Category IT Business Tycoons

     Online social media entrepreneur Mathew Charles Mullenweg is best known as the founding developer of Word-Press. As some of you might know, it is open source software meant for blogging and web content management, used by millions across the world.

      Born on January 11th, 1984, Matt, as he is famously called, studied at the University of Houston, majoring in political science. Before completing his degree, he left college, and started working for CNET Networks, a media website.

      In January, 2003 Mullenweg along with Mike Little, released on Word-Press which grew to become the easiest, and the most popular website management system on the web. The software is managed by the Word-Press Foundation.

      Other than technological innovation, Mullenweg is also involved in charitable programmes.

        Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman has surprised the world, not just through his innovation, but through his ‘talks’ too.

        A renowned orator and writer, Hoffman is a frequent lecturer at universities including Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard.

        He has also appeared on many shows like The Charlie Rose Show, Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square on CNN, and on other current affairs television programmes.

        His essay titled “Disrupting the Diploma” that proposes a new form of credentialing for university students and professors was widely read. It was among the many posts he had published on LinkedIn as a ‘LinkedIn Influencer’. Hoffman has also written articles in the Washington Post on a variety of topics.

Continue reading “Why is it said that besides being a tech-expert, Reid Hoffman is also a prolific orator and writer?”

         We know for a fact that there have been many social networking groups that have helped people connect and reconnect personally. But what LinkedIn did, was something rather different, and more helpful. It helped people professionally, mainly by connecting job-seekers and employers. Since its launch on December 28, 2002, the site has played a vital role in professional circles across the world, thanks to Reid Garrett Hoffman, and his team.

          Hoffman is an entrepreneur, author, and the current executive chairman of LinkedIn, the first business-oriented social network. The site is so successful, that by September 2016, it had more than 467 million users.

          Prior to setting up LinkedIn, Reid was the Executive Vice President of PayPal. PayPal is an international company facilitating online payments system.

            The success of LinkedIn garnered big money, as well as recognition for Hoffman. He is ranked as the 341st richest person in the world.

        As we saw, BitTorrent is a communication platform that enables downloading of data and electronic files using a peer-to-peer file transferring system. Many individuals and organizations use it to distribute their licensed works.

       However, what made BitTorrent most famous is its ability to share large music and movie files. People across the globe have been using the system since its beginning to upload and download such files.

       To its credit, BitTorrent Inc. has received many licenses from Hollywood studios for distributing their content. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also use BitTorrent to distribute updates to servers. Besides the film and media industry, others too have used the protocol for distribution works.

       The UK government used the system to issue details about the expenditure of tax money. The success of the protocol was however unanticipated, its founder Bram Cohen holds.

       BitTorrent Inc. was founded in 2004 by Bram Cohen, along with his business partner of Indian origin Ashwin Navin. 

       Bram Cohen is a computer programmer who is the chief scientist, and co-founder of BitTorrent. It is a peer-to-peer program developed for uploading and downloading files. The program functions via a file distribution protocol, namely the BitTorrent protocol, which was again, was developed by the expert himself.

       Born on October 12th, 1975, Bram Cohen grew up in Manhattan. He claims to have learned the BASIC programming language at the age of five! After schooling, he joined the University of Buffalo, only to drop out of it later, and work for several dot.com companies. It was the experience he got from these firms that helped Cohen conceives the idea of BitTorrent. He designed the protocol in April 2001, and released its first version on July 2, 2001. As of 2013, BitTorrent had around 27 million users.

         Apart from BitTorrent, Cohen has also founded CodeCon, an annual conference of technology enthusiasts and software hackers that was held between 2002 and 2009.

        For his work on the BitTorrent protocol, Cohen has won many awards. He was also among the TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005. 

       Skype is one of the most popular communication tools today, with more than 700 million users across the world.

       Headquartered in Luxembourg, the service was first released on 29th August 2003, by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (Danish).

      The users of the program only need to download it onto a computer or phone, and have a functional web camera and microphone. It allows them to see and hear the person whom they are contacting. Hence, it has been of great help, particularly to people who have their kith and kin in a distant land, to communicate easily and affordably. Skype, as most of us know, takes no money for its basic version. The service is thus also widely used for video conferencing with business partners, as well as for interview

      Instant messaging is another interesting feature of Skype, enabling users to send text messages, voice notes, or videos.

      One needn’t even use a computer for skyping these days. It can be very well done through smart phones and tablets.

             Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom has to his credit many successful ventures that have gone worldwide. Other than the high profile Skype and Kazaa, he has established Atomico, a leading investment group in the technology industry.

             Founded in 2006, Atomico helps entrepreneurs expand their businesses globally. Zennstrom was also the CEO at Joltid, a software company that specialized in developing solutions to optimize Internet traffic.

            Altnet and Joost are the other ventures the brilliant innovator founded after that. The former was the world’s first peer-to-peer network that promoted commercial content. Launched in 2007, Joost was a successful online video distribution service.

            Zennstrom and his wife Catherine have also set up a charitable organization called Zennstrom Philanthropies. It works towards financing human rights projects, social entrepreneurship, and environmental issues. 

     With his introduction of Skype, an application for video chat, Niklas Zennstrom redesigned the scope of communication, and took it to a whole new level.

     This is however, just one of the many reasons why Zennstrom remains a legend in the world of information technology.

     Born on February 16th, 1966 in Sweden Niklas Zennstrom stood out as an innovative kid since childhood.

     Zennstrom started his professional career in 1991 at Tele2, a Swedish telecommunications firm. In 2000, he founded Kazaa along with Janus Friis. It was a high profile second-generation, peer-to-peer file-sharing application, similar to Napster. Following a series of legal cases, Kazaa was shut down in 2001.

     The closure of Kazaa, however, did not stop Zennstrom and Friis, and soon, in 2003 they introduced Skype. It is an application that provides video chat and voice call services. It made communication, especially long-distance ones easier, enabling free international calls through the Internet. By 2005, the service had more than 50 million users, particularly in Asia and Europe. On 10th May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype. 

       For the remarkable contributions made to the development of information technology, Caterina Fake remains an unmatched figure in a field that is dominated by men.

       Her career began as a chief designer for Organic Line, developing websites for companies including McDonalds, Levi’s, and Nike etc. She also served as the art director for Salon.com, before joining Netscape in 1997.

       It was after Netscape that Fake, along with Daniel Butterfield, and Jason Classon founded the Ludicorp. Butterfield and Fake later co-founded Flickr. Before its success, she had also faced failure after the first work by the company, ‘Game Never-ending’, ended up in a disaster. Yet Fake and Butterfield moved ahead confidently with Flickr.

       Fake’s innovative skills were seen again when she launched the website ‘Hunch’ in 2009. The site provided advice and recommendations to its users, based on their interests.

       The same year, Fake joined the board of directors of Creative Commons, an American non-profit organization, and was also made the chairman of the Board of Etsy, an e-commerce website. San Francisco headquartered Findery is Fake’s latest venture. 

       Caterina Fake is an entrepreneur known for co-founding the Flickr and Hunch websites. The success of these two sites helped her create a niche in the world of technological innovation and investment.

       Fake was born on June 13th, 1969 in Pittsburgh to an American father and a Filipino mother. She is a graduate in English literature from Vassar College.

       Fake’s career in the web world began when she started working as a lead designer at the web development agency ‘Organic Online’.

Continue reading “Why is Caterina Fake a renowned name?”