Awesome Cards™ History
An early leader and generally believed to be the founder and
the dominant early developer of online greeting cards,
AwesomeCards™
(
then at marlo.com ) was founded in
the spirit of the early days of the Internet as a free
service. Hard to imagine today, in the mid 1990s marlo.com's
visitors were the first on the Internet to be able to fully
personalize greeting cards and email egreeting cards with
changeable greetings and media features such as graphics,
animation and music. Knowing that a card is more than a picture and
that the perfect words of greeting can be hard to write from scratch,
Awesome Cards™
focused on providing a changeable, suggested greeting on each awesome
greeting card.
Firsts
AwesomeCards™
led online ecards in such areas as
- emailable greeting cards
- changeable suggested greetings
- customizable awards
- Internet cards for kids
- virtual fireworks
Stats
One of the Internet's most popular sites, Awesome Cards™ (then at
marlo.com ) ranked in the top 100 sites visited on the Internet through
the 1990s and, without advertising, attracted many millions of visitors
worldwide through the 1990s and 2000s.
Talented and Loyal Visitors
Taking on the rather formidable challenges of navigating new technology
and enduring slow modem speeds, early visitors were the first to send
egreeting cards to friends and family and helped create a new wave of
communication. Awesome Cards™ had a loyal following, with
two-thirds of Awesome Cards'™ card senders "bookmarking" the
site. Awesome Cards™ provided its customers the opportunity to
send awesome egreetings free of charge with an increasingly rich media
experience. Thank you to all our visitors! It was our pleasure serving
you.
Who's Who
AwesomeCards™
Founder and CEO
Marjory " Marlo " Williams was inspired to create the first e-greeting
cards after hearing Jim Clark, co-founder of Netscape, speak in May
1995 about how its revolutionary web browser (predecessor to Internet
Explorer and Safari) was rapidly enabling new pathways of communication
on the Internet. Williams previously founded the SHE and Laura Caspari
specialty store chains and served as a director of the National Retail
Federation, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis Chamber of
Commerce, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, MN Chamber Foundation,
Northwestern Insurance Mutual Funds and the Northstar Funds. She was
inducted into the Minnesota Women Business Owners Hall of Fame in 2013.
Vice President, Multi-Media
Production
Ben Talati joined Awesome Cards in late 1990s and, with his whimsical,
wry animations and clean pleasing graphics, gave the site its unique
style and personality, always carefully balancing creative flare with
the technical challenges of slow modem speeds and rigid bandwidth
limits in which each added pixel in an animation reduced the speed of
creating and viewing a card. Ben is the founder of the animation and
video production company, Cituations™.
Privacy
AwesomeCards™
believed strongly in protecting personal privacy, never selling private
user information such as email addresses. And we congratulate all
companies today who protect their visitors' privacy!