Tucows
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Tucows Inc. | |
Type | Public AMEX: TCX, TSX: TC |
---|---|
Founded | Flint, Michigan (1993) |
Headquarters | Toronto, Ontario (with offices in Starkville, Mississippi and London, England) |
Key people | Stanley Stern (Chairman), Elliot Noss (President and CEO) |
Industry | Internet software and services |
Revenue | $48.517 million USD (2005)[1] |
Net income | $2.722 million USD (2005)[1] |
Employees | ~190[2] |
Website | www.tucowsinc.com |
Tucows (originally an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software that has long since been dropped) was formed in Flint, Michigan, USA in 1993. It is now based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The company is perhaps most well known for its popular website directory of shareware, freeware, and demo software packages available to download. A system of mirror sites are maintained to allow the traffic to the site to be distributed among several world wide server locations. Tucows contains software for many major computer platforms including Windows, Linux and Macintosh, and also older versions of Windows (most notably the Windows 3.x series).
The Tucows logo is two cows staring at each other. Additionally, their ratings system uses cow icons.
Contents |
[edit] Business
Tucows business has evolved over the years and today is a leading provider of wholesale internet services, including email, anti-spam tools, web-publishing tools, billing solutions and domain name registrations to ISPs, web-hosting companies and telecommunications providers..
Tucows started as a freeware and shareware download site which was created by Scott Swedorski in 1993, and throughout the history of the commercial Web it has always been a major destination. The site was bought out by a Canadian online service, Computerlink Online in 1995 which later became the internet service provider Internet Direct Canada, Inc. In 1999, Internet Direct Canada Inc. merged with Canada Internet Direct Ltd. forming a national Internet service provider. Tucows Inc. was spun off shortly thereafter and quickly sold to a consortium of shareholders. In 2001, Tucows undertook a "reverse-takeover" merger of Pennsylvania-based Infonautics Corp. In 2004, Tucows acquired Mississippi-based Boardtown Corporation, a billing software provider. In January, 2006, Tucows completed its acquisition of certain assets of Critical Path, an outsourced email services provider. In June, 2006, Tucows announced that it had acquired Mailbank.com Inc. (dba NetIdentity) a privately held, business owning and managing a domain name portfolio that Tucows believes is one of the Internet's largest collections of surname domain names. On 26 August 2006, Tucows was the winning bidder on an eBay auction for the web calendar site Kiko.com. In a blog entry about the purchase, it was revealed that they plan on rolling the features of Kiko into their existing email platform[3].
Today, Tucows still maintains its download archive. Although some listing features are now available only on a for-pay basis, basic listing remains free. The original creator of the Tucows software archive, Scott Swedorski, announced in November 2003 that he had resigned from Tucows. On March 10, 2006, Tucows Content division closed its satellite office located in Flint, Michigan, USA and relocated the remaining editorial functions to its corporate head office in Toronto. The Content division now solely operates from the corporate head office in Toronto under the direction of Greg Weir. Tucows hosts more than 30,000 software titles in its worldwide network of partner sites. In addition, Tucows is a major provider of domain name registration services, with more than 5,000 active resellers in more than 100 countries.
[edit] Domain name registrar
Tucows has become one of the largest domain name registrars. Tucows was the first to offer domain name registration services through a wholesale API driven platform business model entirely through domain name resellers. The company is well known for this platform, known as the OpenSRS software platform manages their wholesale services business, including interaction with registries and resellers) to the extent that the names Tucows and OpenSRS are often informally used interchangeably when referring to Tucows' registrar business.
[edit] Mailbank.com (NetIdentity/NamePlanet) Email Migration
In June 2006 Tucows bought Mailbank.com Inc - a company that sells e-mail accounts on domains for common surnames like smith.net or brown.org. In September of that year it migrated these customers to a new mail system. An operation that in many respects failed, and left a number of customers without email access for weeks. Details of the incident have been chronicled at a Tucows managed blog starting with this entry. The migration is basis for the article "System migration may be the most dangerous thing you ever do" in ITWorld[1].
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ a b Tucows Annual Report on Form 10K. Retrieved on 2006-07-29.
- ^ Tucows Investor Relations. Retrieved on 2006-07-29.
- ^ Why We Bought Kiko.com. Retrieved on 2006-09-05.