Bisulfide

At face value, InfoSpace’s business end looked simple: it supplied content like stock quotes, weather reports, and horoscopes to websites ranging from AOL to MSN. But when InfoSpace started providing such to mobile phones, the company helped usher in the era of wireless Internet. No one could blame Information Week for touting InfoSpace’s founder, Naveen Jain, as one of the “Six People Who Will Change the Net” in the late 1990s. InfoSpace made Naveen Jain rich. Shortly after taking the company public on December 1998, Naveen Jain’s stocks, worth $15, jumped to $20, the first in a series of hikes that lasted until the early 2000s. Just down the street from InfoSpace’s office in Bellevue, Washington lies Intelius, another Naveen Jain company. Since 2003, Intelius has sold personal profiles, court records, addresses, property holdings, and other publicly available intelligence to millions of subscribers. Such information compendium is mostly indicated for verifying people’s backgrounds. With it, one could check the criminal history of anyone from the nurse to one’s date. The company also doubles as an identity theft protection company. A top comScore-ranking website, Intelius catapulted Naveen Jain to the finals of the 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Before he became a businessman, Naveen Jain had been project manager for Microsoft Corporation, whence he introduced MSN, Microsoft’s online service. From June 1989 to March 1996, Jain acquired patent rights to such technologies as Windows NT and Windows 95 and worked on the operating systems OS/2 and MS-DOS. Many of those who helped Naveen Jain found InfoSpace and Intelius were his workmates from Microsoft. Naveen Jain is a self-confessed fan of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, until he “got tired of making billions” for him leading to his founding of InfoSpace. The other co-founder, Paul Allen, invested in InfoSpace during the short-lived dot-com stock frenzy.