Happy Holidays and the OLPC XO Laptop

First, we here at Acronym Finder send our best wishes to everyone -- have a Happy Holiday season, and a wonderful 2008!

We very much appreciate your contributions, suggestions, feedback, and visits to Acronym Finder during 2007. We thank you for helping us be the best, most complete database of abbreviations and acronyms on the planet!

Not too long ago, we added a new abbreviation to our database, OLPC, which stands for One Laptop per Child. The OLPC initiative is a non-profit foundation by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. The laptop, designed with children and education in mind is called the "XO". The OLPC foundation's goal is to:

"provide children around the world with opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities."

Recently, OLPC started its Give One Get One (G1G1) program. You pay $400 for two laptops, one of which will be sent to benefit a child in one of the OLPC target areas in the world, and the other XO is sent you. In the US, you can take a charity deduction for about half this amount, plus, T-Mobile is offering a one year subscription to its T-Mobile Hotspots.

We ordered an XO laptop at the beginning of the G1G1 program and just got it last week. We're very impressed with it! It may look and feel a little like a toy, but it's a fully functional laptop with wireless connectivity and a surprising amount of power for the size and price. And we feel good about contributing a laptop to a child who can benefit from it.

If you're interested in the G1G1 program, hurry, as the program ends on December 31, 2007!

Yahoo! Tech mentions Acronym Finder

Yahoo! Tech's Robin Raskin mentioned Acronym Finder in her Aug 22, 2007 blog entry "Top-Notch Reference Sites for Students".

We're listed with some very nice company: RefDesk, Wikipedia, eHow, The Library of Congress, and more.

Thanks, Robin!

The World of Home Theater abbreviations

After years of wanting a large-screen high-definition television (HDTV), we recently purchased an HDTV, a receiver/DVD/speaker system, and a media center computer. As I did the product and technology research, I was amazed at how many acronyms and abbreviations I encountered.

Here's a tour of some of the most common ones I ran across, from electronics, the TV/HDTV world, and the Sony-specific ones related to the equipment I got.

Television, computers, and general: CATV, DVD, DVI, DVR, FCC, JPEG, LCD, MP3, NTSC, OSD, PAL, PC, PCM, QAM, RGB, SAP, VESA

HDTV, Home Theater, and audio: BD, DBFB, DRC, DTS, HD-DVD, HDCP, HDMI, HDTV, HTIB, HTPC, PBC

Sony specific: ACE, DCAC

Although I work with acronyms and abbreviations all day, I wasn't familiar with many of these! Fortunately, Acronym Finder knew what they meant!

The Times Online mentions Acronym Finder

Ben Macintyre, a columnist for The Times Online UK Edition, mentions Acronym Finder in an article about acronyms and abbreviations.

With just the right touch of both seriousness and humor, he asks,

"Why do we shorten world wide web to double-you double-you double-you, which has three times as many syllables?"

Good question! :-)

We used to list the extremely long Soviet acronym he mentions at the end of the article, but we were told by a Russian translator we trust that it's almost certainly made-up, so we "delisted it" (even though it's apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records).

Thanks, Ben.

Acronym Finder chosen as Refdesk.com SOTD

On May 17, 2007 Acronym Finder was the Site of the Day (SOTD) at Refdesk.com, one of the mostly highly regarded news and reference portal websites.

Bob Drudge has done an outstanding job with organizing and indexing the very best resources on the web. We're honored not only as a SOTD selection, but also as a Refdesk.com recommendation for acronym and abbreviation reference. Thanks, and keep up the good work, Bob!

AcronymFinder.com Celebrates Ten Year Anniversary

Acronym Finder, the world’s largest and most trusted acronym and abbreviation reference source, celebrates its 10^th year online.

Estes Park, Colorado May 1, 2007 – Mountain Data Systems LLC, the publisher of Acronym Finder (www.acronymfinder.com), announced that it is marking its tenth year online as the most respected and widely-used abbreviations reference source.

Mike Molloy, the founder and developer of AcronymFinder.com, said, “When I launched the site in 1997, I had two goals: I wanted to make available a database of abbreviations and acronyms I had collected since 1985; and I wanted to learn about web database programming. Acronym Finder wasn’t the first web-based abbreviations search site, but the day it went online, it became the largest human-edited collection available – and it still is.”

In early 1998, Acronym Finder was picked as a USA Today Hot Site, and was soon a Netscape Cool Site of the Day. Visits to the site soared, and many users began to suggest meanings for new abbreviations not found in the database. So many new meanings streamed in that Molloy had to develop a submission form to accept new entries and a custom software application to speed up verifying and editing all the new terms.

“I knew the abbreviations database might be very useful to others, but I had no idea how quickly it would be embraced and enhanced by web users all over the world,” Molloy says. People contributing to Acronym Finder were pioneers in what we now call “user-generated content.” The site launched with just over 43,000 entries and doubled in size in less than two years.

Molloy added, “Now, just ten years later, Acronym Finder has over 550,000 terms, and is still growing by an average of 200 new entries every day.” The site is queried around the clock by users worldwide, and in every conceivable discipline: K-12 and university students and educators; government and defense industry employees; medical transcriptionists; translators and interpreters, and anyone with a need to decipher the alphabet soup of letters that abbreviate often highly technical concepts.

The site’s rapid growth and popularity garnered further recognition in the press: two more USA Today Hot Site mentions; twice named as a PC Magazine Top 100 Website; Site of the Week in TechTV’s The ScreenSavers; and selected for the Britannica Internet Guide Award. Acronym Finder was also chosen for the Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers, and it made the list of Best Free Reference Websites selected by the American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Section. Most recently, Acronym Finder and its owners were featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on January 13, 2007.

Acronym Finder also collaborates with, links with, or licenses content to other major web search and reference providers, including TheFreeDictionary.com, Reference.com, RefDesk.com, Ask.com, OneLook.com, and many others.

Molloy concluded, “We look forward to celebrating many more milestones in providing our high quality reference content to users around the world.”

About AcronymFinder.com:

The privately held AcronymFinder.com is the largest and most authoritative acronym and abbreviation reference website. Users from a wide variety of disciplines visit this free resource to look up acronyms from every imaginable subject area. Each month AcronymFinder.com receives over 1 million unique visitors from over 180 countries and answers more than 3 million acronym and abbreviation queries.

# # # #

Copyright © 2007, Mountain Data Systems, LLC

Press Contact
Mike Molloy
AcronymFinder.com
970-586-5556

No Name-Calling Week (NNCW), January 22-26, 2007, is an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities.

Inspired by a young adult novel entitled "The Misfits" by author, James Howe, the No Name-Calling Week Coalition was created by Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, and consists of over 40 national partner organizations. GLSEN first organized the No Name-Calling Week in schools across the nation during 2004.

No Name-Calling Week 2007 is made possible, in large part, by a generous grant from Cisco Systems.

For more information visit the NNCW website at http://www.nonamecallingweek.org/

New acronym: Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) program

The new Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered programme (EDGE) takes an interesting approach to conservation. EDGE species are both Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered. Every mammal species has been scored according to the amount of unique evolutionary history it represents, and its conservation status according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

From this scoring system, EDGE produced a Top 100 EDGE mammals list. Amazingly, about two-thirds of these, including the number one listed Yangtze River dolphin, are receiving little or no conservation attention!

Started in January 2007 by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), EDGE aims to conserve the world's most Evolutionarily Distinct and
Globally Endangered species by implementing the research and conservation actions needed to secure their future.

The EDGE website has a blog, downloadable database of endangered species, and advanced search features. You can learn more here: http://www.edgeofexistence.org/home.asp

Acronym Finder in "Best Free Reference Web Sites"

Acronym Finder was selected as one of the "Best Free Reference Web Sites" for 2006 by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association (ALA).

The list, in its eighth year, is published in the fall issue of Reference & User Services Quarterly and recognizes outstanding reference sites on the World Wide Web. The complete index of all previous winners is also available at the RUSA site.

Acronym Finder featured in Wall Street Journal

We were thrilled to see Acronym Finder featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) for Saturday, January 13, 2007.

Read the article here.