Belkin
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| Belkin Corporation | |
 |
|
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1983 |
| Headquarters | Compton, California |
| Key people | Chet Pipkin, Founder, President and CEO |
| Industry | Computer hardware |
| Products | Computer hardware |
| Revenue | unknown |
| Employees | unknown |
| Website | www.belkin.com |
Belkin Corporation is a global manufacturer of computer hardware which specializes in connectivity devices. Belkin sells primarily in the consumer and home user market, but they also make switches, hubs (USB and computer network), cables, UPSs, and other peripherals. The company was founded in 1983 in Hawthorne, California by current President Chet Pipkin, and it has twice made the Inc. Magazine list of 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. At present, Belkin is headquartered in Compton, California. It is the largest and most well-known employer in that city.
[edit] Wireless networking
Belkin is a large provider of wireless LAN equipment. In January 2005, the company launched one of the first MIMO routers under the name pre-N to some acclaim [1].
In 2003 Belkin released a home-use wirelessrouter which would occasionally replace user's HTTP requests with an advertisement for Belkin's filtering software. Belkin received some intense criticism for this ([2] [3] [4] [5] [6]) from technically-literate customers who described it as a man-in-the-middle attack or a form of session hijacking. Belkin initially treated this as a public relations problem rather than a technical problem, but later relented and removed this feature from its products.
[edit] Other products
Since 2002, Belkin has been one of the most successful makers of accessories for the Apple iPod. In 2003, Belkin introduced the Nostromo SpeedPad n52, a hybrid keyboard/joypad peripheral. At CES in January 2006, Belkin announced that it would launch the first commercially-available ultrawideband product, called CableFree USB [7].
