Death Anniversaries, 2005-2009

newest years (2016-2026)
newer years: 2015 · 2014 · 2013 · 2012 · 2011 · 2010
on this page: 2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005
older years: 2000-2004 · 1990s · before 1990

~ 2009 ~

• Jan 2009 PC Magazine (print) — ziff-davis's flagship pc magazine, the one whose ad-page count in any given month of 1996 was thicker than most short novels. founded march 1982 by da
• 2009 StarForce — starforce was the russian copy-protection company that built the aggressive kernel-level drm system used on western pc-game releases from the early 20
• 2009 gOS — gos was a google-themed ubuntu derivative built around the google web apps suite. it shipped on the everex gpc tc2502 at walmart for 199 dollars on no
• 2009 Nokia Lifeblog — the earliest mainstream idea of lifelogging shipped as an s60 app plus a windows companion. every photo and MMS your phone captured would sync to a ti
• 2009 Guba — guba started as an archive, not a video site. the name was an acronym, gigantic usenet binaries archive, and in 1998 that is what it was, a way to sea
• 2009 Palm OS — the operating system that lived in your palm before the phone did. it taught a generation to write in a stripped-down alphabet so a machine could read
• 2009 vSocial — white-label video hosting from arizona, sold to publishers who wanted their own branded player without building one. it worked for a while, then youtu
• Jan 2009 Ms. Dewey — microsoft put an actress in a dark room and shot six hundred reaction clips across three days. you typed a word into live search and janina gavankar a
• 2009 Nomade.fr — nomade.fr opened on 2 july 1996 and spent seven years doing the thing google made unnecessary: paying people to read websites and write a sentence abo
• 2009 MAE-East — mae-east was the place where the networks that made up the american internet agreed to pass each other packets, and through the middle of the nineties
• Jan 2009 Flektor — flektor let you pull photos and video into a browser page and cut them together with about a hundred effects. the finished piece was called a flek and
• 2009 Veropedia — a free advertising-supported encyclopedia that wrote nothing of its own. a small invited group of wikipedia editors picked articles that already met a
• 2009 GNU arch — a distributed version control system written as a pile of shell scripts in 2001, years before the industry agreed that the central server was the prob
• 2009 Xohm — sprint spent 2007 and 2008 building a fourth generation network and a brand name to sell it under. the name was xohm, it rhymed with home, and it went
• 2009 Norton SystemWorks — norton systemworks was symantec's answer to the question every windows owner was asking in 1998, which was why the computer had gotten slow. it put no
• 2009 QuickCam — connectix shipped a hundred-dollar camera in 1994 that plugged into a macintosh serial port and produced sixteen shades of gray at 320 by 240. it was
• 2009 PC Card (PCMCIA) — every laptop had the slot, usually two of them stacked, with a spring-loaded eject button beside it and a plastic blank wedged in to keep the dust out
• Jan 2009 UIQ — symbian shipped three provisional user interfaces and let the phone makers pick. nokia picked the one it controlled, called it series 60 and put it on
• 2009 TurboNick — nickelodeon put full episodes on the open web in july 2005, free and with no cable login, and called it turbonick. it ran for four years on the theory
• 2009 BuyMusic — scott blum spent the summer of 2003 telling anyone who would listen that buy.com had built the world's largest music download store. buymusic opened o
• 2009 Sony Rolly — an egg with a wheel at each end and a pair of cup-shaped wings that opened and closed in time with the music. sony put it on sale in japan on 29 septe
• 2009 Hugo the TV Troll — a child dialed a number and then steered a cartoon troll across a live television broadcast by pressing digits on the handset. the danish company behi
• 2009 Konceptzia — israel, 1999: a magazine about how to build websites, written in hebrew for the people building them. konceptzia ran ten years at exego.net and spun o
• 2009 Incognito Entertainment — sony bought incognito entertainment in august 2002 with fifty-one people inside it, and by 2009 there was almost nobody left to close. twisted metal:
• 2009 U3 — in october 2005 a usb stick started arriving with a second personality: a small read-only cd drive welded to the front of it, put there so windows wou
• 2009 Tailrank — kevin burton had already co-founded rojo when he put tailrank into alpha on 21 september 2005. it crawled the blogs registered with it and worked out
• 2009 Duepuntozero — two sixteen-year-olds in milan built a social network in 2004 that had public likes on photographs and a one-way follow, years before instagram existe
• 2009 Net Detours — james cook spent the back half of the nineties writing a weekly column about the useless parts of the web, with a fake professor of netology and a har
• 2009 Adventure Rock — the strange thing about the bbc's virtual world for children is that there was nobody else in it. adventure rock gave a six to twelve year old an isla
• 1 Jan 2009 Podango — bountiful, utah, is an unlikely address for a podcast empire, and by the autumn of 2007 podango had one: 1,300 podcasters spread across 250 themed sta
• 2009 Norton AntiBot — avg finished buying sana security on 16 january 2009, and symantec stopped selling norton antibot not long after, because the behavior engine inside t
• 2009 SuperDOT — what killed it was a database migration, announced in a memo to member firms and carried out stock by stock through 2009. for twenty-five years superd
• 2009 Airhitch — robert segelbaum started it in 1969 and the deal never really changed. you bought a window of dates and then showed up at an airport to take whatever
• 2009 Insoshi — in december 2007 two former college roommates moved to silicon valley for y combinator's winter batch to build an open source social network in ruby o
• 2 Jan 2009 JournalSpace — journalspace was a small blogging platform that ran from 2002 to early 2009 with a few hundred thousand bloggers in its quiet steady-state. on decembe
• 5 Jan 2009 JPG Magazine — jpg was a photography magazine that let its readers make it. you uploaded photos and the community voted the best ones into a printed issue you could
• Jan 2009 Fantasy Congress — on monday 23 october 2006 four students at claremont mckenna college put up a game in which you drafted real members of the united states house and se
• 9 Jan 2009 Alltel — alltel was the fifth largest wireless carrier in america and most of the country could not have told you what its logo looked like. it ran the biggest
• 9 Jan 2009 Bullog.cn — luo yonghao built bullog in 2006 because the big chinese portals kept deleting things, and for three years it was the most liberal blog host in the ch
• 15 Jan 2009 Ficlets — an aol system architect built a writing site with a byte ceiling on it. you got between 64 and 1,024 bytes, and anybody who read your story could bolt
• 15 Jan 2009 circaVie — eighteen months was all it got. aol opened circavie in july 2007 as a place to lay your life out chronologically, in a flash widget you could embed on
• 15 Jan 2009 Whopper Sacrifice — 233,906 friendships were ended in ten days of january 2009, at a rate of ten per free sandwich. facebook had asked the agency to stop notifying people
• 17 Jan 2009 TOTSE — jeff hunter and j.c. stanton opened & the temple of the screaming electron as a dial-up bbs in 1989 under the nirvananet umbrella, focused on a gr
• 18 Jan 2009 Jubii — jubii was denmark's first search engine and then its homegrown yahoo, a portal so dominant it reached more than ninety percent of danish internet user
• 18 Jan 2009 xMule — in june 2003 a fight over a hijacked project website split lmule and produced xmule, and two months later a subpoena split xmule and produced amule. w
• 18 Jan 2009 CAPICOM — signing something with the real windows crypto library meant c++ and a lot of it. capicom meant three lines of visual basic, which is why script autho
• 21 Jan 2009 Times File — in december 2008 the new york times emailed its readers to say that social bookmarking sites could do the heavy lifting from now on. times file had le
• 23 Jan 2009 Qimonda — infineon moved its memory business into a separate company in 2006 and listed it in new york three months later, arriving just as dram prices fell eig
• 25 Jan 2009 Unicel — unicel was the brand on rural cellular corporation, a company that forty small minnesota telephone companies put together in 1990 by pooling five cell
• 26 Jan 2009 Alexa Web Search Platform — a dollar per cpu hour, and a dollar for every fifty gigabytes you pushed through it. that was the price of building a search engine on top of amazon's
• 27 Jan 2009 Culture11 — william bennett put money behind an online magazine in august 2008 and david kuo ran it, and the pitch was a center-right slate: cultural criticism fr
• 28 Jan 2009 Transmeta — transmeta stayed quiet for five years and came out in january 2000 with a chip that had almost no x86 logic on it. a software layer translated intel i
• 29 Jan 2009 Ensemble Studios — ensemble studios was the dallas rts house that built the age of empires series across twelve years and three full installments, then closed the day ha
• 30 Jan 2009 GreatestJournal — greatestjournal was one of the many sites built on livejournal's open-source code, launched in 2003. what set it apart was free image hosting, called
• 30 Jan 2009 Toonami Jetstream — cartoon network and viz media put toonami on the web in july 2006, free and paid for by advertising, at a point when almost nobody was doing legal vid
• Jan 2009 Electronic Gaming Monthly (print) — the multi-platform us gaming print magazine, twenty years on newsstands. founded march 31 1989 by steve harris under sendai publications. ziff-davis t
• 31 Jan 2009 Hellgate - London — hellgate london was the diablo team's first act after they left blizzard. it was supposed to be the next great isometric action-rpg with a first-perso
• Feb 2009 Dodgeball — dodgeball was a check-in-by-sms service that ran from 2000 to 2009. dennis crowley and alex rainert built it at nyu and ran it as an indie startup unt
• 1 Feb 2009 STAR-BEACH — starbeach was a message board for japanese phones where you posted asking for someone to write to you. no fee, no app, no computer involved, just a ha
• Feb 2009 Comedy 23/6 — barry diller's iac and arianna huffington went into the satire business together in november 2007 and were out of it fifteen months later. 23/6 hired
• Feb 2009 Co.mments — you left a comment on somebody's blog in 2006 and then had no way of finding out whether anyone answered it. assaf arkin's fix was a bookmarklet that
• 3 Feb 2009 Free Radical Design — free radical was the studio four senior rare developers opened in 1999 to keep making the kind of arcade-feel console shooters they had built on the n
• 4 Feb 2009 JuicyCampus — juicycampus was an anonymous college gossip board that ran from 2007 to 2009 and turned american campuses into a comment war. matt ivester, a duke gra
• 4 Feb 2009 Project Kangaroo — kangaroo was going to be one place to watch british television, built jointly by bbc worldwide and itv with channel 4 alongside them, holding more tha
• 5 Feb 2009 Wikitruth — jimmy wales called it a hoax and said whoever ran it had almost certainly been banned. the people running it said the opposite, that several of them w
• 6 Feb 2009 Ruckus Network — ruckus was the 2003 vincent han and david galper venture that gave free music to anyone with a .edu email address. january 2006 it switched from subsc
• 9 Feb 2009 KB Toys — kb toys started in pittsfield massachusetts in 1922 as kaufman brothers, a wholesale candy company. it pivoted to wholesale toys in 1946 and to mall r
• 11 Feb 2009 Blazer — every palm treo sold between 2002 and 2008 had a browser under the globe icon called blazer, and for a lot of american business users that browser was
• 15 Feb 2009 The Baltimore Examiner — the baltimore examiner was a free daily commuter paper launched in april 2006 by philip anschutz's clarity media group as part of a us-wide free-daily
• 15 Feb 2009 Lycos Europe — there were two lycos companies. the american one in massachusetts, and this one, a joint venture between bertelsmann and lycos inc that licensed the n
• 16 Feb 2009 Jellyfish.com — a shopping search engine earns affiliate commission on every click it sends to a retailer, and in 2006 two founders in middleton, wisconsin decided to
• 18 Feb 2009 Solipsis — joaquin keller and gwendal simon designed solipsis inside france télécom's research division as a shared virtual world with no servers in it, where ev
• 18 Feb 2009 Bud.TV — fifteen million dollars bought a beer company its own television network in february 2007, and the first thing the network did was ask for your driver
• 19 Feb 2009 Coghead — coghead sold a promise that keeps coming back and keeps not working: build real business software without a programmer. from 2003 it let people assemb
• 20 Feb 2009 Enjoy Japan — naver opened enjoy japan in june 2002 as a bulletin board with japanese and korean machine translation running underneath every post, so that neither
• 21 Feb 2009 MSN Groups — msn groups was the bureaucratic floor of the msn building. you got a shared message board, a small file storage area, a member list, and a url under g
• 26 Feb 2009 Angelfire / Tripod — the other free hosting services. while geocities took the bigger audience, angelfire and tripod each had millions of personal pages, fan sites, and ha
• Feb 2009 Swurl — two guys built swurl in the evenings, and when their day jobs got heavier they wrote that down and stopped. it pulled nineteen services into one illus
• 27 Feb 2009 Rocky Mountain News — the rocky mountain news was denver's oldest daily newspaper, born in a print shop on the corner of larimer and cherry in april 1859 when denver was si
• 27 Feb 2009 Manganovel — toshiba owned 89 percent of a manga shop that sold volumes for four dollars and then paid its own customers half the price of any translation they mad
• 28 Feb 2009 Tabula Rasa — tabula rasa was richard garriott's other life. ultima online made his name. this was the follow-up: an MMO set in space, eight years in development, p
• 28 Feb 2009 Empas — empas launched in december 1999 as a korean search engine built around natural language queries, and for a couple of years it was the country's second
• Mar 2009 Vindigo — two traders quit d. e. shaw in 1999 and built a city guide that lived on a palm pilot. vindigo held restaurant reviews and walking directions for amer
• 1 Mar 2009 XLEAGUE.TV — in 2007 a british company decided competitive gaming was a television format and bought satellite carriage to prove it. xleague.tv sat on sky channel
• Mar 2009 Groxis — grokker took a search query and gave you back a map. results arrived as nested circles grouped by topic, so you could see the shape of a subject befor
• 8 Mar 2009 Circuit City — circuit city peaked at 567 stores and was the largest us consumer-electronics chain by revenue through much of the 1990s. in march 2007 management fir
• 12 Mar 2009 FindWhat.com — in september 1999 a small florida company that had been selling search engine placement stopped selling placement and started auctioning it, letting a
• 13 Mar 2009 Fabchannel — a concert hall turned itself into a broadcaster. fabchannel put television-grade cameras into paradiso and melkweg in amsterdam and streamed whole gig
• 16 Mar 2009 WiMedia Alliance — a deadlocked committee did this one. the ieee task group working on high-rate ultra-wideband narrowed twenty-three proposals down to two radios that c
• 17 Mar 2009 Seattle Post-Intelligencer (print edition) — the seattle post-intelligencer print edition was killed on 17 march 2009, 146 years after it started life as the seattle gazette in december 1863 in a
• 17 Mar 2009 ITV Local — itv's attempt at putting the english regions online, tried first in brighton and hastings in 2005 and then rolled out across the whole network. local
• 18 Mar 2009 Yahoo! MyWeb — yahoo myweb was the social bookmarking service yahoo built internally in june 2005, four months before it bought delicious in december 2005. the two p
• 19 Mar 2009 SpiralFrog — spiralfrog was the largest ad-supported free music download service in north america. it shipped songs as drm-locked wma files that expired after 60 d
• 20 Mar 2009 Lookybook — craig frazier had run a design studio in california since 1980, and in november 2007 he opened lookybook so that a parent could turn every page of a p
• Mar 2009 music.download.com — february 2009 was the last month anyone could load the page. cnet built music.download.com in 2004 to catch the unsigned artists it had just evicted f
• 25 Mar 2009 Yahoo FareChase — farechase was a travel meta-search engine built in israel in 1999. yahoo paid around 20 million dollars for it in july 2004 to compete with sidestep a
• 26 Mar 2009 Blender — august 1994, and the delivery format was a disc. regina joseph built the first magazine published entirely on cd-rom, with sound and video in it, at a
• 27 Mar 2009 Christian Science Monitor daily print — the christian science monitor was founded in boston in november 1908 by mary baker eddy, published daily except sundays and holidays for a full centur
• 30 Mar 2009 Yahoo! Briefcase — yahoo briefcase was thirty free megabytes of online storage with a yahoo id, ten years before "the cloud" was a marketing phrase. you uploaded a doc o
• 31 Mar 2009 Wikia Search — jimmy wales' attempt at an open-source search engine, launched as a public alpha in january '08 with thirty million pages indexed. by august it held s
• 31 Mar 2009 SafeDisc — safedisc was the macrovision pc-game copy-protection system that shipped on hundreds of cd and dvd titles from 1998 onward. final build 4.90.010 went
• 31 Mar 2009 MobaHO! — a hundred thousand subscribers against a target of a million is the whole story. mobaho! put eight video channels and thirty audio channels on a satel
• 31 Mar 2009 HP Upline — hewlett-packard sold unlimited online backup for a few dollars a month, broke it three weeks after launch and closed it eleven months later. the backu
• 1 Apr 2009 Silicon Graphics (SGI) — silicon graphics inc was founded in november 1981 by jim clark and a group of stanford engineers, ran the unix workstation market for two decades on t
• Apr 2009 Microsoft Agent — microsoft agent was the ActiveX-based animated-character runtime that shipped in september 1997 alongside internet explorer 4. four free characters li
• Apr 2009 Computer Shopper — computer shopper was the 700-plus page newsprint tabloid of pc parts, motherboard ads and mail-order coupons that landed in north american mailboxes e
• 1 Apr 2009 SeeqPod — seeqpod was a search engine for playable audio and video files on the open web, built out of emeryville in 2005 by a small team with lawrence berkeley
• Apr 2009 Mugshot — red hat's attempt at an open-source social network, a feed that pulled together the music you played and the sites you shared and showed it to people
• Apr 2009 MyToons — three weeks after the march 2007 launch it had taken over 1.5 million unique visitors, which looked like proof that animation wanted its own video sit
• 2 Apr 2009 Openmoko — openmoko was a taiwanese motherboard company's attempt to build a phone with nothing hidden inside it. the neo 1973 shipped in july 2007 and the neo f
• Apr 2009 Pleo — pleo was a 349-dollar robot dinosaur toy from ugobe, co-founded by furby's caleb chung. it shipped in december 2007 with skin sensors, microphones, a
• 8 Apr 2009 AT&T Pogo — a phone company decided in 2008 that browsing needed to look like flipping through physical objects, hired a toronto 3d shop to build it on top of fir
• 13 Apr 2009 FlashMail — an internet provider in corvallis, oregon, with a few thousand customers in the willamette valley, ended up owning one of the last survivors of the 19
• 14 Apr 2009 Ascaron — ascaron spent eighteen years in gütersloh making trading simulations that were enormous inside germany and barely registered outside it, then made sac
• 16 Apr 2009 Habbo Japan — the japanese localization of habbo hotel never took hold. sulake opened it in february 2003 as one of the first overseas hotels, alongside the early e
• 17 Apr 2009 Furl — furl was the page-archiving social bookmarking site of the mid-2000s. mike giles founded it in 2003 with a single distinguishing feature: every bookma
• Apr 2009 Coollist — onelist and egroups took the free mailing list market in 1998 and yahoo bought the survivor. coollist was already there, one of the also-rans nobody w
• 20 Apr 2009 Zango — two brothers in bellevue built a business on a bargain nobody was meant to read: you take the free game, we take the right to put advertisements on yo
• 2009 AskMeNow — fifty four thousand five hundred and thirty six dollars. that was askmenow's revenue for the whole of fiscal 2007, against a net loss of twenty and a
• 22 Apr 2009 Baby Shaker — ninety nine cents bought a black and white drawing of a crying baby and a timer that counted up while you tried to calm it. shaking the phone put two
• 23 Apr 2009 Putfile — putfile was the kind of video host i should have known about. it ran 2004 to 2009 out of godalming, england, founded by gordon page. ZVUE acquired it
• 24 Apr 2009 Central Park Media — central park media opened in new york on 11 april 1990 and spent nineteen years buying north american rights to japanese animation that nobody else wa
• 27 Apr 2009 e-gold — e-gold was a gold-backed digital currency that ran from 1996 to 2009 out of melbourne florida. douglas jackson, a radiation oncologist, founded it wit
• 27 Apr 2009 Location View — a tokyo company put street-level imagery of japanese cities online on 14 may 2007, more than a year before google street view arrived in japan. the fo
• 29 Apr 2009 OD2 — od2 was the engine under most of europe's legal music downloads before apple got here. peter gabriel started it in bristol in november 1999 and it nev
• 30 Apr 2009 Spock — spock was a vertical search engine for people, indexing 250 million real humans from public sources. cnet named it the most promising startup of 2007.
• 30 Apr 2009 SWX Europe — on 21 september 1995 three people who had left the london stock exchange opened a rival to it, the first in two hundred years, and almost nobody trade
• May 2009 OQO — oqo built the smallest fully-functional windows pc on earth for most of the 2000s. the model 01 shipped in 2004 at under a pound, with a slide-out key
• 1 May 2009 Quixtar — on 1 september 1999 amway launched a separate internet company and kept its own name off it. quixtar sold the same products through the same distribut
• May 2009 Fake IPL Player — for four weeks in april and may 2009 a large part of indian cricket believed that a squad player at kolkata knight riders was blogging from inside the
• 11 May 2009 Concord Camera — this is the company whose name was almost never on the camera. concord built cheap film bodies and single-use cameras in china and sold them under oth
• 18 May 2009 XFree86 — for twelve years this was the thing that put pixels on the screen of almost every linux and bsd machine on earth, and almost nobody who used it could
• 19 May 2009 trueSpace — roman ormandy started building 3d software on the amiga in the mid eighties and shipped truespace 1.0 for windows in 1994. it put modeling and animati
• 19 May 2009 Otoko no Ko Bokujou — six days. cyberagent opened a marriage-hunting service on japanese mobile phones on 13 may 2009 that let women register the men they knew, display the
• 21 May 2009 MSN QnA — microsoft ran a question and answer site for three years and renamed it twice while it was running, which tells you roughly how loved it was inside th
• 26 May 2009 Macromedia HomeSite — homesite shipped september 1996 from a single developer in north carolina named nick bradbury, written as a delphi side project. it was the html edito
• 27 May 2009 Trusera — trusera was built on the idea that the useful thing is not a diagnosis but somebody who has already been through it. keith schorsch started it in seat
• 29 May 2009 Sony eyeVio — sony eyeVio was a japan-only video-sharing site launched by sony corporation on 27 april 2007, six months after google bought youtube. the site requir
• 29 May 2009 Deadline Games — deadline games was a danish studio that spent its first decade making quiz and edutainment titles for a domestic market of five million people, then b
• 30 May 2009 Vidoop — vidoop replaced the password with a grid of pictures. you chose a few categories when you signed up, and at every login the grid came back with a lett
• 30 May 2009 Doblog — on the morning of 8 february 2009 a hard disk failed at ntt data and every blog on doblog went dark at once. the service had run since november 2003 a
• May 2009 dMarc Broadcasting — dmarc broadcasting was a radio-ad automation platform founded by chad and ryan steelberg in newport beach in 2002. google bought it in january 2006 fo
• 31 May 2009 Cafesta — in december 2008 the operators of cafesta emailed every member to say the site could not continue as it was, and would people consider buying an avata
• 31 May 2009 Popular Science Predictions Exchange — 33,339 people were holding pop dollars when popular science closed its prediction market on 31 may 2009, a shade under two years after opening it. you
• 3 Jun 2009 Microsoft Live Search — live search was the brand microsoft tried on its search engine for three years between msn search and bing. it launched as windows live search on 11 s
• 4 Jun 2009 Langmaker — jeffrey henning ran a newsletter about invented languages from 1995 and turned it into the website that became the directory of the whole hobby, the p
• 6 Jun 2009 Palm Treo — the treo was the smartphone before the iphone was the smartphone. handspring built the first one, palm bought handspring, and for six years the treo w
• 10 Jun 2009 Club-Internet — club-internet was one of the companies that put france online. it launched in 1995 out of the lagardère group, a dial-up service and portal that gave
• 10 Jun 2009 Predictor@home — the first boinc project that did not come out of berkeley. michela taufer's group at the scripps research institute launched it on 9 june 2004 to ente
• 14 Jun 2009 Jaxtr — jaxtr was a calling service wrapped in a social network, founded in menlo park in 2005. you put a small widget on your blog or profile and people coul
• 15 Jun 2009 Jumpcut — jumpcut was the browser video editor that landed early enough to matter and late enough to get bought by yahoo before it could grow. you cut and remix
• 16 Jun 2009 PlanetOut — planetout started in august 1995 as a forum on the microsoft network, run by tom rielly, and spent the next decade absorbing the rest of american gay
• 17 Jun 2009 Sesam — schibsted owned most of the newspapers norwegians read and decided the country should have its own search engine rather than rent one from california.
• 23 Jun 2009 Setanta Sports — setanta was an irish company that spent the 2000s buying sports rights in britain that sky had held on its own since 1992. in 2006 it took two premier
• 23 Jun 2009 Manifesto Games — greg costikyan spent the early 2000s arguing in print that the game business had become sequels and licenses with no room left for anything strange, a
• 29 Jun 2009 Maven Networks — maven networks was the 2002-2009 cambridge ma online-video platform that powered the embedded video players for fox news, sony bmg, cbs sports, the ne
• 30 Jun 2009 CompuServe — the first big commercial online service in the US. text only for most of its life. its user IDs were long numeric strings that looked like 71234,5678.
• 30 Jun 2009 Microsoft Money — microsoft money was the household budgeting app that came in a shrinkwrap box. it lost the fight to quicken in the US and never built a home in turkey
• 30 Jun 2009 Windows Live OneCare — microsoft's first paid consumer antivirus suite. it launched may 31 2006 as a $50 per year subscription that bundled the antivirus engine with a firew
• Jun 2009 Microsoft Tafiti — tafiti was a public silverlight demo from microsoft's platform incubation group that wrapped live search results in an animated ui. it launched on 22
• 30 Jun 2009 Yahoo Bix — bix was a sunnyvale startup launched in july 2006 by stewart bonn and the speiser brothers, a website that let users enter video karaoke and photo con
• 30 Jun 2009 AvantGo — avantgo let you read the web on a handheld before a handheld could reach the web. you subscribed to channels on a desktop computer, and every time you
• 30 Jun 2009 WinCIM — compuserve was a text service you reached by typing go and a word. in 1989 it moved to a private binary protocol called hmi and shipped its own softwa
• 30 Jun 2009 Milanca — october 2006, and the japanese web had already decided that video should be free. gyao was streaming whole television programs with ads and no charge
• 30 Jun 2009 MSN Web Messenger — in august 2004 microsoft put msn messenger in a browser tab, for the very large number of people whose computer would not let them install anything. y
• 30 Jun 2009 CompuServe OurWorld — in 1996 compuserve started handing its members web space and calling it ourworld. you built pages with a tool called home page wizard and they went up
• 30 Jun 2009 Windows Live Agents — on 25 november 2008 the windows live agents team shipped version 5.1 of its sdk and used the same post to announce that the whole platform was being r
• 30 Jun 2009 Flowgram — on 12 june 2009 abhay parekh wrote to his users that flowgram would be gone by the end of the month. the product let you talk over real web pages whil
• Jul 2009 CompuServe CB Simulator — cb simulator was the first widely-available public chatroom on a commercial network. sandy trevor wrote it at compuserve and put it live on 21 februar
• 1 Jul 2009 Shadowbane — shadowbane was a fantasy mmo where the whole world was player-made. guilds raised cities from nothing, then rival guilds sieged and burned them, and l
• Jul 2009 Everex — in 1988 everex sold half the tape backup drives on earth, and in 1990 it did 436 million dollars of business with 2,200 people on the payroll, and alm
• Jul 2009 Net Yaroze — ken kutaragi's idea was that ordinary people should be allowed to program the playstation, and for about $750 sony would sell you a black console with
• Jul 2009 Ireland On-Line — barry flanagan started an internet company in galway in 1992, two years before most of the country knew what one was, and in january 1994 it became ir
• Jul 2009 Rubies of Eventide — a 1998 text mud old enough to ship with a working dos client put a 3d face on itself and relaunched as a paid mmo on 2 june 2003. it died on valentine
• Jul 2009 Hainei — on 16 november 2007 wang xing opened hainei, a real-name network for people who had outgrown the campus site he had sold the year before. kaixin001 ar
• 1 Jul 2009 DL.TV — two ex-techtv hosts on a ziff davis budget, putting out a weekly download in five file formats because nobody had agreed on one yet. the numbered epis
• 7 Jul 2009 Fanfou — fanfou was the first chinese twitter clone. it launched in beijing in may 2007 from the same wang xing team behind xiaonei, and it grew to nearly a mi
• 7 Jul 2009 .Mac Groups — the least advertised thing in a .mac subscription was groups. you invited a few people, and apple handed the set of you a private website with a messa
• 10 Jul 2009 Midway Games — midway started in 1958 as a chicago amusement-game manufacturer, took over the us license for pac-man in 1980, and ran for fifty-one years before fili
• 13 Jul 2009 Yahoo! 360° — yahoo 360 was yahoo's social network in the years yahoo was supposed to be turning into a portal company. it launched in march 2005 in eight countries
• 14 Jul 2009 Yahoo! Gallery — at o'reilly's etech conference in march 2006 yahoo opened four more apis to outside developers and put up a directory where anyone could find what got
• 21 Jul 2009 Stephen Fry's Podgrams — nine episodes in seventeen months, read aloud by an actor who was already one of the most visible early users of twitter. the podgrams ran from twenty
• 23 Jul 2009 MyStrands — february 2005 in corvallis, oregon: a team out of barcelona put a music recommender online that read your player instead of your purchase history and
• 24 Jul 2009 SearchMe — searchme gave you your search results as a stack of page screenshots you flipped through sideways, the way itunes showed album covers in 2008. it rais
• 27 Jul 2009 Borland — borland was the company that taught you what an ide could feel like, two decades before that became normal to expect. turbo pascal undercut microsoft
• 30 Jul 2009 Apple Shake — shake was the compositing program peter jackson's wellington vfx houses used to put gollum on screen. it started life at nothing real in 1997, was bou
• Jul 2009 LaserDisc — laserdisc was the first consumer optical video format. it shipped in atlanta in december 1978 as mca discovision, became pioneer's product in the 1980
• 31 Jul 2009 The Matrix Online — the matrix online launched march 22, 2005 as the official continuation of the film trilogy with the wachowskis' blessing. then world of warcraft happe
• 31 Jul 2009 Outpost Gallifrey — outpost gallifrey was the long-running doctor who fan site shaun lyon launched on 11 december 1995 from los angeles. it ran episode guides and reviews
• Jul 2009 Google Mashup Editor — may 2007 was peak mashup and google shipped a browser ide for it. you wrote a page in a tag set google invented, pointed it at an rss feed, and google
• 31 Jul 2009 Coupon-Eligible Converter Box — thirty-three and a half million forty-dollar coupons, mailed to american households as bank cards that would buy one thing and nothing else. the tv co
• Aug 2009 Google Page Creator — google page creator launched in beta on february 23 2006 at pages.google.com. any gmail user could log in, drag in a template, and publish a personal
• Aug 2009 xD-Picture Card — olympus and fujifilm launched a memory card of their own in july 2002 because owning the format meant owning the accessory sale afterward. it was smal
• 1 Aug 2009 Arcor — arcor was germany's second phone company, assembled in 1996 out of mannesmann money and the fiber deutsche bahn had running beside its railway tracks.
• 11 Aug 2009 Shiira — a mac browser written in japan by makoto kinoshita, with the stated goal of being better and more useful than safari. it ran the same webkit engine un
• Aug 2009 Susning.nu — susning.nu was a swedish wiki that lars aronsson started in 2001, back when swedish wikipedia was not yet worth reading, and for three years it was th
• 17 Aug 2009 Snaptalent — two years of runway were still sitting in the bank when snaptalent quit. four founders started it in 2007 and took it through y combinator's winter 20
• 18 Aug 2009 MediaDefender — randy saaf and octavio herrera started mediadefender in los angeles in 2000 and sold decoys to every major label and studio, flooding kazaa and later
• 20 Aug 2009 ConSentry Networks — mario nemirovsky, founder and chief scientist, told network world on 20 august 2009 that his company was going out of business effective that day. sta
• 21 Aug 2009 Riya — riya was the face-recognition photo tagger that arrived years before facebook could reliably do the same thing. the founders realized nobody would pay
• 24 Aug 2009 Microsoft Popfly — popfly was a microsoft web tool for stitching mashups out of building blocks in the browser, launched as a public beta on may 18 2007 by the developer
• 24 Aug 2009 Iris Browser — a perfect hundred on acid3, scored on a stylus phone in 2009, while shipping desktop browsers were still failing the same test. that was iris, built b
• 26 Aug 2009 Blyk — blyk was an advertising-funded mobile virtual network operator launched in the united kingdom in october 2007 by former nokia president pekka ala-piet
• 28 Aug 2009 AppleTalk — appletalk was how apple computers found each other before the internet made everyone speak the same language. released in 1985, it let a room full of
• 31 Aug 2009 Microsoft Soapbox — soapbox was the youtube clone microsoft built into msn video. it required a windows live id, played back through windows media player inside internet
• Aug 2009 NewsGator — newsgator was the rss company that owned feeddemon, netnewswire, an outlook plugin, and a sync service that kept all of them in step before google rea
• 1 Sep 2009 ADV Films — adv films opened in houston on 17 august 1992 and spent the next fifteen years deciding which japanese cartoons got english voices in north america. a
• Sep 2009 Ulead PhotoImpact — most image editors made you choose between pushing pixels and drawing shapes. photoimpact refused to, and kept a vector object layer sitting on top of
• 7 Sep 2009 Google Web APIs — one developer key, five hundred queries a day, later a thousand. that was the entire offer google made in april 2002, and for four years it was the on
• 9 Sep 2009 Sbectel — when south west wales finished switching off its analogue transmitters on 9 september 2009, the welsh-language teletext service went off with them. sb
• 15 Sep 2009 GrandCentral — the fremont startup that gave you one phone number for life and rang every device you owned when somebody called it. google bought it for ninety five
• 21 Sep 2009 Facebook Beacon — beacon was the moment facebook decided that what you bought on overstock or fandango should show up on your wall by default. it lasted twenty-two mont
• 22 Sep 2009 Slashcode — slashdot gave its own software away in march 2000 under the gpl, so that anyone could run a site with the same moderation and karma machinery. the pub
• 29 Sep 2009 Kazehakase — twenty-nine in japanese numerals reads ni-ku, the word for meat, so this browser put out its releases on the 29th of the month with a piece of meat kn
• Sep 2009 Vodafone live! — vodafone live! was the operator-portal that vodafone bolted onto every handset in its network starting in october 2002. it was the european answer to
• 30 Sep 2009 Austext — brisbane and sydney are where the useful pages started coming through in 1982, on a service the seven network had been testing since the late seventie
• Oct 2009 Microsoft Works — microsoft works was the office suite you got when you bought a compaq or an emachines at a discount. it had its own word processor that almost saved t
• Oct 2009 NewsFutures — over 120,000 events were listed as tradable contracts on newsfutures between september 2000 and october 2009, and not one dollar changed hands on any
• Oct 2009 Sphere — aol bought sphere in april 2008 for a price reported at upward of twenty five million dollars, renamed the engine surphace eighteen months later, then
• 5 Oct 2009 Gourmet — gourmet was the first us food monthly, launched by earle r. macausland in january 1941 out of new york. it ran forty-two years as an independent prope
• 5 Oct 2009 Rocky Mountain Independent — rocky mountain independent was a small online news site launched by steve foster and about a dozen ex-rocky-mountain-news staff on 4 july 2009. subscr
• 8 Oct 2009 Verizon Hub — the verizon hub launched on february 1, 2009 as a $200 tabletop touchscreen phone with a $35 monthly service charge. it was a 7 inch lcd device built
• 13 Oct 2009 Backflip — backflip sold you a bookmark folder that lived on the web instead of on one machine, which in 1999 was a real problem worth solving. it survived the d
• 20 Oct 2009 Apple Mighty Mouse — apple shipped the mighty mouse on august 2, 2005. it was the first apple mouse with more than one button after twenty-two years of one-button orthodox
• 22 Oct 2009 InkBall — inkball shipped in august 2004 inside windows xp tablet pc edition 2005, a puzzle game whose only control was a line you drew with a pen. colored ball
• 22 Oct 2009 Windows Ultimate Extras — microsoft sold windows vista ultimate at $399 retail and justified the gap over home premium with a program called ultimate extras: premium add-ons th
• 22 Oct 2009 Windows Meeting Space — a peer-to-peer meeting tool microsoft put inside windows vista to replace netmeeting, able to share a desktop or a file with up to ten people and able
• 24 Oct 2009 xB Browser — the tor project shipped a browser bundle of its own and the reason for torpark stopped existing. steve topletz had put portable firefox and a tor clie
• 26 Oct 2009 GeoCities — the city of personal homepages. you got a small chunk of disk space, a subdomain like geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/9876, and you could put up a page
• 26 Oct 2009 Hampsterdance — hampsterdance was the first internet meme that crossed from email forwards into pop culture. deidre lacarte built it in august 1997 on geocities, thre
• 26 Oct 2009 Metropolis Software — metropolis software was founded in warsaw in 1992 by two high school friends and spent seventeen years making adventure games and shooters for a count
• 27 Oct 2009 livedoor キーワード — eight weeks after prosecutors arrested takafumi horie, and less than four weeks before the tokyo exchange threw his company off the board, livedoor sh
• 30 Oct 2009 OdSiebie.com — a press conference in wrocław ended odsiebie.com on 30 october 2009, with the polish rights bodies standing next to the prosecutors and the police. it
• Nov 2009 Nokia Internet Tablets — nokia internet tablets were a four-device line of small linux web tablets, sold from late 2005 to late 2009. the 770, then the n800 and n810. they wer
• Nov 2009 Hell.com — kenneth aronson registered hell.com in august 1995 and ran it for fourteen years as a gated online art project involving roughly fifty new media artis
• Nov 2009 Rupture — shawn fanning's second act, built for a game i never played. rupture watched your world of warcraft characters and pushed the profiles out to a social
• Nov 2009 chello — upc launched chello in march 1999 across five countries on the same day, and for a lot of europe it was the first internet connection that was simply
• Nov 2009 Microsoft Thumbtack — live labs was microsoft's applied research arm, and the small print on everything it shipped said that nothing was guaranteed. thumbtack let you drop
• 7 Nov 2009 GoPets — a seoul studio spent four years on a virtual pet that lived on your desktop rather than in a browser tab, and that could travel to a stranger's machin
• 8 Nov 2009 Bombagyár — registration required a real name and a home address, which is an odd door policy for a site whose entire pitch was that it would host the people nobo
• 13 Nov 2009 RealArcade — realnetworks built a casual games portal in 2001 and bolted it onto the realplayer install on every windows machine in the country. for eight years it
• 13 Nov 2009 Xoopit — xoopit was a firefox plugin that added a strip across the top of gmail showing every attachment you had ever received as thumbnails. photos, videos, p
• 15 Nov 2009 BubbleShare — bubbleshare was a toronto photo-sharing site with a voice-caption gimmick and one of the smoother AJAX zoom widgets of the era. kaboose bought it in e
• 16 Nov 2009 Microsoft Office Accounting — microsoft office accounting was a small-business bookkeeping program shipped as part of the office 2007 lineup. it started in 2006 as microsoft small
• 17 Nov 2009 Pandemic Studios — pandemic studios was founded in 1998 in westwood, los angeles, by andrew goldman and josh resnick after they left activision. across eleven years it s
• 19 Nov 2009 AmiZilla — an anonymous donor known only as a former netscape executive put $4,205.61 into a community pot to get mozilla running on amigaos, then pulled the mon
• 23 Nov 2009 Cyworld US — in korea, cyworld had something like nine out of ten people under twenty. sk telecom opened a thirty-person office in san francisco in 2006 and shippe
• 24 Nov 2009 POWDER — eighty four days separate the publication of powder as a w3c recommendation from the closing of the group that wrote it. the spec was supposed to be h
• 26 Nov 2009 Mininova — mininova was the default torrent index for the late 2000s, back when ten million visits a day was a thing a torrent site could have. a dutch court tol
• 30 Nov 2009 Zembly — sun microsystems spent 2008 arguing that the next generation of software would be small social apps written by people who were not professional develo
• Dec 2009 Metropolitan Home — metropolitan home launched as apartment life at meredith in 1969 and rebranded to its final name in april 1981. hachette filipacchi media bought the t
• Dec 2009 BTChina — btchina was the tracker most of china pointed its bittorrent client at, an index of films and shows that ran on foreign fansubs and cheap broadband. o
• Dec 2009 Kludge — arturo perez ran a music magazine out of los angeles from 2000 with a masthead of more than twenty people working under him, and the thing it was know
• 3 Dec 2009 Wikivoices — on 4 march 2008 a handful of wikipedia editors got on skype, pressed record, and called it not the wikipedia weekly because there was already a wikipe
• 6 Dec 2009 Favrd — dean allen pulled it offline on a sunday in december 2009 and left a note saying stars on twitter had become take-out menus hung on the doors of other
• 8 Dec 2009 Imeem — imeem was the music social network that briefly looked like the future. it had a free ad-supported streaming player with playlists you could embed in
• 8 Dec 2009 PowerQuest PartitionMagic — partitionmagic was the boot floppy you reached for when you wanted to make room for a second os without wiping the disk. powerquest invented the categ
• 8 Dec 2009 Indeo Video — intel architecture labs shipped indeo in november 1992 alongside video for windows, and it was one of the first codecs that could play video on an ord
• 9 Dec 2009 Monopoly City Streets — three million in play money and every street google maps knew about, against a server that fell over under the weight of people trying to register. ha
• 14 Dec 2009 FireTune — mozilla's trademark policy killed this one, and totalidea said so on the page where the download used to be. firetune was a free windows utility that
• 15 Dec 2009 Teletext (UK) — teletext ltd was the commercial side of the uk teletext signal. it ran on itv and channel 4 from 1 january 1993, after taking the franchise from oracl
• 15 Dec 2009 Planet Sound — john earls edited a music magazine that lived inside a television signal, and enough of the british music press quoted it back that the bbc and nme bo
• 15 Dec 2009 Psystar — apple filed in the northern district of california on 3 july 2008, weeks after the first machines went out, and never lost a round of it afterwards. p
• 15 Dec 2009 Yahoo! World of Star Wars — yahoo spent the last quarter of 2009 deleting things. geocities went in october, and seven weeks later the star wars site went the same way, with thir
• 31 Dec 2009 Microsoft Encarta — the multimedia encyclopedia that came on cd-rom and later dvd. microsoft bought funk & wagnalls in 1989, dressed it up with video clips and panoramic
• 2009 Swatch Internet Time (.beats) — swatch's 1998 attempt to replace timezones for the internet age. the day was divided into 1000 beats. each beat was about 86 seconds. the meridian was
• 2009 Suncoast Motion Picture Company — suncoast was a 90s and 00s american mall video retailer, peaking around 400 stores before the streaming era. parent musicland filed bankruptcy in 2003
• 2009 easyInternetCafé — easyinternetcafe was stelios haji-ioannou's bet that the internet cafe would become a high-street utility, the same way easyjet had become a low-cost
• 2009 In2TV — in2tv was aol and warner bros putting the warner television archive on the web for free in march 2006, paid for by one or two minutes of advertising p
• 2009 Metababy — metababy opened in november 1998 on a single rule. any address under the domain was a page, and any page could be rewritten by anyone who found it, wi
• Dec 2009 Radio UserLand — userland demoed it as pike in march 2000 and shipped it properly a year later at $39.95 for the year, which bought a desktop program plus hosting at r
• 2009 Ircle — ircle was how you got onto irc from a macintosh. olaf titz wrote the first version in think pascal and released it in 1993 under the gpl through versi
• 31 Dec 2009 DATAPAC — canada switched on the first public data network designed from the start for x.25 in 1976, and then kept it running for thirty three years. it was sup
• 31 Dec 2009 WorldSpace — noah samara spent the early 1990s persuading the international telecommunication union to invent a radio band, and in 1999 he used it to point two sat
• 31 Dec 2009 Net Jet — hasbro sold american children a game console with no processor in it. the net jet was a gamepad you plugged into a windows pc, which then downloaded t
• 31 Dec 2009 Netzeitung — m. dumont schauberg announced on 6 november 2009 that it was giving up the concept of an internet newspaper with its own newsroom, for economic reason
• 31 Dec 2009 Storytlr — laurent eschenauer wrote storytlr to power his own homepage, then he and alard weisscher put a proper interface on it and started hosting it for stran
• 31 Dec 2009 XHTML 2.0 — for seven years the w3c drafted a version of html that would not run in any browser built for the previous one. xhtml 2.0 dropped backward compatibili

~ 2008 ~

• 1 Jan 2008 Court TV — court tv was the cable channel that steven brill built around live american courtroom coverage between 1991 and 2008. the OJ simpson criminal trial in
• 2008 Sconex — sconex was a dorm-built high-school sn that timed its 2004 launch correctly, scaled to half a million registered users on word of mouth, and sold to a
• 2008 Rojo — rojo stood for rss with mojo, and the pitch was that reading feeds should behave like a network instead of an inbox. you tagged stories and handed the
• 2008 Game Boy Micro — game boy micro was nintendo shrinking the game boy advance down to roughly the size of an nes controller, with a two inch backlit screen and swappable
• 2008 Intel Viiv — two years after intel announced it, viiv was a sticker on a computer that nobody in the shop could explain. the plan was centrino for the living room:
• 2008 PC-cillin — los angeles in 1988, and a copy protection dongle whose profits paid for the pivot into antivirus. trend micro's first real product was named like a p
• 2008 e-manga — in 1997, a year before most people in my country had a modem, kodansha was charging 500 yen a month for manga that moved. e-manga started as morning o
• Jan 2008 Namesys — reiserfs was the fast one, the journaling filesystem that beat ext3 on small files and shipped as the default on suse. the company behind it was effec
• 2008 ThunderHawk — $49.95 a year, or $5.95 a month, to look at the web on a phone in 2002. the handset never rendered anything: bitstream's servers fetched the page, lai
• 2008 ScribbleWiki — simon koldyk was nineteen when he started scribblewiki in a vancouver bedroom in june 2007 and funded it out of the proceeds of a previous site. eight
• 2008 System Commander — v communications of san jose sold a boxed utility whose entire job was the three seconds before an operating system loads. system commander arrived in
• 4 Jan 2008 Total Hi Def — warner home video stood up at ces in january 2007 and unveiled a disc with hd dvd on one face and blu-ray on the other, promised for the second half o
• 8 Jan 2008 NetCaptor — adam stiles wanted the tabs he already had in his html editor to exist in his browser, so he wrote them himself and published simulbrowse on 4 january
• 15 Jan 2008 ezboard — ezboard was a free hosted-forum platform vanchau nguyen launched in 1996, written in smalltalk visualworks 3.1 with jay o'connor on a flat-file object
• 17 Jan 2008 WebSideStory — websidestory was an early enterprise web analytics company, founded in san diego on 10 september 1996 by blaise barrelet. its two main products were h
• 25 Jan 2008 VerticalNet — verticalnet ran 43 trade portals for industries nobody writes nostalgia posts about, water treatment and solid waste handling among them. the pitch wa
• 1 Feb 2008 Sony ImageStation — imagestation was sony's online photo service. it launched in november 1997 with photonet as a joint venture, ran for a decade as sony's flickr-and-pri
• Feb 2008 RawSugar — palo alto, june 2005. ofer ben-shachar and a small team shipped rawsugar into the middle of the tagging boom, betting that if enough people labeled th
• 11 Feb 2008 Reeltime.tv — melbourne had a download-to-own movie store running in February 2007, which put australia ahead of nearly everywhere outside the united states, and th
• 13 Feb 2008 Ageia PhysX — ageia sold an add-in card whose only job was physics. it reached shops in may 2006 at around two hundred and fifty dollars, from asus and bfg, and the
• 14 Feb 2008 Think Secret — nicholas ciarelli started think secret in 1999, at thirteen, and wrote it under the name nick deplume. it became the most accurate apple rumor site of
• 14 Feb 2008 Yahoo! Design — yahoo ran a design innovation team, called yHaus inside the building, and gave it a public site at design.yahoo.com to show nine data-visualization pr
• 19 Feb 2008 HD DVD — hd dvd was the optical disc format toshiba and nec built to follow up dvd. blu-ray was sony's answer to the same question, and the consumer market got
• 19 Feb 2008 Sharper Image — sharper image started in 1977 as richard thalheimer's san francisco mail-order side hustle selling a runner's chronograph out of his apartment. by the
• 19 Feb 2008 PrivatePhone — netzero switched off its voice business on 15 december 2007 and the free voicemail number went with it. for twenty months privatephone had given anyon
• 22 Feb 2008 Tekel — the republic bought out the ottoman tobacco régie in 1925 and ran tobacco and alcohol as a state monopoly under the name tekel from 1932. it made the
• 25 Feb 2008 Perpetual Entertainment — perpetual took on two massively multiplayer games at once before it had shipped a single one. gods and heroes: rome rising was announced in march 2005
• 27 Feb 2008 Iron Lore Entertainment — iron lore was the studio brian sullivan opened with paul chieffo in 2000 in maynard massachusetts after leaving ensemble. titan quest in june 2006 was
• 27 Feb 2008 JotSpot — jotspot was a hosted wiki built by joe kraus and graham spencer, the excite founders coming back for a second round with google money floating around.
• 29 Feb 2008 Stage6 — stage6 was divx inc.'s answer to youtube: the same upload model but encoded in divx at up to 1080p. bandwidth costs ran around $1m a month and copyrig
• Feb 2008 ConnectU — the winklevoss twins started designing harvardconnection with their classmate divya narendra in december 2002. they brought mark zuckerberg onto the p
• Mar 2008 Netscape Navigator — the first browser most people used. it was a real product you could buy in a shrink-wrapped box at the store. microsoft bundled internet explorer with
• Mar 2008 Trinitron — trinitron was sony's picture tube, and for most of forty years it was the one you wanted. it was announced in april 1968 with a single electron gun an
• 3 Mar 2008 Talk City — talk city launched in july 1996 as a chat service from liveworld productions, a campbell california startup founded by peter friedman and jenna woodul
• 3 Mar 2008 AllPeers — on 2 march 2008 allpeers announced it was closing, and the service stopped the following day, eighteen months after the public beta. it was a firefox
• 5 Mar 2008 Go!Zilla — go!zilla was the loud one. it broke a file into pieces, pulled the pieces at the same time, and picked the download back up when the phone line droppe
• 6 Mar 2008 WhenU SaveNow — whenu save arrived bundled with free software you actually wanted and then served you pop-ups matched to whatever site you were looking at. the compan
• 13 Mar 2008 Capazoo — capazoo raised more than twenty-five million dollars and never got past ten thousand users. the montreal site paid you for posting, in a currency call
• 14 Mar 2008 Ezmo — oslo built a music locker and ran out of road in nine months. ezmo took your itunes library, put it on a server and let you hand listening access to t
• 15 Mar 2008 Consumating — consumating threw out the dating profile form and replaced it with tags. you described yourself in words and other people added words to you, and what
• 19 Mar 2008 Pay By Touch — pay by touch bolted fingerprint readers onto supermarket checkouts across america and enrolled around three million people who liked the idea of leavi
• 24 Mar 2008 TorrentSpy — torrentspy was one of the big torrent index sites of the 2003-2008 window. peak around 2007 it indexed over a million torrents and was running in the
• 24 Mar 2008 Automatix — ubuntu's own cto said in november 2006 that he could not recommend it and that machines which had used it could not be given a clean upgrade path. peo
• 30 Mar 2008 Ricochet — metricom put spread-spectrum radios on lampposts across silicon valley in 1994 and sold subscribers the first taste of always-on wireless internet at
• 31 Mar 2008 Sony Connect Music Store — sony connect was sony's may 2004 to march 2008 attempt at an itunes store. the catalog ran through the sonicstage windows client and only played back
• 31 Mar 2008 Canadian Health Network — a national health information service run by the public health agency of canada from 1999, in both official languages, with 26 affiliated organization
• 31 Mar 2008 The 9 on Yahoo — nine web finds a day, numbered down the side of the video player, one of them usually a pepsi tenth sent in by somebody watching. yahoo put the show o
• 31 Mar 2008 TU-KA — 4,018,200 contracts at the end of june 2001, and the company that held them decided not to bid for a third generation license. tu-ka stayed on the old
• 31 Mar 2008 Stormfront Studios — fourteen million copies sold and over half a billion dollars at retail across twenty years, and the studio still could not survive its publisher going
• 1 Apr 2008 ASCII Corporation — ascii started in 1977 as a computer magazine and became microsoft's first office outside america a year later. by 1980 its licensing of microsoft basi
• Apr 2008 ihug — nick and tim wood opened an internet company in auckland in 1994 with eight thousand dollars borrowed from their father john. ihug sold the first flat
• 4 Apr 2008 Radio.Blog.Club — the french audio embed service of the mid-2000s. you uploaded an mp3, got a small flash player you could paste into your skyblog or any other blog, an
• 7 Apr 2008 Snocap — snocap was shawn fanning's second act after napster. the plan was to take the peer-to-peer distribution mechanic and put a rights layer under it, so l
• 8 Apr 2008 Microsoft Visual Basic 6 — visual basic 6 launched in mid 1998 and became the most popular programming language in the world by tiobe count for several years. microsoft ended ma
• 21 Apr 2008 Gator / Claria — gator started as a 1998 password autofill utility from a stanford-mba founder and an ex-symantec co-founder. by 2003 it was bundled into every free do
• 22 Apr 2008 Morpheus — morpheus was the streamcast networks brand of file-sharing client, originally a fasttrack frontend before the network owner cut it off and forced a re
• 23 Apr 2008 Peerflix — for 99 cents plus postage you put a dvd you were finished with in an envelope to a stranger, and a different stranger sent you one you actually wanted
• 28 Apr 2008 Adobe GoLive — golive was Adobe's web authoring app from 1999 to 2008. it started life as a small mac-only HTML editor called GoLive CyberStudio. Adobe bought the co
• Apr 2008 tunespoon — students at the hochschule furtwangen put an online music channel on the web in 2004, a year before youtube existed. tunespoon streamed music videos i
• May 2008 iFilm — pre-youtube viral video destination. founded 1997 by raphael raphael as a filmmaker think tank, became one of the primary places where viral videos li
• 2 May 2008 Gemstar-TV Guide International — seven point nine billion dollars bought a magazine, and the magazine was never the point. gemstar owned the patents on putting a television schedule o
• 4 May 2008 Marshallese Wikipedia — the closure proposal opened in august 2007 with an inventory: one real article, and one translated prayer. eight months of voting followed, thirteen i
• 13 May 2008 JetBrains Omea — omea was jetbrains trying to sell software to somebody other than programmers, and it is the only time they ever seriously did. it swallowed your emai
• 15 May 2008 The All-Seeing Eye — the all-seeing eye was a windows program that told you which game servers were alive and what your ping to them looked like, across dozens of games at
• 15 May 2008 Brijit — nearly sixteen thousand abstracts in seven months, every one of them a long magazine article cut to about a hundred words by a freelancer who got paid
• 21 May 2008 Virtual Magic Kingdom — VMK was disney's promo MMO for the 50th anniversary of disneyland. it ran from may '05 to may '08 as a sulake-built virtual theme park where kids walk
• 22 May 2008 MacMinute — macminute was one of the pre-verge apple news blogs. stan flack ran it as a solo operation from prince edward island starting in may 2001, three month
• 23 May 2008 Microsoft Live Search Books — microsoft's google books rival. launched in beta december 2006 with publisher partners including cambridge, harvard, oxford, mcgraw-hill, pearson, sim
• 23 May 2008 Open Content Alliance — the open content alliance was announced in october 2005 by yahoo and the internet archive with a row of university libraries behind them, as the open
• 26 May 2008 Atlas.cz — a few people at a prague software firm built a search engine to show a client what microsoft's scripting language could do, and the demonstration turn
• 30 May 2008 QXL — qxl was britain's big bet that europe would run its online auctions on a homegrown site instead of an american one. tim jackson, an ex-journalist, sta
• 30 May 2008 Bear Stearns — two dollars a share, for a firm whose stock had been $172 sixteen months earlier and $93 six weeks earlier. that was the price jpmorgan agreed on sund
• 31 May 2008 Mondex — mondex was a smart card stored value cash system invented at natwest in the uk in 1990 by tim jones and graham higgins. mastercard bought a fifty one
• 31 May 2008 Front Mission Online — front mission online took a japanese tactics series about mechs called wanzers and turned it into a real time mmo on the playstation 2. it launched on
• Jun 2008 Aluka — aluka was an ithaka harbors project, started in 2003 on mellon and hewlett money, to scan the scholarly record of africa and put it back within reach
• 2 Jun 2008 Akimbo — akimbo was a video-on-demand set-top box launched in october 2004 by former replaytv exec steve shannon, paired with a $200-300 thomson-built device a
• 5 Jun 2008 Bidville — bidville never reached turkey at any meaningful scale. it was one of the late-1990s eBay alternatives that the US trade press kept hopeful coverage on
• 12 Jun 2008 Xgl — february 2006, a novell demo showed a linux desktop rotating on the faces of a cube with windows you could see through, and for about eighteen months
• 12 Jun 2008 Gobuntu — mark shuttleworth wanted an ubuntu with nothing in it the free software foundation would refuse, and in october 2007 he got one. eight months later jo
• 13 Jun 2008 Google Browser Sync — a firefox extension out of google labs, free from 8 june 2006, that pushed your bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and open tabs to google's servers
• 13 Jun 2008 HD VMD — twenty gigabytes stacked on four red-laser layers, sold in a player that cost one hundred and eighty-nine dollars with twenty films to its name. new m
• 18 Jun 2008 MSN Radio — june 18, 2008: microsoft switched the radio off inside msn music and left one line saying the service had been discontinued. for the previous eighteen
• 18 Jun 2008 NetManage — zvi alon, an engineer out of the technion, started netmanage in cupertino in 1990 and sold a tcp/ip stack for a version of windows that had no idea th
• 23 Jun 2008 6nergies.net — the first professional social network in france, built by alain lefebvre from 2004 and named after the six degrees of separation. it reached more than
• 24 Jun 2008 Windows Live for TV — codenamed nemo, then orbit, then shipped to the public as windows live for tv. the plan was to put messenger and spaces on the television through wind
• 30 Jun 2008 COMIC SEED! — penguin shobo went bankrupt on 28 october 2005 and most of its catalog went out of print with it. the one division still making money was a web comic
• Jun 2008 BrainBoost — assaf rozenblatt spent 2004 and 2005 building a search engine that answered the question rather than listing pages that mentioned it, and it tested we
• 1 Jul 2008 Powerset — powerset was the semantic-search startup that promised to let you type a question instead of a keyword. barney pell founded it in 2005 with steve newc
• 1 Jul 2008 Planet Internet — for about a decade there was a species of company that sold you a dial-up line and also employed journalists to tell you what had happened that day. p
• Jul 2008 The Lifehouse Method — pete townshend wrote lifehouse in 1971 as a story about music generated from a person's own data, and the who could not build it because the machines
• 2 Jul 2008 AllOfMP3 — allofmp3 was a russian music store that sold downloads at roughly ten cents a track. mediaservices inc launched it in 2000, paid royalties to a russia
• 4 Jul 2008 CoolWebSearch — coolwebsearch changed your homepage to coolwebsearch.com and then made itself extremely hard to take back off. webroot's audits in early 2005 found it
• 8 Jul 2008 Usenet (the ISP-bundled era) — the original distributed discussion network. text-only newsgroups about every possible topic. for thirty years you got nntp access free with your isp
• Jul 2008 Sierra Entertainment — sierra started in 1979 in simi valley as on-line systems, founded by ken and roberta williams. roberta wrote mystery house in 1980, the first computer
• 9 Jul 2008 Apple iCards — apple introduced icards on january 5, 2000 as one of the launch features of itools, the free @mac.com bundle steve jobs unveiled at macworld san franc
• 15 Jul 2008 Monitor110 — jeff stewart started it in 2003 to sell wall street an early warning system built out of blogs and message boards. twenty million dollars later it had
• 17 Jul 2008 PodTech.net — podtech.net was a menlo park podcast and video studio founded in may 2005 by john furrier. the pitch was a tech-focused podcast network aimed at silic
• 20 Jul 2008 Yael Mevakeret BaKolnoa (יעל מבקרת בקולנוע) — june 1998, two students in israel, one who could write and one who could build the pages, put up the first hebrew site that existed for nothing but fi
• 25 Jul 2008 Redlasso — redlasso recorded american television and radio off the air. it then gave bloggers a way to cut a piece out of that recording and drop it into a post.
• Jul 2008 Omnidrive — nik cubrilovic started omnidrive in wollongong in late 2004 and had twenty thousand private beta users across seventy countries before dropbox opened
• 25 Jul 2008 Colombo-BT — the guardia di finanza of bergamo reached two administrators on 25 july 2008 and the servers went with them. colombo-bt was the italian bittorrent hub
• 29 Jul 2008 Scrabulous — scrabulous was the unofficial scrabble that facebook picked up before hasbro did. two brothers in kolkata shipped it in 2006, it hit half a million mo
• 30 Jul 2008 YouOS — youos was a webshaka product, four y combinator founders in palo alto, and in 2006 it put a windowed desktop inside a browser tab at a time when that
• 31 Jul 2008 Windows Live Expo — codenamed fremont, this was microsoft's attempt to beat craigslist by adding the one thing craigslist had deliberately refused to build, which was a s
• 1 Aug 2008 The Sims Online — the sims online launched december 17, 2002 from maxis and ea. it was the sims you knew from the boxed game, except your neighbors were other paying su
• Aug 2008 Sony SonicStage — sonicstage was sony's attempt to be itunes. it managed atrac music files, tied them to your machine through openmg drm, and pushed them onto a walkman
• 1 Aug 2008 lonelygirl15 — lonelygirl15 launched 16 june 2006 as a youtube vlog from bree avery, a homeschooled teenager. the videos pulled into a slowly-developing cult conspir
• 4 Aug 2008 Mercora — mercora was a licensed peer-to-peer streaming radio service founded in 2003 by srivats sampath, the ex-mcafee.com and ex-netscape executive. it went l
• 5 Aug 2008 e-Bullion — e-bullion let you hold a balance in grams of gold and wire it to anybody with an account, ten years before bitcoin made that idea sound modern. it gre
• 6 Aug 2008 I Am Rich — armin heinrich put a glowing red gem on the app store for nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents, which was the highest price apple al
• 7 Aug 2008 Fury — fury was an mmo with the world taken out of it. no quests and no leveling curve, only arenas where players fought each other with instant-cast spells
• 8 Aug 2008 Linspire — the desktop linux that walmart sold on $299 microtel pcs starting in 2002 with a wine compatibility layer that promised to run microsoft office. micha
• 8 Aug 2008 Streamload — streamload was the 1998 cloud-storage pioneer steve iverson built out of his data-compression thesis work. the service got rebranded mediamax at demof
• 12 Aug 2008 Teleflip — "we've gone as far as we can with our financial resources, and the piggy bank is empty." that was the chief executive writing to subscribers on 12 aug
• Aug 2008 theGlobe.com — theglobe.com was the dot-com bubble's IPO mascot. two cornell undergraduates, stephan paternot and todd krizelman, launched it on april 1, 1995 as a s
• 21 Aug 2008 Biographicon — a wiki for everybody, including the people wikipedia would have deleted. ethan herdrick and daniel terhorst opened it on 1 march 2008 with y combinato
• 22 Aug 2008 Helio — helio was the sk telecom joint venture that tried to import the korean handset-and-service combo into the american MVNO market between 2006 and 2008.
• 26 Aug 2008 DeRemate — deremate launched in 1999 as the regional latin american online-auction marketplace competing with mercadolibre, founded by alec oxenford and others o
• 31 Aug 2008 PlaysForSure — playsforsure launched january 2004 as a microsoft certification program for portable media devices and online music stores using windows media drm. th
• Sep 2008 Wippit — paul myers started wippit in 2000 on the idea that peer to peer file sharing could be made legal if somebody paid the labels first, which is not a sen
• Sep 2008 SunCom Wireless — suncom started in january 1999 as triton pcs, holding spectrum that at&t wireless had handed over across the carolinas and down into georgia, and sell
• Sep 2008 Nintendo e-Reader — the e-reader was a scanner that plugged into a game boy advance and read paper cards. you pulled a card through the slot and got a minigame, or someti
• 4 Sep 2008 Adobe FlashPaper — flashpaper started life at a company called blue pacific software, got picked up by macromedia, and first shipped to the public bundled inside contrib
• 4 Sep 2008 Amazon Unbox — amazon's first video store did not stream anything. you installed a windows program called the unbox video player, bought a film, waited for a few gig
• 15 Sep 2008 SmarterChild — the AIM bot from 2001. you added it to your buddy list and asked it stuff. weather, definitions, song lyrics, dirty jokes if you knew the trick. Activ
• 15 Sep 2008 Lehman Brothers — a dry goods store on commerce street in montgomery, alabama, taking raw cotton as payment because the customers had no cash to give. that was the 1840
• 18 Sep 2008 Wallop — wallop started in 2003 as a microsoft research social-network experiment, spun out as a silicon valley startup on 25 april 2006 with karl jacob as ceo
• 22 Sep 2008 TagWorld — tagworld was a 2005 myspace clone built by evan rifkin and fred krueger in los angeles, with a wysiwyg page editor and a widget platform that let user
• 22 Sep 2008 MatMice — emily boyd wrote the software when she was sixteen and her two younger sisters did the graphics. what they made was geocities for children: a page bui
• 25 Sep 2008 Washington Mutual — on a thursday night, after the west coast branches had closed for the day, the office of thrift supervision took washington mutual away from its share
• 27 Sep 2008 Galeon — galeon was a gecko browser built for gnome by marco pesenti gritti, first released in june 2000, and for two years it was the quickest way to use the
• 28 Sep 2008 Yahoo! Mash — yahoo mash was the social network where your friends could edit your profile unless you blocked them. it was yahoo's fourth swing at the category afte
• 28 Sep 2008 MuPAD — paderborn, 1989: a research group starts building a computer algebra system meant to run on parallel hardware, which is where the name comes from. mul
• 29 Sep 2008 CMGI — cmgi started as a company that sold mailing lists of university professors to textbook publishers and ended up, for about eighteen months, the purest
• Sep 2008 MusicMatch Jukebox — musicmatch was the windows app that ripped a cd into mp3 and tagged it cleanly in one window. yahoo bought it for $160m in 2004 and rebranded it as ya
• 30 Sep 2008 Yahoo Music Unlimited — yahoo music unlimited was a subscription streaming service from 2005 to 2008 that ran on the musicmatch backbone yahoo bought the year before. the pri
• 30 Sep 2008 Vongo — vongo was starz entertainment's first attempt at a direct-to-consumer streaming and download service, launched at ces in january 2006 with a thousand-
• 30 Sep 2008 Deepfish — 29 march 2007, three months before the first iphone shipped: microsoft live labs put out an invite-only preview of a mobile browser that did the work
• Oct 2008 MTV Overdrive — mtv overdrive was mtv networks' first serious attempt at a broadband video portal, launched april 25 2005 with six channels of music videos, artist in
• Oct 2008 Google Web Accelerator — a free program you installed to make web pages load faster, back when a lot of them still crawled. it compressed data and guessed which links you woul
• Oct 2008 Netbul — netbul opened in 1999 as the first real turkish portal, a yahoo-shaped directory somebody had built by hand, with a search box that could be told to l
• Oct 2008 Ciudad Internet — argentina's biggest newspaper decided in 1996 that the phone line was worth owning, and put its name on a dial-up service and a portal at the same add
• 1 Oct 2008 DAG — a telephone company and a newspaper publisher started a free daily together in may 2007, on the theory that a printed page could hand you off to a web
• 4 Oct 2008 DarkMarket — an fbi agent working out of pittsburgh spent two years inside the biggest english-language carding forum in the world as master splyntr, a spammer wit
• 5 Oct 2008 Accoona — a former american president lent it his face and a reigning world chess champion sat down against its toolbar on television. accoona spent four years
• 6 Oct 2008 Bolt.com — bolt was one of the first sites to hand every teenager a real page of their own. it ran for over a decade as a us teen-and-college community. a 2006 u
• 9 Oct 2008 TXTMob — tad hirsch wrote it as an mit doctoral student so that protesters at the two american party conventions of 2004 could text each other in groups. about
• 9 Oct 2008 Amstrad — alan sugar was twenty one in 1968, selling car aerials and cheap electrical goods out of a van, and the company he registered that year spent two deca
• 15 Oct 2008 Adobe Ultra — adobe bought serious magic in october 2006, shipped its keyer once as adobe ultra inside creative suite 3, and then left it out of creative suite 4 wh
• 20 Oct 2008 JumpTV — toronto, 2000: a broadcast lawyer named farrel miller started buying internet rights to national television channels nobody in north america could oth
• 24 Oct 2008 MOPy fish — ten million downloads by the year 2000 and an entry in the guinness book, for a screensaver whose actual job was to make you print more. hewlett-packa
• 30 Oct 2008 BlogRush — 3.4 billion blog post headlines went through it in twelve months, which is a number that belongs to a successful product. john reese launched blogrush
• 31 Oct 2008 AOL Hometown — aol hometown was the free web hosting service attached to aol subscriptions from 1998 to 2008. it offered drag-and-drop tools called "1-2-3 publish" a
• Oct 2008 eBay Express — ebay express was a fixed-price marketplace that ebay launched in april 2006. it took the inventory ebay sellers had already posted with buy-it-now pri
• 31 Oct 2008 AOL Journals — aol asked its members what the word blog meant to them, and the answers were bad enough that the product shipped in august 2003 under the name journal
• 31 Oct 2008 Digital Railroad — on 28 october 2008 digital railroad told its members the company had shut down and they had around twenty four hours to get their images out. the serv
• Nov 2008 Sony EyeToy — the eyetoy was a usb webcam for the playstation 2 that read color and motion from a couch, three years before nintendo's wii remote and seven before t
• Nov 2008 GameZnFlix — franklin, kentucky is where somebody decided to fight netflix and gamefly at the same time, on postage, with a public shell listed at fractions of a c
• Nov 2008 ABBAMAIL — two men in sydney who had run the australian abba fan club from 1976 to 1983 started a mailing list on 13 january 1997, because the list that already
• 4 Nov 2008 megabbs — the man who ran it quit because the police kept calling. megabbs was a 2channel clone that opened on 3 june 2000 and closed without warning eight and
• 11 Nov 2008 Yugo — kragujevac took a fiat 128, cut the back off it, and built the result for twenty-eight years. malcolm bricklin brought it to the united states in 1986
• 13 Nov 2008 Fire Joe Morgan — on 13 november 2008, at 8:54 in the evening, three anonymous writers posted a goodbye and changed their own slogan into the past tense. for three and
• 14 Nov 2008 Windows Marketplace — windows marketplace was microsoft's first attempt at a centralized software store for windows, launched 12 october 2004 with 93,000 products and a dig
• 18 Nov 2008 Championship Gaming Series — directv put more than fifty million dollars of news corporation money into turning competitive gaming into a television league with salaried city fran
• 21 Nov 2008 BBC Local Video — the bbc wanted video journalism on around sixty of its local websites and costed the plan at up to sixty-eight million pounds across four years. regio
• 24 Nov 2008 SearchMash — the logo was the experiment. google built a search site in october 2006 with its own name removed from every corner of it, on the theory that people r
• 24 Nov 2008 EstDomains — icann does not often terminate a registrar, and in october 2008 it terminated this one over a single clause about convicted officers. estdomains was a
• 28 Nov 2008 MAGNA — in 2006 almost no japanese publisher ran its own manga site, and gentosha comics ran three. magna was the free one, a monthly issue you downloaded on
• 28 Nov 2008 Antics3D — development costs that outran revenue closed antics technologies in 2008 and the software went with it. antics3d let a director drop characters into a
• Dec 2008 Yahoo Kickstart — yahoo kickstart was yahoo's 2007 attempt at a college alumni professional network. undergraduates got automatically placed into their university's pag
• Dec 2008 Mixwit — mixwit let you build a mixtape on the web as a little animated cassette you could embed anywhere, then fill it with songs streamed from around the int
• Dec 2008 幻蔵 (GENZO) — gentosha comics started selling a manga magazine as a monthly download in november 2004, years before anyone would have called that a market. genzo wa
• 2 Dec 2008 MP3.com — this was the place where bands uploaded their own mp3s, before anyone really knew what to do about music on the internet. it ran for a few years. then
• 2 Dec 2008 Entellium — entellium sold customer relationship management software out of seattle and told its investors it was selling roughly four times as much of it as it w
• 2 Dec 2008 WinFixer — winfixer ran a scan nobody asked for and reported infections that were not there, then charged forty dollars to remove them. it arrived through ad net
• Dec 2008 Yahoo LAUNCHcast — launchcast started as the radio side of LAUNCH Media on november 11 1999, with todd beaupré and jeff boulter building a recommender that learned from
• 3 Dec 2008 Yahoo! Live — yahoo opened a webcam broadcasting site on 6 february 2008 and it fell over the same evening, because there was not enough bandwidth standing behind i
• 4 Dec 2008 Infostore.org — on 4 december 2008 the ukrainian interior ministry spent twelve hours inside an office on tverska street in kyiv and left with the machines. infostore
• 8 Dec 2008 Stikkit — a sticky note that read plain english and turned a date into a reminder on its own, built by rael dornfest at values of n. twitter bought the company
• 9 Dec 2008 Caramail — the french webmail and chat rooms service from 1997 to 2008. before MSN took over here, this is where french teenagers met strangers, sent first email
• 12 Dec 2008 MobLogic — eight and a half months is the whole life of it. cbs bought wallstrip in may 2007 for about four million dollars and told the team to make more short
• 15 Dec 2008 Pownce — twitter rival from 2007. made by kevin rose (digg), leah culver, and daniel burka. you could share short messages, files, links, events. cleaner inter
• 15 Dec 2008 iTVP — twelve million złoty of polish science ministry money went into a television system that deliberately avoided the public internet, because in 2005 the
• 16 Dec 2008 Movielink — hollywood's studio-cartel attempt at legal movie downloads, owned jointly by paramount, sony, mgm, universal, and warner bros. it ran from november 20
• 16 Dec 2008 Flip.com — condé nast spent two years trying to build a place where american teenage girls would make digital scrapbooks and show them to each other. flip.com ca
• 18 Dec 2008 Filterset.G — before there was easylist there was one person's text file, updated weekly and downloaded by enough people to break the hosting bill under it. graham
• 19 Dec 2008 eyeSpot — eyespot was a browser video-mashup tool out of san diego, built so you could mix clips and music together online and pass the result around. jim kaska
• 19 Dec 2008 Google Ride Finder — between 2005 and 2008 google labs ran an experiment that showed you where the taxis actually were. ride finder pulled gps positions off participating
• 24 Dec 2008 CastleCops — paul laudanski took a job at microsoft in june 2008 and nobody took his. six months later the volunteer security community he and robin had run since
• 31 Dec 2008 Tickle.com (eMode) — emode.com launched in 1999 as a san francisco quiz site that ran on a single viral email to four hundred friends. it grew into millions of monthly vis
• 31 Dec 2008 AOL Pictures — aol pictures was the photo-storage and online-print arm of aol's consumer portal, descended from the 1997 you've got pictures kodak deal that scanned
• 31 Dec 2008 Google Lively — google lively was a web-based virtual environment built as a 20 percent project by niniane wang and her team. you installed a windows plugin and picke
• 2008 A9.com — a9 was amazon's 2003 attempt to be a search engine. it gave you multiple columns at once: web results from google on one side, amazon book search in t
• 31 Dec 2008 Xdrive — xdrive was an online file storage service founded in 1999 in santa monica. aol acquired it on 4 august 2005 for around 30 million dollars and rolled i
• Dec 2008 Cdigix — cdigix sold subscription music access to american universities so the campus IT department could legally point students at a service that was not the
• Dec 2008 Sharp Zaurus — sharp shipped the sl-5500 zaurus in march 2002 as the first mass-market linux pda. you could log in as root and ssh into your machine over a cf wifi c
• 2008 Casio Cassiopeia — casio's cassiopeia was the first hardware partner microsoft used to ship windows ce to a wide audience. the a-series handheld pcs of 1997 had small ke
• 2008 Names Database — names database launched in 2003 with an offer stated plainly on the front page: hand over the email addresses of people you know and we will help you
• 31 Dec 2008 ABIT — abit was the taipei motherboard company that moved the cpu multiplier off a row of jumpers and into the bios, which is the single change that turned o
• 31 Dec 2008 VideoCipher — videocipher was the analog scrambling system that closed off american satellite television. linkabit built it in 1983 and hbo switched it on full time
• 2008 Motorola Razr V3 — one hundred and thirty million units, and hardly any of them bought for what the phone actually did. the razr v3 went on sale in september 2004 with t
• 2008 Dark and Light — a courtroom in france settled this one. npcube, a five-person studio on reunion island, shipped an mmo in june 2006 that promised a world of 39,000 sq

~ 2007 ~

• 2007 Amazon zShops — amazon zshops was bezos's second attempt at being more than a bookstore. it ran from september 1999 to roughly 2007 as a fixed-price third-party marke
• 2007 Bomis — bomis was a san diego web portal founded by jimmy wales and two chicago friends in 1996. it ran webrings around a babe search engine for the revenue s
• Jan 2007 PatroNet — todd rundgren's 1998 subscription service, and the first place on the internet where you could pay a musician directly and in advance for records that
• 2007 IBM Microdrive — ibm announced it on 9 september 1998 and shipped it the following june, a spinning hard disk small enough to sit in a compactflash type ii slot, 340 m
• 2007 Feedster — scott johnson started it in march 2003 and merged it three months later with francois schiettecatte's rss-search, and for about two years feedster was
• 2007 Game Boy Advance Video — majesco put the first video paks on shelves on 12 may 2004: forty-odd minutes of american children's television on a light grey game boy cartridge for
• 2007 3721 (Yahoo Assistant) — 3721 was the plug-in that taught china to hate plug-ins. zhou hongyi built it in 1998 so people could type a chinese word into internet explorer inste
• 2007 Todito.com — todito was built in 1999 by a private university in monterrey and turned into one of mexico's largest consumer portals with television money behind it
• 2007 Bonus.com — bonus.com opened in january 1997 with five hundred games and one idea: wrap the whole site in a fake browser so a child could not click their way out
• 2007 NetAid — cisco and the un development programme built an anti poverty campaign around a webcast and put it on three stages across two continents at once on 9 o
• 2007 Server.com — sean brunnock put a personal information manager on the web in september 1996 and spent the next six years adding to it, a threaded message board serv
• 2007 Esuvee — in january 2005 the attorneys general of every american state put twenty-seven million dollars into a campaign about suv rollovers, and the money came
• 2007 GoTrump.com — gotrump.com was a travel booking site launched at trump tower on 24 january 2006 with the tagline "the art of the travel deal". underneath it was trav
• 2007 Club Nokia — club nokia was a handset manufacturer trying to sell you things directly, which the mobile operators were never going to allow. it started in 1997 as
• 2007 X.400 — x.400 was the telecommunication union's design for electronic mail, published in 1984 and meant to be how the whole planet sent messages. it had messa
• 2007 Abilene Network — the abilene project started in april 1998, run by the university corporation for advanced internet development on fiber donated by qwest, with the ope
• 2007 HyperScan — mattel's answer to the question nobody asked: what if a console made you buy trading cards to unlock the characters. an rfid reader sat in the lid and
• 2007 Microsoft Fingerprint Reader — "the fingerprint reader is not a security feature and is intended to be used for convenience only." that sentence was sitting in microsoft's own getti
• Jan 2007 Visual J# — sun microsystems sued microsoft over a java virtual machine that failed the compliance tests, and visual j# is what microsoft shipped once the settlem
• Jan 2007 IBM Workplace — mike rhodin stood up at lotusphere in january 2007 and said the quiet part out loud: ibm had been confusing the hell out of its own customers. workpla
• 5 Jan 2007 eMule Paradise — vincent valade started emule paradise in 2004 as a teenager and closed it on 5 january 2007, after 48 hours in police custody. the site listed edonkey
• 5 Jan 2007 Pluck — october 2006 is when the consumer rss reader stopped being a business anybody wanted to be in, and pluck said so out loud before most of its competito
• 6 Jan 2007 Coliseum Books — the northwest corner of 57th street and broadway held a general bookstore from 1974 until the lease ran out at the end of january 2002. george leibson
• 8 Jan 2007 NTK — danny o'brien and dave green wrote a plain text email every friday for the people who worked in and around the british technology press, and for ten y
• 8 Jan 2007 GlobeXplorer — walnut creek, california, 1999. four executives out of a survey firm spun a nasa orthophoto project into the first business built on selling aerial an
• 12 Jan 2007 Cingular Wireless — cingular wireless was formed in april 2000 as a joint venture between sbc communications and bellsouth out of their respective wireless properties. it
• 15 Jan 2007 Aucland — fabrice grinda and sacha fosse-parisis launched aucland in april 1999 and within a year it was one of the three largest auction sites in europe, funde
• 24 Jan 2007 Ritual Entertainment — dallas in 1996 was full of studios spun out of the quake and duke nukem level scene, and ritual was one of the good ones. it shipped sin six weeks ahe
• 26 Jan 2007 BitPass — bitpass was a mountain view micropayment startup kurt huang and gyuchang jun founded in 2002. the service let users prefund an account by credit card
• 30 Jan 2007 3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet — the windows pinball that came with every microsoft plus! pack and then every copy of windows from 98 through xp. you launched it because the start men
• 30 Jan 2007 Microsoft Clippy — the animated paperclip in microsoft office. "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. microsoft turned him off by def
• Jan 2007 Microsoft Plus! — microsoft plus! was a paid windows add-on disc from 1995 to 2007. it gave you desktop themes and screen savers the base os shipped without, plus a han
• 30 Jan 2007 NetMeeting — netmeeting was the icon nobody clicked. microsoft shipped it bundled with internet explorer 3 in may 1996, and for a decade it sat in the start menu o
• 30 Jan 2007 Outlook Express — outlook express was the email program preinstalled on every windows machine for ten years. nobody bought it because nobody had to, and nobody loved it
• 30 Jan 2007 Active Desktop — active desktop arrived inside internet explorer 4 in september 1997 and replaced the windows wallpaper layer with a browser. alongside it came the cha
• 30 Jan 2007 Program Manager — program manager is what windows booted into between 1990 and 1995. one large window holding smaller windows, each of them full of icons you had sorted
• 30 Jan 2007 HyperTerminal — microsoft did not write hyperterminal. it licensed a cut-down version of a michigan company's terminal program in 1995 and dropped it into accessories
• 30 Jan 2007 EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions) — windows vista reached consumers on 30 january 2007 with the audio stack rewritten and the hardware path taken out, and every effect creative had spent
• 30 Jan 2007 NTBackup — the bkf file outlived the program that wrote it, and that is the whole story. ntbackup shipped with windows nt on 27 july 1993, written originally by
• 30 Jan 2007 ClipBook Viewer — windows for workgroups 3.1 arrived in october 1992 with a program that let you name the thing you had just copied and then publish it to the office ne
• 30 Jan 2007 Windows Address Book — every windows machine between 1996 and vista kept its contacts in one file ending in .wab, and outlook express read it, and so did anything else that
• 30 Jan 2007 Windows File Protection — dll hell was the name for what happened when an installer dropped an old system file on top of a newer one and took the machine down with it. microsof
• 30 Jan 2007 Direct Cable Connection — a laplink parallel cable and two windows machines got you a network before an ethernet card was a given, and the wizard that set it up sat in accessor
• Feb 2007 HomeChoice — homechoice was video on demand over a telephone line in 2000, which was several years before that sentence sounded reasonable to anyone. video network
• Feb 2007 Virgin.net — ntl and richard branson's group opened an internet provider together in november 1996 and put the virgin name on the front, which in britain was worth
• Feb 2007 Globix — globix started in manhattan selling apple hardware to printers and ended up owning twenty eight thousand miles of fiber and a million square feet of d
• Feb 2007 Radio Free Virgin — sixty-something channels, a downloadable player past a million installs within months of launching, and by march 2003 about 2.8 million unique listene
• Feb 2007 Ghostzilla — the problem it solved was the cubicle. ghostzilla drew a gecko browser inside the window of whatever you already had open, usually outlook, drained th
• Feb 2007 Neumu — michael goldberg built the first web music magazine and then built a second one. neumu went up in june 2001 with a ten-point album scale whose bottom
• 6 Feb 2007 Farallon Computing — a berkeley user group built a kit in 1986 that ran appletalk down ordinary telephone wire, and reese jones turned it into a company. phonenet and timb
• 7 Feb 2007 Singingfish — singingfish crawled the web for sound and moving pictures instead of text, which in 1999 was a hard problem nobody else particularly wanted. it ended
• 8 Feb 2007 NTL — ntl started in 1992 as an american company called international cabletel, buying up the fragmented british cable franchises one region at a time until
• 8 Feb 2007 Telewest — telewest was the other british cable company, the one holding the half of the country ntl did not. it started as a croydon franchise in 1984 and spent
• 10 Feb 2007 Dragon's Gate — dragon's gate opened to the public on genie in the spring of 1990 and ran for seventeen years as a text world with live game masters staging scenarios
• 26 Feb 2007 Fametracker — tara ariano and david t. cole started fametracker in 1999 out of toronto with adam sternbergh, a year after the same couple had started what became te
• 28 Feb 2007 Hitel — hitel was the largest of the four services that were the korean internet before the korean internet, a dial-up world of message boards and clubs you r
• Mar 2007 Clover Studio — clover studio was capcom letting its best directors run their own subsidiary for less than three years. it made okami and god hand back to back in 200
• Mar 2007 AOL Music Now — aol music now was a subscription music download store that aol acquired from circuit city in 2005 and operated for about sixteen months. in january 20
• Mar 2007 Microsoft Visual FoxPro — visual foxpro was the database-and-language combo that ran small accountancy and clinic software through the 90s and 2000s. fox software built it, mic
• 13 Mar 2007 AppForge — visual basic programmers who wanted their software to run on a palm pilot bought crossfire, and crossfire phoned a license server every time anything
• 16 Mar 2007 Micropal — christopher poll started micropal in london in 1985 with six other people and a question nobody was answering properly, which was whether a given mutu
• 20 Mar 2007 BBC Jam — the bbc built a free online curriculum for every school-age child in the country and spent ninety six million pounds of license fee money getting it t
• 31 Mar 2007 Tales of Eternia ONLINE — 諸般の事情 is the reason namco gave, which comes out in english as various circumstances and explains nothing at all. this was the tales series' first mmor
• Apr 2007 Peppercoin — peppercoin was an mit-spinout micropayment company silvio micali and ron rivest set up in waltham massachusetts in late 2001. the system batched small
• 1 Apr 2007 Telsim — telsim was the other number. turkcell was 0532 and telsim was 0542, and for most of the 1990s that prefix was the whole of what anybody knew about som
• Apr 2007 Weedshare — a media player update decided the files had been tampered with, and four years of work stopped working. weedshare sold songs wrapped in a format that
• 16 Apr 2007 Adobe ImageReady — imageready was the half of photoshop that handled the web. animated gifs, sliced table-layout images, rollover hover states. for nine years it shipped
• 23 Apr 2007 Oregano — a deputy mayor cut a tape to open a computer show in wakefield on 20 may 2000, and the product sharing top billing with the ceremony was a web browser
• 27 Apr 2007 grid.org — a screensaver that did chemistry. you installed it, left the machine on, and while nobody was typing it tested drug-like molecules against protein tar
• 27 Apr 2007 1mdc — 1mdc was digital gold that held no gold. you sent it e-gold and it credited you the same weight in its own units. because it was storing nothing itsel
• 29 Apr 2007 Socialite Rank — an anonymous blog that put twenty young manhattan socialites in numbered order every two weeks, from april 2006 to april 2007. the women in the rankin
• 2007 Innertube — cbs opened innertube on 5 may 2006 as its answer to youtube, a free advertiser-supported video channel living on cbs.com, carrying full episodes along
• 15 May 2007 Adobe FreeHand — freehand started at altsys in 1988 and passed through aldus and macromedia before adobe inherited it in the 2005 macromedia acquisition. by then adobe
• 18 May 2007 Foetry.com — foetry.com spent three years reading the winner lists and the judge lists of american poetry book contests and matching the names against each other.
• 29 May 2007 World Chess Network — a paid internet chess server from 1997, put together by master games international with money from the chess patron dato tan chin nam. it sold the roo
• 1 Jun 2007 Amp'd Mobile — amp'd mobile was the youth-targeted MVNO that mtv and universal music funded between 2005 and 2007 to sell ringtones and short-form video to 18-to-35-
• Jun 2007 Freeserve — freeserve invented the uk free-isp model, sold at the peak of the dot-com bubble for one point six five billion pounds, then got passed through wanado
• Jun 2007 Koan — a floppy disk published in april 1996 carried twelve pieces of music by brian eno that would never play the same way twice, along with the player that
• 1 Jun 2007 Linux Screen Reader — ibm changed its mind about gnome accessibility on 31 may 2007, and the following afternoon peter parente wrote to five mailing lists at once to explai
• 4 Jun 2007 LinkExchange — linkexchange started in march 1996 as a banner-exchange cooperative for small personal and small-business websites that did not have ad budgets. you j
• 16 Jun 2007 Yahoo! Auctions — yahoo auctions launched on september 14, 1998 as yahoo's answer to ebay. its main differentiator was free listings, with revenue coming from advertisi
• 29 Jun 2007 Derive — in 1977 a professor at the university of hawaii heard that a man in honolulu had lisp running on an intel 8080, and went to find him. david stoutemyer
• Jun 2007 Webjay — webjay was a playlist-sharing site that lucas gonze started in early 2004. you made a playlist by pasting in links to mp3 files that already existed s
• 30 Jun 2007 magnet — the n was for ntt and the s was for sanrio, and sanrio's president said he picked the name because a magnet has an n pole and an s pole. from november
• Jul 2007 BurnLounge — burnlounge sold you a digital music store with your name on it. packages ran from $29.95 to $429.95 a year and the storefronts were real, but retail m
• 1 Jul 2007 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards — a bad-movie awards outfit started in 1978 by two former ushers from a pasadena theater, which makes it older than the golden raspberries and a great d
• Jul 2007 Moviso — most of the north american mobile content market ran through one company, and almost nobody knew its name, because moviso built other people's storefr
• Jul 2007 Osiolki.net — internet explorer losing its majority is what ended osiolki.net, which has to be one of the stranger causes of death on this site. four people out of
• Jul 2007 Yahoo! News Underground — brad miskell made a yahoo news series about american subcultures, shot it and edited it and reported it himself, and wrote original songs about the pe
• 3 Jul 2007 Choctaw Wikipedia — johannes rohr spent six months protecting pages on a wiki almost nobody was writing in, then took it to meta himself on 21 may 2007 and asked for it t
• 6 Jul 2007 Backfence — one of the earliest and loudest bets on citizen journalism: hand each town a website, let the neighbors report their own news, pay for it with classif
• Jul 2007 Builder.com — on 3 july 2007 builder.com served its last homepage under its own name, and four days later the domain was redirecting to techrepublic. cnet had launc
• 10 Jul 2007 Muscogee Wikipedia — in june 2007 an editor called philip j opened a page on meta-wiki proposing that the muscogee wikipedia be closed, and the case was arithmetic rather
• 16 Jul 2007 SunRocket — the offer was a year of unlimited home telephone for a hundred and ninety nine dollars, paid up front. that is a wonderful price for the customer and
• 23 Jul 2007 AWeb — yvon rozijn wrote a web browser for the amiga in 1996, two years after commodore had gone bankrupt and the whole platform was supposed to be finished.
• 24 Jul 2007 Herero Wikipedia — zero. that is what hz.wikipedia.org reports when you ask it how many articles it has, and it is the only one of the seven language editions shut in 20
• 29 Jul 2007 Sichuan Yi Wikipedia — a closure proposal went up on 10 july 2007 saying this wikipedia had never had activity beyond account registration and bots. the only objection anyon
• 31 Jul 2007 MusicNet — musicnet was the second half of the major-label cartel attempt to build itunes before itunes existed. it shipped through aol with rationed streams and
• Jul 2007 Nikki Saito (日記才人) — before search engines were any good, and before anyone in japan said the word blog, you found web diaries through a directory that let readers vote. i
• 31 Jul 2007 Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE — 1,200 yen every thirty days bought you a desk in a fictional japanese high school, where the thing you did in place of fighting monsters was go to cla
• Aug 2007 Blingo — blingo was the american search-and-sweepstakes hybrid that put a google search box on top of the publishers clearing house prize model. you entered a
• Aug 2007 CoralQQ — shenzhen police arrested chen shoufu in beijing in august 2007 and took the servers. he had spent six years giving away a patched build of tencent qq
• 3 Aug 2007 Adobe Authorware — authorware was the icon-and-flowchart e-learning authoring tool of choice from the late eighties through the early two-thousands. michael allen launch
• 15 Aug 2007 AppleWorks — it started as clarisworks in 1991, an all-in-one suite where word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, painting, database, and a terminal lived under one
• Aug 2007 FuckedCompany.com — fuckedcompany was a dot-com dead pool launched in may 2000 by philip j kaplan, who posted as pud. the site let users wager on which companies would fa
• 17 Aug 2007 GreenStone Media — jane fonda put her name and her money on a talk radio network for women, with gloria steinem and robin morgan beside her, spun out of the women's medi
• 24 Aug 2007 Tegic Communications — one press per letter. that was the entire product, and for about a decade it was the difference between a phone you could write on and a phone you cou
• 31 Aug 2007 Auto Assault — auto assault was the post-apocalyptic vehicular mmo from ncsoft and netdevil that lasted sixteen months. it shipped on 13 april 2006 with three factio
• Sep 2007 Yahoo Oddpost — oddpost was the four-dollar-a-month webmail that taught yahoo what mail could look like in a browser. it launched in april 2002 with ajax techniques a
• Sep 2007 WiseNut — it launched in september 2001 with a crawler of its own and one real idea: every search came back sorted into topic groups instead of one flat list. t
• Sep 2007 Open eBook — open ebook was the file format the electronic book industry agreed on before there was an electronic book industry. the open ebook forum published ver
• Sep 2007 Lektora — an unpaid renewal did this one. lektora inc. shipped a french-language feed reader for internet explorer in 2004 and made 1.0 free and multilingual by
• 4 Sep 2007 Palm Foleo — the palm foleo was announced by jeff hawkins on 30 may 2007 as a 10-inch linux subnotebook meant to be a bigger screen for the treo smartphone. it wei
• 5 Sep 2007 Apple iPod Hi-Fi — the ipod hi-fi was apple's home-stereo speaker for the 30-pin ipod dock. steve jobs announced it at a february 2006 town hall, called it audiophile-gr
• 12 Sep 2007 San Francisco Municipal Wireless — on 6 november 2007 san francisco voted for free citywide wifi by 86,451 to 52,428, and the network it was voting for had been dead for eight weeks alr
• 13 Sep 2007 Movieland — movieland sold movie downloads to people who had never asked for them, by installing software that filled the screen with a pop-up demanding $29.95 an
• 19 Sep 2007 TimesSelect — timesselect was the new york times' first big paywall. on september 19 2005 it locked the opinion columnists, the archive, and early sunday access beh
• 19 Sep 2007 BlackICE Defender — twelve thousand machines was the entire vulnerable population, and the witty worm reached all of it in about forty-five minutes on the night of 19 mar
• 20 Sep 2007 Yahoo! Photos — yahoo photos launched on march 28 2000 as the photo tab inside yahoo mail, with unlimited storage at a time when one megabyte felt heroic. for the fir
• 21 Sep 2007 Opsware — loudcloud opened on 9 september 1999 selling managed internet infrastructure by the month, which is close to what amazon would sell as a web service s
• 28 Sep 2007 NetBank — netbank started in february 1996 as atlanta internet bank, the first FDIC-insured online-only bank in the united states. it grew to about $2.5 billion
• Sep 2007 Dragon Magazine — dragon was tsr's house magazine for dungeons and dragons. the first issue shipped june 1976 as the successor to the strategic review. paizo publishing
• 30 Sep 2007 S!ケータイ動画 — vodafone japan built a video service in december 2004 that treated the phone as the worst part of the setup. you downloaded the file on a pc and carri
• Oct 2007 eConozco — econozco was the spanish professional network from grupo galenicom, running from 2003 to 2007 as one of the earliest linkedin-shaped products in a non
• Oct 2007 Business 2.0 — business 2.0 launched in july 1998 to explain the new economy to the people who wanted to be inside it, and for two years it was so heavy with adverti
• Oct 2007 Direct Revenue — direct revenue was an adware company with venture funding, a manhattan office and clients like american express and ford. its software arrived attache
• 5 Oct 2007 Nico Nico Bookmark — niwango took the comment layer from nico nico douga and tried to put it on the entire web. you submitted a url, the service grabbed a screenshot of th
• 9 Oct 2007 Shiny Entertainment — laguna beach, october 1993. david perry left virgin games to run his own studio and spent the first two years on a cartoon earthworm wearing a robot s
• 18 Oct 2007 TV Links — tv links held no video. every link on it pointed at a file already sitting on youtube or dailymotion, and the site's entire contribution was knowing w
• 19 Oct 2007 Virgin Digital — virgin digital was richard branson's answer to itunes, launched 2 september 2005 as a wma-drm music download store with a catalog of 2.5 million track
• 23 Oct 2007 OiNK's Pink Palace — oink's pink palace was a private bittorrent tracker founded by alan ellis in may 2004. it ran out of northeast england and grew into a roughly 180,000
• 25 Oct 2007 Telenet Japan — telenet japan spent twenty-four years making games that reached the west under somebody else's label. valis and cosmic fantasy were its own, and the w
• 26 Oct 2007 Sherlock — apple's built-in mac search and internet-services tool, shipped with mac os 8.5 in 1998. sherlock 3 in 2002 added web channels for stocks and weather
• 26 Oct 2007 URGE — urge was the mtv networks subscription music store welded into windows media player 11 at the may 2006 launch. it shipped with the wmp11 install, open
• 26 Oct 2007 MTV Urge — on 17 may 2006 microsoft shipped a music store built into windows media player 11 and let mtv stock the shelves. urge carried 2.4 million tracks and a
• 31 Oct 2007 Yahoo Podcasts — yahoo built a podcast directory in october 2005, when podcasting was eighteen months old and every large company was buying into it. the product did t
• 31 Oct 2007 Stylus Magazine — most publications die of money. this one died because todd burns got off the subway one day and decided he did not want to do it anymore, which is wha
• Nov 2007 Geosign — $160 million went into a company in Guelph, Ontario in March 2007, the largest venture investment made in canada that year, and eight months later the
• Nov 2007 DotComedy — november 9, 2006 to november 2007, almost to the day. nbc universal built a comedy channel for the web, commissioned eleven original series and shorts
• Nov 2007 Findory — greg linden came out of amazon, where he worked on the recommendation engine, and spent the next four years in seattle on findory, a news front page t
• 5 Nov 2007 Siberian Wikipedia — yaroslav zolotaryov, a businessman in tomsk, spent 2005 building a siberian language out of old settler dialects with tatar roots stirred through it,
• 12 Nov 2007 ShareConnector — shareconnector indexed ed2k links and stored nothing, which is why the criminal case against it kept falling apart. dutch investigators seized the ser
• 21 Nov 2007 Yukos — the russian state took this one apart on purpose and never especially hid it. yukos came out of the 1995 loans-for-shares auctions, where mikhail khod
• 27 Nov 2007 Minimo — chris hofmann left netscape in 2003 and started a project to make gecko run on a handheld with sixty four megabytes of ram. nokia paid for much of it
• 29 Nov 2007 KOL (AOL Kids Online) — kol was the aol kids portal that launched in september 2003 as a rebrand of the older kids only channel, designed for six to twelve year olds and bund
• 2007 Microsoft Picture It! — picture it! launched in september 1996 as microsoft's answer to the photoshop-is-for-professionals problem. it ran on pentium-class hardware with 8 me
• Dec 2007 TextAmerica — textamerica was one of the first moblog sites, a place to send a photo straight from your phone to a public web page in 2002, years before that was no
• Dec 2007 Quigo — yaron galai and oded itzhak started quigo in israel in 2000 and built adsonar, a contextual ad engine that read a page and matched an ad to what was o
• Dec 2007 AOL OpenRide — fourteen months is a short life for software with a launch campaign behind it. openride arrived on 4 october 2006 as aol's answer to the question of w
• 3 Dec 2007 Geneon USA — pioneer opened a laserdisc company in america in december 1985, and by 1993 its anime division was the reason tenchi muyo existed in english. dentsu b
• 6 Dec 2007 MyCoke / Coke Studios — coke studios was a coca-cola corporate virtual world for american teenagers, built in 2002 by atlanta digital agency studiocom using the habbo engine
• 11 Dec 2007 Comic Gumbo — forty eight issues in eleven months, then two hundred million yen of debt. comic gumbo was the world's first free weekly manga magazine, handed out fr
• 15 Dec 2007 MovieBeam — moviebeam was disney's answer to video on demand before broadband was ready, and the answer was a box that pulled films out of the blank lines of a pu
• 21 Dec 2007 FUN Technologies — a company built on one legal distinction: a game of skill is not gambling. fun technologies bought skilljam and then worldwinner and ran paid tourname
• 2007 astalavista.box.sk — the warez search engine. you typed in a piece of software (photoshop, winrar, 3ds max, anything) and got a list of sites and FTPs that hosted the crac
• 31 Dec 2007 Disney Mobile (US) — disney mobile us was a family-mvno on sprint that disney ran for around 18 months. the pitch was parental controls and a child-safe phone for the unde
• 2007 Nokia Communicator — nokia's eleven-year keyboard-clamshell line. an attempt to make the phone a small computer for business users. it ran from the 9000 in 1996 through th
• 2007 Meetro — a location-aware messenger four years before foursquare and eight years before the location tab on every social app. meetro launched 1 june 2005 out o
• 31 Dec 2007 The Cincinnati Post — the cincinnati post was a scripps evening paper that ran from january 1881 to december 2007. it started life as the penny paper under the wellman brot
• 31 Dec 2007 Microsoft Java Virtual Machine — the msjvm came with internet explorer 3 in 1996 and was the fastest way to run java on windows for about two years, which is not in dispute. what is i
• 2007 Digital8 — digital8 was sony putting the dv codec inside a hi8 cassette so that anyone with a shelf of 8mm tapes would not have to abandon it. at the bitstream l
• 2007 DVD-Audio — dvd-audio was the dvd forum's answer to the compact disc, specified in march 1999 because toshiba and the rest of the forum did not want to pay sony a
• 31 Dec 2007 BidPay — bidpay solved the 1999 problem of paying a stranger for something you won in an auction, and it solved it with the post office. you handed over your c
• 31 Dec 2007 CNET Newsburst — cnet put out its own web rss reader in february 2005, the same month ask jeeves bought bloglines, and ran it for not quite three years. by the end com

~ 2006 ~

• 1 Jan 2006 Trio — trio was a us cable channel built around tv-about-tv. it ran behind-the-scenes documentaries and network-history pieces plus recovered-from-the-vault
• 2006 ImaHima — imahima was a mobile-phone-only social service in japan, launched in 1999 by neeraj jhanji and a small team in tokyo. the name meant 'are you free now
• 2006 Infopop (UBB.classic) — ubb.classic was a perl bulletin board engine that ted o'neil released on 7 may 1996. it ran on flat files and a cgi-bin install and at one point sat u
• 2006 Windows Messenger — windows messenger was the one that came in the box and lost anyway. microsoft built it into windows xp as the clean, corporate-friendly version of msn
• 2006 SmartMedia — toshiba announced it on 15 may 1995 under the name solid state floppy disk card, which is what it looked like and what it was meant to replace. it wen
• 2006 Uproar.com — uproar.com sold the television game show with the studio taken out of it. the company licensed family feud and match game from pearson, put them in a
• 2006 OzEmail — ozemail started in 1992 as an email service with eight staff and became the loudest name in australian dial-up. it was the first australian technology
• 2006 Purple Skirt — tracey ullman launched a fashion site in november 1999, at the last moment when a famous person with an idea could get a retail website funded without
• 2006 AOL Explorer — aol released a free tabbed browser in july 2005 and built it on trident, the rendering engine inside internet explorer. it could do that because micro
• 2006 TUNeZINE — zouhair yahyaoui started tunezine in july 2001, not long after finishing an economics degree, and signed everything ettounsi, the tunisian. the site p
• 1 Jan 2006 Thrunet — in 1998 a korean household could buy roughly a megabit over cable television wiring while most of the world was still listening to a modem negotiate.
• 2006 Davilex Games — 103,000 copies in nine months of 1998, in germany alone, for a budget racing game about driving down a motorway. davilex was an accounting-software co
• 2006 바로타 (BAROTA) — korea's railway agency did not have enough computers in 2000. rather than make everyone queue behind one overloaded website, it stood up a second one
• 10 Jan 2006 Alias|Wavefront — silicon graphics owned two rival 3d houses and merged them on 7 february 1995, because microsoft had just bought softimage and sgi wanted one answer t
• 12 Jan 2006 UDDI Business Registry — the uddi business registry was a public directory where any company could publish a machine-readable description of its web services and any other com
• 23 Jan 2006 Marconi — a hundred year old name and £2.6 billion in cash, spent inside eighteen months on two american equipment makers at the peak of the telecoms bubble. ge
• 26 Jan 2006 QRIO — qrio was sony's second robot and the one that never got a price tag. it stood 60 centimeters and weighed 7.3 kilos. on 18 december 2003 it became the
• 27 Jan 2006 Western Union Telegram — the telegram was the first message that could arrive without anyone carrying it, and western union ran that business in america for a century and a ha
• 31 Jan 2006 Internet Explorer for Mac — internet explorer for mac was a real separate browser, not a port. it had its own rendering engine called tasman that was more standards compliant tha
• 31 Jan 2006 Digital Anvil — chris roberts walked out of origin systems and opened digital anvil in austin on 8 april 1996, with his brother erin, six other wing commander people
• 31 Jan 2006 Siebel Systems — forty five percent of the crm market in 2002, and no longer a company four years later. thomas siebel left an executive job at oracle in 1993 to build
• Feb 2006 3Dlabs — 3dlabs spent the late 90s and early 2000s building the gpus that ran professional cad and 3d animation. the wildcat line lived in solidworks and maya
• 6 Feb 2006 Gizmondo — gizmondo was a windows ce handheld game console with gps, a camera, a sim slot, and a business model that involved subsidizing the hardware with deliv
• 14 Feb 2006 JAMDAT Mobile — jamdat was the largest mobile games publisher in the world for about two years, back when a mobile game meant a java file bought off a carrier menu fo
• 14 Feb 2006 Sleepycat Software — carlisle, massachusetts, 1996: margo seltzer and keith bostic start a company because netscape wants a better version of the database library they wro
• 22 Feb 2006 China Worker Net — china worker net, at zggr.org, was a left-wing chinese site founded on may day 2005 in beijing by a group who called themselves socialists, edited by
• 22 Feb 2006 Communist Party People Net — communist party people net ran at gcdr.com.cn, a maoist site put up by a group who described themselves as believers in communism, with a worker-peasa
• 24 Feb 2006 Nokia N-Gage — the n-gage was nokia's phone-and-game-boy hybrid. it had a side-mounted speaker that made you hold it sideways against your face to take calls, which
• 26 Feb 2006 Teoma — a search engine that ranked pages by authority inside a subject, not across the whole web. teoma came out of rutgers in 2001 with a smart idea about h
• 28 Feb 2006 WebCT — the first widely deployed web-based course management system for higher education. murray goldberg started it at the university of british columbia an
• Mar 2006 Diary-X — diary-x is remembered less for how it lived than for how it died. one hard drive failed in early 2006. there was no backup. 120,000 diaries evaporated
• 1 Mar 2006 Takara — takara made licca-chan dolls and the transforming robot toys that hasbro licensed and renamed transformers in 1984, which means most of the world owne
• 2006 Bonsai Kitten — tens of thousands of furious emails had arrived by february 2001, the boston fbi field office served mit with a grand jury subpoena, and the humane so
• 8 Mar 2006 PopTop Software — phil steinmeyer started poptop in 1993 in fenton, missouri, and wrote most of railroad tycoon ii himself. it shipped in 1998 under the gathering of de
• 17 Mar 2006 AOL Brasil — aol brasil was the brazilian arm of aol latin america, the joint venture between aol time warner and venezuelan grupo cisneros with banco itau holding
• 28 Mar 2006 Zeal — zeal was a web directory written by unpaid volunteers who earned points toward donations to charities they chose themselves. you passed a test before
• Mar 2006 Sony AIBO (original line, 1999-2006) — the first aibo, the ers-110, shipped on may 11 1999 in japan at 250000 yen and at 2500 dollars in the us. the line ran through several generations, er
• Mar 2006 NIFTY-Serve — nifty-serve sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was the japanese answer to compuserve, started 198
• 31 Mar 2006 Namco — masaya nakamura put two coin operated rocking horses on a department store roof in yokohama in 1955 and ended up owning the arcade business. pac-man c
• 31 Mar 2006 Minolta — minolta started in osaka in 1928 as a japanese-german camera shop and spent most of the twentieth century as one of the names that mattered. the maxxu
• Apr 2006 Internet Underground Music Archive — iuma was the first place on the internet where unsigned bands could upload music and have anyone download it. three uc santa cruz students built it in
• Apr 2006 nowthatsfuckedup.com — chris wilson ran an amateur pornography site out of lakeland, florida. soldiers in iraq and afghanistan could not get their cards through his payment
• Apr 2006 Mathsoft — a page of engineering arithmetic looks like a page of engineering arithmetic, which sounds trivial until you remember that in 1986 every other calcula
• Apr 2006 yellowTAB — mannheim, 2001: a small german company got hold of the last unreleased build of beos and started selling it in a box as zeta, on shopping television,
• 3 Apr 2006 SoftICE — a kernel debugger written in 386 assembly by two people at numega in 1987, sold for $386 as a joke about the processor it needed. it halted the entire
• 21 Apr 2006 Mozilla Application Suite — the whole internet as one program. browser, mail and news reader, page editor, irc client, address book, all of it out of the netscape communicator so
• 26 Apr 2006 Videoway — illico took the subscribers one neighborhood at a time from 1999 onward, and the last videoway terminals were collected in april 2006. what videotron
• May 2006 Eudora — eudora was the email client steve dorner wrote at the university of illinois in 1988, named after the southern writer eudora welty. qualcomm bought it
• May 2006 Blogdex — a graduate student at the media lab pointed a crawler at every weblog he could find and counted which links they were handing to each other. the front
• 8 May 2006 Google Deskbar — the windows taskbar was contested ground in 2003, and google took a piece of it. no browser, no page load, just control alt g and a small window that
• 10 May 2006 Rockstar Vienna — on the night of 9 may 2006 take-two closed its vienna studio, and the hundred and ten people who worked there found out the next morning, when securit
• 17 May 2006 Blue Frog — "blue found the right solution to stop spam, and i can't let this continue." a spammer calling himself pharmamaster typed that into an icq window in m
• May 2006 Maxtor Corporation — the first drive out the door in 1983 was designed to hold 190 megabytes and shipped at 140, because the heads were not ready and the company took what
• 25 May 2006 Juniper Bank — richard vague opened juniper bank in wilmington, delaware in january 2000 with money from benchmark capital and a plan that had no branches anywhere i
• 1 Jun 2006 Wanadoo — wanadoo was france telecom's consumer internet brand, launched in may 1996. it grew into the largest french isp, bought freeserve in 2000 to become th
• 6 Jun 2006 6bone — 6bone was a practice internet, a second network stitched on top of the real one so engineers could test ipv6 before anybody's life depended on it. it
• 9 Jun 2006 Doctor Fun — 520 weeks was the number dave farley promised himself, and he hit it, though ten years' worth of weeks took nearly thirteen calendar years to deliver.
• 9 Jun 2006 Libranet — a father and son in vancouver sold a debian desktop for ninety dollars a copy and enough people bought it to keep the lights on for six years. jon dan
• 12 Jun 2006 Emagic — rellingen, a small town outside hamburg, is where logic came from. gerhard lengeling and chris adam founded emagic there in september 1992 and spent a
• 13 Jun 2006 ART image file format — a security patch killed this one. ms06-021 shipped on 13 june 2006 and internet explorer stopped drawing .art files from that day, because a malformed
• 19 Jun 2006 MSN Gaming Zone — msn gaming zone was microsoft's online gaming portal from 1996 to 2006. it started life as the village in 1996, got bought by microsoft and renamed th
• 30 Jun 2006 Symantec WinFax PRO — winfax was the windows fax stack that office pcs ran for fifteen years. delrina built it, symantec bought delrina, then quietly let the product rot on
• 1 Jul 2006 Bulldog Broadband — bulldog put its own equipment inside bt exchanges in central london and sold people a line that did not run on bt wholesale terms, which in 2004 made
• Jul 2006 de.lirio.us — running a copy of del.icio.us on your own machine was the promise, and the code delivered on it. the hosted version at de.lirio.us is what buckled, un
• 3 Jul 2006 Keijibanteki Kotoba Uchu (掲示板的コトバ宇宙) — three waseda students lost a school festival to a cancellation in 1998 and decided to build something ugly on purpose before they graduated. what came
• 4 Jul 2006 NPG Music Club — july 2006: a british science publisher complains about three letters, and prince's subscription website is gone inside a day. his lawyer said the two
• 7 Jul 2006 VK Mobile — vk mobile was a south korean handset maker that began life in 1997 importing batteries for other people's phones and was selling its own by 2001. sale
• 11 Jul 2006 Windows ME — windows me shipped september 14 2000 as the consumer follow-up to windows 98. microsoft cut real-mode dos out of it to speed boot times and broke a lo
• 11 Jul 2006 Windows 98 — june 1998 is when the home pc stopped being a machine you loaded programs onto and became a machine you connected. windows 98 made usb work without a
• 16 Jul 2006 Democracy and Freedom Web — democracy and freedom web was a mainland chinese political discussion site founded on 12 june 2001 by wu wei, a guangzhou writer who publishes as ye d
• 20 Jul 2006 Varig — otto ernst meyer founded varig in porto alegre on 7 may 1927 and for most of the twentieth century it was the only brazilian airline anyone outside br
• 22 Jul 2006 Dailysonic — 219 episodes between march 2005 and july 2006, promised monday to friday and delivered closer to three a week. dailysonic was a free audio magazine ma
• 23 Jul 2006 Interactive Systems Corporation — before 1977 there was exactly one place to get unix, and it was the company that wrote it. peter weiner changed that from an office in santa monica an
• Jul 2006 Century China — century china opened on 19 july 2000 as a place for chinese academics and writers to publish essays and argue about them in public, run by a beijing r
• 27 Jul 2006 FastTrack — a small estonian team wrote a file-sharing protocol that hid the index inside the users themselves, and for about three years it moved more music than
• 31 Jul 2006 Adelphia Communications — founded 1952 by gus and john rigas in coudersport pennsylvania after they bought a small cable franchise for three hundred dollars. by 1998 adelphia h
• Aug 2006 Internacia Televido — the first television channel in esperanto went live on 5 november 2005, streaming around the clock over the internet from sao paulo. it was built by f
• 17 Aug 2006 Daypop — daypop was a blog and news search engine run as a one-man project by dan chan from late 2000, started during the us presidential election while dan wa
• 18 Aug 2006 Captain Copyright — captain copyright was a cartoon superhero that access copyright, the canadian agency which collects reproduction royalties for publishers and writers,
• 24 Aug 2006 SPEWS — spews was a list of address ranges that a mail server could check before accepting a message. nobody knew who ran it and there was no way to appeal a
• 26 Aug 2006 Kiko — $258,100 was the winning bid. google calendar shipped in april 2006 and kiko's signups stopped inside a season, so justin kan and emmett shear listed
• 28 Aug 2006 Netian — netian opened in february 1998 as the first korean portal built around handing everyone a homepage, and it worked well enough to pass seven million re
• 1 Sep 2006 Office Pirates — time inc. built a website for american men aged 21 to 34 who were avoiding their jobs, staffed it with five people, launched it quietly in february 20
• 12 Sep 2006 eDonkey2000 — edonkey2000 was the first p2p client that pulled a file from many users at once instead of one. it ran on its own network alongside the official clien
• 12 Sep 2006 Overnet — the network under the network. overnet was metamachine's own client for the edonkey world, a serverless layer meant to route around the central server
• 12 Sep 2006 Foxnet — in 1991 fox reached 91 percent of american television households, the worst coverage of the four big networks, because the small markets had no spare
• 14 Sep 2006 Kuro — feiliu networks launched kuro in taiwan in 2000 and switched the billing on in january 2001, ninety nine taiwan dollars a month for a file sharing cli
• 15 Sep 2006 Nvu — nvu was a free wysiwyg web page editor built on top of mozilla composer, paid for by linspire because desktop linux had nothing to put in front of som
• 29 Sep 2006 Siemens Mobile / BenQ-Siemens — siemens made phones for twenty-one years and was fourth in the world at the start of the decade, behind nokia and motorola and whoever was third that
• Oct 2006 Triton — july 2006 was the month a digital storefront nobody had heard of got one of the biggest pc releases of the year. triton, built by digital interactive
• 10 Oct 2006 Writely — writely was a browser-based word processor built by three people at upstartle in 2005, launched in august of that year with almost no marketing. it wa
• 12 Oct 2006 Wal-Marting Across America — a freelance writer and a washington post staff photographer drove a rented rv from las vegas to georgia in the autumn of 2006, sleeping in walmart par
• 14 Oct 2006 MSN Chat — msn chat was the room next to the messenger everyone actually used. microsoft ran open chat rooms for years, then got scared of who was walking into t
• 16 Oct 2006 Cartoon Orbit — cartoon orbit was the trading-card site cartoon network ran on cartoonnetwork.com from november 2000 to october 16 2006. the cards were called ctoons,
• 18 Oct 2006 Active Channel — active channel was the push-technology bet microsoft shipped inside internet explorer 4 in september '97. the format underneath was called cdf, channe
• 19 Oct 2006 Deepnet Explorer — version 1.5.3 beta 3 shipped on 19 october 2006 and nothing ever followed it. deepnet security in britain had built the first browser to pair a gnutel
• 20 Oct 2006 USinternetworking — in 1998 a company in annapolis decided that business software should be rented over a wire instead of installed off a disc, and the market agreed hard
• 24 Oct 2006 Lik-Sang — lik-sang was the hong kong import retailer founded in 1998. it sold region-free console hardware, mod chips, imported japanese games, and accessories
• 2006 Diversity University — jeanne mcwhorter built it in the summer of 1993 while she was a sociology graduate student, and it was the first moo made specifically for education.
• 31 Oct 2006 Ogrish.com — ogrish was the post-rotten shock site of the 2000-2006 window. the domain registered june 18, 2000. its peak content was war footage and execution vid
• Nov 2006 Madchat.org — a dark apache directory index with a cheshire cat quote pinned above it, and under that, nine years of everything the francophone underground had both
• 1 Nov 2006 Audioblogger — noah glass built a voicemail box that published to the web. you called a number from any phone and said whatever you wanted, and the recording turned
• 13 Nov 2006 HotPrize — "hotprize.com is no more!" said the front page on monday, 13 november 2006, adding a very slim chance of being reborn that never came. for seven years
• 14 Nov 2006 MSN Music — msn music opened september 1, 2004 as microsoft's branded download store, built on top of windows media drm and the playsforsure ecosystem and aimed s
• 14 Nov 2006 Spectrum Information Technologies — john sculley took this job five days after leaving apple and called it a little gem that fell in his lap. four months later he resigned and sued the c
• 20 Nov 2006 Exabyte — boulder, colorado, 1987: engineers out of storagetek worked out that the helical scan head sony had built for camcorders could write 2.3 gigabytes ont
• 28 Nov 2006 Novell Hula — novell announced hula on 15 february 2005 at linuxworld in boston and dropped roughly two hundred thousand lines of its netmail code into the open und
• Nov 2006 Computer Gaming World — cgw was the long-running american pc-gaming monthly. founded by russell sipe in 1981 and acquired by ziff-davis in 1993, it ran twenty-five years and
• 30 Nov 2006 Google Answers — google answers was the paid question-and-answer service google ran from 18 april 2002 to 30 november 2006. you wrote a question, you offered a bounty
• Nov 2006 Melbourne House — melbourne house was a london publisher run by two australians who had moved the other way, and its biggest game was a tolkien text adventure that sold
• Dec 2006 Save Toby — save toby was a january 2005 hoax page where two anonymous webmasters claimed they would cook and eat a pet rabbit named toby if the internet did not
• 1 Dec 2006 Lucent Technologies — lucent was the equipment half of at&t, cut loose in 1996 with the western electric factories and bell labs attached, and for four years it was the mos
• Dec 2006 IBM Home Page Reader — home page reader was a browser that spoke the page out loud, built at ibm out of chieko asakawa's research in tokyo and sold from 1998 onward. the thi
• 2006 Project Looking Glass — project looking glass was sun microsystems' attempt at a three dimensional desktop, written in java on top of the java 3d api and shown off by jonatha
• Dec 2006 Torget.se — 904 million kronor is what the swedish post office eventually admitted it had spent on a website meant to sell things. the visitors came for the chat
• Dec 2006 Hogwarts.nu — 700,000 accounts, which in a 2004 survey put a harry potter fan site third in all of sweden, behind lunarstorm and playahead and ahead of everything e
• 12 Dec 2006 Ulead Systems — ulead systems was founded in taipei on 5 august 1989 and spent seventeen years making the software everybody used and nobody discussed. gif animator b
• 12 Dec 2006 InterVideo — windvd came in the box. that was the whole business model and for about six years it was an excellent one, because windows could not play a dvd on its
• 14 Dec 2006 All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP — nine posts and one rap video, across twenty four days. two characters called charlie and jeremy spent late november 2006 writing in invented slang abo
• 20 Dec 2006 Emulation Zone — started on 28 august 1996 as a bet among friends over who could build the best website, and it won by still being there ten years later. andy wolan, w
• 22 Dec 2006 Tower Records — tower records grew out of a drugstore in sacramento in 1960 when russ solomon started selling 45s out of his father's pharmacy, and by the 1990s the c
• 2006 AOL CDs — the free AOL signup discs that arrived in every american mailbox for over a decade. peak distribution was something like 1.2 billion CDs. they were fr
• Dec 2006 Microsoft FrontPage — frontpage was the WYSIWYG editor that taught a generation of people how to build a webpage by dragging things on a canvas. vermeer technologies shippe
• 31 Dec 2006 OS/2 — os/2 was ibm's pc operating system, the one supposed to replace dos. ibm and microsoft started it together in 1985. they shipped 1.0 in december 1987
• 2006 Sam Goody — sam goody started as a manhattan discount record shop in 1951, became the largest mall music retail chain in the us by the mid-eighties under musiclan
• 2006 Motorola ROKR E1 — the rokr e1 launched september 7 2005 in a steve jobs special-event keynote, a motorola candybar handset running a version of itunes on its small colo
• Dec 2006 Mobile ESPN — mobile espn was disney's MVNO experiment for the american sports-broadcast audience, live for around ten months in 2006 on the sprint ev-do network. t
• Dec 2006 Apple iSight — the small aluminum cylinder that clipped to the top of a powerbook lid via a magnetic mount and ran video over a single firewire cable. announced june
• 2006 BowieNet — bowienet was a real internet service provider owned by a rock musician. twenty dollars a month bought you dial-up access and an @davidbowie.com email
• 31 Dec 2006 Connexion by Boeing — connexion by boeing put a steerable ku-band antenna on the roof of a widebody and gave passengers real broadband at cruising altitude, four years befo
• 31 Dec 2006 iRows — january to december of one year is the entire life of it. two israeli developers built a spreadsheet that ran inside a browser tab in 2006, got writte

~ 2005 ~

• 2005 UUNET — uunet ran the wires that the early commercial internet sat on. it started as a usenet feed for unix sysadmins, became the largest us isp by traffic in
• 2005 GP32 — i missed the gp32. the korean linux handheld from game park shipped in november 2001 and almost nobody outside of the homebrew forums had one. by 2007
• 2005 Ritmoteca.com — a store that sold music by the track before anyone thought people would pay for it that way. ninety-nine cents a song, or nine ninety-nine for an mp3
• 2005 Adobe Type Manager — adobe shipped atm in 1989 because apple and microsoft had just gone public with truetype and adobe needed an answer that worked on the screen instead
• Jan 2005 Titus Interactive — titus was a french publisher that spent twenty years being competent and unglamorous, and is now remembered almost entirely for one nintendo 64 game a
• 2005 Telegard — telegard came out of a copy of wayne bell's wwiv source that nobody had cleared with anybody, and then passed through four more sets of hands, a lawsu
• 2005 The Romp — fifteen million dollars of private money went into a website that made flash cartoons, and for about a year it looked like the right call: 600,000 reg
• Jan 2005 ELORG — moscow, 1971: the soviet ministry of foreign trade opened one office holding a monopoly on every computer that crossed the border in either direction,
• 2005 Streamwaves — dallas, 1999. jeff tribble and daniel hexter wanted a legal answer to napster, and what they built ran entirely inside a browser with nothing to insta
• 2005 MarthaTalks.com — martha stewart was indicted on 4 june 2003 and had a website of her own up the same day. it carried her own letters alongside the briefs her lawyers f
• 3 Jan 2005 nCUBE — cable television is where the hypercube ended up. five intel engineers left for beaverton, oregon in 1983 to build parallel machines wired as binary n
• 14 Jan 2005 Media Lab Europe — january 2005 is when the irish government and mit stopped being able to agree on a second funding model, and the board of media lab europe put the lab
• Feb 2005 Sony Clié — the clié was sony's palmos pda line. it launched in japan in september 2000 and reached north america in 2002, running palm os over sony's own jog dia
• Feb 2005 HitClips — a portable player that played one minute of one song, in mono, off a removable plastic chip you bought separately at target. the songs were the radio
• Feb 2005 EarthStation 5 — earthstation 5 announced itself in june 2003 as a file-sharing network operating out of jenin refugee camp #23 in the west bank, on the argument that
• 9 Feb 2005 Ion Storm — john romero and tom hall left id software in 1996 and took the 54th floor of a dallas skyscraper before they had shipped anything. the ad said john ro
• 10 Feb 2005 LokiTorrent — lokitorrent was a bittorrent tracker with about 680,000 registered members that spent two months publicly refusing to fold. the mpaa sent a cease and
• 24 Feb 2005 Troika Games — three of the people behind the original fallout walked out of interplay on april fools day 1998 and named the studio after the russian word for a set
• Mar 2005 Games Domain — a birmingham developer named dave stanworth put games domain online in march 1994, which made it older than most of the industry it covered. it ran a
• 10 Mar 2005 Groove Networks — ray ozzie decided in the late nineties that the file server was the problem, and built a collaboration tool with no server in it at all. the workspace
• 15 Mar 2005 CU-SeeMe — cu-seeme was the first video call most people ever saw. tim dorcey wrote it at cornell and it went out free in april 1993, a small gray picture that r
• 1 Apr 2005 Team Silent — on 1 april 2005 konami swapped one share of konami computer entertainment tokyo for one share of itself, and the subsidiary stopped existing. team sil
• 6 Apr 2005 CherryOS — on 12 october 2004 a company in lahaina, hawaii opened pre-orders for a windows program that would run mac os x at eighty percent of the host machine'
• 7 Apr 2005 Liberate Technologies — oracle spun a division out in april 1996 to build software for the network computer, the cheap terminal larry ellison was certain would replace the pc
• 8 Apr 2005 Rover — ten pounds is what bmw charged the phoenix consortium for mg rover in may 2000, and it was not a bargain. the company had started as a coventry bicycl
• 9 Apr 2005 MovieCD — scottsdale, arizona, november 1996: sirius publishing announces a way to sell feature films on ordinary compact discs, playable in software on a 486 w
• 2005 Adobe Streamline — adobe streamline was a single-purpose mac utility that turned a scanned bitmap into vector artwork using bezier traces. it shipped at macworld san fra
• 25 May 2005 EliteTorrents — elitetorrents was the biggest private bittorrent tracker in the world for about two years, and it ended six days after an admin posted a workprint of
• 27 May 2005 AgfaPhoto — agfaphoto was the consumer film half of agfa, sold off in a management buyout on 2 november 2004 and insolvent by 27 may 2005. it inherited a film and
• Jun 2005 Telerate — a 21 year old named neil hirsch worked out in 1969 that bond prices lived inside telephone calls and could live on a screen instead. for two decades t
• Jun 2005 FingerWorks — wayne westerman could not type without pain, so his doctoral work at delaware became a flat surface that read all ten fingers at once and turned gestu
• Jun 2005 TheFeature — howard rheingold and justin hall spent the early 2000s writing about the mobile internet on a website nokia paid for, which reads stranger in 2026 tha
• 6 Jun 2005 Espotting Media — two men in their twenties left an advertising agency in the middle of the dot-com crash and started selling keywords in london, which in 2000 was a bu
• 6 Jun 2005 DVD Decrypter — dvd decrypter was one man's freeware and the default way a windows machine turned a disc into a file. it read a retail dvd and wrote out an image with
• 13 Jun 2005 TV Tome — john nestoriak iii opened tv tome on 11 july 2000 and gave the work away to volunteers, one editor per show, writing episode guides for american telev
• 16 Jun 2005 China Public Opinion Supervision Net — china public opinion supervision net, at yuluncn.com, was a one-man anti-corruption site founded on 1 october 2003 by li xinde, a reporter since the 1
• 17 Jun 2005 Reflect.com — reflect was procter & gamble's late-dot-com bet on mass-customization. it launched in late 1999 and offered around fifty thousand variations of cosmet
• 28 Jun 2005 Keyhole EarthViewer — earthviewer was google earth four years before google owned it. from 2001 you paid a yearly fee for a program that streamed satellite imagery off a di
• 29 Jun 2005 Sendo — a birmingham handset maker that built cheap phones for operators and then bet its future on being first out with microsoft's smartphone platform. micr
• Jul 2005 NeoModus Direct Connect — jon hess wrote direct connect in 1999 while he was still in high school, and paid for it with an ad banner sitting inside the client window. the netwo
• Jul 2005 Cellular Digital Packet Data — cdpd was a way of moving data over a phone network built for voice. it hunted for the channels nobody was talking on and pushed packets through them a
• Jul 2005 Wildfire Communications — bill warner had already built the avid editing system when he started wildfire communications in 1992, and what shipped in october 1994 was a voice yo
• Jul 2005 MyOwnEmail — two hundred domain names and a mascot called m.o.e. were the whole product, and in 1997 that was enough to let you be somebody at an address nobody el
• 27 Jul 2005 Granville Technology Group — britain's largest computer manufacturer was a mail-order operation in a converted mill town in lancashire, selling under the names time and tiny to pe
• 29 Jul 2005 CodeWarrior — codewarrior was an integrated development environment from metrowerks, a montreal-based startup, first shipped december 23 1993. it was the ide that c
• 31 Jul 2005 Tapwave Zodiac — the tapwave zodiac was the palm os handheld that wanted to be a console. it shipped on 1 november 2003 with twin analog controls and a 480x320 color s
• 1 Aug 2005 Blizzard North — in june 2003 four executives sent one email to vivendi asking for financial protection and a straight answer about whether blizzard was being sold. vi
• 7 Aug 2005 Klingon Wikipedia — brion vibber sent four lines to the wikipedia-l mailing list on 7 august 2005. he had locked tlh.wikipedia.org at jimmy's request, it stayed readable
• 17 Aug 2005 DVD Shrink — dvd shrink was a one megabyte windows executable that took a dual layer retail dvd and threw away enough bitrate to make it fit on a 4.7 gb blank. the
• 22 Aug 2005 Humongous Entertainment — humongous entertainment was a kids' point-and-click studio in bothell, washington that built putt-putt, pajama sam, freddi fish, spy fox and the backy
• 31 Aug 2005 Storage Technology Corporation — the whole company rested on one bet: a tape drive fifteen percent cheaper than ibm's would sell against ibm. that arithmetic worked for a decade, and
• Sep 2005 Banner Ad Museum — in september 2005 a crawler that had been visiting almost every week started getting a 404 where a museum used to be. for five years banneradmuseum.co
• 13 Sep 2005 Totality Corporation — it started in san francisco in 1999 as mimecom and sold remote management of the servers and applications underneath large e-commerce sites. in 2000 i
• 14 Sep 2005 PalmSource — palmsource was the half of palm that built the operating system, after the hardware half was renamed palmone and walked off to make devices. the split
• 14 Sep 2005 UserLinux — bruce perens spent late 2003 describing a debian for businesses that would come with certifications and paid support and cost nothing to install, and
• 20 Sep 2005 Mindpixel — chris mckinstry spent five years asking volunteers to write one-line statements that any adult would answer the same way, then had other volunteers vo
• 21 Sep 2005 WinMX — winmx was a windows program that did one job. it found mp3s on other people's computers and let you queue them up. the interface was ugly and the queu
• 26 Sep 2005 Ehoron.com — ehoron.com was a mongolian-language online forum for ethnic mongolian students in inner mongolia. it ran for exactly one year before chinese state aut
• Sep 2005 Contax — contax started in 1932 as zeiss ikon's answer to leica and came back in 1975 as a japanese body with german glass in front of it, styled by porsche de
• 30 Sep 2005 Steel Battalion: Line of Contact — capcom gave notice that between 10am and noon pacific on friday 30 september 2005 it would end the online campaign of steel battalion: line of contact
• Oct 2005 Coktel Vision — coktel vision was two companies wearing one name. one of them made adventure games with a french sense of humor and the other made adibou, which had p
• 1 Oct 2005 VisualBoyAdvance — a game boy emulator written by one person under the handle forgotten, which is the entire biography anybody ever got. it ran the game boy and everythi
• Oct 2005 SoapCity — sony pictures built soapcity as the web half of a soap opera cable channel that never launched, beaten to air by disney's soapnet and blocked by contr
• Oct 2005 Metrowerks — freescale took the metrowerks name off the door in october 2005, six years after motorola had bought the company for 95 million dollars. it began in 1
• Oct 2005 GoTo.com / Overture Services — the first company to make money on paid search clicks. bill gross at idealab spun out goto.com in 1997 and ran the first live ppc auction in february
• 8 Oct 2005 EB Games (US brand) — electronics boutique started as a calculator and gadget kiosk in the king of prussia mall in 1977, founded by james j. kim. it rebranded to eb games i
• Nov 2005 CWShredder — merijn bellekom wrote cwshredder as a dutch student, because coolwebsearch had gotten past everything else, and for about a year it was the only thing
• 7 Nov 2005 Grokster — grokster was the us-branded fasttrack client that existed mainly to be the supreme court's test case. it never had napster's name or kazaa's reach, bu
• 14 Nov 2005 i2hub — i2hub only worked if your machine sat on a university network, because it ran over internet2, the research backbone american campuses had been given f
• 15 Nov 2005 Sony BMG XCP — xcp was the first 4 internet copy-protection software that sony bmg shipped on around 2 million audio cds across 52 titles in 2005. on october 31 mark
• 20 Nov 2005 COMDEX — comdex opened in 1979 as an exhibition for computer dealers and grew into the week every november when the entire industry moved to las vegas. two hun
• 22 Nov 2005 Virgin Interactive — virgin games started in london in 1983 inside richard branson's group and spent the next twenty years being bought and renamed by people who wanted so
• 30 Nov 2005 Sygate Personal Firewall — sygate personal firewall was the free outbound firewall people installed instead of trusting windows, grown out of a program for sharing one modem acr
• 30 Nov 2005 Sakura Wars Online — sega walked out of the console business in january 2001 and shipped this in december. two dreamcast discs went on sale the same day, one set in the im
• Dec 2005 Digital Audio Tape — dat was a perfect digital copy on a tape half the size of a cassette, and the american record industry understood what that meant before the public go
• 2005 eXeem — on 19 december 2004 suprnova.org went dark and took the largest torrent index on the internet with it. five weeks later the replacement arrived, close
• 3 Dec 2005 Macromedia — one hundred million people had installed shockwave and flash by the end of 1999, which is how a company that started out selling cd-rom authoring soft
• 12 Dec 2005 Working Designs — working designs was the cult north american localizer that put japanese rpgs on disc-based consoles with full english voice acting and elaborate boxed
• 19 Dec 2005 ReplayTV — replaytv shipped a dvr that skipped commercials automatically and let you send recorded shows to other replaytv owners over the internet. hollywood su
• 20 Dec 2005 AOL Media Player — aol released the media player beta on 13 april 2005 after three years of development inside the aol client group. the playback engine was codenamed un
• 28 Dec 2005 SCI FICTION — the sci-fi channel hired ellen datlow, gave her a corner of scifi.com and let her buy short fiction at professional rates for five and a half years. i
• 2005 Diamond Rio PMP300 — the diamond rio pmp300 was the first mass-market portable mp3 player. 32 megabytes of internal flash, with a smartmedia slot for another 32. the riaa
• 2005 NeoPlanet — neoplanet was a trident-shell browser released in 1997 by bigfoot international, a new york company that licensed the internet explorer rendering engi
• 2005 Rio Karma — the 20gb audiophile mp3 player rio shipped in august 2003 with proper gapless playback, ogg vorbis and flac decoding in firmware, a 5-band parametric
• 2005 Sega Pico — sega pico was a kids edutainment console built on mega drive hardware, sold like a toy, played through a hardback book whose pages turned the cartridg
• 2005 Microsoft Threedegrees — threedegrees was a 2003 microsoft p2p add-on to msn messenger built by the netgen team, an internal startup of recent college graduates working out of
• 2005 Patagon.com — patagon was the first major online brokerage built for the latin american retail investor. wenceslao casares started it in buenos aires in 1997. on 9
• 2005 SpeechBot — compaq's research lab put speechbot on the web at the end of 1999, running speech recognition across public radio archives so you could search the wor
• 31 Dec 2005 Danmønt — denmark built a prepaid chip card for the payments too small to be worth a debit card, and put readers in railway ticket machines and payphones. you b
• 2005 IBM ViaVoice — ibm viavoice arrived in august 1997 at 199 dollars and asked you to sit and read prepared sentences aloud for an hour before it would transcribe anyth

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