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Exploding Internet companies make the most of virtual reality
(CNN) -- Internet bookseller Amazon.com started with six employees in a garage in Seattle six years ago. Today it has 1,600 employees, and warehouses and offices throughout the United States and Europe. Although Amazon.com has yet to turn a profit, its stock prices are outselling brick-and-mortar bookstores like Barnes and Noble. "I think they are beating Barnes and Noble to the punch in many cases, but they shouldn't be worth six or seven times Barnes and Noble. That's where rationality has divorced itself from the stock market," said Adam Schoenfeld of Jupiter Communications. Amazon.com is just one example of a company growing by leaps and bounds in the real world because of its presence in the virtual one. Online information service Yahoo! started in a trailer in 1994, as the brainchild of two Stanford University graduate students. It has grown into a company of 800 employees and is giving companies like America Online a run for its money on the Web. Broadcast.com is another successful Internet upstart. It was launched in a spare bedroom in Dallas, Texas, in 1995 by two frustrated Hoosier fans. "We both went to school at Indiana University and we were big basketball fans. Living in Dallas, there was no way to listen to our favorite Hoosiers," said Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com. From this humble beginning, Broadcast.com grew into a company of 288 employees with offices in 10 cities, which connects users to a variety of radio and television programming through its 22 satellite dishes. Science Correspondent Anne Kellan contributed to this report.
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