History
Mirabilis was founded in June 1996 by Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir. It was purchased by America Online (AOL) for $407 million in 1998. Funding for Mirabilis came from Yossi Vardi, father of Arik Vardi.
Goldfinger, Visiger, Vardi and Amir met while working for a Tel Aviv software company, Zapa Digital Arts, that specialized in three-dimensional graphic tools for the Internet. In 1996, they left Zapa and began to toy with ideas for new Internet innovations. They created ICQ in less than two months, but had no funding. Yossi Vardi, one of the founders of Israel Chemicals, agreed to invest a few hundred thousand dollars to develop the technology. Mirabilis was established in a small apartment in San Jose, California, where Internet access was cheaper.
ICQ grew as people encouraged their friends to join so they could communicate with each other. This established a powerful network effect as prospective users strongly preferred the system where their friends were likely to be.
AOL sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies for $187.5 million on April 28, 2010.
Read more about this topic: Mirabilis (company)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)