My Science School

       There have been many social media websites developed and popularized in the past two decades, but none like Twitter.

       As we know, it is a social networking service which enables users to post, share, and view updates called ‘tweets’. Unlike other sites, it has not only helped connect people, but has played significant role in culture, politics and society, since its beginning.

       The service is equally used by common people, celebrities, government, organizations and the news media to give updates about trending issues.

       In 140-characters, the tweets have played major roles in a variety of issues including governmental elections. It has also caused what is sometimes referred to as ‘Twitter Revolutions’ that included the 2011 Egyptian revolution, 2010-2011 Tunisian protests, 2009 Iranian presidential election protests etc.

      Protesters and supporters used Twitter as their platform for expression. For the unrests it caused, Twitter was subsequently banned in many countries, including China, North Korea, and Iran.

      At the same time, some other countries have made official announcements through their tweets. Based in San Francisco, Twitter had more than 310 million monthly active users by March 2016. 

Jeff Bezos is an American technology entrepreneur best known for founding the world’s largest online shopping retailer ‘Amazon.com’.

Born on January 12th, 1964 in New Mexico, Jeff had an interest in technology and business at a very early age. He earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the Princeton University, after which he worked with many firms.

In 1994, he founded Amazon.com, an online bookstore. It is said that without any promotion, the site sold books across the US and 45 foreign countries within months. Its sales reached $20,000 a week, creating tough competition for other e-commerce ventures. In the years later, Amazon.com went beyond books and started the online sale of CDs, clothes, electronic equipment, toys etc.

In 2007 was released Kindle, the popular handheld digital book that enabled users to read, downloading and store books on the device.

Today, Amazon.com has separate retail websites for each country and also, different language versions. It also made Jeff Bezos an inspiring and rich figure in the world. With a net worth of US $45.2 billion as of December 2016, he is the 5th richest person alive. 

         Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The family moved to Texas when Jeff was a kid.

Noted as a brilliant student, Jeff attended the Student Training Programme at the University of Florida, and received a Silver Knight Award at the age of 18. He was also a National Merit Scholar.

              Jeff’s interest in business drove him to start his first business venture while at high school. It was the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for kids. Later, he graduated from the Princeton University. There, he served as the president of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. He was also elected to honour societies like Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi at Princeton.

              After graduation, Jeff worked for several firms including a few on the Wall Street, like the Fitel Bank Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co, New York, where he became the youngest vice president. Although it was a lucrative job, Jeff quit the company after a few years, and started working on Amazon.com. The company was initially set up in his garage, and served as an online bookstore. It soon found subscribers across many countries, and grew into a major e-commerce firm.

               In 2000, Jeff Bezos founded the Blue Origin, a human spaceflight start-up, out of his fascination for space travel. Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper.

 

               When he launched the site in March 2010, Ben Silbermann defined Pinterest as a ‘catalogue of ideas’ rather than as a social network. The co-founder was so passionate about the project that he gave up his lucrative job at Google to dedicate fully to the project.

               As we know, Pinterest is a personalized image sharing platform that brings together people of similar interests. Users can view, upload, and sort images or ‘pins’ and can browse others’ too. Pinterest does not generate its own content; rather, it draws from many resources around the web.

            

Continue reading "Why is it said that Pinterest was a major breakthrough in the lives of its founders, Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra? "

Ben Silbermann is an American entrepreneur who founded the popular application Pinterest that allows sharing of photos.

Born in 1982 into a family of ophthalmologists, Silbermann was raised in Iowa. A brilliant student, he attended the Research Science Institute at MIT, and then the Yale University from where he graduated with a degree in political science.

As a young boy, Silbermann had a fascination for collecting dried insects, stamps etc. and pinning them to card boards. It was this hobby that later gave birth to the idea of Pinterest. The site enables users to upload, save, and arrange images or videos that are called ‘pins’. Their collection is termed as a ‘pinboard’. Users can also browse other pinboards and ‘like’ them.

Prior to the creation of Pinterest in 2010, Silbermann worked at Google on its online advertising group. He left the company shortly after that, and started designing iPhone apps with his college mate Paul Sciarra. This did not work well, and soon the duo, along with their friend Evan Sharp started working on Pinterest.

The site was not successful in the beginning; it only had around 10,000 users in the first 9 months. But the following year, it shot into fame, and received media attention. Today, Pinterest has around 20 million users worldwide. 

          Canadian computer scientist James Arthur Gosling is best known to the world as the father of the Java programming language.

          Introduced in 1995, Java is a high level programming language developed by Sun Microsystems as a foundation for designing and delivering web content. Its importance is such that applications and websites will not work unless Java is installed in them. A user can download its latest version from the official website of Java. According to Oracle, the company which now owns Sun Microsystems, there are more than 3 billion mobile phones that run this programming language.

      

Continue reading "Why is it said that James Gosling changed the phase of IT by the introduction of Java programming language?"

          Canadian computer scientist James Arthur Gosling is best known to the world as the father of the Java programming language.

          Introduced in 1995, Java is a high level programming language developed by Sun Microsystems as a foundation for designing and delivering web content. Its importance is such that applications and websites will not work unless Java is installed in them. A user can download its latest version from the official website of Java. According to Oracle, the company which now owns Sun Microsystems, there are more than 3 billion mobile phones that run this programming language.

      

Continue reading "Why is it said that James Gosling changed the phase of IT by the introduction of Java programming language?"

Richard Matthew Stallman is an American computer programmer and an advocate for free software. He is the founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Born on March 16th, 1953, Stallman obtained a degree in physics from Harvard University, and became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been an active campaigner of free software since then. The concept behind it is to distribute software in such a manner that its users receive the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software.

In 1983, Stallman started working on the GNU Project. GNU is an operating system and a collection of free software. He developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License (a free software license) too.

In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation. It worked on promoting free software and development of the GNU General Public License. There also arose the concept of the ‘copy left’ agreement, providing authors a way to allow their works to be modified by users without releasing them to the public domain.

Though Stallman did not complete his PhD, he has received around 15 honorary doctorates. He is also a recipient of many international awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award, and the ACM Software System Award for the development and leadership of GCC. 

            Besides being a successful entrepreneur, Azim Premji is also a benevolent philanthropist. He founded the Azim Premji Foundation in 2001 with an aim to ensure education of universal quality to the needy. It operates across various states including Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Pondicherry, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. The foundation mainly focuses on elementary education in rural areas.

          In 2010, Premji pledged to donate two billion US dollars towards school education in India.

         He has also established the Azim Premji University in Bangalore. It focuses on effective programmes of learning, research, and development in fields like health, nutrition, livelihood etc.

         The first Indian to sign up for The Giving Pledge, Premji has donated 39 per cent of his personal wealth to charity so far. His motto is that those who are privileged to have wealth should contribute to create a better world for the millions who are far less privileged.

          For his charitable work, the Forbes magazine named him ‘the Bill Gates of India’. In 2009, the Wesleyan University in Middletown, US awarded Premji an honorary doctorate for his outstanding philanthropic work.

           Azim Premji was only 21, pursuing his BS degree at Stanford University when his father Muhammed Hashem Premji died. Subsequently, young Premji had to return to India and take over the family business.

            The Western India Palm Refined Oil Limited, which the family owned, was set up in December 1945. It manufactured vegetable and refined oils in Amalner, Maharashtra. The main products of the company were the cooking oil brand Sunflower Vanaspati and laundry soap. The brilliant businessman in Azim soon managed to diversify the range of products and started producing bakery fat, different kinds of lights, toiletries, hydraulic cylinders, hair care soaps and baby products. The business became extremely successful under his leadership.

            Towards the 1980s, the country witnessed the growth of IT. Premji seized the day, and entered the new technology sector. He changed the company name to ‘Wipro’, an abbreviation of the former name. Collaborating with the American company Sentinel Computer Organization, Wipro started manufacturing mini-computers. In no time, the company met with success and the rest is history.

            Today, Wipro is a global provider of IT solutions and services and has over 1,40,000 employees. It has a client circle across 54 countries and revenue of $7.7 billion as of March 2016.

N. R. Narayana Murthy is a prominent figure in the field of IT for co-founding Infosys, the global software consulting company headquartered in Bangalore. Murthy has played a key role in taking the company to a global platform after serving as its chairman and CEO.

Born on 20th August 1946, in Sidlaghatta, Karnataka into a middle class family, Murthy stood out as a meritorious student since an early age. He completed engineering at the National Institute of Engineering, and his master’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Soon after, he found himself flooded with job offers. However, Murthy chose to work at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad as a chief systems programmer.

After a brief stint at the IIM, Murthy went overseas only to return to his homeland, and start a company named Softronics. It was a failure, and he joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune.

In 1981, Murthy and six other software professionals founded Infosys. He served as its CEO for long 21 years and made significant contributions. He designed and developed what is known as the Global Delivery Model for IT services outsourcing from India. Murthy was also the chief mentor of the company till his retirement in 2011.

Now he is the Chairman Emeritus of Infosys. Murthy was often described as the ‘father of Indian IT sector’.

 

    Nandan Nilekani is an Indian entrepreneur known for two reasons-as the co-founder of Infosys, and as the former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

Born on June 2nd,             1955 in Bangalore, Nandan Nilekani was noted as a promising student since the beginning. After his school education in Dharwad, Nilekani joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay where he completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

        Nilekani’s career began at Patni Computer Systems, where he met N.R. Narayana Murthy. In three years, he left the company with six others, and started Infosys. For two decades, he served as the managing director, president and the chief operating officer. In 2002, Nilekani became the CEO of the company, and worked till 2007. After that, he served as the co-chairman of the company’s board of directors.

        In 2009, Nilekani’s life took a different turn after he became the chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a cabinet-ranking position. He was responsible for implementing the Unique Identity Card (Aadhar card) project in the country, that later became the biggest social project on the planet.

        His work has won Nilekani many awards including the NDTV Indian of the Year’s Transformational Idea of the Year Award in 2011, the Joseph Schumpeter Prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics and the Legend in Leadership Award by the Yale University.

       In 2009, TIME magazine named him in the list of ‘World’s Most Influential People’.

           Senapathy Gopalakrishnan or Kris Gopalakrishnan is a co-founder and the executive vice chairman of Infosys, the global IT service providing firm.

            Born on April 5th, 1955 in Trivandrum, Kris did his schooling in the Government Model Boys HSS, Thycaud. After graduation, he joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and obtained an M. Sc in physics and M. Tech in computer science. His career began at Patni Computers, Mumbai, where he met N.R. Narayana Moorthy, Nandan Nilekani and other founders of Infosys.

     

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           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.