American businessman Robert Hoffer has worked for the past 25 years primarily in technology and software. He initially developed and launched one of the first online

yellow pages The yellow pages are telephone directories of businesses, organized by category rather than alphabetically by business name, in which advertising is sold. The directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for ...

. Hoffer is also credited with having developed instant messaging agents, web-based scratch-off games and several other now commonplace technologies. Over the course of his career, he has worked and consulted for many large corporations including Apple Computer, AOL,

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

, PepsiCo,

Playboy ''Playboy'' is an American men's Lifestyle magazine, lifestyle and entertainment magazine, formerly in print and currently online. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from H ...

, Citibank and Lipton.

Inventions

Hoffer often promotes the message that "everything old is new again" arguing that many of today's inventions are simply repackaged versions of old ideas. This may be the driving force behind his work as co-founder of several Internet companies, including Infospace Corp., an Internet directory services provider; Query Labs, offering third-party directory services to newspapers and media firms and Typo.net, which launched the hotly debated concept of interstitial advertising. His vision is often credited with bringing products to market that today are used by millions of people, and have been purchased by companies like

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 Manage ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and others, for millions of dollars. For example, in 1995, Hoffer was instrumental in bringing the first web-based national Yellow and White pages online, which were later licensed and co-branded with Yahoo,

Nynex NYNEX Corporation was an American telephone company that served five states of New England (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) as well as most of the state of New York from January 1, 1984 to August 14, 1997. Histor ...

, American Express,

Excite@Home @Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their f ...

Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...

and others.

Patents

As the co-founder of

Colloquis Colloquis, previously known as ActiveBuddy and Conversagent, was a company that created conversation-based interactive agents originally distributed via instant messaging platforms. The company had offices in New York, NY and Sunnyvale, CA. Found ...

in 2000, Hoffer created the first commercially viable online robot for instant messaging, securing a controversial patent for the technology. In 2006, Microsoft purchased ActiveBuddy (now

) for $46 million."Got A Question? Microsoft's Newly Acquired Software May Have The Answers"
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Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoffer, Robert American computer businesspeople Living people Year of birth missing (living people)