X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. is an American subsidiary of a Hong Kong-Bermuda company best known for marketing wireless video cameras with controversial pop-under advertisements. It was founded in 1999 in Kent, Washington.

The company's many pop-under windows containing flashing animations in the 2001-2003 advertising campaign for its flagship product, the Amazing X10 Camera, proved to be counter-productive and were seen by many as a nuisance instead of a viable marketing tool. For many Internet users, X10 came to epitomize invasive and bothersome Internet marketing, and instructions for disabling the JavaScript technology used by these windows were circulated.

History

1974

X10 sprang from a small engineering company in Scotland called Pico Electronics, Ltd. Pico now fits under the umbrella of X10 Ltd. X10 was a founding member of the Home Automation and Networking Association and is sometimes considered the founding father of the home automation industry.

1978

Having Radio Shack as their first customer, X10 was introduced to the American Public. Sears, Roebuck became X10's second customers soon after.

1988

Under the One-For-All brand, X10 started manufacturing universal remotes for Universal Electronics, Inc. (UEI). The operation grew so large that soon X10 was manufacturing 1 million remotes per month. X10 now makes remotes for many original equipment manufacturers (including Philips) and has the best infrared (IR) code library in the business. This makes X10 one of the largest manufacturers of universal remotes in the world.

1989

X10 introduces the world's first low-cost, self-installed wireless security system: the SS5400. To this date, there is nothing that matches it for the performance per dollar.

1995

X10 sets up ORCA Monitoring Services in Seattle, Washington to handle the monitoring of their security systems as well as they ones X10 sells to Radio Shack and other vendors.

1996

X10's website goes live on the Web at http://www.x10.com on December 26th, 1996.

2008

X10 continues to innovate the industry by providing quality electronics like the iconRemote at an affordable price.

Legal and financial problems

The company was sued in October 2003 by Advertisement Banners.com, who created their pop-up advertisements, for not paying advertising fees as promised, and had to pay them more than US$4.3 million in compensation.

X10 made an attempt to go public in 2001 using the ticker symbol XTEN. They aborted this plan after a copy of Escape from Paradise, a book which revealed that X10's owner Hin Chew Chung had been under house arrest for over a year in Brunei, was sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington in 2003, and the bankruptcy was confirmed by the Court in April 2005.

Parodies

Due to the pervasiveness of the X10 ads, and the low opinion of them that many Internet users had, there have been several parodies of them.

Something Awful created a page satirizing the design sense of the company, as well as a mock interview with the inventor of the X10 Camera

In one website's humorous timeline of Internet history, "X10 sells its first camera" is a future event that occurs in 2003, one to two years after the timeline is published.

On the KOMPRESSOR album Crush Television there is a song titled We Must Destroy X10 about the X10 ads.