Preparatory Materials on Internet Websites:
- Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. History of Google, The Google Timeline, Google's Yahoo Moment, Early Google History.
- Jeff Bezos: Founded Amazon.com, which pioneered successful e-tailing. Links: The Seattle Times Article: Momentous moments at Amazon.com
- Hotmail, the first Web based E-mail, was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Hotmail was online on July 4, 1996 and had 100 users within an hour. Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997 for $400m worth of Microsoft stocks, when it had around a billion subscribers. It suffered a major fiasco on August 30, 1999 when any user could enter the account of any other user. Links: Wired Article: HotMale (On Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail)
- Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two Ph. D. students at Stanford University. The name is an acronym for ""Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"", and it started as a tiny directory of their personal interests on the then nascent Web. The first name that they gave to it was ""Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web"". Links: A brief history of Yahoo!
- Napster was founded by Shawn Fanning in May 1999. It offered peer-to-peer file sharing, allowing users to share their personal MP3 files with anyone on the Web.
- The ZD in ZD-Net stands for Ziff-Davis.