ThinkGeek
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| Type | Subsidiary/Corporation |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Fairfax, Virginia, USA |
| Industry | Retail |
| Owner(s) | SourceForge, Inc. |
| Website | ThinkGeek |
ThinkGeek is an electronic commerce company and online retailer based in Fairfax, Virginia and a subsidiary of SourceForge, Inc.. It sells items that mostly cater to PC enthusiasts and other "geeky" social groups. Their merchandise consists of clothing, computer hardware, toys and gadgets for around the office, caffeinated drinks, and candy.
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[edit] History
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This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009) |
Three out of the four founding members started an Internet Service Provider based in Northern Virginia in 1995. A short while later, the founders had the idea of publishing an online retailer which sold merchandise targeted to electronic enthusiasts, such as programmers, engineers, students, open source developers and the fast-growing Internet culture. After a few months of operation, the website was linked on the popular technology news website Slashdot and subsequently overwhelmed by traffic. Promptly thereafter, ThinkGeek was acquired by Andover.net.
[edit] Website
[edit] Products
A majority of products sold on ThinkGeek are heavily related to (and sometimes only understood within) Internet culture. Some T-Shirt designs include stick figure with a detached buttocks, with "LMAO" as the caption, a ROFLCOPTER (an ASCII drawing of a helicopter made of internet slang), the Intel Pentium Processor logo replacing "Intel" with "Geek", and a pixellated 1up Mushroom from the Super Mario Brothers games series.
ThinkGeek runs a points-for-reward system called Geek Points, under which customers can earn rewards for buying more products.
On April 1 every year, the company posts a fake homepage with absurd fictional products. For example, in 2007 it advertised "Surge Stix", cigarette-like high potency caffeine delivery systems that, when snapped like a glow stick, supposedly deliver as much caffeine as five cans of Coca-Cola.
[edit] System
[edit] Software
ThinkGeek runs Linux (mostly Debian and Gentoo Linux with some Red Hat) servers using Apache (with mod_perl, mod_SSL and custom modules). Their system was developed primarily in Perl and their "WarpSpeed checkout" is based heavily on the AJAX framework OpenThought.
[edit] Hardware
ThinkGeek utilizes five front-end servers with dual processors for serving content to customers, and a single dual processor web server for administrative tasks. They also run a pair of quad Xeon processor Linux systems for their database servers. A few miscellaneous servers exist to do various testing and to stage content before going live on the site.
[edit] Network
There are dedicated firewalls (mixture of Linux and OpenBSD systems) in front of all the servers. ThinkGeek has access to dual 100 Mbit/s pipes served from the West Coast. ThinkGeek also shares a 1.6 TB SAN with other OSDN websites for near-line backups.
