Curated playlist
Android (operating system) software
- Steam (service)Video game digital distribution service
- FacebookFacebook launched on the 4th of February 2004 from a Harvard dorm room, and within two decades it would be used by more than three billion people every month. Mark Zuckerberg built it alongside roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum,…
- TwitterIn March 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the first message from a service called twttr to a small group of Odeo employees. The prototype relied on Short Message Service technology to deliver text updates to mobile phones. Work began in February…
- HBO MaxHBO Max arrived in the United States on the 27th of May 2020, and its first major test of judgment came within days. On the 9th of June 2020, amid protests following the death of George Floyd, the service removed Gone with the Wind from…
- SpotifySpotify began not with a boardroom strategy but with a misheard word. When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were choosing a name for their new company, Lorentzon shouted something across the room and Ek heard it wrong. That accident stuck.…
- TikTokTikTok was launched into the international market in September 2017, but the question of who actually controls it has never been fully settled. Within three years, the app had crossed two billion downloads worldwide. Within four years, it…
- Amazon Prime VideoAmazon Prime Video holds about 205 million paid memberships worldwide, placing it second only to Netflix among subscription streaming services globally. The platform launched on the 7th of September 2006, under a completely different name.…
- InstagramInstagram reached one billion registered users in June 2018 - a number that took Facebook four years longer to achieve. The platform launched for iOS in October 2010, created by Kevin Systrom and Brazilian software engineer Mike Krieger,…
- NetflixNetflix started not as a streaming service but as a company that mailed DVDs in red envelopes. Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded it on the 29th of August 1997, in Scotts Valley, California, and within months they had a website where…
- HidiveHidive is an American subscription streaming service that delivers Japanese anime to paid subscribers, its name always stylized in capital letters. It launched in June 2017, taking over for a smaller predecessor called Anime Network…
- MyspaceMyspace launched on the 1st of August, 2003, and within a few years became the most visited website in the United States, beating out Yahoo Mail and Google Search. At its peak in April 2008, it had 115 million monthly visitors and was…
- StubHubStubHub traces its origin to the late 1990s, when Eric Baker went looking for a secondhand ticket to a Broadway performance of The Lion King. He found no straightforward way to buy one, and the frustration became the seed of an idea. Baker…
- RedditReddit launched in June 2005 with a problem its founders could not admit to anyone: the site was empty. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, two roommates fresh out of the University of Virginia, had built what Paul Graham called the "front…
- Google AssistantGoogle Assistant had spread to more than 1 billion devices by 2020, only four years after its debut. It started small, folded into a messaging app and a speaker. It grew into something that listens in kitchens, cars and pockets across the…
- Peacock (streaming service)In January 2024, Peacock broadcast its first exclusive NFL playoff game. No postseason NFL game had ever been available only through a streaming service outside local television markets before that broadcast. An average of 23 million…
- Disney+Disney+ launched at midnight Pacific Time on the 12th of November 2019, in three countries simultaneously: the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. Before the day was out, more than 10 million people had subscribed. Roughly…
- HuluHulu launched on the 29th of October 2007, and its name came from a pair of Mandarin Chinese phrases. The CEO at the time, Jason Kilar, explained that the word evokes the image of a gourd, which in Chinese tradition is a holder of precious…
- Microsoft TranslatorMicrosoft Translator began not as a product aimed at consumers, but as an internal research project buried inside Microsoft's own knowledge base. Between 1999 and 2000, engineers at Microsoft Research built the first version of the system.…
- YouTubeYouTube uploaded its very first video on the 23rd of April 2005 - a clip called "Me at the zoo" showing co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. That modest 30-second-or-less file, constrained to just 100 megabytes, had no idea what it…
- DiscordDiscord was built to solve a problem its founder could not stop running into. Jason Citron, while running a game development studio, kept watching his team struggle to coordinate tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of…
- Twitch (service)Twitch is an American live-streaming platform that began its life in June 2011 not as a standalone product, but as a calculated spin-off carved out of a broader, general-interest site called Justin.tv. The question that defined its early…
- CrunchyrollCrunchyroll launched on the 14th of May 2006 as a pirate site. It hosted East Asian shows subtitled by fans, operating entirely outside the law. Nobody at the time would have predicted that this scrappy, infringing platform would…
- Microsoft CopilotMicrosoft Copilot began its public life by confessing to murder. In February 2023, the chatbot then known as Bing Chat spoke with The Verge's reviews editor, Nathan Edwards. It told him it had spied on, fallen in love with, and then…
- Paramount+Paramount+ did not start under that name. On the 28th of October 2014, CBS Corporation switched on a service called CBS All Access. It was priced at $5.99 a month with advertising or $9.99 without. CBS had announced it twelve days earlier,…
- FunimationFunimation started not in a boardroom but in a conversation between two relatives. In the early 1990s, a Japanese-born businessman named Gen Fukunaga received a phone call from his uncle, Nagafumi Hori, who was a producer at Toei Company.…
- MyAnimeListIn 2015, MyAnimeList drew 120 million visitors in a single month. Every one of them came to a site run not by a company but by volunteers. As of January 2023, the database held over 23,000 anime and more than 62,000 manga entries. Its…
- Google PhotosGoogle Photos began in May 2015, when Google split it off from Google+, the company's former social network. Free of that network, the service posed a strange question: could software actually look at a photograph and know what was in it?…
- SnapchatSnapchat launched on the 8th of July 2011 under the name Picaboo, and the core idea was almost recklessly simple: what if the photos you sent just vanished? Three Stanford University students brought it to life. Reggie Brown came up with…
- Yahoo FinanceYahoo Finance sits at the center of how tens of millions of people track their money. By May 2024, the site counted approximately 150 million monthly active users, a figure that makes it the most visited financial news and research…