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