Mark Zuckerberg

Not many people would become a self-made billionaire at the very young age of 23 and not everyone could create a network whose reputation could catch like fire across the planet. That person is none other than Mark Zuckerberg and the network is Facebook, which of course needs no introduction. This young American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur is one of the five co-founders of this network and can be regarded as the protagonist behind its creation. Let’s know more about the life and various circumstances that led Mark Zuckerberg create this masterpiece of a network.

Birth and Growing Up:

Mark Zuckerberg was born to Edward Zuckerberg and Karen on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. His mother and father were psychiatrist and a dentist respectively. He was their only son along with three daughters Randi, Donna and Arielle and they were raised in Dobbs Ferry town which is about 10 miles north of New York City. A Jew by birth, Mark Zuckerberg followed Atheism as soon as he had his Bar Mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony celebrated among the Jews at the age of 13.

Days of Education:

Mark excelled in every category of subject he was interested in during his school days. He had shown excellent interest in classics at Ardsley High School and he won prizes in Science and Classical Studies during his junior year in Philips Exeter Academy.

Obsession with Computers and Software:

During the middle school years, Mark was tutored by software developer David Newman hired by his father after teaching him the Atari BASIC programming in the early 90s. Mark proved to be an excellent student and Newman described that it was always tough for him to stay ahead of Mark. His obsession with software development can be proven by the fact that he took a graduate course in that at Mercy College while he was still in high school!

ZuckNet:

It is clearly evident that Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed developing software applications since childhood. With this enormous interest he even designed a software application called “ZuckNet” which allowed the communication between the computers at his home and his dad’s dental office. This was even considered as the basic version of the following year’s release AOL’s Instant Messenger. A well-recognized writer Jose Antonio Vargas described Mark as the kid who created computer games while the other kids would generally play them. Zuckerberg himself told that there were many friends of his who were good artists and he would create some games basing on the pictures they drew.

Not Just a Computer Nerd!

Many of us would think that Mark Zuckerberg is a computer nerd right from the start because of his creation of this ultimate social media network. But we would be deceived by that fact. He was not at all a typical geek. In fact he was a fencing star and the fencing captain for his team during the school days. He also had immense interest in Greek odysseys and other classic like Roman epic poem Aeneid written by Virgil.

Entering Harvard:

Mark Zuckerberg built a music player called Synapse built on an algorithm which would detect the user’s listening habits. This was posted on the news website Slashdot and was well received by PC magazine. Both Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase this software and recruit Mark but both their efforts resulted in vain as Zuckerberg opted to enroll at Harvard after graduating from Exeter in 2002.

Facemash and TheFacebook:

During his sophomore year at Harvard, Zuckerberg built a program called “CourseMatch” which enabled the new students to select classes based on the course selections of the already enrolled users. During his 2nd year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a program for a software called “Facemash” which would allow the students at Harvard to rate two students, whose photos were compared in the same page, either hot or not. For this purpose, he hacked the Harvard’s then network facebooks which contain the photos and identities of the students at the universities. This was later shutdown by Harvard as it violated a number of privacy laws and Zuckerberg faced expulsion, but later all the charges against him were dropped.

Later, he started to write a code for a wider social network that would enable the students at Harvard to communicate with each other. Zuckerberg took this as a challenge and completed this within a week after stating that he could create a better network than the University was planning to. After one of his friend’s suggestion, he put this network on Kirkland House online mailing list where he saw it registered by a number of students over just one night. He named this “TheFacebook”.

Zuckerberg was later accused by three senior students that he stole the idea of creating a social network in Harvard after making them believe that he would write a code for that and deceiving them. They had reported it to the newspaper Harvard Crimson which filed a lawsuit against him which was subsequently settled later.

The Rise of Facebook:

When TheFacebook had received an enormous reception among the Harvard community, Mark Zuckerberg had decided to spread it to other schools and universities as well even though he had not planned this before. In 2004 he, along with his roommate Dustin Moskovitz, promoted this network across different universities like Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale. After buying a network domain ‘facebook.com’ in 2005 for $200,000, they had removed ‘The’ from the original network name making it just Facebook.

Career Growth:

Apart from the inception of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was involved with a number of other networks and platforms establishments. Some of themwere Wirehog, Platform, Beacon, Connect and interner.org.

•    Wirehog was a peer-to-peer file sharing network which was established by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D’Angelo and Sean Parker and it was meant to be a competing service to the already established campus-only service i2hub. It was later suspended as one of its uses on Facebook, photo sharing, was introduced into Facebook itself.

•    A development platform for the application developers known as Facebook Platform was announced by Mark Zuckerberg on May 24 of 2007 which can be used for creating different social applications for Facebook. It had received an enormous response that more than 800,000 developers around the world built applications through that.

•    Beacon, a social advertising system, was introduced into Facebook not much time later which enables the users to share the information regarding their browsing activities on other websites. When this had become a concern for privacy issues, Mark Zuckerberg offered a simpler way for the users to opt out of that service.

•    Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform was announced by Zuckerberg on July 23rd of 2008.

•    In the backend of August 2013, Zuckerberg launched a domain Internet.org which would enable about 5 billion people who are not connected at that time to connect to the internet. It was also meant to provide a number of opportunities for the job seekers and open up new markets.

Accolades and Achievements:

•    Zuckerberg became a billionaire by the age of 23 as a result of his creation Facebook. The number of worldwide users reached one billion as of 2012.

•    He was awarded with the prestigious Time Magazine “Person of the Year” in 2010.

•    He has been named among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world.

•    The Jerusalem post ranked him first among the most influential Jews in the world in 2011 and he garnered that for 3 consecutive years till now.

•    His personal wealth is expected to be $27.9 billion as of February of 2014. He is one of the wealthiest CEOs who receive $1 nominal salary per year.

MARRIAGE:

Mark Zuckerberg married his long-time girlfriend, whom he met at a fraternity during his sophomore year at Harvard, Priscilla Chan on May 19, 2012. The occasion was simply celebrated in the backyard of his house and the daywas also marked as Chan’s graduation celebration from medical school.

INSPIRATION TO YOUNG DEVELOPERS:

Mark Zuckerberg has proved to be a great inspiration to all the young software developers across the world. His talent, achievements and openness have been a boost to many people out there making them believe that one can achieve anything with talent and determination to become successful.

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin-Google

Google, one of the most profitable internet companies, was co-founded by the American Scientist and Internet entrepreneur of Russian Origin, Sergey Brin along with Larry Page. He was referred to as an “Enlightenment Man” by the Economist newspaper. Let us know more about the life of this Enlightenment Man and his collaboration with Larry Page which produced the most successful search engine on the internet.

CHILDHOOD:

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin popularly known as Sergey Brin was born to Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin on 21 August, 1973 in Moscow, Russia. His father was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother was a researcher at NASA’s Goddard space flight centre. In Moscow, Brin’s family used to live with his grandmother in a flat. When Brin was 6 years old, his family shifted to the USA due to Soviet Union issue.

EDUCATION AND GRADUATION:

Brin as a child attended Paint Branch Montessori School though he had received most of the education from Michael Brin at home. He had graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In 1990 he entered the University of Maryland and within three years he graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Science. He then entered Stanford University, where he studied computer science with a scholarship from National Science Foundation.

ASSOCIATION WITH LARRY PAGE:

Brin again went to Stanford University to do PhD in Computer Science and there he met his fellow student Larry Page and joined his research work “BackRub” which is all about exploring the mathematical properties of World Wide Web and Backlinks.That was when the thought for Page Rank was originated. The simple thought of this PageRank algorithm which was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a new idea that would later revolutionize the internet age. That is nothing but the idea of a search engine that would be a far more superior version than the existing ones.

CAREER – JOURNEY WITH GOOGLE:

While studying at Stanford University he did an internship at Wolfram Research. In 1998, after raising 1$ million from family, friends and investors, Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company. The mission of their group was “to organize the worlds informative and make it universally accessible and useful” and “Don’t be evil”. In the beginning, Page served as the CEO of the company and Brin as president. In 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin enrolled their names as Ph. D students at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement’s in London as graduate student delegates. In 2001, they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google and Larry page took the role of President of Products and Brin as President of Technology.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found as multi-billionaires at age 27. The three top executives of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt has reduced their annual salaries to a single dollar a year, tying their personal wealth to Google performance in Stock market. By the end of 2006, it is estimated that Page and Brin are among the top 12 richest people on earth and top 6 richest Americans.Together Brin and Page own 16 percent of the company shares.

Other than Google, Brin work on the other projects, he along with Page invested in the alternative energy industry which help to solve the worlds energy and climate problems to find wider sources of renewable energy. He is also an investor in Tesla Motors. He involved in Project Glass program which is a research and development program by Google and in Google driverless project.

PERSONAL LIFE:

In 2007, Brin was married to a biotech analyst and entrepreneur, Anne Wojcicki. Brin and Anne have a son, born in 2008 and a daughter, born in 2011. Anne Wojcicki has a keen interest in health information so, the couple brainstormed with the leading researchers about human genome project. Genetics is regarded as a database and computing problem by Brin and Anne instinctively so, Anne co-founded a firm “23andMe” which enables people on their genetic structure. In august 2013, it was announced that Brin and his wife have been living separately but officially they did not get divorced.

PAPERS:

Brin’s  focus was always on developing data mining system and he wrote many papers on data mining and pattern extraction which includes "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web," "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures”, "Dynamic Item-set Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data," and "Beyond Market Baskets”.

Brin and Larry both wrote the paper “Dynamic Data Mining” and the second paper was “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The second paper became more popular and one of the most downloaded scientific papers in the history of internet.

Brin created a website for film ratings and even designed a software application which can translate the text processing language to HTML.

AWARDS:

In 2002, Brin along with Page was named to MIT Technology Review TR100. 

In 2003, Page along with Brin, received an Honorary MBA from IE Business School.

In 2004, the pair was elected Fellows of the Marconi foundation at Columbia University and received Marconi Foundation Price. In the same year, they were named as “Persons of the Week” by ABC World News Tonight. Brin received the “Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award” with Larry at Chicago.

In 2005, Page and Brin were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

PRESENT:

Brin is now serving as the Co-founder and Director of special projects at Google and he is considered as the one of the most influential business magnates in this era with completely exceptional entrepreneurial skills.

APPLE – INCEPTION, FALL AND RISE OF THE ELECTRONICS MNC

THE ‘APPLE’ REVOLUTION:

Gone are the days where the word “Apple”, would make most of us just think of the fruit. If you ask anyone who has a basic knowledge of electronic consumer goods about “Apple”, their immediate response would relate to the prestigious electronics and software developer across the world. That’s the impact Apple organization has made in the contemporary world.

WIDE ARRAY OF PRODUCTS:

Apple is a multinational corporation having its base headquarters in Cupertino, California that deals with the design and development of different consumer electronics, personal computers and software applications. Its most famous products include the Mac line of computers, iPods, iPhone mobiles, and iPad tablet computers among the hardware products and OS X, IOS among the operating systems along with different software applications like iTunes media browser and the Safari web browser, iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites. It has been established almost 38 years ago. Let us have a brief look into how this renowned organization has evolved through the decades.

INCEPTION OF APPLE:

Steve Jobs and Steve Woznaik used to work for an American video game and home computer company known as Atari Inc. in their early career. But in the year 1976, they left the job to establish a company on their own which basically deals with the sale of personal computer kits. Hence on 1st April, 1976 the Apple computercompany was established by the both of them along with Ronald Wayne. The name was christened in remembrance of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples!

FIRST SALE AND INCORPORATION:

The Apple I kits were basically motherboards built single handedly by Steve Woznaik and they were first publicly shown at the Homebrew Computer Club. The first Apple I device which constituted CPU, RAM and basic textual video chips was sold in July of 1976 for $666.66!

One of the co-founders of Apple, Roland Wayne sold his share of Apple for $800 after which the Apple Company was incorporated on January 3rd, 1977. The funding of $250,000 along with the required expertise for incorporation was given by Mike Markkula who was a multi-millionaire.

APPLE II, III AND LISA:

This advanced version computer, Apple II came with cell-based color graphics and an open architecture also designed by Woznaik, which were not available in its then rivals TRS-80 and Commodore PET. The early usage of cassette tapes was replaced by 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives known as Disk II. It was chosen to be the platform for first killer app of the business world, VisiCalc.

Apple III was introduced later in the May of 1980 as a competition to the products of other organizations like IBM and Microsoft in the corporate market of computing. After visiting Xerox PARC Company in 1979, Jobs was convinced that every future computer would run with a Graphical User Interface (GUI)and it was then first developed for Apple Lisa personal computer. With $22 per share, Apple went public in 1980 becoming a company that created most number of millionaires in the history.

MACINTOSH:

Because of some internal disputes between Steve Jobs and the Apple Lisa team, he removed himself from that project and joined a much less budgeted Macintosh project. Both teams competed on who we would release their version first. Though Lisa had won the race, it was a commercial failure because of high price and limited software titles.

Macintosh on the other hand had a very good opening fueled by the masterpiece of an advertisement directed by famous director Ridley Scott announcing its debut. Though the follow-up sales were slow, the introduction of Post Script Laser Printer, LaserWriter and PageMaker changed the fate of this product making the combination a very powerful and intuitive Macintosh package.

DISPUTE AND JOBS RESIGNATION:

Because of a power struggle between Jobs and the two years earlier hired John Scully in 1985, Jobs was deprived of all the managerial duties after the board of directors supported John Scully. Uninterested to continue the work at Apple, Jobs resigned from the company and founded NeXT Inc in the same year.

POWERBOOK – GOLDEN AGE:

Apple introduced “PowerBook” in the year 1991 after introducing Macintosh Portable in 1989 which faced heavy weight problems. PowerBook solved all those problems with enhanced effective functioning and hence the sales and revenue were hugely increased for the Apple Company. This period between 1989 and 1991 was regarded as the Golden Age for Apple.

PERIOD OF DECLINE:

Because of too much experimentation in producing a variety of appliances like Digital Cameras, Portable CD audio players, speakers, video consoles, and TV appliances etc. which had not made a huge mark in the market, Apple faced a huge commercial failure in the 1990s. Also the unyielding strategies of the then CEO John Scully did not help either.

Meanwhile Microsoft had been developing effective and efficient software applications which came cheap. Apple, though had been developing quality software, because of the high cost and richness, their products had been a commercial failure. Even though they sued Microsoft for using a similar GUI as that of Apple Lisa, the case dragged and eventually dismissed after many years. The Apple’s decline continued with a heavy loss in almost every strategy they employed. Their CEO John Scully was replaced by Michael Spindler then.

During Michael’s reign, many strategies were employed to enhance the version of Macintosh and introducing alternative platforms like A/UX and experimented with Mac-only online portal called e-World. They faced huge competition from OS/2 and UNIX vendors and the outdated Macintosh was not helping them either. Apple collaborated with IBM and Motorola to enhance the performance of Macintosh and together they produced Power Macintosh using Motorola’s Power PC processor but it was unable to create any huge difference.

Michael Spindler was then replaced by Gil Amelio in 1996 who later tried to install a number of changes to Apple and Mac OS but failed miserably. Apple then ousted Gil Amelio after observing the heavy loss that incurred to the organization on July 1997. Before that, Gil Amelio brought back Steve Jobs and chose to purchase NeXT and NeXTSTEP operating system.

Steve Jobs then became the interim CEO and started restructuring the company’s product line as follows

•    Collaboration with Microsoft to release newer MS office for Macintosh in 1997.

•    Introduction of all-in-one computer in 1998 led by Jonathan Ive.

•  Purchase of several companies to create a portfolio of professional and consumer-oriented digital production software including Macromedia’s Final Cut.

REGAINING THE POWER:

The years between 2000 and 2006 marked the power regaining period for the Apple Company. Starting with Mac OS X which was released in 2001, there have been many developments in the productions of innovative operating systems and software applications. Since then, they have abandoned the use of colored plastics starting with the titanium PowerBook.

The new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use Intel’s Core Duo CPU on January 10, 2006 shortly after Jobs’ announcement that they would be producing systems based on Intel. The new products that followed were Mac Pro, MacBook and MacBook Pro and since then Apple began building its own engineers to design microchips. To install Windows XP or Vista alongside Mas OS X, a new software Boot Camp was introduced.

With an increase from $6 to $80 per share, the price of Apple’s stock had raised more than ten times which represented an enormous success and it had even beat Dell’s market cap by January 2006. The only thing they were unable to beat was Microsoft as only 8% of Apple’s laptops and desktops were used in US.

THE APPLE MOBILE ERA:

Apple had developed a number of successful mobile devices, media players and personal computers between the years 2007 and 2010. It had brought a new dimension to the touch screen devices by including certain pre-programmed touch gestures. With most of the success coming from the mobiles, Apple decided that it would concentrate on developing hand held devices. The share price of Apple crossed $100 mark by May of 2007.

After introducing the innovative iPhones, iPods, Apple began developing third party applications for these touch devices. These had become a huge success too and later Apple had become third largest mobile handset supplier in the world owing to the popularity of the iPhone.

In the year 2010, Apple had introduced the iPad touch device which is nothing but a large screen tablet device based on the same operating system which iPhone uses. iPad devices also have been a huge success and it enabled Apple to exceed the Microsoft’s market cap since 1989. Later iPhone 4 which came with the features like video calling and multitasking was released which faced some problem with the signal reception. Apple then released a free bumper case for iPhone 4 users to eliminate the signal reduction. The release of iPhone 4 was followed by multi touch iPod Nano, iPod touch and iPod shuffle devices.

Later that year, in the month of October, the shares of Apple reached an all-time high with as much as $300 per share.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND RECOGNITION:

• Apple is now the world’s second largest IT Company in terms of revenue with only Samsung Electronics in front of it.

• It is also the third largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia.

•It has been named the most admired company by Fortune Magazine in United States in 2008 and in the world consequently for five years from 2008 to 2012.

•It has also become the world’s most valuable brand among Omnicom Group’s “Best Global Brands” report surpassing Coca-Cola on September 30, 2013.

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BILL GATES – A COMPUTER REVOLUTIONARY AND RICH PHILANTHROPIST

Not everyone could become the wealthiest person in the world and definitely not for thirteen consecutive years. But it’s not the wealth of money we should be talking about. It’s about the wealth of knowledge and the contribution a person makes to the world. And we can say that the wealth garnered by this person in his lifetime definitely speaks less of his achievements even though he may have earned tens of billions. You might have got an idea whom we’re speaking of now, haven’t you? Yes, that person is none other than William Henry Gates III, mostly known to us as Bill Gates, the co-founder of the world renowned Microsoft Corporation.

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD:

Bill Gates was born to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates,on October 28, 1955. His parents were prominent lawyer and one among the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem respectively. He was the second child with an elder and younger sister and he was called “trey” as his father was Gates II and he would be Gates III. Since childhood, Gates grew up in a competitive atmosphere promoted by his family. They would always conduct some games and competitions where the winner would get a reward and loser would receive some penalty.

PASSION FOR COMPUTERS:

Gates had an early interest in computers and during his schooling at Lakeside School he sought out an interest in the then famous language BASIC and he got permission to get excused from Mathematics class to pursue this programming on a General Electric Computer. His passion for programming and computer gaming was so much that he, along with three other Lakeside students were banned from the school for exploiting the bugs  in the OS of a PDP-10 belonging  to Computer Center Corporation.

Recognizing the rare abilities of these four young men, the CCC offered computer time to fix the computer bugs in their systems and they continued this until 1970 which was when the company ran out of business.  Later, they were hired by Information Sciences, Inc. to write a payroll program in COBOL in exchange for royalties.

LOGGING IN AND STEPPING OUT OF HARVARD:

After his graduation in the year 1973 from the Lakeside School, Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on SAT reasoning test and later enrolled at Harvard College where he met his future Microsoft CEO successor Steve Balmer.

Gates continued pursuing his passion for computers even after joining Harvard and he held the record of devising the fastest solution in the form of an algorithm for pancake sorting. The year 1975 marked the release of MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and both Gates and Paul Allen saw this as an opportunity to start their own software company. They both dropped out of Harvard and their parents too were supportive of their decision after recognizing their passion in that field.

ESTABLISHING MICROSOFT:

After demonstrating the BASIC programming language that would be compatible with the MITS developed Altair to its head Ed Roberts, MITS purchased the software and hired Paul Allen and Bill Gates. The partnership of Gates and Allen at MITS led to the establishment of Micro-soft which had its first office located in Albuquerque. It was changed to Microsoft on November 26, 1976 and it was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.

During the early years of Microsoft, Bill Gates had dealt with the generation and editing of the code while overlooking the business details. Microsoft was relocated in Bellevue, Washington in the year 1979 from Albuquerque.

JOINING HANDS WITH IBM:

With the introduction of UNIX operating system, Microsoft created new software Xenix but this was not received well because its functionality had not reached the expectations. Gates and team then took up the task of designing a command line interface that would require a very minimum number of boot files but performing basic tasks on a computer. They had succeeded in creating that which required just 5 boot files. This is how MS-DOS came into existence.

International Business Machines Corporation was very much impressed with this creation that they had integrated this software into all of their computers. With this success collaboration, Microsoft later developed a number of languages for the IBM Corporation like GW Basic, C language and Flight Simulator etc. IBM had its systems run on the operating system OS/2 designed by Microsoft and they had their partnership until 1990.

DEVELOPING WINDOWS:

Bill Gates was instrumental in the development of success of the most used operating system Windows.  After the OS/2 operating system, he had made many advanced modification and released Windows 95. With its success and in the span of few years, Microsoft had developed a series of Operating Systems which include Windows 98, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and 8.

While Windows XP achieved worldwide acclaim and considered the best, Vista was considered a failure. It was not until the introduction of Windows 7 that users tried to change their operating systems from Windows XP. Microsoft is now planning to release a newer version of Windows i.e. Windows 9 in the month of April, 2014.

STEPPING DOWN FROM CEO POST:

After nearly 25 years after the establishment of Microsoft, Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in Microsoft in the year of 2000 during the month of January but still remained as chairman and created the post of chief software architect for himself. He assumed the full time duties until June 27, 2008 when he transformed into a part-time worker in order to balance the duties at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft appointed Satya Nadella as CEO in February 2014 and Bill Gates stepped down as chairman and assumed the duties of technology advisor to the newly appointed CEO.

PERSONAL LIFE:

Bill Gates married one of the employees of Microsoft, Melinda French on January 1, 1994. Their first daughter, Jennifer Katharine, was born in the year 1996 and then a son, Rory, in 1999 and again a daughter, Phoebe Adele, in 2002. The Gates family resides at an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina.

RECOGNITION, ACCOLADES AND CONTROVERSIES:

Bill Gates is the only person to be consistently ranked for thirteen times from 1995 to 2007 according to the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people. He was third in the 2008 and regained the first position back again in 2009. Bloomberg Billionaires named him the world’s richest person again in 2013.

Along with great recognition and a number of accolades, Gates also has been criticized for his business tactics which were considered unconventional and anti-competitive and was upheld by judicial courts.

In spite of all those controversies, Gates has always been a charitable person devoting most of his time for philanthropic endeavors and providing incentives for the needed through the organization co-founded by him and his wife Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

He and his wife were awarded with Jefferson award for greatest public service benefitting the disadvantaged. Apart from that the following are the different awards and accolades achieved by Bill Gates:

•    Times one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century.

•    One of the members among the Sunday Times power list in 1999.

•    One of the top influential people in media in 2001.

•    Fourth most powerful person in the world in 2012 according to Forbes.

•    He was made honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.

•    Bower Award for Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute in 2010.

•    Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America in 2010.

Not only as a revolutionary computer entrepreneur, Bill Gates garnered wide acclaim throughout the world as a great philanthropist.

THE YAHOO! PHENOMENON – RISE AND GROWTH OF THE ORGANIZATION:

If there’s one web portal and a Search Engine that is considered as a tough competitor for the world renowned Google, it is undoubtedly the American multinational Internet corporation Yahoo. It is one of the most popular websites in United States of America and has even surpassed Google on the number of visitors to its website in that country in the month of July, 2013. Let’s know more about this one of the most successful start-up companies of all times and how it had come into being.

THE BEGINNING AND EARLY CHANGES:

The roots for this Multinational Internet Company were planted by two Electrical Engineering graduate students of Stanford University in the year 1994. They are Jerry Yang and David Filo. For the purpose of providing a directory of other websites organized in a hierarchical structure as opposed to searchable pages index, they had created a website named “Jerry’s guide to the World Wide Web”. This was later changed to “Yahoo!” in March, 1994 and a domain “yahoo.com” was created on January 18, 1995.

From its abbreviation, “Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, we can understand that the Yahoo database was arranged hierarchically through a number of layers of subcategories. Though this full form was unknown to most people, the acronym Yahoo was an instant catch and was liked by most people.

EXPONENTIAL DEVELOPMENT AND A BLOW:

Yahoo was one of those rare organizations which had experienced rapid growth as soon as it was established. Following the path of many other successful search engines and Web directories, it had also added a web portal. Its first disappointment arrived in September of 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst during which it had attained an all-time low of $8.11.

SEARCH ENGINE AND MAIL:

Yahoo had used Google for search purposes only in the early 2000s. During this time, it developed its own search engine and it was launched in the year 2004. It had also created a Mail engine in the year 2007 which offers unlimited storage with an addition of Yahoo Messenger and offered free text messages to the mobile users across the countries like U.S.A, Canada, India and Philippines.

Yahoo created a homepage in the year 2006 during which users were offered a chance to beta test that on different browsers. It had supported well only for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox while it drew criticism from the users of browsers like Opera. After this, Yahoo assured that it would design it in such a way that it supports all the major browsers in the future.

Because a number of major layoffs the company had a tough time during the year 2008. This was mainly due to its competitor website and industry search leader Google. As many as thousand employees were laid off at first and at the end of the year, the number turned into 1,520 because of the economic downturn.

MERGING DISCUSSIONS WITH MICROSOFT:

After three consecutive unsuccessful merging discussions by Yahoo with Microsoft in the years 2005, 2006 and 2007, Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock which was also rejected by Yahoo as it thought their organization was undervalued.

During this time Yahoo had considered merging with major organizations like Google and News Corp for which it was sued by two Detroit-based pension companies for allegedly breaching the duty of shareholders.

Even after Microsoft had raised its offer by $5 billion making it $33 per share, Yahoo still declined the offer by telling that they wouldn’t go for less than $37 per share. After all the discussions and failed negotiations, Microsoft withdrew their offer. This had hit Yahoo like a blow as the stock of this company had dropped down to $23.02 per share. This forced Yahoo to re-negotiate with Microsoft but it refused to go with the earlier proposed $33 per share and announced that it would consider another proposal only if Yahoo ousts its then nine directors and on November 30 of 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $20 billion and in the month of July, 2009, an announcement that Microsoft has full access to use Yahoo’s search engine for the next years was made.

THE CHANGE OF CEOs:

During the year 2009, Carol Bartz, former executive chairman of Autodesk, was appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors by Yahoo replacing the co-founder Jerry Yang.

Yahoo! has undergone a number of changes after Bartz has taken charge as the CEO. In the year 2009, it launched a new front page which allowed users to customize it through the “My Favorites”. This helps users to avail the users with third party applications or web services.

But Bartz did not last long as the CEO as Tim Morse was appointed as interim CEO in September 2011 after Bartz was removed from her position by company’s chairman Roy Bostock through a phone call. The former president of Paypal, Scott Thompson was appointed as CEO on January 4, 2012 and immediately succeded by Marissa Mayer who is the current CEO of Yahoo!

YAHOO PRODUCTS AND SERVICES:

Yahoo has a wide array of products and services apart from mail and search engine. The most popular categories in which it has its upper hand in providing services are personal information and tracking usage, communication, content and information, co-branded internet services, mobile services, E-commerce, small business, advertising. Some of its unique services are Yahoo Next, Yahoo BOSS, Yahoo Meme, Y!Connect, Yahoo Accessibility, Yahoo Axis and Yahoo SearchMonkey.

THE AGE OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

INTRODUCTION:

Among the most renowned companies in the world that dealt with the sales of computers, creation of languages and provision of information technology services, Sun Microsystems can be said as one of the best. It had ruled for about three decades since its inception in the year 1982 and was considered to be as one of the finest competitors among its rivals in this period of time.

The most amazing creation of this corporation is Java which is now the foundation and utility for the creation of most advanced software applications and widely used computer programming language. Sun Microsystems is also credited with many inventions and creations. Let us see what they are in brief.

FOUNDATION:

Sun Microsystems was founded by three graduate students at Stanford University VinodKhosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy on February 24, 1982. Soon after it was founded, they were joined by Bill Joy who was a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The name SUN was taken from the first letters of the three words Stanford University Network.

ROOTS FOR SUN:

Andy Bechtolsheim would gain the credit for planting the roots for SUN microsystems as he created the first UNIX work station; the Sun-1 was their first UNIX station. He created this while was pursuing his graduation at Stanford University. The design is built based on the Motorola 68000 processor with advanced memory management to support the UNIX operating system. He was then joined by his colleagues VinodKhosla and Scott McNealy and established the organization.

SUN’S HARDWARE AND SYSTEMS:

Sun started designing the systems based on the Motorola family of central processing units and later their systems were evolved based on the SPARC systems and x86 based systems. Let us see their evolution in brief:

MOTOROLA:

•Their first UNIX system, SUN-1 was designed with Motorola 68000 family central processing unit. Their later UNIX creations SUN-2 and SUN-3 were also built on Motorola processors with Sun-2 using 68010 processors and Sun-3 using 68020 processors. The Sun-3x variant was built with Motorola 68030 processor.

SPARC:

• SPARC is a RISC processor which is designed by the company itself. It is initially a 32-bit architecture system and they had used this until their introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture which added 64-bit extensions.

•Their wide array of SPARC-based computer systems which were developed in the later years include SPARC station, Ultra and Sun Blade series of workstations, the SPARC server, Netra, Enterprise and Sun Fire line of servers.

X86 BASED SYSTEMS:

•Sun Microsystems first began using the x86 based systems in the late 1980s. But with the introduction of the SPARC systems and the termination of the Motorola based systems, they stopped using these systems.

•It was in the year 2002 Sun Microsystems again announced that it was introducing their first x86 general purpose system. They later allied with AMD to produce x86/x64 based AMD’s Opteron Processor. The following years saw a great advancement in x86 processor based systems through SUN microsystems.

IN THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY:

Sun Microsystems had been a source for a number of software applications that have now become an essential part in every domestic system usage and business usage of computers. The basic categories in software industry that were conceived by the Sun Microsystems were operating systems, Java platform, office suite, virtualization and datacenter automation software, and database management systems.

•The well-known operating system Solaris was the creation of the Sun Microsystems which was introduced into the market in the year 1993. Until then, the Sun Microsystems had used the SunOS for their systems. After the Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of the Sun Microsystems in the January, 2010, its name was changed to Oracle Solaris. These systems are mostly known for their scalability with the SPARC systems.

• Java platform which was famously known for the slogan “Write once, debug everywhere” was developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. It is regarded as hardware and operating system-independent.  This platform basically contains three major parts, the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine and several Java Application Programming Interfaces. This is an object-oriented language and has been the development platform for various applications of music, video and others.

•When Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision, it also had acquired their office suite StarOffice which Sun releases as OpenOffice.org and this has supported many platforms like Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris.

•Sun had announced the virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity and hardware in the year 2007. It had also provided many virtual desktop solutions and products to the clients in the later years. They had acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the MySQL database in the year 2008 for 1 billion US dollars.

•Apart from these software development branches, Sun Microsystems also had sales in the storage systems to complement their system offerings. They also had marketed for the High Performance Computing solutions through Sun Constellation System.

ACQUISITION BY ORACLE:

Sun Microsystems was officially announced as sold to the Oracle Corporation in the year 2009. Sun started laying-off many employees in the days followed by and late completely transferred the required and discussed assets to the Oracle Corporation. Sun India became a legal part of the Oracle in the September 1, 2011.

EVER REMEMBERED CORPORATION:

Though Sun was officially sold to Oracle, the corporation’s name and fame has its own uniqueness and will be remembered forever. After all it is the creator of the Java which is one of the most used programming languages world-wide.

THE CO-FOUNDER OF SUN MICRO SYSTEMS – Vinod Khosla

INTRODUCTION:

The years since 1970 have produced some great inventors and entrepreneurs especially in the field of computers and networking. They have not only invented something, but they revolutionized the usage of the computers and related peripherals. One of those legends who contributed to the age of computer revolution by co-founding the renowned Sun Microsystems, known for creating Java programming language, is Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is also well-known as a strong supporter of clean technology. Let us know some interesting facts about Vinod Khosla and his career.

CHILDHOOD – INTEREST IN TECHNOLOGY:

Vinod Khosla was born on January 28, 1955 in Delhi, India. His father was an Indian Army officer who was posted at New Delhi, India.

Since his childhood, he had shown immense interest in technology. The roots for his passion for technology were planted when he read about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times at the age of fourteen. This was an inspiration for him to pursue a career in technology. He had graduated with multiple degrees from various universities.

•    Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering – IIT Delhi

•    Masters in Biomedical Engineering – Carnegie Mellon University

•    MBA – Stanford Graduate School of Business

SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

Vinod Khosla worked for a company known as Daisy Systems which was an electronic design automation company after graduating from Stanford in the year 1980. He worked there for two years before co-founding the Sun Microsystems.

SUN in the Sun Microsystems is the acronym for Stanford University Network and it was co-founded in the year 1982 by Vinod Khosla with Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, his Stanford University classmates and UC Berkeley computer science graduate Bill Joy. Khosla was the first chairman and CEO for the company and he had served in those positions for 2 years i.e. from 1982 to 1984.

CAREER AS A VENTURE CAPITALIST:

Vinod Khosla had a highly successful career as a venture capitalist. He had joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the year 1987 and within a very short time was recognized as a successful one with his profitable early investments.

SKS Microfinance in India was another firm which Khosla invested in. This is a finance company which lends small loans to the poor and women in rural India.Apart from the investments, he had also founded companies like TiE and The Indus Entrepreneurs. Khosla believed that ethanol can be used as a gasoline substitute and hence invested a lot in the companies that produced ethanol.

CONTRIBUTION TO FOUNDATIONS:

CK-12 foundation was co-founded by Khosla’s wife Neeru in the year 2006. This foundation is aimed at developing the open source textbooks to lower the cost of education. The couple also donated $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation.

ESTABLISHING KHOSLA VENTURES:

In the year 2004, Vinod Khosla established Khosla Ventures which is a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. The capital is estimated to be 1 billion dollars along with the funds invested by Vinod Khosla. Clean tech and information technology start-ups have been invested with the funds from Khosla in September 2009. An announcement in May 2010 have been made that Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain would be joining Khosla Ventures to advising on the investments in environment focused technologies.

WORKS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

Vinod Khosla was involved in the foundation and development of many other organization, businesses and foundations apart from his own Khosla Ventures. They are

•    Daisy Systems which was established in 1981 had the contribution of Vinod Khosla in its foundation.

•    He is one of the founders of The Indus Entrepreneurs, shortly known as TiE.

•    He also guest edited a special issue of Economic Times newspaper.

•    He was the finalist for World Technology Award in the year 1999.

•    He served as the Honorary Chair of the Donors Choose San Francisco Bay Area Advisory Board.

•    He is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.

SUPPORTER OF CLEAN TECHNOLOGY:

Vinod Khosla has always been a great supporter of clean technology and he has invested a lot of the capitals in the ventures for the safer inventions. He once said “If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter. Most of what we talk about today – hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal – I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem.” There are a very few people in the world of technology who has a vision of clean technology and Vinod Khosla is one of them.