FreeRealTime.com, Inc. (short name: FreeRealTime) is a small, Aliso Viejo/Irvine-founded and now Lake Forest, California–based provider of online financial market data (address of record: 22365 El Toro Rd., Suite 224, Lake Forest, CA). Kona Equity lists a 1997 founding; the company formerly operated as First International Financial Corp. It was publicly traded in the late 1990s (discussed under ticker FRTI; Bloomberg carries a "FRTIQ" profile, the Q suffix indicating bankruptcy), filed Chapter 11 on April 24, 2001 for itself and its Canadian unit, and sold off subsidiaries afterward. Its current ownership is not clearly documented in public sources; Kona Equity estimates ~8 employees and roughly $1.4 million in annual revenue, but these are third-party estimates, not verified figures.
Operations. FreeRealTime's core offering was free real-time stock quotes, news, charts, Time & Sales data, and options information for Nasdaq, NYSE and OTC securities, funded largely by advertising. It also operated subsidiaries including RedChip.com (small-cap research, sold in 2001) and DigitalOffering Inc. (an institutional/broker-dealer unit). After bankruptcy it shifted toward paid subscription services. It is an operating company, not a patent-holding shell.
Litigation posture. The case data show zero plaintiff suits and one defendant suit, which is the classic profile of an operating company being targeted rather than an asserter. The sole tracked matter is InternetAd Systems, LLC v. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. et al., No. 3:06-cv-01063 (N.D. Tex., filed June 15, 2006; closed April 8, 2008), naming FreeRealTime among six defendants alongside Turner Broadcasting. Venue was the Northern District of Texas (Dallas Division), not the Eastern District of Texas.
Context. The plaintiff, InternetAd Systems, LLC, was a Northbrook, Illinois entity formed by TechSearch LLC specifically to commercialize and assert four advertising patents (U.S. 5,572,643; 5,737,619; 6,185,586; 6,457,025) covering interstitial and pop-up/pop-under advertising; contemporaneous press (CNET/ZDNet) described it as a patent-enforcement vehicle and quoted 5% royalty demands on ad revenue. Reporting also notes TechSearch's prior unsuccessful suit against Intel. FreeRealTime's involvement reflects its ad-supported financial-data website rather than any assertion activity of its own.