BEIJING, July 29 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- Maxthon International, developers of the Maxthon 2 Internet browser and a Chinese company with a worldwide presence, is providing free help services for visitors to the International Olympics in Beijing.
    More than 300 Maxthon users have signed up to staff Maxthon's Online Volunteer Web site ( http://volunteer.maxthon.cn/ ). They are using PCs and chat software to answer Olympic tourists' questions about Olympic scheduling and locations, housing, restaurants, entertainment, and shopping. The volunteers are providing chat services in English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Russian, and Spanish.
    Through Aug 3, the site is open from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., Beijing time.  From Aug. 4 to Aug 30, the volunteer center will provide help from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. The page also has a digital bulletin board where visitors can leave and read messages. The board is open 24 hours a day.
    "We have such a large number of users in all countries, and with the Olympics being held in the same city where Maxthon is based, it just seemed right for us to do something to help people from around the world," said Jeff Chen, CEO of Maxthon.
    Maxthon 2.0 is a free Internet browser. It has been downloaded nearly 160 million times just from Maxthon's own site ( http://www.maxthon.com ). In China, Maxthon has about 30 percent of the browser market, beaten only by Microsoft Internet Explorer.  The company has only recently begun to actively market the browser in the United States, but already it is making strong inroads into a market that has been dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox Browser.
    What began as a one-person project to improve on Microsoft Explorer has grown into an independent browser, with Maxthon consistently leading Internet Explorer in features and performance. Long before such features became available on MS Explorer and some other rival browsers, Maxthon provided a tabbed interface for opening several Web sites at the same time, split screen views of two site simultaneously, a spell checker, a library of plug-ins and skins, automatic form filling, language translations, CPU and memory savers, pop-up blockers, advanced Internet security, mouse-gesture navigation, and undo of accidentally closed Web pages. Many of these features are still not available today on Microsoft and competing browsers. (More detailed information on these and other Maxthon features may be found at http://maxthon.com/overview.htm . 
    In early 2008, Maxthon received fully one-fourth of the nearly 2 million votes cast among 100 finalists in the Webware 100 awards.  In fact, the votes for Maxthon were so overwhelming that the servers where the vote count was tabulated crashed until the Maxthon votes could be diverted to other computers. 
    Today, 30 people, mostly engineers, work on Maxthon in Beijing. Much of the work on such projects as a wiki, forum, and skin and plug-in develop continues to be done by volunteers. Chen estimates Maxthon has 10 million users in China, and 2 million in the rest of the world.
    As the popularity of Maxthon grows, Chen's company has received seed funding from the first Skype investor, Morten Lund, and the WI Harper Group in 2005. In 2006 Maxthon received further investment from the venture capital group Charles River Ventures, and the following year from Google.
    For more information on Maxthon, its volunteer Olympics program, or any other aspect of Internet use, contact Ron White at ron@maxthon.com or 210-683-1444.



 
SOURCE  Maxthon International