If you’ve kept an eye on the download counter on our front page, you probably noticed that WOT just reached 40 million downloads just a moment ago! We so like round numbers, and are extremely happy to see that we seem to be reaching them faster every time!
How did we get here?
The idea of WOT was born in 2006 by our founders Sami and Timo. At that time they were young university students from Tampere University of Technology, but they had a big vision. As passionate web security enthusiasts, they had well understood that with the continued growth and increasing complexity of the Internet, the threats the Web poses were also growing, and even more – changing their nature. In addition to viruses and malware, phishing, scams, and bad online shopping experiences were becoming increasingly widespread.
Our founders realized that many of the modern threats were to escape from automated security technologies. They were too complex, too agile, and too human – spotting them would require real human experiences.
Obviously one, two, or even ten human eyes wouldn’t be enough to spot everything that was going on in the web. Therefore they decided to create a system that would gather experiences of MILLIONS of web users – The idea of WOT was born.
The idea of WOT and improving the web safety with a crowd-sourced effort was embraced by web users. WOT reached its first million downloads in August 2008, 10 million in March 2010, 20 million in April 2011, and 30 million in January 2012. During the past few weeks the community growth has been sped up by cooperation with Mail.Ru Group. Today, the 20th of August 2012, we reached the milestone of 40 million downloads!
Be the boss like Herman the Lemur – wear a WOT hat!
This is almost a tradition already – to celebrate the round download number, and to thank our active community, we are giving out WOT hats. Be the boss like Herman the Lemur – wear a WOT hat!
To take part in the raffle, send email to herman@mywot.com, and include your postal address*. We’ll raffle 20 hats among participants on Monday the 27th, 10 a.m. UTC+2. Thank you for being part of the WOT community and helping it grow!
*We’ll only use your information to send the hats to the winners, and obviously won’t keep it after the winners have been announced or share the information with anyone.