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Actually, it is funny, because Orbitz was started by the airlines themselves. They didn't need to scrape cheap airfares to lower prices as much as cut out the travel agents as middlemen:

Five airlines--United Airlines Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc., Northwest Airlines Corp., and, later, AMR Corp. (American Airlines)--teamed to create a new online travel service. (American became an equity partner in March 2000; total start-up funding was around $100 million.) Together, the five founding partners controlled 90 percent of seats on domestic commercial flights. Existing computer reservations systems such as SABRE did not present competing fares in an unbiased way, said company officials.

What makes it even funnier to me is that American Airlines was one of the founding companies of Orbitz who was trying to lower prices from SABRE, which American Airlines started in 1960!!!

NPG (Nature.com) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, a global publishing group founded in the United Kingdom in 1843. Macmillan is itself owned by German-based, family run company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. "To defend its leading position in the profitable market for business information Holtzbrinck partnered with long-term American affiliate Dow Jones & Company to plan a new weekly business title. In 1994 Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt and Dow Jones had taken over German business news agency Vereinigte Wirtschaftsdienste (VWD) and Czech publisher Economia. Since November 1995 the two companies had coordinated their strategies and cooperated in marketing of advertising and their electronic databases Genios and Dow Jones News Retrieval. In June 1999 Holtzbrinck and Dow Jones announced a strategic alliance and swapped shares of their business newspapers. Holtzbrinck assumed 49 percent of the Wall Street Journal Europe, while Dow Jones received 22 percent of Handelsblatt. While Holtzbrinck's goal was to open up new European markets to the Handelsblatt, Dow Jones aimed at broadening the German readership for the Wall Street Journal Europe. While both periodicals were expected to stay independent, an intensification of the exchange of content, and cooperation in ad sales and distribution was planned." (Taken from http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/verlagsgruppe-georg-von-holtzbrinck-gmbh-history/) Dow Jones is a News Corporation company.(http://www.newscorp.com/operations/publishing.html) Conservative connection in THREE MOVES. P.S.The U.S. DOJ has officially filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple as well as publishers Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster for price fixing.

None of that is to say that there is any sort of manufacturing oversight, claims testing (particularly in the diet and erectile dysfunction areas) or that a natural random soup of chemicals is somehow automatically safer than an intelligently purpose crafted solution.

Well, you'd think that, but there's one thing that biological processes are big on, and that is important in the realm of pharmaceuticals - handedness. Most chemical processes have no preference for handedness, but biologicals do. This is one of the aspects of invert sugar.
Many of the chemicals we use as drugs have side effects that are linked to the other-handed version of the active ingredient. If your process makes even amounts of the active ingredient and the one that causes side-effects, it may have no worth as a drug. If, on the other hand, you can get 90% of the resultant chemicals to be the correct hand, it may be very valuable. Sepracor made their money doing just that.

One of the first people the founders hired was Bill Joy, a Berkeley Ph.D. well known for his design of a popular version of the UNIX operating system.

Indeed, what else to expect from a company which was founded by emperor Napoleon III?

Where are you getting this from? The write up at: http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Saab-Automobile-AB-Company-History.html

Show the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you just said.

When GM acquired at 50% stake in SAAB in 1989 the company had already been operating at a LOSS for several years. They decreased the time to build a car from 100 hours to 50-60 hours, increasing per unit profit!

Also don't overlook that for much of the period of GM "ownership" they actually had only %50 of the company. Peter Wallenberg / INVESTOR owned the other half!

Why SAABs demise is being blamed solely on GM is beyond me.

SAAB hasn't turned a profit since ***BEFORE*** GM bought half of it in...1989! That's two over decades of losses! How long do you expect a non-profitable business to survive?

Take off the rose colored glasses and read the real history.

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Saab-Automobile-AB-Company-History.html

Telus in British Columbia was "BC Tel". I may be wrong, but I believe that in both BC and Alberta (western-most and adjascent province) they were at least one time partly public entities.

This article mentions Telus as having been provincially owned in Alberta:
    http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0011790

This article mentions "BC Tel" as having been a public utility:
    http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/BRITISH-COLUMBIA-TELEPHONE-COMPANY-Company-History.html

Never heard of Beretta, eh?

Got an order for arquebusquequebus... gun barrels in 1526! Still going strong.

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Fabbrica-D-Armi-Pietro-Beretta-SpA-Company-History.html

It's been so long, and it's been rebranded and refocused, but I thought that WebMD was originally targeted to provide such a service - digital records that would replace / glue together the mess of health care services. Can anyone confirm that?

No surprise there. Brother Orrin was just responding to is corporate constituents, such as Nutraceutical International, of Provo, Utah.

Read the link. It provides some info on why Utah became the "Silicon Valley" of herbal supplements.

i am actually for some regulation. not really of any content, but to force the larger companies to be more open. fact is, the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money.

Fact is, Sprint was not a Baby Bell born from the AT&T breakup. Sprint was formed out from a private Railroad communications network. None of your taxes was used to create the Sprint network. So your all for regulating other peoples property?

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Sprint-Corporation-Company-History.html

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Aspirin was Big Pharma. You can't get much bigger than Bayer.

I bought an Apex DVD player sometime between 1997-1998 for under $200. I'd have to dig out the receipt to be absolutely certain, but it was definitely purchased before 2000.

The parent company of Ticketmaster is IACI, which also owns Ask.com, LendingTree, Match.com, the Home Shopping Network, the remnants of Excite, and some real estate companies. It's Barry Diller's company.

The corporate history of Ticketmaster is fascinating. Paul Allen owned it for a while (and, unusually, managed not to screw it up.) They've sued Microsoft over deep linking, and been sued by Pearl Jam over their monopoly.

My Grandparents live in an apartment in Manhattan, and they were offered a internet/tv/phone fiber connection (from RCN?) a long time ago (maybe it was even around 2000 http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/R CN-Corporation-Company-History.html, an eternity as far as high speed internet goes) -- before I heard of fiber anywhere else. So yes, there's good evidence the densly populated areas get the goods first.

However, they turned down the offer because they had no use for the bandwidth :(

For some or another reason the lameness filter won't post a list of companies/products I had listed.

WebPhone, CUSeeMe, Net2Phone, ... all around 1995

Much dotcom boomers which I even remember using. CUSeeMe for example has been around forever, NeVoT is an example of something that ran on older stuff. I used to do it while messing around with modems. ICQ had it (I don't know when exactly).

NEVOT (NetworkVoice Terminal) is a media agent that provides packet-voice communicationsacross internetworks. It operates in either unicast, simulated multicast or IP multicast environments, using the vat or RTP protocols. NEVOT is part of the SPOKES conferencing systems that allows to create flexible multimedia applications from independent components. This document describes installation, operation and implementation of NEVOT. Copyright 1991-1995 by AT&T Bell Laboratories and GMD Fokus;

Start here: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/384701.html

Also, the H.324 protocol describes a way to get video & audio conferencing over POTS. The Datapoint MINX system was one of the early steps ('80s) and had all the fun-stuff we find in calling systems today. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/D atapoint-Corporation-Company-History.html

There you go, have fun in court.