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Meebo

Meebo (often stylized as meebo) was an instant messaging and social networking service provider. It was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry, and was based in Mountain View, California. Initially the company offered a web-based instant messenger service, extending its offer in more general online chat and even social networking directions. In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.

Meebo's backend was originally written with libgaim 1.5.0. After the initial period when the project was funded exclusively by its founders, Meebo raised $100,000 as angel investments (investors included Auren Hoffman and Marc Andreessen), received $3.5 million from Sequoia in 2005, and $9 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006.

On August 2, 2006, Meebo launched the Flash-based "Meebo Me" chat window widget for personal websites, which automatically added visitors to the site owner's Meebo Messenger contact list, offering the possibility to start a realtime chat both to site owner and visitor In May 2007, Meebo launched media-enabled chat rooms (Rooms) that can be embedded in any website page. At this point, Meebo still didn't have a revenue model.

In April 2008, Meebo secured $25 million in venture capital funding from Jafco Investment, Time Warner and KTB Investment & Securities. In December 2008, Meebo started offering a "Community IM" integration widget, which was targeted at community-oriented sites and provided Meebo's services at third-party locations. A year later, in December 2009, Community IM was replaced with "Meebo Bar", a gadget that could be integrated by third parties into their site, providing advanced chat functionality to their users.

While initially operating on web access to the instant messaging market, Meebo expanded its offerings in the increasingly popular social network services. In February 2009, Meebo added Facebook Messenger to its list of supported instant messengers.

During the rise of the new generation of smartphone operating systems, Meebo released mobile applications for all major platforms: Android, iOS and BlackBerry. In February 2010, after being among the first to launch an iPhone app, Meebo released a fully-fledged native iPhone app.

In May 2010, the original Meebo Rooms service was discontinued, and the feature was ultimately removed in October 2011.[citation needed] In February 2011, Meebo acquired Mindset Media advertising company to improve its ads targeting.

On June 4, 2012, Meebo announced that they had entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google. A month later, on July 11, 2012, all of Meebo's products were discontinued except for Meebo Bar, which remained operational until June 6, 2013. Meebo's staff was assigned to Google+ development.

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