ON24 Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that markets products and services based upon webcasting and virtual events technology. The privately held company has primary venture capital investors that include Gold Hill Capital, U.S. Venture Partners

U.S. Venture Partners

U.S. Venture Partners , is a venture capital investment firm headquartered on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley focusing on investments in an array of segments including semiconductors, software as a service, communications, storage, wireless, Internet 2.0, Cleantech, Medical devices and...

, Canaan Partners

Canaan Partners

Canaan Partners is a multi-billion dollar global venture capital firm focusing on investments in early stage companies in the technology and healthcare sectors....

, and Rho Ventures.

History

The company was founded in 1998 under the name Newsource with an initial idea to become a distribution center for Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

-based video press releases.

In 1999, the company changed its name to ON24 and changed its focus to being an online financial news

Financial News

The Financial News, is a financial newspaper and news website published in London. It is a weekly investment banking, fund management and securities industries newspaper, published by eFinancial News Limited. Financial News was founded in 1996....

 streaming media

Streaming media

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...

 source. The company hired Mitch Ratcliffe to form a news team based in San Francisco. ON24 News became the first news operation to provide on-demand streaming audio and video news product made specifically for an Internet audience. The news team produced more than 79,000 audio and video news reports of between 1 minute and three hours in length. Viewers were able to subscribe to news based on the specific companies in which they invested or by industry sector. Each viewer's stream was customized based on their preferences, a mode of delivery that remains unique.

At its height in 2000, the ON24 News staff numbered more than 100 with international reporters in cities such as New York, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 and Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...

. Its content was syndicated to various financial portals such as Merrill Lynch

Merrill Lynch

Merrill Lynch is the wealth management division of Bank of America. With over 15,000 financial advisors and $2.2 trillion in client assets it is the world's largest brokerage. Formerly known as Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., prior to 2009 the firm was publicly owned and traded on the New York...

, E-Trade and the Nasdaq

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 trading floor. On August 1, 2002, ON24 shuttered its news operation, citing a lack of interest in Internet-based financial news in the wake of the dot-com bust.

In 2003, ON24 introduced a web-based video publishing platform that enables users to self-produce live and on-demand webcasts. ON24 Webcast Center has been adopted across the publishing, medical education and enterprise sectors. ON24 enters 2006 with 20 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, a customer list featuring some of the world's largest companies, and the experience of producing more than 100,000 successful webcasts.