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. 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, Wo ...

History

Bix was also a

BBS BBS may refer to: Ammunition * BBs, BB gun metal bullets * BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets Computing and gaming * Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet * BIOS Boot Specificat ...

and website sponsored by

Byte Magazine ''Byte'' (stylized as ''BYTE'') was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. "''Byte'' magazine, the leading publication serving the homebrew market ..." '' ...

(BIX = "Byte Information Exchange"), rather like a

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

site before such became popular. The website survived for a short time after the magazine ceased publication in 2001 (there was a July issue, but no August issue that year). The site had forums for virtually every known computer language, most major computing topics of interest, and each forum was run by relatively well-known people in the industry. The site was rather like a

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

, and by current standards was rather crude, but it was very popular at the time.

Yahoo! acquisition

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

acquired Bix on November 16, 2006. The company moved from downtown Palo Alto 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 (acronym BET) is an American basic cable channel targeting African-American audiences. It is owned by the CBS Entertainment Group unit of Paramount Global via BET Networks and has offices in New York City, Los ...

, The Game,

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

and

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

. 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