998, ListBot became part of LinkExchange, which acquired Submit It! Inc. In November 1998, ListBot became a Microsoft property via the acquisition of LinkExchange.
Anthony Hsieh was an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He retired as the CEO of the online shoe and clothing company Zappos in August 2020 after 21 years. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded the Internet advertising network LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
iLike was an online service that allowed users to download and share music founded by brothers Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi. The website made use of a sidebar that is used with Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. The program and sidebar are not required in order to use the site but allow for ease in discovering new artists. The site attracted around half a million users in the first four months after it was launched. According to the latest statements by the company, over 60 million consumers registered to use iLike either directly on iLike.com or using the apps built by iLike for third-party social networks such as Facebook. iLike also built a "post-once publish-everywhere" dashboard for artists – major label artists as well as independent artists.
Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in all-stock deal worth around $1.2 billion at the time. Amazon purchased all of the outstanding shares and warrants from Zappos for 10 million shares of Amazon's common stock and provided $40 million in cash and restricted stock for the Zappos employees.
Scott Banister is an American entrepreneur, startup founder, and angel investor. He cofounded the anti-spam company IronPort, and he was an early advisor and board member at PayPal. He invented paid search advertising via keyword auction, a core business model for internet advertising companies.
Invite Media is a display advertising and exchange bidding company that was acquired by DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google Inc., on June 3, 2010 for $81 million. Prior to Google's acquisition, Invite Media partnered up with AlmondNet, a data aggregator and intellectual property licensor.
Drugs.com is an online pharmaceutical encyclopedia that provides drug information for consumers and healthcare professionals, primarily in the United States. It self-describes its information as "accurate and independent" yet limited to being "for educational purposes only and is not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment."
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010) is a book by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. It details his life as an entrepreneur, with emphasis on the founding of LinkExchange and Zappos.
Alfred Lin is an American venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Lin was the COO, CFO, and Chairman of Zappos.com until 2010.
Ali Partovi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Code.org, iLike, LinkExchange, an early advisor at Dropbox, and an early promoter of bid-based search advertising. Partovi currently serves on the board of directors at FoodCorps. He is currently the CEO of Neo, a mentorship community and venture fund he established in 2017.
Kevin Henrikson is a San Francisco-based engineer, speaker, and investor. Henrikson has worked for or headed several companies, such as Zimbra, Alpha Brand Media and Acompli.
Submit It! was a search-business internet advertising product that Scott Banister created in 1995, while he was a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Co-founded by Bill Younker and Larry Gormley, it was acquired by LinkExchange in June 1998.
