9781422277393

L ike many tech startups , YouTube’s story begins in the San Francisco Bay Area (left), the region around the cities of San Francisco and Oakland in northern California. In the southern part of the Bay Area is “Silicon Valley,” a nickname given because so many tech companies—including Google, Apple, Pixar, and Facebook—are head- quartered there. (Silicon is a key ingredient in making computer chips, on which all those companies’ products rely.) Silicon Valley has been known as an epicenter of computer innovation since the 1970s. One of the most successful Silicon Valley companies of the late 1990s was PayPal, a pioneer in the technology of online money trans- fers. As the World Wide Web was becoming more and more a part of WORDS TO UNDERSTAND bandwidth  a measurement of the data transferred from a website to the site’s visitor beta test the public test of a computer product before its official release codec  a type of software that processes video files to make them easier to send and receive

fortuitous  when something happens by a lucky chance startup  a new business designed to meet an emerging need stocks  shares of a company that can be bought and sold

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