Category IT Business Tycoons

           Ajit Balakrishnan is an entrepreneur and the founder of Rediff.com, hailing from Kerala. He is currently the chairman of the successful internet company.

            Born in Kannur, Balakrishnan completed his graduation from the University of Kerala, and a Post Graduate diploma in management with a master in business studies from IIM Calcutta. It is said that Balakrishnan was a huge fan of football, and aspired to be a footballer in his childhood. But of course, he treaded a different path.

             At the age of 22, he started his first business venture, Re-diffusion. It is now known as Re-diffusion DY&R (Dentsu Young & Rubicam). In 1995, Balakrishnan founded the Rediff.com, a web portal for information, news, entertainment and shopping. The next year, the site became the first website domain name registered in the country. 

             Other than at Rediff.com, Ajit Balakrishnan has served top posts in various organizations and governmental bodies. He is also known to the world as an established writer.

             As we saw, Balakrishnan joined the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in the start of the 1970s to do a post graduate diploma course in management with a master in business studies. Today, he is the chairman of the board of governors at the reputed institution. He has also served as the chairman to the Working Group of Internet Governance and Proliferation that comes under the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India.

            Besides being an entrepreneur and an inspiring patron, Ajit Balakrishnan is also an established writer. He writes columns in the Business Standard, and is the author of the book titled ‘The Wave Rider’. He has also co-authored a research paper with Alkesh Patel. 

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda or Sam Pitroda is one name without which the history of Indian IT and telecom sector remains incomplete. For his efforts in taking the country to the global map, Pitroda was rightly named the father of India’s communication revolution.

           Sam Pitroda was born on May 4th, 1942 at Titlagarh, Odisha. After completing master’s degree in physics and electronics from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Pitroda moved to the US and obtained masters in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

           For the next two decades, Pitroda was fully involved in technology research. In 1974, he started a digital switching company called Wescom Switching. Thereafter, he made several inventions and won patents. In 1975, he invented the electronic diary, and became a pioneer of handheld computing. In 1983 he designed Compu-cards, a computer-themed card game. The following year Pitroda returned to India, and founded the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT).

           Pitroda is also credited to have democratized the telecom industry in India, by introducing public call offices (PCO) throughout the country, thereby making calls accessible and affordable to all. Till date, Pitroda has won more than 100 patents in his name. 

          Ajay Bhatt is a computer architect best known for developing the USB (Universal Serial Bus), the cable used to connect different devices. He also invented the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and the PCI Express. Altogether, this Indian- American owns more than 130 patents.

          Bhatt was born in 1957 in India, and lived here till his completion of graduation at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He then moved to the US and obtained a masters from the City University of New York. In 1990, he joined Intel as a senior staff architect after which he designed the devices and technologies. He was part of the chipset architecture team in Folsom, California.

          For his contributions, Bhatt has won several awards including the Achievement in Excellence Award in 2002 for the PCI Express specification development. In 2013, he received the Outstanding Achievement in Science & Technology Award at The Asian Awards in London. The same year he won the Europe an Inventor Award too, in the Non-European countries category. The award is institute by the European Patent Office.

           Vinod Khosla is an Indian American venture capitalist best known for co-founding Sun Microsystems. It was a company that sold computers its components, software and IT services, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Khosla was the CEO and chairman of the company in the early 1980s.

           Born on 28th January 1955 in Delhi, Khosla was inspired to make a career in technology after reading an article about the founding of Intel. To chase his dreams, Khosla studied electrical engineering at IIT Delhi, and masters in biomedical engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University. He also did an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

           In 1980, Khosla co-founded Daisy System, an electronic design automation company. Two years later, he joined hands with his classmates Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy to set up Sun Microsystems. For two years, he served the company as its chairman and later quit to become a venture capitalist.

             Pranav Mistry is an Indian computer scientist known for many interesting innovations, including the Sixth Sense and the Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch. At the age of just 35, this young man is the head of the Think Tank Team and the Director of Research at Samsung.

             Known to have developed in less than five months, Sixth Sense made Mistry a celebrity in the field of IT. The device is like a pendant which people can wear, but is a combination of a mini projector, camera, sensors and computing device. It helps users to use their fingers to interact with different objects around them. Mistry’s other inventions include the Mouseless, an invisible mouse with an infrared camera and laser; Sparsh, a way to transfer data between devices easily by simple touch gestures, and Blinkbot, a system which use users’ blink to control a robot. Yet another, Quickies are smart sticky notes that can send reminders and messages to users.

             For his works, Mistry was made the Young Global Leader, 2013 by the World Economic Forum. In May 2011 he was listed as one of the 15 Asian scientists to Watch by the Asian Scientist Magazine.

             Pranav Mistry was born on 14th May 1981 in Palanpur, Gujarat. After schooling he pursued bachelor’s degree in computer science. The bright boy then moved to the US, and obtained a master’s degree in media arts and sciences from MIT and later, a PhD at the MIT media lab. Mistry also holds a master of design degree from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay.

            After his studies, Mistry worked in various companies, including the Microsoft, Google, and NASA.

           In 2012, he joined Samsung as the director of research. Currently, he is the global vice president of the company. 

Vinod Dham is an Indian – American inventor and entrepreneur, popularly known as the father of Pentium chip.

          Born in Pune, Dham did his BE degree in electrical engineering at the Delhi College of Engineering, and a masters at the University of Cincinnati.

          In 1971, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices as an engineer. Then he moved to National Cash Register (NCR) in Ohio. After a brief stint there, Dham joined Intel, and developed the famous Pentium processor. It was a huge success in the market, and took Dham to the position of the vice president of the Intel’s Microprocessor Products Group. He also co-founded Intel’s first Flash Memory technology (ETOX).

          He worked there till 1995, and then moved to NexGen, a startup, as its COO and executive vice president. The company was later acquired by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), where Dham developed the K6 processor, which even briefly held the title of fastest computer processor.

          In the years that followed, Dham founded many ventures. He is currently the managing director of the Indo-US Venture Partners, as well as the CEO of Acadglid. In 2000, he was appointed to the President’s advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders by the then US President Bill Clinton. 

           Bill Gates was born on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle to William H. Gates, Sr., a prominent lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates.

           During his school days, Gates stood out as an ambitious and intelligent student. He wrote his first software program at the age of thirteen. It allowed users to play games against the computer.

           In 1973, Gates graduated from the Lakeside School, and won the National Merit Scholarship. He then enrolled at Harvard University. But by 1975, he dropped out of college, and started working with Paul Allen to form Microsoft. Thus, at the age of 20, he co-founded the world’s largest PC software company, and established himself as an entrepreneur.

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