Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is the largest online retailer in the United States, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995. The company was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver". The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is one of the largest rivers in the world and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with "A" and therefore would show up near the beginning of alphabetical lists. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.

Website: www.amazon.com

eBay

eBay Inc. is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the notable success stories of the dot-com bubble; it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries. eBay expanded from its original "set-time" auction format to include "Buy It Now" standard shopping; shopping by UPC, ISBN, or other kind of SKU (via Half.com); online classified advertisements (via Kijiji or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); online money transfers (via PayPal) and other services.

Website: www.ebay.com

foursquare

foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on software for mobile devices. This service is available to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users "check-in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges".

The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.

Foursquare is the second iteration of the same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. As of March 2011, the company reported it had 7 million registered users.

On September 1, 2010, the World Economic Forum announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.

Website: www.foursquare.com

Ibibo

Ibibo which stands for iBuild, iBond, is an Indian social networking site. It is an umbrella site that offers a variety of applications under its social network.

Ibibo was founded in January 2007 by Ashish Kashyap who had formerly served as the Head of Indian Sales and Operations for Google. Kahsyop currently serves as the company's CEO.

Ibibo is funded by the electronic media arm of South African company Naspers, MIH. China-based Tencent has expressed interest in a long term capital deal.

The company has recently tied up with Fashion TV for a photography competition.

Ibibo's iScream is a real-time product that allows ibibo users to broadcast their messages directly to all online ibibo users, via an SMS sent to 5676746 (India only), with MA as a prefix.

Ibibo's tool iFreshface lets aspiring models feature and promote their modelling portfolios within the social network.

Website: www.ibibo.com

Miniclip

Miniclip is a popular website famed for its browser-based casual games. It was started in 2001 by Robert Small and Tihan Presbie on a budget of £40,000 and quickly grew to become a leader in its respective market. As of 2008, the company has been valued at over £200 million, having been profitable for six of its seven years, with turnovers exceeding £20 million in the past two years. As well as publishing exclusive games, the website also provides more widely known titles such as Club Penguin, RuneScape, Clone Wars Adventures, Free Realms and Webosaurs.

Website: www.miniclip.com

Zapak

Zapak.com is a privately-held, online gaming portal, with browser games in India (services provided Globally), promoted by the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group's subsidiary company Reliance Big Entertainment. Launched in 2006, the site provides a very large collection of casual games, including some famous games like Bejeweled from PopCap Games & Diner Dash from PlayFirst. They claim to host the largest collection of online casual games, compared to any gaming website in India and are also among the top 50 portals according to Alexa ratings. This gaming site is meant for all kids and teenagers between the age of 8-25 years.

Website: www.zapak.com

LiveJournal

LiveJournal (LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal's blogging features include those found in similar blogging sites (multiple authors, commenting, calendars, and polls). However, LiveJournal differentiates itself from other blogging sites by its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to other social networking sites.

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

On December 2, 2007, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. The new owners unveiled a plan to upgrade the service, engage with the LiveJournal community and launch new products for advertisers. This work would be undertaken by the newly formed American-based company LiveJournal, Inc.

On January 6, 2009, it was announced that LiveJournal had laid off some of their San Francisco-based employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.

Website: www.livejournal.com

Tumblr

Tumblr, sometimes styled as "tumblr.", is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

Website: www.tumblr.com

Wordpress

WordPress is an open source blog tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It's often customized into a Content Management System (CMS). It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of February 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 32.5 million times.

Website: www.wordpress.com

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhone, BlackBerry and for Windows Phone 7, but not for other mobile devices. Several third party apps offer alternatives such as flickr HD for the iPad.

Website: www.flickr.com

Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[2][3] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket. [4]

In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.[5]

Photobucket is usually used for personal photographic albums, remote storage of avatars displayed on internet forums, and storage of videos. Photobucket's image hosting is often used for eBay, MySpace (from 2007–2009, a corporate cousin), Bebo, Neopets, and Facebook accounts, LiveJournals, Open Diarys, or other blogs, and message boards. Users may keep their albums private, allow password-protected guest access, or open them to the public.

Photobucket advertises 99.9% uptime, and offers 500MB free storage (reduced from 1GB on 19 August 2009). This reduction of storage space frustrated users, who were locked out of adding new images to their accounts unless they agreed to pay the upgrade fee. (Unlimited space with paid PRO account), Unlimited (was 100GB but went to 25GB in July 2008 and down to 10GB on August 19, 2009) monthly bandwidth.] Unlimited space and bandwidth is valid only for non-commercial use. Uploaded photos must either be smaller than 1 MB or 1024×768 in size (4000×3000 with paid account), uploaded videos must be five minutes or shorter (10 min with paid account).

Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable content, they may remove content at their discretion due to violations of their TOS.

Photobucket supports FTP uploads, but the user must be a Pro account holder. Windows XP Publisher is supported as an alternative to FTP. It is available in free accounts.

Website: www.photobucket.com

Picasa

Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004."Picasa" is a blend of the name of famed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house", and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available through Google Labs. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine, see Linux section). For Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 2000, only an older version is available. There is also an iPhoto plugin or a stand-alone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

Website: www.picasa.com

Metacafe

Metacafe is a community based video sharing web site, that specializes in short-form original entertainment, where users upload, view and share video clips.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

In its early years, Metacafe was similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but has since transformed itself into a short-form video entertainment site with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel and VideoRank as well as the production and sourcing of exclusive video clips and the programming and curation by editors of relevant video clips. The site focuses on and features short-form videos in a variety of entertainment-related categories, including Movies, Video Games, TV, Sports and Music. In addition to its own production, original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.

Website: www.metacafe.com

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005.

The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, BBC, Vevo, Hulu and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

Unregistered users may watch videos, and registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users 18 and older.

In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google.

Website: www.youtube.com

Blogger

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs.

Website: www.blogger.com

hi5

hi5 is a social networking website based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi. Bill Gossman was appointed CEO in April 2009, and Alex St. John joined as President and CTO in November 2009. In early 2010, hi5 acquired social gaming company, Big Six. The company raised $20 million in series A venture capital from Mohr Davidow Ventures, as well as $15 million in venture debt, in 2007, and announced it had raised $3 million convertible note from existing investor Mohr Davidow, bringing the funding up to $38 million. Quantcast reports Hi5 has 2.7 million monthly US visitors and 46.1 million global visitors.

Website: www.hi5.com

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 22 March 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 100 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Quantcast reports Linkedin has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally.

Website: www.linkedin.com

Orkut

Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of April 2010, 48.0% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 39.2% and United States with 2.2%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.
As of March 2011, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 102nd in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. Anyone 18 years old or older can join Orkut.

Website: www.orkut.com

myYearbook

myYearbook is a social networking website, headquartered in New Hope, PA, United States. Members can make new friends by creating profiles, interacting through chatter, a real-time stream, sending virtual gifts, and playing games. Since its launch myYearbook has grown to be one of the top teen sites and one of the 25 most trafficked sites in the US. Quantcast reports MyYearbook has 4.7 million monthly unique US Visitors and 5.4 million globally It is estimated by Alexa that 77% of the website's visitors are from the US, where it has a traffic rank of 390.

Website: www.myyearbook.com

Myspace

Myspace, (stylized My_____ and previously MySpace) is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, owned by News Corporation.

Myspace drives social interaction by providing a highly personalised experience around entertainment and connecting people to the music, celebrities, TV, movies, and games that they love. These entertainment experiences are available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices, and offline events. 

 

Myspace is also the home of Myspace Music, which offers an ever-growing catalogue of freely streamable audio and video content to users and provides major, independent, and unsigned artists alike with the tools to reach new audiences. The company is headquartered in Beverly Hills, CA and is a division of News Corporation.

Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, a position that it held throughout 2007 until 2008. In April 2008, according to comScore, Myspace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook based on monthly unique visitors. Myspace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009; the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. Quantcast estimates MySpace's monthly U.S. unique visitors at 43.2 million.

Website: www.myspace.com

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging website, based in San Francisco, California, also having servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas, Boston, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but has been incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware since 2007. Since being created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launching that July, the website has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have more than 200 million active users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet".

Twitter enables users to send and read text-based posts composed of up to 140 characters, called tweets, which are displayed on the user's profile page. Users can subscribe to other users' tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers or tweeps ('Twitter' + 'peeps'). By default, tweets are publicly visible, though senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Website: www.twitter.com

Facebook

Facebook (stylized facebook) is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website
.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in October 2010. According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.

Website: www.facebook.com

In.com

In.com is the an online venture from Web18, a Network 18 group company and one of India’s online networks based in Mumbai available for access since August 2008. 

In.com has a meta-aggregator, a crawler, which works for a dynamic, and continuous mapping of the internet, from which the most searched for and relevant sites are showcased for the user. This includes reading news, blogs, feeds and information to watching videos, from listening to music to playing games, from mailing to searching for news, videos, music, games, products, holidays, marriage partners, city search, and downloads of software wallpaper and ringtones.

Website: www.in.com

AOL Inc.

AOL Inc. (stylized as "Aol.", and previously known as America Online) is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services. 

AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called AOL, that allowed customers to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the Internet as a whole. At its prime, AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide, most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite.

On May 28, 2009, Time Warner announced that it would spin off AOL into a separate public company. The spinoff occurred on December 9, 2009, ending the eight year relationship between the two companies.

Website: www.aol.com

Bing Search

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.

Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

^{Website: www.bing.com}

Rediff.com

Rediff.com India is a news, information, entertainment, and shopping portal. It was founded in 1996 as "Rediff On The NeT" and is headquartered in Mumbai, India with offices in New Delhi and New York City, USA.

According to Alexa, Rediff is the No. 10 Indian web portal. It has more than 316 employees. 89.1% of the millions of visitors to Rediff.com are from India, while the rest come primarily from the USA (3.4%) and China. In April 2001, Rediff.com acquired and began offering India Abroad. It is ranked 146 on Alexa. Rediff.com was the first .com domain name registered in India in 1996.

Website: www.rediff.com

MSN

MSN (originally The Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.

The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its initial release in 1995. MSN was once a simple online service for Windows 95, an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet, and one of the most popular dial-up Internet service providers.

Microsoft used the MSN brand name to promote numerous popular web-based services in the late 1990s, most notably Hotmail and Messenger, before reorganizing many of them in 2005 under another brand name, Windows Live. MSN's Internet portal, MSN.com, is currently the 11th most visited domain name on the Internet.

Website: www.msn.com

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides services via the Internet worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services.

Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

Website: www.yahoo.com

Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system; the iTunes media browser; the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software; the iWork suite of productivity software; Aperture, a professional photography package; Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products; Logic Studio, a suite of music production tools; the Safari internet browser; and iOS, a mobile operating system. As of August 2010, the company operates 301 retail stores in ten countries, and an online store where hardware and software products are sold. As of May 2010, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world and the most valuable technology company in the world, having surpassed Microsoft. 

Established on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California, and incorporated January 3, 1977, the company was previously named Apple Computer, Inc., for its first 30 years, but removed the word "Computer" on January 9, 2007, to reflect the company's ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers. As of September 2010, Apple had 46,600 full time employees and 2,800 temporary full time employees worldwide and had worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion.

For reasons as various as its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its distinctive advertising campaigns, Apple has established a unique reputation in the consumer electronics industry. This includes a customer base that is devoted to the company and its brand, particularly in the United States. Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the United States in 2008, and in the world in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The company has also received widespread criticism for its contractors' labor, environmental, and business practices. 

Website: www.apple.com

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified in recent years into the video game industry with the Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360 as well as into the consumer electronics and digital services market with Zune, MSN and the Windows Phone OS. The ensuing rise of stock in the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO) made an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.

Primarily in the 1990s, critics contend Microsoft used monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive strategies including refusal to deal and tying, put unreasonable restrictions in the use of its software, and used misrepresentative marketing tactics; both the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission found the company in violation of antitrust laws. Known for its interviewing process with obscure questions, various studies and ratings were generally favorable to Microsoft's diversity within the company as well as its overall environmental impact with the exception of the electronics portion of the business.

Website: www.microsoft.com

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day. Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid, as well as Google Chrome OS, which is still under heavy development but is best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48. Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut. Google is also BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world. The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship. 

Website: www.google.com

Safari

Safari is a graphical web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included as part of the Mac OS X operating system. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther".

Safari is also the native browser for iOS. A version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows operating system, first released on June 11, 2007, supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The latest stable release of the browser is 5.0.5, which is available as a free download for both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. As of 2011, Safari is the fourth most widely used browser in the US, following Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome, respectively.

Website: Apple - Safari

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. As of January 2011, Chrome was the third most widely used browser, and passed the 10% worldwide usage share of web browsers, according to Net Applications.

In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project entitled Chromium. This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help convert the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Google also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt V8 to improve web application performance. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed source software programs. Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open source licenses. Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates and Google branding, and most noticeably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored Google logo.

Opera

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones.

Opera does not come packaged with any desktop operating system; however, it is the most popular mobile browser, and the most popular desktop browser in some countries, such as Ukraine.

Features include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing and malware protection, strong encryption when browsing secure websites, and the ability to easily delete private data such as HTTP cookies.

Opera is known for originating many features later adopted by other Web browsers.

Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Maemo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, and iOS operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices. Approximately 120 million mobile phones have been shipped with Opera. Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems. Some television set-top boxes use Opera. Adobe Systems has licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite. 

Website: www.opera.com

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting nearly 78 million visitors monthly as of January 2010. There are more than 91,000 active contributors working on more than 17,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages. As of today, there are 3,615,804 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether it fits within Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, so excluding editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research, and is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and many experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link at the top of any editable page!

Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Older articles tend to grow more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this aids obtaining valid information and avoiding recently added misinformation.

Website: www.wikipedia.com

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. As of March 2011, Firefox is the second most widely used browser with approximately 30% of worldwide usage share of web browsers. The browser has had particular success in Germany and Poland, where it is the most popular browser with 60% usage and 47% respectively.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements most current web standards in addition to several features that are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

The latest Firefox features include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, private browsing, location-aware browsing (also known as "geolocation") based exclusively on a Google service and an integrated search system that uses Google by default in most localizations. Functions can be added through extensions, created by third-party developers, of which there is a wide selection, a feature that has attracted many of Firefox's users.

Firefox runs on various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and many other platforms. Its current stable release is version 4.0, released on March 22, 2011. Firefox's source code is tri-licensed under the GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, or Mozilla Public License.

Website: www.firefox.com

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads, or in service packs, and included in the OEM service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows.

Internet Explorer has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with Internet Explorer 5 and Internet Explorer 6. Since its peak of popularity its usage share has been declining in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers, and was 43.55% as of February 2011. Microsoft spent over US$100 million per year on Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, with over 1000 people working on it by 1999.

Since its first release, Microsoft has added features and technologies such as basic table display (in version 1.5); XMLHttpRequest (in version 5), which aids creation of dynamic web pages; and Internationalized Domain Names (in version 7), which allow Web sites to have native-language addresses with non-Latin characters. The browser has also received scrutiny throughout its development for use of third-party technology (such as the source code of Spyglass Mosaic, used without royalty in early versions) and security and privacy vulnerabilities, and both the United States and the European Union have alleged that integration of Internet Explorer with Windows has been to the detriment of other browsers.

The latest stable release is Internet Explorer 9, which is available as a free update for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Internet Explorer was to be omitted from Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in Europe but Microsoft ultimately included it, with a browser option screen allowing users to select any of several web browsers (including Internet Explorer).

Versions of Internet Explorer for other operating systems have also been produced, including an embedded OEM version called Internet Explorer Mobile, which is currently based on Internet Explorer 7. Pocket Internet Explorer, later rebranded Internet Explorer Mobile, which is made for Windows Phone 7, Windows CE, and previously Windows Mobile, remains in development alongside the more advanced desktop versions. Internet Explorer for Mac and Internet Explorer for UNIX (Solaris and HP-UX) have been discontinued.