History of Inline
Inline was founded in May 1995 as an ISP and web development company. We decided to carve out a niche in connecting databases to the web because we saw that as a definite future need for business. At the time, no tools existed to do this and thus iHTML was born. iHTML began life as a simple tool with a single tag to connect a database to a web page. As customer needs developed, so did the product. Instead of being a pure software company, we used the tools we created and that is evidenced in the functionality that iHTML provides. Focusing on what corporate customers needed instead of what we thought they needed allowed the product to grow and be focused on what web developers required. In September 1995, iHTML 1.0 was officially released. A year later 2.0 of iHTML was released, this provided much more functionality. In June 1997, O'Reilly & Associates, a well known computer book and software publisher approached us about bundling iHTML with their popular web server product, WebSite Pro. A part of that agreement was the birth of the iHTML Merchant. Released in September 1997, the product acceptance grew quickly as ISP's and web developers found the product easy to use and functional for their clients to setup stores on the Internet. Based on the feedback we received from those clients, we packed considerable new functionality into the iHTML Merchant 2.0 Pro edition that was released in November 1998. Work continued unabated on iHTML Merchant 2.0 Enterprise which was released in May 1999. Over the summer of 1999, improvements were made to both the Pro and Enterprise edition along with a new product, the iHTML Merchant Mall. These products were released in late August and early September 1999.
Since that time we have added other new products including InTelaCart (2001), oPAYc (2000), oSHIPc (2000), iHTML Enterprise Plus (2002) along with enhancements to our existing product line. A number of new inititatives are under way in 2024
The combination of the iHTML programming language and application server with the merchant application makes for a powerful set of tools to implement e-commerce and other web based business solutions. Inline's future directions are to improve upon the existing product line and add new related applications to the product mix. This enables us to expand our customer base. Inline is a privately held corporation which allows us to concentrate on making the best products possible.
The President of Inline is Russ Cobbe, (russc@inline.net) who has a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo with a joint honours in Business Administration and Computer Science. He is the past President of the Toronto Internet Developers Association and has had numerous articles published regarding dynamic web sites and e-commerce.
A Bit About Our Philosophy
When people initially find out about our products they wonder why the price is so reasonable in comparison to other products while the Inline products have more features. There are a number of reasons for this. We believe in providing high quality software that isn't crippled, at a reasonable price. We keep our costs under control and run a profitable business. We don't need to gouge our customers to be successful. We are also interested in market share. Market share is important for long term stability of any business. It then allows us to provide more related products and more enhancements since the overall costs are spread over many more customers.
Customer service is very important to us. It is something we pride ourselves on and is clearly a differentiating factor between ourselves and our competitors. We want our customers to be happy and profitable in using our products. The more happy customers, the more referral business we get and the less we have to spend on marketing. Most other companies see technical support and customer service as cost centers, we look at them as tools to our growth. Inline provides continual after sales service, ask our customers, they know. The best way to do that is subscribe to our mailing list or support forum. Customers discuss things between themselves and with us. It is a community of users that we are proud to have.
Inline Internet Systems, Inc.
20 Marlatts Road
Thorold ON Canada L2V 1N1
Phone: 905-680-0436
Fax: 905-680-0437
Email: sales@inline.net