Category: Internet Start Ups
Instagram is definitely one of the greatest companies of the Internet era, and its story – one of the most engaging start-up stories today. The company started by two young entrepreneurs Kevin Systrom and Michel Krieger was sold to Facebook for the whooping of $1 000 000 000, just a few years after its foundation. The story of Instagram is not only a story of ‘how to start a billion dollars company and cash in’, but also it’s a story about faith, persistence, and entrepreneurship. It’s really amazing and you can see it in the following set of images, which...
In 2012, there was an announcement from Facebook – they were buying Instagram for the price of $1 billion. A company started just a few years ago by two young entrepreneurs, has brought them to the world of super riches. A company that had no revenue, only 13 employees, and completely no profits by the time of the deal… Who would be so insane to pay a billion for such a business?!? Well, actually Instagram had one thing that was far more valuable – potential. And this is what the managers of the biggest social network spotted there. Here is...
Imagine that you could create a folder on your desktop. You could go to work, create a folder with the same name on your office computer and find there the same files you put in the folder at home. You could also access these files of yours via your smartphone, no matter where you are. Well, you can do all of this with a service called Dropbox (www.dropbox.com). This is a cool way of storing your information, so it’s accessible from anywhere you are, from any device you use. And here is the story about how this great business idea...
Tumblr.com has gained prominence in recent years as a microblogging platform that has allowed millions of people around the world to share whatever they like. The reason for the site’s popularity is that you don’t need to write long blog posts in order to stand a chance of getting noticed. If you take photos then you can share them with the world, likewise, if you find something funny online then again you can share it with the world. This platform originated from one man, David Karp, and his lead developer Marco Arment. It was through a lack of patience on...
When social media websites became popular, some rose to prominence and remained at the top of search results. Others plowed steadily down the middle of the road, remaining in the peripheral vision of interested online parties. And still, others fizzled out quickly due to keeping their focus too limited. In the case of LiveJournal, a social media outlet designed specifically for blogging, it has remained important depending on the geographical location. Founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, a programmer born in Iowa and raised in Oregon, the site grew in popularity over the next few years. It wasn’t until the...
A Short History Of MySpace and Founders Tom Anderson And Chris DeWolfe Oh, how the mighty have fallen. What was once the proving ground for social media has since become the punch line of many jokes. The history of MySpace.com is a tale of energetic innovation, risk, and ultimately, failure to capitalize. While some people believe that MySpace was the original social networking site, it is actually based on an existing model that was functionally successful for its time. In August of 2003, several employees of eUniverse, now called Intermix Media Inc, recognized the growing potential of a social networking...
The world of finance completely shut its doors to Daniel Kan. During his senior year in college, Dan wanted nothing more than to become a financier. They all did some decent money, right? Everybody goes to finance… But of the 35 jobs he applied for, mainly in the lucrative finance world, he got 33 rejections. The two offers that he was left with were both not related to finance at all. One of the opportunities he received was for teaching English in Korea and the other – working for a startup. He opted for the opportunity to work with a...
A History of eBay.com eBay‘s origins lie in San Jose, California. On September 5th, 1995, the American computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar founded a personal auction website called – AuctionWeb. One of the first items that were sold on the site was a not working laser pointer, at the price of $14.83. Astonished, Pierre contacted the buyer and asked him if he really understood that the pointer he bought was actually broken. In the email in which the buyer responded, he wrote: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” Actually, eBay was just a side work for Pierre. One day...
Did you know that many of the biggest Internet companies today were started in a garage? These multi-billion businesses had barely anything at the beginning, the most important thing for their success turned out to be simply a great business idea. Here are the stories of some of the most popular ‘garage start ups‘: Google The founders of one of the greatest Internet companies – Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the business in a small garage in California. They paid $1 700 monthly for the rent and spent there around 5 months. During that time, they actually created the...
Baidu (www.baidu.com) is a company that provides public web services. It was established in January of 2000 and its headquarters are currently housed in the Haidian District of Bejing in China, on the Baidu Campus. The company offers a huge range of internet-related services, including a search engine that uses Chinese as its main language, for images, videos, and websites. It also provides a discussion forum for keywords, and an extensive online encyclopedia, like Wikipedia for the Chinese-speaking world. Baidu Inc. was created by two guys, named Eric Xu and Robin Li. Robin is the current chief executive and chairman...
