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OmniVis : Medical Science Meets Technology to Make the World Better and Disease Free

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In the bigger picture, the present condition of our world is no less than mayhem. On the one hand, science is creating wonders with technology making our lives easier but on the other hand, millions of people are dying every day due to lack of treatment and development in medical science. Who is to blame for this? Are we way too ignorant to make significant contributions in the medical community? Or the price is so high that we have blatantly stopped trying? There are so many people dying every minute suffering from incurable diseases or due to late detection of infections in their body. Though the renowned and biggest research centres of our world are working together to invent instruments that can easily detect diseases, they are way too costly for common citizens.

With the zeal to alter the future of our world and stop it from destruction, four scholars of Purdue University, Katherine Clayton, Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Jacqueline Linnes and Steve Wereley, came up with a unique solution to detect infectious and deadly diseases, which are both times efficient and affordable. With the mission to create affordable medical equipment, these four enlightened minds founded OmniVis, a company that will reach out to common people, help them detect disease and make out society better in terms of well-being.

Founders of OmniVis

Currently, Katherine Clayton is the CEO of the company with Ursem, Linnes and Wereley working as the Advisors.

Katherine Clayton Founder OmniVis
Image Source: halcyonhouse.org

Clayton, who is originally from San Francisco, went to Pursue University to complete her PhD in mechanical engineering. When she was an undergraduate student, she had already decided to work with healthcare products and make easy infection and disease detection equipment available to common people. When Clayton was a kid, she lost someone very close to her, due to the absence of better tools in the medical field, and hence, this was the beginning of her dream to do better for the community. She, with other three scholars, co-founded OmniVis in 2017, and since then, it has received worldwide support and funding.

Ursem is associated with Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor which is under Purdue University. Her main area of research involves molecular biology, computational biology and neuroscience.

Linnes is also an assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as well. The Linnes Lab basically works to create technologies that can detect pathogens in a time-efficient way and stop them from propagating. She also has her own start-up, PotaVida founded in April 2010. The company’s goal is to develop pocket-friendly water purifiers and reach to the rural areas of the entire world.

Currently, Wereley is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His specialised fields are fluid mechanics and optics. He is also the founder of a company called Microfluidics Innovations.

The Idea

Since all of them belonged to a strong research background, OmniVis emerged out as a successful idea. More than a business, it is really an idea that inspired every company, research institutes throughout the world. OmniVis has created products that can detect Cholera with less than an hour with its concepts and techniques.

Currently, OmniVis works with iPhone but soon it will incorporate the software in Android and start testing the beta version. OmniVis works in a simple process with few steps, collect the sample, detect pathogen and map location. OmniVis detects and shows the location on the map from where the sample was taken to alert the authorities. And all of these are getting done within 30 minutes with the technology of OmniVis.

The Achievements

In 2017, OmniVis acquired the first place in Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project funded by Vodafone Foundation. In 2018, OmniVis was nominated for World Changing Idea Finalist. In June 2018, the company received Phase I SBIR Grant from National Science Foundation. In the same year, OmniVis won the 2018 AMPLIFY Pitch Competition where participants from 46 different countries participated. After winning the Biological Innovation Award in February 2019, OmniVis took a step ahead and expanded out of Indiana. In May 2019, the team reached out to Bangladesh and shared the benefits of OmniVis products with them.

Some of the major investors at OmniVis are Vodafone Foundation, Deloitte, Fast Company, Purdue University, halcyon and many more.

Plaid

Plaid : Powering Innovation in Financial Sector by Connecting Apps to Banks

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There has been an explosion of multiple payment apps in the past couple of years, to be more precise, last two years. These apps have made it easy for all of us on how to manage our finances and bank accounts, making us able to send and receive money from and into our bank accounts in just a few taps on our smartphone. But is it that easy to do all of these processes? It looks like but is definitely not. These companies create an infrastructure to connect the banks with the app or use a ready-made API for the same. Plaid is one of the companies which creates those APIs for the app makers who then can connect the banks through their apps and provide financial services to their customers.

Plaid was founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey in 2012. Perret is a Duke University pass out with a bachelor’s degree in Science, and William has a degree in Computer Science from Emory University. The two worked at Bain & Company, Perret as a consultant and Hockey as an associate. The two met at work and gelled well due to their common interest, i.e. coding. While working at the company, they discussed ideas for a new startup and started working on some. And, in 2012 finally left their job to start their own business. They moved to New York and spent over eighteen months to conceive the right idea.

Like every other startup founders, it was not their first startup. Before Plaid they had tried their hands on various consumer-based products as well, but none of them worked. Once, they decided to create an app for connecting bank accounts and do the transaction. But it was again a failure.

Plaid founders
Image Source: wsj.com

So they decided to create an infrastructure for connecting the apps and the banks altogether, like a pipeline, moving their focus from consumer-based products. Following that, the two created personal financial management and tracking tool for consumers and named it Sliver. Later, the product was renamed as Rambler, which later won the $5,000 grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon as a winner in 2013. It was the first time that a team made a full-scale financial services application live within 24 hours.

With Rambler, the two co-founded Plaid, an application programming interface, or API, that would do almost every type of banking work, like generating PDFs for the transaction and connecting the banks, just by using a bank customer’s online user name and password. The two moved to San Fransisco to set up an office and join more engineers to work on the product. Along with that, they started looking for investors and got rejected more than 50 times.

Finally, in July 2013, the company was able to raise a $2.9 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital. Later, the company raised a $60 million in Series A and Series B funding. Since then, the company has been growing in every which way. Within two years, the startup idea took the two co-founders of Plaid into the list of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2015.

According to Plaid, as of December 2018, 25 per cent of people in the United States having a bank account had connected to Plaid through an app. It was a fair increase of 13 per cent in 2017.

In 2019, the company raised a $250 million Series C investment and valued at a $2.65 billion. In total, the company has raised a $310 million investment from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital, etc.

Today, more than 15,000 banks are connected through various apps with the Plaid infrastructure and extend to thousands of apps, including Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

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Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

Weebly

The Founding Story of Weebly : The Website Hosting and Building Interface

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There have been many cases when people created wondrous things without knowing its worth. Though they want to accomplish a goal, they don’t have the idea that of the impact of their end product. They just keep working to get the product, and at the end, when the product is ready, it transforms their whole lives. One appropriate example of the same is none other than Weebly. Three college students, Dave Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri, founded Weebly as a college project in 2006, and now, it is one of the most popular website building platforms.

Rusenko and Fanini were friends and met Veltri at the Pennsylvania State University. The university required every student to maintain an online profile. So one of Rusensko’s friend, who was a non-computer student, asked him to help her out with building her website for the astronomy class. While he was helping her, he figured out that many people need a website, but don’t have the skill to build one. This incident led him to think of developing a software that would help people, who did not know how to code, build a whole website.

Rusensko wrote the first line of code for the software, Weebly, as his college project, and Fanini and Veltri also joined in. In 2006, they completed a basic product and represented the same in a tech gathering of 1000 people. But for their disappointment, the CEO who was leading the gathering called the software “the worst idea” over the mic. This was heartbreaking for the three, but they kept the belief in their product, as it was a fact that not many people were into coding and ultimately, needed a website.

After the successful release of the invitational beta of the software in January 2006, in six months, they launched the official private-beta of the software. The next year in January, they took the software to Y Combinator’s winter startup program in Silicon Valley, California. Even though they were the last to apply, their idea had the potential that they got the entry. After getting selected in for the program, the three started working full-time on the software. The next year, they included a new editing interface named “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” to the software. They also raised a US$650,000 funding the same year.

Weebly now was a company, and they had to monetise the software. For that, they introduced the Pro accounts for the users, and also, included AdSense to the platform. In 2009, they also added support for editing the HTML and CSS to Weebly software. In 2013, the company hosted the C series funding, which helped them raise another $35 million. Companies, like Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings Ltd., also became the investment partner of Weebly. Till the time, the company had joined 80 employees to its work fleet.

In 2016, the company started working to add support for building an eCommerce website to the software, including the support for online payments through PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net. It also included features to help people promote their brand, like Facebook Ad creator, integrated email marketing, and lead capture, etc. The platform offers support for 15 different languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German, etc.

In 2018, Square acquired Weebly for a massive $365 million in cash and stock.

The website builder provides the users with multiple feature-rich options, such that they can create a multi-function website in minutes. Today, the very platform also provides hosting service where the users can get domain name including .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, or .us. In the past 12 years, the company has earned over 45 million customers.

In 2007, Weebly was among the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by TIME Magazine. The CEO and co-founder of Weebly, David Rusenko, got a place in the Forbes’ list of “30 Under 30” in 2011.

rapido

Rapido : India’s Biggest Bike Taxi Pooling Service

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Though taxis were always there, the ride-hailing services have got even more popular after the companies like Uber and Lyft has come onboard. These apps provide the most convenient method to hire cabs and travel independently. But for a daily basis, these are not the affordable choice for people. In countries like India, there is also a problem of traffic in big cities, which also affect the efficiency of a rental car. But with the motorbikes, there is still hope for affordability as well as escaping the traffic. This very fact has inspired many people to build a bike ride-hailing service, and companies like Uber and Ola are not any exception. Even though these big companies could manage to host the very service, it is Rapido that has successfully established its motorbike ride-hailing service in India.

Rapido was founded by three engineer friends, Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, and S.R. Rishikesh, in 2015, in Bengaluru India. Sanka and Guntupalli are childhood friends, and Rishikesh was the flatmates with Guntupalli. Three of them were working as engineers in Bengaluru, earning good bucks, but none of them could not escape from the startup fever.

After the app-based ride-hailing services came to India, all three loved the concept and used those apps to commute to their offices and back. But it was not an affordable option. One fine day, all three decided to overcome this problem and look for some better and affordable option for daily travelling.

Rapido founders
Image Source: Forbes

Motorcycles are quite popular in India and are also the most affordable mean of travelling. All the three decided to quit their job and start working on a business model that will help people hire bikes to commute from one place to the other at cheap prices. At the beginning of their business, they named the company ‘theKarrier’. They started theKarrier in November 2014 and rebranded it as Rapido in 2015.

The basic idea behind the startup was to hire people who owned two-wheelers. The idea was different from Uber and Ola, as these company invested heavily on the vehicles. But in the case of Rapido, the bike owners just needed to register on the Rapido-captain app and verify their details with the company. And, they were good to go. Another thing that helped Rapido to rise above its rivals was that it did not bother that the driver wanted to be full or part-timer.

The driver in terms of Rapido is called the Captain, and the company provides its every captain with insurance. For the safety of the rider, it has included a few features on the app. The user gets the assistance just in a single tap on the app. Rapido has also set up a customer care service for the users and also offers perks on the rides.

Almost over 5000 drivers use the app every day, and an average of 15,000 drivers log in to the app every month. These drivers also complete over 30,000 rides per month on an average, and the company aims to make it one million rides per day by the end of 2019. The women drivers have also registered to the app and are successfully earning good money over it. According to the stats, the app usually registers drivers of the age between 18 to 50 years.

In April 2017, Rapido raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding, backed by Hero MotoCorp Ltd chairman Pawan Munjal and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan. By 2018, the company has raised $6 million in two rounds and was earning a $1.5 million revenue every month. It hosted the latest round of funding in August 2019 and raised over $58 million in funding led by Westbridge Capital. Rapido wants to spend this money on technical innovation and intends to reach 100 major cities in India soon.

Rapido began its service from Bengaluru and is now expanded to 40 cities across the country, including Hyderabad, Mysore, Vishakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai, Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Surat, Patna, and the NCR region.

The Rapido founders got their names listed in Forbe ‘30 Under 30 Asia – Consumer Technology 2019’.

sql

The Story of two Genius Scientists Behind SQL

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Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce are the original developers of the SQL Server, a product for storing and managing data. Both of them started working on it in the 1970s, and the first version of the software was released in 1974. SQL (Structured Query Language) was built as a domain-specific language to be used for accessing and manipulating data, data query and much more.

Apart from SQL, Chamberlin and Boyce are well known for their contribution in XQuery and Boyce-Codd normal form respectively.

Donald D. Chamberlin

Born in 1944 in San Jose, California, Chamberlin attended Campbell High School. He pursued electrical engineering in Harvey Mud College and later, completed his master’s as well as a PhD degree from the Stanford University. While he was in his college, he managed to land an internship in IBM Research in New York, and it is the same place where he started working after his PhD.

donald d chamberlin sql
Image Source: computerhistory.org

In the 1960s, at the time Chamberlin was in college, Computers were merely reachable by commoners. In fact, at that time, Harvey Mud College also had only a single computer, an IBM 1620. Chamberlin got lucky to have access to the computer and managed to write a program for tic-tac-toe for a human player on a keyboard.

During this time, two significant figures, Charlie Bachman and Ted Codd, were making exceptional contributions to the database management system. When Chamberlin joined IBM, one of IBM’s main concerns was to launch an efficient optimizing compiler for Codd’s Relational Model of data. Chamberlin was a part of the group working for the prototype, and hence, he was sent to CA, where he met Raymond F. Boyce.

Raymond F. Boyce

Boyce was born in 1947 and grew up in New York. He graduated from Providence College in 1968 and received his PhD from Purdue University in 1972. After receiving his doctorate, he also joined IBM and worked on database projects. Shortly, he came up with Boyce-Codd normal form in collaboration with Todd and was later sent to CA to work on the optimizing compiler.

And, when he met Chamberlin in CA, both of them set their course to develop SQL.

The Idea of SEQUEL

Raymond F Boyce Sql
Image Source: alchetron.com

SEQUEL stands for Structured English Query English which is one of IBM’s original database management systems.

While they were working on Codd’s relational ideas, they found one major drawback that made this relational model look very complicated. Since Codd was a mathematician, he explained everything with reference to the Cartesian plane and used many complex mathematical symbols and relations to elaborate his models. Since they were working to improve the data management system, both Chamberlin and Boyce thought of coming up with a language that would simplify the complexity of his models because Codd’s ideas were undoubtedly too strong. So, both of them started working on writing a language and named it SEQUEL for everyone (non-mathematicians) to use it using simple terminologies.

When they came up with SEQUEL, IBM didn’t have any product plan based on this language, so the company suggested them to produce the paper at a technical conference in Ann Arbor. Boyce went to the conference and realized that the relational database system (RDBMS) is truly the future of database management in every field. Soon after Ray returned from the conference, he died of a brain aneurysm.

Success of SEQUEL

IBM lost one of its greatest computer scientists, and Chamberlin, unfortunately, lost his partner. But, this didn’t hinder the growth and exposure of SEQUEL. Once the paper was released, IBM started working on testing the usefulness of the language in the practical world. They started building prototypes of the product (system R prototypes) based on this language. A team of 12 IBM programmers was made to work on this system R.

Products like System/38, SQL/DS and DB2 were commercially available during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After SEQUEL started launching commercial products, the shorter version of the commercial name became SQL.

During the early 1980s, the prices of computers fall unexpectedly, thus, allowing every organization to shift their paper records to a computer database. This led to the growth of database management systems, having a grip on the market and opening a vast source of profit for SQL.

Oracle also started making SQL database systems for the U.S government and sold them successfully. The language becomes so easy and efficient to command that the government launched FIPS 127, a federal database system that used SQL.

By 1986, both ANSI and ISO accepted SQL as the database language, and since then, new versions of it have been popping up into our systems.