Kerbango was both a company acquired by 3Com and its lead product. Kerbango was founded in 1998 in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

by former executives from

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

and Power Computing Corporation. On June 27, 2000, 3Com announced it was acquiring the Kerbango company in an $80 million deal. As part of the deal, Kerbango's

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

, Jon Fitch, became vice president and general manager of 3Com's Internet Audio division, working under Julie Shimer, then vice president and general manager of 3Com's Consumer Networks Business.

Kerbango Internet Radio

The "Kerbango Internet Radio" was intended to be the first stand-alone product that let users listen to

Internet radio Internet radio, also known as online radio, web radio, net radio, streaming radio, e-radio and IP radio, is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting on the Internet is usually referred to as webcasting since it is not ...

without a

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

Linux Journal ''Linux Journal'' (''LJ'') is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Hous ...

quipped that the Kerbango 100E, the prototype, looked "like a cross between an old

Wurlitzer The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to as simply Wurlitzer, is an American company started in Cincinnati in 1853 by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer. The company initially imported stringed, woodwind and brass instruments ...

jukebox A jukebox is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine, that plays a user-selected song from a self-contained media library. Traditional jukeboxes contain records, compact discs, or digital files, and allow user ...

and the dashboard of a '54

Buick Buick () is a division (business), division of the Automotive industry in the United States, American automobile manufacturer General Motors (GM). Started by automotive pioneer David Dunbar Buick in 1899, it was among the first American automobil ...

." This initial model was even advertised on

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

in anticipation of its sale, although it was never released. The Kerbango 100E was an embedded

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

device (running Montavista's Hard Hat Linux), reportedly using

RealNetworks RealNetworks LLC is an American technology company and provider of Internet streaming media delivery software and services based in Seattle, Washington. The company also provides subscription-based online entertainment services and mobile enter ...

' G2 Player to play Internet audio streams ( RealAudio G2, 5.0, 4.0, and 3.0 streams as well as streaming

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

). A

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

connection to the Internet was required as

dial-up Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

connections were not supported. In addition to Internet streams, the 100E featured an AM/FM tuner. The Kerbango radio's tuning user interface was designed by Alan Luckow and long-time Apple

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

developer Jim Reekes and was later adopted for use within

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

. The Kerbango radio also had a companion website which allowed the user to control various aspects of the radio, save presets and edit account information. The website also acted as a streaming radio search engine, where users could search for, and listen to streaming radio stations through their browser.

References

{{reflist Internet audio players Online companies of the United States Internet radio Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies