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AddressHealth

AddressHealth: The Journey Of Anand Lakshman To Create A One-Stop-Shop For Pediatric Healthcare

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Children are the future of any country because they are going to participate in the development of the country. However, children should be healthy in their early stages of growth. Because it determines their mental and physical development. Also, it is the utmost requirement to have healthy and intelligent youths to build the nation. In India, almost 27% of the population has consisted of children up to 12 years of age. But India is facing several health challenges every day. Especially, related to the child’s health. And yet, most of the child health issues are unaddressed. The reason behind this is considered to be the lack of healthcare providers and pediatricians. However, the AddressHealth came forward to provide the best healthcare service to the children. In 2010, Dr. Anand Laxman set up AdressHealth to serve society. 

Backstory

In India, the various healthcare areas are fragmented from each other. Like dental health, nutrition and vision, etc. are rarely found in one place. Since these areas isolated, most people don’t take their children for all types of a medical check-ups. But two young doctors, Anand Lakshman and his fried A. Radhakrishnan took a big step to change this scenario. They always wanted to do something to ensure that every child attains a positive health state. Thus, Anand with his friend founded AddressHealth in 2010. 

Presently, this company is the largest school health provider in India. Also, it is recognized as India’s first one-stop-shop for Primary Paediatric Healthcare. It is a Bengaluru based start-up that is a pioneer in children’s primary healthcare services. 

School health program of AddressHealth

After one year of formation, the company launched the School health program. Earlier, it started in six schools covering health check-ups of about 4000 children. Basically, the program is an initiative to check the complete health of students. Under this program, they check vision, hearing ability, teeth, etc. In fact, it’s a complete medical examination of students from head-to-toe.

In addition, they have designed a curriculum for the student of class 1st to 5. This curriculum covers contents related to healthy behavior as per the age of students. Also, it provides information related to physical and mental behavior changes during the formative age. Presently, AddressHealth successfully providing this program in about 250 schools. 

AddressHealth’s Founders

Anand Lakshman

He is the co-founder of Addresshealth also, the current CEO of the company. After long service in the government’s public health program, he plunged into entrepreneurship in 2010. 

Education and Career

Anand went to Kendriya Vidyalaya for his secondary education. Thereafter, he completed M.B.B.S in medicine from Mysore medical college. Also, he attended the Tata institute of social science for post-graduation in Public Health Management. However, after that, he worked for several years on the public health program. During his career, he also worked in Micronutrient initiative. As well, served as an RNTCP medical consultant for the World Health Organization.

Anoop Radhakrishnan

He is a doctor turned entrepreneur to set up a new generation healthcare project. After graduating from IIM-Lucknow, Anoop set up consultancy familiar as IndigoEdge. But being a doctor, he always wanted to serve in his field. Therefore, he joined Anand to set up Addresshealth in 2010.  

Successes of AddressHealth

AddressHealth rise as a first Indian one-shop stop for primary child healthcare providers. In fact, the company is a pioneer in this field. Today, with its School health program, the company became the largest school health provider. Also, they run several Child Speciality Clinics. Recently, the company successfully completed 10 years of excellent healthcare service. However, it is conducting several projects for the complete medical examination of students from head-to-toe. The company’s School health program is aimed to increase school coverage in the future.

AddressHealth also awarded by Grand College Canada as “The Stars in Global Health-7”.

Pixabay Logo

The Journey of Pixabay Founders – Hans and Simon are helping the people to get Royalty-Free Images

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This digital age has become really about visuals. Getting good images for everything you put on the Internet is a must to catch the attention of the visitors. It has become a need for every content creator and entrepreneur. If you copy images from the internet, you might face a lot of complications if the real owners take an objection against you. There are several websites/apps available to give you royalty-free images. One of the most famous of such tools is Pixabay. 

The Pixabay is an app and site that facilitates accessing and managing over 600k+ images and videos on users’ devices. The community on this app has user-donated copyright and royalty-free images that can be used by anyone without credit. 

How Pixabay Came Into Picture?

Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger started their first web project called pagewizz.com where people can write articles/blogs on different topics with related images. They found that many users put copyrighted images from Google and that’s how they got an idea to launch Pixabay.com to give free images to their users. 

As it was created with the intention of providing quality images to people for their blogs, and other types of content without worrying about the copyrights, it gained popularity rapidly. Also, it provides a great platform for professionals and laypersons to share their work with the community. They get all the deserved praises and recognition from the other users.

Founders

Hans Braxmeier, Co-Founder and CEO of Pixabay

Hans Braxmeier is currently living in Switzerland. He studied computer science in Ulm (Germany) and did some web projects initially. He is personally interested in photography and that’s how he made his passion out of it. Hans is also interested in various new technologies. In fact, he is really fascinated with the new cameras being launched nowadays. 

Hans Braxmeier
Image Source: Google Images

To keep himself engaged and creative, he prefers learning something new every day. He thinks that a day should have more than 24 hours so that he will get more time to learn new things. 

His own interest in photography made him work for Pixabay passionately. He loves to be outside and shoot everything he sees in his surroundings. Hans’s profile on Pixabay is an example of how creative he is. His profile is full of landscapes, artistic images, and natural snaps. 

He specifically had no mentor in his overall journey. His main source of learning new things was always the internet. With his projects, he learned the most.

Simon Steinberger, Co-Founder, CEO of Pixabay

Simon Steinberger is Hans’s partner in launching Pixabay.com. He studied chemistry in the same university in which Hans studied (Ulm, Germany) and finished his Ph.D. in 2011. In this span, he started working in the IT sector and developed various websites. Other than this interest, he enjoys rock climbing, mountain biking, and some adventurous fun. 

Simon Steinberger
Image Source: Google

Simon thinks that the best motivation for growing Pixabay day by day is how useful it is getting for users all over the world. His view of photography is quite different than Hans. He believes that photography is a really special art and they get very diversified results in Pixabay. People all over the world put up their images on the site and it amazes him a lot. He is also fascinated by the new generation cameras and their features which help their users create amazing images. 

His main focus is Pixabay but he is also working on some mobile apps for iOS and Android. 

Unlike Hans, Simon has an idol, Mark Zuckerberg. He thinks Mark is passionate about what he is doing than the money he is getting. That’s how Simon sees himself and Hans.

Simon likes the fact that he is free to do whatever he wants with this career choice and that’s what he likes the most about his job.

Bottom Line

Hans and Simon give major goals about how small projects can grow if they help people in the right way. Pixabay is helping a lot of people in creating amazing blogs and sites with no worries for the attribution.

Coinbase Logo

Applications Of Cryptoassets Led Coinbase To The Unicorn Club

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We talk about a new era of technology where the Internet has made our lives pretty easier. The modern technologies and types of equipment have been beneficial to our medical, educational and industrial systems as well. But, it is high time we put a little attention to our financial system.

The world is changing but the subject, that is, mankind is constant. Since time immemorial humans have improvised the world. Speaking of the modernization in our financial system, the major population is not familiar with the concept of cryptoassets.

Defining cryptoassets is similar to introducing one to a whole new financial world. They are nothing but digital assets with the implementation of cryptographic techniques. There are no central parties to monitor any transaction. Coinbase is a company based on such digital assets which made billions over the span of seven years.

Coinbase

Currently, Coinbase is the United Nation’s largest crypto assets exchange. In June 2012, Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam founded the company. Within five years the company hit annual revenue of $ 1 billion. The company’s headquarters is based in San Francisco California.

The main products of Coinbase are Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum and exchange of digital assets. The bitcoin transaction of Coinbase takes place in more than 190 countries worldwide.

Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong
Image Sorce: Google

Brian Armstrong completed both his Bachelor’s and Masters from Rice University. While he was an undergraduate student in Computer Science he worked as an intern for IBM. He also worked at Deloitte & Touch for five months.

In August 2003, Brian co-founded UniversityTutor.com and in 2011 he joined Airbnb.com as a software engineer. He resigned when he decided to build Coinbase.

Fred Ehrsam

Fred went to Duke University and has a B.S degree in both Computer Science and Economics. He also carried research on Self-assembling DNA Nanostructures from Duke University.

Fred Ehrsam
Image source – Google

He started off his career as a Trader on GoldmanSachs and worked there for a couple of years. In 2012, he co-founded Coinbase with Brian Armstrong and now serves as the Board of Directors. Fred also co-founded Paradigm in June 2018. He also appeared in Forbes 30 Under 30.

Early History

Back in June 2012, Ben Reeves, co-founder of Blockchain.info was also a part of the founding team of Coinbase. But, due to mismatching of future plans, he left shortly. The company wasn’t in its full form back then. After it participated in the Y Combinator startup incubator program it finally started providing services from October 2012.

Initially, the company launched the service buying and selling bitcoin but who knew it would be a scope of investment in the near future. Once the company sees through it never really had to turn back.

Investments, Growth, and Expansion

The company’s Series A round took place in May 2013. Coinbase raised a funding of $5 million from venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. After a few months, the company again received a funding of $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital.

The next year Coinbase hit a million users. It also implemented a lot of new things in their systems. Some of them were a vault system for secure bitcoin storage and secured insurance for the bitcoin stored in the company’s server.

In 2015, the company received a funding of $75 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New York Stock Exchange, etc. 2017 was a big year for Coinbase as it received the BitLicense. The company was given legal permission to trade in Ethereum and Litecoin. On 5th April 2018, the company formed Coinbase Ventures to invest in companies with similar grounds of interest.

Coinbase Ventures made its first investment on May 20 on Compound Labs.

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Coinbase made its first acquisitions in 2014. It acquired Blockr, blockchain explorer service and Kippt, a web bookmarking company. In the same year, the company came into joint ventures with Overstock, Dell, Expedia, etc. The company also made a deal with PayPal, Braintree and, Stripe which allowed users bitcoin payment.

Recently, Coinbase has acquired a company called Neutrino. The company was acquired for an undisclosed amount. A lot of questions have been coming up since then. Some information came up regarding Neutrino’s founders having a connection with the Hacking Team. Hacking Team is a Milan based company that sells information to the government and clearly has a poor human rights record.

In August 2019, the company announced a hacking attack. A questionable acquisition followed by a hacking attack has clearly put the users in a dilemma. But, Coinbase declared that nothing was compromised and everything is secure.

Kraken-logo

Kraken, One Of The World’s Oldest And Largest Cryptocurrency Exchanges

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With the arrival of the twenty-first century, everything around us has been transforming at light speed. The progress in every field is astounding. With every nation striving hard to build a fantastic economy, the founders of digital currency exchanges are raising a toast.

The digital currency has shown a whole new side of a financial system. It is not only for transferring assets but cryptocurrency provides a huge opportunity for investment. The value of crypto assets has been increasing with every passing day. And, speaking of digital currency the companies transferring and trading with such assets are becoming billionaires.

Kraken is one such digital currency company based in San Francisco, California. In July 2011, Jesse Powell established the company.

Jesse Powell

Jesse Powell completed his education from California State University-Sacramento. He is a well-known entrepreneur who did more than just founding Kraken.

Jesse Powell Kraken
Image Source: Google

His entrepreneurial life started with co-founding Lewt, Inc in 2001. In July 2006, he co-founded Internet Ventures & Holdings and also served as the CEO. He founded Verge Gallery and Studio Project in June 2007. This start-up of Jesse gave a lot of opportunities to the potential artists out there. It ale became Sacramento’s largest commercial fine arts gallery.

Jesse seems to have a soft corner for arts. In April 2010, he co-founded Verge Center for the Arts and after a year he co-founded Kraken.

The Beginning

Mt. Gox was the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. In 2010, Jed McCaleb founded the company. It was just a year before Kraken came up. But, who knew that the world’s leading digital currency platform would go out of business within four years.

In 2011, when Jesse started working on Kraken he suspected the downfall of the company. And, it happened in 2014. A company that carried out 70% of the world’s bitcoin transaction suddenly went bankrupt. Today, the company is still struggling hard to get back on track.

This was the golden hour for Kraken. Jesse worked on his company for two long years. And, after several tests and developments, Jesse launched Kraken in September 2013. The platform initially allowed exchange via bitcoin, Litecoin and euro trades.

Jaw-dropping Success

In July 2013, Kraken became a part of the Digital Asset Transfer Authority (DATA). The company’s trade began escalating since the very year of its launching. It came into a partnership with Fidor bank.

The company’s funding started in 2014 with a massive amount of $5 million in Series A funding. The funding round was led by Hummingbird Ventures. Just a year after its formation, Kraken became the first-ever digital currency exchange to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal.

In May 2015, Kraken launched the beta version of margin trading and later that year it opened the dark pool.

Expansion

In 2016, Kraken expanded its service to thirty-seven other states of the U.S. and all Canadian residents. In the same year, Kraken came into a joint venture with SynpasePay and Vogogo. Kraken completed its Series B funding this year. SBI Investment led the investment round.

Kraken acquired CleverCoin and Glidera in the same year. 2016 proved to be a very vital year of Kraken. Though it expanded gigantically the alleged crimes pulled down its face value.

The Turmoil

In July 2016, news spread out through media about the stolen funds of Kraken. Tension grew among customers when they heard accounts were compromised as well. The investigation went on for one long month. And, finally, the FBI informed that Kraken was safe and no such attack took place.

It took time for Kraken to build up the reputation. Because no matter a company has been under serious threats or attacks, once the word goes out it tends to fall apart.

Present Day

It is a platform that allows both the exchange of digital currency and exchange between digital currencies and normal currency like USD.

In March 2017, they acquired both Cryptowatch and its founder. Kraken also witnessed 50,000 new users signing up every day.

In April 2018, Kraken put an end to its business in Japan. The company announced that after four years of doing business in Japan suddenly the expenses started rising and they have to cease the business.

In February 2019, company received $100 million at a valuation of $4 billion. Though the company is making pocket-full for itself investigation continues.

AT&T

Randall L. Stephenson – A Dazzling Star In The World Of Telecommunication

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High-speed Internet is a very important part of our world. For the past two decades, everything is getting better and faster. Development throughout the world has been growing exponentially. CEO’s like Randall L. Stephenson helps the companies to grow and take the company to the next level.

But, it’s human nature to look beyond. The sheer curiosity and passion are what drives mankind to learn and discover more. With the establishment of fast-growing technology and efficient network, speed has become a very important factor. It has been just a couple of years that we settled with the 4G speed that 5G is paving its way.

Telecommunication Companies

The multinational telecommunication conglomerates are working for faster networks. Mass media, telecommunication, and technology together can create the strongest devices for transport and communication.

AT&T is one of the greatest companies of all time for telecommunication. And, Randall L. Stephenson being the current Chairman and CEO of the company is one of the powerful men in the industry. He acquired this position in May 2007.

Who is Randall L. Stephenson?

Randall started his career in 1982. Over the years, he has become a true leader serving the world with faster Internet and much more. AT&T has grown significantly under his leadership and made the greatest acquisitions.

AT&T CEO
Image Source – Google

He believes in competing. According to Randall, competitions help fetch the best quality products faster.

Early Career

Randall completed his Master’s from the University of Oklahoma. His career started with the company, Southwestern Bell Telephone. He served the company for a good long time.

When he started working for the company in 1982 he got a job in the IT sector. Over the years he did well in the finance sector and got a chance to work abroad. Randall fled to Mexico for his job and there he received training from Carlos Slim, one of the richest and most successful Mexican businessmen.

In 2001, Randall became the chief financial officer of SBC (Southwestern Bell Corporation). By the next couple of years, he helped the company coming out of debt worth $30 billion. In 2004, Randall got promoted as the Chief Operating Officer of the company. Before this post, Randall played his role as the chairman of the Board of Directors for Cingular Wireless.

The Great Success

Though Randall was doing great at the very beginning of his career, the real deal came in 2005. This year, SBC acquired AT&T and Randall continued in the company as COO. SBC changed its name to AT&T after the acquisition and in 2007 Randall became the CEO of the company.

The story doesn’t end here. Randall also became the Chairman of the Business Roundtable in 2014. He continued this position for a couple of years.

AT&T

Bell Telephone Company and AT&T are correlated and their history dates back to 1877. The founder of the Bell Telephone Company is Alexander Graham Bell. Southwestern Bell Telephone Company was a subsidiary of Bell Telephone Company.

All the subsidiaries and the former parent company merged in 2005. And the newly formed company changed its name to AT&T. The company also acquired Cingular Wireless and renamed it as AT&T Mobility.

AT&T’s Growth after 2007

Randall’s leadership changed the face of the company forever.

In 2013, the company decided to expand to Latin America through a partnership with America Mobil. The next year AT&T acquired Iusacell (Mexican carrier) and NII Holdings (Mexican Wireless Business). The two companies were merged and named as AT&T Mexico.

In July 2015, the company acquired DirecTV for $48.5 billion and in October 2016 Time Warner for $108.7 billion. These are the two biggest acquisitions in the history of the company.

The biggest news for AT&T came in 2017. It became the largest telecommunication company around the world and also the largest provider of the mobile telephone.

Criticism

Randall faced a lot of difficulties and hard situations after the acquisition of Time Warner. In September 2019, Elliott Management published a letter questioning the position of Randall in AT&T. Elliott made some suggestions regarding the company and Randall stepping down from his position was one of them. This situation has not been a friendly one for the company’s reputation.

Fighting Social Drawbacks

Randall is a great social influencer who promotes anti-racism. He gave a speech about how it is affecting our society and pulling us back from the true sense of development. Randall is a person who deeply believes in equality and preaches the same.

SanDisk

Sanjay Mehrotra: Never-Ending Journey For A Better Digital World of SanDisk Founder

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There are many persons who believe in innovations. Although, very few of them are responsible to make that happen. But the persons, who dare to transfer those inventions from lab to daily use, make the world a better place. So, they set their name in the list of influencing entrepreneurs. Sanjay Mehrotra is one of them, who not only believes in innovation but also devoted himself to deliver a better one. He is the co-founder and former CEO of SanDisk that replaces hard disk drives with flash memory in the 19th century.

Image Source – Google

At present, he is the CEO of Micron Technology, which is one of the leading memory storage devices manufacturers. It has been never easy to climb the ladder of success. Yet, it is inspiring to know the untold journey of Sanjay Mehrotra.

Early life

He was born on 27th June 1958 in Kanpur, India. Sanjay spent his childhood days in the same city. Thereafter, the Mehrotra family shifted to Delhi due to his father’s work. He went to Delhi school for primary education. Also, at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya he completed secondary schooling.

UG course at the University of California

When the students were dreaming of post-graduation in foreign. At that time, Sanjay’s father inspired him for UG in a foreign country. BITS Pilani was well known for collaboration with international Universities. So, he took admission for UG program, in the hope of future chance to go abroad. He completed two years of Electrical engineering in Bits Pilani, and then the day came.

He grabbed the opportunity to study the remaining UG course at the University of California, Berkeley. Reaching there was not a cakewalk. At first, his visa got denied three times. But his father’s support and his ambitions do not let him stop. They had to request multiple times and countless meetings to the Indian US embassy. Finally, he got the passport and flight landed at the destination.

Earlier achievements

He applied for a master’s degree, at the same University as a UG program. During his master’s program, he worked on Integrated circuits. But his interest was more towards designing. Hence, he could not stop himself from discovering non-volatile memory design.

Sanjay named more than 70 patents. Also, he presented research papers on the Flash memory system and non-volatile memory design.

He joined Intel Corporation as a Non-Volatile design engineer in 1980. It was the opportunity to explore his area of interest in non-volatile memory design more.

What happens when one Indian, one Chinese, and one person from Israel meet? No idea. Well, when these three persons met, they founded SanDisk; that too in one different country.

Boom of SanDisk

In 1988, Sanjay Mehrotra, Eli Harari, and Jack Yuan started a small company in Silicon Valley. Initially, they wanted to replace hard disk drives with their flash solid-state drives (SSD). To achieve this, they designed the first flash-based SSD mounted in a 2.5inch hard drive for IBM. Though it was of only 20MB capacity, it was a great move to install the technology which was at the experimental state at that time.

The first product of SanDisk traded out for $1000. After that, they changed their products according to market needs. SanDisk boomed the digital industry with its first mega-market sale of open standard digital films.

The Journey Continues

In the year 2011, Sanjay Mehrotra acquired the position as CEO. Under his policies, the company gained most of the electronics market. In fact, in 2012 SanDisk was the third-highest among other consumer electronics companies.

In recent years, SanDisk working on SSD for cloud computing. Also, they produce more than 2 million USB flash drivers per day. In 2017, Sanjay Mehrotra assigned as the new Chief executive officer of Micron Inc. Also, he is the onboard member of SanDisk.