User:Donstrack/NextPage

In February 1997, Folio Corporation, co-founded by Brad Pelo and Curt Allen, was sold to Open Market, an internet Company based in Boston, MA seeking to take advantage of the growing electronic commerce phenomena taking place on the world wide web.

Open Market struggled to integrate the Folio technology into its business model, and together with a growing sense of reality among investors and businesses of high tech internet-related stocks, the company was soon seeing serious decline in its fortunes. A change in management at Open Market, and a switch in technologies in mid 1999 saw the Folio technology licensed back to Pelo and a group of Utah investors that included Alan Ashton of WordPerfect fame, under the name of ABSB.

This new company was very soon renamed as NextPage, and soon embarked on an expanding effort to leverage the benefits of Folio technology into what was variously called Peer-To-Peer Content Network and eContent Network. Where Folio really shined was in its ability to index all sorts of documents on a company's internal network, known as an intra-net, and make those documents readily available to all users on the network.

As the internet came into play in the mid 1990s, Folio as a stand alone company, had improved its product to allow additional formats to be indexed, and made available to a company's customers and employees as web documents. NextPage continued to improve on its Folio technology, and within a couple short years, the technology was being successfully marketed as NextPage's NXT.

The benefit's of NextPage's former Folio technology saw Pelo give testimony before the U.S. Senate in October 2000 on the advantages of server-based peer-to-peer document management, in the Senate's hearings on the negative impact of Napster, a similar peer-to-peer technology that allowed users to share (illegally) music across the internet. Open Market attempted to embrace at least two other content management technologies, but was never able to fully recover. In March 2003, Open Market declared bankruptcy. Its surviving technology is now controlled by FatWire.

September 1, 2004:

NextPage, Inc. announced that Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian-based leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, had agreed to purchase the technology, product lines, and the over 500 customers and partners of NextPage's publishing applications business unit, including NXT, Folio, LivePublish, and GetSmart. NextPage's document management services, Chrome, was to remain with the company. (source)

In January 2006, FAST announced the release of ProPublish 4.1, "designed specifically for premium content providers whose research-oriented users demand complex search and navigation capabilities." The relationship of the old Folio format, to this newer ProPublish format in not known, but the news release shows that ProPublish included "Enhanced support for Folio and NXT content types. " (source)

April 25, 2008:

FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary — On April 25, 2008, Microsoft completed its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer, opening a new chapter in the ongoing evolution of search."