While ICQ was displaced by AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, and other competitors in the U.S. In April 2010, AOL sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies, headed by Alisher Usmanov, for $187.5 million. Eliav Moshe replaced Gilliam in 2009 and became ICQ’s managing director. Under the leadership of the new CEO, Orey Gilliam, who also assumed the responsibility for all of AOL’s messaging business in 2007, ICQ resumed its growth it was not only a highly profitable company but one of AOL’s most successful businesses.

ICQ’s management changed at the end of 2003. In 2002 AOL successfully patented the technology.Īfter the purchase, the product was initially managed by Ariel Yarnitsky and Avi Shechter. At the time this was the highest price ever paid to purchase an Israeli technology company. The technology’s success encouraged AOL to acquire Mirabilis on June 8, 1998, for $287 million up front and $120 million in additional payments over three years based on performance levels. The technology Mirabilis developed for ICQ was distributed free of charge. They recognized that many people were accessing the internet through non-UNIX operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, and those users were unfamiliar with established chat technologies, e.g.

The founding company of ICQ, Mirabilis, was established in June 1996 by five Israeli developers: Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and Arik’s father Yossi Vardi. You can specify a list of ICQ friends, and an ICQ server will alert you when any of these friends go online. You use your ICQ# to register your presence with the ICQ network when you go online and start ICQ, and to allow other ICQ users to recognize when you are online so that they can contact you. During registration, you are given a unique number called an ICQ#, which identifies you to all other users on the ICQ network. When you install ICQ and begin the registration process, you are connected to an ICQ server that belongs to a network of such servers distributed across the Internet. ICQ can even function as a universal platform for launching any peer-to-peer application, such as Microsoft NetMeeting. You can use ICQ to send real-time messages to other users, have group chat sessions, send e-mail, transfer files and URLs, play games, and so on. ICQ, which homophonically stands for “I seek you,” lets you search for users currently online on ICQ networks and alerts you when friends go online. ICQ is a program that enables users to locate other ICQ users on the Internet and communicate with them in real-time. Definition of ICQ in Network Encyclopedia.

Icq number 117702659