 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(May 2009) |
Xoom was an early dot-com company that provided free unlimited space web hosting, similar to GeoCities. The domain "xoom.com" is now held by the Xoom Corporation, an international-focused money transfer website run by PayPal.
Xoom was founded by Chris Kitze in September 1996 as a download website offering free clipart and a productivity suite including a word-processing application, centering on a word processor based on WordStar.
In March 1997, Xoom became a web hosting (offering 100 MB) and an e-mail hosting website. The company acquired several small service providers in 1997 and 1998, including Paralogic, creator of ParaChat, which was the largest chat network on the web at the time, and PageCount, a web counter service. The main revenue sources for the company were direct marketing via email to members and banner advertising.
The company was funded by a former Lycos executive who had previously started Creative Multimedia (Portland, OR), Aris Multimedia (Marina del Rey, CA) and Point Communications (New York, NY), and angel investors who invested a total of $10M in common stock. No venture capital was raised and the company went public in December 1998 (ticker symbol: XMCM). Around that time, it was ranked as the 13th most popular site on the web by Media Metrix. In May 1999, a deal was announced to use Xoom.com as a vehicle for NBC's internet ventures, that combined Snap.com (owned by CNET and NBC), and various NBC internet assets plus $400M of NBC on-air promotion to form NBC Internet (NBCi). At that time, the combined entity was ranked as the 7th most popular site on the web by Media Metrix.
Xoom was both criticized and praised for its strict policies on violations of terms of service. A short-lived experiment in franchising and licensing the Xoom software platform and business model in 1998 led to an Italian website, xoom.it, which is still in operation and owned by Virgilio.
Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Ybrant Digital.
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. The headquarters of NBC is in New York City at the Comcast Building. NBC also has offices in Chicago at the NBC Tower.
Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services. It was one of the major internet service providers of the 1990s.
Pogo.com is a free online gaming website that offers over 50 casual games from brands like Hasbro and PopCap Games. It offers a variety of card and board games to puzzle, sports and word games. It is owned by Electronic Arts and is based in Redwood Shores, California.
Meebo was an instant messaging and social networking service provider. It was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry, and was based in Mountain View, California. Initially the company offered a web-based instant messenger service, extending its offer in more general online chat and even social networking directions. In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.
StarMedia is a Latin American Internet brand, co-founded in August 1996 by Fernando Espuelas and Jack Chen as the first pan-regional Internet portal for Spanish and Portuguese speaking audiences.
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.
Mplayer, referred to as Mplayer.com by 1998, was a free online PC gaming service and community that operated from late 1996 until early 2001. The service at its peak was host to a community of more than 20 million visitors each month and offered more than 100 games. Some of the more popular titles available were action games like Quake, Command & Conquer, and Rogue Spear, as well as classic card and board for more casual gamers. Servers and matchmaking was provided through a proprietary client. Initially, the service was subscription-based, but by early 1997, they became the first major multiplayer community to offer games to be played online through their network for free. This was done by relying on advertisement-based revenues.
Ma Huateng is a Chinese businessman, investor and philanthropist who is the co-founder, chairperson and chief executive officer (CEO) of Tencent, one of the most valuable companies in East Asia, one of the largest internet and technology companies, and one of the biggest investment, gaming, and entertainment conglomerates in the world. The company in Shenzhen develops China's biggest mobile instant messaging service, WeChat, and its subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, payment systems, smartphones, internet-related services, value-added services and online advertising services, both in China and globally.
AllBusiness.com provides business information and resources for small businesses, those companies with fewer than 500 employees. The company also conducts research to measure the health and direction of the small business sector.
Wirtualna Polska is a group of companies operating in the media and e-commerce sectors.
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (HWVP) is an American software and web focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. Its founders include John Hummer and Ann Winblad. The firm was an early investor in Napster, the first popular file sharing service, and in several internet firms that failed during the dot-com bubble.
Clive Ng is a media sector financier and executive. He has focused primarily on Asian business opportunities and has been instrumental in several joint-venture partnerships between American companies and Asian firms, particularly during the Internet and e-commerce boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. He has also been a founding shareholder in Asian new media firms such as MTV Japan and E*TRADE Asia.
WebChat Broadcasting System, or WBS for short, is a virtual community created during the 1990s. Supported by online advertising, it was one of few services at the time to offer free integrated community services including chat rooms, message boards, and free personal web pages. Extremely popular during the mid to late 1990s in the era prior to the Dot-com bust, WBS was at that time the largest and best-known social media website on the internet. In 1998, WBS was acquired by the search engine Infoseek, which was in turn acquired by Disney/ABC. The original WebChat Broadcasting System closed on 15 September 1999 after its chat rooms were integrated into Disney's existing Go Network chat rooms. A revival of WBS was launched in 2009 and is virtually identical to the original community.
Shockwave.com, or Shockwave, is an online and offline video games distributor and game portal. It is owned by Shockwave LLC, based in Los Angeles, California, United States. It was launched by Macromedia on August 2, 1999, to promote the company's Shockwave and Flash players, both used on the website. As of 2005, the website had 22 million users. By 2010, it hosted more than 400 games in a variety of genres.
Xoom Corporation is an electronic funds transfer and remittance provider.
Similarweb Ltd. is a global software development and data aggregation company specializing in web analytics, web traffic and digital performance. The company has 12 offices worldwide. Similarweb went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021.
William Dawson is an American software engineer and co-founder of early Web giant Xoom, which at one time ranked as the 7th largest Internet site in the world. Dawson is credited for creating over 30 products for a dozen companies ranging from scientific research tools to video games. Early in his career, Dawson was the Chief Science Officer at Apple Inc. and a member of the Macintosh Development Team. He also helped launch the optical media industry by producing the world's first CD-ROMs and DVDs, authoring both the media and development systems that mastered them.
VoloMetrix, Inc. is an American subsidiary of Microsoft based in Seattle, Washington. VoloMetrix sells analytics software that combines data from collaboration platforms to create data visualizations and dashboards. At the end of April 2013, the company raised $3.3M in series A funding from Shasta Ventures. In October 2014, VoloMetrix announced a series B funding round with Shasta Ventures and Split Rock Partners that raised $12M. In September 2015, Microsoft announced that they had acquired the company, but did not disclose the amount. The acquisition was made to improve existing Microsoft offerings such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Delve.
MSN Dial-up is an Internet service provider operated by Microsoft in the United States and formerly also in several other countries. Originally named The Microsoft Network, it debuted as a proprietary online service on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of Windows 95. In 1996 and 1997, a revised web-based version of the ISP was an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet.