Epinions

Epinions.com was a general consumer review site established in 1999. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com (known as DealTime at the time of the acquisition) in 2003, which in turn was acquired by eBay in 2005. At Epinions, visitors could read new and old reviews about a variety of items to help them decide on a purchase. As of 25 March 2014, all community features, and features for submitting new reviews, were disabled. This is stated in the site's still-appearing information - FAQs.

Corporate history

Epinions was founded in 1999 during the dot-com bubble by Nirav Tolia (who left Yahoo and $10M of unvested shares), Naval Ravikant (formerly of @Home where he left $4M in options), Ramanathan Guha (from Netscape by way of AOL where he left ~$4M in stock options), Mike Speiser (formerly of McKinsey), and Dion Lim (formerly of Morgan Stanley) with $8 million in seed financing from venture capitalists Benchmark Capital and August Capital.

By January 2003, Epinions had received $45M in funding. It had 5.8 million users, but all of the founders other than Tolia had left, and the company had just started to make a profit in 2002. In the words of Tolia: "We felt we couldn't finish what we started because we had a little problem. We needed a viable business model."