Universo Online

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Universo Online

Type	Public
Founded	1996
Headquarters	Brazil
Key people	Luiz Frías (Chairman and CEO)
Industry	Online service provider
Products	Social networking Online media
Website	www.uol.com.br

UOL (Bovespa UOLL4), once known as Universo Online, is a Brazilian online service provider and internet service provider. It is the leader in Latin America and the homepage portal is the biggest in the Portuguese speaking world.

1 Overview
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Overview

UOL started operations in 1996 as a joint venture with Grupo Abril (no longer a partner in the company) and Grupo Folha. UOL has cemented its leadership with the biggest Brazilian publications: Revista Veja and Folha de São Paulo.

UOL competes with another large communication groups for Brazil's internet audience: Organizações Globo (owner of the nation's top-rated television network) with Globo.com, Telefónica-owned Terra, Brasil Telecom's iG, iBest and BrTurbo, and Oi-owned Oi Internet.

UOL is ranked among the top 300 most visited websites according to Alexa. UOL provides local Internet access in more than 3,000 cities throughout Brazil and 14,000 cities abroad. The Company has approximately 1.4 million content paying subscribers as of November 2005. Since September 1999, UOL has also operated a portal and Internet Service provider in Argentina. According to IBOPE//NetRatings, UOL had an average of 7.1 million unique visitors in Brazil in 2004, thus ranking first among the largest content portals in Brazil and accounting for a 63% reach in this market. This means that for each 100 people who accessed the Internet from home in September 2005, 63 visited the Company’s portal.^[1]

In November, 2005, UOL started an Internet social network service called UOLKut ^[1]. It was later renamed to UOL K ^[2].

On December 16, 2005, UOL started to being traded at Bovespa.