Xoom was an early
dot-com company that provided free unlimited space
web hosting, similar to
GeoCities. The domain "xoom.com" is now held by the
Xoom Corporation, an international-focused
money transfer website run by
PayPal.
History
Xoom was founded by Chris Kitze in September 1996 as a download website offering free
clipart
Clip art (also clipart, clip-art) is a type of graphic art. Pieces are pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively and comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is creat ...
and a productivity suite including a word-processing application, centering on a word processor based on
Wordstar. In March 1997, Xoom became a web hosting (offering 100 MB) and an
e-mail hosting website. The company acquired several small service providers in 1997 and 1998, including Paralogic, creator of ParaChat, which was the largest chat network on the web at the time, and PageCount, a
web counter service. The main revenue sources for the company were direct marketing via email to members and banner advertising.
The company was funded by a former
Lycos executive who had previously started Creative Multimedia (Portland, OR), Aris Multimedia (Marina del Rey, CA) and Point Communications (New York, NY), and angel investors who invested a total of $10M in common stock. No venture capital was raised and the company went public in December 1998 (ticker symbol: ''XMCM''). Around that time, it was ranked as the 13th most popular site on the web by
Media Metrix. In May 1999, a deal was announced to use Xoom.com as a vehicle for NBC's internet ventures, that combined Snap.com (owned by CNET and NBC), and various NBC internet assets plus $400M of NBC on-air promotion to form
NBC Internet (NBCi). At that time, the combined entity was ranked as the 7th most popular site on the web by Media Metrix.
Xoom was both criticized and praised for its strict policies on violations of terms of service.
A short-lived experiment in
franchising
Franchising is based on a marketing concept which can be adopted by an organization as a strategy for business expansion. Where implemented, a franchisor licenses some or all of its know-how, procedures, intellectual property, use of its busine ...
and
licensing the Xoom software platform and business model in 1998 led to an Italian website, xoom.it, which is still in operation and owned by
Virgilio.
References
Motley Fool article on Xoom.comWired article about NBCi
External links
Official Website Archived
Internet properties established in 1996
Dot-com bubble
Web hosting
Defunct online companies
Internet properties disestablished in 2001
Web 1.0
{{Internet-stub