X10 Wireless Technology
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- This article is about the company "X10 Wireless Technology". For the home automation protocol, see X10 (industry standard).
X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. is an American subsidiary of a Hong Kong-Bermuda company best known for marketing wireless video cameras with controversial pop-under advertisements. It was founded in 1999 in Kent, Washington.
The company's many pop-under windows containing flashing animations in the 2001-2003 advertising campaign for its flagship product, the Amazing X10 Camera, proved to be counter-productive and were seen by many as a nuisance rather than a viable marketing tool. For many Internet users, X10 came to epitomize invasive and bothersome Internet marketing, and instructions for disabling the JavaScript technology used by these windows were circulated.[1]
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[edit] Legal and financial problems
The company was sued in October 2003 by Advertisement Banners.com, who created their pop-up advertisements, for not paying advertising fees as promised, and had to pay them more than US$4.3 million in compensation.[2]
X10 made an attempt to go public in 2001 using the ticker symbol XTEN. They aborted this plan[3] after a copy of Escape from Paradise, a book which revealed that X10's owner Chung Hin Chew had been under house arrest for over a year in Brunei, was sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington in 2003,[4] and the bankruptcy was confirmed by the Court in April 2005.
[edit] Parodies
Due to the pervasiveness of the X10 ads, and the low opinion of them that many Internet users had, there have been several parodies of them.
- Something Awful created a page satirizing the design sense of the company,[5] as well as a mock interview with the inventor of the X10 Camera[6]
- Parody industrial musician Kompressor recorded a song titled "We Must Destroy X10," with the chorus "We must destroy X10. We must destroy all Internet ads."
- In one website's humorous timeline of Internet history, "X10 sells its first camera" is a future event that occurs in 2003, one to two years after the timeline is published.[7]
[edit] References
- ^ Those annoying pop-under ads (and how to stop them). Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
- ^ "Brothers sue Net company, win $4.3 million", CNN, 2003-10-21. Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
- ^ X10 Wireless Technology's letter of public offer withdrawal to SEC. Hoover's. Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
- ^ Festa, Paul. "X10 files for Chapter 11", CNET News.com, October 22, 2003.
- ^ The Amazing 10X Home Surveillance Kit!. Something Awful. Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
- ^ Unsung Heroes of the Internet. Something Awful. Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
- ^ The Lemon: History of the Internet. thelemon.net (defunct). Retrieved on 2006-05-02.
[edit] External links
- Jeff Dorsch (2005). "X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. company information". Hoover's.
- X10 Wireless Technology company website
- X10's latest Surveillance Camera
