Acer Cloud Technology

From Rare Gaming Dump
Revision as of 13:59, 12 May 2019 by Larsenv (talk | contribs)
Logo used from RouteFree.
Logo used for BroadOn.
Logo used for iGware.
Logo used for Acer.

BroadOn (formerly known as RouteFree and later known as iGware) was a company that helped Nintendo with network services, the Wii's IOS, device management, and more. It was launched in April 2000 (probably April 13, 2000, the day that AiLive was launched). The company merged with Acer Cloud Computing in 2011 with a $320 million deal. It was founded by a Chinese-American entrepreneur named Wei Yen. BroadOn was a privately held startup company, with 50 employees at its peak.

Not much is known about the company, but it's where a lot of development for Nintendo's console features took place. The company didn't have a quality assurance team. We have gathered data from their employees' LinkedIn profiles. Their office was originally in Palo Alto, California (which is now used as the offices for Nest, a company that makes thermostats, smoke detectors, etc.) and then moved to Mountain View, California (which is now used for a school owned by Khan Academy called Khan Lab School).

BroadOn originally worked on the iQue Player (Chinese version of the Nintendo 64). The console has finally been hacked and the ROMs and the SDK for it have been released in 2018.

The name of the company was most likely changed to iGware due to a lawsuit between Broadcom and BroadOn, possibly relating to their name and/or the chip manufacturing business.

When BroadOn merged with Acer Cloud Computing, the NUS service they made was reused for deploying cloud apps. The domain they use on SOAP requests is "nus.wsapi.broadon.com", and continued to be used even after they were called iGware.