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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.
CompuServe was an American online service, the first major commercial one in the world. It opened in 1969 as a timesharing and remote access service marketed to corporations. After a successful 1979 venture selling otherwise under-utilized after-hours time to Radio Shack customers, the system was opened to the public, roughly the same time as The Source. H&R Block bought the company in 1980 and began to more aggressively advertise the service.
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.
Excite is an American website operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.
ARTISTdirect is an American online digital media entertainment company.
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. During the dot.com boom of the 1990s, StarMedia raised the first dollar of venture capital for a Latin Internet company which followed with the first IPO in its sector, while becoming one of the top 10 biggest websites on the Internet, measured by audience which is the site not written in English.
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.
LineOne was an Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. LineOne was a joint venture of News International, United News & Media and British Telecom. It then became the UK branch of Tiscali, which is now TalkTalk.
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. The WP Group owns the Wirtualna Polska horizontal portal founded in 1995 and known for being the first internet portal in Poland. It is currently the second largest online news source and one of the most quoted news media in the country. According to the Gemius/PBI surveys around 21 million Poles use WP's internet products every month.
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.
Stockpoint was a provider of online financial information through its websites InvestorsEdge.com and Stockpoint.com. The company also supplied SaaS capabilities which powered market data features for over 200 other websites such as Barclays Global Investors and Piper Jaffray, the San Francisco Chronicle and Wired News.
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 Addicting Games, Inc., 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
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.
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.
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