The Greatest Business Ideas Online

Tumblr.com has gained prominence in recent years as a micro blogging platform which has allowed millions of people around the world to share whatever they like. The reason for the site’s popularity is that you don’t need to write long blog posts in order to stand a chance of getting noticed. If you take photos then you can share them with the world, likewise if you find something funny online then again you can share it with the world. This platform originated from one man, David Karp and his lead developer Marco Arment. It was through a lack of patience on David Karp’s part that the website came into existence. David Karp was born in 1986 and at the age of 11 began learning HTML from a book. He dropped out of high school at age of 15 in a bid to form his own company. At the age of 19, a new word began to hit the Internet called ‘tumblelog’ which referred to short blog posts. This idea caught David’s eye and already the seeds of Tumblr were being sown in his mind. David waited for a while to see if anybody launched a website based around this idea, but that never looked like it was going to happen. David teamed up with his friend Marco Arment to begin developing the Tumblr website. On 1st November 2007 the site was fully launched and the history of micro blogging changed forever. Much of the popularity that Tumblr... Read more

In 1996 Ask.com was launched as ‘Ask Jeeves’, a partnership between entrepreneur David Warthen and venture capitalist Garrett Greuener. The idea was to form a search engine that spurred the users on to ask questions in their natural language rather than keywords. The character of Jeeves was a butler who was based on the popular character from the Jeeves & Wooster books. In 2006 the character was ‘retired’ and the website became known as ask.com. The company grew rapidly during its first few years and its initial stock offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange occurred in 1999. Around the same time two companies were purchased by Ask each designed to allow users of the search engines get more relevant content. The first of... Read more

When social media websites became popular, some rose to prominence and remained at the top of the search results. Others plowed steadily down the middle of the road, remaining in the peripheral vision of interested online parties. And still others fizzled out quickly due to keeping their focus too limited. In the case of LiveJournal, a social media outlet designed specifically for blogging, it has remained important depending on the geographical location. Founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, a programmer that was born in Iowa and raised in Oregon, the site grew in popularity over the next few years. It wasn’t until the company operating LiveJournal for Fitzpatrick, Danga Interactive, was sold that real controversy and major demographic changes began. Originally pieced together by... Read more

The History of Myspace Oh, how the mighty have fallen. What was once the proving ground for social media has since become the punch line of many jokes. The history of MySpace.com is a tale of energetic innovation, risk, and ultimately, failure to capitalize. While some people believe that MySpace was the original social networking site, it is actually based off of an existing model that was functionally success for its time. In August of 2003, several employees of eUniverse, now called Intermix Media, Inc, recognized the growing potential of a social networking site where they all had accounts (Friendster). Copying the model and losing the less popular features, the employees created a working prototype design for what they coined as MySpace. This... Read more