In light of Friday's announcement that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo, it's a good opportunity to take a look at some of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today. Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.
About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.
AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.
Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen other high-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.
AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.
Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.
Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.
... Read moreIt's nowhere near Silicon Valley and it's likely that the residents who use "Google" as a verb are in the minority. But there's a town in Eastern Oregon that was once known as "America's First Dot-com City."
Halfway, Ore., a little town southwest of Hells Canyon, gained fame in 1999 when it agreed to publicly change its name for a year to Half.com in exchange for cold hard cash (said to be $100,000) and school computers. In an auction that ended Sunday on eBay, the town was able to squeeze out a bit more from its affiliation with the Web site.
The town auctioned off one of its two signs that once greeted people entering "America's First Dot-com City." Half.com founder Josh Kopelman had the winning bid at $1,000, according to a story in The Oregonian.
"While the sign represents a unique moment in Halfway's history, it also represents a unique time for me as well," Kopelman told The Oregonian. (In an aim to compete with Amazon.com, eBay agreed to buy Half.com, an online person-to-person marketplace for fixed-price goods, in 2000.)
When the deal to rename the town was announced in 1999, Kopelman told CNET News.com: "The biggest thing is that we both needed a way to put ourselves on the map. There is such a '.com' clutter out there, and we wanted to do something innovative to get some visibility in the crowd."
Half Moon Bay, Calif., was reportedly among the list of places that Half.com had thought of approaching with its publicity play. But Halfway, Ore., ended up going for it.
"We're kind of at a point where the economics of our community are falling by the wayside--we're losing Main Street businesses and just lost a gas station," Patti Huff, Halfway's city planner at the time, told News.com in 1999.
In addition to the $1,000 Kopelman bid for the sign, he reportedly also donated $1,500 to go toward community development. The City Council has not decided how it will use the money. The other Half.com sign will be kept in the town museum.
The farming and ranching community did not legally change its name to Half.com. Back in 1950 however, Hot Springs, N.M., did legally change its name--to Truth or Consequences, after the popular game show. Host Ralph Edwards had promised to broadcast the show from the first town that renamed itself for the program.
- prev
- 1
- next
