Xoom was an early

dot-com company A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com, dotcom or .com), is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that uses the popular top-level domain ". ...

that provided free unlimited space

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing we ...

, similar to

GeoCities Yahoo! GeoCities was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and ...

. The domain "xoom.com" is now held by the Xoom Corporation, an international-focused money transfer website run by

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

History

Xoom was founded by Chris Kitze in September 1996 as a download website offering free clipart and a productivity suite including a word-processing application, centering on a word processor based on

Wordstar WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It was published by MicroPro International and originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Rob Barnaby was the so ...

. In March 1997, Xoom became a web hosting (offering 100 MB) and an

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

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 A web counter or hit counter is a publicly displayed running tally of the number of visits a webpage has received. Web counters are usually displayed as an inline digital image or in plain text. Image rendering of digits may use a variety of ...

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 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 ...

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 Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...

. 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 and

licensing A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

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 Virgilio, the Italian and Spanish form of Virgil may refer to: *Virgilio, Lombardy, a ''frazione'' of the ''comune'' of Borgo Virgilio in the Italian province of Mantua *Virgilio.it, a website People with the given name *Virgilio Barco Vargas (192 ...

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