My Science School

       Skype is one of the most popular communication tools today, with more than 700 million users across the world.

       Headquartered in Luxembourg, the service was first released on 29th August 2003, by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (Danish).

      The users of the program only need to download it onto a computer or phone, and have a functional web camera and microphone. It allows them to see and hear the person whom they are contacting. Hence, it has been of great help, particularly to people who have their kith and kin in a distant land, to communicate easily and affordably. Skype, as most of us know, takes no money for its basic version. The service is thus also widely used for video conferencing with business partners, as well as for interview

      Instant messaging is another interesting feature of Skype, enabling users to send text messages, voice notes, or videos.

      One needn’t even use a computer for skyping these days. It can be very well done through smart phones and tablets.

 

             Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom has to his credit many successful ventures that have gone worldwide. Other than the high profile Skype and Kazaa, he has established Atomico, a leading investment group in the technology industry.

             Founded in 2006, Atomico helps entrepreneurs expand their businesses globally. Zennstrom was also the CEO at Joltid, a software company that specialized in developing solutions to optimize Internet traffic.

            Altnet and Joost are the other ventures the brilliant innovator founded after that. The former was the world’s first peer-to-peer network that promoted commercial content. Launched in 2007, Joost was a successful online video distribution service.

            Zennstrom and his wife Catherine have also set up a charitable organization called Zennstrom Philanthropies. It works towards financing human rights projects, social entrepreneurship, and environmental issues. 

     With his introduction of Skype, an application for video chat, Niklas Zennstrom redesigned the scope of communication, and took it to a whole new level.

     This is however, just one of the many reasons why Zennstrom remains a legend in the world of information technology.

     Born on February 16th, 1966 in Sweden Niklas Zennstrom stood out as an innovative kid since childhood.

     Zennstrom started his professional career in 1991 at Tele2, a Swedish telecommunications firm. In 2000, he founded Kazaa along with Janus Friis. It was a high profile second-generation, peer-to-peer file-sharing application, similar to Napster. Following a series of legal cases, Kazaa was shut down in 2001.

     The closure of Kazaa, however, did not stop Zennstrom and Friis, and soon, in 2003 they introduced Skype. It is an application that provides video chat and voice call services. It made communication, especially long-distance ones easier, enabling free international calls through the Internet. By 2005, the service had more than 50 million users, particularly in Asia and Europe. On 10th May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype. 

       For the remarkable contributions made to the development of information technology, Caterina Fake remains an unmatched figure in a field that is dominated by men.

       Her career began as a chief designer for Organic Line, developing websites for companies including McDonalds, Levi’s, and Nike etc. She also served as the art director for Salon.com, before joining Netscape in 1997.

       It was after Netscape that Fake, along with Daniel Butterfield, and Jason Classon founded the Ludicorp. Butterfield and Fake later co-founded Flickr. Before its success, she had also faced failure after the first work by the company, ‘Game Never-ending’, ended up in a disaster. Yet Fake and Butterfield moved ahead confidently with Flickr.

       Fake’s innovative skills were seen again when she launched the website ‘Hunch’ in 2009. The site provided advice and recommendations to its users, based on their interests.

       The same year, Fake joined the board of directors of Creative Commons, an American non-profit organization, and was also made the chairman of the Board of Etsy, an e-commerce website. San Francisco headquartered Findery is Fake’s latest venture. 

       Caterina Fake is an entrepreneur known for co-founding the Flickr and Hunch websites. The success of these two sites helped her create a niche in the world of technological innovation and investment.

       Fake was born on June 13th, 1969 in Pittsburgh to an American father and a Filipino mother. She is a graduate in English literature from Vassar College.

       Fake’s career in the web world began when she started working as a lead designer at the web development agency ‘Organic Online’.

   

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     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.