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Unity Technologies

Unity Technologies Co-founder, David Helgason, Teaches Us ‘Never Give Up’

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In the past fifty years, the video game industry has evolved tremendously, and an infinite number of video game developers are currently contributing to the very field in their own way. David Helgason is one such developer, who along with Nicholas Francis and Joachim Ante, created a gaming engine that is used by half of the active game developers in the world, under the name of their company Unity Technologies. Unity Technologies is one of the biggest video game software development companies which are responsible for the development of most popular video games running today.

Early Life

David Helgason was born and brought up in Iceland. After spending the first ten years of his life in Iceland, he moved to Denmark with his mother. He was a little kid when his mother brought him a computer. As soon he got his hands on the computer, he grew an interest in learning more about it. Once after breaking the computer, he tried to fix it and got some video games to play on it. He even started learning programming languages, so that he could build games on the computer.

He spent a whole 22 years in Denmark, and from education to his first job, he did all there. Though he never got a degree from the university, as he dropped out of university at least four times, and studied different subjects every single time, including psychology, physics, computer science, Arabic, and middle eastern studies.

Unity Technologies founders
Image Source: globenewswire.com

Founding Unity Technologies & Initial Struggling Years

Helgason was never sure of what he wanted to do in future, except becoming a scholar. But studies did not interest him, and after dropping out for four times from the university, he finally thought of starting a software development company.

In the year 2000, he started Over the Edge Entertainment (later rebranded as Unity Technologies) with his friends Nicholas Francis and Joachim Ante, inside a basement. To pay the rent and the taxes, all three were working part-time in restaurants and coffees shops.

The three friends had started the business but without a business plan. So they had nothing to do better than sticking along. So for a long time, they were doing some consulting projects and other non-technical jobs to support their company. The three finally launched their first game, GooBall, in 2005, and the bizarre thing about the game was that it only supported Mac. This way, the first project of the company failed badly.

The Rise of Unity Technologies

But this failure brought the three into the light, and they started working on another project. This time, they added support for Windows PCs and Web browsers. They also shifted their focus from developing games to developing a gaming engine. They aimed at creating a gaming engine that could ease out the process of development of 2D and 3D interactive content.

In 2006, the co-inventors participated in the Apple Design Awards and were the runner-up for Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics. In the next year, with the release of the iPhone, the company started working on adding the support for the iPhone in the engine. In 2008, they released the new version of the engine that supported iPhone games, becoming the first gaming engine to do so. This made the engine popular among the people. The company started developing support for mobile games and began to grow at a faster rate.

In 2008, Cartoon Network used the Unity engine to create FusionFall. FusionFall is an MMORPG for kids and has been played by 8 million people. In the following years, other big names like Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Ubisoft, also used the same engine for their projects.

In 2010, the company launched the Unity Asset Store, and in 2012, Unity Technologies acquired the animation company Mecanim. The next year, the company recorded 1 million registered developers, the 50 per cent of the total game developers of the world. Facebook also added Unity engine to its platform, in 2013,

The Fundraiser

By 2016, Unity Technologies had earned more than 5.5 million registered users. The same year the company raised a $181 million round of funding making the company valued at approximately $1.5 billion, and in another round of funding in the next year, the company raised $400 million that valued the company at $2.8 billion. In 2018, with $145 million raised in another funding valued the company at $3 billion.

In the year 2017, the company released the Unity 2017 version and partnered with Google to develop augmented reality tools for Android devices and apps on ARCore. The two companies also joined their hands to offer online game development on Google Cloud. Unity Technologies also started working with DeepMind, an Alphabet subsidiary, to develop a virtual world artificial intelligence.

Unity Technologies Expansion

Today, the Unity engine is also used in various other fields other than game development, including film, television and automotive. Since its inception, the company has acquired much other game development and media companies, including Digital Monarch Media (2018), Vivox (2019), Applifier (2014) and Multiplay (2017).

As of 2018, the company has hired more than 2000 employees and has established its offices in various parts of North America, Europe and Asia. John Riccitiello replaced Helgason as the CEO of the company in 2014. Since then, Helgason has been working as a member of the board of the company and has moved to Copenhagen. He has also spoken as a motivational speaker at many events, such as TechBBQ, Copenhagen Tech Festival, Techfestival.se, Tech Open Air Berlin, Slush, etc.

Revolut

Nikolay Storonsky : Founder of Revolut, the Amazon of Banking

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No one better than a traveller would know the worth of every single cent as he/she has to pay an extra fee on the exchange of currency when crossing borders. This is not only the problem of a traveller but many others, who need to get their currencies exchanged, and that too, over different exchange fees. Would it not be better if we get a personalised and accurate platform that would help us with the foreign spendings and the currency exchanges, so that the whole process remains transparent, and we always pay the right amount?

Nikolay Storonsky, a British-Russian entrepreneur, went through the same problem, every time he planned vacations out of the country. But, in the end, he came up with Revolut. Revolut is a banking app that helps you with your finances and spendings across the globe.

Early Life

Nikolay Storonsky was born on 21 July 1984 in Moscow, USSR, to Nikolay Mironovich Storonsky. His father is the Deputy General Director of Science for Gazprom Promgaz, Russia.

Nikolay Storonsky
Image SOurce: vixc.com

Storonsky, after completing his school education from a public school, joined the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he completed a master’s degree in Physics. During his time at the university, he also participated in various swimming competitions and became a state-level swimming champion. Later, he went to the New Economic School in Moscow, where he completed another master’s degree in economics.

Storonsky started his career as a trader and worked for Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers.

Founding Revolut

Storonsky loved travelling and even went abroad for small trips. But every time he went out of the country, he faced issues with the currency exchange and their hiked fees. This annoyed Storonsky a lot and wanted to find a better solution for the same.

After a lot of searching and brainstorming, Storonsky reached to a conclusion that he should develop a system that could help people with their finances. So, along with Vlad Yatsenko, and with the help of former Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank developer, he started working on Revolut.

In the beginning, he raised a $3.5 million for the startup and launched Revolut as an exchange platform on 1 July 2015. The new and convenient concept of Revolut helped it reach more people and make other investors interested in it. In the next two years, the company raised $71 and valued at $350 million. The company also added some other financial services to the platform like cryptocurrency exchange, peer-to-peer payments and pre-paid debit card, etc.

In 2018, the Revolut raised a $250 million in another round of funding, led by Hong Kong-based DST Global. The company became a unicorn and valued $1.7 billion after the round of funding. The same year, the company was able to get the Specialised Bank licence from European Central Bank and an Electronic Money Institution licence, both facilitated by the Bank of Lithuania.

This way, the company is allowed to accept deposits from the consumers and offer them credits. But since it has the Specialised License, it cannot process the investments from the consumers.

Further Expansion

Revolut is one of the fastest-growing fintech, and as of February 2019, it has earned over 4 million users out of which half of them uses the Revolut debit card. The Revolut app offers withdrawal of around 120 currencies through ATMs, and around 29 currencies can be sent to people directly using the app. The app also supports the exchange of cryptocurrency with 20 different fiat currencies. The cryptocurrencies that the app support includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and XRP, etc. The app has its own wallet that can be used to make online payments.

The app had been developed to help people cut the extra fees they pay on exchanges, so the app provides a minimal or no fee for all of its services.

The company headquarters is based in London, United Kingdom, and Nikolay Storonsky is serving the company as the CEO. Currently, 600+ people are working for Revolut. The net worth of Storonsky is estimated to be $510 million.

Awards and Recognition

Revolut has been ranked number three in the LinkedIn Top Companies (UK Startups) list in 2018. It has been also awarded the Top 10 Employed Brand (UK) by Hired in the same year. Revolut won the award of Hottest Fintech Startup 2018 by Europa Awards and Innovator of the Year 2018 by Amazon Growing Business Awards. It was also named the Fintech Company of the Year 2018 by CityAM Awards.

For now, Storonsky is working hard and wants to extend the scope of Revolut services to other countries as well.

roblox

David Baszucki : Founder of Roblox, the Biggest Video Game Building Platform

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Video games are the best way to pass time and also good for some brain exercises. But it takes a lot of efforts to create a video game as it is quite a complex task. But what if there be a platform that helps the keen developers to create those video games in some simpler steps? It would be great, Right? Roblox is such a platform that allows its users to design their games, and even play games created by other developers. The platform not only is helping people create their own games, but also establish themselves as tech entrepreneurs. Roblox was founded by American internet entrepreneur David Baszucki in 2006.

Early Life

Baszucki was born on 20 January 1963 in Canada. He completed his high school education from Eden Prairie High School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. He was an active participant in the extracurriculars of his school and was the head of the quiz team of the school. Later, he joined Stanford University, where he studied engineering and computer science. He then graduated as the General Motors Scholar in electrical engineering in 1985.

Career

Baszucki was always into starting up his own business, so only after four years from his graduation, along with his brother, he founded ‘Knowledge Revolution’ in 1989. Knowledge Revolution produced educational applications for Macintosh users. The first product of the Knowledge Revolution was Interactive Physics, an application that helped users learn Physics. The platform simulated a 2D environment where the users could carry out Physics experiments.

Roblox founder David Baszucki
Image Source: bizjournals.com

The next year, the company released ‘Working Model’, another application that helped users learn mechanical physics. After building various educational applications, MSC Software, a California based company acquired Knowledge Revolution in 1998.

After the acquisition, Baszucki joined MSC Software as Vice President and the General Manager in 2000. After working for two years in the company, he left the job to start an investment firm named Baszucki & Associates. He even hosted a radio show named KSCO Radio Santa Cruz from February to July 2003.

Founding Roblox

Baszucki was inspired by the success of the Knowledge Revolution, and how popular Interactive Physics had become among the young kids. This led him to start working on a new project in 2004 that would also involve its users in the development work. Baszucki started working on a new project and founded DynaBlocks with Erik Cassel.

Later in 2005, the company was rebranded as Roblox. The official launch of the company and its website took place in 2006. The company produced a creation engine named Roblox Studio that allowed people to create their games and experiences on the platform. The users could also play games created by other developers on the platform. In 2007, the company released a premium membership, i.e. Builders Club, that offered extra features to the subscribers.

The platform became a place to learn and create codes for the teenagers, and it received maximum engagement form the children under the age of 13. In 2009, the company raised a $2.2 million in crowdfunding, and it raised a $4 million in the second round of funding in 2011. In the same year, the company hosted Hack Week, an event for the developers where these developers could present some out-of-the-box ideas.

The company has launched its own virtual currency named Robux, that players use to buy games on the platform.

In December 2012, Roblox released an iOS version of the platform, and in the next year, the company developed a currency exchanging platform, Developer Exchange system, using which the developers could exchange their Robux virtual currency with real-time currency.

In 2015, Roblox then released a new and revamped feature for the game development, ‘Smooth Terrain’, that offered, even smoother game development. The next year, the company also introduced Roblox VR for Oculus Rift that could be used for playing over ten million 3D games available on the platform. Roblox also released a Windows 10 compatible version of Roblox in the same year.

The company even raised a huge sum of $92 million in another funding round led by Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures in March 2017.

In 2017, there was a total of 2 million Roblox developers on the platform, and it had over 56 million monthly active players. The collective earning of this year was calculated to be $30 million. The platform has helped many teenagers to make some money for their expenses, many of which have also paid for their college fee with the same money. Developers are even making $50,000 a month through Roblox.

Roblox is one of America’s fastest-growing companies, and it also received the same title from Inc. 5000 in 2016 and 2017. It was also awarded the ‘Economic Development Association (SAMCEDA) Award of Excellence’ in 2017.

Baszucki also received various awards and accolades for his invention, including the ‘San Mateo Visionary Hero Award’ for Roblox’s contributions to education and encouraging kids to code (2015). He was also named as one of ‘100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs’ by Goldman Sachs (2017-18). He has over 15 patents in his name.

blogger

Evan Williams : The Man Behind Major Startups Including Blogger, Twitter, and Medium

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Entrepreneurship demands skills and experience, but for some people, it comes all by birth. They do not need much experience, instead, their passion helps them to reach their goals. One such name is Evan Williams, who is the founder of the biggest blogging websites, Blogger and Medium. He has also co-founded some other ventures and is one of the co-inventors of the largest micro-blogging website, Twitter. From a part-time farmer to an internet entrepreneur, Williams’ story, definitely, includes motivation for people.

Early Life

Evan Williams was born as Evan Clark Williams on March 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska, to Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. His family was into farming, so he also worked in the farms in the summer holidays as help. After completing high school from a local government school, Williams joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also became a member of the FarmHouse Fraternity. But as he was more into starting his own business and making a career, he left college only after a year and a half.

Career

Blogger co-founder Evan Williams
Image Source: wefornews.com

Looking for a better work opportunity, Williams ended up working with a few startup companies based in various parts of Florida, Texas, and Austin. Later, he moved to Sebastopol, California, to join the marketing team of O’Reilly Media. While working at O’Reilly, he switched to the coding department of the company. He was successful in learning the required skills and developed a personal blog website EvHead.com. Eventually, he left the job to become a freelance coder. As a freelancer, he worked with companies, like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Founding Blogger

Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs. The aim behind founding the company was to create management software for businesses. The first product that the company produced was a web application named ‘Pyra’, which included a project manager, contact manager, and a to-do list.

I999, they used the elements of ‘Pyra’ and created a blog-publishing tool named Blogger. It was officially launched in August in the same year. The platform was entirely free, so it faced a lot of trouble to survive. But soon, when it started getting ads, it began to stabilise. Soon Williams added some premium features to the platform, to monetise it. Hourihan left the company just after a few years of the inception of the company.

In February 2003, Google acquired PyraLabs, and eventually, Blogger. With the acquisition, the premium features of Blogger also became free to use. Williams continued to work with Google for one year after the takeover and left the company in 2004.

With Google, Blogger got new redesigns every few years and became the number one blogging platform. Blogger has provided its users with the freedom to create blogs for free. It provides the users to create beautiful looking designs for their blogs, and also, buy a separate domain to host their blogs as a distinct channel.

After PyraLabs: Obvious Corporation, Twitter, Medium

After PyraLabs, Williams went on to found Odeo, a podcast company, in October 2004. Sonic Mountain later acquired the company in 2007. He also co-founded Obvious Corporation in late 2006.

The famous micro-blogging website, Twitter, was one of the various projects that Williams co-worked on along with other key members of Obvious Corporation. Later April in 2007, Twitter was spun off to become a separate company. Williams held the position of the CEO of Twitter, the most successful venture he has worked on, in 2008. After serving the company for two years, Williams stepped down as the CEO to focus entirely on product development. Williams holds around 30-35 per cent stake in Twitter.

After Twitter, Williams wanted to develop a platform that would provide the users with an increased character-limit to write their blogs, as in the beginning, Twitter allowed writing 140- characters. So, in 2012, he founded Medium. Initially, it was only open to the early adopters, but later, it was opened for public.

In the first two years of its inception, the platform did not have much of users, but by March 2015, the platform recorded over 1.5 million hours reading time by its visitors. The company hired a staff of writers and editors to put good content over the platform. In 2015, the platform was nominated for the National Magazine Award.

In May 2017, Medium.com had gained an average of over 60 million unique monthly readers. By this time, the company started paying the writers based on the likes and the number of readers their posts had on Medium. Williams added ad banners to the platform, such that to make some profits through ads, but this business model did not work for the company, and he had to remove those ads from the platform.

Personal Life

William is married to Sara Williams and has two children. He lives in San Francisco with his family. He has a net worth higher than $1 billion.

William got his name under the list of top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 in the MIT Technology Review TR100, in 2003. In the next year, he was named “People of the Year” along with his partners Hourihan and Paul Bausch in one of the PC Magazines.

Toshiba

Toshiba : An Uproarious Success Story of a Brand in the World of Electronics

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Gone are the days, when mankind still managed to survive without the help of high tech equipment and power systems. Life in the 21st century would have been vulnerable if we didn’t have access to communication equipment to transfer signals, medical equipment to carry out surgeries, and most importantly, power systems to fuel up the machines. And, amongst the growing advancement in electronic products, Toshiba, a Japanese multinational corporation, has sailed the world through a wave of premiere wide-ranging devices, starting from household appliances to social infrastructure systems. The company has its headquarters based in Tokyo, Japan, with a robust number of subsidiaries.

The First Step, Tanaka Engineering Works

In 1873, Hisashige Tanaka, a renowned engineer of that time, was given the charge to build a telegraphic equipment to enhance the development in Japan. This contract led him to establish Tanaka Seisakusho (Tanaka Engineering Works), in 1875, the first Japanese company to build telegraphic equipment. The company also produced various electrical devices like switches for the communication systems. The company, later, came under the control of Tanaka’s adopted son.

On the other side, Japan still didn’t have enough technology to build its own electric lamps. But, in 1878, Ichisuke Fujioka, a student of Imperial College of Engineering, under the guidance of Prof. William Ayrton built Japan’s first arc lamp. He also built Japan’s first power generator with the help of Miyoshi Shoichi, a worker from Tanaka Seisakusho. Thus, in 1890, Hakunetsu-Sha Co., Ltd was established by Fujioka to produce light bulbs.

The Growth

Toshiba Headquarters Japan
Image Source: wikimedia.org

After the death of Tanaka in 1881, Tanaka Seisakusho was partly acquired by General Electric, followed by the acquisition of the company by Mitsui Bank in 1893, renaming it as Shibaura Seisakusho. Both the companies, Shibaura Seisakusho and Hakunetsu-Sha Co Ltd, were at their best phase when the Great Kanto earthquake hit the city and took away a lot of lives. A lot of employees of these two companies fall victim to this calamity, and hence, suffered a major loss.

During the 1930s, the government put a ban on the production of home appliances and shifted its interest to make war equipment. In 1939, Tokyo Denki (previously known as Hakunetsu-Sha) and Shibaura Seisakusho were merged to form Tokyo Shibaura Denki (now Toshiba) with General Electric Company holding 24% share.

The company expanded during the time of war, as it supplied military needs, radios and generators. During the postwar period, the company again started focusing on producing electrical and electronic equipment, and it expanded its business by exporting the machinery to Southeast Asia.

From the 1950s, Toshiba started growing exponentially and established a lot of industries. In 1984, the company was rebranded as Toshiba, replacing Tokyo Shibaura Denki. During the late 1990s, the company established further new firms, including Toshiba Music Industries, Toshiba International Corporation, Toshiba Electrical Equipment, Toshiba Chemical, and many more. The company was also responsible for developing some of Japan’s first electronics. The company built Japan’s first TAC digital computer followed by transistor television and microwave oven colour video phone, MRI system, DVD, and sub-notebook personal computer. These are some of the few inventions that helped the company pioneer the electronics industry.

2000-Today

To meet the growing demand in the North American market, Toshiba signed an agreement with Orion Electric in 2001 to supply TV and video products for the company. In 17th October 2006, Toshiba made one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of the company by acquiring Westinghouse Electric Company, the world’s largest nuclear power company for $5.4 billion. Toshiba had a 77% share of the company while The Shaw Group and Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy industries had 20% and 3% share, respectively. In January 2009, Toshiba bought the Hard Disk Drive business of Fujitsu.

On 16th May 2011, Toshiba announced the acquisition of Landis+Gyr for $2.3 billion, followed by the acquisition of IBM’s point-of-sale business $850 million. In December 2013, Toshiba established its own manufacturing unit in India after acquiring Vijai Electricals Limited Plant, Hyderabad, India. In January 2014, Toshiba acquired OCZ Storage Solutions, and in the same year, Toshiba and United Technologies came in a joint venture and expanded it outside Japan. Since then, Toshiba has acquired a lot of other companies, and even, faced many scandals. The company sold Westinghouse as it suffered a wide loss in 2017.

Currently, Toshiba produces one of the finest electronic products and services in the entire world and is getting stronger day by day. The company has around 140,000 employees as per the statistics of 2019. It believes in creating more efficient products in future and thrives for excellence.

Ethan Nicholas

Ethan Nicholas : From A Software Engineer to an Overnight Successful Game Developer

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In the programming world, which is already brimming with the tech experts and finest coders, only a few have achieved overnight success. Experience plays a vital role in the journey of a long-term accomplishment, but who knows when one can turn out to be a millionaire while just planning to earn some extra cash. Ethan Nicholas, a senior software engineer currently working at Google, developed a game with the sole purpose of earning some extra cash. But iShoot, the game he developed, turned out to be the biggest achievement of his life and brought him profit he never dreamt of.

Early Life

Nicholas started programming from the tender age of 8 and became a professional coder at the age of 16. He went to North Carolina State University and graduated in 1998. In June 1998, he joined GeoCities as a software engineer, but he shifted to Yahoo! only after a year and worked there as a lead developer. In July 2006, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked as a primary developer on the Java Kernel Project. And, while working for this company the idea of developing a game strike his mind, and he started learning objective C. Nicholas had to learn objective C so that he could start developing the game.

Development of iShoot

Ethan Nicholas
Image Source: wired.com

While he was working as a staff engineer in Sun Microsystems, he spent eight hours every day to develop iShoot. Since he didn’t know objective C and also didn’t have enough cash to afford the documentation he needed to learn it; he mastered it from various internet sources within six weeks followed by writing the code. Programming from an early age of 8, he was able to ace a whole different language very quickly.

Ethan Nicholas, in one of his interviews, mentioned that he was inspired by Steve Demeter, developer of Trism, a game that brought him overnight glory and became a connoisseur in the world of game development. In 19th October 2008, Nicholas launched iShoot, an artillery combat game which was available in Apple’s iPhone app store. The launch of iShoot changed his life dramatically by earning $37,000 in a single day.

He was still working at Sun Microsystems and decided to leave his job to work on the next version of the game. In January 2009, Nicholas left his job and founded the gaming software company, Naughty Bits, under which he launched the second version of the game. By then, he totally made up his mind to devote all his time to iPhone software development.

The Success of iShoot

Though many game and application developers release their apps on the Apple Store, the success of Ethan Nicholas was quite appreciable and unpredictable. Initially, when the app was launched in October the number of users was less than expected and to attract more of them, Nicholas created both paid and free (iShoot Lite) versions of the game. This hiked the selling of the app, and the game became ranked number 1 on the App Store, within a few months of its release.

The game also acquired the top spot on the Top Paid Apps list, witnessing minimum 10,000 downloads per day. The free app was downloaded around 2.4 million times and over 300,000 users bought the paid app. Revenue of $21,000 was confirmed for 10,000 downloads per day, which were partially the driving force for creating the second version of it. By early 2009, Nicholas had already bagged $800,000, which is a more than a decent amount.

He was pretty surprised about the success, the 6-weeks hard work brought to him. So, for the next version, he was ready to blow the minds of the users with better graphics and game strategies exposing more of his programming skills.

Apart From Being a Game Developer

While Nicholas focused on expanding Naughty Bits, he was also involved with other business tycoons to expand his influence on other fields.

In January 2010, he cofounded echoBase and served as the lead server engineer for four years. He developed software that was useful to the medical professionals to track patient’s data. He served as a software engineer at Oracle for eight months.

At present, apart from working at Google, he is developing a swift compiler in Apportable.