Know your Web Founders – Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, Hotmail.com

Know your Web Founders – Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, Hotmail.com

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Jack Smith, Sabeer Bhatia Creators of the World Wide Web's first commercially  successful and free  Email Service -  HOTMAIL.COM
Quote:
"It solved a real world problem:
The killer idea was to make
email available on the web…"

Sabeer Bhatia, a Stanford grad,  joined a startup company called Firepower Systems Inc, where he spent two years.
In 1994, Sabeer started working on new ideas for the Internet and he teamed up with Jack Smith, a colleague from Apple Computer, Inc.

While working on a concept of a web-based database, they realized the potential of a web-based e-mail system. And thus decided to create one called HoTMaiL (the uppercase letters spelling out HTML—the language used to write the base of a webpage).

It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, American Independence Day, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based e-mail [8] and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world.

In less than six months, the website attracted over 1 million subscribers. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. On December 30, 1997 (Bhatia's 29th birthday), Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for a reported sum of $400million. (Source: Wikipedia.org)