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Ray Kurzweil : The Tech Visionary who Invented the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Technology

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The world is filled with possibilities and opportunities to build a better future. Once in a while, there comes a genius or two, who turn tap into these right set of circumstances and changes the face of the planet as we know. Raymond a.k.a. Ray Kurzweil is one such eminent personality with a flair for creativity and erudition. Ray can be reflected as one of the brightest minds of our generation, who has given major contributions to the field of Artificial intelligence. He has written several books and published papers on the same. One of the most remarkable of his contributions is the invention of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). The journey of this astounding visionary has a lot of interesting aspects and a fair share of ups and downs. Then again, what value does success have unless it is achieved after a little bit of toil and grinds?

Early Life and Career

Born in the favourable soil of US, Ray Kurzweil received normal education at a regular public school in New York City. Even though he had much humble upbringing, Ray did show an inclination towards the world of science. He belonged to a musical family, but at a tender age of 5 years, Kurzweil decided to become a scientist. This was fueled by his increased penchant for electronic gadgets that he assembled now and then. At the age of 15, Ray wrote his very own computer programme, with the assistance of his uncle, who was a computer science engineer at Bell Labs.

Quite predictably, keeping up his momentum, the young genius got into the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he built software that helped students find appropriate colleges according to their academic credentials. The application was welcomed with great spirit, which was later, launched commercially in the name Select College Consulting Programme. This was soon bought by an educational publishing firm called Harcourt, Brace and World. The most fascinating part of the story is that Ray was just 20 when he first built a firm and sold it for a huge profit.

Journey as an Entrepreneur and Inventing OCR

Ray Kurzweil
Image Source: pinterest.com

Raymond graduated from MIT in lightning speed with dual degrees in Computer Science and English literature. Later on, Ray started his very own company named Kurzweil Computer Products, where he built something that changed how we read faces. The firm developed an Optical Character Reader, which was one of a kind idea. This led to the invention of the flatbed scanners, which also shook the technology industry like a whirlwind.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine was the name of his series of inventions and was successfully launched in collaboration with Bell Labs. The man was not just an inventor or a scientist, but also a great visionary with a big dream about the future. Ray was selling the OCR like hot pancakes, and eventually, sold his Kurzweil Products Company in the year of 1980. It went on to be renamed as ScanSoft and was later taken over by Xerox Corporation.

After Kurzweil Products Company

Ray went on to invent a couple of other remarkable products and services that managed to make the lives better for every user across the globe. One such invention was a programmable synthesizer that could correctly reproduce the sounds of musical instruments such as a piano, drums and many others. Ray even started a company named Kurzweil Music System to pursue this line of ideas. This could be attributed to the fact that he hails from a family full of musicians. Its first product was the Kurzweil 250, which was quickly approved by musicians all over the world.

Ray Kurzweil also developed speech recognition software alongside, which was also a huge success. Later on, he started focusing on Artificial Intelligence, and its future, and interestingly enough, authored books such as Robots and Beyond, Fantastic Voyage, etc.

Currently, Ray works for Google, at the request of the company co-founder Larry Page. Such an awe-spiring story, isn’t it? Once in a while, the earth is graced by super-intelligent beings such as Raymond Kurzweil. We can consider it a privilege to have born in this millennia and have a piece of his wisdom. Science makes earth easier to live in, while people like Ray, make it a better place to live in.

Ahley Qualls

Ashley Qualls : A Successful Entrepreneur Who Became a Millionaire at 17

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Many of the people around us have a dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur in their life. But, how often do you hear about a 14-year-old teenage girl creating history in the entrepreneurial world?

Ashley Qualls, an American entrepreneur, from Detroit, Michigan, started her website at the age of 14 to provide tutorials in the domain of web designing. In 2004, Qualls released whateverlife.com providing mainly HTML tutorials and free MySpace layouts. She mainly opened this website as a hobby to help teenagers, especially of her age, learn graphic design and coding.

The First Step into the Business World

Qualls neither belonged to a financially predominant family nor did she have a lucrative investor by her side while creating her website. Her mom was a single mother and Qualls was the eldest daughter in her family. She really struggled her way to the top, and ultimately, became one of the successful teenage entrepreneurs of her time.

Ahley Qualls
Image Source: networthbuzz.com

At first, 14 years old Ashley Qualls wanted to create an interesting website for everyone without any future perspective and strategies. Initially, she planned on publishing her own portfolio having graphics and pictures create by herself. Applying her knowledge of web designing in the project, she finally launched the website in 2004, under the domain name whateverlife.com. It was the first stepping stone for her towards creating something funny and attractive for the people, especially teenagers.

Just after a few months of the launch of the website, Qualls earned $70,000. Eventually, she started uploading different tutorials in her website regarding web designing and programming, thus, helping out the teenage students. As the number of unique viewers started increasing, many modifications were made to whateverlife.com. Every user, who created an account on the website, was allowed to upload their own projects, which in turn helped them gain more popularity and even earn rewards. These rewarded points are used to buy digital goods online.

This strategy escalated the rate of popularity of the page, and within a year, it had visitors from around the world. Whateverlife.com became famous among every youngster throughout the globe, witnessing 300,000 users every single day.

The Growth

Before the company turned three years old, whateverlife.com observed 3-4 million page views, especially, for tutorials of HTML and CSS. Qualls’s website became so popular that it started giving tough competition to websites like cbsnews.com and oprah.com.

In 2006, a buyer, whose name has not yet been revealed, offered a price of $1,500,000 to buy the portal, which was humbly turned down by Qualls. Her performance in the field was so impressive that Brad Greenspan, co-founder of MySpace, offered her a hefty amount of money twice in exchange for her website. But, Qualls had more craze for knowledge, and a passion to drive her business even higher than just giving up the ownership to someone else. So, she rejected the offer from Greenspan twice, irrespective of the money he was willing to pay. It is very rare that a young entrepreneur has such high spirit to turn down business tycoons and stand tall by her own. She also bought a house in 2006, where she started living with her mother and younger sister.

Soon, the number of visitors on her website turned to 7 million, and by the time Ashley Qualls turned 17, she was a millionaire.

When Life Turned Upside Down

The flow of success suddenly hit a pause when Qualls was diagnosed by an autoimmune disease, due to which she experienced gastrointestinal issues. The turmoil of her life wasn’t just limited to this, as she lost her business, her house followed by her miscarriage. But she never thought of giving up. She joined a job in 2015, which unfortunately hit an end the very next year due to her worse health conditions and regular visits to doctors.

But, after reading an article in The New Yorker by Meghan O’Rourke, she realized that there are many people out there who are suffering from the same disease.

SickNotDead

After realizing the harsh certainty that this disease will haunt her forever, and there are about thousands of women suffering from the same, Qualls decided to open a blog, SickNotDead. She accepted the reality and started writing to provide advice and support to everyone out there who is prey to this unfortunate veracity. And, through her motivational writings, she has been able to bring a difference in the lives of these people.

unacademy

Unacademy : India’s Online Learning Platform Helping People To Move a Step Forward Towards Their Dream

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Almost all the students of our country are pressurized for signing up in coaching classes after the secondary examination. But life becomes hectic after long hours in school followed by coaching and then self-study. This is the reason why students lose interest and tend to give up. Moreover, even in coaching classes, the lectures are equivalent to long hours of speech and every doubt of students is not solved.

So here, Unacademy comes to the rescue. Unacademy brings to India an online learning platform, where you can get to watch online videos of your curriculum prepared by experienced educators. The app is not only useful for 10+2 students but also for the college students preparing for exams like CAT, GATE, UPSC, etc.

History

Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, launched Unacademy.in, a Bangalore based start-up, in January 2016. The organisation is run by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd. Before launching this free learning platform, Unacademy used to be an educational youtube channel, started in 2010, which now has around 15 million video views. The channel was created and run by Gaurav Munjal, and then later in 2015, the other two members joined in.

Unacademy Founders
Image Source: techcrunch.com

Munjal and Singh before launching Unacademy, worked at Flatchat which came under the acquisition of CommonFloor in 2014. Saini was one of the civil service aspirants, who cracked the examination at a very young age, but he left his job as Assistant Collector, in order to build Unacademy. At the age of 22, Saini became an IAS Officer by ranking 18th in the civil service examination 2013. He realized that among 6.5 lakhs IAS aspirants, only 1.5 lakhs were able to afford coaching classes. So, he decided to join Munjal in the platform of Unacademy and give online coaching to help the underprivileged students.

Growth and Investors

Only after a year of launching the free app, Unacademy raised a good amount of funding. In 2016, the company raised $500,000 in the seed round of funding hosted by Blume Ventures. Some of the investors who participated in this funding round were Rajan Anandan (Google India Head), Sumit Jain (Co-founder of CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-founder of Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar and Phanindra Sama (Co-founder of redBus). Flipkart’s co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Paytm’s founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma also funded $1 million to Unacademy. By this time, Unacademy already gained more than 200,000 subscribers and 729 videos from online coaches. The videos were short (around 8-10 minutes) and crisp with a lot of visuals like graphs and images to make sure that the students don’t lose interest.

In 9th August 2017, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and founder of Directi (an online application for business and communication) joined the board as Director. Turakhia is a huge tech entrepreneur who apart from founding Directi also founded Flock, Radix, CodeChef, Ringo, Media.net (co-founder) and Zeta (co-founder). According to the estimates of Forbes magazine in 2017, he was ranked as 95th richest person of India. He looks upon the overall business strategy of Unacademy and focuses on creating more versatile contents.

In 2017, the company raised $11.5 million in series B funding, from Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The company announced that the funds will be invested in hiring new employees and for increasing the number of products. The company was hiring online educators on the basis of their experience and the educational background.

The three founders got featured in ‘Forbes 30 Under 30 India’ for their commendable work and progress. In July 2018, the organisation raised $21 million funds through another round of funding, Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners being the main investors. The company has raised a total of $38.6 million through all the funding rounds so far.

The success

With the increasing number of active students and teachers, Unacademy has become India’s largest online learning platform. There are over 2,400 lessons in Unacademy, covering topics from the various competitive exams. With more than 2 million views on the videos, Unacademy is reaching every corner of India to help the youth and empower them. Unacademy also has some top ideal educators, like Kiran Bedi, on board. More than 300,000 students have been benefited from the free app and have cracked even the toughest competitive exams of India.

Reynolds Johnson – The Man Who Created the First Ever External Hard Disk

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Data storage – It certainly does not carve a niche in one’s mind. However, Imagine being able to save only 5 MB data in a machine that weighed a ton and measured a whole room. That machine was the start of a journey that has resulted in accommodating the technology to create better and higher standards of living. It was the first external Hard Disk ever invented. Well, and it was in 1952.

Reynolds B. Johnson was the ninth child of John and Elizabeth Reynolds and was born in Minnesota on July 7th,1906. He was a simple school going boy who displayed a keen interest in technical and mechanical sciences. Johnson was interested in workings of the machines and exhibited his ability to the world by creating and demonstrating a working model of a submarine in a horse trough. He graduated from one of the best private schools- Minnehaha Academy and went on to pursue a BS in Educational Administration as a part of his higher education from the University of Minnesota.

A teacher by profession, Johnson decided to return to his original occupation and improve its status quo. In 1932, Johnson had an idea to create a device that could grade the standardized tests and dissipate horrors associated with it. He tasked two of his pupils to work under his directions to create such a device. He called it the “mark-sense technology”, and this was the official start to his career as an inventor. Technology-giant IBM hired him as an engineer and bought rights over his invention. The company sold his test scoring machine from 1937 onwards. Other companies such as Bell System used mark sense technology to record calls, and utility companies used it to record meter readings. The government organizations used it under the name “electrographic” technology.

Since then, his role at IBM was not limited to an engineer, but further expanded, when he led a research team at IBM’s research laboratory, with the objective of improving current data storage and retrieval solutions. His ideas are being worked on even today.

He created a machine that could store data using aluminium and magnetic drums, making the first imprint of a data external storage device on the world. His inspiring work in the field of data storage made him known as the “Father of Hard Disk Drive”.

Johnson was one of the most influential inventors of this century. His life is marked with almost hundreds of patents relating to storage and technology. He was an influential figure in the toy industry, too. He implanted technology by inventing “microphotography” in simple toys. Fischer Price also used Johnson’s technology in their “Talk to my books”. He is also famous for creating handy videocassette tapes bettering the original ones made by Sony.

Johnson’s visionary mind was recognized throughout the world. He was a recipient of several awards such as Franklin Institute’s Certificate of Merit, in 1996, and the National Medal of Technology, in 1986. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers ( IEEE) established the “IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award” in 1991. The award is given to the inventors for their outstanding contributions.

Today, we dream of getting our desired things without making a splash in the water. It would be a disgrace if we do not remember a person who has provided the world with uncanny inventions, not only in the field of technology but also in the field of education. In 1966, Johnson made a bold prediction and a correct one, too, about the future of the education system: “The classroom of the future will be as different from today’s as the computer centre is different from the accounting room with its high stools of a few decades ago.” Such pioneering vision could only be compared to today’s Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks.

Jamie Siminoff : A Lifelong Inventor Who Founded World’s First Wi-fi Video Doorbell

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‘Failing at the beginning is not always the end.” says the American entrepreneur and the founder of Ring, the world’s first wi-fi video doorbell, Jamie Siminoff. The journey of this entrepreneur has been quite tough but amusing and gives us the lesson that sometimes the biggest business ideas are hidden in small things, but we are not aware of their potential.

Jamie Siminoff was born and brought up in Chester, New Jersey. He was a naughty but creative child. After school, he used to spend most of his time building things. By building things, he came across to very basic but major chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering stuff. He was never into academics, but later, started working hard to get A grade in tests, as his father had promised him if he would get As in his exams, he will be able to get his favourite Land Rover Defender 90. And after school, his father brought him his favourite car as promised.

jamie siminoff
Image Source: businessinsider

Jamie after completing his high school joined the Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In college, he studied entrepreneurship and even won a business plan competition. He also received an offer worth $10,000 for writing a business plan while in college.

In college, he also used to paste posters around the campus saying that he would do anything for $10. These small jobs helped him learn new things.

After completing his college, Jaime was back into his garage, and with a few college mates, started working on different products. During the time, his wife, Erin complained that while he used to be in the garage, he would not answer the doorbell. So he started looking for a doorbell that was connected to a mobile app such that it could be answered from his garage without going to the main door.

After looking for a good long time, he found out that there were lots of video doorbells, but he did not find any doorbell that could fulfil his requirement. This was the point when he thought of building a wifi doorbell, that was safer and could be answered from a farther place, even outside the house.

According to Jaime, conceiving the idea was easy, but getting it done was tough. So without thinking more, he started working on this new product with his friends and built a prototype for the same. The next thing was to pitch the idea in front of investors, to get the backup for the product. And, the first thing he got to hear was, “It is impossible.”

But being a stubborn kid, Jaime wanted to prove that investor wrong, and finally, in 2011, built the first version of the device, DoorBot. The device had a few flaws but was good enough to find investors.

In 2013, he received an email from Shark Tank producer, in which he was invited to participate in the American business-related reality television series, Shark Tank. It was a tough time for him, as he was almost broke. So getting an email from a TV show, where he could win money to invest in his company, was like a ray of hope.

Though he did not win any capital in the show, he was able to reach more people with his idea as his product received free marketing. As a result, people started ordering DoorBot to gift it to people in festivals. Also, the product came into the eyes of many investors who became interested in it.

One of his first biggest investors Richard Branson came across to this product when one of his guests was remotely talking to a delivery guy at his doorsteps through an app. Branson was fascinated with the product and contacted Jaime for investment.

Later, during an investment pitch, he rebranded the product to Ring, as one of his investors suggested, “You said ‘ring’ about 1,000 times, just call it Ring.”

This was the start of his good time with the company, and in 2016, he even got the famous NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal to be the spokesperson for his company, who was also a customer of Ring and loved the way it worked. In fact, O’Neal himself had reached out to meet the CEO of Ring, Jaime, to thank for such safe invention.

In early 2018, news of Jeff Bezos making the second biggest investment in Ring, i.e. of a $1 billion, started making rounds, and finally, in February 2018, acquired the company with a worth estimated value of between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion.

Before Ring, Jaime had also founded PhoneTag, the world’s first voicemail-to-text company, and Unsubscribe.com, a service to clean commercial email from inboxes.

Jaime says that the serial entrepreneurs are looking for that right product that they really want to sell, and Jaime found Ring which he believed in the most, and his persistence and faith helped him to get to the position where he stands today.

7 Most Influential Women Making Their Own Space in the Tech World

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8th March, the International Women’s Day, a day to observe the contribution of women to the world, that many women rejoice with lots of excitement and as a proud woman, and some clearly say that every day is a women’s day. Even we think the same, but what is bad in celebrating it together on the day, which internationally has been reserved for every woman.

Women's day

Today, as a recognition to the contribution of women to the world, as a daughter, mother, wife, sister, a homemaker, an entrepreneur and what not, we are writing down a list of few of the most influential women in the tech world:

1. Lynda Weinman, Founder Lynda.com: Online learning and training have become quite popular these days, but over twenty years ago, it was not that of a common thing. It was Lynda Weiman, who founded one of the first online training websites Lynda.com, in 1995. The website offers a variety of courses for online software training as well as for learning creative, and business skills. Lynda has won the San Francisco Women on the WebTop 25 Women award in 1999.

2. Melanie Perkins, Founder Canva: Melanie Perkins is the Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Canva, which was founded in 2012, as an online tool to build beautiful graphic designs. The platform facilitates million of photographs, graphics and fonts, that people use to create awesome designs.

Perkins founded Canva in 2015, and in just four years, the company has raised to over 200 employees. According to 2018 reports, the company is valued at $1 billion. Melanie Perkins is one of the youngest female CEOs in the tech industry.

3. Lara Setrakian, Founder News Deeply: From a journalist to an entrepreneur, Lara Setrakian is the founding CEO and Executive Editor of News Deeply. It is journalism and technology-based digital platform that hosts world news, discussions and knowledge exchange. She was among the top 9 most influential Young Professionals in Foreign Policy under 33 list by The Diplomatic Courier.

4. Limor Fried, Founder Adafruit: Being the only female entrepreneur among 15 finalists for the “Entrepreneur of the Year” list might be a great feeling. Limor Fried is that ‘only female’ who gave competition to the other 14 male entrepreneurs for the title in 2012.

Fried was studying electrical engineering at MIT when she founded Adafruit, the company which sells electronic kits, components, and tools, mainly for the hobbyist market. Her leadership skills can be estimated with the fact that Adafruit sold more than $3 million worth of product while having a team of only eight employees in 2010.

5. Rashmi Sinha, Founder Slideshare: An Indian-American businesswoman, who is the CEO and founder of SlideShare, the biggest presentation sharing platform, was named the No. 8 on its Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs list by Fortune in 2008. Rashmi Sinha was also among the World’s Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company.

6. Meredith Perry, Founder uBeam: Perry is a Paleobiology graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. She founded uBeam as a project for an invention competition. uBeam is a device that solves the problem of wired chargers, emitting power through which people can roam in a room with their laptops without connecting it with a charger.

Perry also performed zero gravity experiments at NASA Ames Research Center as a student ambassador.

7. Tracy Young, Founder Plangrid: A civil engineering pass out who opted to go to the site build buildings, instead of sitting in an office and make plans and designs. After gaining some experience, Young came to the conclusion that technology must get into construction, too, and built Plangrid. The app enables contractors and architects to collaborate on plans via their iPads.

Although this is a small list of women and only in the field of technology, there are millions of women having their influential part to every field, whether it is sports, education, journalism, architecture, entertainment, or any other field that exists.

On this special day, we wish all the Women out there a Happy Women’s Day.