What is "basecamp"

n. (alternative spelling of base camp English)

Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, is a privately held American web application company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was co-founded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company. Segura left in 2000 and Kim left in 2003, leaving Fried as the only remaining founder.

In February 2014, the company adopted a new strategy, focusing entirely on its flagship product, Basecamp, and renaming the company from 37signals to Basecamp.

Since mid-2004, the company's focus has shifted from web design to web application development. Its first commercial application was Basecamp; this was followed by Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise. It maintained two freeware web applications, Ta-Da List and Writeboard. However, both of these are now closed to new users and similar functionality has been incorporated in their (chargeable) product, Basecamp. The open source web application framework Ruby on Rails was initially created for internal use at 37signals, before being publicly released in 2004.

The company was originally named after the 37 radio telescope signals identified by astronomer Paul Horowitz as potential messages from extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2006, co-founder Jason Fried was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool developed by Basecamp and launched in 2004. A new version was launched in 2012. The Ruby on Rails framework was extracted from the Basecamp project. There is a 60-day free trial and since 2014 is free for teachers. In 2015 Basecamp released Basecamp 3.