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Gill Shwed : The Israeli Inventor & the Pioneer of the Cybersecurity

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

Computer’s security has been the biggest issue, even if its a PC or a huge work station. Also, as the Internet is a vulnerable place, the data security has become a major concern. But thanks to those who have been working to maintain the cybersecurity, and are, continuously, providing proper protection from various threats and malware. One of such computer scientists, who are responsible for the basic computer security, is Gill Shwed. This Israeli software engineer is one of the extraordinary personalities who has a big share in the development of the cybersecurity and is considered as the inventor of the modern firewall.

Early Life

The 50 years old Israeli software engineer, Shwed, was born Jerusalem, Israel, in 1968. He was merely 13 when he grew interested in computer programming and started practising it. Being a bright student at the school, and having mastered computer programming at a young age, he was able to get enrolled at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study computer science, at the age of 15. When he got admission into the college, he was still in the high school.

Gill Shwed
Image Source: ifi.today

Career

After completing his education, Shwed joined the Israel Defense Forces and served the Intelligence Corps Unit 8200, where he worked on securing classified networks. Soon after completing the military service, he joined an Israeli startup company Optrotech, as a software developer.

Founding Check Point

In 1993, Shwed joined his hands with Marius Nacht and Shlomo Kramer, to found a computer software and hardware company, Check Point. Nacht was his colleague from Optrotech and Kramer was a friend from his military unit.

The foundation of Check Point was based on the core technology, the stateful inspection. The first product the company launched was the FireWall-1. It then developed the world’s first VPN, the VPN-1. The two products were inspired by Shwed’s work at the military.

Soon, Check Point raised its first round of funding from the BRM Group. Just the next year, in 1994, Sun Microsystems signed an OEM agreement with CheckPoint, and HP too signed the same agreement with the company in 1995. The same year, Check Point established its head office in Redwood City, California. In the following year, the company went public on NASDAQ and raised $67 million from its IPO.

Check Point and Nokia came together in 1998. The two companies bundled their software together, i.e. Check Point’s security software and Nokia’s Computer Network Security Appliances.

Check Point acquired many startups and companies, including Zone Labs (2003), Protect Data (2006), NFR security (2006), Nokia’s network security business unit (2009), Liquid Machines (2010), etc. In March 2018, Check Point along with SanDisk launched Check Point GO, a USB drive to turn a PC into a secure corporate desktop.

In 2016, the company’s revenue was estimated around US$1.741 billion and the net income at US$ 725 million. In the same year, total 3,500 employees were working in the company.

Personal Life

Shwed holds Israeli citizenship and lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2002, he got featured on the cover of the billionaire issue of Forbes. He has received a doctorate degree in Science from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in 2005. He was named in the list of world’s 100 top young leaders by the World Economic Forum’s Global Leader for Tomorrow. He became the first recipient of Israel Prize in technology.

Apart from programming and computing, Shwed has immense interest in cooking and photography.

Frank Wang : The Man Behind the Flight of Unmanned Drones

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Even the thought of flying gives us a sense of freedom. Flying means that we can see the world from another perspective, an open one, a wide one. But we cannot fly! Technology has been coping with everything we cannot do. The places where we lack, we take the help of technology to reach that potential. And so is the technology that DJI brings to you, to see the world from a perspective so different, the perspective of flying! And, the man behind the scenes of DJI, ‘Frank Wang’ shares a story so motivating.

SZ Da-Jiang Innovation, also known as DJI, is a drone manufacturing company. DJI manufactures unmanned, autonomous aerial vehicles, flight controllers, and the list goes on and on. At present, DJI is the largest drone-manufacturing company in the market, standing on top of the competition of drone companies.

Frank Wang
Image Source: Forbes

Frank Wang was born in 1980 as Wang Tao, in Hangzhou, China. His father was a small business owner and an engineer. During his childhood, Frank developed an interest in flying objects. He literally craved flying helicopters, and always begged his parents to buy him one. At 16, he finally received one, but the joy was short-lived because he crashed it in no time. He spent most of his youth reading about model aeroplanes and helicopters. His childhood dream was to build a flying robot that had a camera on it, and it could follow him anywhere he went. Over time, his interest in planes and helicopters kept growing.

Even having poor academic results, he was a genius when it came to helicopters and planes. He always intended to build a career in the flying field. But this setback of results landed him into East China Normal University, Shanghai, as top universities were out of range for him. In the university, he studied psychology. Further, he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

It was the Hong Kong University, where his life took a turn, and things got interesting. During his senior year, he designed a ‘helicopter-flight control system’, which was the part of a college project. He was granted HK$18000 (US$2300) by the university, to conduct research and develop a ‘drone helicopter’. He built a helicopter with the help of one of his professors. For that, he skipped classes, worked and studied day in day out and without even having a good sleep! He knew the importance of his project and worked so hard that he managed to make an unmanned helicopter. Wang’s hard work paid off, and the drone made its first flight by nearly reaching the top of the Mount Everest.

In 2006, Wang started DJI from his dorm room, which today, stands as the largest drone company all over the world, with it owing almost 70% of all the drones industry. In 2017, he became Asia’s youngest tech billionaire. According to a report from Forbes, in 2018, his worth stood a huge amount of US $5.4 billion. Frank holds 40% of the shares of DJI.
DJI reportedly had more than US$2 billion as sales, and during the valuation of the company, in 2018, it came out that the company raised more than US$15 billion. The headquarter of the company is located in Shenzhen, China and has its operating divisions in China, Hong Kong, Japan, North America and Europe. The company which started with an employee count of 4 has now more than 4000 employees in different countries.

DJI is famous for its UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and to be more precise, the ‘Phantom’ series. It manufactures devices like Camcorder, Camera stabilizers, flight platform gimbals, flight controls, etc.

The CEO and founder of SZ Da-Jiang Innovation (DJI), Frank Wang gives us the motivation that if we have the will, if we have the passion and the desire to work hard, we can achieve the dreams, even the ones that we saw as a child. Frank, achieved what he dreamt as a kid and puts an example in front of the whole world of what ‘true passion and hard work’ can do.

Mona Ataya : The Woman Who Revamped a Mother’s World And her Babies

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What is the toughest job on the planet? If you ask me, I would say a mother’s job is the toughest that stands today. Bringing up a human with qualities and personality is certainly difficult. Besides, every mother in the world wants the best for her little devil, be it outfits, education or anything else.

Shopping for kids is enervating these days. Considering the prices and the choices in the market, it is very difficult to pick out the best, for your little one. One has to look for the quality, the pricing and the service that is being provided to them. Well, put these three together, and you’ve got Mumzworld.

Mumzworld is an online site for baby shopping. Yes! A whole internet site that caters only baby needs. And the mastermind behind this, Mona Ataya, shares an inspiring story out with the world.

Mona Ataya
Image Source: arabianbusiness.com

Mona, the CEO and founder of Mumzworld, launched the startup site after taking into account the daily troubles and needs of mothers, that were being ignored by the market. She stepped up and launched the site, which is now the 1st and the largest online shopping site in the Middle East for mothers and their babies.

Mumzworld services in countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, and ships their products all over the world. Mumzworld has got everything related to babies and children. From diapers to clothes, feeding to toys, bathing needs to books and what not! It has also got a wide range of more than 1600 brands with big names such as Lego, Pampers, Fischer Price and Johnson&Johnson. Mumzworld promises the best price guarantee, free speedy delivery, easy returns and flexible payment options.

“A baby is the light of a mother’s eyes, and we at Mumzworld understand that every mum wants the best for her precious angel. In a remarkable breakthrough in online baby shopping, we present before you the most extensive range of baby and kids products that you could find in one place,” says the official site.

Mona started her career at Procter and Gamble (P&G) in the USA. Working there, she was involved in the soap sector. Then, after some time, she moved back to the Middle East and joined Johnson&Johnson. During her work period at Johnson’s, she launched many brands like Greiter Skin Care, ph5.5, Clean and Clear, and also, Johnson’s Suncare. She also relaunched some of the brands like Suncare and Piz Buin in Europe. In 2000, she left Johnson&Johnson and teamed up with her brother Rabea Ataya and co-founded Bayt (bayt.com), which today, is the leading job site in the Middle East and provides services all over the world to help people find the perfect jobs for them.

After becoming a mother to three boys, she turned to a full-time mother job. But this period brought difficulties for her. Soon, she began to discover gaps in the market, which could not satisfy the needs of a mother for her baby. But she wanted to tear down this inconvenience. So, in 2011 she came up with her 2nd startup, Mumzworld. She wanted to revolutionize the way mothers shop for their babies. Mumzworld had every indispensable for the need of a mother, which was also cost-effective. Since then, the site has been growing at a rapid pace. The site won many awards like ‘Small Business of The Year (2013)’, ‘Most Admired Online Retailer (2014)’, and ‘Customer Service Excellence Award’.

Mona, too, won many awards. She was listed in the ‘100 Most Powerful Arab Women’ in 2014 and 2015. She also got mentioned in ‘100 Most Powerful Arabs, next generation’.

“Endeavors have been fantastic. It has allowed us to meet and get support from super-super smart minds” quoted Mona, when enquired about the network of startups and businesses. She tips for new entrepreneurs, that in business world one has to keep on going and fundamentally believe their vision and what they are trying to achieve. ‘Being an entrepreneur is more of a mindset’ she says.

Mona says that her vision was and is to create a necessary online extension to a mother’s world. Mumzworld also keeps on enrolling itself into social initiatives, like giving out free meal vouchers and providing impoverished mothers with baby essentials.

She shares her daily routine as a typical work mom. Starting from taking her kids to school, then working in her office until her kids get free from school, and then ending it by putting all her kids to sleep by herself. She refers that the hardest job is of a full-time mother, and also that this fact cannot be denied. When asked about her inspiration, she said that her challenges were her inspirations alongside her children. Her challenges gave her the ultimate idea for success.

So, the CEO and founder of Mumzworld, Mona Ataya clearly gives us the light that even the hardships and challenges in our day-to-day life can leave life-changing impressions on us which leads our pathway to success. Mona undoubtedly is a role model and a great mentor to be followed.

Kenny A. Troutt : A Billionaire Who Once was Dirt Poor

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

A major Republican donor and the owner of the elite thoroughbred horse farm in Versailles, Kenny Trout is one of the richest persons in the world. The life of the American billionaire was never this easy. As a kid, he went through the financial struggle and worked hard to get at the position where he stands right now. In school, when his teacher questioned him that what he wanted to become in future, he did not know what career he would choose, but he surely knew that he wanted to become rich.

Early Life

Troutt was born in 1948 in Mount Vernon, Illinois, United States. His father worked as a bartender. He was the eldest of his three siblings. Troutt did his schooling from the Mt. Vernon Township High School, and later, graduated from the Southern Illinois University, in 1971. Belonging to a poor family, he always intended to overcome his family’s financial conditions and become rich. Due to the shortage of money, he started working at a very young age, to support his family and earn extra bucks. He even sold insurance to subsidise his studies while he was in college.

Kenny Troutt
Image source: dmagazine.com

Career

After completing his graduation, with continues hard work, he co-founded Excel, a long distance phone service, along with his business partner Steve Smith, in 1988. Smith’s interest in the network marketing business, helped the two to start the company, as he had found much more scope in the same. Just in nine years, the company had earned revenue in billion dollars. Excel became the fastest growing company in the U.S., even faster than Microsoft. In 1996, it went public in the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ECI, becoming the youngest company ever to join the NYSE.

In the month of June, the very next year, Excel acquired the Telco Communications Group, followed by a merger with Teleglobe, in November 1998. The merger between the two companies brought lots of fortune to the two co-founders of Excel. Troutt and Smith became billionaires overnight.

Troutt retired as CEO on September 20, 1999, and was replaced by Christina Gold. Currently, Troutt serves as the chairman of Mt. Vernon Investments.

Personal Life

Troutt is married to Lisa E. Copeland and has three children with her. The family lives in their 13000 square foot grand estate in Dallas Texas. At present, he owns a 2,400-acre thoroughbred horse breeding and racing farm in Versailles, Kentucky, named WinStar Farm. In 2014, his net worth was estimated to be approx. US$1.5 billion.

Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging

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Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.

Early Life

Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.

Early Career

After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.

winer
Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.

In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.

UserLand

The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”

In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.

During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.

By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.

DaveNet

In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.

Podcasting

Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.

Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.

In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.

Logan Green & John Zimmer; The Nice Guys of Ride-sharing

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“Follow your instinct,” you might have heard it several times from the mouths of the most successful entrepreneur across the world, but how many times it happened that you really did? Logan Green and John Zimmer, two young tech professionals, are among the ones, who went along with their gut feeling of starting an unusual business of sharing a car with strangers for the money. In the beginning, they were warned by many, that the business has higher chances of failing. But after almost ten years, the two are operating the same business, backed by biggest venture capitalists and making revenue in billions every coming year.

Logan Green was a native of California, where he attended the New Roads High School in Santa Monica. He received a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the college, he founded The Green Initiative Fund and was the youngest director for the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District.

As a child, Green used to ride with his parents in their car, and whenever he saw outside the car, he found more cars, with most of the times, only a single person riding it. The time he had to join the college, he left his car back at home, to try the other conventional means of transportation. At the same time, his girlfriend Eva was also transferred to a college in Los Angeles.

lyftfounders
Image source: riverfronttimes.com

In the time of three years of her college, Green continued to visit Eva on every weekend riding different transportations. He even asked Zipcar, a car-sharing program, to implant their cars at UCSB, but could not convince them. Finally, he himself bought four cars and started the car-sharing program at the campus. Under the program, the users could unlock cars with radio-frequency identification.

On the other hand, Greenwich, Connecticut brought up John Zimmer, was also interested in the car-sharing concept. Zimmer, a graduate from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, was influenced with the fact that he could fill the empty seats of his car while going back to home in the college breaks but had no idea from where to begin. After graduating from college, Zimmer started working as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City, keeping a journal about carpooling ideas, side-by-side.

After completing the college education, Green went on a trip to Zimbabwe, where he was introduced to the crowdsourced carpool networks. The idea led him to build a platform named Zimride, using the Facebook API, upon which users could find and plan carpools.

Eventually, at the same time, he was introduced to Zimmer on Facebook via a common friend. Zimmer came to know about Zimride, and both coincided on the same idea of the development of a carsharing platform. As the two shared the similar interest, it took no time for Green to fly to New York and meet Zimmer.

In late 2006, together Green and Zimmer launched the first version of Zimride in the Cornell University and later, in 2007, in the UCSB campuses. Over 20 per cent of students registered for the service, but still, they used it only a few times in a year. During the very time, Uber was also providing its car-renting service, but the service included the rental of brand new luxury cars. The idea of Zimmer and Green was way too different from that.

Green and Zimmer moved to Silicon Valley, to work on the growth of the company and shared an apartment that served as both apartment and office. After working hard on Zimride for five years, they expanded the company to thousands of users and over 50 universities.

The main mission, the two were working towards, was to provide an alternative to car ownership. In 2013, they sold Zimride to Enterprise Holdings and turned there focus towards Lyft, their newly founded company, providing carpooling in local areas.

The next thing they figured out was that having an app for the smartphones can get them more users as well as more frequent rides for localities. So, they hired two engineers to develop an app for Lyft, and within three weeks the app was ready.

In 2017, Green and Zimmer raised $4.1 billion dollars for Lyft, valuing the company at $11.5 billion. Currently, Lyft is providing its services in 50 United States and has grown to 1,000 employees.

In 2009, Zimmer and Logan Green were named finalists in Business Week’s list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs and in 2014, the two were named “35 Under 35 list of Inc. Magazine.