Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and incorporated in Pennsylvania, United States. The company is composed of three independent businesses: Tucows Domains, Ting Internet, and Wavelo.
Originally founded in 1993 as a shareware and freeware software download site, Tucows shuttered its downloads business in 2021. Tucows Domains is the second-largest domain registrar worldwide and operates OpenSRS, Ascio, and Hover.
In 2012, Tucows launched Ting Mobile, a wireless service provider and used the same brand to launch its fiber Internet provider business Ting Internet in 2015. In 2020, Tucows sold its wireless business to Dish Network, while they continued to operate Ting Internet. The billing platform Tucows built for Ting Mobile was spun off into an independent OSS/BSS SaaS business, Wavelo.
The company was formed in Flint, Michigan, United States, in 1993. The Tucows logo was two cow heads, a play on the homophone "two cows".
Origins
Scott Swedorski, a Flint native, started working as a computer lab manager at Flint's Mott Community College in 1991. By late 1992, Swedorski left Mott College to work at the Genesee County Library System as a system administrator for FALCON (Flint Area Library Cooperative Online Network) and saw a need to bring shareware reviews to the public. In 1993 he formed TUCOWS (The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software) leading all editorial, reviews, HTML programming and scripting.
Company history
In the early 1990s, Tucows was hosted on university and public servers (much like Yahoo! and Google were in their early stages). TUCOWS' mission was to provide users with downloads of both freeware and trial versions of shareware. Internet Direct, owned and operated by John Nemanic, Bill Campbell, and Colin Campbell, acquired Tucows in 1996. STI Ventures acquired Tucows in 1999.
The company employed roughly 30 employees in Flint, Michigan, in 1998 with additional employees in Canada. For several years Scott Swedorski personally oversaw day-to-day activity in the Flint office located in the White House building on Beecher Road.
In 2000, Tucows acquired Linux Weekly News (which was then "unacquired" in 2002).
In 2001, Tucows was acquired by Infonautics, which then changed its name to Tucows, a business tactic called a "reverse takeover". On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com, its search and reference services properties inherited from Infonautics, to Alacritude. Internet Archive preserves a full copy of the Tucows Software Library, with thousands of software titles both in the latest versions, as well as in older versions not yet available through Tucows.
In 2004, Tucows acquired Boardtown Corporation, a billing software provider based in Starkville, Mississippi.
On August 19, 2005, Tucows went public, after completing a secondary offering, listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange as TC and the NASDAQ as TCX.
In January 2006, Tucows completed its acquisition of certain assets of Critical Path, an outsourced email services provider.
In June 2006 Tucows paid $18 million to purchase Mailbank.com Inc, a company that owns over 17,000 domain names for common surnames, such as smith.net and brown.org. Mailbank generates income from ads on its websites (from domain parking) and also from customers who want e-mail accounts with their surname in the domain name.
On June 15, 2006, Noss disclosed that the portfolio of NetIdentity's domain names acquired by Tucows represents at least 68% of surnames in the United States and Europe, and that the cost of the acquisition was $18 million. On February 19, 2008, Tucows announced that they were launching a "Personal Names Service" using their portfolio of 39,000 domain names. "The launch of the Personal Names Service marks the complete integration of the surname assets we acquired with NetIdentity into our wholesale channel", said Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows.
On August 26, 2006, Tucows won an eBay auction for the web calendar site Kiko.com. The company planned to roll Kiko's features into their existing email platform.
On July 27, 2007, Tucows acquired ItsYourDomain.com (IYD), another privately held ICANN-accredited wholesale registrar offering domain services through a network of over 2,500 affiliates with over 700,000 domains under management, paying US$10.35 million. ItsYourDomain.com managed 699,951 domains compared to Tucows's 5,919,987, at the time of the sale in July 2007 ItsYourDomain.com's monthly growth of 29,181 exceeded Tucows growth of 21,126.