September 17, 2011
The domain name hack Soci.al has been sold for $50,000 according to host.al. The Albania country code domain name now sits on brand protection company Mark Monitor’s name servers. Moniker sold Social.com for $2.6 million in June to an undisclosed buyer.
It would make sense for the social.com to also buy the domain soci.al for a shortening their url.
January 14, 2012
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced yesterday he would strike a provision from SOPA that would compel Internet Service Providers to block access to foreign websites allegedly dealing in counterfeit goods and/or accused of other forms of intellectual property infringements. However, the permanent removal of the blocking provision isn’t set in stone.
Chairman Smith commented, “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers.
According to some in the domain name and connectivity sectors – including Affilias, registry operator of the .info Top Level Domain (TLD) – SOPA could undermine security improvements made with the introduction of DNSSEC, which makes the Domain Name System (DNS) more stable and trustworthy.
While SOPA has been supported by more than 120 businesses and associations from around the USA, resistance to it is also significant. A well known registrar of domain names that previously supported the legislation was pressured to reverse its position after grass roots action by protesting customers saw the company lose tens of thousands of domains names under management by the service.
Among the other reasons for opposition to the bill: those concerned feel there will be a general negative impact to online business, a lack of transparency in enforcement, it will be ineffective against online piracy, that it poses a threat to online freedom of speech and weakens “safe harbor” protections for site hosting content published by members, customers and users.
Date: 05/23/2008
More than half of those registrars named had already been contacted by ICANN prior to publication of KnujOn’s report, and the remainder have since been notified following an analysis of other sources of data, including ICANN’s internal database.
With tens of millions of domain names in existence, and tens of thousands changing hands each day, ICANN relies upon the wider Internet community to report and review what it believes to be inaccurate registration data for individual domains. To this end, a dedicated online system called the Whois Data Problem Report System (“WDPRS”) was developed in 2002 to receive and track such complaints.*
“ICANN sends, on average, over 75 enforcement notices per month following complaints from the community. We also conduct compliance audits to determine whether accredited registrars and registries are adhering to their contractual obligations,” explained Stacy Burnette, Director of Compliance at ICANN.** “Infringing domain names are locked and websites removed every week through this system.”
Although the majority of registrars offer excellent services and contribute to the highly competitive market for domains, ICANN’s compliance department has developed an escalation process to protect registrants and give registrars an opportunity to cure cited violations before ICANN commences the breach process.
However, while registrars are responsible for investigating claims of Who is inaccuracy, it is not fair to assume a registrar that sponsors spam-generating domain names is affiliated with the spam activity. A distinction must be made between registrars and an end user who chooses to use a particular domain name for illegitimate purposes.
“But if those registrars, including those publicly cited, do not investigate and correct alleged inaccuracies reported to ICANN, our escalation procedure can ultimately result in ICANN terminating their accreditation and preventing them from registering domain names,” Ms Burnette said.
August 2, 2011
Web-based teleconferencing system Speek has purchased the domain name Speak.com from a familiar face in the domain name industry.
According to whois records, the domain name was sold by Nat Cohen of Telepathy.
The sales price was not disclosed.
This is another example of a company launching a business on a “cute” domain name and then having to pay a price later. Speek.com is a bad domain name because when most people here the domain name, they’ll naturally think “speak” instead of “speek”.
Speek seems like a cool product. It’s a web based teleconference system that dials out to cell phones, landlines, and VoIP applications such as Skype and GoogleTalk.
Date: 12/11/1986
SoftQuad Software was a Canadian software company best known for HoTMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor. It is also known for Author/Editor, the first specialized SGML editor, and Panorama, the first browser plugin for SGML. Panorama demonstrated the need for standardization of SGML on the web, which eventually resulted in the development of the XML specification. HoTMetaL was one of a series of applications created by SoftQuad for editing, viewing and publishing structured (SGML and XML) content. It was based upon a popular SGML Editor called Author/Editor and has since evolved into XMetaL.
SoftQuad Software, Ltd. develops XML authoring tools and e-commerce solutions for business. The Company’s XMetaL is an enabling technology for XML-based content applications in e-publishing, e-commerce, and knowledge management. SoftQuad’s MarketAgility is an XML-based content solution that enables the management and real-time delivery of product information to e-marketplaces.
Early history
SoftQuad started its life in 1984 as a technology-oriented spin-off of Toronto’s Coach House Press. Its founders were Yuri Rubinsky, David Slocombe and Stan Bevington.
SoftQuad was started in order to improve automated typesetting at Toronto’s Coach House Press, and for many years developed an enhanced commercial version of the text formatting program troff, developed under license from AT&T, called sqtroff. It was sold with a suite of associated programs, corresponding to AT&T’s Documenter’s Workbench, under the name SoftQuad Publishing Software (SQPS).
SoftQuad’s business headquarters was in Toronto. After SQPS was largely supplanted by Author/Editor as SoftQuad’s main product, product development was transitioned to the Vancouver area, retaining the Toronto team as combined professional services and customization development for Author/Editor and its associated software development kit, called “Sculptor”. This arrangement arose out of a highly coincidental reunion of Yuri Rubinsky (in Toronto) and his high school friend Peter Sharpe. Peter Sharpe led the development of Author/Editor.
By virtue of its early lead and its charismatic leader, Yuri Rubinsky, SoftQuad provided considerable leadership to the nascent SGML community. For example, Yuri Rubinsky was the first president of SGML Open.
SoftQuad goes Public
In 1992, SoftQuad went public on the Vancouver Stock Exchange through a reverse takeover of BC’s “Hatco”. In January 1994, SoftQuad was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
HoTMetaL
Released in 1994, HoTMetaL was the first commercial HTML authoring product. SoftQuad was able to beat other products to the market by virtue of the fact that HTML was defined as an application of SGML. By virtue of this strong base and early lead, HoTMetaL became very popular as a tool for creating HTML web sites.
HoTMetaL was initially free, but a commercial version HoTMetaL Pro was soon released. Early versions of HoTMetaL ran on Windows and Unix. HoTMetaL Pro also ran on Macintosh, but by version 5, it was restricted to Windows.
On the basis of HoTMetaL’s early success, SoftQuad was able to go public on the NASDAQ stock exchange as SWEBF.
Over time, however, companies like Microsoft and Netscape increasingly saw HTML authoring tools as loss leaders to tempt web developers into their product suites. In addition, HoTMetaL adhered to the SGML philosophies that dictated that content should adhere to standards and that the structure and presentation of content should be separate. HoTMetaL was excellent at visualizing the structure of the content, and of enforcing the standards. But neither of these were as important to Web designers as “What You See Is What You Get” presentation of the content, which was better provided by products like DreamWeaver and FrontPage. In September, 1996, SoftQuad released HoTMetaL Intranet Publisher (HiP). HiP was essentially an Intranet Content Management System.
XMetaL
XMetaL was one of the first XML authoring products and has remained popular for almost a decade. Unlike tools like the popular XML Spy, XMetaL used a word processor metaphor and was designed to be used by writers and not programmers.
Along with Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft was an early site-license customer for XMetaL and according to public reports, still uses XMetaL widely.
Date: 01/17/1986
On January 17, 1986 SRI.com became the 8th registered “.com” domain.
History
In 1986, SRI.com became the 8th registered “.com” domain. The Artificial Intelligence Center developed the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. PRS launched the field of BDI-based intelligent agents. In the 1990s, SRI developed a letter sorting system for the United States Postal Service and several education and economic studies. Military-related technologies developed by SRI in the 1990s and 2000s include ground- and foliage-penetrating radar, the INCON and REDDE command and control system for the U.S. military, and IGRS (integrated GPS radio system)—an advanced military personnel and vehicle tracking system. To train armored combat units during battle exercises, SRI developed the Deployable Force-on-Force Instrumented Range System (DFIRST), which uses GPS satellites, high-speed wireless communications, and digital terrain map displays. SRI created the Centibots in 2003, one of the first and largest teams of coordinated, autonomous mobile robots that explore, map, and survey unknown environments.
With DARPA-funded research, SRI contributed to the development of speech recognition and translation products and was an active participant in DARPA’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program.[81] SRI developed DynaSpeak speech recognition technology which was used in the handheld VoxTec Phraselator, allowing U.S. soldiers overseas to communicate with local citizens in near real time. SRI also created translation software for use in the IraqComm, a device which allows two-way, speech-to-speech machine translation between English and colloquial Iraqi Arabic. In medicine and chemistry, SRI developed dry-powder drugs, laser photocoagulation (a treatment for some eye maladies), remote surgery (also known as telerobotic surgery), bio-agent detection using upconverting phosphor technology, the experimental anticancer drugs Tirapazamine and TAS-108, ammonium dinitramide (an environmentally benign oxidizer for safe and cost-effective disposal of hazardous materials), the electroactive polymer (“artificial muscle”), new uses for diamagnetic levitation, and the antimalarial drug Halofantrine. SRI performed a study in the 1990s for Whirlpool Corporation that led to modern self-cleaning ovens. In the 2000s, SRI worked on Pathway Tools software for use in bioinformatics and systems biology to accelerate drug discovery using artificial intelligence and symbolic computing techniques.[88] The software system generates the BioCyc database collection, SRI’s growing collection of genomic databases used by biologists to visualize genes within a chromosome, complete biochemical pathways, and full metabolic maps of organisms.
Early 21st century
SRI researchers made the first observation of visible light emitted by oxygen atoms in the night-side airglow of Venus, offering new insight into the planet’s atmosphere. SRI education researchers conducted the first national evaluation of the growing U.S. charter schools movement. For the World Golf Foundation, SRI compiled the first-ever estimate of the overall scope of the U.S. golf industry’s goods and services ($62 billion in 2000), providing a framework for monitoring the long-term growth of the industry. In April 2000, SRI formed Atomic Tangerine, an independent consulting firm designed to bring new technologies and services to market. In 2006, SRI was awarded a $56.9 million contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to provide preclinical services for the development of drugs and antibodies for anti-infective treatments for avian influenza, SARS, West Nile virus and hepatitis. Also in 2006, SRI selected St. Petersburg, Florida, as the site for a new marine technology research facility targeted at ocean science, the maritime industry and port security; the facility is a collaboration with the University of South Florida College of Marine Science and its Center for Ocean Technology. That facility created new a method for underwater mass spectrometry, which has been used to conduct “advanced underwater chemical surveys in oil and gas exploration and production, ocean resource monitoring and protection, and water treatment and management” and was licensed to Spyglass Technologies in March 2014.
In December 2007, SRI launched a spin-off company, Siri Inc., which Apple acquired in April 2010. In October 2011, Apple announced the Siri personal assistant as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S. Siri’s technology was born from SRI’s work on the DARPA-funded CALO project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was co-founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (vice president, engineering), and Tom Gruber (CTO/vice president, design), together with Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures). Investors included Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. For the National Science Foundation (NSF), SRI operates the advanced modular incoherent scatter radar (AMISR), a novel relocatable atmospheric research facility. Other SRI-operated research facilities for the NSF include the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility in Greenland. In May 2011, SRI was awarded a $42 million contract to operate the Arecibo Observatory from October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2016. In February 2014, SRI announced a “photonics-based testing technology called FASTcell” for the detection and characterization of rare circulating tumor cells from blood samples. The test is aimed at cancer-specific biomarkers for breast, lung, prostate, colorectal and leukemia cancers that circulate in the blood stream in minute quantities, potentially diagnosing those conditions earlier.
Date: 11/30/1999
Although there is no limit on the number of registrars that may register names using the SRS, stability of the Internet and continuity for consumers is protected by the requirement that every business desiring to become a registrar in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains must first become accredited for this purpose by ICANN.
SRS and ICANN
The US Department of Commerce appointed ICANN to look after the transition to SRS. The main responsibilities of ICANN included formulating and implementing a procedure for the sake of registrar accreditation, in a way that would create a competitive domain name registration system, ensuring continued domain name durability and Internet stability.
In March 1999, ICANN started accepting applications from companies who were interested in participating as one of five domain name registrars in SRS Testbed Program, which was prescribed in Amendment 11 of the DOC’s cooperative agreement with Network Solutions.
Starting in April 1999, ICANN was in charge of accepting the applications for registrar accreditation for the post-testbed period of the SRS. It accredited more than 160 businesses along with the five testbed program participants.
From 2001 to 2009, ICANN adopted the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) for all accredited registrars. In May 2009, the ICANN Board approved a total 17 amendments to the RAA. This agreement continues to be a hotly debated and edited agreement at nearly every ICANN meeting.
Problems in the Allocation of SRS
In 2001, there were reports about some registrars experiencing difficulties in evaluating the .com, .net, .org SRS in the hours wherein expiring names are deleted. After an investigation, it was found that substantial amounts of the bandwidth were being used in the wee hours by some registries, causing a large amount of queries to expire. ICANN took note of this matter and began keeping the community informed about its search a remedy. The solutions was the equitable allocation of the Shared Registry System, wherein every ICANN-accredited registrar was limited to use 256K of bandwidth and 250 simultaneous RRP connections.
Date: 09/29/1986
On September 29, 1986, Siemens AG registered the siemens.com domain name, making it 28th .com domain ever to be registered.
Company History:
Founded to manufacture and install telegraphic systems, Germany-based Siemens AG has prospered and grown over 155 years to become a multifaceted electronics and electrical engineering enterprise, and one of the most international corporations in the world. With a presence in more than 190 countries, Siemens’ primary business operations include information and communications networks, industrial automation and control, power generation and transmission, medical solutions, and lighting. Siemens was once viewed by analysts as a corporate dinosaur and urged to disband its conglomerate structure in favor of a more nimble and tightly focused enterprise. In the 1990s, however, under the leadership of Heinrich von Pierer, the company underwent major restructuring to minimize costs and maximize efficiencies while retaining the synergistic benefits of its broad-based structure. Siemens has entered the 21st century with a new listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and a competitive foothold in the burgeoning information technologies and communications sector.
Company Origins in Telegraph Systems: 1847-76
Siemens & Halske was founded in Berlin in 1847 by Werner Siemens and J.G. Halske to manufacture and install telegraphic systems. Siemens, a former artillery officer in the Prussian army and an engineer who already owned a profitable patent for electroplating, was the driving force behind the company and remained so for the rest of his life. The company received its first major commission in 1848, when it contracted to build a telegraph link between Berlin and Frankfurt.
Construction of telegraph systems boomed in the mid-19th century, and Siemens & Halske was well equipped to take advantage of the situation. In 1853, it received a commission to build an extensive telegraph system in Russia. Upon its completion, the company opened an office in St. Petersburg under the direction of Werner Siemens’ brother Carl Siemens. In 1857 Siemens & Halske helped develop the first successful deep sea telegraphic cable. This led to the transformation of the London office into an independent company under the direction of Wilhelm Siemens, another of Werner’s brothers, the next year. By 1865 the company’s English operations had become substantial. Its name was changed to Siemens Brothers, still under the direction of Wilhelm, who was eventually knighted as Sir William Siemens.
In 1867 Siemens Brothers received a contract for an 11,000-kilometer telegraph line from London to Calcutta, which it completed in 1870. In 1871 it linked London and Teheran by telegraph. In 1874 Siemens Brothers launched its own cable laying ship, the Faraday, which William Siemens co-designed. The next year, it laid the first direct transatlantic cable from Ireland to the United States.
Expansion and Diversification: 1877-1929
In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephones reached Berlin for the first time. Immediately grasping their worth, Werner Siemens quickly patented an improved version of the device and began production. In the next decade, Siemens & Halske also developed and began manufacturing electrical lighting and power generating equipment after Werner Siemens discovered the dynamo electric principle in 1866.
In 1888 Werner Siemens was ennobled by the German kaiser for his achievements. Two years later he retired and his company became a limited partnership shared by his sons Arnold and Wilhelm and his brother Carl. Werner Siemens died in 1892, but the House of Siemens continued to prosper. That same year, Siemens & Halske built a power station at Erding in Bavaria and founded an American subsidiary, Siemens & Halske Electric Company, in Chicago. The latter, however, closed in 1904. In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the X-ray, and the very next year Siemens & Halske owned the first patent for an X-ray tube. In 1897 Siemens & Halske decided to go public and reorganized with Carl Heinrich, now Carl von Siemens after being ennobled by the Russian czar in 1895, as chairman of the supervisory board. He retired after seven years in that post and was succeeded by his nephew Arnold.
Siemens & Halske remained busy as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. In 1903 it established Siemens Schuckertwerke GmbH, a subsidiary devoted to electric power engineering. In 1909 Siemens & Halske developed an automatic telephone exchange serving 2,500 customers in Munich. But when World War I broke out, orders for civilian electrical equipment slowed considerably and the company began production of communications devices for the military. Siemens & Halske also produced explosives, gun locks for rifles, and, later in the war, aircraft engines.
But perhaps the company’s most successful contribution to the German war effort was the fire control system it produced for the navy’s battle cruisers, which proved its worth at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. There, the battle cruiser squadron of the High Seas Fleet met its British counterpart for the only time during the war. While the main fleets fought to a draw, the German battle cruisers used their superior gunnery equipment to batter their opponents, sinking two British ships and severely damaging several others. It was a highlight for the German navy in a battle from which it otherwise won no advantage.
On the balance, however, the war hurt Siemens & Halske badly. The Bolshevik government that seized power in Russia in 1917 also seized the assets of the company’s St. Petersburg subsidiary, which were worth about Ru 50 million. Siemens Brothers was taken over by the British government in 1915 and sold to British interests the next year. The company was not returned to the Siemens family after the armistice, although it retained their name for business purposes. Siemens Brothers eventually re-established links to its old parent, and its general manager, Dr. Henry Wright, even became a member of the Siemens & Halske supervisory board in 1929. But Carl Friedrich von Siemens, a son of Werner’s who had headed the British subsidiary for six years and had many English friends, was shocked by these events; “they have stolen our name,” he lamented.
Arnold von Siemens died in 1918, before the end of the war. He was succeeded by his brother Wilhelm, who died the next year. Carl Friedrich then became chairman. Despite the precarious state of the German economy in the 1920s and a bias among foreign customers against doing business with a German company, the company continued to make its mark in electrical manufacturing. In 1923 it started producing radio receivers for the consumer market. In the same year, recognizing the growing importance of Japan as an industrial power and not wishing to concede that market to General Electric and Westinghouse, Siemens & Halske set up a Tokyo subsidiary, Fusi Denk, later known as Fuji Electric. In 1925 Siemens began construction of a power station on the Shannon River in Ireland, and in 1927 the company began work on another hydroelectric power station for the Soviet government, near Zaporozhe. Back home in Germany, Siemens & Halske financed and produced a railway network in suburban Berlin that began operation in 1928. By the end of the decade, the company was accounting for one-third of the German electrical manufacturing industry’s production and nearly the same proportion of its employees.
The Company During Wartime: 1930-45
Siemens & Halske was bloodied by the Great Depression, but it survived. It was forced to halve its dividend in the early 1930s and lay off employees in large numbers, but remained on relatively sound financial footing until the Nazi government’s rearmament project helped revive its fortunes in 1935. During the remainder of the decade, Siemens & Halske manufactured a wide range of equipment for all of Germany’s armed services. One of its most significant technical contributions at this time, the development of an automatic pilot system for airplanes, was the result of a project initiated for the Luftwaffe.
The company’s activities during this time are difficult to evaluate. On the one hand, according to family historian Georg Siemens, Carl Friedrich von Siemens was repelled by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism from the start and only grew more disgusted with their goals and methods as time went on. Just before his death in 1941, he wrote to an assistant: “My work no longer brings me satisfaction or joy. Those who were once proud that their work was devoted to the task of serving progress and humanity, can now only be sad that the results of their work merely serve the evil of destruction. Whenever I start to think, ‘why,’ I should prefer to creep into a corner, so as not to see or hear any more.” Yet there is no question that Siemens & Halske benefited from German rearmament during the late 1930s. Certainly the company did little or nothing to hinder Nazi militarism.
Carl Friedrich went into partial retirement in 1940 and appointed Hermann von Siemens, Arnold’s eldest son, to succeed him. By this time, Siemens & Halske was devoting virtually all of its manufacturing capacity to military orders and would do so for the duration of the war. In 1944 it helped develop and manufacture the V 2 rocket. Its factories also suffered substantial damage from Allied bombing raids. After the Soviet army conquered Berlin in 1945, Russian occupation authorities completely dismantled the Siemensstadt factory works and corporate headquarters.
In 1945 Hermann von Siemens, who had also been a director of Deutsche Bank, was arrested by American occupation authorities and interned for two years. There is also no question that the company employed slave labor during the war. Georg Siemens pointed out that every major German industrial concern used forced labor because of manpower shortages caused by the war, and asserted that Siemens & Halske treated its laborers better than most companies. But in 1947, allegations surfaced that three of the firm’s directors had been active in importing slave laborers from occupied countries. In addition, testimony from Holocaust survivors also surfaced at this time that Siemens had supplied gas chamber equipment to the concentration camps. These allegations were never proven, however, and the company denied them both.
Rebuilding and Reorganization Through the 1950s and 1960s
Hermann von Siemens resumed the chairmanship upon his release in 1948. The company had been devastated by the war and required years of rebuilding to get back on its feet. Its corporate headquarters was relocated to Munich in 1949. By the early 1950s, Siemens & Halske was once again producing railroad, medical, telephone, and power generating equipment, as well as consumer electronics products. In 1954 it established an American subsidiary in New York, Siemens Inc. Its first product sold to the American market was an electron microscope. In the mid-1950s Siemens & Halske entered the burgeoning fields of data processing and nuclear power. It introduced its first mainframe computer in 1955, and its first nuclear reactor went into service in 1959 at Munich Garching.
Hermann von Siemens retired in 1956 and was succeeded by Ernst von Siemens, Carl Friedrich’s only son. In the mid-1960s, Siemens & Halske technology went to Mars after the company developed a disc seal triode that was used in the transmitter of the American space probe Mariner IV. In 1965 it scored another coup when its 03 high-speed passenger train went into service with the German Federal Railway. Three years later, it began constructing a nuclear power station at Atucha, Argentina, the first such facility in South America. The company underwent a major reorganization in 1966, bringing all of its subsidiaries directly under control of the parent company and reincorporating as Siemens A.G. By the end of the decade, worldwide sales had reached DM 10 billion; in 1970 they reached DM 12.6 billion. In 1971 Ernst von Siemens retired and his cousin Peter succeeded him as chairman.
Prospering in the 1970s
The 1970s were prosperous years for Siemens. Despite a slower worldwide economy that curbed customer orders in some areas and forced the company to cut its workforce, sales grew to DM 20.7 billion and net profits to DM 606 million in 1976. When the summer Olympic Games came to Munich in 1972, Siemens was its first official supplier of telecommunications and data processing equipment. In 1977 the company entered into a joint venture with the American engineering firm Allis Chalmers, called Siemens Allis Inc., to market turbine generators in the United States. In fact, Siemens’ status as an electrical manufacturer rose to the point that Fortune wrote in 1978 that it had “replaced Westinghouse in General Electric’s demonology.” Siemens had replaced Westinghouse as the world’s number two electrical manufacturing concern, ranking “as GE’s major worldwide competitor in everything from motors and switchgear to generators and nuclear reactors.” It also had raised its share of the West German mainframe computer market to 21 percent, cutting sharply into IBM’s position as the Bundesrepublik’s leading mainframe supplier.
In the late 1970s, Siemens stumbled when it initiated a research and development effort in microcircuit technology, against the advice of a consulting firm employed by the West German government to counsel the nation’s industrial companies. It was thought that Siemens’ slow and methodical practices would render it unable to keep up with the smaller, quicker Silicon Valley firms that were breaking ground in this area. Nonetheless, Siemens A.G., with its research and development budget of $1 billion (one-eighth of all the money spent by West German industry on research at the time), eventually entered into a joint venture with Dutch rival Philips to develop advanced microcircuits. None of the company’s efforts on this front proved successful, however. Its components division lost money through 1987 and Siemens was forced to buy chips from Toshiba to meet its commitments until its own became available in early 1988.
Keeping Pace with High Technology and Globalization in the 1980s and 1990s
In 1981 Peter von Siemens retired and was succeeded by Bernhard Plettner. For the first time, the Siemens family relinquished day-to-day control over the company it had founded over a century ago. But the 67-year-old Plettner had worked for Siemens for all of his adult life, and Peter von Siemens felt that his own son, at the age of 44, was still too young and inexperienced for the top job.
Under Plettner and new CEO Karlheinz Kaske, Siemens embarked on an expensive and ambitious program of acquisitions and research and development to try to make itself into a world leader in high technology. Its effort to develop its own microchips was a part of that effort, as was the acquisition of IBM’s struggling Rolm Systems subsidiary in 1988. That deal cost Siemens $844 million, but gave it control of the third largest supplier of PBX telephone switching equipment in North America. Siemens’ strategy during the 1980s was designed to pay off over the long term and produced few tangible benefits in the short run. The company spent $24 billion on both research and development and acquisitions between 1983 and 1988, and the tremendous cash drain produced both a significant drop in earnings and a cut in the dividend in 1988. As one analyst told Business Week in 1988, “Siemens will be an interesting story in the 1990s.”
As the company entered the new decade, globalization became a vital part of its policy–and that meant a readjustment of the company’s homogeneous culture. Europe was facing a recession and the Asian and South American markets offered huge opportunities for growth. To help guide the new direction of Siemens, the company appointed Hermann Franz as chairman and Heinrich von Pierer as president and CEO. The appointment of Dr. Heinrich von Pierer as chief executive in 1992 reflected the need for a cultural change and the drive for higher profitability. Siemens had always been dominated by engineers. When von Pierer, an economist and lawyer, was elected to head the company, it was seen as a commitment to greater commercialism for the company. Von Pierer’s guidance stressed three fundamental trends: the first was that 85 percent of Siemens’ business would be conducted either in global markets or in markets that showed an unmistakable trend toward globalization; second, that significant improvements in manufacturing depended on reducing manufacturing “depth”; and third, that software was increasingly the crucial commercial factor. Within the company, von Pierer caused a cultural revolution. He continued the reorganization begun by his predecessor, Kaske, and developed a program designed to make Siemens more competitive with Japanese companies by making it more responsive to market pressures. He replaced the hierarchical structure and engineering focus with a new emphasis on innovation and service. He gave managers in local markets free rein to cut costs and bid for projects, while also appointing a younger generation of managers in their 40s. Moreover, von Pierer cut Siemens’ workforce by 7.5 percent and sold $2 billion in noncore businesses and slashed $3.6 billion in operating expenses by fiscal 1995. He continually asked if the company was flexible and changing enough, and at one point, included self-addressed postcards in the company magazine urging employees to send him their ideas.
Such measures were part of a strategy to get Siemens into new high-growth markets, especially in Asia. Von Pierer planned to invest $3.4 billion in Asia by the year 2000 and to double sales to $14.3 billion, according to Business Week in 1995. He set up facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe to lower costs and reach new customers, and bought telecommunications units in the United States and Italy. He also planned further acquisitions to move more production out of Germany. The strategy began to pay off. While net profits slipped 17 percent to $1.18 billion in 1994, earnings jumped 8 percent in three months and analysts saw a 20 percent increase for the year. As of 1995, sales continued to increase and the declining profits for the company began to increase. In another move toward globalization, an international partnership brought Siemens together with the world’s largest computer maker and Japan’s second largest chip maker. In 1992, Siemens joined forces with IBM and Toshiba Corporation to develop 256M-bit chips to create microprocessors with the power of supercomputers. The first chip was expected to be marketed in 1998. The estimated cost for the project was a billion dollars for designing the chip and another billion for setting up the manufacturing facilities. The Siemens, IBM, and Toshiba alliance was expected to become the industry norm given rising operation costs and the focus towards a “borderless” world economy. Innovation was always a part of Siemens’ tradition. But new social pressures and rapidly changing technology throughout the world brought new challenges to Siemens as it faced the 21st century. To deal with this new business market, Siemens used its tradition of intelligence, resources, and systematic application to remain a strong international force. As von Pierer stated in Siemens’ 1994 annual report: “Helping set the course of change has been a vital part of our business for nearly 150 years. … Fifteen years ago, barely half of our worldwide sales came from products that were less than five years old. This figure has now risen to more than two-thirds–solid proof that we are not just meeting increased demands for change, but are setting the pace for innovation.”
Radical Restructuring for the 21st Century
The mid-1990s proved to be difficult years for Siemens. Coupled with sluggish conditions in Europe, the 1996 onset of the economic crisis in east Asia took a serious toll, diminishing the company’s profits by two-thirds between 1996 and 1998. Analysts critiqued Siemens for being too slow to respond to the new demands of the rapidly globalizing business environment, and many called for the company to overhaul its “old economy” conglomerate structure, especially by unloading those businesses dependent on slow-growing markets, such as power generation. Under the time-optimized processes, or Top, program, a three-pronged strategy promoting cost-reduction, growth, and innovation, management had effected significant restructuring and substantial productivity gains since the early 1990s. Profits were still not sufficient, however, to finance the international expansion needed to keep up with competitors. The company’s earnings were particularly impaired by its semiconductor business, which, after being hard hit by a vicious price war for memory chips, lost $727 million in 1998. Other problem divisions included power generation, transportation systems, and private communication networks. In spite of criticism, von Pierer held fast to his traditionalist belief that there were valuable synergies between the various arms of Siemens’ business activities, especially as nearly all of the company’s businesses were in electrics or electronics, and as the broad scope of activities helped to insulate Siemens from the inevitable ups and downs of different business cycles. By 1998, however, the CEO conceded that the company had diluted its overall strength by stretching itself in too many directions at once. Resolving to keep only the businesses in which Siemens could maintain market leadership, von Pierer moved to discontinue more than 30 of the company’s minor operations, including those in military electronics and dental equipment. This also included selling its stake in the suffering telecom group GPT to the U.K.-based GEC. Still, most investors remained frustrated, contending that this streamlining constituted little more than a piecemeal restructuring and was not radical enough to restore the ailing company to solid profitability. Finally, in late 1998 von Pierer introduced a global ten-point plan that was heralded as a revolution for the 153-year-old company. Under this sweeping shake-up, designed to bolster earnings and eliminate underperformance, Siemens would sell or spin off one-seventh of its entire domain, divisions with combined annual sales of more than $10 billion. Key to this unburdening, Siemens had resolved to spin off Infineon, its highly cyclical semiconductor business, which was forecasting huge losses again in 1998. Further, the company let go of businesses that made copper cable, electronic components, and locomotives.
The revamped Siemens consisted of four main divisions: power generation, industry, rail systems, and information and communications. To shore up power generation and achieve critical cost-cutting, Siemens purchased the electricity generation arm of Westinghouse in August 1998. With the establishment of Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation, Siemens was well positioned to take advantage of strong demand in the United States, and to restructure its manufacturing operations worldwide. Further, the acquisition represented a major stride toward relocating the bulk of Siemens’ manufacturing outside of Germany, another of von Pierer’s goals. The industry division had undergone its own rigorous restructuring under the leadership of Edward Krubasik and, with a 60 percent profit increase in 1997, was beginning to thrive. Krubasik had introduced best-practice initiatives, joint account teams, and other measures to bring cohesion to the division’s loosely bundled units, whose activities ranged from industrial plant building to automated machines. Rail systems, which lost $479 million in 1997, was Siemens’ least vital division. With von Pierer’s shake-up, it received a new management team charged with strengthening operations enough to make the division salable in the coming years.
Information and communications was Siemens’ biggest division. Here, the company hoped to forge partnerships in its mobile phones and personal computers businesses, both areas in which it lacked sufficient market share to compete effectively on its own. Further, while it had a secure stake in the traditional telecoms switching market, a strategic acquisition was needed to bring the division up to speed with Internet-based network technologies, a crucial area of competence, as the world volume of data traffic was projected to surpass that of voice telephone communication in the coming years. Success in this area depended on executing a major push into the U.S. market, where the pace of competition was being set by such companies as Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, and Cisco Systems. To this end, in 1999 Siemens acquired two Massachusetts-based private data networking companies, Castle Networks Inc. and Argon Networks Inc., for the establishment of a new, Boston-based subsidiary. Further, in 2001 the company made its first listing on the New York Stock Exchange, laying the groundwork for future stock-based acquisitions. Also that year, Siemens adopted more transparent U.S.-style accounting practices, and published its annual results accordingly.
Analysts applauded von Pierer’s visionary restructuring, as Siemens saw its earnings double in 1999; moreover, net income increased from EUR 1.2 billion in 1999 to EUR 8.9 billion in 2000. With retirement on the horizon in 2004, von Pierer continued to laud the synergistic benefits of Siemens’ conglomerate structure. As he told the Financial Times of London on January 21, 2002, “Our relative strength is that we are in a range of different businesses which are subject to different economic cycles. The validity of this approach was not appreciated by everyone a few years ago.” Still, in the ongoing quest to establish its standing as a world-class company, Siemens continued to conduct surgery on itself in the early years of the 21st century, excising fat from all divisions and honing its focus on IT & Communications and Industry. Von Pierer was particularly intent on restoring profitability to the three IT-related divisions of telecom equipment, mobile phones, and business services, through job cuts, the closure of non-essential manufacturing sites, and a redoubled push to bring new products to market. Having used similar strategies to achieve major turnarounds in the formerly loss-plagued medical equipment and trains divisions, it seemed likely that Siemens would meet its mark.
Date: 01/01/2003
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003.
Skype is based on a freemium model. Much of the service is free, but Skype Credit or a subscription is required to call a landline or a mobile phone number. At the end of 2010, there were over 660 million worldwide users, with over 300 million estimated active each month as of August 2015. At one point in February 2012, there were thirty four million users concurrently online on Skype.
First released in August 2003, Skype was created by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Estonians who developed the backend that was also used in the music-sharing application Kazaa. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.
In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Skype division headquarters are in Luxembourg but most of the development team and 44% of all the division’s employees are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.
Skype allows users to communicate over the Internet by voice using a microphone, by video using a webcam, and by instant messaging. Skype-to-Skype calls to other users are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones (over traditional telephone networks) are charged via a debit-based user account system called Skype Credit. Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks, citing such reasons as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage and security concerns.
Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. Skype has been powered entirely by Microsoft-operated supernodes since May 2012. The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that Microsoft had granted intelligence agencies unfettered access to supernodes and Skype communication content.
The name for the software is derived from “Sky peer-to-peer”, which was then abbreviated to “Skyper”. However, some of the domain names associated with “Skyper” were already taken. Dropping the final “r” left the current title “Skype”, for which domain names were available.
In June 2005, Skype entered into an agreement with the Polish web portal Onet.pl for an integrated offering on the Polish market. On 12 September 2005, eBay Inc. agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA for approximately US$2.5 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.
On 1 September 2009, it was announced that eBay was selling 65% of Skype to Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for US$1.9 billion, valuing Skype at US$2.75 billion.
Microsoft acquisition
On 10 May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications, S.à r.l for US$8.5 billion. The company was incorporated as a division of Microsoft, which acquired all Its technologies with the purchase. This was completed on 13 October 2011.
Shortly after its acquisition, Microsoft began integrating the Skype service with its own products:
Along with taking over development of existing Skype desktop and mobile apps, the company developed a dedicated client app, called Skype for Modern Windows, for its newly released, touch-focused Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems. This app became downloadable from the Windows Store when the new OS launched on 26 October 2012. The following year, Skype for Modern Windows became the default messaging app for Windows 8.1, replacing the Windows 8 Messaging app at the time, and became pre-installed software on every device that came with or upgraded to 8.1.
When the company introduced Office 2013 on 27 February 2013, it was announced that 60 Skype world minutes per month would be included in Office 365 consumer plans (Home and Personal, and University). In a month-long transition period from 8 to 30 April 2013, it phased out its long-standing Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service in favour of Skype, although Messenger continued in mainland China.
On 11 November 2014, Microsoft announced that in 2015 Lync would be replaced by Skype for Business. The latest version of the communication software combines features of Lync and the consumer Skype software. There are two user interfaces – organizations can switch their users from the default Skype for Business interface to the Skype for Business (Lync) interface.
Features
Registered users of Skype are identified by a unique Skype Name and may be listed in the Skype directory. Skype allows these registered users to communicate through both instant messaging and voice chat. Voice chat allows telephone calls between pairs of users and conference calling and uses a proprietary audio codec. Skype’s text chat client allows group chats, emoticons, storing chat history, and editing of previous messages. Offline messages were implemented in a beta of version 5 but removed after a few weeks without notification. The usual features familiar to instant messaging users—user profiles, online status indicators, and so on—are also included.
The Online Number, a.k.a. SkypeIn, service allows Skype users to receive calls on their computers dialed by conventional phone subscribers to a local Skype phone number; local numbers are available for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A Skype user can have local numbers in any of these countries, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country. The countries on this growing list are referred to collectively as the SkypeIn Countries.
Skype supports conference calls, video chats, and screen sharing between 25 people at a time for free.
Skype does not provide the ability to call emergency numbers, such as 112 in Europe, 911 in North America, or 100 in India and Nepal. However, as of December 2012, there is limited support for emergency calls in the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, and Finland. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ruled that, for the purposes of section 255 of the Telecommunications Act, Skype is not an “interconnected VoIP provider”. As a result, the U.S. National Emergency Number Association recommends that all VoIP users have an analog line available as a backup.
On 14 July 2011, Skype partnered with Comcast to bring its video chat service to Comcast subscribers via their HDTV sets.
On 17 June 2013, Skype released a free video messaging service, which can be operated on Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android and BlackBerry.
On 12 August 2013, Skype released the 4.10 update to the app for Apple iPhone and iPad that allows HD quality video for iPhone 5 and fourth-generation iPads.
On 20 November 2014, Microsoft Office’s team announced that a new chat powered by Skype is going to be implemented in their software, giving tools to be able to chat with co-workers in the same document.
On 15 September 2015, Skype announced the release of Mojis, “a brand new way to express yourself on Skype.” Mojis are short clips/gifs featuring characters from films and TV shows to be entered into conversations with the same ease as emoticons. They are working with Universal Studios, Disney Muppets, BBC and other studios to add to the available collection of Mojis.
On 21 December 2015, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President of Skype, announced that Microsoft acquired the technology from Talko, “maker of an innovative mobile app for on-the-go business communications (…) Together, the new technology and talent will help us deliver great new features and capabilities in both Skype and Skype for Business.”
In January 2016, Skype announced it would roll out free group video calling to users on mobile devices, including iOS and Android. In February 2016, Microsoft announced that it had started to introduce group calling on smartphones and tablets in North America and Western Europe.
In July 2016, Skype introduced an early Alpha version of a new Skype for Linux client, built with WebRTC technology, after several petitions had asked Microsoft to continue development for Linux.
On 30 September 2016, Skype updated their iOS app with new features, including an option to call contacts on Skype through Siri voice commands.
On 27 October 2016 Microsoft launched Skype for Business for Mac.
Date: 05/20/1987
Schlumberger Limited is the world’s largest oilfield services company. Schlumberger employs approximately 100,000 people representing more than 140 nationalities working in more than 85 countries. Schlumberger has four principal executive offices located in Paris, Houston, London, and the Hague. Schlumberger is incorporated in Willemstad, Curaçao as Schlumberger N.V. and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext Paris, the London Stock Exchange, and SIX Swiss Exchange. Schlumberger is a Fortune 500 company, ranked 287 in 2016, and also listed in Forbes Global 2000, ranked 176 in 2016.
Company History:
As oil is explored for and developed all around the world, so is Schlumberger Limited providing a range of oilfield services and products spanning the entire reservoir life cycle. Among these activities are seismic surveying (through the 70-percent-Schlumberger-owned WesternGeco joint venture with Baker Hughes Incorporated), wireline logging (a company invention dating from 1927), directional drilling, measurements while drilling, well services from construction through completion, and integrated project management. Through 28 service regions, the firm’s oilfield services operations serve customers in 100 countries. Nearly 70 percent, or $9.35 billion, of the company’s 2002 revenues were generated by these services. Beyond these operations, Schlumberger (pronounced shlum-ber-jay) in the early 2000s also operated SchlumbergerSema, a unit that provided information technology consulting, systems integration, and network and infrastructure services to the energy and other industries. The company, however, announced in September 2003 that it would sell the bulk of this unit to Atos Origin SA. Also designated for divestment is a unit called Axalto, which specializes in smart cards and point-of-sale terminals.
Founding an “Electrical Prospecting” Firm in 1919
Schlumberger was the creation of two brothers of that name, Conrad, born in 1878, and Marcel, younger by six years. Rooted in the Alsace region of France, the Schlumberger family had made its mark in both politics and business; the Schlumberger brothers’ great-grandfather served as prime minister under Louis Philippe (the king of France from 1830 to 1848) and their father, Paul Schlumberger, later amassed a fortune in the textile industry. Conrad Schlumberger early displayed a genius for science and, by 1907, had become a professor of physics at the École des Mines, while his brother Marcel pursued mechanical engineering and business. Conrad became interested in the electrical resistance generated by different types of rock formation and was soon testing his results on the family’s summer estate in Normandy. In 1914 Conrad successfully completed the first commercial application of this technique, locating a body of copper ore for a client in Serbia. World War I brought all experimentation to a halt, but in 1919 Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger set up a modest business in Paris to pursue the further evolution of electrical prospecting, as it was called.
At this point the brothers received crucial financial backing from their father, who made it clear that he considered their work a type of scientific inquiry, and only secondarily a means to monetary rewards. This scientific bias has remained strong at Schlumberger, which has always depended on its technological superiority. Bolstered by this aid, which eventually reached FFr 500,000, Conrad resigned from his teaching position in 1923 to devote his energy to the new company, which was named Société de Prospection électrique in 1926. Also in 1923, the brothers received their first order from an oil company, resulting in the successful mapping of an oil-rich salt dome in Romania.
A few years later the Pechelbronn Oil Company of France asked the Schlumbergers to make such measurements not from ground level, but from the interior of an already drilled borehole. Conrad asked Henri Doll, his son-in-law and longtime technical supervisor, to design the necessary equipment, and in September 1927 the men compiled the first “wireline log” by lowering an electrical recording device down a Pechelbronn oil well and measuring the resistance every few feet. The results were accurate, meaning that oil deposits could now be located and measured without resorting to expensive and time-consuming mechanical coring.
The world did not immediately beat a path to the Schlumberger door, however. By the time logging teams had been sent to Venezuela, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the Great Depression had taken hold, and drilling activity had come to a virtual halt. The Venezuelan tests went so well that Royal Dutch Shell became interested and ordered additional work to be done in Romania, Sumatra, and Trinidad. Furthermore, the Soviet Union proceeded with its drilling in the Baku oil fields regardless of the Depression, and there the Schlumbergers landed sufficient orders to get them through the first lean years. An ardent socialist, Conrad Schlumberger was pleased to do business in Soviet Russia.
Successfully Expanding into U.S. Market in 1932
The young company’s biggest break came with its introduction to the U.S. market in 1932, when Shell asked it to run logs in California and on the Texas gulf coast. These again proved successful and Schlumberger was soon picking up business among the many wildcatters in Texas and Oklahoma. In 1934 the brothers founded Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation in Houston, Texas, to meet the growing demand for their services, and this U.S. division soon became the largest and most profitable of the parent company’s worldwide businesses.
Once underway, Schlumberger expanded rapidly, despite the Depression. The brothers had a long technological lead on any would-be competitors, an advantage the company has maintained to this day by consistently hiring top engineering talent and spending liberally on research and development. In addition, Schlumberger remained very much a family organization, with the resulting high degree of trust and unity helping to keep employees motivated and loyal. This became of greater importance after the death, in 1936, of Conrad Schlumberger. Marcel Schlumberger assumed control of a burgeoning business, which was already doing more than 1,000 logs a month in North America alone, but he soon had help from other members of the extended family.
As world depression gave way to World War II and France was overcome by Germany, Marcel Schlumberger worked with Jean de Ménil to move the corporation from Paris to Trinidad. De Ménil, the husband of Conrad Schlumberger’s daughter Dominique, was a banker who became head of Schlumberger’s financial affairs in 1939. De Ménil is generally credited with managing the move to Trinidad. De Ménil remained overseas and eventually became head of Schlumberger’s South American and Middle Eastern businesses, operating out of the Houston office.
Although information is sparse, it is clear that the war was not good for Schlumberger’s business. It was necessary to retreat before the Nazi advance, and the war effectively scattered key members of the Schlumberger family. Doll, the company’s top technician, fled to Connecticut, where he formed a company called Electro-Mechanical Research that went on to do important work for the Allied war effort. Schlumberger eventually bought out Electro-Mechanical, and Doll emerged as the head of all technical research for Schlumberger worldwide. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Marcel’s son-in-law René Seydoux spent two years as a German prisoner of war before assuming control of all European operations. In Houston Pierre Schlumberger, Marcel’s son and the only male heir of either of the founders, began to rebuild the U.S. business in 1946 and guided it back to a position of leadership.
Thus fragmented by war, the Schlumberger family was held together largely by Marcel, whose devotion to the business became legendary. In 1940, when it was clear that France would soon fall and many thought that the Schlumbergers would be ruined, Marcel Schlumberger was offered $10 million for his business by the head of rival Halliburton Oil. It is said that Marcel did not even respond to the suggestion, but instead showed his guest to the door.
When Marcel Schlumberger died in 1953, the remaining Schlumbergers were unable to decide on a successor. The firm was left divided, roughly between Doll, who controlled technical research; de Ménil, who controlled the business in South America and the Middle East; Seydoux, who controlled the company’s European business; and Pierre Schlumberger, who ran the company’s U.S. operations.
Incorporated in the Netherlands Antilles in 1956
Pierre Schlumberger, the natural candidate to follow his father as president, strongly favored incorporating the company and selling stock to raise capital needed to take advantage of the booming postwar economy. Other family members resisted the idea, fearing a loss of both control and quality, but in 1956 Schlumberger Limited was formed in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. That location was chosen for tax purposes. Pierre became president and Henri Doll was named chairman.
The new corporation was headquartered in Houston. It remained under family control, as it did for many more years, but it began to sell stock, and the fresh capital allowed Schlumberger to expand rapidly at a time when postwar U.S. oil drilling was at its peak. As the undisputed technical leader in the field, Schlumberger charged what it pleased, and when the initial financial statements were made public in 1958 they showed a first year profit of $12.2 million.
The next 25 years may someday be thought of as the company’s golden age. By carefully managing the high profits earned by its wireline business, Schlumberger diversified slowly into a number of related fields, giving each acquisition the time and resources needed to make it healthy. Aside from a pair of French electronics firms, the company’s first significant purchase was the 1959 acquisition of Forages et Exploitations Pétrolières (Forex), a French oil drilling company. A complementary deal was the 1960 formation of Dowell Schlumberger, a joint venture with Dow Chemical to provide oil well completion services such as cementing and flow stimulation. Schlumberger was now a complete oil services company, able to set up drilling operations anywhere in the world.
As oil drilling gradually fell from its 1957 peak, Pierre Schlumberger and his advisers thought it prudent to expand further into the electronics field. This was a natural extension, as Schlumberger had always used sophisticated electrical monitoring devices and was at home in the electronics field. Accordingly, the firm made a major acquisition in 1961 when it swapped stock with Daystrom, a manufacturer of various electronic instruments primarily for military use. With $90 million in sales, Daystrom was nearly as large as Schlumberger ($130 million), but did not turn a profit for several years after. The parent company pursued many other electronics concerns, eventually absorbing 11 French companies and several in England and the United States. Most of the newcomers required years of work before paying dividends; in 1966, for example, 42 percent of Schlumberger’s $343 million in sales was generated by the electronics division, whose operating deficit held down overall corporate profit to $28 million.
After a few wobbly years in the early 1960s, the Schlumberger board of directors decided that Pierre Schlumberger should step down as president. Promoted to his place in 1965 was Jean Riboud, a longtime friend of the Schlumbergers, particularly Marcel. Riboud guided Schlumberger for the next 20 years, during which time the company’s net income and worldwide reputation rose with equal regularity.
Riboud immediately moved corporate headquarters from Houston to New York City and reorganized the now diffuse company on the basis of product lines rather than geography. In 1970 Riboud further diversified the Schlumberger portfolio with the $79 million purchase of Compagnie de Compteurs, an aging French manufacturer of utility meters, which also took a few years to become profitable. By 1980 it had made Schlumberger the largest meter manufacturer in the world and formed the heart of one of the company’s four divisions.
The 1973 OPEC oil embargo spurred a massive worldwide increase in oil exploration and drilling, with Schlumberger positioned to benefit from every new well. Its wireline services helped to find new oil, Forex-Neptune drilled the wells, and Dowell Schlumberger kept them pumping. In the space of five years Schlumberger’s sales jumped from 1972’s $812 million to a robust $2.2 billion in 1977, with profit exceeding $400 million in 1977. Schlumberger earned spectacular profits by delivering a superior and much needed product.
Unwise Acquisitions, Oil Glut Leading to Lower Profits: 1980s
The boom years at Schlumberger reached their peak in 1982. At that time the company had sales of $6.3 billion and profits of $1.35 billion, a staggering 21 percent ratio that made Schlumberger the most profitable of the world’s 1,000 largest corporations. The firm’s hold on the wireline logging business rivaled that of IBM’s in computers, with seven out of every ten logs in the world taken by Schlumberger. Its drilling operation was the world’s largest, and it produced more utility meters than anyone else.
As 1982 drew to an end, however, a close observer would have noticed that Schlumberger’s quarterly profits were slipping, and they continued to do so as a world recession and greater oil conservation combined to put the brakes on oil exploration. In addition, Chairman Riboud had made a tactical mistake, and he was about to make a second. In 1979 Riboud paid $425 million to buy the leading American semiconductor manufacturer, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. Schlumberger hoped that Fairchild’s technical expertise would help keep it ahead of the pack in its various fields, but the move was a failure from the beginning. Fairchild lost money and drained valuable research and development dollars from the rest of Schlumberger; the parent company was forced to write off much of Fairchild’s assets and sell the rest to National Semiconductor in 1987, at a loss of $220 million.
Schlumberger’s, and Riboud’s, second mistake came in 1985, when it paid $1 billion for SEDCO, another enormous drilling company. Riboud apparently assumed that the oil glut would soon turn around; it did not. Riboud died in 1985 and was succeeded by Michel Vaillaud, who was ousted the following year by the board of directors, during a year that turned out to be the first one in which Schlumberger posted a loss ($1.6 billion) since incorporation. Next in the chairman’s seat came 30-year Schlumberger veteran Euan Baird, a Scottish geophysicist and the first non-Frenchman in history to run the company.
Baird-Led Turnaround, Late 1980s Through Mid-1990s
As the oil glut continued, Baird quickly moved to turn the company around by refocusing on the core oil field services and measurement and systems business groups. In addition to selling Fairchild, other noncore businesses were divested. Schlumberger also underwent a restructuring to cut costs and become more cost-effective to survive in the difficult economic environment. At the same time Baird was creating a leaner Schlumberger, he also invested heavily in research and development to keep the company at the technological forefront. From 1987 into the early 1990s, research and development spending was 37 percent higher than before Baird took over. The result was successful innovations, such as EB-Clean and Maxis.
EB-Clean, introduced in 1990, was an additive used in a well bore to enlarge cracks. After it drained away, more oil and gas was able to flow through the now larger cracks. The additive was developed by the joint venture Dowell Schlumberger, which Schlumberger later owned outright when it bought Dow’s half-interest in 1993 for $800 million in cash and warrants.
Maxis, also developed in the early 1990s, was a premium imaging system that provided much clearer, more detailed, and faster evaluations of potential well sites than previous systems had done. When rival Western Atlas introduced a competitive system, Schlumberger was ready with a new Maxis Express unit that was smaller and 50 percent cheaper to operate.
In addition to new product development, Baird also actively sought out acquisitions to enhance Schlumberger’s oil field services core. Soon after becoming chairman, Baird moved the company into a new area of oil field services, seismic data, which involved using and measuring sound waves bounced off the earth’s surface to search for oil-bearing formations. In 1986 a 50 percent interest in the Norwegian firm GECO, one of the world’s top seismic companies, was acquired; the remaining 50 percent was bought two years later. In 1991 Schlumberger acquired 51 percent of Prakla Seismos, a leader in onshore seismic operations, from the German government. In 1992 Seismograph Service Limited was purchased from Raytheon Company. The following year, Schlumberger purchased the remaining 49 percent of Prakla. All of the company’s seismic operations were then combined within a Geco-Prakla division. The seismic area proved to be highly competitive and not immediately profitable, but by 1995 Schlumberger’s focus on improvements to seismic technology had begun to pay off.
Another important acquisition came in 1992 when GeoQuest Systems, Inc. was purchased, also from Raytheon. GeoQuest specialized in computing and information technology services geared to hydrocarbon exploration and production. In late 1994 Schlumberger formed a joint venture, Omnes, with Cable & Wireless plc to provide communications and information technology systems for oil, gas, and other companies with operations in remote areas.
By the mid-1990s, it was increasingly clear that Baird had successfully turned Schlumberger around from that bleak year of 1986. In 1994 and 1995, the company achieved revenue of $6.7 billion and $7.6 billion, respectively, and net income of $536.1 million and $649.2 million, respectively. Schlumberger’s wireline testing services remained the industry’s unchallenged leader, and its growing stable of electronic subsidiaries was helping to keep the company at the forefront of technical innovation.
Acquisitions, Joint Ventures, and Divestments: Late 1990s and Early 2000s
Schlumberger rode the peak of the latest oil industry cyclical upturn to record results in 1997 of $10.65 billion in revenues and profits of $1.3 billion. But in 1998, even though revenues inched slightly higher, profits fell nearly 22 percent as the industry went into another tailspin. Demand for oilfield services declined sharply during the second half of 1998 as a result of the combined effects of the Asian economic crisis, tropical storms, and slumping oil prices. Schlumberger quickly cut costs, axing more than 10,000 workers from the payroll from mid-1998 to mid-1999. The corporation achieved just $366.7 million in net income on revenues of $8.39 billion in 1999.
In the meantime, consolidation in the oil-services field was continuing apace, with Halliburton Company acquiring Dresser Industries, Inc. and Baker Hughes acquiring Western Atlas Inc., both in 1998. Schlumberger engineered a large takeover of its own that year, buying out Camco International Inc. in August in a stock swap valued at $2.2 billion. Schlumberger also assumed $160 million of Camco debt. The purchase of Houston-based Camco, which had 1997 revenues of $913.9 million, filled a hole in Schlumberger’s array of services–the high-end of the oil well completions business, which centered around building wells and readying them for production.
In another industry trend during this period, oil-services firms were forming a variety of joint ventures, and Schlumberger was a player here as well. In July 1999 Schlumberger merged its non-U.S. drilling fluid operations with the M-I unit of Smith International Inc., forming a new M-I joint venture, 40 percent owned by Schlumberger and 60 percent owned by its new partner. In addition to its contribution of assets, Schlumberger also injected $325 million into the venture. Just a couple of weeks after the deal’s completion was announced, however, the U.S. Justice Department filed a petition in a U.S. district court accusing the two companies of a criminal violation of antitrust law. The government alleged that the new joint venture violated a 1994 consent decree that specifically barred Smith from combining M-I with the drilling fluid operations of Schlumberger and several other firms. In December 1999 a federal judge found Schlumberger and Smith guilty of criminal contempt, assessing each a fine of $750,000 and five years of probation. The firms also reached an agreement with the Justice Department whereby they would pay a $13.1 million civil penalty and would be able to continue operating the M-I joint venture. Schlumberger next divested its offshore contract drilling business, Sedco Forex, in December 1999. This unit was first spun off to Schlumberger shareholders and then merged into Transocean Offshore Inc., creating Transocean Sedco Forex Inc. In November 2000 yet another joint venture was created. Schlumberger and Baker Hughes combined their seismic businesses, Geco-Prakla and Western Geophysical, respectively–the two largest seismic firms in the world–into a joint venture called WesternGeco. Schlumberger paid Baker Hughes $500 million as part of the transaction, which resulted in the former company taking a 70 percent stake and the latter a 30 percent stake.
Schlumberger’s focus on technical innovation throughout its history naturally led the firm into the information technology field, and the firm had made some notable achievements, despite having never quite lived down its disastrous purchase of Fairchild. It had been one of the first commercial users of the ARPAnet (the precursor to the Internet) and had presciently registered the domain name slb.com in 1987, years before the World Wide Web had achieved any sort of critical mass. One of Schlumberger’s least-known achievements was its development of smart cards, which grew out of technology that the company had developed for oil wells. A smart card was similar to a credit card but had a computer chip embedded into it and a variety of applications. By the early 2000s they had become quite popular in Europe but were slow to catch on in the United States. Schlumberger bolstered its operations in this area in March 2001 by purchasing the smart-card unit of France’s Groupe Bull S.A. for $313 million. In a much more ambitious foray into information technology, Schlumberger spent $5.19 billion to acquire Sema plc, an Anglo-French systems integration, consulting, and outsourcing firm, in April 2001. Sema’s customers centered around the telecommunications, energy, transportation, and finance sectors. Its operations were integrated with several of Schlumberger’s information technology units to form SchlumbergerSema.
By 2002, however, the Sema acquisition was already being viewed internally as a disappointment and externally as another huge mistake. The collapse of the technology and telecommunications sectors sharply reduced the value of SchlumbergerSema, and under new accounting guidelines related to the impairment of goodwill, Schlumberger was forced to take a charge of $2.64 billion to reflect the lower value of the unit. Additional charges of $587 million were also taken in 2002, most of which were tied to restructurings of SchlumbergerSema and the WesternGeco joint venture. About 1,200 WesternGeco employees lost their jobs as the company closed down the venture’s land-mapping operations amid the start of another drilling downturn. At SchlumbergerSema, meantime, the businesses that revolved around products rather than services–including the smart cards, point-of-sale terminals, and utility meters units–were separated from the unit, which also began to focus more narrowly on services oriented to the global energy industry. This restructuring involved an additional 3,300 job cuts. The charges resulted in a net loss for 2002 of $2.32 billion on revenues of $13.47 billion. In December of that year, Schlumberger sold Reed Hycalog, a maker of drill bits that had been inherited from Camco, to Grant Prideco for $362 million in cash and stock.
In February 2003 Baird resigned and was succeeded as chairman and CEO by Andrew Gould. The new chief, who had headed up the firm’s oilfield services operations from 1999 to 2002 before being named president and chief operating officer, quickly began refocusing Schlumberger on its core business. During 2003 the corporation’s semiconductor-testing and electricity meters businesses were divested, and the smart-card unit was renamed Axalto in preparation for a sale or spinoff during 2004. Most importantly, the company announced in September 2003 that it had reached an agreement to sell most of SchlumbergerSema to Atos Origin SA for EUR 1.3 billion (US$1.5 billion) in cash and shares. Of the retained Sema operations, all except one were slated to be separately divested; the exception, the information technology business focusing on the upstream oil and gas market, was merged into the existing Schlumberger Information Solutions segment, which was already an integral part of the firm’s core oilfield services operations. Once it was able to complete the divestments–and rid itself of what many analysts considered unnecessary distractions–Schlumberger seemed likely to become an even stronger player in the oilfield services sector.
Decembet 9, 2011
Amazon also recently filed two trademark applications for “SMART IS BEAUTIFUL.” in two different classes on an intent to use basis. One is for “Clothing, footwear, headgear” and the other for the goods and services category “paper, cardboard and goods made from these materials, not included in other classes, printed matter; photographs; adhesives for stationery; plastic materials for packaging, not included in other classes; paper materials for packaging, not included in other classes; posters; billboards; inventory packing slips.”
Date: 01/01/1982
SMTP by default uses TCP port 25. The protocol for mail submission is the same, but uses port 587. SMTP connections secured by SSL, known as SMTPS, default to port 465 (nonstandard, but sometimes used for legacy reasons). Although electronic mail servers and other mail transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages, user-level client mail applications typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying. For retrieving messages, client applications usually use either POP3 or IMAP. Although proprietary systems (such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Notes) and webmail systems (such as Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) use their own non-standard protocols to access mail box accounts on their own mail servers, all use SMTP when sending or receiving email from outside their own systems.
SMTP is part of the application layer of the TCP/IP protocol. Using a process called “store and forward,” SMTP moves your email on and across networks. It works closely with something called the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to send your communication to the right computer and email inbox. SMTP spells out and directs how your email moves from your computer’s MTA to an MTA on another computer, and even several computers. Using that “store and forward” feature mentioned before, the message can move in steps from your computer to its destination. At each step, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is doing its job. Lucky for us, this all takes place behind the scenes, and we don’t need to understand or operate SMTP.
History of SMTP
Various forms of one-to-one electronic messaging were used in the 1960s. People communicated with one another using systems developed for specific mainframe computers. As more computers were interconnected, especially in the US Government’s ARPANET, standards were developed to allow users of different systems to email one another. SMTP grew out of these standards developed during the 1970s. SMTP can trace its roots to two implementations described in 1971: the Mail Box Protocol, whose implementation has been disputed, but is discussed in RFC 196 and other RFCs, and the SNDMSG program, which, according to RFC 2235, Ray Tomlinson of BBN invented for TENEX computers to send mail messages across the ARPANET. Fewer than 50 hosts were connected to the ARPANET at this time.
Further implementations include FTP Mail and Mail Protocol, both from 1973. Development work continued throughout the 1970s, until the ARPANET transitioned into the modern Internet around 1980. Jon Postel then proposed a Mail Transfer Protocol in 1980 that began to remove the mail’s reliance on FTP. SMTP was published as RFC 788 in November 1981, also by Postel.
The SMTP standard was developed around the same time as Usenet, a one-to-many communication network with some similarities.
SMTP became widely used in the early 1980s. At the time, it was a complement to Unix to Unix Copy Program (UUCP) mail, which was better suited for handling email transfers between machines that were intermittently connected. SMTP, on the other hand, works best when both the sending and receiving machines are connected to the network all the time. Both use a store and forward mechanism and are examples of push technology. Though Usenet’s newsgroups are still propagated with UUCP between servers, UUCP as a mail transport has virtually disappeared along with the “bang paths” it used as message routing headers. Sendmail, released with 4.1cBSD, right after RFC 788, was one of the first mail transfer agents to implement SMTP. Over time, as BSD Unix became the most popular operating system on the Internet, sendmail became the most common MTA (mail transfer agent). Some other popular SMTP server programs include Postfix, qmail, Novell GroupWise, Exim, Novell NetMail, Microsoft Exchange Server and Oracle Communications Messaging Server. Message submission (RFC 2476) and SMTP-AUTH (RFC 2554) were introduced in 1998 and 1999, both describing new trends in email delivery. Originally, SMTP servers were typically internal to an organization, receiving mail for the organization from the outside, and relaying messages from the organization to the outside. But as time went on, SMTP servers (mail transfer agents), in practice, were expanding their roles to become message submission agents for Mail user agents, some of which were now relaying mail from the outside of an organization. (e.g. a company executive wishes to send email while on a trip using the corporate SMTP server.) This issue, a consequence of the rapid expansion and popularity of the World Wide Web, meant that SMTP had to include specific rules and methods for relaying mail and authenticating users to prevent abuses such as relaying of unsolicited email (spam). Work on message submission (RFC 2476) was originally started because popular mail servers would often rewrite mail in an attempt to fix problems in it, for example, adding a domain name to an unqualified address. This behavior is helpful when the message being fixed is an initial submission, but dangerous and harmful when the message originated elsewhere and is being relayed. Cleanly separating mail into submission and relay was seen as a way to permit and encourage rewriting submissions while prohibiting rewriting relay. As spam became more prevalent, it was also seen as a way to provide authorization for mail being sent out from an organization, as well as traceability. This separation of relay and submission quickly became a foundation for modern email security practices.
As this protocol started out purely ASCII text-based, it did not deal well with binary files, or characters in many non-English languages. Standards such as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) were developed to encode binary files for transfer through SMTP. Mail transfer agents (MTAs) developed after Sendmail also tended to be implemented 8-bit-clean, so that the alternate “just send eight” strategy could be used to transmit arbitrary text data (in any 8-bit ASCII-like character encoding) via SMTP. Mojibake was still a problem due to differing character set mappings between vendors, although the email addresses themselves still allowed only ASCII. 8-bit-clean MTAs today tend to support the 8BITMIME extension, permitting binary files to be transmitted almost as easily as plain text. Recently the SMTPUTF8 extension was created to support UTF-8 text, allowing international content and addresses in non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic or Chinese.
Many people contributed to the core SMTP specifications, among them Jon Postel, Eric Allman, Dave Crocker, Ned Freed, Randall Gellens, John Klensin, and Keith Moore.
SMTP at work.
SMTP provides a set of codes that simplify the communication of email messages between email servers (the network computer that handles email coming to you and going out). It’s a kind of shorthand that allows a server to break up different parts of a message into categories the other server can understand. When you send a message out, it’s turned into strings of text that are separated by the code words (or numbers) that identify the purpose of each section.
SMTP provides those codes, and email server software is designed to understand what they mean. As each message travels towards its destination, it sometimes passes through a number of computers as well as their individual MTAs. As it does, it’s briefly stored before it moves on to the next computer in the path. Think of it as a letter going through different hands as it winds its way to the right mailbox.
Aug 22, 2011
Tim Schumacher, CEO at Sedo, said: “We are happy to have Thies on board as Product Manager for Domain Pricing. His expertise and experience with online commerce, coupled with his scientific background in economic and real estate research, are the ideal combination to help grow Sedo’s domain pricing service into the industry leader.”
Sedo previously partnered with Lindenthal to develop IDNX, the first standard price index for domain names that uses real estate valuation methodology to accurately assess the domain name market. IDNX will continue to be an independent project.
“I am thrilled to combine my passions for the domain market and real estate research at Sedo,” said Lindenthal. “I look forward to continuing work on IDNX, and to bringing my research to Sedo in order to develop transparent, industry-leading domain pricing services for the marketplace.”
July 1, 2011
The typical sale on Sedo.com will now carry a 15% commission, up from 10%. The commission is still 10% if the domain is parked at Sedo and it is sells through a fixed price.
Sales on Sedo’s MLS system carry a 20% fee.
These commissions seem directly in line with Sedo’s biggest competitor, Afternic, with a couple differences. Afternic’s sales charge is 10% after rebate if the domain is parked with the service but it doesn’t have to be a fixed price sale. Also, sales on Afternic’s distributed listings service are only 15% after rebate if the domain is parked with Afternic. Sedo does not offer a commission break on MLS domain names.
The fixed price offer is certainly an effort to get more people to price their domains names, which will help increase sales on Sedo.com but also create more inventory for Sedo MLS.
On the plus side, minimum fees for a number of ccTLDs have been reduced.
I don’t see the commission increases having much of an impact on domainers’ choice to list domains on Sedo, although they might consider the fee difference when negotiating a sale.
Date: 01/01/2010
January 20, 2012
Instead, domain visitors are automatically forwarded to relevant advertisers’ sites. Sendori’s consumer facing web site now promotes a tool that edits your computer’s DNS and says it will save you from phishing, malware, and other vulnerabilities. However, a number of domain parking companies still work with Sendori for so-called “zero click” monetization. IAC purchased Sendori in January 2009 for an undisclosed price. Rumors pegged the purchase at $25 million, although the company said that was not accurate.
Sendori was merged into Ask Sponsored Listings, which may be part of this sale.
An agreement to sell the company was reached on November 3 and was expected to close on or around November 10, according to the filing. The name of the buyer was not disclosed. The filing is from November, so an update should be provided in a future filing.
The filing shows Sendori’s revenue was $9.3 million in Q1 of this year. Q2 revenue fell to $7.0 million and Q3 revenue was only $5.3 million. It had losses in five of the last seven quarters.
The company wrote down $4.9 million in capitalized software costs and took an intangible asset impairment charge of $0.6 million in Q3 in preparation for the sale.
$2.3 million of the $3.0 million purchase price is contingent on the collection of outstanding accounts receivable.
Date: 08/15/2000
ICANN has released a report evaluating the introduction of the seven generic top-level domain names (.aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro) which took place in September 2001.
After years of discussion on the introduction of new top-level domains (TLDs), the “government of the Internet”, the ICANN (ICAAN), today decided to admit seven new suffixes.
ICANN Announces Selections for New Top-Level Domains
November 16, 2000 — The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, (ICANN) today announced its selections for registry operators for new top level domains. The applications selected for further negotiation are the following:
.aero — Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques SC, (SITA)
.biz — JVTeam, LLC
.coop — National Cooperative Business Association, (NCBA)
.info — Afilias, LLC
.museum — Museum Domain Management Association, (MDMA)
.name — Global Name Registry, LTD
.pro — RegistryPro, LTD
The new gTLDs fall into three groups: .biz and .info are group general, .name is for individuals, and .aero, .coop, .museum, and .pro are reserved for specific interests. All but .museum will help relieve name pressure and competition in the .com domain. The .museum gTLD will affect the .org TLD since most museums, as not-for-profits, register there. ICANN planned to have its approval process completed by the end of 2000. So sometime this year, we should expect to see some or all of these domain names working on the Web.
In November 2000, the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) selected seven proposals for new top-level domains (gTLDs): .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro. This was the first effort to expand the domain name system (DNS) since the 1980s, other than by adding “country code top-level domains” that correspond to particular countries or territories. Shortly before the first of the new gTLDs was launched in September 2001, the ICANN Board decided that it was important to evaluate the “proof-of-concept” under which they were introduced. The Board established the “New TLD Evaluation Process Planning Task Force” (Task Force) to determine the scope of the evaluation. The Task Force decided that seven questions, among others, would take priority. Those questions, which are the focus of this report, address the effectiveness of intellectual property protections, compliance with registration restrictions, competition, the reasonableness of the legal framework, and regulatory issues.
The new gTLD start-up periods proved generally effective at protecting the interests of trademark holders, but suffered from other problems. The lack of any screening or verification in the .info Sunrise period led to serious abuses, including an unusually high number (43%) of registrations that had to be cancelled or transferred. The intellectual property claim process that .biz established operated more smoothly, but was extremely complicated. It proved fairer than a Sunrise period because parties without registered trademarks – including individuals – could defend registrations by demonstrating a legitimate interest or right. The .name system of defensive registrations was complex too, and in an unrestricted TLD would not be consistent with attracting new users and uses to the DNS. Looking to the future, these experiences suggest several options: (i) a Sunrise period that verifies registrations by use of online databases and other means in a cost-effective manner; (ii) notice to prospective registrants and trademark holders of their respective claims prior to adjudication, perhaps on the basis of the familiar UDRP rather than the new “STOP” procedure .biz used; or (iii) reliance on UDRP alone, as simpler and appropriate given that trademark registrations may constitute only 2 – 3% of all registrations.
The process .info and .biz used to allocate names – called a “round robin” — was criticized for enabling manipulation of the system. Some registrars kept their list of desired names short and offered coveted slots to their best customers. Others used registrars they controlled to do the same, while they opened their own lists to the general public. (Initial efforts by .biz to design an alternative distribution system for led a court to determine it would have constituted an illegal lottery.) The .name registry sought to eliminate the advantage of submitting shorter lists by using random batch processing, but that did not prevent registrants from submitting duplicate requests through multiple registrars. Admittedly, the dilemma of how best to allocate names does not have an easy solution. Other options include first-come, first-served; auctions; and reverse Dutch auctions. The most appropriate method depends to a great extent on which underlying values should be given priority. It also depends on which entity should benefit from the monetary rewards that certain names generate. Both subjects require more discussion within the ICANN community.
Both the .biz and .name gTLDs are subject to restrictions that limit registrations to commercial purposes and to personal names, respectively. Random sampling indicated fewer problems than expected in .biz, with 1.8% of the registrations appearing to fail to satisfy the criteria and another 9.6% being unclear. In .name, where it was somewhat easier to estimate noncompliance, 10.6% of registrations raised questions, with another .8% unclear. While the registries are not obligated to enforce the restrictions through verification, there are simpler methods, such as random screening, or heightened scrutiny when a registrant reaches a certain number of registrations, which could help. Another solution is to recognize the difficulty of enforcing restrictions on global registries and adopt the model offered by the .com, .net and .org TLDs, which were once restricted but are no longer.
The new gTLDs have introduced some competition, but how much is debatable. Examining market share, extent of actual choice and price elasticity suggests that impact has been minimal. Other evidence, however, indicates that TLD expansion has attracted about 20% new registrants and led to new uses among 40 – 60% of registrants. The most significant contribution has been the development of facilities-based competition. As a result, new providers of registry services have been able to compete effectively with the incumbent registry, VeriSign, on that basis. Innovation has played a supporting role, and may become increasingly important as the three largest registries work to distinguish themselves from one another.
The agreements that underpin the new gTLDs reflect a level of detail that may not be necessary for future TLDs. While it was understandable for ICANN to have erred on the side of caution as it undertook initial expansion, the resulting legal framework is cumbersome. There was relatively strict insistence that the agreements adhere to key provisions of the original proposals, although it appears that such rigidity was not always the wisest course. While the agreements are relatively uniform, there are some cases — such as the requirement that smaller, sponsored TLDs use only ICANN-accredited registrars – where divergence would have made sense. In a future round, it should be possible to use a streamlined base agreement and limit appendices to those necessary to ensure critical elements of registry performance and compliance with ICANN policies. There should also be more flexibility in the agreements to enable both ICANN and the registries to address routine issues.
Launching a new gTLD is not for the faint of heart. The experiences of the six that have done it already, and the wisdom the community as a whole as gained, should provide valuable assistance to those TLDs that follow.
Date: 10/01/2010
The domain was put up for auction in July 2010 when its former owner, Escom LLC, went bankrupt. Clover Holdings, an obscure company registered on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, put in the highest bid for the domain. The sex.com domain has changed hands several times and at one time was under the control of a conman who stole it from its original owner.
The sale will only be final if it wins approval from the bankruptcy court overseeing Escom LLC’s affairs. The court will make that decision on 27 October. The sale of sex.com came about because of a board-room wrangle at the creditors administering Escom as it went into bankruptcy. It is thought about 12 different companies were bidding for control of the domain. The price is among the highest ever paid for a domain. In 2006 when Escom bought sex.com it is thought to have paid up to $14m for it. The highest price ever paid for a domain was $16m, which marketing firm QuinStreet paid for insure.com in 1999. The original owner of sex.com was Match.com founder Gary Kremen who sold the name in 2006. He first registered it in 1994 but lost control to conman Stephen Cohen in 1996 and waged a long legal battle to prove his ownership.
Mr Cohen was fined $65m and served a prison sentence for fraudulently taking the domain.
It should really come as no surprise. Some analysts believe that the only sites that make money consistently are those that traffic in pornography. A look at the largest sites by number of visitors as measured by Alexa and other research firms shows that porno sites have a large number of spots among the top 500 by visitors.
The abundance of Internet porn may be the biggest problems facing the site’s new owners. Sex.com is likely to come up high on most search engine results for sex and pornography sites. But, the key to success in the adult entertainment industry is a mixture of content and price. Sexual images and videos are a commodity on the Internet now. It is not clear that people are willing to pay for one additional site to satisfy their needs.
Sex.com is the one domain to own, one could argue, for pornographers who hope to profit from one of the largest businesses on the web. But, as is true with many businesses, the early movers take the market. Sex.com comes to that market very late.
Date: 01/01/1983
SAGE became operational in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a combined cost of billions of dollars. It was noted that the deployment cost more than the Manhattan Project, which it was, in a way, defending against. Throughout its development there were continual questions about its real ability to deal with large attacks, and several tests by Strategic Air Command bombers suggested the system was “leaky”. Nevertheless, SAGE was the backbone of NORAD’s air defence system into the 1980s, by which time the tube-based FSQ-7’s were increasingly costly to maintain and completely outdated. Today the same command and control task is carried out by microcomputers, based on the same basic underlying data.
Earlier systems
Just prior to World War II, Royal Air Force tests with the new Chain Home (CH) radars had demonstrated that relaying information to the fighter aircraft directly from the radar sites was not feasible. The radars determined the map coordinates of the enemy, but could generally not see the fighters at the same time. Even if the information was accurate, it was difficult for the pilots to know where to turn to intercept their targets. The solution was to send all of the radar information to a central control station where operators collated the reports into single “tracks”, and then reported these tracks out to the airbases, or “sectors”. The sectors used additional systems to track their own aircraft, plotting both on a single large map. Operators viewing the map could then easily see what direction their fighters would have to fly to approach their targets, and relay that simply by telling them to fly along a certain heading. This Dowding system was the first ground controlled intercept system of large scale, covering the entirety of the UK. It proved enormously successful during the Battle of Britain, and is credited as being a key part in the RAF’s success.
However, the system was also slow, often providing information that was up to five minutes out of date. Against propeller driven bombers flying at perhaps 225 miles per hour (362 km/h) this was not a serious concern, but it was clear the system would be of little use against jet powered bombers flying at perhaps 600 miles per hour (970 km/h). The system was also extremely expensive in manpower terms, requiring hundreds of telephone operators, plotters, trackers and all of the radar operators on top of that. This was a serious drain on manpower reserves, making it difficult to expand the network. The idea of using a computer to handle the task of taking reports and developing tracks had been explored beginning late in the war. By 1944, analog computers had been installed at the CH stations to automatically convert radar readings into map locations, eliminating two people. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy began experimenting with the Comprehensive Display System (CDS), another analog computer that took X and Y locations from a map and automatically generated tracks from repeated inputs. Similar systems began development with the Royal Canadian Navy, DATAR, and the US Navy, the Naval Tactical Data System. A similar system was also specified for the Nike SAM project, specifically referring to a US version of CDS, coordinating the defense over a battle area so that multiple batteries did not fire on a single target. However, all of these systems were relatively small in geographic scale, generally tracking within a city-sized area.
Development
Jay Forrester was instrumental in directing the development of the key concept of an interception system during his work at Servomechanisms Laboratory of MIT. The concept of the system, according to the Lincoln Laboratory site was to: develop a digital computer that could receive vast quantities of data from multiple radars and perform real-time processing to produce targeting information for intercepting aircraft and missiles
The AN/FSQ-7 was developed by the Lincoln Laboratory’s Digital Computer Laboratory and Division 6, working closely with IBM as the manufacturer. Each FSQ-7 actually consisted of two nearly identical computers operating in “duplex”[26] for redundancy. The design used an improved version of the Whirlwind I magnetic core memory and was an extension of the Whirlwind II computer program, renamed AN/FSQ-7 in 1953 to comply with Air Force nomenclature. It has been suggested the FSQ-7 was based on the IBM 701 but, while the 701 was investigated by MIT engineers, its design was ultimately rejected due to high error rates and generally being “inadequate to the task.” IBM’s contributions were essential to the success of the FSQ-7 but IBM benefited immensely from its association with the SAGE project, most evidently during development of the IBM 704. On October 28, 1953, the Air Force Council recommended 1955 funding for “ADC to convert to the Lincoln automated system”. The “experimental SAGE subsector, located in Lexington, Mass., was completed in 1955…with a prototype AN/FSQ-7…known as XD-1” (single computer system in Building F). In 1955, Air Force personnel began IBM training at the Kingston, New York, prototype facility, and the “4620th Air Defense Wing (experimental SAGE) was established at Lincoln Laboratory”
On May 3, 1956, General Partridge presented CINCNORAD’s Operational Concept for Control of Air Defense Weapons to the Armed Forces Policy Council, and a June 1956 symposium presentation identified advanced programming methods of SAGE code. For SAGE consulting Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories formed the Air Defense Engineering Service (ADES), which was contracted in January 1954. IBM delivered the FSQ-7 computer’s prototype in June 1956, and Kingston’s XD-2 with dual computers guided a Cape Canaveral BOMARC to a successful aircraft intercept on August 7, 1958.:197 Initially contracted to RCA, the AN/FSQ-7 production units were started by IBM in 1958[citation needed] (32 DCs were planned:207 for networking NORAD regions.) IBM’s production contract developed 56 SAGE computers for $½ billion (~$18 million per computer pair in each FSQ-7)[—cf. the $2 billion WWII Manhattan Project.
General Operational Requirements (GOR) 79 and 97 were “the basic USAF documents guiding development and improvement of [the semi-automatic] ground environment. Prior to fielding the AN/FSQ-7 centrals, the USAF initially deployed “pre-SAGE semiautomatic intercept systems” (AN/GPA-37) to Air Defense Direction Centers, ADDCs (e.g., at “NORAD Control Centers”). On April 22, 1958, NORAD approved Nike AADCPs to be collocated with the USAF manual ADDCs at Duncanville Air Force Station TX, Olathe Air Force Station KS, Belleville Air Force Station IL, and Osceola Air Force Station KS.
Deployment
In 1957, SAGE System groundbreaking at McChord AFB was for DC-12 where the “electronic brain” began arriving in November 1958, and the “first SAGE regional battle post began operating in Syracuse, New York in early 1959”.[4]:263 BOMARC “crew training was activated January 1, 1958”, and AT&T “hardened many of its switching centers, putting them in deep underground bunkers”, The North American Defense Objectives Plan (NADOP 59-63) submitted to Canada in December 1958 scheduled 5 Direction Centers and 1 Combat Center to be complete in Fiscal Year 1959, 12 DCs and 3 CCs complete at the end of FY 60, 19 DC/4 CC FY 61, 25/6 FY 62, and 30/10 FY 63. On June 30 NORAD ordered that “Air Defense Sectors (SAGE) were to be designated as NORAD sectors”, (the military reorganization had begun when effective April 1, 1958, CONAD “designated four SAGE sectors — New York, Boston, Syracuse, and Washington — as CONAD Sectors”.)
SAGE Geographic Reorganization: The SAGE Geographic Reorganization Plan of July 25, 1958, by NORAD was “to provide a means for the orderly transition and phasing from the manual to the SAGE system.” The plan identified deactivation of the Eastern, Central, and Western Region/Defense Forces on July 1, 1960, and “current manual boundaries” were to be moved to the new “eight SAGE divisions” (1 in Canada, “the 35th”) as soon as possible. Manual divisions “not to get SAGE computers were to be phased out” along with their Manual Air Defense Control Centers at the headquarters base: “9th Geiger Field… 32d, Syracuse AFS… 35th, Dobbins AFB… 58th, Wright-Patterson AFB… 85th, Andrews AFB”. The 26th SAGE Division (New York, Boston, Syracuse & Bangor SAGE sectors)–the 1st of the SAGE divisions—became operational at Hancock Field on 1 January 1959 after the redesignation started for AC&W Squadrons (e.g., the Highlands P-9 unit became the 646th Radar Squadron (SAGE) October 1.) Additional sectors included the Los Angeles Air Defense Sector (SAGE) designated in February 1959. A June 23 JCS memorandum approved the new “March 1959 Reorganization Plan” for HQ NORAD/CONAD/ADC.
Project Wild Goose teams of Air Material Command personnel installed c. 1960 the Ground Air Transmit Receive stations for the SAGE TDDL (in April 1961, Sault Ste Marie was the first operational sector with TDDL.) … By the middle of 1960, AMC had determined that about 800,000 man-hours (involving 130 changes) would be required to bring the F-106 fleet to the point where it would be a valuable adjunct to the air defense system. Part of the work (Project Broad Jump) was accomplished by Sacramento Air Materiel Area. The remainder (Project Wild Goose) was done at ADC bases by roving AMC field assistance teams supported by ADC maintenance personnel. After a September 1959 experimental ATABE test between an “abbreviated” AN/FSQ-7 staged at Fort Banks and the Lexington XD-1, the 1961 “SAGE/Missile Master test program” conducted large-scale field testing of the ATABE “mathematical model” using radar tracks of actual SAC and ADC aircraft flying mock penetrations into defense sectors. Similarly conducted was the joint SAC-NORAD Sky Shield II exercise followed by Sky Shield III on 2 September 1962 On July 15, 1963, ESD’s CMC Management Office assumed “responsibilities in connection with BMEWS, Space Track, SAGE, and BUIC.” The Chidlaw Building’s computerized[specify] NORAD/ADC Combined Operations Center in 1963 became the highest echelon of the SAGE computer network when operations moved from Ent AFB’s 1954 manual Command Center to the partially underground “war room”. Also in 1963, radar stations were renumbered (e.g., Cambria AFS was redesignated from P-2 to Z-2 on July 31) and the vacuum-tube SAGE System was completed (and obsolete).
On “June 26, 1958,…the New York sector became operational” and on December 1, 1958, the Syracuse sector’s DC-03 was operational (“the SAGE system become operational until January 1959.”) Construction of CFB North Bay in Canada was started in 1959 for a bunker ~700 feet (210 m) underground (operational October 1, 1963), and by 1963 the system had 3 Combat Centers.
July 30, 2012
The nameservers on Work.com have changed to Salesforce.com. Here are the nameservers currently on the Work.com domain name:
In March We wrote about how all signs pointed to Salesforce having purchased the domain name. The whois record and brand protection company to whom the domain was registered was the same as Site.com, which Salesforce.com recently purchased. Work.com had also been listed in a Moniker auction, and Salesforce has purchased multiple names through Moniker including Data.com.
We happened to check the Work.com nameservers today when we noticed that Saleforce.com acquired another domain, GovernmentCloud.com, using the same brand protection service.
Date: 09/03/1987
Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) was a software company based in Santa Cruz, California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX (later known as SCO OpenServer), and UnixWare. Eric Raymond, in his book The Art of Unix Programming, calls SCO the “first Unix company”. Prior to this, some prominent Unix vendors had been computer hardware manufacturers and telephone companies. In 1993, SCO acquired two smaller companies and developed the Tarantella product line. In 2001, SCO sold its rights to Unix and the related divisions to Caldera Systems. After that the corporation retained only its Tarantella product line, and changed its name to Tarantella, Inc.
Caldera Systems becoming Caldera International subsequently changed its name to SCO then to The SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX; now delisted: SCOXQ.PK), which has created some confusion between the two companies. The company described here is the original Santa Cruz Operation (NASDAQ: SCOC). Although generally referred to simply as “SCO” up to 2001, it is now sometimes referred to as “old SCO”, “Santa Cruz”, or “SCO Classic” to distinguish it from “The SCO Group” to whom the U.S. trademark “SCO” was transferred.
History
Early years
SCO was founded in 1979 by Doug Michels and his father, Larry, as a Unix porting and consulting company. The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. was incorporated in January, 1979.
In 1983 SCO ported Xenix to the unmapped Intel 8086 processor (earlier 8086 Xenix ports required an off-chip MMU) and licensed rights from Microsoft to be able to ship its packaged Unix System, Xenix for the IBM PC XT. SCO Xenix for the PC (XT) shipped sometime in 1984 and contained some enhancement from 4.2BSD. Somewhat in parallel with that, SCO and Microsoft also developed the 68000-based Xenix port for the Apple Lisa; this was actually the first shrink-wrapped binary product sold by SCO.
In 1986, SCO acquired the Software Products Group division of UK consultancy firm Logica to form their European headquarters. Gary Daniels, Steve Brophy, Bill Bateson, Geraint Davies, and Peter Kettle headed this group, running European development operations. The European arm of SCO grew rapidly to about 40% of SCO’s worldwide revenues.
In 1987, SCO ported Xenix to the Intel 80386 processor. The same year Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO.
In 1989, SCO started producing SCO UNIX from a more recent branch from the Unix family tree, System V Release 3.2.
SCO acquired Toronto based HCR Corporation in 1990. HCR was Canada’s leading commercial Unix platform developer.
The initial version of SCO UNIX, Release 3.2.0, did not include TCP/IP networking or X Window System graphics. Shortly after the release of this product, SCO shipped SCO Open Desktop, with both.
Collectively, Xenix and SCO UNIX became the most installed flavor of Unix due to the popularity of the x86 architecture.
The company went public in 1993 on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange.
1994 saw the release of SCO MPX, a supporting SMP for SCO UNIX.
PizzaNet and SCO Global Access
In August 1994 SCO and Pizza Hut announced PizzaNet, “a pilot program that enables computer users, for the first time, to electronically order pizza delivery from their local Pizza Hut restaurant via the worldwide Internet.”
PizzaNet was based on the first commercially licensed and bundled Internet Operating System, SCO Global Access. SCO was the first commercial Unix System supplier to license the powerful NCSA Mosaic hypertext, NCSA HTTPd and the first to ship these technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana bundled with an OS for commercial use.
Client Integration Division / Tarantella Division
In 1993 SCO acquired IXI Limited, a software company in Cambridge, UK, best known for its X.desktop product, which formed the graphical basis of ODT. In 1994 it then bought Visionware, of Leeds, UK, developers of XVision. In 1995 it combined the two development teams to form IXI Visionware. This later became SCO’s Client Integration Division. Client Integration was relatively independent of the rest of SCO. It specialized in software to integrate Microsoft Windows and UNIX systems, It operated its own web site for some time and ported its code to all major UNIX platforms, including those of SCO’s competitors.
AT&T System V
In 1995, SCO acquired the AT&T UNIX System V source code from Novell and eventually became the licensor for UNIX. This allowed it to port System V Release 4 features into SCO UNIX. However, in 2007 a court ruled that Novell still owned the copyrights to original AT&T UNIX source code and derivatives. SCO also acquired the UnixWare operating system from Novell, at which time it renamed SCO UNIX as SCO OpenServer. They were eventually able to re-use some code from that version of UnixWare in later releases of OpenServer. SCO released several versions of UnixWare, notably version 7 starting in 1997, which merged UnixWare 2 and OpenServer 5.
By the end of the 1990s, SCO Unix systems had around 15,000 value-added resellers (VARs) around the world.
Asset sale
In April 2000 SCO reorganized into three divisions: Server Software, Professional Services and Tarantella.
In May, 2001, SCO completed the sale of its Server Software and Services Divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, to Caldera Systems, Inc. At that time Caldera Systems changed its name to “Caldera International”, and the remaining part of SCO, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to “Tarantella, Inc.”
In August 2002 Caldera International renamed itself “The SCO Group” since the SCO UNIX products were still a strong source of revenue mainly due to the huge installed base dating back to the 1990s. That entity soon started the SCO-Linux controversies.
Company culture
From its inception and founding by University of California at Santa Cruz graduate Doug Michels, the company drew upon the readily available technical talent who chose to remain in the central California coastal town of Santa Cruz after graduating.
SCO Forum
Beginning in 1987 SCO hosted an annual Summer conference for the international Unix community. Originally called “The SCO XENIX 386 Developer Conference”, it was held on the university’s redwood-forested campus, overlooking Monterey Bay. The conference was later called “SCO Forum”. After the Caldera Systems acquisition, the conference moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Featured speakers over the years have included Douglas Adams, Scott Adams, Dave Barry,[20] Clifford Stoll, John Perry Barlow, Linus Torvalds, and Scott McNealy. Musical entertainment included concerts by Jefferson Starship, Tower of Power, Roger McGuinn, Jan & Dean, The Kingsmen, The Surfaris, and Deth Specula.
SCO broadcasts first live music concert over the Internet
On August 23, 1994 SCO broadcast a live music concert from the University’s Cowell Courtyard. This event, part of SCO Forum 1994, was the first time a live music concert was broadcast over the Internet utilizing the emerging World Wide Web. The band was Deth Specula, a group composed of SCO employees, and the first song parodied Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re An American Band”.
Palookaville webcasts
Later, SCO continued in that tradition by sponsoring and producing a series of live Internet webcasts from the popular Santa Cruz, California night club Palookaville. These webcasts demonstrated the use of UnixWare 7 as a real-time audio and video webcasting server utilizing RealAudio and RealVideo technologies from RealNetworks.
SCO Follies
From 1985-2001, the company hosted a Winter Solstice party at the Cocoanut Grove in Santa Cruz featuring a live musical show known as “The SCO Follies.” This was a fully scripted and produced satire skewering SCO management and the high-tech industry. It featured live action, musical numbers, and videos. On September 22, 2012 the SCO Alumni Association hosted the SCOGala Reunion party at the Coconut Grove, which included the first SCO Follies since 2001. Some 500 former employees, friends, and family attended the event.
December 6, 2011
DomainTools has rebuilt the thumbnail engine that for years has provided a visual context to the powerful domain name detail information available at DomainTools.com. By launching on the premium domain name Screenshots.com, DomainTools is able to feature this important content in a more functional way for users that are specifically interested in home page archives.
Screenshots.com was created with key features in mind to help users better research competitive websites, easily scroll through a website’s image history, and discover details about the website. Visitors can quickly uncover the year the domain was first registered, find similar type websites and learn how a website looked over time. The site includes the ability for users to request an updated screenshot at any time. The Featured Screenshot section on the home page scans news feeds for domain name references and showcases them on a rotating basis.
The DomainTools thumbnail image capture system, the back-end service for Screenshots.com, was originally developed in 2004. The current version now checks up to 1,000,000 websites a day and, unlike other screenshot services, captures critical external resources like ads and images. With Screenshots.com, what you see is exactly what a visitor would have seen when they visited the site. Domain investors, trademark attorneys and brand agents alike have relied upon DomainTools’ screenshot history tool to make more informed business decisions and to investigate and defend potential trademark-infringing domain names.
For nearly 10 years, DomainTools has provided users with the most comprehensive data about domain names, and the launch of Screenshots.com helps extend that mission. Together with DomainTools.com, DailyChanges.com, ReverseWhois.com, and Reversemx.com, individuals, small business owners, and many large enterprises use DomainTools’ breadth of tools to do everything from finding a good domain for a new business to verifying DNS and WHOIS information on corporate portfolios of thousands of domains.
