Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

History

It was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

, USA, based voice portal infrastructure company named Quackware. Quack was the first company to try to create a voice portal: a consumer-based destination "site" in which consumers could not only access information by voice alone, but also complete transactions. Quackware launched a beta phone service in 1999 that allowed consumers to purchase books from sites such as Amazon and CDs from sites such as CDNow by answering a short set of questions. Quack followed with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon,

Moviefone Moviefone is an American-based moving pictures listing and information service. Moviegoers can obtain local showtimes, cinema information, film reviews, and advance tickets, as well as TV content and a comprehensive search tool that allows users ...

) to news, weather and stock quotes. This concept introduced a series of lookalike startups including

Tellme Networks Tellme Networks, Inc. was an American company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, which specialized in telephone-based applications. Its headquarters were in Mountain View, California. Tellme Networks was acquired by Microsoft on Mar ...

which raised more money than any Internet startup in history on a similar concept. Quack received its first venture funding from HDL Capital in 1999 and moved operations to Mountain View in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

in 1999. A deal with

Lycos Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), 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 ...

was announced in May 2000. In September 2000 Quack was acquired for $200 million by

America Online AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo! Inc. The service tra ...

(AOL) and moved onto the

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

campus with what was left of the Netscape team. Quack was attacked in the Canadian press for being representative of the Canadian " brain drain" to the US during the

Internet bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...

, focusing its recruiting efforts on the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

, hiring more than 50 engineers from Waterloo in less than 10 months. Quack competitor

raised enormous funds in what became a highly competitive market in 2000, with the emergence of more than a dozen additional competitors in a 12-month period. Following its acquisition by America Online in an effort led by Ted Leonsis to bring Quack into AOL Interactive, the Quack voice service became AOLbyPhone as one of AOL's "web properties" along with MapQuest,

and others. Quack secured several

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s that underlie the technical challenges of delivering interactive voice services. Constructing a voice portal required integrations and innovations not only in

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

and speech generation, but also in databases, application specification, constraint-based reasoning and artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. "Quack"'s name derived from the company goal of providing not only voice-based services, but more broadly "Quick Ubiquitous Access to Consumer Knowledge". The patents assigned to Quack.com include
System and method for voice access to Internet-based information

System and method for advertising with an Internet Voice Portal
and recognizing the axiom that in interactive voice systems one must "know the set of possible answers to a question before asking it".
System and method for determining if one web site has the same information as another web site
Quack.com was spoofed in ''

The Simpsons ''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon for the Fox Broadcasting Company. It is a Satire (film and television), satirical depiction of American life ...

'' in March 2002 in the episode " Blame It on Lisa" in which a "ComQuaak" sign is replaced by another equally crazy telecom company name.

2010 onwards

In July 2010, quack.com became the focus of a new AOL iPad application, that was a web search experience. The product delivers web results and blends in picture, video and Twitter results. It enables you to preview the web results before you go to the site, search within each result, and flip through the results pages, making full use of the iPad's touch screen features. The iPad app was free via iTunes, but support discontinued in 2012.

References

External links

* *{{cite web , url=http://quack.com , title=Internet Call Waiting , access-date=March 28, 2009 , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090122125134/http://quack.com/ , archive-date=January 22, 2009
iTunes App Link
Speech recognition Computational linguistics Speech synthesis Speech processing Companies based in Mountain View, California Telecommunications companies of the United States Telecommunications companies established in 1998

History

2010 onwards

See also

References

External links