My Science School

     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!

 

     David Filo is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of the tech giant Yahoo!

     The venture initially started off as a web portal with a web directory that provided a wide range of products for online activities. In February 1994, Filo and his friend Jerry Yang created a website called ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. It served as a directory of other websites.

     Later, it was renamed as Yahoo!, and became a very popular portal among users across the world. Filo was still a PhD student at Stanford when the venture turned into a massive success.

     As years passed, the success of Yahoo! brought a fortune to its founders. With a net worth estimate of 3.8 billion dollars, Filo became the 580th richest person in the world in December 2014. 

         It was with the aim of developing and selling personal computers that Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne, and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in April 1976. Till then, home computers were too expensive for the common man. With their innovation, Jobs and his partners stirred a revolution, and democratized computer technology.

         Today, Apple Inc is perhaps the largest information technology company for its revenue and assets. It is also known to be the second largest mobile manufacturer company. From the US, its customer circle has expanded to all over the world.

         Macintosh, Apple Lisa, Apple Dot Matrix Printer, Apple Mouse IIc etc, was among the first products of the company. Since then, Apple has developed a wide range of attractive devices including the iPad, iPhone, iPod, MacBook etc.

       Steve Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955, in California, to two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. The couple gave him up for adoption, and Steve was since then taken care of by Paul Jobs, a coast guard veteran and his wife Clara, an accountant.

        In his new family, Steve was brought up well, although he was different from the children of his age. As a young boy, he worked in the family garage, and proved his mechanical skills.

         After schooling, Steve joined the Reed College in Portland, only to drop out within months. He then attended creative classes, including a course in calligraphy.

         By 1974, Jobs landed a job as a video game designer, but again gave it up, and travelled to India to gain spiritual enlightenment. He was deeply interested in Zen Buddhism.

         At the age of 21, Steve and Wozniak started working on the Apple computer. Their beginning was very humble, and the duo used Steve’s family garage as their workplace.

         In 1985, he resigned from Apple, and began a new company known as the NeXT Inc. But by December 1997, Apple Inc. purchased NeXT Inc. for millions and Steve was back in the home-firm.

         On October 5th, 2011 he died of cancer, creating a void in the world of technology that cannot be filled.

       Very few computer wizards in the world have been as popular as Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. Beyond the world of technology, Jobs had donned the roles of a humanitarian, philanthropist, and environmentalist thereby influencing people worldwide.

       At a time when computers were just too expensive for the common man to use, Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded the Apple Computers Inc. in 1976. Their first work space was in the garage of Jobs’ Los Altos home. The following year, Jobs and Wozniak released Apple II, stirring the microcomputer revolution.

       The growth of the company had been very fast, and under Jobs’ leadership, it introduced the Macintosh 128k computer in 1984, the first PC featuring an integral graphic user interface and a mouse.

       In 1998, the all-in-one iMac computer was released-the first machines to get rid of the floppy disc drive and introduce a CD ROM slot. These computers also drew attention for their style and design.

       In 1999, the iBook that came with Wi-Fi technology entered the market. The years that followed witnessed Apple introducing many gadgets like the iPod, iPhone, iPad etc.

       For his outstanding contributions, Steve Jobs won many awards.

 

     Other than the technology hub Microsoft, Bill Gates has also founded an equally important organization that works on an entirely different platform. It is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) that focuses on charitable work.

     Founded in 2000 by Gates and his wife Melinda, BMGF is said to be the largest private foundation in the world that operates in a transparent manner.

     The foundation is based in Seattle, Washington. Other than Bill and Melinda, there is one more member in the trustee board- business magnate Warren Buffet. Some of the programmes initiated by the Foundation include ‘The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Programme’, and the ‘Reinvent the Toilet Challenge Programme’ that promoted safe and effective sanitation. 

Steve Chen is an Internet entrepreneur credited to have co-founded the popular video sharing website YouTube.

Born on August 18, 1978, Chen and his family moved from Taipei to the US when he was 15 years old. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an exceptional student, and soon joined PayPal. There he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Chen also worked with Facebook before launching YouTube.

In 2005, Chad, Chen and Karim together released the popular video sharing and viewing online portal, thereby creating history. The site soon had millions of subscribers all over the world, and was named one of the 10 most important sites within a year. Chen served in the position of the chief technology officer.

In 2006, YouTube was sold to the Google Inc. Subsequently, Chen and his friends moved to work on other projects. The video sharing app Mix-Bit and internet company AVOS Systems were two of them. In 2014, Chen joined Google Ventures. 

           Internet entrepreneur Jawed Karim is a co-founder of YouTube and also, the first person to upload a video on the site.

            Born on October 28, 1979 in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother, Karim and his family moved to the US in 1992. After schooling, he attended the University of Illinois, to study computer science.

             During graduation, Karim was an employee of PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. It is said that Karim was responsible for developing many components for the company, including its real-time anti-fraud system.

             In 2005, the trio created YouTube. It was Karim who first uploaded a video on the video sharing site titled ‘Me at the Zoo’, on April 23, 2005. As of 2016, the video has received more than 34 million views. Karim was not an official employee of YouTube when it was founded, as he wanted to be an informal adviser alone.

             Thus, his name remained unknown till the company was acquired by Google Inc. in 2006. However, Karim has been an active figure in the field of IT since then. In 2008, Karim launched the Youniversity Ventures to help university students develop and launch their business ideas. 

Jack Dorsey is an American programmer who co-founded the popular social networking site Twitter. He is also the founder and CEO of the mobile payments company ‘Square’.

Born on November 19th, 1976 in Missouri, US, Dorsey grew up a tech-wizard. It is said that he suffered from stammering at an early age, and overcame it by participating in oratory competitions.

Dorsey studied at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and later got transferred to the New York University. It was from there that he got the idea of sharing short messages and updates with friends. Like many computer experts, Dorsey too quit college before completing his studies.

On March 21, 2006 he founded Twitter along with his friends Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It was a social networking service that enabled users to post and read short 140-character messages called ‘tweets’. The attempt was a huge success, and was accepted by people all over the world. As of March 2016, the site had more than 310 million monthly active users.

In May 2010, Dorsey founded ‘Square’, a mobile device that facilitated making payments.