'ThinkGeek' is an
electronic commerce company based in
Fairfax, VA and a subsidiary of
SourceForge, Inc.. It sells items that mostly cater to
PC enthusiasts and other '
geeky' social groups. Their merchandise consists of clothing, computer hardware, toys for around the office, caffeinated drinks, and candy.
History
Three out of the four founding members started an
ISP based in Northern Virginia in 1995. A short while later, the founders had the idea of publishing an online retailer which sold merchandise targeted to electronic enthusiasts, such as
programmers,
engineers,
students,
open source developers and the fast growing
Internet culture. After a few months of operation, the website was
Slashdotted. Promptly thereafter, ThinkGeek was acquired by Andover.net.
Website Features
Products
The navigational panel on every ThinkGeek page contracts and expands in branch format to display subcategories of products.
★ T-shirts
★ Other Apparel
★ Geek Toys
★ Gadgets
★ Home & Office
★ Computing
★ Caffeine
★ Electronics
★ Books
A majority of products sold on ThinkGeek are heavily related to (and sometimes only understood by)
Internet culture. Some T-Shirt designs include stick figure with a detached buttocks, with "
LMAO" as the caption, a ROFLCOPTER (an ASCII drawing of a helicopter comprised of internet slang), the
Intel Pentium Processor logo replacing "Intel" with "Geek", and a pixelated 1up Mushroom from the
Super Mario Brothers games series.
Customer Action Shots
Think Geek allows, and encourages its customers to send in pictures of a product in use, or used in some humorous or otherwise interesting way. Examples include: Pictures of creations made with the popular Smart Mass Thinking Putty, long exposure photographs of laser pointers, and photos of customers wearing the various
T-Shirts the company sells.
Geek Points
ThinkGeek runs a points for reward system. The more products a customer purchases from ThinkGeek (provided they're enrolled in the Geek Points program and meet the qualifications), the higher quality of rewards they can claim. The requirements to join this program state participants must be at least 18 years old, must live in the U.S. or Canada, (mainly because the laws regarding reward programs vary in different countries) and must have a ThinkGeek account to accumulate and use Geek Points. Geek Points will expire after 3 years for active customers and cannot be transferred for money, or to other accounts.
April Fools Day Humor
On April 1st every year, a fake homepage complete with at least four fictional, and generally absurd products are posted, such as: "Surge Stix",
cigarette-esque high potency
caffeine delivery systems that, when bent like a glow stick till a snap is heard, deliver 18mg of caffeine per pull, with a capacity for ten puffs, amounting to as much caffeine as five cans of
Coke. Also, the site's characteristic subheading "Stuff for Smart Masses", has its M crossed out, so that it reads "Stuff for Smart Asses"
System
Software
ThinkGeek runs
Linux -- mostly
Debian and
Gentoo Linux with some
Red Hat -- servers using
Apache (with mod_perl, mod_SSL and custom modules). Their system was developed primarily in
Perl and their "WarpSpeed checkout" is based heavily on the AJAX framework
OpenThought.
Hardware
ThinkGeek utilizes five front-end servers with dual processors for serving content to customers, and a single dual processor web server for administrative tasks. They also run a pair of quad
Xeon processor
Linux systems for their database servers. A few miscellaneous servers exist to do various testing and to stage content before going live on the site.
Network
There are dedicated firewalls (mixture of Linux and
OpenBSD systems) in front of all the servers. ThinkGeek has access to dual 100 Mbit/s pipes served from the West Coast. ThinkGeek also shares a 1.6 TB
SAN with other
OSDN websites for near-line backups.
External links
★
ThinkGeek
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