Acer Cloud Technology
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BroadOn (formerly known as RouteFree and later known as iGware) was a company that helped Nintendo with network services, the Wii's IOS, device management, and more. It was launched in April 2000 (probably April 13, 2000, the day that AiLive was launched). The company merged with Acer Cloud Computing in 2011 with a $320 million deal. It was founded by a Chinese-American entrepreneur named Wei Yen. BroadOn was a privately held startup company, with 50 employees at its peak.
Not much is known about the company, but it's where a lot of development for Nintendo's console features took place. The company didn't have a quality assurance team. We have gathered data from their employees' LinkedIn profiles. Their office was originally in Palo Alto, California (which is now used as the offices for Nest, a company that makes thermostats, smoke detectors, etc.) and then moved to Mountain View, California (which is now used for a school owned by Khan Academy called Khan Lab School).
BroadOn originally worked on the iQue Player (Chinese version of the Nintendo 64). The console has finally been hacked and the ROMs and the SDK for it have been released in 2018.
The logos for the company were heavily subpar. The RouteFree and BroadOn logos are basic logos with Times New Roman as the font, and iGware using Arial as the font.
The name of the company was changed to iGware probably because, we found a court case between BroadOn and Broadcom (a company that makes chips, not the kind you snack on), so they might have been forced to change their name because it was similar. The court case could also be a patent infringement because BroadOn also made chips, maybe?
When BroadOn merged with Acer Cloud Computing, the NUS service they made was reused for deploying cloud apps. The domain they use on SOAP requests is "nus.wsapi.broadon.com", and continued to be used even after they were called iGware.
