1999 > A website for the Ulysses Bookstore, the oldest travel bookstore in the world
Created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in the center of Paris, France, on Ile Saint-Louis in the middle of the river Seine, the Ulysses Bookstore (Librairie Ulysse) is the oldest travel bookstore in the world, with 20,000 books, maps and magazines, out of print and new. Catherine, an avid traveler herself, started a website in early 1999, as a virtual travel in the field of computing, and wrote in November 2000: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money, but that doesn't worry me… I am very pessimistic though, because it is killing off specialist bookstores." (NEF Interview)
1999 > WordReference.com: free bilingual online dictionaries
WordReference.com was created in 1999 by Michael Kellogg, who wrote much later on his project's website: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world for free on the internet. The site has grown gradually ever since to become one of the most-used online dictionaries, and the top online dictionary for its language pairs of English-Spanish, English- French, English-Italian, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Portuguese. Today, I am happy to continue working on improving the dictionaries, its tools and the language forums. I really do enjoy creating new features to make the site more and more useful."
1999 > Wordfast, a translation memory software
Created in 1999 by Yves Champollion in Paris, France, Wordfast is a translation memory software with terminology processing in real time. Worldfast was compatible with the IBM WebSphere Translation Server and other translation memory software like Trados. During a few years, a basic version of Wordfast was also available for free, with a manual in 16 languages. In 2010, Wordfast is the most widely used translation memory solution on both Windows and Mac platforms,, and the second most widely used translation memory software on Windows (the first one being SDL Trados), with over 20.000 customer deployments, including the United Nations, Nomura Securities, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), and McGraw-Hill.
September 1999 > OeB (Open eBook), a standard format for ebooks
With so many formats showing up in the late 1990s for new reading devices, the digital publishing industry felt the need to work on a common format for ebooks. In September 1999, it released the first version of the Open eBook (OeB) format, based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and defined by the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS). The Open eBook Forum was then created in January 2000 to develop the OeB format and OeBPS specifications. Since 2000, most ebook formats have been derived from - or are compatible with - the OeB format, for example the PRC format from Mobipocket or the LIT format from Microsoft.
December 1999 > Britannica.com, the web version of the Encyclopedia
Britannica
Britannica.com was launched in December 1999, as the digital equivalent of the 32 volumes of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The website was available for free - as a complement to the print and CD-ROM versions (for sale) -, with a selection of articles from 70 magazines, a guide to the best websites, a selection of books, etc., all searchable through a single search engine. In September 2000, the site was among the top 100 websites in the world. In July 2001, the website, not free anymore, was available for a monthly or annual fee. In 2009, Britannica.com opened its website to external contributors, with registration required to write and edit articles.