Bix was a web service that was best known for its online competitions. The site provided self-service tools for the creation of contests. After a user created the contest, other members could enter and vote on the outcome of those contests. The company was founded in February 2006 and received venture funding from Trinity Ventures and

Sutter Hill Ventures Sutter Hill Ventures is an American private equity firm focused on venture capital investments in technology-based start-up companies. Founded in 1964, Sutter Hill is one of the oldest venture capital firms still in operation. Based in Palo Alto ...

History

The website officially launched in July 2006 with a web-based video recorder that merged a user's karaoke performance to create a contest entry. The site received strong praise from industry experts including Walt Mossberg of the WSJ. Within a few months the site opened up contests for audio karaoke, videos, photos and text. In November 2006 the site switched to a faceoff style voting system, increasing votes from 5000 a day to 150,000 a day. Site votes reached as much as 1,000,000 in a day in 2007. Users voted 25 times per visit on average. Bix's competitors included Singshot (discontinued) and

Worth1000 Worth1000 was an image manipulation and contest website. Worth1000 opened on January 1, 2002, and hosted over 340,000 unique images made in theme contests such as "Rejected Transformers", "Invisible World", and "Stupid Protests". In mid-2003, W ...

Yahoo! acquisition

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

acquired Bix on November 16, 2006. The company moved from downtown

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

to Yahoo's main campus in March 2007. Bix generated revenue by running contests for corporate clients. Customers included Extra (TV series),

Black Entertainment Television Black Entertainment Television (BET) is an American basic cable channel targeting Black American audiences. It is the flagship channel of the BET Media Group, a subsidiary of Paramount Global's CBS Entertainment Group. Originally launched ...

, The Game,

Capitol Records Capitol Records, LLC (known legally as Capitol Records, Inc. until 2007), and simply known as Capitol, is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group through its Capitol Music Group imprint. It was founded as the first West Coast-base ...

and

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

. Bix was shut down by Yahoo June 30, 2009.

Patents for Bix

* Automated Reward Management for Network-Based Contests * Network Based Content Creation * Automated Administration of Networked-Based Contests

History

Yahoo! acquisition

Patents for Bix

References

Further reading