Your Tech Story

Harshal Pawar

Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life. He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.

Pip Jamieson : The Founder & CEO of The Dots

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The 21st century has brought many revolutionary changes across the globe. Today, female entrepreneurs are competing, shoulder to shoulder in the male-dominated sectors. Now each field is witnessing several such brilliant women exploring, creating, and leading, amazing businesses and inspiring women across the world.

One such female, Pip aka Phillipa Jamieson, from the United Kingdom, has set up a company named ‘The Dots’, which is also popularly known as ‘LinkedIn for Creative people’. She is a passionate, enthusiastic, and always on the lookout for great collaborators.

Early Life and Career

Pip, being dyslexic, struggled with everything, in her early years. Her father worked in the creative industry, which groomed her to become interested in the creative field. When everyone believed she would choose the creative field as a career, her rebellious nature led her to do a degree in Economics. She topped the batch and proved that she could do anything, even if she was dyslexic. Later, she was appointed by the UK government as a fast-stream economist. She joined the government, but, soon left the job to pursue a career in the creative industry.

In the Creative Industry

Pip, initially, worked for the Brit Awards in London and then worked on various roles, while working at MTV, around the world. The idea for Dots arose when she was working with MTV. As a head of marketing at MTV, Pip was finding it really hard to connect with great creative talent and service providers. Also, her colleague Matt Fayle working as a digital director for Viacom in Australia was being asked by creatives for advice on how to set up an online portfolio.

Pip Jamieson
Image Source: startups.co.uk

The creative industry is all about connecting and finding perfect talents. And with the boost of the internet, setting up an online platform for creative people and the ones searching for such talents could prove a boon to the industry. Pip and Matt’s vision was to bridge the gap between the talent and the client creating a commercial outcome.

Pip worked in the creative industry for over 13 years before founding The Dots. She held senior positions in MTV Australia and New Zealand. In 2009, she co-founded The Loop, a leading professional networking site for the creatives in the region. The site has more than 67% of Australian creative people registered. She left The Loop in 2014, to start her own venture.

On 25th September 2014, Pip Jamieson launched her most ambitious and daring business- The Dots. Pip aims to take over LinkedIn as she believes that the future belongs to the creatives. She firmly believes that the speed at which this world is being automated robots will replace most of the jobs/ But, one thing a robot cannot do is to be creative as a human being. Therefore, The Dots serves a great promising future for creative individuals and the whole industry.

The Dots has joined hands with the top UK brands including BBC, Net-a-Porter, Spotify, TATE, V&A, Vice, Jamie Oliver Media Group, AKQA, Liberty, Conde Nast, Sony Music, Virgin Group, and many more. The company plans to expand in Europe and then slowly to the United States.

In an interview, Pip said, “The Dots is set to revolutionise how creatives and businesses connect, collaborate and commercialise; helping to build stronger, more profitable and diverse creative sectors around the world.”

Ronaldo Mouchawar : The Biggest Online Retailer in the Middle East

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Starting a business is itself a huge challenge and starting in a sector dominated by giants just makes the challenge double-fold. Amazon, undoubtedly, is one of the leading e-commerce company today. It has expanded to almost every part of the world and has become the top e-commerce company.

With a fierce competition already present in the market, a man decides to start his own e-commerce venture, in the middle-east, and just within a year, reaches maximum people in the country. The website was named Souq.com and co-founded by Ronaldo Mouchawar. How he became the most successful self-made businessman? Let’s get to know more about him.

Early Life

Ronaldo was born in Aleppo, Syria, to a merchant father. His father’s business became an inspiration for him to name his e-commerce site. Mouchawar went to Northwestern University in Boston to earn a Master’s degree in digital communications and a Bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Massachusetts in the United States. Initially, Mouchawar took a job at the Boston engineering firm. He also worked as a technical and systems consultant in the technology and business management sector at the Electronic Data System (EDS).

Entering into Start-Ups

After completing his education, Mouchawar joined Maktoob, the first successful web portal in the Middle East. He was not quite fluent in English and Maktoob was not looking for the fluent ones. As the web portal was gaining attention and becoming popular in the country, Mouchawar realized the potential of e-commerce business and wanted to create a separate commerce-only website.

Then, in 2006, he started a website called Souq.com. The word means ‘market’ in Arabic and Mouchawar’s hometown, i.e. Aleppo was famous for its souqs. The company was set up in Dubai as UAE had a larger population of young people and could prove a very profitable marketplace for an e-commerce website.

ronaldo mouchawar
Image Source: webit.org

Initially, Souq was launched as an auction website which later was diversified into an automobile and real estate. The business grew pretty quickly and was getting popular. Mouchawar expanded the business to Saudi Arabia and, by the end of 2009, Souq became independent of Maktoob. At that time the website was witnessing 3 million UAE dirhams worth of auctions i.e. the US $1 million.

There was also a time when smartphones were entering the market and more and more people were shifting from their laptop to smartphones. As Souq was available only for the desktops and there was no app developed for it, further growth of the business seemed to be limited. Mouchawar took a smart decision and quickly adapted to the changing technological era. And in 2012, Souq launched its first app. Today, more than 70% of purchases are done using smartphones.

Next big change was introduced in 2010. With Wisam Daoud joining as CTO, Mouchawar decided that Souq would no longer run auctions and classifieds. The company, at that time, had 80% business from the auction and 20% from fixed price. But in May 2010, they closed the auction site. Initially, the company lost most of their transaction but they made for it in around six months and also doubled its revenue each quarter.

Mouchawar, in 2014, launched ‘White Friday’ sales which coincide with the ‘Black Friday’ sale in the US. He explained that ‘Black Friday’ does not make cultural sense in Arab as Friday is the traditional day of prayer. The sale received a thunderous response and raised more than $275 million. At the time of its next White Friday Souq had doubled its sales and witnessed 13 million visitors and around 600,000 products sold during 25th-28th November.

In March 2017, Amazon acquired Souq by paying $580 million in cash.

Personal Life

Ronaldo Mouchawar has received a number of accolades including Gulf Business Industry Awards CEO of the year in 2013 and Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015. He currently lives in Dubai, UAE.

Matt Mullenweg : The Founder and CEO of WordPress

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.

Early Life

Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.

Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.

Rise of Career

Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.

Matt Mullenweg
Image Souce: wikimedia.org

WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.

Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.

Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.

In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.

In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.

Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.

Personal Life

Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.

Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.

Qantas Airlines : The Flying Kangaroo of Australia

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Airlines are one of the biggest business and a symbol of pride for every country. For some countries, its aviation industry plays a pivotal role in its development. One such country is Australia which has the third oldest airline in the world named Qantas Airways. It is the flag carrier of Australia, and, also is the largest airline in terms of fleet size and international flights. Qantas is the abbreviated name for the airline’s it stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services. The airline is also popularly known by its nickname ‘The Flying Kangaroo’.

Early Years

In the early 1920s, three people came together to set up Qantas, that would become one of the most influential airlines in the future. These people were Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinnes, and Fergus McMaster. On 16th November 1920, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited was founded in Winton, Queensland.

The airline set up their headquarters in Winton, Queensland and owned their first aircraft named Avro 504K. The next year they shifted to Longreach, Queensland and after nine years later, i.e. in 1930, they shifted the headquarters to Brisbane, Queensland. Initially, the tickets booking was available in their office set up in a small building in Longreach.

The year 1934 brought a prosperous offer for Qantas Airways. The company, along with British Imperial Airways, formed a new company and called it Qantas Empire Airways, also known as QEA. The air service started between Brisbane and Darwin the same year. The company began international flight service next year in 1935 when it extended airline to Singapore.

But with the World War II, Qantas Airways suffered a huge loss as five of its total ten aircraft were destroyed in the enemy attacks. The rest five were taken by the Australian government for the war services. It was way after, in 1943, that the services resumed again. The logo of Qantas airways consists of a kangaroo, which was first used on the “Kangaroo Route” in 1944 between Sydney and Karachi.

Qantas
Image Source: cloudfront.net

Nationalization & Expansion

The Australian government shortly nationalized Qantas Airways in 1947. It was the decision of the then Labor Prime Minister Ben Chiefly. This led to a complete nationalization of the airways which transferred the domestic flights to Trans Australia Airlines. Qantas now operated within just international networks. This gave the airlines more opportunities to expand its services and the company flew its aircraft to Tokyo, then Hong Kong. Later the headquarters was formed in Sydney and in June 1959, entered into the jet age, with its first Boeing 707-138 aircraft.

Qantas, in 1992, merged with the Trans Australian Airlines and was semi-privatised between 1993 and 1996, with 51% of stakes owned by Australian shareholders. In 2001, Qantas founded a budget airline service, called Jetstar Airways, to compete with the newly entered Virgin Blue Airways in the Australian airline industry. It successfully acquired about 65% of the market share with Virgin Blue acquiring 30%. Qantas is also one of the founding members of Oneworld Airline Alliance.

The company slowly launched its services to other parts of the world including the Asian market. In 2004, it launched Jetstar Asian Airways covering major Asian countries. And it is expanding and increasing its services to other parts of the world too.

Qantas Airways headquarters is situated at Qantas Centre in the Bayside suburb of Mascot, Sydney, New South Wales. The airline has played a major role in the development of Australian aviation industry. The airways carry about 47 million passengers every year and have provided employment to more than 30,000 people. It operates about staggering 7300 flights each week which fly to more than 1000 destinations around the world.

Andy Bechtolsheim : German Electrical Engineer & a self-made Billionaire

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Being a successful entrepreneur depends highly on an individual’s decision making and risk taking capability. Higher the risk, greater the reward. This has been said and written, over and over. If you read about businessmen, who are highly successful today, you will find the huge array of risks, these people have taken to reach where they are. Out of these risks, emerges many successful companies. A company that produces valuable products and employs thousands of people. One such risk taker, and now a billionaire, is Andy Bechtolsheim.

Early Life and Education

Andy was born on 30th September 1955, in Bavaria, Germany and was the second of the four children in the family. He spent the most of the time of his childhood between the electronics devices, as there was no television or children in the neighbour to play with. So he chose to keep himself busy and entertained with electronics.

At the age of 16, Andy designed an industrial controller that worked on Intel 8080. He programmed it in binary code as he didn’t have any access to assemblers. He made this controller primarily for a nearby company, who then further paid him royalties for the product. These royalties paid for Andy’s most of the education.

Andy Bechtolsheim
Image Source: forbesimg.com

When Andy was attending the Technical University of Munich to pursue engineering, he entered the Jugend forscht contest that was organised for the young researchers. He kept participating in the contest for three years and finally, in the third year i.e. in 1974, he won the physics prize.

Andy, further, went to Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, after he received the Fulbright Award, in 1975. In 1976, at the same university, he received his master’s degree in Computer Engineering. Later, he went to the Stanford University to earn his PhD in electrical engineering, in 1977.

Early Career

While his time at Stanford, Andy came across the Xerox Alto computer, developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Inspired by this computer, he designed a powerful workstation, which had a built-in networking, named as SUN workstation (taken from the initials of Stanford University Networking). This workstation gained him free access to the researches at Xerox Palo Alto. During the same time, Lynn Conway was developing Very Large Scale Integration circuits (VLSI).

Birth of Sun Microsystems

The VLSI was developed on the workstation made by Andy. One such company called Daisy systems was also into building computers for the VLSI design. A man named Vinod Khosla worked at Daisy systems, who would soon partner with Andy. Khosla graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business just a couple years earlier than Andy. He was good friends with his classmate Scott McNealy who was the manager of manufacturing at Onyx Systems. These three people came together and developed a business plan for their first company. They also received funding in no time from the venture capitalists in 1982.

Andy with three others was joined by Bill Joy as the fourth member responsible for the development of BSD series of Unix OS. In the earlier days, Andy and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto. Sun Microsystems launched their first product named Sun-1. It included Stanford CPU board design with expanded memory and a protective metal sheet casing. The company went public in 1986 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1988. Andy also launched a cheaper desktop computer for educational market under his project SPARCstation. The computer was known as Campus.
Changing Companies.

He left Sun Microsystems in 1995, after working there for almost a decade. The same year he founded Granite Systems. A startup working to develop high-speed network switches. In 1966, when Andy owned about 60% of the company, Cisco acquired it for $220 million. After this deal, he also acquired the position of Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Systems Business Unit.

After working for 8 years at Cisco, he left the job in 2003 and took the head position in Kealia, Inc. This was the company that Andy had founded back in 2001 along with a Stanford Professor named David Cheriton, also a partner in Granite Systems. Kealia worked on developing advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

Andy was soon going to go back to where he started from. In the February of 2004, Sun Microsystems acquired Kealia, Inc., and Andy took the position of Vice President and Chief Architect in the company. He founded yet another company named Arastra which was renamed as Arista in 2005. The company was focused on developing high-speed networking. He left Sun and took Chairman and Chief Development Officer in Arista in October 2008.

Investment in Google

In the September of 1998, Andy and Cheriton decided to invest in the emerging search engine company Google. Both invested around $100,000 even before the company was founded and legally incorporated. His investment is now worth $1.6 billion.

Andy is known as the most successful investors in the electronics sector. He also invested in Magma Design Automation. His stake is valued at $60 million. He has invested in a number of startups and has been successful every time.

Achievements

Andy received the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999. He also received Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the Year award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Personal Life

Andy is not married and has not taken US citizenship. He continues to be a German and does not intend to change it. He lives in Palo Alto, California, US.

Ed Fries : Lead Developer of the Gaming Console Xbox

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From the invention of computers decades ago till today, when the technology has surpassed innovations, games have also been evolving tremendously. Starting from the 8-bit block type games to the high-end graphics almost life-like games, have made their way in the market. Companies, like Atari and Microsoft, brought some of the earliest games which became widely popular all over the world. Genius people have contributed their bit to the development of the gaming sector from years, and have set a landmark in the industry. One such figure is Ed Fries.

Early Life

Ed Fries, born on 1954, is an American video-game programmer and an entrepreneur. It was in the early 1980s when he fell in love with video games while playing the arcade games. His father worked at the Boeing an Aircraft manufacturing company and his mother was an engineer. His father loved the aeroplanes more than anything and Fries also found similar love with games. Fries got a B.S. in Computer Science from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, in 1986.

Ed Fries
Image Source: eurogamer.net

Ed’s first program was a clone of Frogger that he developed for the Atari 8-bit family and was distributed using the bulletin board system. Developing this clone proved to be a lucky move for Fries, as someone from the gaming industry noticed his game and offered him a job. In 1982, Fries published his first game, which was named as The Princess and the Frog. The game was published by Romox. Fries wrote two more games for Romox, which were named as Ant-Eater and Sea Chase.

Career

Just after earning his BS degree, Fries went to the Seattle area, to join Microsoft. During his ten-years job with Microsoft, he worked on the productivity software like Excel and Word. He worked at Microsoft for ten years. During this time he also created Microsoft Game Studios.

Initially, he was handling the team of around fifty people and over the course of eight years, the team increased to above twelve hundred people. The team developed and published more than 100 games, among which a lot of games were sold to more than a dozen million customers.

It was in the late 1990s when Fries led a team which created the first version of the Xbox gaming console. The development of Xbox put Microsoft on the top list in the interactive entertainment business. Fries was the most important figure among the game development community and played a pivotal role in the acquisition of Bungie, Ensemble Studios, and Rare.

Career after Microsoft

Fries left Microsoft in January 2004 and, started consulting various startups. One of the companies he consulted was FireAnt which was later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment. Some other startups Fries was involved with were Ageia and Emotive Systems. Ageia, a company building an EEG based game controller, claims to bring the first “physics accelerator” chip for games and Emotive Systems.

Fries’ favourite game is World of Warcraft, and he is currently working on bringing the game into a three-dimensional life. This project is carried out by his own startup company Figure Prints. The company deals with making 3D models of a player’s characters, using Z Corporation printers.

Fries said in an interview that within just 12 hours of taking his company to live, more than 4000 people ordered a model. “It takes almost a week to complete one model”, he explained further. His another favourite game Halo got an updated version called Halo 2600, which was released as an Atari 2600. Currently, Fries serves as an advisor for Ouya, which is an Android-based game console and development program.