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noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 06:08:00 +0000

Paramount Picture1911–1920: Early History

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 14:33:00 +0000

1911–1920: Early history

Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company (1895) and Pathé (1896), followed by the Nordisk Film company (1906), and Universal Studios (1912). It is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.

Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company. Hungarian-born founder, Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time (leading to the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays"). By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. Its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt.

That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn. The Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable location site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man.

Starting in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms. Hodkinson and actor, director, producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies. Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor; until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation.

In 1916, Zukor maneuvered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount. Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount, and merged the three companies into one. The new company Lasky and Zukor founded, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, grew quickly, with Lasky and his partners Goldwyn and DeMille running the production side, Hiram Abrams in charge of distribution, and Zukor making great plans. With only the exhibitor-owned First National as a rival, Famous Players-Lasky and its "Paramount Pictures" soon dominated the business.

Microsoft Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 14:41:00 +0000

Microsoft Windows (or simply Windows) is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of several families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) or Windows Server. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x and Windows Mobile.

Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. However, since 2012, because of the massive growth of smartphones, Windows sells less than Android, which became the most popular operating system in 2014, when counting all of the computing platforms each operating system runs on; in 2014, the number of Windows devices sold were less than 25% of Android devices sold. However, comparisons across different markets are not fully relevant; and for personal computers, Windows is still the most popular operating system.

As of July 2015, the most recent version of Windows for personal computers, tablets and smartphones is Windows 10. The most recent versions for server computers and embedded devices are respectively Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Embedded 8. A specialized version of Windows runs on the Xbox One game console.

The next server version of Windows is Windows Server 2016, which is expected to be released in Q3 2016.

Mediafire

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 15:15:00 +0000

As of July 2012, features of MediaFire include up to 50 GB of storage (starting at 10 GB then increased by as much as 40 GB when various activities like installing mobile or desktop clients, or when sharing on Facebook and Twitter are done).

In April 2014, MediaFire responded to reduced pricing from Google Drive's by increasing its professional storage plan from 100GB to 1TB and reducing its monthly price to US$2.50 per month.

Business account storage is shared across all sub accounts allowing for single billing and management of multiple users at a single company.[MediaFire's free account service does not require download activity in order to preserve files, and is thus often suitable as a backup only solution. MediaFire does not officially support free data warehousing (long-term storage for free and inactive accounts).

RapidShare History

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 06:19:00 +0000

RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid in Mulheim, Germany, initially as ezShare later Rapid Share, a file hosting service for his RapidForum web forum hosting services. In 2004, he started the company RapidShare AG, which went online in August 2004 then moved its premises to Baar, Switzerland in 2006. Schmid avoids the public eye, but took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010.

RapidShare's original site was RapidShare.de. Later a second site, RapidShare.com, was started. It operated in parallel with RapidShare.de for several years. On 1 March 2010, RapidShare.de was shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to RapidShare.com. Files hosted on RapidShare.de were no longer available for download.

In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites.

Lawsuits by the owners of copyrighted content shared via RapidShare, and the takedown of file hoster Megaupload, caused RapidShare to revise its business model. The company changed its focus to B2B cloud storage services, but a drop in revenue led to a reduction in staffing by three quarters in May 2013. By 2014 its Alexa ranking had sunk below 1,400.

In late February 2014, the website PCTipp.ch, based on reports from a former RapidShare employee "MarkusP," stated that RapidShare had presented a "quit or be fired" ultimatum to 23 of its 24 employees (already down from 60 employees just two years before) and that most had resigned. The rest, save one, had their contracts terminated. As of mid-March, RapidShare was reported as operating with only one employee, a support person who answered the telephone and managed customers and accounts. The product development team was no more. On 13 March 2014, RapidShare announced price increases for its paid services of about 150%. Free users would continue to be able to use RapidShare, but their download speeds and capacity were sharply curtailed.

On 10 February 2015, RapidShare announced on its home page that it would shut down its services permanently on 31 March 2015. After that date none of the data it hosted would be available, even to the customers who uploaded it. On 31 March 2015, the site home page displayed a notice about the service's closing.

Baidu

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:04:00 +0000

Baidu, Inc. (Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù, Anglicized /ˈbaɪduː/ "BY-doo"), incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered at the Baidu Campus in Beijing's Haidian District.

Baidu offers many services, including a Chinese language-search engine for websites, audio files and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike (an online, collaboratively-built encyclopedia) and a searchable, keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu was established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are Chinese nationals who studied and worked overseas before returning to China. In March 2015, Baidu ranked 4th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings.

During Q4 of 2010, it is estimated that there were 4.02 billion search queries in China of which Baidu had a market share of 56.6%. China's Internet-search revenue share in second quarter 2011 by Baidu is 76%. In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.

As of 2006, Baidu provided an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files.nBaidu offers multimedia content including MP3 music, and movies, and is the first in China to offer Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and personal digital assistant (PDA)-based mobile search.

Baidu Baike is similar to Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia; however, unlike Wikipedia, only registered users can edit the articles due to Chinese laws. While access to Wikipedia has been intermittently blocked or certain articles filtered in China since June 2004, there is some controversy about the degree to which Baidu cooperates with Chinese government censorship.

The company also hosts a music service, called Baidu Music, that has more than 150 million monthly active users. On December 4, 2015, Baidu announced plans to merge with Taihe Entertainment Group to help the service compete with Apple Inc.'s Apple Music, which Apple plans to make available in China. Baidu stated in a press release

Stumbleupon History

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 04:38:00 +0000

StumbleUpon was founded in November 2002 by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd during Garrett's time in post-graduate school in Calgary, Canada. The idea of creating a company was established before the content: of the five or six ideas for products, StumbleUpon was chosen. Garrett describes in a BBC interview the moment for him in which he felt the company had really taken off: "When we passed the half a million mark (in registered users), it seemed more real."

The popularity of the software attracted Silicon Valley investor Brad O'Neill to take notice of the company and assist with a move to San Francisco, as well as bringing in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million from other angel investors including Ram Shriram (Google), Mitch Kapor (Mozilla Foundation), First Round Capital and Ron Conway. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith now reside in San Francisco, where StumbleUpon is headquartered.

StumbleUpon was owned by eBay from May 2007, when it was acquired for $75 million until April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with offices in San Francisco and New York City.

In September 2012, StumbleUpon released an update for its iOS app that brought the new feature "StumbleDNA," which aggregates content that is recommended for you, trending content as well as a section where you can view the activity of your StumbleUpon connections. On September 25, 2012, StumbleUpon released a redesign of its website in beta, and extended it to all users on October 24.

On January 16, 2013, StumbleUpon confirmed it had laid off 30% of their staff from 110 to 75 employees.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 04:38:00 +0000

Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images—known as pins—and other media content (e.g., videos) through collections known as pinboards. Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform. Users can browse the content of others in their feed. Users can then save individual pins to one of their own boards using the "Pin It" button, with Pinboards typically organized by a central topic or theme. Users can personalize their experience with Pinterest by pinning items, creating boards, and interacting with other members. By doing so, the users "pin feed" displays unique, personalized results.

Content can also be found outside of Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Pin It" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser, or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. They also have the option of sending a pin to other Pinterest users and email accounts through the "Send" button. Some websites include red and white "pin it" buttons on items, which allow Pinterest users to pin them directly.

Initially, there were several ways to register a new Pinterest account. Potential users could either receive an invitation from an already registered friend, or they could request an invitation directly from the Pinterest website that could take some time to receive. An account can also be created and accessed by linking Pinterest to a Facebook or Twitter profile. When a user re-posts or re-pins an image to their own board, they have the option of notifying their Facebook and Twitter followers; this feature can be managed on the settings page.

On the main Pinterest page, a "pin feed" appears, displaying the chronological activity from the Pinterest boards that a user follows. When browsing for new boards and relevant pins, users can visit a "Tastemakers" page that recommend pinboards with content similar to previous pins saved by a user. For both guests and Pinterest users, there are currently four main sections to browse: everything, videos, popular, and gifts. Quick links to Pinterest include the "pin it" button that can be added to the bookmark bar of a web browser, "Follow me" and "Pin it" buttons added to personal website or blog page, and the Pinterest iPhone application available through the App Store. Users should be aware of certain terms and functions when using Pinterest. A "board" is where the user's pins are located. Users can have several boards for various items such as quotes, travel or, most popularly, weddings. A "pin" is an image that has either been uploaded or linked from a website. Once users create boards and add pins, other users can now repin, meaning they can pin one user's image to their board as well. Once the user has set up their account and boards, they can browse, comment, and like other pins. If a user wants to turn an image online into a "pin," there are a few simple steps to do so. First, the user must select the image to pin. Second, the user then clicks on the “Add +” button on Pinterest. Third, the user enters an image URL into the link box. Next, the user selects the exact image they want to pin, and place it on the designated board. Users can then describe the pin and share it via Twitter or Facebook. Other users can now click on the pin to see which board the image is pinned in, who pinned the image previously, where the original pin is from, and who has liked, commented, or repinned the image. Pinterest has also added the option of making boards "secret" so that the user can pin to and view boards that only the user can see when logged into their own account. People normally post "selfies" and things they have made. A user can find friends by using his or her Facebook and Twitter accounts. This allows for an easy flow of information through varying infrastructure.[citation needed] The website has proven especially popular among women. According to Nielsen, in 2012 the U.S. female audience of Pinterest accessing the website through the computer was 70%. The average Pinterest user spent about 90 minutes per month on the website in 2012. The most popular categories on Pinterest are food & drink, DIY & crafts, women's apparel, home decor, and travel.

Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 04:36:00 +0000

This article is about the social networking service. For the type of directory, see face book.

Founded February 4, 2004; 11 years ago

Headquarters Menlo Park, California, US

Coordinates 37.4848°N 122.1484°WCoordinates: 37.4848°N 122.1484°W

Area served United States (2004–05)

Worldwide, except blocking countries (2005–present)

Founder(s)

Mark Zuckerberg

Eduardo Saverin

Andrew McCollum

Dustin Moskovitz

Chris Hughes

Key people Mark Zuckerberg

(Chairman and CEO) Sheryl Sandberg

(COO) Industry Internet

Revenue Increase US$17.928 billion (2015)

Operating income Increase US$6.225 billion (2015)

Net income Increase US$3.688 billion (2015)

Total assets Increase US$49.407 billion (2015)

Total equity Increase US$44.218 billion (2015)

Employees 11,996 (September 2015)

Subsidiaries Instagram

Oculus VR

PrivateCore

Website www.facebook.com Tor: facebookcorewwwi.onion

Written in C++, PHP (as HHVM)[4] and D language

Alexa rank Steady 2 (January 2016)

Type of site Social networking service

Registration Required

Users Increase 1.44 billion monthly active users (March 31, 2015)

Available in Multilingual (140)

Current status Active

Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old was allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students.

After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, use various apps and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Also users can complain or block unpleasant people. Facebook had over 1.18 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. Because of the large volume of data users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion. Following its Q3 earnings call in 2015, Facebook's market cap soared past $300 billion.

Twitter History Creation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 04:33:00 +0000

Creation and initial reaction

A blueprint sketch, c. 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was.

The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo, formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007. Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview:

With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.

The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it."

Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter was "absolutely ruling" SXSWi. Social software researcher danah boyd said Twitter was "owning" the conference. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"

The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.

In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network as president of revenue.

Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:08:00 +0000

Microsoft Corporation /ˈmaɪkrɵsɒft, -sɔːft/ (commonly referred to as Microsoft) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup. It is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies.

Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.

As of 2015, Microsoft is market dominant in both the IBM PC-compatible operating system (while it lost the majority of the overall operating system market to Android) and office software suite markets (the latter with Microsoft Office). The company also produces a wide range of other software for desktops and servers, and is active in areas including Internet search (with Bing), the video game industry (with the Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles), the digital services market (through MSN), and mobile phones (via the operating systems of Nokia's former phones and Windows Phone OS). In June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers.

With the acquisition of Nokia's devices and services division to form Microsoft Mobile Oy, the company re-entered the smartphone hardware market, after its previous attempt, Microsoft Kin, which resulted from their acquisition of Danger Inc.[

Microsoft is a portmanteau of the words microcomputer and software.

Bing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:06:00 +0000

Bing (known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft.

Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California, for release on June 1, 2009. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset, which Microsoft purchased in 2008.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.

In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology has been incorporated into Bing globally since August 2011. In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query. In September 2013, a new-look Bing was released to tie in with Microsoft's "Metro" design language.

As of November 2015, it is the second largest search engine in the US with a query volume at 20.9%, while Yahoo Search, which Bing powers, has 12.5%. Its competitor Google is at 63.9%.

AOL

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:05:00 +0000

AOL Inc. (previously known as America Online, written as AOL and styled as Aol.) is an American multinational mass media corporation based in New York City that develops, grows, and invests in brands and web sites. The company's business spans digital distribution of content, products, and services, which it offers to consumers, publishers, and advertisers.

AOL originally provided dial up service to millions of Americans. At the height of its success it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner. As dial up rapidly lost ground to broadband in the early 2000s, AOL's fortunes significantly retracted and it lost the vast majority of its value, laying off thousands of employees. AOL was eventually spun off, and Time Warner is worth fourteen times that of AOL, as of late 2015.

On May 12, 2015, Verizon Communications announced plans to buy AOL for $50 per share in a deal valued at $4.4 billion. The acquisition was completed on June 23, 2015.

Yahoo

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:04:00 +0000

Yahoo Inc. (styled as Yahoo!) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website. It is one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! is the highest-read news and media website, with over 7 billion readers per month, being the fourth most visited website globally, as of June 2015. According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo websites every month. Yahoo itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages."

Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, serves as CEO and President of the company.

In January 2015, the company announced it planned to spin-off its stake in Alibaba Group in a separately listed company. In December 2015 it reversed this decision, opting instead to spin-off its internet business as a separate company.

Google

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:03:00 +0000

Google Inc. is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil". In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers online productivity software (Google Docs) including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing (Google Chrome), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and instant messaging (Hangouts). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS for a class of netbooks known as Chromebooks. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its "high-quality low-cost" Nexus devices. In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.