37signals (formerly Basecamp before reverting to its original name) is an American web software company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was cofounded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company. Since mid2004, 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 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. The Ruby on Rails web application framework was extracted from the work on Basecamp and released as open source. In 2006, the company announced that Jeff Bezos had acquired a minority stake via his personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions. The same year, Jason Fried, 37signals CEO, was included among MIT Technology Review's TR35 honoring technologists and scientists under the age of 35 for their ground-breaking inventions and research. In 2014, 37signals changed its name to Basecamp and chose to focus solely on that product. As of August 2018, the Highrise product also stopped accepting new signups. In September 2019, Basecamp gained some notoriety for purchasing Google Ads in the name of their own company because other organizations bought the keyword "Basecamp", causing four competitors to appear above Basecamp's own website in search results. Jason Fried called Google's search result policy a "shakedown". A Google spokesperson responded that competitors are not allowed to use trademarked names in their keywords if the owner of the trademark files a complaint with Google. Since the story broke, Google has stopped competitors from using the Basecamp trademark. After Apple threatened to pull the service's iOS app, Hey, from the