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G7 Summit 2019 : France, U.S. Strike Compromise on Digital Tax

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The 45th G7 summit just took place in France and became the centre of discussion for various reasons. One of the reasons being the meeting between Indian PM Narendra Modi and Trump as well as the rejection of $20 million aid for stopping the Amazon forest fire by Brazil. But one of the main agenda that was sorted out at the summit was the controversial French Digital Tax.

During the conference at the G7 summit, President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron announced that they have agreed on finding a way to put a fair tax on the big foreign tech companies operating in France. But until the OECD does not set some proper tax guidelines, France will retain the same digital tax.

Macron also admitted that the controversy based on the new taxes has also affected the business of the French wine in the U.S. He also admitted that it has become expensive for big companies like Facebook and Google to operate their business in France.

France G7 Summit
Image Source: cbs42.com

The 134 OECD countries have been working towards establishing a new set of rules for the tech companies to operate in foreign countries, and France promised at the G7 summit that it would remove its digital tax asap OECD will finalise the new rules. The announcement also indicated that the rules may arrive as soon as 2020.

In July, France imposed new digital tax for the big foreign tech companies operating in the country. The digital tax is based on the local profits rather than the global revenues those companies earn. According to French digital tax the companies that make over a €25 million (around $27.7 million) in France, or €750 million (around $830 million) worldwide, will need to pay an extra 3% tax to the French government. This way, the GAFA companies, i.e. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (all the U.S. based companies) are becoming the main targets of France.

But after the agreement, the Tax Authority of France will look on the taxes that those companies have paid and the taxes they will pay under France’s digital tax policy. It will also calculate the amount these companies will be paying after OECD establishes the new tax rules for them. Concluding the extra paid tax, the French government will reimburse the extra amount back to those companies.

“Everything that is paid in excess compared to the international solution will be credited to the company,” said the French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire.

The new agreement will help the two companies to reduce the tension as well as the trade conflict between them.

Baidu

Robin Li : The Founder of Baidu, the “Google of China”

Leave a Comment / Founder, Google, Inspiration, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The emergence of the Internet opened new ways for everyone, especially for them who were innovative and wanted to create something big. It also helped those who had no resources as a child, but later, reached the heights of success. The rags to riches stories are interesting and inspire people to fight with their situations and face the struggle. One such person who presents the most appropriate rags to riches story is Robin Li, an internet entrepreneur from China, who once faced the worst financial conditions and now is one of the richest men in China. He is the founder of the multinational company Baidu, which is the owner of China’s biggest search engine, with the same name.

Early Life

Robin Li was born on 17 November 1968 in Yangquan, Shanxi, China in a labour family. He was a single boy among the five children of his parents. The Shanxi province was an underdeveloped area, and there were no good resources of education. But still, Li tried his best and on the advice of his mother, worked hard to get a better education. Ultimately, he was able to crack the entrance exam for Peking University, Beijing, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in library information management.

After completing his bachelor’s degree, the next step was to get a job. He worked in a company in Beijing for one and a half year, but fortunately got admission to a Fellowship program at the State University of New York. He moved to New York and completed a master’s degree in science from the university in 1994. He was enrolled in the PhD program in computer science but did not complete his doctorate.

Career

Robin Li
Image Source: buffalo.edu

As soon Robin Li completed his master’s he joined Dow Jones and Company’s IDD Information Services as a software engineer. At IDD, he became the part of the development team, which was working on software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. Here he also got the chance to work on the search engine algorithms as well.

While working at IDD, he started working on page-ranking algorithms, and ultimately developed Rankdex, the first web search engine with page-ranking and site-scoring algorithms that means, it used hyperlinks to check the quality of a website. Rankdex later became the inspiration for Google’s PageRank algorithm.

After Li successfully developed Rankdex and got the U.S. patent for its ranking algorithm, he left his job at IDD, in 1997. He then, joined Infoseek, another internet company that was working on search engine algorithms. During his time at Infoseek, he developed a new function for Go.com, through which it could do image-based searches. Here he worked for two years and left the job in 1999.

Founding Baidu

Robin Li moved back to China, to work on his own product and in 2000, he developed Baidu with the help of his friend Eric Xu. The two used the same algorithm as of Rankdex to develop Baidu. Li did not have a permanent apartment in China at that time and did all the coding work and the launch of Baidu from a hotel room near Peking University. Li became the Chairman of the company and Xu was appointed as the CEO.

In 2001, Baidu offered people to bid for putting ads on the search engine. This led to the monetization as well as the growth of the company. Baidu was an instant hit, and Li was named among the “Chinese Top Ten Innovative Pioneers” in the same year. In 2003, the company introduced image-based searches as well as a news search engine.

In 2004, Xu resigned from his post as CEO, and Li held the position. The next year, Li took Baidu to NASDAQ, and the value of its every share raised by 350 per cent, i.e., from $27 to $122. In December 2007, Baidu was listed in the NASDAQ-100, becoming the first Chinese company to do so. In the same year, Li was named in CNN Money’s annual list of “50 people who matter now”.

By 2010, Baidu was the most used search engine in China, and it also got the title of “Google of China”. The company has partnered with big names like Qualcomm, Continental and Bosch. It has also started working in the field of AI. The company has also launched a self-driving vehicle platform under its Apollo project (Apolong).

Along with hosting the biggest search engine in China, Baidu offers over fifty internet-related services as well as artificial intelligence-based products to its users.

Baidu is one innovative product that helped Li to fight with his circumstances. Today, Li is one of the richest men in China and ranks at number eight with $16.5 billion’s net worth. He has been awarded great accolades, including “15 Asian Scientists To Watch” by Asian Scientist Magazine in 2011, “Most Influential Business Leader in China” by Fortune, and “World’s Best Business Leader” by the American Business Weekly in 2006.

Founders of Google Map, From Doodling on a White Board to Monitoring the Roads

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Before settling down in the technical sector of Google and long before founding ‘Where 2 Technologies’, all the four founders of Google Map, Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma and the Rasmussen brothers, Lars and Jens, had totally divergent lifestyles. Initially, they had no plans on starting something of their own, but they somehow ended up creating a Sydney-based digital mapping start-up, ‘Where 2 Technologies’, which came under the acquisition of Google after a year of its launch.

Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma, Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen are the founding members of Google Map. The story starts with the Rasmussen brothers, at the time, when they started from zero with a sky-high dream of becoming millionaires, later, joined by Gordon and Ma.

Before Founding Where 2 Technologies

Born in Denmark, Lars always wanted to become a veterinarian. But, his mindset was changed after a terrible incident happened when he was 13. The Rasmussen brothers started taking programming lessons after school. Lars graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Computing in 1998 and moved to the US in 2000. In the US, he worked for a company, prior to dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. Dot-com or Dot-com Bubble was a business model that was followed by many companies to expand rapidly and capture the market.

After the stock market crashed in the year 2000 (also known as the dot-com boom), the Rasmussen brothers went through a $45 million loss in start-up capital. Though it was a major loss, they didn’t consider giving up as an option. With no savings and a mere $16 in their pockets, they started thinking of building a start-up. After the dot-com bust, the two needed to come up with something very unique, and something which, people would be interested to invest in. They started to work with mapping and navigation systems, to create something unusual and to set their application apart from already existing mapping software. And that is how they developed the idea of Where 2 Technologies, one of the most widely used platforms for navigation.

Google Map
Image Source: medium.com

After six months of diligent hard work, they finally had a prototype to show and went to meet Frank Marshall, a private investor, to discuss fundings. Marshall was a very influential person, and it was him, who set all the meetings between Rasmussen brothers and high profile investors.

Where 2 Technologies really started taking shape after the other two founders joined Rasmussen brothers in the venture. Before joining Where 2 Technologies, Ma worked at a petrol station, and Gordon worked in his father-in-law’s clothing factory.

The Real Struggle

When the two bothers were still struggling with the idea of a new mapping system, Lars flew to Australia to live with his girlfriend. In Australia, Lars sought out Gordon and Stephen, when the brothers were already bankrupt. Then, with a little funding from Gordon, Where 2 Technologies was actually created and started shaping towards perfection. The team worked in the spare bedroom with conditions led by Gordon’s girlfriend. They didn’t work after 5, and also, spared the weekends. Gordon, in one of his interviews, said that they might be the only start-up in the entire world that worked from 9 to 5.

The next step was to get the right investors for the idea. They jot down the list of potential competitors, list of buyers, capital firms and technical strategies for Where 2 Technologies. By this time, they were already living lives with maxed out credit cards, but the zeal to achieve the goal was untamed. After showing a few prototypes to some of the huge investors, the real deal began when they had to represent the idea of advanced digital mapping to Google’s co-founder, Larry Page.

At first, Where 2 Technologies created an application for mapping which was supposed to be downloaded, installed, and then used for navigation. But Google wasn’t interested in application software, so it gave the team a deadline to get an idea for a web browser. Within a time span of only three weeks, they required to create a prototype, and that is how the scribbled whiteboard became famous. Finally, the team was able to successfully deliver it in August 2004. And with an unrevealed sum, Where 2 Technologies came under the acquisition of Google. This was Google’s second acquisition.

The Triumph

Even before the founders could embrace success, they found themselves working as Google employees. These Nooglers, that is, new recruits of Google started working at the Australian headquarters of the company. The company launched its IPO soon after they were recruited, where Google valued $23 billion. Among the four of them, Gordon still works at Google, and Ma retired a few years ago.

Google Map was founded on 8th February 2005, and by 2012, the company had over 2,100 employees working in the mapping sector.

The hard work of those four men paid off well because they were never ready to give up.

Yandex – The Google of Russia Simplifying the Lives of the Russians

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In this era of the Internet, the importance of search engines cannot be adequately described. From finding your favourite restaurants, booking flight tickets to forecasting weather, its uses are infinite. Google, AOL, Bing, Yandex, Baidu (in China), and many more, flock the internet.

For the uninitiated, Yandex is the Google of Russian Internet or Ru-net. It is a search engine providing services such as Yandex Mail, Search, News, Video, Taxi, Traffic, Maps, etc., to the people of Russia.

yandex
Image Source: businesschief.com

Founding Yandex

It all started when two young boys, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, both computer nerds, decided to make money by selling computers in the 1980s. Volozh and Segalovich, together, have co-founded several IT companies such as InfiNet Wireless, Comptek International, and Yandex is also one of them. The word “Yandex” has been derived from “Yet another Index”, indicating it to be one of the numerous search engines present at that time.

The first phase of Yandex’s success started with the Advertisement phase. The engine started displaying contextual advertisements. It pioneered the internet’s advertisement industry by boldly changing the dynamics. The majority of the company’s revenue came from such advertisements. They concentrated a large part of their resources on this venture, and it turned out to be a stroke of genius.

The second phase came soon in the year 2000, when the company announced the launch of several services such as Mail, News, Bookmarks. These services allowed people to access a unified interface for all their queries. The services were backed by unique marketing strategies, creating a lasting imprint on the minds of the Russian people.

The 2000s was a crucial period, including the Internet Revolution. The businesses had numerous growth opportunities, and the Internet had become a stepping stone for various corporations to expand their horizons. It was like a ‘rainbow on an already sunny day.’ The dependency on the Internet facilities was increasing. The year 2005 saw the upsurge in Yandex users, numerically 3 million. In 2009, the number reached 18 million users.

Apart from services, this tech giant also ventured in the field of education. Yandex started the school of Data Analytics in 2007 to support technology friendly academics, and “Yandex.Start” was launched to work with startups on newer projects. In 2014, it ventured with Moscow School of Economics to open a computer science facility. In 2016, It rolled out “Yandex.Lyceum” to teach coding and programming to young teenagers. It also provided CERN with computing resources. Yandex, a believer in Artificial Intelligence, has released “Alice” on the lines of Amazon’s Echo and Google Home.

The company has also been regularly updating its platforms. It recently launched Catboost, a new algorithm replacing the older MatrixNet. It is supposed to be faster and more precise. It released “Palekh”, a new search algorithm that uses neural networks to map information on the network.

The dynamics of Yandex’s success changed to good business deals from the quality substance. In 2011, Yandex offered its shares to the public. It raised north of 1 billion dollars. After the IPO, a larger resource pool was created. It partnered with Uber in multi-million dollar deals to share the taxi business. It also ventured into Turkey – providing Turkish people with its services.

Yandex had become a comprehensive search engine, touching every aspect of a person’s life. Timetables to Traffic, it had answers for everything. It concentrated keenly on search algorithms. Such ability must be attributed to the timely and efficient launch of its services. Another aspect of its success must be credited to its convenient linguistics. The ability to interpret local Russian language and provide accurate results was very well conceived. It overhauled the problems of people and provided holistic solutions. Such extensive and conscious effort towards improvement of technology services has certainly carved a niche in the minds of the people.

orkut

Orkut Buyukkokten : Founder of Orkut, One of the First Social Media Network

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The power of social networking sites has made our public life more scintillating and invigorating. Updating every single incident occurring in our life and getting to know about other people’s status, all at once, have attracted the audience, especially, the youngsters around the globe. But the history of social media dates back to long before you used a filter on Instagram or even updated the status on Facebook. On 24th January 2004, Orkut Buyukkokten created one of the first social networking websites, Orkut, which was under the acquisition of Google. Buyukkokten is a software engineer who worked at Google and did much more than creating Orkut.

Early life of Buyukkokten

Orkut Buyukkokten was born on 6th February 1975, in Konya, Turkey. After a year of his birth, the family shifted to Germany and came back to Turkey a few years later. Buyukkokten had already adopted a German accent by then and got admitted in the second standard after they moved back to Turkey. Buyukkokten always maintained good grades in school and started coding when he was only in the fourth standard. Büyükkökten, in one of his interviews, said that a bunch of students always bullied him at school.

Higher studies and career

Buyukkokten went to Bilkent University in Ankara, from where he graduated with a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science. The time he had to go for his master’s, he almost had thought of dropping the idea of applying in Stanford, due to the high application fee. But, he eventually applied and made it to Stanford University.

Orkut Buyukkokten
Image Source: vox.com

After completing his M.S, he pursued a PhD degree from Stanford as well. He researched mainly on how to create a better and more efficient way of web browsing based on the devices used by individuals. And during his days in Stanford, while working for his thesis, he created a social network, Club Nexus, in 2001, for the students of Stanford University. The students of the university used the platform for chatting, finding people with similar interests, buying and selling products and many other things. He received a good response from the students, especially the undergraduates, and by opening this platform, he actually enhanced the interaction between the undergraduates and graduates.

Buyukkokten also introduced another social network, inCircle, which was for the Stanford Alumni Association. He wrote the entire code for these networking websites in C#, and as the number of users increased rapidly, he started using different serves to reduce the traffic.

In 2002, When Buyukkokten was in his final year, he eventually, started receiving job offers, and finally, he ended up in Google. Even after he joined Google, he worked hard to develop better social networking sites. He believed in bringing the entire world together on a single platform where people can enjoy, make new friends and socialize. Buyukkokten also launched a company, Affinity Engines, which later, sued both Google and Buyukkokten for trading secrets.

Success of Orkut.com

Since Buyukkokten gave 20% of his time to create a new social networking site, he finally, built one and, named it Eden. And then, after a suggestion by Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, the name was changed to Orkut.com. Google launched Orkut on 22nd January, Buyukkokten being the creator of the platform. Starting it as a 20% project, it turned into a massive success that the company and Büyükkökten, himself, never expected. Though Affinity engines claimed the code of Orkut to be theirs, the lawsuit they filed against Google and Buyukkokten was settled in 2006. A lot of new features were added once the website went live. A logo was resigned in 25th August 2007, followed by second redesigning in 27th October 2009.

As the number of people making profiles in Orkut increased, Buyukkokten declared that it will also be released in 6 different languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu). Orkut was launched worldwide and gained the most popularity in Estonia, Brazil and India. Buyukkokten decided to leave the team of Orkut.com in 2008 and started working as a product manager at Google.

In 30th June 2014, Google announced that it will be closing Orkut.com by 30th September 2014. But for the time span it existed, Orkut changed the face of social media by giving the common people a real experience of communicating virtually and socializing.

Hello

Buyukkokten launched another social networking site Hello, in 2016, which is having users from all over the world, and he, still, thrive to make the world a better place by connecting people through technology.

Personal life

His parent’s names are still unknown to most of the world. He was in an openly gay relationship, and eventually, married to Derek Holbrook. But later, they got separated. He has two children.

Google Drive and Google Photos Will No Longer Sync Together

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Although Google Photos and Google Drive work independently, many of the people use both to store their images and videos by syncing them with each other. This way, the data is kept safe and can be accessed easily. But, based on a few feedbacks from the users, now Google is going to make some changes on how the two platforms will share the content with each other.

Google drive and google photos
Image Source: phandroid.com

According to a blog post, Google has got many feedbacks regarding the confusion the relation between the two platform cause among the users, and now, it will make some changes to both, in order to ‘simplify’ things.

“We’ve heard feedback that the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Google Drive and Google Photos,” stated Google in the blog post.

Usually, the pictures and the videos uploaded over either the platforms get synced to both the platforms and gets stored on it. But now after the changes, if the pictures/videos are uploaded to Photos, these won’t get stored to the Drive, automatically, and the same will happen if done other way around. Also, if a picture is deleted from Google Photos, it won’t affect the same picture in the Drive and vice-versa. This way, the pictures/videos will be safe from any accidental deletion.

Now with another new feature, named Upload From Google Drive, the users will have better control over the two platforms. Since the automatic syncing is already out of option, the users will be able to select the pictures and videos they want to import to Photos from Drive. Even though the images and the videos are imported from the Drive, these are not related to each other. And yes, the same image in both platforms will occupy space separately and will be counted in the storage quota. The users will still be able to upload items to both the platforms with the Backup and Sync option, altogether.

According to the company, the changes will take place starting from 10 July. The images and the videos that are already in both the platforms will remain as it is, even after the changes.