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Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

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Toppr-Evolution of Indian Education System With E-Learning

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The Indian education system does honestly not impress the world or Indian students itself. High competition among students especially after the 12th standard has opened a source of business for private tutors. This is the biggest reason why offline education is so costly in India.

But, we know the major population of our country cannot afford proper education. So, it has a negative impact mostly on the students appearing for a joint entrance examination or a medical examination. To overcome this urgent crisis suffered by mediocre students of our nation, Zishaan Hayath came up with Toppr.

Toppr is an e-learning platform launched in 2013. It assists a student in gaining proper knowledge about the competitive exams who can also watch videos and solve questions. Zishaan along with his ex-classmate Hemanth Goteti launched this innovative and helpful website. Since then a massive amount of students have signed in and made brilliant outcomes.

About the founders of Toppr

Zishaan Hayath went to IIT Bombay and graduated in 2005. His first step into the corporate world was with ITC Limited where he joined as an Assistant Manager. In April 2006, he joined Opera Solutions as an Assistant Consultant. He co-founded Chaupaati Bazaar, a phone-commerce start-up in 2008.

Futurebazaar.com acquired Chaupaati Bazaar and Zishaan became the VP Product of Futurebazaar eventually. In April 2013, he co-founded Toppr with Hemanth.

Hemanth studied Aerospace Engineering in IIT Bombay. He worked in many companies before co-founding Toppr. Hemanth also worked at Futurebazaar.com as Head of Engineering.

How did it start?

Zishaan knew Hemanth from college and working together before co-founding Toppr made a good understanding between them. Both of them were tech geeks and their idea was to use technology into a sector with a massive audience. In India, most of the youngsters are highly devoted to gaining proper education. So, what could be better than implementing high tech in the educational system?

This led the co-founders to come with Toppr. Toppr received its initial funding from Kasyap Deorah and Abhisekh Jain. Within one year of launching Toppr, 8000 students signed up for the preparation courses of JEE, medical exams, and foundation courses.

At this time, many websites like this already came in the market but Toppr clearly steered the right direction.

The Positive Side

The middle-aged children’s population seeking education has outnumbered even China. This opened a huge potential for the platforms of e-learning. And, now that the age of the internet has come everyone prefers learning from websites. Because going to coaching classes is both expensive and time-consuming.

Moreover, different cities have different quality of education. For example, we all know Rajasthan has the best coaching facilities for JEE and medical entrance exams. But, with the help of a mobile app, every student at every corner of India received the same quality education.

Currently, there are around 8 million users that pay for their courses in Toppr. And, for a start-up, it is a pretty impressive number of paid users. The revenue keeps increasing thrice every year for the last three years.

The Expansion

In May 2014, Toppr raised a funding of $2 million from SAIF Partners and Helion Ventures. Zishaan announced that all the funds raised will be invested to improve the existing modules. In April 2015, Toppr acquired EasyPrep, a platform that served the same purpose as Toppr.

Within a year, the team of Toppr comprised of 100 members and served more than 150,000 students. The rate of success also increased every year since the study materials were made by freelancers from IITs. The Mumbai-based start-up also acquired Manch in 2015. Zishaan announced that the main reason behind the acquisitions is making education more affordable.

In 2017, Toppr raised $450 million from SAIF Partners, Helion Ventures and FIL Capital Management. And, it raised another $155 million from Alteria Capital. In the last three years, Toppr received a massive amount of funding from the existing investors and also $35 million from Kaizen Private Equity. This was the latest round of funding.

The Success

The company so far has reached out to students from twenty-five different cities. By 2020, their target is to reach thirty cities and also to thrice its annual revenue. The app approximately has seven million total downloads to date. The subscription charge of Toppr is also very affordable which adds a big plus point in its list.

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NetApp – Surviving The Dot-Com Burst And Becoming One Of The Biggest Data Management Companies

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The cloud computing services have majorly developed in the past few years. Many Indian start-ups have also been emerging. But, more importantly, Indians are acquiring powerful positions in many top tech companies around the world. One of the most established Indian, George Kurian is the current CEO of the company, NetApp.

NetApp is a California based company founded in 1992. The company’s main products are cloud computing, cloud storage, and data management. David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm founded the company twenty-eight years ago. In 2015, George Kurian became the CEO of the company.

About the Founders

David went to Annandale High School but he dropped out. Becoming a Silicon Valley icon or establishing a billion-dollar company, none was present in the bucket list of David. But, somehow he became the founder of one of the best companies in the industry of cloud computing.

After graduating from Princeton University, David started working at MIPS Technologies. David’s main role in the companies was as a Software Engineer. In April 1992, he co-founded NetApp and became the Executive VP of Engineering. In 2000, David became the Chairman of the Hitz Foundation.

James went to City College of San Francisco and Heald College- San Francisco. He worked at HP Enterprise Services for more than thirteen years. Currently, he is the System Engineer of NetApp.

Early History

In 1992, when the company was founded it was named Network Appliance, Inc. After a couple of years, the company received venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. Within three years of its establishment, that is, in 1995 the company filed its first IPO. The company started growing rapidly from the very beginning.

Unexpected Success

In 1997, the company acquired Internet Middleware for $10.5 million. The company stood strong during the time of dot-cot burst and emerged out of it even stronger. A lot of companies suffered huge losses during this boom and a few were even dissolved. But, from 1999 through 2001, NetApp’s annual revenue turned up to $1 billion.

The Key to Success

With the evolution of the start-up culture throughout the world and especially India, criticism arises simultaneously. The most important question is whether a founder should step down and give control to the young entrepreneurs of today.

David, in one of his interviews, said that it is not about the 90s founders or current generation. When a company is built from scratch there might be times when the founders only focus on the remaining products. They don’t consider expanding harms the future of the company. We all know evolution is the key to survival. And, that’s the reason NetApp is still on track.

When the vision of a founder is limited they are expected to step down. But, it doesn’t necessarily mean all the founders will have limited vision.

Struggling Moments

David said there were two moments where they needed to hold their breath and be patient. First, when the first CEO of the company stepped down. David said he has the best management styles in the company. But, once the company started expanding with a lot of managers reporting to each other, he didn’t enjoy it anymore. Eventually, he moved to another company.

Well, the company might have survived the dot-com burst but it suffered major losses. During 2000, the price of the company’s stock fell from $150 to $10. And, that’s when he realized he should expand its territory in terms of products.

Success and Acquisitions

In 2004, NetApp acquired Spinnaker Networks for $300 million. The next year, NetApp acquired Alacritus for $11 million. In this year, the company also acquired Decru for security storage systems. The following years witnessed the acquisition of Topio, Onaro, Bycast, Akkori, Engenio and many more.

NetApp under George Kurian

George after joining the company has focused mainly on the new trends and products. He, in an interview, said that the product revenue has been increasing rapidly especially for the new products. The Asian market has also grown well in the last couple of years. Though the company is having a relatively small market share in Asia, it is capable of replacing some bigger companies.

The three biggest markets of NetApp are the UK, France, and Germany. NetApp’s latest acquisition was Cognigo.

C Programming Language

Dennies Ritchie’s Contribution To Programming And Origin of C Language

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Nowadays computer science is a mandatory subject in schools. Though computer science is optional in high school, everyone acquires knowledge of basic computing at an early age. And, when we take steps towards learning how to code, we always start with the C language. At least most of us opt for it. The c programming language is one of the most famous and earliest programming languages around the world. The language can be used extensively for programming operating systems and embedded systems. After the first version by Dennis, so many versions of the language have come up but currently, C18 is the most recent.

About Founder

Dennis Ritchie
Image Source – Google Images

Dennis Ritchie, an American computer scientist is the creator of the C language. He has also developed the Unix Operating System and B language. Dennis received many prestigious awards for his excellent works and contribution to society. He is one of the reasons our world has come so far in terms of technicality.

Early Life

Born into Bronxville, New York, Dennis moved to New Jersey at a very young age. Alistair E. Ritchie, one of the scientists of the Bell Labs was father to Dennis Ritchie. After the family moved to Summit, Dennis attended the Summit High School. Later, Dennis went to Harvard University and acquired degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics.

Early Career

After graduating, Dennis joined Bell Labs in 1967. He was carrying out his Ph.D. under Patrick C. Fisher at Harvard University. But, he was never able to receive the degree officially. When Dennis started working at the Bell Labs, Ken Thompson worked as a colleague of him. Both of them were working on the Multics operating system.

During this time, Thompson discovered an old PDP-7 and he started developing an operating system along with Dennis. In 1970, the operating system which they named “Unix” was finally completed. Eventually, Dennis came up with the B language followed by the C language.

Origin of C Programming Language

After Dennis and Thompson developed the Unix operating system, they decided to port the operating system in PDP-11. Once they incorporated Unix, Dennis needed to come up with a new language or rather a new compiler to make use of this operating system in PDP-11.

Dennis started working in Fortran, but he gave up after some time because it wasn’t possible in that language. Then he started working with BPCL systems programming language but there wasn’t much information about the official description of the language.

Thompson along with Dennis came up with B language but the language was too slow and it didn’t adjust well with the features of PDP-11. So, Dennis tried to modify the language and make some changes. But, doing that led to the invention of a whole new programming language, that is, C.

In 1972, the C compiler was used for version 2 Unix and the fourth version of the OS was released in November 1973. The other versions of C were ANSI C, ISO C, C99, C11, and Embedded C.

Other Works

Apart from working with the C language and Unix operating system, Dennis also wrote a book, The C Programming Language along with Kernighan.

He also worked for the development of operating systems like Plan 9 and Inferno. Dennis also helped in creating the programming language, Limbo. Dennis worked for Lucent Technologies until he retired in 2007.

Awards and Achievements

In 1983, both Dennis and Thompson were honored with the Turing Award. They received for the award for making significant progress in the field of generic operating systems theory and for developing Unix. In 1990, again this couple bagged the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for both the Unix OS and C language.

This decade was followed by receiving a fellowship from the Computer History Museum in 1997. In April 1999, Bill Clinton awarded both of them with the National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Ritchie received the Achievement Award from Industrial Research Institute mainly for Unix. He was also honored with the Japan Prize for Information and Communications in 2011. Thompson received this prize along with him.

Retired Life

He worked for Lucent Technologies after leaving Bell Labs. In 2007, Dennis stepped down from the research department. He passed away on 12th October 2011. He was suffering from prostate cancer and heart disease.

Oodle

Oodle Defined A New Way Of Digital Advertising

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Anyone who has started a new company or is planning to pursue advertising as a career has heard about Oodle. We all know how crucial advertisement has become in today’s marketplace. With competitors crawling in every field, advertisement plays a key role.

Now, from the perspective of an owner of a start-up or a famous businessman they think about unique ideas. They tend to hire people who can brilliantly tackle customers with the skill of digital marketing. But, who thinks about the other side of the coin? People think about establishing their own company in various domains. But, creating a business that is exclusively for advertisement is pretty exceptional.

Oodle, an American company is the world’s largest classifieds aggregator to date. Many of you might don’t know what that means but it’s surely not rocket science. It defines a simple idea of advertising which previously used to be only in newspapers. But, with the advent of the digital era, classifieds advertising has channeled the power of the internet.

The founders of Oodle are Craig Donato, Faith Sedlin and Scott Kister.

Craig Donato

Craig acquired a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. He pursued his MBA from Stanford GSB. He started his career by working for Excite as Vice President of Product. After working in this position for five years he became the SVP Search and Community of Excite@Home.

Craig Donato
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In 2001, Craig became the CEO of Grand Central and after a couple of years, he founded Oodle and became the CEO. He resigned from the company in 2012 and in 2013 he joined QVC as the VP of Social. In 2015, Craig joined Nextdoor.com and currently, he serves as the Chief Business Officer of ROBLOX.

Faith Sedlin

Faith went to Wellesley College followed by Harvard Business School. In her career world, she has played the role of product marketing manager, business developer, product manager, and founding start-up. She had seven jobs in total.

Scott Kister

Scott has a BS degree from the California Institute of Technology. He acquired his Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University. After completing his Bachelor’s degree he joined Oracle in 1992. He also has work experience at Excite for more than five years after which he joined Danger as Senior Director, Service Engineering.

In July 2004, Scott founded Oodle along with Faith and Craig. He is currently the CEO of Oodle.

Founding Oodle

Though the company was founded in 2004, Oodle was launched publicly in 2005. The company started rolling since 2009 when Oodle added a new feature on its user interface. The feature allowed the users to directly publish listings on their social media like Facebook.

After launching this feature, users were able to post any update anytime to Facebook, MySpaceID through Oodle. In 2010, the company announced that the feature will also be available for LinkedIn, eBay, Trulia and Zillow.

In 2009, Oodle raised $5.6 million from investors like Greylock Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. This year, the total fund Oodle invested in the company summed up to $21.6 million.

Expansion and Success of Oodle

People often tend to sell their old belongings to someone they know. And, Oodle spotted out this and turned it to their advantage. People in America also use Craigslist to sell and buy things but research has shown users are more comfortable when the deal is between someone they know, family or friends.

This is the prime reason Oodle tied up with the biggest social networking site, that is, Facebook and eventually other social platforms. The users easily put up the advertisement for something they want to sell. And, the potential buyer just might be from his or her social media.

In 2010, Oodle witnessed 15 million unique monthly visitors in its site giving strong competition to Craigslist. In this year, Oodle also acquired Grouply.

Acquisition of Oodle

From the beginning till the end, Oodle has focused only and only in expanding its social network. Because according to research 49 percent of Americans prefer selling their goods to their acquaintances. The company was making a good profit. In 2012, QVC acquired Oodle which again came under the acquisition of Oodle Holdings in 2015.

The company currently has 75,000 partner listings and serves as one of the best platforms for advertisement. Because apart from the rich source of heavy networking it establishes trust among the users.

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Zillow- Online Real Estate Company Founded By The Owner And Former Svp Of Expedia

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With every latest product coming into the market, the consumers grab the power of choice. The right to information and the freedom to choose are the two main goals every company wants to provide. And, this idea to make people aware of information led to the establishment of Zillow. Founder of Expedia, Richard Barton and the Former Senior Vice President of Expedia, Lloyd Frink developed Zillow. Zillow is an American online real estate company established in Seattle, Washington. It is mainly a database company that generates its revenue by selling advertising on its website. The idea of Zillow and how it came up is really interesting.

About the Founders

Richard Barton is one of the most famous American entrepreneurs. Apart from Expedia, he is mainly known as the founder of Expedia and Glassdoor. Lloyd Frink acquired a degree in economics from Stanford University. He started his career life from working at Microsoft as a Group Program Manager. He worked there for twenty-five years. In 1996, he joined Expedia as SVP and left the company in 2004. After he left the company, a lot of ideas popped up in Richard’s and Lloyd’s mind for the next start-up.

Rich Barton and lloyd frink
Image Source: Google Images

The Next Idea

The thought of building a new business came up when IAC acquired Expedia in 2003. They could have easily started working for some MNCs. But, for them and especially Frink starting a new start-up would have been far more exciting and challenging.

The first idea that came into their mind was what we call today’s cloud storage. A space to store high-resolution photos and it resembled Dropbox. But, they dropped the idea soon. Because they figured out after a point of time companies like Microsoft and Google would provide it for free.

Finally, they came up with Zillow when they needed some market-related information and won’t able to fetch it. Lloyd and Barton thought of creating a database containing such information. That’s why they founded Zillow.

The Hard Work

After Expedia, it was their second start-up. The founders admit that the journey wasn’t a bed of roses but they were certainly relaxed about it. After they were finally decided what to go for, they started doing thorough research and studies.

The idea of opening a website bothered them a little bit. It happened because they did not have enough expertise in the area of brokerage and real estate. But, they figured out opening a website and then learning to connect with people will be more effective. So, they launched the website in early 2006.

Withstanding Recession

It’s really hard for a start-up to be in the game when the global financial crisis hits after a couple of years of establishment. Still, Zillow managed to survive the big catastrophe. When the recession hit the market, Zillow already had 3-4 million users every month. Around 150 employees working at Zillow at that period.

So, at this moment they just needed to take a big decision and kind of sacrifice. They declared the layoff of one-third of the company. It was a hard decision to make but the team stood together and came out of it stronger. Lloyd also mentioned they were kind of in a bad situation due to their fault. The reason he showed was they just hired too many people too soon.

But, today Zillow has emerged out as a company making billions over a year. The company has made a lot of acquisitions since 2011.

Acquisitions

Zillow started off the list with Postlets in April 2011. In December 2011, Zillow acquired Diverse Solutions which was followed by RentJuice in May 2012. The company also acquired Buyfolio, Lincoln, and HotPads in this year. One of the biggest acquisitions of the company was in 2015 when it acquired Dotloop for $108 million.

Zestimate

Zestimate is one of the most interesting products of Zillow. The product mainly determines the value of a home in a neighborhood considering all the available information. So, the value might vary from place to place depending on the kind of information available.

In 2011, the replacement of Zestimate’s calculated algorithm took place. It estimates the values of over a million houses in the country.

Success of Zillow

Instead of many controversial remarks from Wall Street and other lawsuits, Zillow has become successful. According to the statistics of 2016, Zillow served around 140 million active monthly users.

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We Heart It- A Platform For The Social Butterflies To Spread More Love

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It doesn’t matter if the chicken salad is delicious but it should look tasty. Isn’t it? This is the current status of a social butterfly. From making a DIY lamp to the video of their window shopping, they love to share everything. And, social media gives you a platform to do so. But, how about improvising the concept a little bit and creating something better that touches the heart of millions of people?

Since we all love sharing beautiful pictures all the time, how about an image-based network? Or even better if it is an image-based social network. Fabio Giolito built such a network in 2008 which is still inspiring people and spreading love.

Drop A Heart

The exact idea of what this platform does might be a little blurry. Well, most of us are on famous social platforms like Facebook or Instagram. But, unlike those sites, Weheart It is all about posting pictures and sharing it. It creates a visually dynamic website where images, animated GIFs and videos can be posted.

One can like the picture or rather ‘heart’ it and share and save. The best thing about this social network is one cannot comment on the pictures. This creates a very positive environment within the social community of We Heart It. So, if one doesn’t like a picture he or she can simply scroll down without any criticism.

This helps expand the community as no one feels shy about posting anything on the platform. You simply drop a heart and share away from your favorite photographs.

Fabio Giolito

Fabio Giolito has plenty of experience in the professional world. He had a deep interest in designing from a very young age. And, throughout his career, he was involved as a designer in some biggest companies around the world.

Fabio-Giolito
Image Source: Google Images

Fabio belongs to Brazil. In 2008, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Product Design from a university in Rio de Janeiro.

In January 2008, Fabio joined Globo.com as a designer. But, before joining this company he already started planning his start-up. On 3rd January 2008, the launching of the mobile app for We Heart It took place. But, he didn’t stop here.

In the same year, Fabio joined I Hate Flash as a designer and a developer and continued for two years. He also became the lead designer of Yahoo and left the company within a year. In 2010, he joined WeDemand as a designer and a developer.

Fabio made another breakthrough in 2009 when he created ListaAmiga. It then became the biggest events platform in Brazil. Currently, he works at Expa as a Designer-In-Residence.

A Small Initiative

The story of We Hears It dates back to 2007 when Fabio was still an undergraduate student. He created the website for himself and there he added a feature to collect pictures he liked. He said it was to help him get more ideas about his designing course.

Eventually, he showed it to some of his classmates and they started using it too. Seeing the great feedback within his campus he decided to launch it as a tool for every social media lover out there. In 2008, two years before the creation of Pinterest, We Heart It launched.

The Growth

When the app was launched, there wasn’t anything to dislike about it. It started growing exponentially as the words spread in every friend’s group. They went to the website, signed up and started sharing photos.

When the app was launched, Fabio wasn’t fully dedicated to this. Because he never started it thinking something big will come out of it. And, once the business started flourishing he needed a helping hand because then he had a full-time job at Yahoo.

He brought Bruno Zanchet in the business and together they landed some funding. So, We Hear It finally became a conventional business with funding in 2011. They established the headquarters in San Francisco, California.

The Success

The business started with just 25 employees. There first big funding was in June 2013 when they raised $8 million from White Oak and IDG Ventures. In the next year, Alexa ranked the company 754 globally. In June 2016, the company came into a partnership with The Blu Market.

Currently, the company is under the acquisition of Super Basic, LLC and it doesn’t operate from San Francisco anymore. But, the platform now has 45 monthly users. It continues to inspire people and serves as a hotspot for creative ideas.