It's no secret that the Internet isn't just about sending email, reading the news and searching for hilarious photos of well-proportioned ladies wearing occasion-specific headgear -- useful utilities, archives, stores and tools exist online, too. We've examined five extremely important ones, the first of which highlights the branding significance of Web domains.
One of the most valuable domains ever created, Sex.com went through a years-long battle for ownership shortly following the birth of the modern Web, after it was stolen from its owner, Gary Kremen, earning the thief tens of millions of dollars. The case highlighted how lucrative domains and Web business could be, even in the early days.
Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive after inventing the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) system in 1989. His goal for the IA was to archive the Web sites, text, images, video and audio contained within the entire Internet, and to make it universally available -- for free -- to everyone, for ever.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems Andy Bechtolsheim cut Google a $100,000 cheque in this month, just a decade ago. He was the first outside investor in the search giant which, at the time, wasn't even a legal entity. Two weeks later it was, as Google Technology Inc, and the rest is history.
A pin was about to pop the dotcom bubble as SourceForge.net -- a free repository for open-source code, projects and applications -- opened its doors. Not being over-ambitious, it survived amid financial difficulties and now hosts over 150,000 open-source projects within a 1.9 million-strong community of worldwide developers and groups.
With just 200,000 songs but all major record labels on board, Apple's iTunes Music Store launched and became the first Web store to sell major-label music legally for download. The software initially only ran on the Mac, but it allowed purchased songs to be played on iPods and it sold over a quarter of a million songs within 24 hours.
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