0 WHO INVENTED YOUTUBE?

YouTube was invented by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.

The three former PayPal employees came up with their invention out of a garage in Menlo Park.  As a sidenote: Hurley designed Paypal's trademark logo.

The inventors became millionaires when they sold their invention for 1.65 billion dollars to the search engine Google.

From left to right: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
Photos by wiki user Ianmacm

Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible"
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006.  YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.

YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.  According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than 14 billion videos viewed in May 2010.  YouTube says that over 48 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the US.  It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.  Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.

In 2008, YouTube and YouTubeTV moved its
headquarters into this office building at
 901 Cherry Avenue, San Bruno, California.

The choice of the name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com.   In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006

In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.

The interface of the YouTube website is available in 30 different languages, including Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian and Slovene, which do not have local channel versions.



Source(s):  about.com, wikipedia