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 person 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). At some point, it seems BroadOn shared an office with a company called PostPath which merged into Cisco.
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 has been released in 2018.
The logos for the company were crap. The RouteFree and BroadOn logo are basic crappy 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, after some deep Google searching, we found a court case between BroadOn and Broadcom (a company that makes chips), 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 became Acer Cloud Computing, the NUS service they made was reused for deploying cloud apps. By the way, the domain they use on SOAP requests is "nus.wsapi.broadon.com", and continued to be use even after they were called iGware.
