SAPO (company)

SAPO (Portuguese for toad), Servidor de Apontadores Portugueses, is a brand and subsidiary company of Portugal Telecom Group. It is a portuguese internet service provider that started being a search engine when founded in 1995.

History

SAPO was created on September 4 1995 at the University of Aveiro, by seven members of the Computer Science Center of the University. The name appeared from the acronym of the service, S.A.P. (Servidor de Apontadores Portugueses), in which it was easy to get to SAPO.

In 1997 the members of the Computer Science Center left the university and founded a company, called Navegante, in which SAPO then become property of that company. The portal then started to have a commercial exploration.

Later, in September 1998, Saber & Lazer - Informática e Comunicação S.A. bought SAPO from Navegante. With Saber & Lazer, SAPO launched new services, a free e-mail, a virtual shopping and some new features for the search engine.

Still in that year, due to increasing traffic SAPO and Telepac sign an agreement, becoming Telepac their new internet service provider.

In September 1999, PT Multimédia acquired 74,9% of Saber e Lazer. And in March 2000, SAPO was assigned to PTM.com, with the objective of joining all internet projects on only one company. Currently the company is 100% withheld by PTM.com (which belongs to Portugal Telecom, after selling it in 2005).

After some improvements in infrastructures and accesses, finally in June 2002 was launched the ADSL access service, starting the era of new contents for the portal.

On March 28 2006, SAPO XL was launched: a project for broadband content, in which the main content is videos, on-line television transmission and real-time transmission of events.

See also

• University of Aveiro
• Portugal Telecom
• Minho Campus Party

External links

• SAPO portal
• SAPO Cape Verde
• SAPO Angola