kumo.com…
So back in 1996 there was a company that needed hip name, especially since they were diving into Web and site development. But they thought that there weren’t many decent domain names left, especially since all the 3 letter .com domains had already been taken and a lot of the good 4 letter .com domains were already snapped up. So they got a a little creative and after a bit of research settled on kumo.com, meaning spider in Japanese - and since Japan was still a really hip language (more than now anyway) and since it was easy to spell and the domain name was there, they went for it. Kumo Software was born.
A coupla years later they sold the company to Merak and Merak was subsequently purchased by Schlumberger. Interestingly, one of the founders kept the name and the domain for a number of years after didn’t do anything with it.
Very recently he was approached by an anonymous buyer via a broker who was interested in buying kumo.com. He sold it. If the rumours are to be believed the buyer was Microsoft and the domain is to be used for their new search brand. Of course, it’s just speculation and there’s nothing yet at kumo.com…
Kumo was founded in 1996 by Doug Brown and David McFadzean, with Ken Kittlitz and Todd Kuipers (me) being the first employees. We did a lot of early web work, developing a variety of things in vanilla HTML, ASP 1.0 and Perl. Not much, if any of our early work is around, though parts of the Foresight Exchange were built by us and are still in use - but for the most part, I can’t think of anything else out there.
Interestingly the first thing that struck me was how the sale of the domain had to be one the most information asymmetric that I’d ever been close to. If it was Microsoft buying the app, a little clearer information would have likely changed the transaction completely.
Anyway, kind of an interesting story… You can read more here about the rumours and a surprising amount of history on the name…
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