Infonautics, Inc. was an information services company, founded in 1992 by Marvin Weinberger, Lawrence Husick, and Josh Kopelman, and had its headquarters in

Wayne, Pennsylvania Wayne is an unincorporated community centered in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States, on the Main Line, a series of highly affluent Philadelphia suburbs located along the railroad tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad and one of the ...

, United States. It was a spin-out from Telebase, Inc., which retained a minority position in the company. The company's executives included Van Morris (CEO), Ram Mohan (COO/CTO), Frederica O'Brien (CFO), and Gerard Lewis (General Counsel). Israel J. Melman was also a co-founder, a mentor to Marvin Weinberger and served on the boards of both Telebase and Infonautics, where he was also Chairman of the Board.

History

In 1990, Telebase founder Weinberger and outside counsel Husick conceived of Homework Helper, a $10 per month unlimited research service having a large multimedia database and a natural language user interface. Working with Brewster Kahle, a protocol was developed to run on the Thinking Machines massively parallel computer system, but in late early 1991, Conquest Software demonstrated its semantic search engine and a change in direction ensued. Hardware support was provided by Tandem Computers. Early work on the multimedia database system yielded multiple U.S. patents. In 1996, the company was listed on the

Nasdaq The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list ...

stock exchange. It was

delisted In corporate finance, a listing refers to the company's shares being on the list (or board) of stock that are publicly listed. Some stock exchanges allow shares of a foreign company to be listed and may allow dual listing, subject to conditions. ...

in 2001. In 2001,

Tucows Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and incorporated in Pennsylvania, United States. The company is composed of three independent business ...

acquired Infonautics through a business tactic called "

reverse takeover A reverse takeover (RTO), reverse merger, or reverse IPO is the acquisition of a public company by a private company so that the private company can bypass the lengthy and complex process of going public. Sometimes, conversely, the public compa ...

". Initially, Infonautics purchased Tucows and then changed its own name to Tucows.Paula J. Hane
"Tucows Sells Two Former Infonautics Services"
''Information Today'', August 26, 2002. On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com to

HighBeam Research HighBeam Research was a paid search engine and full text online archive owned by Gale, a subsidiary of Cengage, for thousands of newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines, and encyclopedias in English. It was headqua ...

. The company created online services ''Homework Helper'' on Prodigy, ''Encyclopedia.com'', ''Electric Library'', and ''CompanySleuth''. In 2003, ''

The Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'', often referred to simply as ''The Inquirer'', is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded on June 1, 1829, ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is the third-longest continuously operating da ...

'' reported that the company was "one of the first Internet companies in the Philadelphia area"

References

Technology companies established in 1992 Business intelligence companies 1992 establishments in Pennsylvania 2001 disestablishments in Pennsylvania Defunct companies based in Pennsylvania Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Tucows {{US-internet-company-stub