Network Solutions

Herndon is a town in Fairfax County, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area of the United States. The population was 21,655 at the 2000 census, which makes it the largest of three towns in the county. Herndon was named for Commander William Lewis Herndon, American naval explorer and... author of Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon. Commander Herndon captained the ill-fated steamer SS Central America, going down with his ship while helping to save over 150 of its passengers and crew. The settlement was named Herndon in 1858. In the 1870s, many Northern soldiers and their families came to settle in the area, taking advantage of moderate climate and low land prices. Herndon also offered a group of friendly and local native Americans who helped the town to prosper via trade and instruction. Originally part of the rural surroundings of the Washington, D.C. area, the town of Herndon developed into a hub of dairy farming and vacationing for area residents, aided by its presence along the Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire Railroad Railroad.
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Web.com Group, Inc. is a provider of Web services catering to small and medium-sized businesses. As of June, 2011, Web.com had more than 1,000,000 subscribers. The Web.com Group was formed as a result of the acquisition of Web.com, Inc. by Website Pros, Inc. . Website Pros was founded in 1999 by Darin Brannan with a goal of becoming the largest nationwide website design and related value-add services company to the small and mid-sized market... in a subscription model . The idea was to provide these services at 1/10 the cost and time of that offered by thousands of small web design shops dominating the cottage industry. It took only six years from start-up to achieve its goal of dominating the market, and went public in 2005 - it is still the market leader in its category. The company was initially funded with $65 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Crosspoint Ventures, Chase, Verizon , Office Depot, and Dell; and subsequently by Insight Venture Partners just prior to its IPO.
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RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name System, that would access the page registered by the owner of the RealNames keyword. In effect, to users of Internet Explorer, RealNames... became a domain registry which was capable of registering names that worked without needing to belong to a top level domain such as ".com" or ".net". RealNames and its backers expected this to be a lucrative source of income, and it raised more than $130m of funding for its venture. RealNames was dependent on maintaining its association with Microsoft that enabled the RealNames service on Microsoft's web browser. RealNames shut down operations in 2002 following a decision by Microsoft to redirect the 1 billion page views per calendar quarter that RealNames were resolving from the browser address bar into the MSN search engine.
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