NETZERO

'NetZero' is an Internet Service Provider based in Woodland Hills, California. It is a subsidiary of United Online, owner of Juno Online Services and BlueLight Internet Services. The current (2007) chairman, president, and CEO of United Online (and thus NetZero) is Mark Goldston [1].

Contents

History

See also

External links

History

NetZero launched in October of 1998, founded by Ronald T Burr, Stacy Haitsuka, Marwan Zebian and Harold MacKenzie. The first free internet service provider NetZero grew to 1,000,000 users in six months. NetZero's model was free internet access to attract an audience which it could sell highly targeted advertising to. The NetZero ad serving technology has over 9 patents and was the first company to invent real-time URL targeted advertising based on surfing patterns. NetZero signed a distribution deal with Compaq and was the first and only ISP to be included in the OOBE Out-Of-Box Experience. In late 1999 several other companies began to copy the NetZero free access model including Spinway launched with Yahoo! and AltaVista, Freei and BlueLight Internet, which was originally owned by Kmart. They claimed to offer free Internet service forever, in exchange for displaying ads on a permanent toolbar. After the .com bust in late 2000 early 2001 NetZero acquired all its competitors as each one went bankrupt. In addition NetZero acquired AimTV which displayed full video quality 30 second ad spots as well as Simpli and RocketCash.
In September of 1999 NetZero went public on the NASDAQ exchange with the symbol NZRO. Mark R. Goldston was hired as CEO and Ronald T Burr took the position of President and Chief Technology Officer. Goldston, a brilliant marketer and inventor of such American icon brands as Extra Strength Tylenol and the Reebok Pump tennis shoe, began to build NetZero into a top 100 US brand.
Starting in January 2001, after the crash of internet advertising, NetZero began charging for access time over 40 hours per month. Users who exceeded 40 hours were directed to the company's "Platinum" service, which provided unlimited access for $9.95
With the income statement reinvigorated through charging heavier users of the system, NetZero acquired its rival Juno Online Services and created a new holding company, United Online which now trades on NASDAQ under the symbol UNTD.
NetZero later lowered the threshold for their free service to 10 hours per month. Free service is still offered to a maximum of 10 hours a month. In June 2005, the company released a new client that replaced the advertising bar with an Internet Explorer browser helper object.
In July 2005, NetZero introduced a service called "3G," standing for the "third generation of Internet". The company charged $9.95 for the service, claiming it was so fast, "you wouldn't believe it wasn't broadband". As dial-up connections are limited in speed by the Federal Communications Commission, the service does not actually increase speeds, but pre-fetches HTML markup, JavaScript and other small files and compresses them. Video, images, and other non-text files are not compressed. This technology also utilizes the user's cache to prevent redownloading.
NetZero also has versions of its proprietary dial-up software for computers running Mac OS 9, Mac OS X. The Linux version of the NetZero software is advertised by NetZero as being for Linspire, however the software can be installed on any Debian-based i386 or amd64 Linux distribution. In addition, the Linux version of NetZero requires the Java Runtime Environment to be installed prior to use of the NetZero dialer.

See also

★ Comparison of webmail providers

★ Webmail

External links

★ NetZero

★ CNET - Can a free Net service survive? (October 19, 1998)