Slide.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Slide, Inc.
Type Private
Founded San Francisco, California
(May, 2005)
Headquarters San Francisco, California
Key people Max Levchin, Founder, CEO, and Chairman; Jeremiah Robison, CTO; Kevin Freedman and Keith Rabois, Vice Presidents
Services software applications
Website www.slide.com
Type of site social networking
Available in English
Current status active

Slide, Inc., operator of the Slide.com website, is a Web 2.0 company founded by Max Levchin and based in San Francisco, California. Originally formed to make photo sharing software for social networking services such as MySpace, the company achieved its greatest success as the largest developer of third-party applications for Facebook.[1]

Contents

[edit] History

Slide was begun as a project in 2004 and formed in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who personally invested $1 million in the new company.[2] The company was formed to develop and run a service users would download for their network browsers that would organize photos on their computers and post them to personal blogs.[2]

Slide was one of the companies invited to participate in F8, the event at which Facebook announced an open platform allowing third parties to develop and operate their own software applications on the Facebook website. Several of Slide's plugin applications such as "FunWall", "Fortune Cookie", "My Questions", "Top Friends", and "SuperPoke!" became at various times among the most popular applications on Facebook.[3][4]

Slide's first institutional funder was the Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture capital firm operated by former PayPal executive Peter Thiel to invest in Web 2.0 start-ups.[5]. Subsequent investors included the Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, and BlueRun Ventures.[5] In January of 2008, Slide received a further $50 million in financing from undisclosed institutional investors, rumored to be Fidelity Investments and T Rowe Price.[6]

As of late 2007 Slide's principal competitor was RockYou![7].

Many Slide applications were blocked in Turkey in March 2008 after a local court there ruled that Slide was not censoring user-generated content seen as derogatory to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk per Turkish law.[8].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jon Swartz. "Widgets make a big splash on the Net", USA Today, November 29, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  2. ^ a b Alorie Gilbert. "PayPal co-founder readies photo-sharing service", CNET, August 25, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  3. ^ Eric Eldon. "Q&A with Max Levchin: Slide more than a widget-maker", VentureBeat, June 25, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  4. ^ Aaron Ricadela. "Slide: Max Levchin's Next Act", Business Week, August 23, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  5. ^ a b Eric Auchard. "PayPal founder's photo slideshow site gets funding", Reuters, November 15, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  6. ^ "Facebook software maker Slide gets $50 mln funding", Reuters, January 18, 2008. 
  7. ^ Gary Rivlin. "After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again", New York Times, October 28, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-23. 
  8. ^ "Web site blocked over insults to Atatürk", Turkish Daily News, March 27, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-04-20. 

[edit] See Also

[edit] External Links