CEO and Co-Founder, Ruba
CEO and Co-Founder, Xfire
CEO and Co-Founder, Direct Hit
CEO and Co-Founder, Stylus Innovation
Original MP3's below
mike @michaelcassidy.com
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| Hiking Yosemite's Half Dome |
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| Google Acquires Travel Guide Startup Ruba
TechCrunch, May 21, 2010
"According to this blog post, Google has acquired online travel guide and community Ruba. Ruba is a visual travel guide & tour review site that provides travelers with visual guides written by other travelers. The blog post is embedded below...."
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| Viacom Pays $102M for Xfire
Red Herring, April 24, 2006
"Online gaming community ties up with media giant for help with advertising to its young, male demographic. Viacom, in a move that amps up the gaming and online community offerings of its MTV Networks, said Monday it was set to pay $102 million for two-and-a-half-year-old startup Xfire. Xfire brings a valuable demographic for advertising revenues, said Viacom. The media giant will integrate its purchase with MTV Networks’ music, entertainment, and networking properties."
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| Is Xfire the next MySpace?
Fortune, February 17, 2006
"Xfire, which only launched in January 2004, has three million passionate customers who use its PC software an astonishing average of 88 hours a month, according to Cassidy. More amazing facts: almost 300,000 new users join each month, and for two years the service has sustained a 2 percent-plus growth rate -- weekly. Its users -- in 100 countries (a slight majority are in the United States) -- are online for 200 million minutes every day. The reason for the growth can probably be found in a core philosophy that puts users first."
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| Finding Friends & Foes
Forbes, September 6, 2004
"Tens of millions of people play videogames online; the tricky part is finding your friends--and favorite foes--among them. Michael Cassidy can help. His company, Xfire, runs a Web site that is the TV Guide, maître d' and instant messenger of the gaming world. Cassidy's service can point you to a buddy who is ready to play the game you want at any moment of the day or night. He already has a lot of friends to prove it. In eight months a million people in 100 countries have downloaded Xfire's software."
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Direct Hit Press Articles
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| Ask Jeeves Agrees to Acquire Direct Hit for $532.5 Million
The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2000
"Ask Jeeves, Inc., Emeryville. Calif., operator of an easy-to-use Internet search engine, said it agreed to buy closely held Direct Hit Technologies, Inc. for $532.5 million in stock, adding technology that will help users search for information ranked by popularity."
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| Business at Cyberspeed
The Washington Post, Sunday, January 24, 1999
"When the Web's first search engines were created, there were few users on the Internet. It wasn't until the Web popularized the network, and millions of people began adding documents and searching them, that anyone thought much about how computers could collect and analyze data on searching habits."
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| The Future of Search Engines
Industry Standard, September 25, 1998
"Net users spend 50 percent of their time online conducting research, according to a recent Business Week/Harris poll, and the portals, no matter how many bells and whistles their sites have, know that a better search engine means more visitors."
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Stylus Innovation Press Articles
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| Make Voice Response Sing BYTE Magazine, May 1996 “Visual Voice Pro, from Stylus Innovation, employs custom controls, such as VBXes and OCXes, as well as DLLs that you can access from most applications development environments. Visual Voice Pro handles up to 24 calls simultaneously and supports Telephony API (TAPI)-compliant hardware, multi-line voice-response boards, and most fax modems.”
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| Two teams win top prize in MIT $50K contest
MIT TechTalk, May 13, 1998
"In another unprecedented move, Direct Hit donated its $30,000 winnings to the other finalists after announcing it had received a commitment for $1.3 million in funding. Making the event even richer, contest alumni/ae Krisztina Holly, John Barrus and Mike Cassidy, whose company Stylus Innovations won the grand prize in the 1991 $10K Competition, returned their original $10,000 award to encourage student entrepreneurship. Artisoft acquired Stylus Innovations in 1996 for $13 million."
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