Internet companies
- Aided by Poker Devotees, Lawmaker Pushes to End the Ban on Online ... - New York Times
- ... to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American customers. Under the current law, approved by Congress in September 2006, financial institutions are banned from handling transactions made to and from Internet gambling sites....
- Russian company offers Facebook $200m for 2pc stake - Telegraph.co.uk
- Mr Milner's investment vehicle already owns stakes in Russia's most popular website, Mail.ru, and has recently bought up large holdings in a host of eastern European internet companies. If Facebook accepts the deal it will be first time it has accepted...
- In Europe, eBay Gains in Fights Over Fakes - Wall Street Journal
- Luxury companies including L'Oréal and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA have been feuding with e-commerce marketplaces such as eBay over whether the sites are responsible for people who sell fake and gray-market products on the Internet....
- Ning: The future of online social networking? - CNN
- CNN: Did any specific Web sites or companies inspire you to create Ning? Bianchini: We were really inspired by the first wave of Internet companies truly native to the Web like Craigslist and eBay. They were really around people connecting to other...
- Save Money, Online and Off - Washington Post
- If this bearish economy has you worried about your finances, it may ease your mind to remember one thing: The companies that provide your cable, Internet, and other monthly services are just as concerned as you are. That's good news for you....
- Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive - New York Times
- The case reflects the inability of big media companies to maximize profit from supersize Internet audiences that seem to come from nowhere. In essence, the complexities of TV production are curbing the Web possibilities. “Britain's Got Talent” is...
- 140 Characters About Food - PC Magazine
- The Internet has highly enriched the lives of foodies by giving us instant access to recipes, food blogs, podcasts, restaurant reviews, and recommendations. And now, thanks to Twitter, we can even track down moving food stands to see where they are at...
- Intel Adopts an Identity in Software - New York Times
- For example, Moblin fires up and reaches the Internet in about seven seconds, then displays a novel type of start-up screen. People will find their appointments listed on one side of the screen, along with their favorite programs....
- White-collar crime strikes often in times of recession - Bizjournals.com
- It'sa particularly common problem for companies that are small and don't have the right systems in place to detect the activity. “They don't want to tell anyone because they're ashamed that their processes and practices didn't catch it,” said Clarence...
- Businesses Get Tougher on 'Friendly' Fraud - Wall Street Journal
- By PUI-WING TAM Online merchants are fighting a surge in so-called friendly fraud, as more consumers try to get out of paying for their Internet purchases in the recession. Online jeweler Ice.com Inc. and travel site Expedia Inc. are among companies...
FriendFinder
FriendFinder is a internet holding company for numerious internet companies including the flagship site FriendFinder.com with 30 million active members worldwide. FriendFinder owns a number of other sites, such as Buy.com and CdNow.com.
The FriendFinder Network was founded in 1996 and is privately owned. The corporate headquarters is located in Sunnyvale, California. Friendfinder, Inc.'s different websites have a total worldwide membership of more than 100 million people.
Robert Hoffer
Entrepreneur and innovator Robert Hoffer has been working behind the scenes with some of the best-known Internet companies for more than 20 years – from online yellow pages, to instant messaging, to web-based scratch-off games. He has worked with, consulted at, and created technologies for such global companies as Apple Computer, AOL, Xerox, PepsiCo, Playboy, Citibank, and Lipton.
His work has included executive positions in marketing, operations, finance, and business development, but Hoffer's focus seems to be on innovation. He is known for his sometimes controversial opinion that "everything old is new again" - that is, most of today's inventions are simply repackaged versions of old ideas. This may be the driving force behind his work as co-founder of several Internet companies including: Infospace Corp., an Internet directory services provider; Query Labs, offering third-party directory services to newspapers and media firms; and Typo.net, which launched the hotly debated concept of interstitial advertising. His vision is often credited with bringing products to market that today are used by millions of people, and have been purchased by companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, and others for millions of dollars. For example, in 1995, Hoffer was instrumental in bringing the first web-based national Yellow and White pages online, which were later licensed and co-branded with Yahoo, Nynex, American Express, Excite@Home, Lycos, and others.
As the co-founder of Colloquis in 2000, Hoffer created the first commercially viable online robot for instant messaging, securing a controversial patent for the technology. In 2006, Microsoft purchased ActiveBuddy (now Colloquis) for $46 million.
Today, Hoffer serves as co-founder and managing director of Newforth Partners, a technology-focused investment banking and consulting firm.
American Internet
American Internet is a computer networking company based in the United States. It was acquired by Cisco Systems on August 21, 1998.
Internet Auction Co.
Internet Auction Co. is a online auction company based in the South Korea. It was acquired by eBay on January 8, 2001.
Internet Junction
Internet Junction is a gateway company based in the United States. It was acquired by Cisco Systems on September 6, 1995.
Internet Brands
Internet Brands (NASDAQ: INET) is a company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software applications.
The company operates two divisions: consumer internet and licensing.
The company follows a strategy of aggregating target audiences that are primarily monetized through advertising; the sites are focused on specific vertical markets which tend to be most attractive to advertisers.
According to the company's home page, the sites generated 48 million unique visitors in January 2009.
The company's portfolio of websites include many that have been described as using a Web 2.0 strategy, since they extensively utilize social network services, user generated content, blogs, wikis, and internet forums. Many of the websites are driven by sizeable virtual communities (millions in total membership); for instance FlyerTalk tallies 175,000 registered members on its home page, CorvetteForum.com more than 200,000, Hunting.net more than 122,000, HDForums (Harley Davidson) more than 80,000.
The licensing divisions consists of Autodata Solutions and vBulletin. vBulletin software, which is among the most popular internet forum software in the world, is utilized by many of the company's community-driven websites. Autodata Solutions, headquartered in London, Ontario, supplies content and software solutions to Internet Brands websites, but Autodata's primary business is serving third party clients, such as most as of the leading Automotive OEMs and many internet portals. Autodata was acquired by Internet Brands in 1999.
The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the business incubator Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling cars "haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ. In 2000, Roger Penske invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002, Time Magazine voted the site one of the 50 best in the World.
Reflecting its growth and diversification, the company changed its name in 2005. The company's IPO was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange. The company is an active acquirer of websites.
AT&T Internet Services
AT&T Internet Services is a d/b/a name for 5 companies that provide Internet service.
AT&T Yahoo! is an information service sold by AT&T Internet Services. It is a partnership between AT&T, Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. to provide co-branded dial-up and DSL Internet service.
The AT&T Yahoo! high-speed service is only offered to customers who receive telephone service from AT&T in the former SBC service areas. Customers of the former BellSouth will still be provided broadband under the FastAccess DSL service during AT&T's integration of BellSouth.
From 2003 to January 1, 2006, the ISP was known as SBC Yahoo!; due to the SBC and AT&T merger, its name was changed.
Other ISPs owned by AT&T include Prodigy, whose customers were urged to migrate to the SBC Yahoo! service, and AT&T WorldNet, which still exists after the SBC/AT&T merger to serve customers not in SBC's existing service areas. AT&T also used to provide broadband Internet through cable under its AT&T Broadband division; that division was sold to Comcast in 2002.
Yahoo! also provides Internet service with other companies besides AT&T, such as Verizon and Rogers Communications in Canada as Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo!, with BT Yahoo! in the UK for BT Group respectively.
Fizber (internet company)
This article is about the American internet real estate company. For other uses, see Fizber.
Fizber.com is a Miami Beach, Florida-based real estate website intending to help consumers buy and sell properties without interacting with a real estate broker. The word "fizber" (pronounced /fi:zbər/) comes from the agglutination from the pronunciation of FSBO, the acronym for the term "For Sale By Owner".
Fizber.com targets the American real estate market, its business model of promoting private real estate sales includes traditional flat fee MLS submission to home sellers and buyers and also some elements of web 2.0 services , involving sellers’ blogs, Web cams, 3-D floor plans, city profiles and video tours available on YouTube.
The company says it has over 2 million (listings) of homes for sale across the U.S. The website has over 741,000 visitors per month and places its listings in FSBO and social network websites.
In 2007 fizber.com was certified by TRUSTe as being in compliance with its TRUSTe's Privacy Seal program.
Fizber.com automatically sent sellers’ submitted property to other by-owner sites and about 70 social media sites. The website provides information about homes for sale, homes recently sold, foreclosure properties and rental properties. The site provides Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth integration and customized real estate widgets for users' blogs or Web sites.
In 2008 Fizber.com signed an agreement with Foreclosure.com for the purpose of providing information on U.S. foreclosure properties. This partnership allows visitors of Fizber.com to gain access to 600,000 foreclosure property listings.
State Company for Internet Services
State Company for Internet Services in Iraq, also known as URUKLINK called after its website, was founded on December 11, 1999. It was originally the sole Iraqi Internet service provider until 2003, when it began to face competition from other ISPs, including broadband satellite internet access services from both Middle Eastern and European VSAT hubs.
Uruklink's website provides access to the homepages of the ministries for communication, oil, construction and housing, the central bank and the Red Crescent Society.
Until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Internet access was tightly controlled and very few people were thought to be online; in 2002 it was estimated that only 25,000 Iraqis used the Internet.
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites.
Alexa Internet was created from a novel vision. A vision of navigation that learns and improves over time with the collective participation of its users. We all experience the gaps in navigating and finding information on the Internet as it is used today--frustrating keyword searches that turn up hundreds or thousands of web pages and sites, very few of which are of any interest. What if we, as a community of users, could effortlessly pool our collective experience and add human intelligence to navigation? What if we could fill in those gaps? It is a radical concept and it is our goal to make it real, and we invite you to join us in this effort. What we are doing can change the way we use the Internet forever. The Alexa service is the first Internet software product that learns from people. This intelligent navigation service provides a continuous source of relevant recommendations of where to go next on the Web.
The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world to the potential for the internet if the search problem could be solved. The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco.
The race to solve the internet search problem was decisively won by Google with their much simpler backrub approach. But Alexa still had a lot to offer. Their approach to intelligent navigation included the archiving of webpages as they were crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive (also located in the Presidio) and its Wayback Machine. Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls.
In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock as the company transitioned away from its original vision of providing an intelligent search solution. Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003. Live Search replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006. In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform.
Alexa also provides "site info" for the A9.com search engine.
In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. Uniquely, their Web Search Platform gives developers access to their raw crawl data. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory embedded BritePic ads.
In April 2007, the lawsuit Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the statsaholic service. In the lawsuit, Alexa alleges that Hornbaker is stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site is to display graphs that are generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. Nevertheless, Alexa expressly grants permission to refer its data in third-party work subject to suitable credits.
On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers, and the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009.
Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape.
There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa's user base is a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa's ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.
On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released the "New Alexa Ranking System" claiming that they now take into account more data sources "beyond Alexa Toolbar users".
The Alexa toolbar is regarded by many vendors as spyware. Symantec classifies the toolbar as Trackware. McAfee classifies it as Adware, a "Potentially Unwanted Program." McAfee Site Advisor rates the Alexa website as yellow, with the warning, "In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs,".
Competitors in the Internet market research space include ComScore, Hitwise, and Netcraft.
