Akamai Technologies
Akamai headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA The company was founded in 1998 by Daniel M. Lewin (then a graduate student at MIT) and MIT applied mathematics professor Tom Leighton. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning "intelligent" or "clever". History[edit] Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research, and were selected as one of the finalists.[7] By August 1998 they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig, Preetish Nijhawan, and Randall Kaplan, they began taking steps to incorporate the company.[8] In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of business professionals joined the founding team. On July 1, 2001, Akamai was added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index.[13] In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai. Technologies[edit] Akamai Intelligent Platform[edit] The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide.
Traffic Cops Of The Net
For weeks, techies were abuzz with speculation about Apple's (AAPL) plans to move into movies. And at a Sept. 12 announcement, CEO Steven P. Jobs didn't disappoint, telling a packed audience of journalists in San Francisco that Apple will begin by offering downloads of Walt Disney Co. films. Few tech companies have been hotter over the past year than Akamai Technologies Inc. And if you believe CEO Paul Sagan, 47, cousin of the late scientist Carl Sagan, there are billions and billions more dollars where those came from. The only question seems to be how much of that opportunity will fall to Sagan and his team of math wizards and server jockeys. Akamai got its start when Tim Berners-Lee -- the man credited with creating the World Wide Web -- walked down a hallway at MIT and warned math professor Tom Leighton that congestion would become a huge problem once the Web took off. That same year, Sagan arrived as something of a misfit in this geek paradise. By William C.
Break Down: Akamai Technologies [Rule Breaker] August 3, 2000
"Break Down August" means that we're spending this month analyzing several Rule Breaker candidates in search of a new purchase, with each company being subjected to a detailed analytical "Break Down." Akamai Technologies, the first Rule Breaker candidate that we'll study, has created a vital technology: Intelligent Internet content distribution. It is the first mover and the top dog in the field, which will become a vast industry as bandwidth usage increases. By I'm delighted to kick off the search by introducing you to one of my favorite companies, Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM). Know at the outset that The Motley Fool was one of the early customers of Akamai, that many of our techies here own shares in the company, and that some serve on Akamai's customer advisory board. Let's jump straight to the first, key Rule Breaker criteria: Top dog and first-mover in an important, emerging industry. Customers pay Akamai for bandwidth served. Servers Customers Rev ($mil) Seq. Yahoo! If Yahoo!
The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice
04/21/2004 12:30 PM La Sala de Puerto Rico F. Thomson Leighton, Ph.D. '81, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Akamai; Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT Description: If you have ever wondered what it means for a website to become "Akamaized," this lecture about the company's origins explains much of the mystery. But before there was an Akamai, there were research problems lots of them. About the Speaker(s): Tom Leighton has published more 100 research papers in the areas of parallel algorithms and architectures, distributed computing, communication protocols for networks, combinatorial optimization, probabilistic methods, VLSI computation and design, sequential algorithms, and graph theory. Leighton holds numerous patents involving algorithms for networks, cryptography, and digital rights management — many of which have been licensed or sold to major corporations. He recently began a two-year appointment to the President's Information Technology Advisory Council. credit license MIT TechTV
Akamai & the CDN Price Wars
Akamai Technologies (AKAM) investors are the stock market’s walking wounded. Over the last month, the stock has plummeted to about $33 a share, wiping out over $3 billion in market capitalization. The slide began soon after the company announced its second quarter earnings, indicating that it would have to spend more, and its gross margins were going to decline. The reason: price wars. For a very long time, Akamai, thanks to its arsenal of patents and early technological leads, had a near dominant market share in the content delivery network sector. That burp has come with the increase in the number of competitors, each one trying to cash in on the boom in online video and other digital content. We have heard from various sources that there is a price war going on, with some players being more aggressive in luring business away from Akamai. The action now revolves around adding new services on the basic commoditized CDN service, especially when it comes to online video.
