Yahoo! was started by David Filo and Jerry Yang who started Yahoo! as a hobby in college. Yahoo! was a hobby and now it has turned into a global brand, which allows people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things online. Yahoo! was started in a February 1994 to track the interests of the founders who at the time were attending Stanford. As time passed David and Jerry spent more and more time on Yahoo!. They then had to start splitting the links into categories and sub categories, which is the core concept of Yahoo!. The original name for the Yahoo website was "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" however it changes to Yahoo!. Yahoo! is an acronym that stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang say that they named their company because they like the definition of yahoo. Yahoo! resided on Jerry’s student workstation and the software was on David’s computer.
Soon people found out that the
Yahoo! website was a place to find other useful websites. When word spread
about Yahoo! the number of visitors increased. By fall 1994 they had a million
hits on their site which translated to around one hundred thousand different
visitors. Since there were so many people visiting the site the founders knew
they had potential to become a business. So in March 1995 the founders incorporated
the business and met with Silicon Valley venture capitalists to fund their new business.
The founders of Yahoo! ended up going with Sequoia Capital who has funded
companies like Oracle, Apple Computer and other successful businesses. Sequoia Capital
agreed to fund yahoo in April 1995 with an investment of two million dollars. The
founders decided to start choosing the management team for the company. They
hired former Motorola employee Tim Koogle a Stanford grad as the chief
executive officer. They also acquired Jeffrey Mallet who was the founder of
Novell’s WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer for Yahoo!.
In fall 1995 Yahoo! received more funding from Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. In
April 1996 Yahoo! started a successful IPO in the company of 49 employees.
Yahoo! today is a leader in global internet communications, commerce and media company. They also offer a branded network of services millions of individuals monthly all over the world. Yahoo was the first navigational guide for the World Wide Web and is one of the leaders guiding traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! also is one of the top internet brands globally and reaches many audiences worldwide. Not only does Yahoo! provide services to individuals they also provide services to other clients. They provide services like online business, enterprise service and other things. Corporate Yahoo! is a popular customized enterprise portal solution that allows and supports audio and video streaming, store hosting and management and Web site tools and services. The headquarters of Yahoo! is in Sunnyvale California and they have offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States. Here are a few services Yahoo! provides today: web portal, Yahoo! news, Yahoo! mail, advertising, online mapping, Yahoo! video and some other services. Here are some links to Yahoo! home pages specific to different countries: http://www.yahoo.co.jp/, http://uk.yahoo.com/, http://cn.yahoo.com/, http://ph.yahoo.com/ and many other Yahoo! homepages tailored to a specific country.
Yahoo Mail
Yahoo! email is one of many services provided by Yahoo!. This application will allow you to sign into your Yahoo! email. It also tells you to visit yahoo.com to create an email if you don’t have one already.