Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
One critical issue affects YouTube and all other web-based video services.
Streaming videos and images use enormous quantities of bandwidth. As more and
more companies enter the streaming video and remote-image subindustry, it is
possible to perhaps saturate the web and slow down overall performance.
In any case, YouTube seems to have hit on a psychological need to share per-
sonal images and information in a structured and reasonably safe environment.
However, no personal information put on the web is truly safe or private.
Zillow
Zillow's special niche is providing real estate property values. Here, too, the niche
depends on several recent technologies, including the World Wide Web, large
databases, satellite and aerial digital images, and proprietary software applications
that use proprietary algorithms. The company could not have existed 20 years ago
because some of the technologies were not available. Zillow is a public company
whose stock is traded on NASDAQ.
Zillow was started in 2005 in Seattle, Washington, by Rich Barton and Lloyd
Fink. Both founders had been Microsoft executives and were technical entrepren-
eurs. Zillow was not the first to enter the real estate evaluation market, because
Yahoo had a service called Yahoo Real Estate that started in 1998.
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