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Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world, originally in order to get by corporate firewalls blocking regular mail services. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in "-mail" and finally settled on Hotmail because it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write the base of web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.The Hotmail logo before it was rebranded under MSN.Hotmail was originally backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers [1] and was sold later that month to Microsoft for a reported US$400m, after which it was rebranded under the MSN umbrella
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