On September 30, 1987, Mentat Inc registered the mentat.com domain name, making it 93rd .com domain ever to be registered.

Based in Los Angeles, California, Mentat is the leading supplier of standards-based, high-performance networking solutions to the computer and satellite industries. Mentat’s SkyX products, named the World Teleport Association’s 2002 Technology of the Year, overcome the limitations of TCP/IP to allow high-performance Internet access over satellite-based networks. SkyX products are used by ISPs, corporations, and government organizations in over 85 countries across all seven continents.

Mentat, Inc. was acquired by Packeteer, Inc. on December 22, 2004. Mentat, Inc. provides networking solutions and operating systems to the computer and satellite industries in the United States. Its networking protocol products for operating system developers include TCP/IP protocol suite offering IPv6 and IPsec; Portable Streams, a portable implementation of the STREAMS infrastructure that provides a mechanism for networking protocols, terminal subsystems, and other kernel-level I/O facilities for porting to various operating environments; and XTP, a commercial implementation of the Xpress Transport Protocol for networks. The company also offers SkyX Gateway and SkyX client/server solutions to allow Internet access over satellite-based networks for ISPs, corporations, and government organizations. Mentat, Inc. was founded in 1987 and is based in Los Angeles, California.

Sedo is going to auction more than 170 .me domain names currently held by the .me registry. The auction will start October 27th and runs until Thursday, November 3rd.

Looking over the list there are definitely a lot of good keywords. But missing are the catchy domains that take advantage of the .me extension, such as love.me or like.me.

Some of the domains include: Sydney.me, London.me, Rio.me, golf.me, baseball.me, basketball.me, rugby.me, lottery.me astrology.me, Houses.me, Property.me, RealEstate.me, and Foreclosures.me

Lycos, Inc., is a search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.

History

Lycos is a university spin-off that began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University’s main Pittsburgh campus in 1994. Lycos Inc. was formed with approximately US $2 million ($3.2 million today) in venture capital funding from CMGI. Bob Davis became the CEO and first employee of the new company in 1995, and concentrated on building the company into an advertising-supported web portal. Lycos enjoyed several years of growth during the 1990s and became the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries.

In 1996, the company completed the fastest IPO from inception to offering in NASDAQ history. In 1997, it became one of the first profitable internet businesses in the world. In 1998, Lycos paid $58 million ($84.3 million today) for Tripod in an attempt to “break into the portal market.” Over the course of the next few years, Lycos acquired nearly two dozen internet brands including Gamesville, WhoWhere, Wired Digital (eventually sold to Wired), Quote.com, Angelfire, Matchmaker.com and Raging Bull.

Lycos Europe was a joint venture between Lycos and the Bertelsmann transnational media corporation, but it has always been a distinct corporate entity. Although Lycos Europe remains the largest of Lycos’s overseas ventures, several other companies also entered into joint venture agreements including Lycos Canada, Lycos Korea and Lycos Asia.

Near the peak of the internet bubble on May 16, 2000, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by Terra Networks, the internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica, for $12.5 billion ($17.8 billion today).[9] The acquisition price represented a return of nearly 3000 times the company’s initial venture capital investment and about 20 times its initial public offering valuation. The transaction closed in October 2000 and the merged company was renamed Terra Lycos, although the Lycos brand continued to be used in the United States. Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks.

On August 2, 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation for $95.4 million in cash ($119.72 million today), less than 2% of Terra’s initial multibillion-dollar investment. In October 2004, the transaction closed for sale of half of the business and the company name was changed back to Lycos Inc. The remaining Terra half was reacquired by Telefónica.

Under new ownership, Lycos began to refocus its strategy. In 2005, the company moved away from a search-centric portal and toward a community destination for broadband entertainment content. With a new management team in place, Lycos also began divesting properties that were not core to its new strategy. In July 2006, Wired News, which had been part of Lycos since the purchase of Wired Digital in 1998, was sold to Condé Nast Publications and re-merged with Wired Magazine. The Lycos Finance division, best known for Quote.com and RagingBull.com, was sold to FT Interactive Data Corporation in February 2006, while its online dating site, Matchmaker.com, was sold to Date.com. In 2006, Lycos regained ownership of the Lycos trademark from Carnegie Mellon University.

During 2006, Lycos introduced several media services, including Lycos Phone which combined video chat, real-time video on demand, and an MP3 player. In August of the same year, a new version of Lycos Mail was released, which allowed sending and receiving large files, including unlimited file attachment sizes. In November 2006, Lycos began to roll out applications centered on social media, including the first “watch and chat” video application with the launch of its Lycos Cinema platform. In February 2007, Lycos MIX was launched, allowing users to pull video clips from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video and MySpace Video. Lycos MIX also allowed users to create playlists where other users could add video comments and chat in real-time.

As part of a corporate restructuring to focus on mobile, social networks and location-based services, Daum sold Lycos for $36 million in August 2010 to Ybrant Digital, an internet marketing company based in Hyderabad, India.

In May 2012 Lycos announced the appointment of former employee Rob Balazy as CEO.

Due to a disagreement over the price of Lycos, Daum and Ybrant went to court, which backed Daum’s claims. This prompted Daum in 2016 to seize Lycos’s shares back from Ybrant.

The first live Internet link into low earth orbit was established on January 22, 2010 when astronaut T. J. Creamer posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account from the International Space Station, marking the extension of the Internet into space. (Astronauts at the ISS had used email and Twitter before, but these messages had been relayed to the ground through a NASA data link before being posted by a human proxy.) This personal Web access, which NASA calls the Crew Support LAN, uses the space station’s high-speed Ku band microwave link. Tosurf the Web, astronauts can use a station laptop computer to control a desktop computer on Earth, and they can talk to their families and friends on Earth using Voice over IP equipment.

Communication with spacecraft beyond earth orbit has traditionally been over point-to-point links through the Deep Space Network. Each such data link must be manually scheduled and configured. In the late 1990s NASA and Google began working on a new network protocol, Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) which automates this process, allows networking of spaceborne transmission nodes, and takes the fact into account that spacecraft can temporarily lose contact because they move behind the Moon or planets, or because space weather disrupts the connection. Under such conditions, DTN retransmits data packages instead of dropping them, as the standard TCP/IP Internet Protocol does. NASA conducted the first field test of what it calls the “deep space internet” in November 2008. Testing of DTN-based communications between the International Space Station and Earth (now termed Disruption-Tolerant Networking) has been ongoing since March 2009, and is scheduled to continue until March 2014.

This network technology is supposed to ultimately enable missions that involve multiple spacecraft where reliable inter-vessel communication might take precedence over vessel-to-earth downlinks. According to a February 2011 statement by Google’s Vint Cerf, the so-called “Bundle protocols” have been uploaded to NASA’s EPOXI mission spacecraft (which is in orbit around the Sun) and communication with Earth has been tested at a distance of approximately 80 light seconds.

Left of The Dot Media Inc. (LOTD) created a lot of buzz when the new domain monetization company introduced itself during a Test Track session at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in Vancouver, Canada in June 2010. As we noted in our review of last year’s show, “Left Of The Dot’s business model revolves around monetizing sub-domains of generic keyword domains. For example, one of their clients is Beef.com. Left Of The Dot finds companies in the beef business (many of whom currently have poor websites or no websites at all) who will pay to use the Beef.com brand by having Left Of The Dot build a website for them on a subdomain such as Angus.Beef.com or Alberta.Beef.com.”

The company’s co-founders, Chris Jensen and John Lyotier, told the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. audience that names following that convention do very well in the search engines, almost immediately increasing visibility for their customers.

The LOTD platform caught the attention of the new owner of Importers.com, an investor who originally intended to ditch an existing website and park the domain after buying it last year. Instead the owner decided to let LOTD see if they could do something more profitable with it.

According to a note I got from Chris Jensen this week, LOTD’s efforts have produced a home run with Importers.com. After investing nearly a year in re-tooling the site, LOTD has re-launched Importers.com as an online B2B marketplace for businesses looking to trade with G20 partners. Jensen said, “In cooperation with the new owners, Left of the Dot built has created an attractive, well-organized and safe new trading environment and the international business community is responding by signing up at the rate of over 800 per week for the import export marketplace.”

By rebuilding the site rather than junking it, LOTD also retained businesses that had signed up at the original site so they now have a community that has over 400,000 members, making Importers.com a a realistic, North America-centric alternative to online B2B behemoths Alibaba.com and TradeKey.com. Jensen noted, “those sites are valued at $10 billion and $2 billion respectively. The existing sites value their customers at between $50 and $120 each, which gives Importers.com an implied value of at least $17.5 million – not bad for a business that essentially came for free.”

Jensen added, “International trade is now hugely dependent on web-based services and Importers.com was one of the first sites that allowed Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) to find international partners… After considerable consultation with SMBs the new Importers.com allows businesses to get online via Marketing Names (for example, HardWood.Importers.com), get found via search engines (hundreds of this domain’s existing Marketing Names rank in the Top 3 results on Google, Yahoo and Bing), find customers via trade leads and establish credibility via rigorous Trust Certification.”

LOTD co-founder John Lyotier said, “A memorable generic name like Importers.com is equivalent to quality real estate, the Park Places and Boardwalks of the domain industry. Importers.com represented the virtual equivalent of renovating an entire city center and giving businesses all the tools they need to grow and prosper – it’s good for each business and good for the community. The key for us is enabling importers and exporters to lease their very own sub-domains (Marketing Names) off the Importers.com brand so that they can become a valuable part of the community.”

Jensen concluded, “We think that similar potential exists for many other premium domain names and the purpose of the Left of the Dot model is to unlock this potential and provide alternatives to ad based revenue.” Barely a year since they broke from the gate, it looks like LOTD is off to a great start.

On July 27, 1987, Lockheed Corporation registered the lockheed.com domain name, making it 81st .com domain ever to be registered.

The Lockheed Corporation (originally the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company) was an American aerospace company. Lockheed was founded in 1912 and later merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin in 1995.

Company History:

Formed in 1995 via the union of the nation’s second- and third-ranking defense contractors, Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation is the world’s largest defense contractor. Lockheed Martin further broadened its lead over second ranking McDonnell Douglas with the January 1996 acquisition of Loral Corporation’s Defense Electronics and Systems Integration for $9.1 billion and $2.1 billion of assumed debt. Both Lockheed and Martin Marietta had evolved from relatively small aerospace manufacturers into titans of the global defense industry. A thorough treatment of Lockheed’s history appears elsewhere in this series, while the Martin Marietta saga is recounted here.

In 1905 a youthful Glenn Martin moved with his family to California. In the hills of Santa Ana, Martin built and flew his first experimental gliders. Not long afterwards Martin started a small airplane factory while working as a salesman for Ford and Maxwell cars. Martin applied his earnings from the auto sales, as well as money from barnstorming performances, to finance an airplane business. During this time he hired a man named Donald Douglas to help him develop new airplanes. Soon thereafter, Douglas and Martin collaborated to produce a small flight trainer called a Model TT which was sold to the U.S. Army and the Dutch government.

On the eve of World War I, Douglas was summoned to Washington to help the Army develop its aerial capabilities. Less than a year later, he became frustrated with the slow moving bureaucracy in Washington and returned to work for Martin, who had relocated to Cleveland. While there, Douglas directed the development of Martin’s unnamed twin-engine bomber. Neither he nor Martin was willing to compromise or shorten the period of time needed for the development of their airplane. For that reason the “Martin” bomber, arrived too late to see action in World War I. When Martin moved to Baltimore in 1929, Douglas left the company to start his own aircraft company in California.

Martin continued to impress the military with his aircraft demonstrations even after the war. In July of 1921, off the Virginia Capes, seven Martin MB-2 bombers under the command of General Billy Mitchell sank the captured German battleship Ostfreisland. Continued interest from the War Department led Martin’s company to develop its next generation of airplanes, culminating with the B-10 bomber. The B-10 was a durable bomber, able to carry heavy payloads and cruise 100 miles per hour faster than conventional bombers of the day. Martin’s work on the B-10 bomber earned him the Collier Trophy in 1932.

Although Martin continued to manufacture bombers throughout the 1930s, he also began to branch out into commercial passenger aircraft. With substantial financial backing from Pan Am’s Juan Trippe, Martin developed the M-130 “China Clipper,” the first of which was delivered in 1932. The clipper weighed 26 tons, carried up to 32 passengers and was capable of flying the entire 2,500 miles between San Francisco and Honolulu. Pan Am flew Martin’s planes to a variety of Asian destinations, including Manila and Hong Kong.

But Martin’s consistent development of military aircraft through the decade prepared it well for the start of World War II. The company produced thousands of airplanes for the Allied war effort, including the A-30 Baltimore, the B-26 and B-29 bombers, the PBM Mariner flying boat, and the 70-ton amphibious Mars air freighter. Martin invited some criticism in 1942 when he suggested that the United States could dispense with its costly two-ocean navy and defense of the Panama Canal if it had enough airplanes like the Mars.

After the war ended Martin continued to manufacture what few airplanes the Army and Navy were still ordering. In 1947 the company re-entered the highly competitive commercial airliner market with a model called the M-202. The development of later aircraft, the M-303 (which was never built) and the M-404, was a severe drain on company finances. Despite loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, and a number of other sources, the Martin Company was unable to generate an operating profit.

In July 1949 Chester C. Pearson was hired as president and general manager of the company. Glenn Martin, at the age of 63, was moved up to the position of chairman. Despite the new management and an increase in orders as a result of the Korean War, the Martin Company was still losing money. There were two reasons: first, production of the 404 was interrupted which, in turn, halted delivery and therefore payment for the aircraft. Second, the company hired hundreds of new but unskilled workers, which lowered productivity.

By the end of 1951 George M. Bunker and J. Bradford Wharton, Jr. were asked to take over the management of the company. As part of a refinancing plan Glenn Martin was given the title of honorary chairman and his 275,000 shares in the company were placed in a voting trust. Glenn Martin resigned his position in the company in May of 1953, but remained as a company director until his death. George Bunker succeeded Martin as president and chairman and directed the company for the next 20 years. Pearson, who was demoted to vice-president, later resigned. Bunker and Wharton were successful in arresting the company’s losses and by the end of 1954 declared the company out of debt. Martin, who never married, died of a stroke in 1955 at the age of 69.

Under its new leadership, Martin substantially reengineered a version of the English Electric Canberra bomber for the United States Air Force. Known as the M-272, the bomber was given the Air Force designation B-57. Martin built a number of scout and patrol planes, including the P5-M and P6-M flying boats, and expanded its interest in the development of rockets and missiles. One of Martin’s first projects in this area was the Viking high-altitude research rocket, followed by the Vanguard missile. By the 1960s the company was a leader in the manufacture of second generation rockets like the Titan II.

Despite the company’s return to profitability after the Korean War, the larger airplane manufacturers such as Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed had the advantage of size, which allowed them to compete more effectively with smaller companies like Martin, Vought and Grumman. These smaller companies, however, retained very different kinds of engineering teams which allowed them to continue developing unique aeronautic equipment and weapons systems.

The company was largely unsuccessful in achieving diversification in anything but its number of government customers. Martin aircraft was subject to the whims of the Department of Defense with its unstable pattern of purchases. By December of 1960 Martin’s last airplane, a Navy P5M-2 antisubmarine patrol plane, rolled off the production line. From this point forward the company produced only missiles, including the Bullpup, Matador, Titan and Pershing among them.

The Martin Company diversified through a merger with the American-Marietta Corporation, a manufacturer of chemical products, paints, inks, household products and construction materials, in 1961. After convincing the government that the merger would not reduce competition in any of either company’s industries, the two companies formed Martin Marietta. The diversification continued in 1968 with the purchase of Harvey Aluminum. The name of the subsidiary was changed to Martin Marietta Aluminum in 1971.

Martin Marietta became known for its space projects, but remained a major producer of aluminum and construction materials, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969 the company’s aerospace unit was selected to lead construction of the two Viking capsules which landed on Mars in 1976. In 1973 the company was awarded a contract to build the external fuel tank for NASA’s space shuttles.

Thomas G. Pownall advanced to the presidency of Martin Marietta in 1977 and chief executive officer in 1982, succeeding J. Donald Rauth. The same year Martin Marietta faced the most significant challenge to its existence in its history–a hostile takeover bid from the Bendix Corporation. Bendix, which had earlier abandoned an attempt to take over RCA, was led at the time by Bill Agee. For several years Agee had been divesting Bendix of its residual businesses, accumulating a $500 million “war chest” in the process. In 1982, he leveraged that fund into a $1.5 billion bid for Martin Marietta.

Martin Marietta responded with a surprising turnabout. CEO Pownall invited a friend, Harry Gray of United Technologies, to assist with a takeover strategy of their own. Pownall and Gray agreed to divide Bendix among them in the event that either Martin Marietta or United Technologies was successful in taking over Bendix. The takeover was stalemated until a three-way deal was arranged wherein the Allied Corporation agreed to purchase Martin Marietta’s holdings in Bendix on the condition that Bendix abandon its bid for Martin Marietta. The deal left Allied with a 39 percent ownership of Martin Marietta, but it was agreed that Allied’s voting share would be directed by Martin’s board until such time that Allied could sell its interest in Martin. Bill Agee joined Allied’s board of directors but later left the company. In the meantime, Martin Marietta went $1.34 billion into debt as a result of its takeover defense.

In order to reduce the company’s debt load, Pownall divested its cement, chemical and aluminum operations, and accelerated a reorganization begun before the takeover crisis. By 1986 debt was down to $220 million, giving Martin Marietta a comfortable debt-to-total capitalization ratio of 24 percent. In retrospect, Tom Pownall acknowledged that his company had emerged from Bendix’s takeover attempt as a more tightly managed and efficient business.

In the late 1980s, the company became active in the design, manufacture, and management of energy, electronics communication, and information systems, including the highly sophisticated level of computer technology known as artificial intelligence. Even with this diversification, 80 percent of Martin Marietta’s revenues continued to be generated via U.S. government contracts. The company supplies the Pentagon with a number of weapons systems, including the Pershing II missile, a major part of the MX missile; the Patriot missile, designed for air defense of field armies; and the Copperhead, a “smart,” or guided, cannon shell. Martin Marietta also developed a series of night vision devices for combat aircraft.

The company continued to build external fuel tanks for NASA’s space shuttle program, despite the temporary suspension of that program following the Challenger tragedy. Martin Marietta was also a major contractor for the American space station scheduled to be built in 1993. In another public project, the company was working on a new air traffic management system for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Norman R. Augustine, Tom Pownall’s hand-picked successor, succeeded his mentor as chairman and CEO upon the latter’s mid-1980s retirement. Augustine proved an auspicious choice. Anticipating the impending reductions in the U.S. defense budget, which slid from a high of $96 billion in 1987 down to $75 billion by 1992, the new leader and his executive team developed a three-pronged plan to survive the shakeout. Dubbed the “Peace Dividend Strategy,” the blueprint called for growth through acquisition, diversification into civil and commercial infrastructure markets, and maintaining financial health. Under Augustine, Martin Marietta dove into the wave of consolidation that swept over the American defense industry in the early 1990s. He guided the $3 billion acquisition of General Electric Co.’s aerospace operations in 1992. The merger, which added about $6 billion in annual sales, boosted Martin Marietta’s capabilities in digital processing, artificial intelligence, and electronics. Two years later, Martin Marietta expanded its capabilities in the wireless communications and commercial aviation markets with the acquisition of Grumman Corp. for $1.9 billion.

However, Augustine’s most dramatic move came in 1994, when Martin Marietta and Lockheed announced a “merger of equals.” It took the Federal Trade Commission several months to approve the union, which created the world’s largest defense company. While the federal government typically discouraged such massive combinations within the same business area, it regarded this consolidation in the defense industry with favor, since, according to one statement, it “boosts the industry’s efficiency and lowers costs for the government, which in turn benefits taxpayers, shareholders and employees.”

The spring 1995 exchange of stock created an advanced technology conglomerate with interests in the defense, space, energy, and government sectors serving the commercial, civil, and international markets. Daniel M. Tellep, chairman and CEO of Lockheed, held those same positions at the new company. Martin Marietta leader Augustine stepped into the office of president with the promise that he would advance into the top spots upon Tellep’s retirement.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin began a process of consolidation and reorganization even before the merger was completed in March 1995. An organizational consolidation grouped operations around four major business sectors: space and strategic missiles, aeronautics, electronics, and information technology services. The plan merged and eliminated dozens of offices and functions, rendering thousands of jobs redundant in the process. In fact, Lockheed Martin slashed its work force from a combined total of 170,000 people to 130,000 by mid-1995 and expected to furlough another 12,000 by 1999.

The unified company was involved in a number of well-publicized projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, Motorola’s Iridium satellite telecommunications system, the F-22 Stealth fighter, Titan and Atlas space launch vehicles, the Space Shuttle program, and the space station Freedom.

The January 1996 acquisition of Loral Corp.’s Defense Electronics and Systems Integration business made it clear that Lockheed Martin would not soon relinquish its number-one status. Established in 1948, the Loral division was a $6.8 billion operation and a global leader in defense electronics, communications, space and systems integration. The acquisition was initially categorized as a sixth division, Tactical Systems, at Lockheed Martin. Anthony L. Velocci Jr., an analyst with Aviation Week and Space Technology, predicted that Lockheed Martin would encounter difficulty in consolidating the Loral operations into its own recently-reorganized divisions, but that the acquisition would bring economies of scale and boost electronics, tactical systems, and information technology.

Loral Chairman and CEO Bernard Schwartz held those same positions at the newly-formed Lockheed Martin subsidiary and was invited to join the latter company’s board of directors. Schwartz, Tellep, and Augustine became the first members of Lockheed Martin’s three-man office of the chairman as a result of the acquisition.

Loans.com Domain Auction Fetches Record $3M

Banking behemoth Bank of America has finalized a record $3 million (US$) auction bid for the domain name Loans.com. Domain name auctioneer GreatDomains.com, which hosted the auction, said that the site was sold by a San Jose, California computer consultant. The company claimed that the figure was the highest price ever paid at auction for a domain name, dwarfing the $1 million paid for WallStreet.com last April.

The company added that the highest price ever paid for a domain name was $7 million for the purchase of Business.com in November 1999. That purchase was not at an auction.

A number of financial institutions and investment capital firms apparently bid for Loans.com. The company closed the auction at the end of January and has spent the rest of the time negotiating the terms between the bank and Marcelo Siero, the seller.

Glee-Commerce

Siero, the company said, registered the name in September 1994 with the intention of creating an e-commerce application, but opted later to sell the name.

In a statement issued by GreatDomains.com, Siero said he almost accepted a $100,000 offer for Loans.com before he decided to list it with the company. GreatDomains.com takes a commission of 10 to 15 percent for hosting the auction and brokering the sale.

The company sold the domain name Cinema.com for $700,000 at the same time, but failed to sell Taxes.com — which was widely expected to draw top dollar. Company spokesman Paul Jouve said that recent negotiations for the sale of the name broke off and that it will be resold at auction.

Both Loans.com and Taxes.com have been receiving in excess of a thousand hits per day, Jouve said, as Internet surfers punch in the URL and expect to reach an associated Web site. Bank of America will surely welcome the traffic.

High-Priced Cyberspace

Los Angeles-based Great Domains, which has 312,662 current domain name listings on its site and sells them for an average of $14,500 each, said it has brokered four of the top five auctioned domain names. In addition to Loans.com and Cinema.com, the company also brokered the sale of ForSaleByOwner.com for $835,000 and Drugs.com for $823,000.

LinkedIn  is a business and employment-oriented social networking service that operates via websites. Founded on December 14, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. As of 2015, most of the site’s revenue came from selling access to information about its users to recruiters and sales professionals.  As of September 2016, LinkedIn has more than 467 million accounts, out of which more than 106 million are active. LinkedIn allows users (workers and employers) to create profiles and “connections” to each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional relationships. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. The site has an Alexa Internet ranking as the 14th most popular website (October 2016). According to the New York Times, US high school students are now creating LinkedIn profiles to include with their college applications.

Based in the United States, the site is, as of 2013, available in 24 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Korean, Indonesian, Malay, and Tagalog. LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol “LNKD”.

On June 13, 2016, Microsoft announced it will acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, a deal expected to be completed by the end of 2016.

LinkedIn is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Omaha, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington, Sao Paulo, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Milan, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Stockholm, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Australia, Canada, India and Dubai. In January 2016, the company had around 9,200 employees.

LinkedIn’s CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. Founder Reid Hoffman, previously CEO of LinkedIn, is Chairman of the Board. It is funded by Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. LinkedIn reached profitability in March 2006. Through January 2011, the company had received a total of $103 million of investment.

Founding to 2010

The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Lee Hower, Konstantin Guericke, Stephen Beitzel, David Eves, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante, Chris Saccheri). In late 2003, Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company. In June 2008, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture capital firms purchased a 5% stake in the company for $53 million, giving the company a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion. In 2006, LinkedIn reached 20 million members. In 2010, LinkedIn opened an International Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion, and announced its first acquisition, Mspoke, and improved its 1% premium subscription ratio. In October of that year Silicon Valley Insider ranked the company No. 10 on its Top 100 List of most valuable start ups. By December, the company was valued at $1.575 billion in private markets.

2011 to present

LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011. The company traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol “LNKD”, at $45 per share. Shares of LinkedIn rose as much as 171 percent in their first day of trade on the New York Stock Exchange and closed at $94.25, more than 109 percent above IPO price. Shortly after the IPO, the site’s underlying infrastructure was revised to allow accelerated revision-release cycles. In 2011, LinkedIn earned $154.6 million in advertising revenue alone, surpassing Twitter, which earned $139.5 million. LinkedIn’s fourth-quarter 2011 earnings soared because of the company’s increase in success in the social media world. By this point, LinkedIn had about 2,100 full-time employees compared to the 500 that it had in 2010.

In Q2 2012, LinkedIn leased 57,120 square feet on three floors of the One Montgomery Tower building in the Financial District of San Francisco, which was expanded to 135,000 square feet by 2014. In May 2012, LinkedIn announced its 2012 Q1 revenues were up to $188.5 million compared to $93.9 million in Q1 2011. Net income increased 140% over Q1 2011 to $5 million. Revenue for Q2 was estimated to be between $210 to $215 million. In November 2012, LinkedIn released their third quarter earnings, reporting earnings-per-share of $0.22 on revenue of $252 million. As a result of these numbers, LinkedIn’s stock increased in value, trading at roughly $112 a share.

In April 2014, LinkedIn announced that it had leased 222 Second Street, a 26-story building under construction in San Francisco’s SoMa district, to accommodate up to 2,500 of its employees, with the lease covering 10 years. The goal was to join all San Francisco based staff (1,250 as of January 2016) in one building, bringing sales and marketing employees together with the research and development team. They started to move in in March 2016. In February 2016, following an earnings report, LinkedIn’s shares dropped 43.6% within a single day, down to $108.38 per share. LinkedIn lost $10 billion of its market capitalization that day. On June 13, 2016, Microsoft announced it would acquire LinkedIn for $196 a share, a total value of $26.2 billion and the largest acquisition made by Microsoft to date. The acquisition will be an all-cash, debt-financed transaction. Microsoft will allow LinkedIn to “retain its distinct brand, culture and independence”, with Weiner to remain as CEO, who will then report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Analysts believe Microsoft saw the opportunity to integrate LinkedIn with its Office product suite to help better integrate the professional network system with its products. The deal is expected to be complete by the end of 2016.

In its headquarters in Dublin it currently has 1000 employees. It is expected to increase with the announcement of 200 new jobs taking the total employees to 1200

Security and technology

In June 2012, cryptographic hashes of approximately 6.4 million LinkedIn user passwords were stolen by hackers who then published the stolen hashes online. This action is known as the 2012 LinkedIn hack. In response to the incident, LinkedIn asked its users to change their passwords. Security experts criticized LinkedIn for not salting their password file and for using a single iteration of SHA-1. On May 31, 2013 LinkedIn added two-factor authentication, an important security enhancement for preventing hackers from gaining access to accounts. In May 2016, 117 million LinkedIn usernames and passwords were offered for sale online for the equivalent of $2,200. These account details are believed to be sourced from the original 2012 LinkedIn hack, in which the number of user IDs stolen had been underestimated. To handle the large volume of emails sent to its users every day with notifications for messages, profile views, important happenings in their network, and other things, LinkedIn uses the Momentum email platform from Message Systems.

Applications

In October 2008, LinkedIn enabled an “applications platform” which allows external online services to be embedded within a member’s profile page. Among the initial applications were an Amazon Reading List that allows LinkedIn members to display books they are reading, a connection to Tripit, and a Six Apart, WordPress and TypePad application that allows members to display their latest blog postings within their LinkedIn profile. In November 2010, LinkedIn allowed businesses to list products and services on company profile pages; it also permitted LinkedIn members to “recommend” products and services and write reviews.

Mobile

A mobile version of the site was launched in February 2008, which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone. The mobile service is available in six languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. In January 2011, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, a mobile app maker that scans business cards and converts into contacts. In June 2013, CardMunch was noted as an available LinkedIn app. In August 2011, LinkedIn revamped its mobile applications on the iPhone, Android and HTML5. At the time, mobile page views of the application were increasing roughly 400% year over year according to CEO Jeff Weiner. In October 2013, LinkedIn announced a service for iPhone users called “Intro”, which inserts a thumbnail of a person’s LinkedIn profile in correspondence with that person when reading mail messages in the native iOS Mail program. This is accomplished by re-routing all emails from and to the iPhone through LinkedIn servers, which security firm Bishop Fox asserts has serious privacy implications, violates many organizations’ security policies, and resembles a man-in-the-middle attack.

Groups

LinkedIn also supports the formation of interest groups, and as of March 29, 2012 there are 1,248,019 such groups whose membership varies from 1 to 744,662. The majority of the largest groups are employment related, although a very wide range of topics are covered mainly around professional and career issues, and there are currently[when?] 128,000 groups for both academic and corporate alumni. Groups support a limited form of discussion area, moderated by the group owners and managers. Since groups offer the functionality to reach a wide audience without so easily falling foul of anti-spam solutions, there is a constant stream of spam postings, and there now exist a range of firms who offer a spamming service for this very purpose. LinkedIn has devised a few mechanisms to reduce the volume of spam, but recently[when?] took the decision to remove the ability of group owners to inspect the email address of new members in order to determine if they were spammers. Groups also keep their members informed through emails with updates to the group, including most talked about discussions within your professional circles. Groups may be private, accessible to members only or may be open to Internet users in general to read, though they must join in order to post messages.

In December 2011, LinkedIn announced that they are rolling out polls to groups. In November 2013, LinkedIn announced the addition of Showcase Pages to the platform. In 2014, LinkedIn announced they were going to be removing Product and Services Pages paving the way for a greater focus on Showcase Pages.

Job listings

LinkedIn allows users to research companies, non-profit organizations, and governments they may be interested in working for. Typing the name of a company or organization in the search box causes pop-up data about the company or organization to appear. Such data may include the ratio of female to male employees, the percentage of the most common titles/positions held within the company, the location of the company’s headquarters and offices, and a list of present and former employees. In July 2011, LinkedIn launched a new feature allowing companies to include an “Apply with LinkedIn” button on job listing pages. The new plugin allowed potential employees to apply for positions using their LinkedIn profiles as resumes.

Online recruiting

Job recruiters, head hunters, and personnel HR are increasingly using LinkedIn as a source for finding potential candidates. By using the Advanced search tools, recruiters can find members matching their specific key words with a click of a button. They then can reach out to those members by sending a request to connect or by sending InMail about a specific job opportunity he or she may have. Recruiters also often join industry based groups on LinkedIn to create connections with professionals in that line of business.

Skills

Since September 2012, LinkedIn has enabled users to “endorse” each other’s skills. This feature also allows users to efficiently provide commentary on other users profiles – network building is reinforced. However, there is no way of flagging anything other than positive content.  LinkedIn solicits endorsements using algorithms that generate skills members might have. Members cannot opt out of such solicitations, with the result that it sometimes appears that a member is soliciting an endorsement for a non-existent skill.

Publishing platform

LinkedIn continues to add different services to its platform to expand the ways that people use it. On May 7, 2015, LinkedIn added an analytics tool to its publishing platform. The tool allows authors to better track traffic that their posts receive.

Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American engineer and computer scientist. A computer science professor at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, he made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical foundations of computer networking. He played an influential role in the development of the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, at UCLA.

The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers.

The first IMP was delivered to Leonard Kleinrock’s group at UCLA on August 30, 1969. It used an SDS Sigma-7 host computer. Douglas Engelbart’s group at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) received the second IMP on October 1, 1969. It was attached to an SDS-940 host. The third IMP was installed in University of California, Santa Barbara on November 1, 1969. The fourth and final IMP was installed in the University of Utah in December 1969. The first communication test between two systems (UCLA and SRI) took place on October 29, 1969, when a login to the SRI machine was attempted, but only the first two letters could be transmitted. The SRI machine crashed upon reception of the ‘g’ character.  A few minutes later, the bug was fixed and the login attempt was successfully completed.

BBN developed a program to test the performance of the communication circuits. According to a report filed by Heart, a preliminary test in late 1969 based on a 27-hour period of activity on the UCSB-SRI line found “approximately one packet per 20,000 in error;” subsequent tests “uncovered a 100% variation in this number – apparently due to many unusually long periods of time (on the order of hours) with no detected errors.”

A variant of the IMP existed, called the TIP, which connected terminals instead of computers to the network; it was based on the 316. Initially, some Honeywell-based IMPs were replaced with multiprocessing BBN Pluribus IMPs, but ultimately BBN developed a microprogrammed clone of the Honeywell processor.

IMPs were at the heart of the ARPANET until DARPA decommissioned ARPANET in 1989. Most IMPs were either taken apart, junked or transferred to MILNET. Some became artifacts in museums; Kleinrock placed IMP Number One on public view at UCLA. The last IMP on the ARPANET was the one at the University of Maryland.

National LambdaRail, Inc. provides a network for a range of academic disciplines and public-private partnerships. It offers Lambda-based connectivity and transport services, an optical network infrastructure that provides services and applications for meeting the needs of network and scientific research projects; and Ethernet-based services that facilitate point-to-point and multipoint Ethernet transport. The company also provides IP-based services, including routed IP and IP VPN services that connect educational institutions with one another, as well as with various networks, such as regional, national, and international IP-based research and education networks; video-based collaboration services; Internet transit solutions; and co-location, cross connection, and interconnection services. It offers its services for exploration and discovery in the biomedical, engineering, network research, physics, and various disciplines at research institutions and federal agencies in the United States. The company was founded in 2003 and is based in Cypress, California.

National LambdaRail (NLR) is a 12,000-mile (19,000 km), high-speed national computer network owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community.

The goals of the National LambdaRail project are:

• To bridge the gap between leading-edge optical network research and state-of-the-art applications research;
• To push beyond the technical and performance limitations of today’s Internet backbones;
• To provide the growing set of major computationally intensive science (often termed e-Science) projects, initiatives and experiments with the dedicated bandwidth, deterministic performance characteristics, and/or other advanced network capabilities they need; and
• To enable creative experimentation and innovation that characterized facilities-based network research during the early years of the Internet.

NLR uses fiber-optic lines, and is the first transcontinental 10 Gigabit Ethernet network. Its high capacity (up to 1.6 Tbit/s aggregate), high bitrate (40 Gbit/s implemented; planning for 100 Gbit/s underway[when?]) and high availability (99.99% or more), enable National LambdaRail to support demanding research projects. Users include NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and over 280 research universities and other laboratories. In 2009 National LambdaRail was selected to provide wide-area networking for U.S. laboratories participating in research related to the Large Hadron Collider project, based near Geneva, Switzerland.

It is primarily oriented to aid terascale computing efforts and to be used as a network testbed for experimentation with large-scale networks. National LambdaRail is a university-based and -owned initiative, in contrast with the Abilene Network and Internet2, which are university-corporate sponsorships. National LambdaRail does not impose any acceptable use policies on its users, in contrast to commercial networks. This gives researchers more control to use the network for these research projects. National LambdaRail also supports a production layer on its infrastructure. Links in the network use dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM), which allows up to 64 individual optical wavelengths to be used (depending on hardware configuration at each end) separated by 100 GHz spacing. At present,[when?] individual wavelengths are used to carry traditional OC-X (OC3, OC12, OC48 or OC192) time-division multiplexing circuits or Ethernet signals for Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

National LambdaRail was founded in 2003 and in 2004 its national, advanced fiber optic network was completed. In addition to being the first transcontinental, production 10 Gigabit Ethernet network, National LambdaRail was also the first intelligently managed, nationwide peering and transit program focused on research applications.

In 2008, a company named Darkstrand purchased capacity on NLR for commercial use. By the end of the year the Chicago-based company was having trouble raising funding due to the Great Recession. On May 24, 2012 the NLR network operations center services were transferred to the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California. In October 2009 Glenn Ricart was named president and CEO. On September 7, 2010 Ricart announced his resignation.

In November 2011 the control of NLR was purchased from its university membership by a billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong for $100M, who indicated his intention to upgrade NLR infrastructure and repurpose portions of it to support an ambitious healthcare project through NantHealth. The upgrade never took place. NLR ceased operations in March 2014.

On November 24, 1987, Kendall Square Research registered the ksr.com domain name, making it 99th .com domain ever to be registered.

Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had formerly helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8. KSR produced two models of supercomputer, the KSR1 and KSR2.

History

As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to 170 Tracer Lane, Waltham, Massachusetts. KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations. It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.

The first KSR1 system was installed in 1991. With new processor hardware, new memory hardware and a novel memory architecture, a new compiler port, a new port of a relatively new operating system, and exposed memory hazards, early systems were noted for frequent system crashes. KSR called their cache-only memory architecture (COMA) by the trade name Allcache; reliability problems with early systems earned it the nickname Allcrash, although memory was not necessarily the root cause of crashes. A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.

KSR used a proprietary processor because 64-bit processors were not commercially available. However, this put the small company in the difficult position of doing both processor design and system design. The KSR processors were introduced in 1991 at 20 MHz and 40 MFlops. At that time, the 32-bit Intel 80486 ran at 50 MHz and 50 MFlops. When the 64-bit DEC Alpha was introduced in 1992, it ran at up to 192 MHz and 192 MFlops, while the 1992 KSR2 ran at 40 MHz and 80 MFlops.

One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.

KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below), went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early 1990s. KSR went out of business in February 1994, when their stock was delisted from the stock exchange.

Technology

The KSR systems ran a specially customized version of the OSF/1 operating system, a Unix variant, with programs compiled by a KSR-specific port of the Green Hills Software C and FORTRAN compilers. The architecture was shared memory implemented as a cache-only memory architecture or “COMA”. Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on the access pattern of individual processors. The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access. Instruction decode was hardwired, and pipelining was used. Each KSR1 processor was a custom 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) CPU clocked at 20 MHz and capable of a peak output of 20 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 40 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS). Up to 1088 of these processors could be arranged in a single system, with a minimum of eight. The KSR2 doubled the clock rate to 40 MHz and supported over 5000 processors. The KSR-1 chipset was fabricated by Sharp Corporation while the KSR-2 chipset was built by Hewlett-Packard.

Software

Besides the traditional scientific applications, KSR with Oracle Corporation, addressed the massively parallel database market for commercial applications. The KSR-1 and -2 supported Micro Focus COBOL and C/C++ programming languages, and the Oracle PRDBMS and the MATISSE OODBMS from ADB, Inc. Their own product, the KSR Query Decomposer, complemented the functions of the Oracle product for SQL uses. The TUXEDO transaction monitor for OLTP was also provided. The KAP program (Kuck & Associate Preprocessor) provided for pre-processing for source code analysis and parallelization. The runtime environment was termed PRESTO, and was a POSIX compliant multithreading manager.

Hardware

The KSR-1 processor was implemented as a four-chip set in 1.2 micrometer complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS). These chips were: the cell execution unit, the floating point unit, the arithmetic logic unit, and the external I/O unit (XIO). The CEU handled instruction fetch (two per clock), and all operations involving memory, such as loads and stores. 40-bit addresses were used, going to full 64-bit addresses later. The integer unit had 32, 64-bit-wide registers. The floating point unit is discussed below. The XIO had the capacity of 30 MB/s throughput to I/O devices. It included 64 control and data registers.

The KSR processor was a 2-wide VLIW, with instructions of 6 types: memory reference (load and store), execute, control flow, memory control, I/O, and inserted. Execute instructions included arithmetic, logical, and type conversion. They were usually triadic register in format. Control flow refers to branches and jumps. Branch instructions were two cycles. The programmer (or compiler) could implicitly control the quashing behavior of the subsequent two instructions that would be initiated during the branch. The choices were: always retain the results, retain results if branch test is true, or retain results if branch test is false. Memory control provided synchronization primitives. I/O instructions were provided. Inserted instructions were forced into a flow by a coprocessor. Inserted load and store were used for direct memory access (DMA) transfers. Inserted memory instructions were used to maintain cache coherency. New coprocessors could be interfaced with the inserted instruction mechanism. IEEE standard floating point arithmetic was supported. Sixty-four 64-bit wide registers were included.

The following example of KSR assembly performs an indirect procedure call to an address held in the procedure’s constant block, saving the return address in register c14. It also saves the frame pointer, loads integer register zero with the value 3, and increments integer register 31 without changing the condition codes. Most instructions have a delay slot of 2 cycles and the delay slots are not interlocked, so must be scheduled explicitly, else the resulting hazard means wrong values are sometimes loaded.

In the KSR design, all of the memory was treated as cache. The design called for no home location- to reduce storage overheads and to software transparently, dynamically migrate/replicate memory based on where it was be utilized; A Harvard architecture, separate bus for instructions and memory was used. Each node board contained 256 kB of I-cache and D-cache, essentially primary cache. At each node was 32 MB of memory for main cache. The system level architecture was shared virtual memory, which was physically distributed in the machine. The programmer or application only saw one contiguous address space, which was spanned by a 40-bit address. Traffic between nodes traveled at up to 4 gigabytes per second. The 32 megabytes per node, in aggregate, formed the physical memory of the machine.

Specialized input/output processors could be used in the system, providing scalable I/O. A 1088 node KSR1 could have 510 I/O channels with an aggregate in excess of 15 GB/s. Interfaces such as Ethernet, FDDI, and HIPPI were supported.

Amazon Confirms The purchase of “Kindle Fire” On Their Website

In a smart move by Amazon, just before announcing the new Kindle Fire HD family of products to the world on, the company acquired the domain name.  According to Whois records, the name switched hands from its previous owner to Amazon.

The New York resident who sold the domain name didn’t divulge any details, but the domain name went under whois privacy in early 2010. It remains that way today.

Upon purchase of the domain and on the very same day Amazon unveiled the first generation Kindle Fire in 2011, the company registered well over 500 domain names related to the Kindle Fire and Silk browser products, through the internet brand protection company MarkMonitor.

The first versions of BIND were developed by said promoters Berkeley. All versions up to 4.8.3 were developed under the responsibility of the Computer Research Group. From 1985 to 1987, Kevin Dunlap worked on BIND. Dunlap was employed by Digital Equipment Corporation and posted at the university. Versions 4.9 and 4.9.1 were issued by Digital Equipment Corporation , now part of Hewlett Packard . DEC employee Paul Vixie was the leader of these developments. Version 4.9.2 was released by Vixie Enterprises . From version 4.9.3 was the development in the hands of Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) and was financially supported by the sponsors of ISC. In 1997 the first production version of ripe came BIND 8 on the market, the latest version to version 9, which would be completely redeveloped.

In 1985, Kevin Dunlap of DEC substantially revised the DNS implementation. Mike Karels, Phil Almquist, and Paul Vixie have maintained BIND since then. BIND was ported to the Windows NT platform in the early 1990s. BIND was widely distributed, especially on Unix systems, and is still the most widely used DNS software on the Internet.

On October 27, 1986, Kesmai Corporation registered the kesmai.com domain name, making it 30th .com domain ever to be registered.

Kesmai was a pioneering game developer and online game publisher, founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, one of the first graphical MMOGs, launched in 1987. They also developed an ASCII-based MUD, Island of Kesmai, which ran on CompuServe. Founded in 1981, Kesmai has led the online gaming industry as a developer and publisher of online-multiplayer games. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, one of the first graphical massive multiplayers online games (MMOG), launched in 1987. They also developed an text-based multi-user-dungon (MUD), Island of Kesmai, which ran on CompuServe.

Based in Charlottesville, VA, Kesmai was a world leader in multiplayer online games and the parent company of ARIES Online Games, Kesmai Studios and GameStorm.  The company developed, published, and distributed interactive gaming content to over 12 million paying subscribers of America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, EarthLink Network, Delphi, and major websites throughout the Internet. Popular Kesmai titles include Air Warrior, Online Casino, Harpoon Online, Legends of Kesmai, MultiPlayer BattleTech, Star Rangers Online, Stellar Emperor, CatchWord, Jack Nicklaus Online Tour and a collection of classic board and card games.

Kesmai GameStorm was unique among early online services. Instead of being a matchmaking service for players of popular retail computer games, GameStorm specialized in proprietary, online-only games for large numbers of players, but it was an expensive service charging $9.95 a month.  However, it should be noted it was one of the earliest browser-based service where the player need not download the full game to play.

The company was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 1994. The company continued to develop massively multiplayer games such as Air Warrior 2 and Legends of Kesmai. News Corp distributed their games through AOL. However, this proved a contenius countship when in 1997  Kesmai Corp. filed a suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia chargeing that AOL is exercising “monopolistic control” over on-line services and Internet access, preventing small on-line content developers, like Kesmai, from distributing its product.  It was revealed by the lawyer for News Corp ( Jonathan S. Abady)  that the case was settled in Kesmai favor.

Electronic Arts bought the company from News Corp in 1999, but Kesmai studios and subsidaries were closed in 2001 as changes to how online servies were sold to consumers less through services and more through cable providers interested less in making destination landing pages online.

Jonathan Bruce Postel made many significant contributions to the creation of the Internet, particularly in the area of standards. The Economist dubbed him the “God” of the Internet, and many still refer to him as the network’s principal founder. He is largely known for being the Editor of the RFC document series, and for managing the creation and allocation of Top Level Domains and IP addresses in the pre-ICANN era. When he passed away he was the Director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute’s Computer Network Division; he led a staff of 70. He pioneered many initiatives, which led to creation of the modern Internet and its governing body, ICANN; he established IANA, ICANN’s precursor and the current Internet numbering authority.

Jon Postel’s technical influence can be seen at the very heart of many of the protocols which make the Internet work: TCP/IP determines the way data is moved through a network; SMTP allows us to send emails; and DNS, the Domain Name Service, helps people make sense of the Internet. He contributed to these and many other technologies. He studied at UCLA, ultimately gaining his Ph.D. in computer science in 1974. Those studies led to his early involvement in the ARPANET project, the packet switching network from which the modern Internet evolved.

In addition, he was involved with Request For Comment (RFC) document series, which contains the standards and practices of the Internet’s infrastructure. For almost three decades, Jon Postel was RFC Editor, shepherding drafts through the open consensus processes that characterize Internet development efforts.

For many, Jon’s greatest contribution to the Internet was his role in creating the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). This task – which he volunteered to take on and which he at first performed manually – provided the stability the Internet’s numbering and protocol management systems needed for it to grow and scale. He was also involved with the Los Nettos network (a regional network for the greater Los Angeles area) and was one of Internet Society’s founders, the first individual member; and he served as a Trustee from 1993-98.

Jon voluntarily took on the task of founding and running IANA, the Internet’s necessary numbering authority. He initially performed all numbering procedures and allocations manually. Thus, in Vint Cerf’s words, he kept track of the names of all things in the networked universe.[16] IANA sprung from the expansion of the ARPANET, and the vision of breaking messages into packets, each carrying an address, and sending them over a network to find their own way to another computer; the packets would then be reassembled into the original message. For this system to function each computer would have to have an individual address that would both be intelligible and constant; Jon invented this numbering address scheme. His system also allowed the numbers that computers used for addresses to be translated into English, and thus servers could be accessed by going to a site; i.e. www.example.com, instead of typing in something like 124.345.253.196. As the early network was quite small, Jon initially kept track of all of the existent addresses on scraps of paper. As the network grew, a more formal organization was needed; and the USC’s ISI was contracted by the U.S. government to manage the address system, Jon Postel was the founder and director. Thus, Jon was influential in establishing the protocols of the DNS, the roles of registries and registrars, and all necessary technical standards.

He died October 16, 1998 at the age of 55.

The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, and has been the largest music vendor in the United States since April 2008, and the largest music vendor in the world since February 2010. It offers over 43 million songs, 700,000 apps, 190,000 TV episodes and 45,000 films as of September 12, 2012. The iTunes Store’s revenues in the first quarter of 2011 totalled nearly US$1.4 billion; by May 28, 2014, the store had sold 35 billion songs worldwide.

While most downloaded files initially included usage restrictions enforced by FairPlay, Apple’s implementation of digital rights management (DRM), iTunes later initiated a shift into selling DRM-free music in most countries, marketed as iTunes Plus. On January 6, 2009, Apple announced that DRM had been removed from 80% of its music catalog in the US. Full iTunes Plus availability was achieved in the US on April 7, 2009, coinciding with the introduction of a three-tiered pricing model; however, television episodes, many books, and films are still FairPlay-protected. As of June 2013, the iTunes Store possesses 575 million active user accounts, and serves over 315 million mobile devices, including Apple Watches, iPods, iPhones, Apple TV and iPads.

Before the iTunes Store, most of the online music was download through websites like Napster. Steve Jobs expressed concern that people were illegally obtaining music because it was the only option they had. In 2002, Steve Jobs made an agreement with the five major record labels to offer their content through iTunes. The iTunes Store was introduced by Steve Jobs at a Worldwide Developer’s Conference to give music listeners a legal alternative to peer-to-peer file sharing networks. When it opened, it was the only legal digital catalog of music to offer songs from all five major record labels. At first, it was only available on Mac OS X and the iPod.

Following the introduction of the iTunes Store, individual songs were all sold for the same price, though Apple introduced multiple prices in 2007. Music in the store is in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format, which is the MPEG-4-specified successor to MP3. Originally, songs were only available with DRM and were encoded at 128 kbit/s. At the January 2009 Macworld Expo, Apple announced that all iTunes music would be made available without DRM, and encoded at the higher-quality rate of 256 kbit/s. Previously, this model, known as “iTunes Plus”, had been available only for music from EMI and some independent labels. Users can sample songs by listening to previews, ninety seconds in length, or thirty seconds for short tracks.

In addition, the iTunes Store offers apps, which are applications used for various purposes (games, productivity, news, etc.) that are compatible with the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad, although some apps are specifically for the iPhone or iPad only. Some Apps cost money (called “Paid Apps”) and some are free (called “Free Apps”). Developers can decide which prices they want to charge for apps, from a pre-set list of pricing tiers, from free to several hundred dollars. When someone downloads an App, 70 percent of the purchase goes to the developer(s), and 30 percent goes to Apple.

At the Macworld 2008 keynote, Steve Jobs, who was Apple’s CEO at the time, announced iTunes movie rentals. Movies are available for rent in the iTunes Store on the same day they are released on DVD, though the iTunes Store also offers for rental some movies that are still in theaters. Movie rentals are only viewable for 24 hours (in the US) or 48 hours (in other countries) after users begin viewing them. The iTunes Store also offers one low-priced movie rental a week: in the United States, this rental costs 99 cents. Movie rentals are not yet available in all countries but it is available in the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There is a weekly promotion in which one to three songs are available to download for free to logged-in users. Free downloads are available on Tuesdays, and remain free until the following Tuesday, when the store gets refreshed with new content. Some artists choose to have select songs available for no charge. This is not available at all iTunes Stores. Some iTunes television programs have begun the same technique to encourage brand loyalty; although those stay longer. In fact, the iTunes Store has a “Free TV Episodes” page where free episodes are organized by length, either as “featurettes” (shorter than 15 minutes) or full length episodes (longer than 15 minutes). Free content can vary from a preview of a show to bonus content to pilot episodes and entire seasons of TV shows (examples of free seasons include HBO’s The Weight of the Nation and ABC’s Pan-Am). Some networks, such as ABC and NBC, have their own pages of “Free Season Premieres”.

While previously the US iTunes Store has offered as many as three free songs each week (the single of the week, Discovery Download, and Canción de la Semana) in recent years, the store has instead replaced the three aforementioned categories with a unified “Single of the Week” banner, with the week’s single being from a new up and coming artist. In 2015, Apple discontinued the “Single of the Week” program.

iTunes Store for iOS

The iTunes Store allows users to purchase and download items directly to portable Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and iPod Touch. Apple offers three apps, each of which provides access to certain types of content.

The App Store app sells apps for iOS, and also provides updates to these apps.

The iTunes Store app sells music and videos.

The iBooks app sells ebooks.

Other, free content available from the iTunes Store can be accessed from two other iOS apps:

The Podcasts apps lets users download, subscribe to and sync podcasts.

The iTunes U app gives access to iTunes U educational material.

Originally, mobile users had to be connected to a Wi-Fi network in order to enter the store, hence its original name: the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. However, at Macworld 2009, Apple issued a software update which automatically allowed 3G and EDGE users to access the store’s full functionality for files smaller than 10 megabytes (MB). The iOS 3.0 update added the ability to download movies, TV shows, audiobooks, iTunes U, and ringtones on mobile devices, in addition to the previously available songs and podcasts. On February 18, 2010, Apple increased the 10 MB 3G download limit to 20 MB. In March 2012, Apple increased the 3G download limit to 50 MB, and, in late 2013, Apple increased the limit to 100 MB when they released the final version of iOS 7 for their new iPhones.

Reception and commercial success

Since its launch, the iTunes Store has crossed many milestones. In the first 18 hours, the store sold about 275,000 tracks, and more than 1 million tracks were sold in its first 5 days. When released for Windows in October 2003, iTunes was downloaded more than 1 million times in the first 3 days, selling more than 1 million songs in that period. On December 15, 2003, Apple announced that it had sold 25 million songs.

In January 2004 at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced (Sellers, 2004) that an unnamed person had purchased US$29,500 worth of music. On March 15, 2004, Apple announced that iTunes Music Store customers had purchased and downloaded 50 million songs from the iTunes Music Store. A song sold on iTunes gives the artist 9 cents in profit. They also reported that customers were purchasing 2.5 million songs a week which translates to a projected annual run rate of 130 million songs a year. The 50 millionth song was “The Path of Thorns” by Sarah McLachlan.

On April 28, 2004, the iTunes Music Store marked its first anniversary with 70 million songs sold, clear dominance in the paid online music market and a slight profit. The store also offers hundreds of movie trailers and music videos, in an attempt to boost soundtrack sales. In the conference, Steve Jobs reiterated that a subscription service is still not in the interest of customers and reported that only 5 million of the 100 million songs offered in the Pepsi giveaway campaign were redeemed, which he blamed on technical problems in Pepsi distribution. According to an Apple press release dated August 10, 2004, the iTunes Music Store was the first store to have a catalog of more than one million songs. Also, the iTunes Music Store at that point maintained a 70 percent market share of legal music downloads.

The emerging monopoly of the store has been criticized by Mike Lang of Miramax for “effectively strangling the industry”. He says that because the music industry has allowed too few content providers, it is now suffering. Lang views the issue as being more of a threat than music piracy.

The Internet Society (ISOC) is an international, non-profit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy. It states that its mission is “to promote the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world”.

The Internet Society has its headquarters in Reston, Virginia, United States, (near Washington, D.C.), and offices in Geneva, Switzerland. It has a membership base of more than 140 organizations and more than 80,000 individual members. Members also form “chapters” based on either common geographical location or special interests. There are over 110 chapters around the world.

The Internet Society and Internet History

The Internet Society was formed in 1992 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the “Fathers of the Internet”. The Internet Society’s history and values reflect this founding lineage. Among its leadership and membership one can find many of the Internet’s technical pioneers, innovators, and global connectors. Its mission—to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world—mirrors the guiding principles that gave rise to and enabled the propagation of our era’s defining technology.

For more than 20 years, the Internet Society has also played an important role in informing and creating the history of the Internet. The Internet Society’s foundational pillars—Outreach, Technology, and Policy—have found expression in initiatives that have helped to connect the world, supported the development of fundamental Internet technology, and promoted transparency and a multistakeholder, bottom-up approach in addressing global Internet governance issues.

Believing that “the Internet is for Everyone,” the Internet Society has worked since its founding to make that goal a reality.

History

The Internet Society was formed officially in 1992 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn with one of its purposes being to provide a corporate structure to support the Internet standards development process. Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Lyman Chapin released a document, Announcing ISOC, which explained the rationale for establishing the Internet Society. This document also defines the original charter of the organization as follows:

• The Society will be a non-profit organization and will be operated for international educational, charitable, and scientific purposes, among which are:
• To facilitate and support the technical evolution of the Internet as a research and education infrastructure and to stimulate involvement of the academic, scientific, and engineering communities (among others) in the evolution of the Internet.
• To educate the academic and scientific communities and the public concerning the technology, use, and application of the Internet.
• To promote scientific and educational applications of Internet technology for the benefit of educational institutions at all grade levels, industry, and the public at large.
• To provide a forum for exploration of new Internet applications and to foster collaboration among organizations in their operation and use of the Internet.

Many of the main forces of the Internet, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), remain very informal organizations from a legal perspective. There was a growing need for financial support and organization structure. The Internet Society was incorporated as a non-profit educational organization which could provide that support structure, as well as promoting other activities that are important for the development of the Internet.

The Internet Society is the parent corporation of the IETF; as such all IETF Request for Comments documents, including those RFCs which describe “Internet Standards”, are copyrighted by the Internet Society (although freely available to anyone, including non-members, at no charge). However, the Internet Society itself grew out of the IETF, to support those functions that require a corporate form rather than simply the ad hoc approach of the IETF. In reality, the Internet Society was formed because the IETF Secretariat, which had been operated under NSF contract by staff at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) would not be supported beyond 1991 by NSF. The then Internet Activities Board sought to create a non-profit institution that could provide financial support for the IETF Secretariat among other things. CNRI served as the first host for the Internet Society’s operation.

In 2012, on ISOC’s 20th anniversary, it established the Internet Hall of Fame, an annual award whose purpose is to “publicly recognize a distinguished and select group of visionaries, leaders and luminaries who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet”.

Internet Society today

The Internet Society conducts a great range of activities under three main categories, namely standards, public policy, access, and education.

The Internet Society works with countries and community partners to support network development, interconnection, and Internet traffic exchange, as well as training individuals who can build and maintain the Internet infrastructure in their regions.

Under the standards category, the Internet Society supports and promotes the work of the standards settings bodies for which it is the organizational home: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The Internet Society also seeks to promote understanding and appreciation of the Internet model of open, transparent processes and consensus-based decision making.

Under the public policy category, the Internet Society works with governments, national and international organizations, civil society, the private sector, and other parties to promote policies about the Internet that conform to its core values. The following statement illustrates the foundation for the Internet Society’s policy positions:

We envision a future in which people in all parts of the world can use the Internet to improve their quality of life, because standards, technologies, business practices, and government policies sustain an open and universally accessible platform for innovation, creativity, and economic opportunity.

The Internet Society has a prominent function in Internet governance discussions, including significant involvement in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

The Internet Society works with countries and community partners to support network development, interconnection, and Internet traffic exchange, as well as training individuals who can build and maintain the Internet infrastructure in their regions.

Under the category of education, the Internet Society pursues its goals by coordinating and delivering hands-on technical training, seminars and conferences on topical Internet issues; supporting local and regional Internet organisations; issuing briefings and white papers on Internet technologies; and funding participation opportunities for Internet experts in developing countries.

The Internet Society also encourages innovation and fresh thinking by providing grants and rewards to relevant initiatives and outreach efforts that address the humanitarian, educational and societal contexts of online connectivity.

The Internet Society is the parent company for the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG top-level domain.

ISOC has joint offices in Reston, Virginia, United States and Geneva, Switzerland. It has also established “Regional Bureaus” for Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe.

The Internet Society helped organize World IPv6 Day, which gathered companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks as well as ISPs to raise awareness of IPv6 issues such as fragmentation.

Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 1977 by Peter G. Weiner, a RAND Corporation researcher who had previously founded the Yale University computer science department and had been the Ph. D. advisor to Brian Kernighan, one of Unix’s developers at AT&T. Weiner was joined by Heinz Lycklama, also a veteran of AT&T and previously the author of a Version 6 Unix port to the LSI-11 computer. ISC was acquired by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1988, which sold its ISC Unix operating system assets to Sun Microsystems on September 26, 1991. Kodak sold the remaining parts of ISC to SHL Systemhouse Inc in 1993. Several former ISC staff founded Segue Software which partnered with Lotus Development to develop the Unix version of Lotus 1-2-3[citation needed] and with Peter Norton Computing to develop the Unix version of the Norton Utilities.

Products

ISC’s 1977 offering, IS/1, was a Version 6 Unix variant enhanced for office automation running on the PDP-11. IS/3 and IS/5 were enhanced versions of Unix System III and System V for PDP-11 and VAX. ISC Unix ports to the IBM PC included a variant of System III, developed under contract to IBM, known as PC/IX (Personal Computer Interactive eXecutive, also abbreviated PC-IX), with later versions branded 386/ix and finally Interactive Unix System V/386 (based on System V Release 3.2). ISC was AT&T’s “Principal Publisher” for System V.4 on the Intel platform. ISC was also involved in the development of VM/IX (Unix as a guest OS in VM/CMS) and IX/370 (native Unix on the System/370). They also developed the AIX (Advanced Interactive Executive) for the IBM 6150 RT, again under contract to IBM, although IBM awarded the development contract for AIX version 2 for the PS/2 to the competing Locus Computing Corporation.

PC/IX

Although observers in the early 1980s expected that IBM would choose Microsoft Xenix or a version from AT&T Corporation as the Unix for its microcomputer, PC/IX was the first Unix implementation for the IBM PC XT available directly from IBM. According to Bob Blake, the PC/IX product manager for IBM, their “primary objective was to make a credible Unix system – not try to ‘IBM-ize’ the product. PC-IX is System III Unix.” PC/IX was not however the first Unix port to the XT. Venix/86 preceded PC/IX by about a year, although it was based on the older Version 7 Unix. The main addition to PC/IX was the INed screen editor from ISC. INed offered multiple windows and context-sensitive help, paragraph justification and margin changes, although it wasn’t quite a fully fledged word processor. PC/IX omitted the System III FORTRAN compiler, the tar file archiver and did not add BSD tools like vi or the C shell. One reason for not porting these was that in PC/IX individual applications were limited to a single segment of 64 KB of RAM. To achieve good filesystem performance, PC/IX directly addressed the XT hard-drive rather than doing this through the BIOS, which gave it a significant speed advantage compared to MS-DOS. Because of the lack of true memory protection in the 8088 chips, IBM only sold single-user licenses for PC/IX. The PC/IX distribution came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by a 1,800-page manual. Installed, PC/IX took approximately 4.5 MB of disk space. An editorial by Bill Machrone in PC Magazine at the time of PC/IX’s launch flagged the $900 price as a show stopper given its lack of compatibility with MS-DOS applications. PC/IX was not a commercial success although BYTE in August 1984 described it as “a complete, usable single-user implementation that does what can be done with the 8088”, noting that PC/IX on the PC outperformed the PDP-11/23.