This was one of a string of acquisitions by Yahoo in 2005, closing out the year with the purchase of social bookmarking service Delicious.Īt this time, Yahoo was pursuing a strategy in social search – a sort of fusion of the practicality of search engines and the popularity of social media. In March 2005, at just over a year old, Flickr was bought by Yahoo in a deal reported to be worth up to $25m. Major M&Asīefore he founded Slack, Stewart Butterfield was the co-founder of photo-sharing platform Flickr. To date, Google has mapped more than 220 countries and territories. “Since launching in February 2005, it’s not an exaggeration to say Maps has fundamentally changed the way that most of us travel.” “Today, a lot of us wonder how we ever managed to travel and find new places without using Google Maps,” she said. It also launched a mini version of its Google Search Appliance, the physical embodiment of its indexing technology.īut of all these new Google ventures, there is perhaps none more significant than its decision to build a searchable map of the world.Īccording to Dr Jessica McCarthy, present-day engineering site lead at Google Ireland, this was all part of Google’s mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
There was also Google Talk, its first-ever instant messaging platform (coupled with a phone service), and Google Books, the continuation of Google Print, a project to digitise 10m books. It launched Google Video, which predated YouTube by mere weeks. Google got busy with making in 2005, too.
It was seen a blow to Big Tech, but a boon for makers and the open source movement. Combining the basic microcontroller with signal connectors made Arduinos a perfect building block for home-made robots, motion detectors, smart thermostats and much more.Īnd Europe’s tinkerers received good news in July when the European Parliament rejected a directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. The credit card-sized Arduino board was created as a low-cost and accessible route to creating devices, kick-starting a major maker movement among budding programmers. The soon-to-be-millionaire and subsequent billionaire was hitting the ground running amid a surge of youthful interest in computer programming and hacking.Ģ005 also saw students in Italy start the Arduino project, naming it after a bar in which they used to meet. At a special ceremony with President Mary McAleese, he was bequeathed a cheque for €3,000 and a trophy from Waterford Crystal. He had impressed the competition judges with his project to develop a new programming language based on one of the world’s first, Lisp, which was originally specified in the ’50s. On 14 January 2005, a 16-year-old student from Castletroy College, Co Limerick was named Young Scientist of the Year. A digital-savvy generation gets tinkering with tech as a string of acquisitions starts to build tech behemoths and Google sets out to make the world more searchable.