37signals
American business
37signals (formerly Basecamp before reverting to its original name) is an American web software company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was co‑founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company.
Since mid‑2004, the company's focus has shifted from web design to web application development. Its first commercial application was Basecamp, followed by Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise. The open source web application framework Ruby on Rails was initially created by David Heinemeier Hansson for internal use at 37signals, before being publicly released in 2004.
In February 2014, the company adopted a new strategy, focusing entirely on its flagship product, the software package also named Basecamp, and renaming the company from 37signals to Basecamp. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have published several books under the 37signals name, and in May 2022, citing their present-day focus on both Basecamp and HEY, reverted to 37signals as their company name.
History
The company 37signals was originally named after the 37 extraterrestrial radio signals identified by astronomer Paul Horowitz as potential messages from extraterrestrial intelligence. Work on the company's first product, the project management application Basecamp, began in 2003.
By 2005, the company had moved away from consulting work to focus exclusively on its own web applications.
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This entry incorporates text from “37signals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.