History
An early leader and generally believed to be the founder of Internet greeting cards, AwesomeCards 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 among the first on the Internet to be able to personalize and share with others 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, ACC focused on providing a changeable, suggested greeting on each awesome greeting card.

Firsts
ACC 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, 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. ACC had a loyal following, with two-thirds of ACC's card senders "bookmarking" the site. ACC 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

ACC's 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.

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.

Privacy
ACC 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!