Category IT Business Tycoons

     Flickr is a successful image and video hosting website created by Daniel Butterfield through his Ludicorp Company in 2004. Launched on February 10th that year, the service enables users to share and embed photographs through their accounts.

     For sharing or uploading photos and videos on Flickr, users need to have an account. The user also gets to control privacy settings and decide whether the image should go ‘public’ or be restricted to just within the contact circle.

     The service allows users to release their images either under common usage licenses, or with copyrights reserved.

     As of August 2011, Flickr is known to have hosted more than 6 million images. By March 2013, it had a total of 87 million registered members, and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily.

     The creation of Flickr brought global recognition to Daniel Butterfield. 

      Daniel Stewart Butterfield is an entrepreneur credited to have founded the popular photo sharing website Flickr. He is also the founder of Slack, an instant message communication tool.

      Unlike other tech-wizards, Butterfield had no formal education in computer science or technology. After schooling, he graduated from the University of Victoria in philosophy, and went on to take a master’s degree in the same subject at the University of Cambridge.

      In 2002, Butterfield, and his future wife Caterina Fake, along with Jason Classon, co-founded Ludicorp, a company that developed a multiplayer online role-playing game called ‘Game Never-ending’. This however, did not turn out well, and the firm, in February 2004, started the famous ‘Flickr’ photo sharing service. The following year, it was acquired by Yahoo! Flickr became a massive hit among Internet users across the world.

      As of March 2013, Flickr had about 87 million registered users, and more than 3.5 million images uploaded daily.

      Butterfield worked with Yahoo! till 2008, before moving to found his new venture called Tiny Speck, a company that launched the game ‘Glitch’.

      In 2014, Butterfield released ‘Slack’, a message-based communication tool.

      Jimmy Wales is one name that will ever remain in the history of information technology. He is an American entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Wikipedia as well as Wikia, a web hosting company.

     Wikipedia, as we know, is a free content online encyclopedia that has helped people worldwide to access information on a wide range of topics.

     It started off in March 2000 as Nupedia, an open-content reference site. Wales was working on his startup named Bornis, when he conceived the idea of an online encyclopedia.

     Once Nupedia was set up, Wales hired academic Larry Sanger as its editor-in-chief. On January 15th, 2001 the duo launched the non-profit Wikipedia, an advanced version of Nupedia, that later came to become one of the most popular websites in the world.

    Wikipedia was just one of the ventures started by Wales to democratize IT. In 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation; a San Francisco based charitable organization, to develop wiki-based projects for the public, free of charge. The following year, he founded the company, Wikia Inc. 

     Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21st, 1967 in Paris to an Iranian immigrant parents. The family shifted to the US when Omidyar was a child.

     The bright kid that he was, Omidyar started showing interest in computers while in 9th grade. After high school, he joined Tufts University, and graduated with a BS in computer science. Soon after that, he started working for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer.

     Omidyar’s life as an innovator began in 1991, when he co-founded a start up called Ink Development. It was later rebranded as an e-commerce company, and renamed ‘eShop’.

     Four years later, he founded the ‘Auction Web’, a service that facilitated buying and selling through the Internet. The growth of the company was very rapid, and within a year, Omidyar acquired a license to sell airplane tickets on the site.

     In 1997, Auction Web turned into ‘eBay’. The success of eBay had also transformed Omidyar into a billionaire. Much before that, Omidyar had started donating money through the Omidyar Foundation which he founded in 2004, along with his wife Pamela. It mainly finances and helps smaller businesses to establish themselves, and make a difference in society. 

     Pierre Morad Omidyar is an entrepreneur renowned for launching the eBay auction site. With this online bidding venture, he revolutionized e-commerce.

     The history of eBay dates back to September 4th, 1995 when Omidyar created an online service called ‘Auction Web’ on his personal website. It was intended to help people list items for auction. The attempt was so successful, that soon he opened a separate site, and named it ‘eBay’.

     The growth of eBay was such that Omidyar had to quit his job, and devote himself fully to it. In 1998, he was named the Chairman of eBay, and its services spread across other countries. By the end of that year, the site had around two million users across the globe. It also fetched the founder a huge fortune. Thus, at the age of 31, Omidyar was a billionaire.

     However, Omidyar’s life was not restricted to technology alone. He had an interest in journalism too owing to which he launched the ‘Honolulu Civil Beat’, an investigating news service. In 2013, it collaborated with ‘The Huffington Post’, and launched ‘Huff Post Hawaii’ in Hawaii, and in 2014, another journalism venture named ‘First Look Media’.

       Napster creator Shawn Fanning has proved himself not only as an innovator, but as an entertainer too! He has been a popular figure since the launch of the file sharing service, and has remained so ever since. One could say the Napster controversy hasn’t really dented his public appeal.

       Fanning first entered the big screen in a cameo role for the hit film ‘The Italian Job’, playing himself.

       In 2000, Fanning appeared as a presenter at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing a Metallica t-shirt. Coincidentally, it was this band that first came out against Napster, and filed a lawsuit for circulating one of their works before it was officially released!

       In the same year, Fanning appeared on the cover of the TIME magazine.

       Again, Fanning was seen in commercials. In 2013, both Fanning and Napster became subjects of a documentary made by Alex Winter. It was titled ‘Downloaded’.

       Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, most famous for the creation of Napster. It was an online file-sharing service that enabled users to share music and audio files encoded in MP3 format.

       Launched on June 1st, 1999, Napster was so successful that at its peak, the service had about 80 million registered users. It made downloading of songs much easier; bypassing other distribution devices like records, tapes, and CDs. However, the music industry in the US was much affected by Napster after their songs started circulating online illegally.

       Napster thus came to a halt when it faced legal battles, and the development of software to prevent computer copyright piracy. In July 2001, it was shut down.

       The following year, an American software company Roxio Inc. acquired the assets of Napster, and re-launched it in 2003 as an e-commerce enterprise that sold digital music files. Although Napster had a short and controversial term, Fanning’s idea of downloading, storing, and sharing songs through networks caught on. 

       Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick, or Brad Fitzpatrick, is an American programmer most famous for the creation of Live-Journal. It is a social network service that enables users to keep blogs, journals or diaries.

       Started in April 1999, Live-Journal soon became a massive hit, and established itself as a company named the Danga Interactive. Six years later, Fitzpatrick sold Danga for an undisclosed sum to a software company called Six Apart Ltd. He also worked with them for two years, before returning to the Live-Journal advisory board.

       Other than Live-Journal, Fitzpatrick has authored of a variety of free software programs as well, namely, memcached, OpenID and Camlistore.

       Free softwares are those computer softwares that provide the users with a ‘source code’. Using this, a user can run the software for any purpose like studying, modifying, distributing etc. 

       Jerry Yang is a computer expert who co-founded Yahoo! with David Filo in 1994. Yang was a doctoral scholar at Stanford University while he came up with the idea of a platform to provide web directory on the Internet.

       From ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ the company moved to Yahoo! Inc., transforming the founders into billionaires within two years.

       From 1995 to 2012, Yang served as the ‘Chief Yahoo’, of the firm, and as its CEO from 2007 to 2009.

       In 2012, Yang resigned from the board of directors, and founded a new investment company ‘AME Cloud Ventures’. It provided funding to more than 50 start ups.

       Since then, Yang has worked with many reputed multinational companies, serving in top posts. In 2013, he became an independent director of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, a Chinese e-commerce company. He is also an independent non-executive director of Lenovo Group Limited, and serves on the board of trustees of Stanford University. 

    Tech-wizard and the co-founder of Yahoo! David Filo was born on April 20th, 1966, in Wisconsin, USA.

    A promising student, Filo had since childhood, been interested in computers and proved his technical skills. He earned a BS in computer engineering at the Tulane University through the Dean’s Honour Scholarship, and went on to complete an MS at Stanford University. He also enrolled for the doctoral programme in the university during which he created Yahoo! with the help of fellow researcher Jerry Yang.

    The company which began as ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’ consisted of a directory to other websites. It then became one of the strongest and popular ventures in the field of information technology, following which the founders started receiving offers from other multinational companies like Netscape.

     Filo, known to be a hard worker, has played an instrumental role in taking Yahoo! to the international arena. The Filo Server Program that was written in the C programming language was used in the earliest versions of Yahoo!