Quack.com

Voice portal company acquired by America Online. Quack.com was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, based voice-portal infrastructure company originally named Quackware. Quack was the first company to try to create a voiceportal, or a consumer-based destination "site" in which consumers could not only access information by voice alone, but also complete transactions. Quackware launched a beta phone service in 1999 that allowed consumers to purchase books from sites such as Amazon and CDs from sites such as CDNow simply by answering a short set of questions. Quack followed on with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon, Moviefone) to news, weather and stock quotes. This concept introduced a series of lookalike startups including much-heralded Tellme Networks which went on to raise more money than any single Internet startup in history on a similar concept.