When Sharon and I and Kelly moved to Arizona in the fall of
2011, Brian stayed in Chicago. In addition to the fact had a well-paying job at
a real estate management company, he was also dating a delightful woman named
Ejiro, who happened to be a doctor. Roughly a year later, they came to the realization
that a long-term relationship was not viable, so Brian decided to take the Amtrak
train from Chicago to Flagstaff, and he arrived in the Grand Canyon state in
July of 2013.
By the time he arrived, Kelly and Chris had recently moved
from Flagstaff to Tucson so that Kelly could more easily get the prerequisite
courses she needed for her nursing degree. Brian shortly thereafter moved to
Tucson, and lived with Kelly and Chris briefly until he could find his own
place.
“Plenty of Fish” paired him with a woman in Tucson where he
lived for a brief period of time, but he moved out when she went full crazy. Fortunately,
he met Kim not long after that, and that relationship eventually led to a marriage
and a couple of very cute children.
Shortly after we moved to Flagstaff, we discovered Skype, which
allowed us to have video conferences with Brian in Chicago.
Skype (/skaɪp/) is a proprietary telecommunications
application operated by Skype Technologies,
a division of Microsoft, best known
for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice
calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones
(over traditional
telephone networks), and other features. It is available on various
desktop, mobile, and video game console platforms.
Skype was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and four Estonian developers, and first released
in August 2003. In September 2005, eBay acquired
it for $2.6 billion. In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz,
and the Canada
Pension Plan Investment Board bought 65% of Skype for
$1.9 billion from eBay, valuing the business at $2.92 billion. In May
2011, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and used it to replace
their Windows Live
Messenger. As of 2011, most of the development team and 44% of all
the division's employees were in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.
Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It
became entirely powered by Microsoft-operated supernodes in
May 2012;[in 2017, it changed from a peer-to-peer
service to a centralized Azure-based service. As of February 2023, it
was used by 36 million people each day.
Skype’s popularity has been hurt by Apple’s I-Phone,
which was first released in 2007, Microsoft’s own messaging app and Zoom.
The I-Phone has a FaceTime feature, which permits
video conferencing, a feature that the Android phone did not have until
recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
FaceTime was added to the I-phone is 2011.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime
Zoom was introduced in April of 2011, and its use exploded during
the coronavirus epidemic. Annual revenue is more than $4 billion a year, and
its success have made founder Eric Yuan a very rich man, with an estimated net
worth of more than $16 billion, a very impressive figure for a man who did not
speak English when he moved to California in 1997, but it took 9 tries for him
to obtain a visa.
Although Skype’s founding nearly 20
years ago seems like ancient history, consider the fate of a company that is
even older.
AOL (originally known as America Online) had its origins in
1985, nearly 40 years ago.
AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the 1990s and was
(at one point) the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. AOL
once provided a dial-up internet service
to millions of Americans and pioneered instant messaging and chat rooms with AOL Instant Messanger (AIM). In 1998, AOL
purchased Netscape for US$4.2 billion. By 2000, AOL
was providing internet service to over 20 million consumers, dominating the
market of internet service
providers (ISPs). In 2001, at the height of its
popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner in the largest merger in U.S.
history. AOL rapidly shrank thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up and
rise of broadband. AOL was eventually spun off from
Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed
the new CEO. Under his leadership, the company invested in media brands and
advertising technologies.
On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon
Communications for $4.4 billion. On May 3, 2021,
Verizon announced it would sell Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm Apollo Global
Management for $5 billion. On September 1, 2021, AOL
became part of the new Yahoo! Inc.
Do you remember this greeting?
(2) AOL Dial Up Internet Connection Sound + You've Got Mail
(America Online) 90's - YouTube
I have not had an AOL account for many years, but I know a few
people who still have theirs. I now rely on Microsoft’s hormail.com and Google’s
Gmail for my electronic mail needs.
For videoconferencing, ZOOM has been a great tool. Not only
did it allow me to teach classes remotely in 2020, I also use it to contact with
my old neighbor in China on a fairly regular basis, and I have used it to connect
to family picnics in Minnesota. It also happens to be how Brian and Kim got
married, since the justice of the peace was in downtown Tucson, and they were
in a hotel in Oro Valley.
Technology is constantly changing, so it’s important to try to
stay as current as you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment