Pyra Labs
{{Short description|American company}}
{{Infobox dot-com company
| name = Pyra Labs
| owner = Google
| logo = Pyra Labs Logo.svg
| company_type = Subsidiary
| foundation = {{Start date and age|1999|01|01}}
| location_city = San Francisco, California
| location_country = U.S.
| products = Blogger
| key_people =
| revenue =
| screenshot =
| caption =
| url = {{url|pyra.com}}
| registration =
| launch_date =
| current_status = Offline, February 17, 2003
| language =
| alexa =
| website_type =
}}
Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003.
History
Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. Their coder Paul Bausch altered an ftp program to work on a webpage, enabling online users to upload to a webpage web-log. In 1999, while still in beta, the rudiments of Pyra were repurposed into an in-house tool which became Blogger. The service was made available to the public in August 1999. Much of this coding was done by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey.{{Cite book| publisher = Crown| isbn = 978-0307451361| pages = [https://archive.org/details/sayeverythinghow00rose/page/101 101 ‒ 130]| last = Rosenberg| first = Scott| title = Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters| chapter = The Blogger Catapult: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan| location = New York| date = 2009-07-07| chapter-url-access = registration| chapter-url = https://archive.org/details/sayeverythinghow00rose/page/101}}
Initially, Blogger was completely free of charge and there was no revenue model. In January 2001, Pyra asked Blogger users for donations to buy a new server.{{Cite magazine| last = Kahney| first = Leander| title = Dot-Com Begs for Bucks| magazine = Wired| accessdate = 2012-04-12| date = 2001-01-04| url = https://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/01/40979}} When the company's seed money dried up around the same time, the employees continued without pay for weeks or, in some cases, months; but this could not last, and eventually Williams faced a mass walk-out by everyone including co-founder Hourihan. Williams ran the company virtually alone until he was able to secure an investment by Trellix after its founder Dan Bricklin became aware of Pyra's situation. Eventually advertising-supported Blogspot and Blogger Pro emerged.
In 2002, Blogger was completely re-written to license it to other companies, the first of which was Globo.com of Brazil.
On February 17, 2003, Pyra was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum.{{Cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/18/digitalmedia.citynews|title=Google buys Blogger web service|last=McIntosh|first=Neil|date=2003-02-18|website=the Guardian|language=en|access-date=2018-01-25}}
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [http://www.pyralab.com Official site]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20061016164215/http://meg.hourihan.com/2003/02/bloggers-history-reimagined Blogger's History Reimagined]
- [http://danbricklin.com/log/blogger.htm How the Blogger Deal Happened]
Category:Defunct software companies of the United States
Category:American companies established in 1999
Category:Software companies established in 1999
Category:Software companies disestablished in 2003