BroadVision
More info
- Creator
- Pehong Chen
- Released
- 1993
- Type
- E-commerce software
The software that was going to personalise every web shop — and one of the dotcom bubble's steepest descents.
Pehong Chen founded BroadVision in California in 1993, before most people had a web browser. Its One-To-One product let companies build shops and portals that showed different content to different visitors based on profile and behaviour — standard in every e-commerce platform today, but in 1996 it took expensive licences and a team of consultants.
For a brief stretch in 2000 BroadVision was worth around $20 billion on the stock market, more than many of its customers. When the bubble burst the share price fell more than 99 percent, and the rest of the decade was a long contraction while Oracle, IBM and open source ate the market. In 2020 it was bought by ESW Capital, a collector of ageing software companies.