Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

(

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003.

History

Pyra was co-founded by

Evan Williams Evan Williams may refer to: __NOTOC__ People In sport * Evan O. Williams (c. 1889–1946), American football and basketball coach * Evan Williams (footballer) (born 1943), Scottish football goalkeeper * Evan Williams (jockey) (1912–2001), horse ...

and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. Their coder Jack Dorsey altered an ftp program to work on a webpage, enabling online users to upload to a webpage web-log. In 1999, while still in beta, the rudiments of Pyra were repurposed into an in-house tool which became Blogger. The service was made available to the public in August 1999. Much of this coding was done by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey. Initially, Blogger was completely free of charge and there was no revenue model. In January 2001, Pyra asked Blogger users for donations to buy a new server. When the company's seed money dried up around the same time, the employees continued without pay for weeks or, in some cases, months; but this could not last, and eventually Williams faced a mass walk-out by everyone including co-founder Hourihan. Williams ran the company virtually alone until he was able to secure an investment by Trellix after its founder Dan Bricklin became aware of Pyra's situation. Eventually advertising-supported

Blogspot Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 which enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed th ...

and Blogger Pro emerged. In 2002, Blogger was completely re-written in order to license it to other companies, the first of which was Globo.com of Brazil. On 17th, February, 2003, Pyra was acquired by

References

{{Reflist , 2

External links

Official site

Blogger's History Reimagined

Defunct software companies of the United States Google acquisitions American companies established in 1999 Software companies established in 1999 Software companies disestablished in 2003 2003 mergers and acquisitions 1999 establishments in California