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Michael Serbinis : A Significant Entrepreneur who Founded Kobo

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There always doesn’t have to be a reason for reading. Reading has always been valuable as it only adds up to your knowledge. That is why the community of book lovers is expanding with every passing second. But, we do know that everyone can’t afford the highly expensive original editions of classic novels every time. So for such a crisis, the e-books become the true guardian angels in our life.

Kobo Inc. is a Canada-based platform that is famous for selling e-books and electronics. The company serves customers at a global level and has attracted more than 10 million readers by now. Its founder Michael Serbinis, who is an engineer, entrepreneur and an angel investor, is even more famous for founding more than just one company.

Where Michael Serbinis belongs?

Born on 28th October 1973, Michael Serbinis belongs to the land of maple syrup, i.e., Canada. His keen interest in science made him win gold at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for which he designed a high-temperature superconductor propulsion system. So, his first big achievement happened when he was in high school, that led to big opportunities for working with NASA and Intel.

Michael Serbinis founder Kobo
Image Source: alejandrocremades.com

In 1996, Serbinis graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduating from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. While he was a student, he entered into the Ontario Engineering Competition, and his creation of motor, that ran on an advanced software coding, helped him fetch a summer job at Microsoft. He also conducted thorough research on neural networks and artificial intelligence.

The Journey in the Late 90s

Serbinis’s journey into the entrepreneurial world started while associating the Musk brothers. He received a call from the Musk brothers, who were his university classmates to help them build a business. And thus, Serbinis was one of the first ten employees of Zip2, the company that was established by Elon and Kimball Musk.

Since Serbinis was already a very efficient programmer, at the age of twenty-four, he built a cloud-based document storage service called DocSpace. After a couple of years, it was sold to a San-Francisco based company for $530 million.

In 2000, Michael Serbinis joined Critical Path as CTO and EVP Marketing. It was then one of the largest companies which ran one-third of the world’s emails through their software. After he moved back to Canada, Serbinis joined Indigo as CIO and EVP Online, and this is the point at the juncture, where Kobo spun out to become an independent business.

Founding Kobo

At first, a global e-reading platform called Shortcovers was released in February 2009, under the main company Indigo. But, once they gained board approval and funding, they cut out from Indigo and established as an independent company. In late 2009, the company was rebranded as Kobo, an e-reading platform for worldwide customers. This was just the beginning for Serbinis to do great things in his homeland.

The Success

Kobo received a very good response from all over the world, shortly after its release. Kobo, today, attracts over 18 million users from more than 190 countries. It has over more than 3 million magazines, eBooks, and even, newspapers. Thus, creating the largest e-readers catalogue in the history of the e-reading platform.

In January 2012, Kobo came under the acquisition of a Japanese e-commerce company called Rakuten for $315 million. The catalogue of Kobo has e-books on 77 different languages, helping readers connect to their native land.

After Kobo

Since it was only the beginning, Serbinis founded 3 Angels Capital in 2014, to invest in a disrupted market and create a better world. Serbinis has always been a determined and optimistic man for sure. He mostly invests in areas, like the internet of things, digital content, digital health, etc.

Michael Serbinis is also the board director of MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. He serves as a board director in another institute called Vector Institute, a non-profit research institution in Toronto.

In November 2014, Serbinis founded League Inc., an online platform that connects worldwide users to provide health benefits and much more.

After developing so much on his homeland and contributing to science, Serbinis still lives in Toronto with his family.

Graphcore

Simon Knowles : A Pioneering Engineer in the Field of AI-ML

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In the 21st century, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have spread a cloak of mystique around the world that no one wants to drop off. Today, the prime area of learning, research and improvement have been revolving around these two things which so far seems to the two most important and necessary development of science.

With science already bringing a new wave of inventions to the shore of computation, Simon Knowles is ruling the world with his idea of creating chips for AI and ML which will make the computer’s brain work more like a human’s brain.

Simon Knowles is a famous entrepreneur and an engineer who is the co-founder of Graphcore, a semiconductor company that he founded along with Nigel Toon. Knowles’s main aim is to create an IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) that can allow humans to explore the scope of AI more freely and not just scraping the surface.

Education and Early Career of Knowles

Simon Knowles
Image Source: http://scaledml.org

Simon Knowles graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge. After graduating, he went to study early neural networks at a UK government research lab.

He co-founded his first start-up, Element 14, a wireless processor developing company in the 1990s, which came under the acquisition of Broadcom Inc. in 2000. He sold the company for $640 million and co-founded his second start-up, Icera, in partnership with Toon. The company was established for mobile chip making in 2002, which later was acquired by Nvidia for $436 million.

The Idea of Graphcore

After selling Icera to Nvidia Corp. in 2002, both the co-founders were trying to settle on one single idea, which could be their next field of research or next chance to make billions. Not being able to make a choice, Knowles decided to attend the series of lectures at Cambridge University. One day, he attended the presentation of Steve Young, a Cambridge professor of the Information Technology department, who was elaborating the limits of computational dialogue systems. Young is also known to invent a speech processing service which is now used in Siri.

While Knowles listened to Young’s speech, the former asked him multiple questions about numerical precision and energy efficiency. But, it seemed like Knowles’s questions were out of the field for Young, but that is where Knowles’s interest was stuck as he wanted to invent something instead of just swallowing the lump of information.

Few days after the lecture, Young contacted Knowles to tell him that his students found out that they were using 64 bits of data for one single calculation. They realized that this can be replaced by 8 bits data per calculation, as Knowles suggested in the lecture, which will save the energy that is consumed before. But the calculations won’t be that precise. Well, Knowles said that was his entire idea to manipulate the brain of the computer and make it more human-like. Knowles, in one of his interviews, said that if they could build this kind of processor, the performance factor will be increased by one thousand.

Everyone including, Young and Toon, was very impressed with his idea, and hence, Knowles and Toon decided to found Graphcore, to build this new kind of IPU. They started raising capital from 2013 and were finally able to launch Graphcore in 2016.

Success of Graphcore

After carrying out thorough research, for three years, to create energy-efficient and a cost-efficient chip, that can harness all the power at one single time, but uses less energy than a GPU, they designed a chip with 1,216 processor cores with 24 billion transistors. This chip was manufactured in 2018 and turns out, it was able to detect 10,000 different images per second.

The company is still working on these chips and making it recognize more complex data and not just simple objects. Knowles’s main goal is to provide the machine with lots of data, and the machine should find out a way to complete the given task. Knowles’s dream to make machines behave human-like is bringing a new era, an era of Artificial Intelligence.

The first funding round of Graphcore was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital in 2016, followed by a round B funding in 2017 by Atomico, and a few months later, by Sequoia Capital. In 2018, Graphcore raised $200 million in series D funding from investors like Dell, Microsoft and Samsung, which resulted in its net worth to $1.7 billion in December 2018. The company also announced that it might hit $50 million revenue this year.

Graphcore also provides server blueprints to many big companies to guide them on how they should manufacture next-generation computers.

Michael Aldrich inventor of online shopping

Michael Aldrich : A Connoisseur in the Entrepreneurial World and the Founder of Online Shopping

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In the biggest success stories of start-ups of that, we hear from around the world today would have not come into existence today, if online shopping did not exist. From the prospering online shopping sites, like eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, to the very small newly started e-commerce sites should be grateful of the English entrepreneur who came up with the idea of online transactions. That great innovator is none other than Michael Aldrich, who developed e-commerce from scratch in the late 1970s. With an experience of 28 years in the IT sector, he worked for reputed companies before inventing teleshopping (today known as online shopping).

Early Life

Born into a family living in Hertfordshire, England, on 22nd August 1941, Aldrich did his schooling from Clapham College, London. He was a very bright student and even received a scholarship to study history at the University of Hull in 1959. During his time there, he met Sandy Kay Hutchings and got married to her just before completing his graduation. So, Aldrich already established a family before starting his career.

Many say that getting committed and entering into married life at a very young age can create difficulties and stops you from giving your best. But, in this case, it’s diametrically opposite.

Beginning of Aldrich’s Career

Michael Aldrich inventor of online shopping
Image Source: alchetron.com

Aldrich worked for Honeywell and Burroughs in the sales and marketing department of the company for almost 15 years. After that, he joined Redifon Computers, which was a part of the UK Rediffusion Group of Companies. The Rediffusion Group manufactured televisions as well as computers, but Aldrich worked for the department of computer manufacturing.

This is when the journey of the invention of online shopping (he named it teleshopping) began.

The Story

One day in the year of 1979, UK Rediffusion Group sent a colour television to Aldrich’s office, but he didn’t pay much attention to it, as his main concern revolved around selling computers. This television came with a new service called Prestel, a paid commercial service that would be delivered through a telephone line.

Seeing no interest of Aldrich in that television one of the engineers in his company, Peter Champion, decided to learn more about this new TV, and its new feature. After studying about the TV for a few weeks, he told Aldrich that the television came with an auto-dialer that could hold four telephone numbers. He gave Aldrich the idea of building such a controller for a computer, and then, connecting the television. Aldrich noticed his point, but he didn’t give it much of thought at that time.

After a few days, when Aldrich was complaining about the weekly tour to grocery shops, the idea of Peter hit him hard. This was when he thought of connecting the television to the supermarket itself and get the groceries delivered to home. Without wasting a single second, Aldrich started working on this idea.

After days of research and writing papers, finally, a prototype TV to test this real-time transaction process was connected to one of their computers, and the test was successful. There wasn’t any year of research going on to support this idea of teleshopping, and hence, it seemed like a sudden scientific mutation took place in the communication world.

Once it was developed, Aldrich needed to set up a market and build up demand as the entire world wasn’t aware of how to use this new system.

After Reality Hit Hard

Aldrich found himself in a total mess, as he invented a product, but there wasn’t a market to sell it. So, after the invention, he tried reaching out to people for real feedback and everything was done in sheer privacy as their product wasn’t officially launched.

He went to a conference in New Orleans, kept it low and received positive feedback from the people. Returning back to the UK, the company designed the multi-port controller, built the computer interface software, and finally, launched it on April 1980. The entire world was amused by the idea of shopping from home, but no one was actually able to interpret how it worked. So, Aldrich hosted a press conference, and again, launched the product in July 1980.

Marketing Strategy

After launching the product, the idea was very clear to Aldrich that he would sell this to big corporations so that he could connect the agents, customers and distributors directly to the system without the involvement of a third party. He divided the market into leaders and followers and approached the leaders with this product. This business idea was later known as business to business online shopping (B2B).

The company had almost no competition, so it flourished for the next ten years after its launch.

After the great invention

In 1984 Aldrich became a fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Fellow in 2004. He was also awarded an honorary degree of Doctorate of Letters by the University of Brighton in 2004. In 1987 he was made a Freeman of the City of London, England. Aldrich became the Chairman of Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1989. In 2010, University of Brighton named an award after his name, which is given to the talented students excelling in e-commerce.

Aldrich died on 19th May 2014.

Marshall Amplification

Jim Marshall : The Guitar Amp Pioneer and the ‘Father of Loud’

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From a drummer to one of the most successful entrepreneurs and the inventer of the amplification system, the life journey of Jim aka James Charles Marshall has been quite an interesting one. Jim Marshall is the founder of the famous Marshall Amplification, a company that designs and manufactures music amplifiers and the other music-related products, including speakers cabinets, headphones, and earphones, etc. The company is also known for manufacturing customised products for its customers and is one of the biggest brands in the music industry.

Early Life & Career

Jim Marshal was born in a family of musicians and boxers settled in Acton, London, United Kingdom, on 29 July 1923. Being a part of a musical family, he got naturally inclined towards music. When he was a little kid, he got diagnosed with tubercular bones. So he had to spend most of his childhood in the hospital. At the time he grew a little older, the second world war took place. He also tried his luck in the army but was rejected due to his poor health condition.

Despite missing his school education, Marshall was able to get a day-time job as an electrical engineer at a small firm. He also worked part-time in the evening as a singer as well as a drummer. As an electrical engineer, he got to gain a lot of experience and designed and built a portable amplification system that he brought to his workplace in the evening. This was the first time when he built an amplification system by himself.

Jim Marshall
Image Source: allaboutbluesmusic.com

Soon in 1942, he joined a band as the lead drummer. At the same time, he started teaching music to people. Those people include some of the famous names of the music industry, including Mitch Mitchell and Micky Waller.

Career as an Entrepreneur

Through working with the band and the music classes, he was able to save enough money to start a music store in Hanwell, west London. Initially, he sold drums in the store and soon, on the request of many guitarists, he stocked guitars and their amplification system in the store. While selling those guitars and their amps, he often got to hear that these guitars were not producing the desired sound for them, not even with the amps. The customer wanted something bigger and louder. The customers had to buy different amps for different sounds. So on the suggestion of Ken Bran, the amp repairer, Marshall thought of building a single amplification system for all.

The Turning Point

Marshall started working on a new amplification system, along with his team, that included Ken Bran and the other worker at the store, Dudley Craven. Within a total of six attempts, using a Fender Bassman, Jim Marshall developed the first prototype of the Marshall Amplification in 1962. He named the system as JTM45. JTM is the acronym for Jim and Terry Marshall (Jim’s son).

The new Marshall Amplification became an instant hit and offered people with the sound they were seeking for. Soon the sales, as well as the products in the range of amplification, increased.

One of the most significant product from Marshall Amplification is the Marshall stack. The Marshall stack was designed specifically on the request of Pete Townshend, who wanted a 100 Watt head and an 8×12 cabinet amp. But instead of an 8×12 cabinet, Jim Marshall suggested him a 4×12. But Pete directed him to build what he wanted initially. At last, he had to come back to Marshall so that he could cut the cabinet into half and make it a 4×12. And eventually, the famous 100 Watt Marshall stack was developed.

In 1981, Marshall came up with the Master Volume Marshall amps and the classic Marshall JCM800 split-channel amps. The Marshall store also started including speakers and other music equipment for sale.

The Life After Success

In 1984, Jim Marshall became the recipient of the “Queen’s Award for Export” by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for the extraordinary achievement of the Marshall Amplification.

Upon completing the 25 years of the company in 1987, it introduced a new Silver Jubilee series of amps, that included the 2555 (100-watt head) and the 2550 (50-watt head) models. The new models rendered the “semi-split channel” design, such that the user could set two different input gain levels through the same tone stack and master volume control.

In 1985, Marshall got his hands printed to the Rock and Roll Walk of Fame. Marshall also received an OBE honour from Buckingham Palace for his “services to the music industry and charity” in 2003.

Marshal participated in many charity works. When Marshall suffered from tuberculosis as a child, he was treated at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, London. So after earning enough money, he donated a few million dollars to the same hospital.

Marshall had become the biggest name in the field of music through his invention. Today, Marshall Amplification is the first choice of every musician. In fact, in the 60s and 70s, the big-sized Marshall stack had become a status symbol for the musicians. Marshall died at the age of 88 on 5 April 2012. Today he is remembered as one of the four forefathers of rock music equipment and is often cited as the father of Loud.

nio

William Li : The Founder of Chinese Tesla, Nio

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Everyone is aware of the potential of electric motor vehicles, as these can help the world save on fuel as well as money. Tesla has been the biggest inspiration for every other automobile company, and most of them have already built their electric cars, and are steadily moving towards manufacturing autonomous vehicles. One such company is Nio, founded by a celebrity entrepreneur William Li, that is working on something inspired by the same concept of Tesla electric cars, but a bit on the cheaper end.

William Li was born on born 9 August 1974 in Anhui, Eastern China. Li’s family did not have a very good financial condition, so they started saving for his college since he was seven. He had to work part-time while he was still in school to support his family. He attended a local school and later, joined the Peking University in Beijing to pursue a graduate degree in sociology. He also opted for a minor in law.

Despite the humble beginnings, Li managed to start a business at the age of 21 in 1996. The business was an internet-based startup, and the boom in the industry helped him grow as a successful entrepreneur.

William Li Founder Nio
bloomberg.com

In 2000, he started his second company, which later become his first biggest business. The company name was Bitauto, and it was an automobile Internet content and marketing services provider. Bitauto later became public and traded on the American Stock Exchange Copyright in 2010. It saw huge success and valued at $1 billion. It helped Li to gain enough experience as a businessman and established him as one of the most influential entrepreneurs in China. He served as the CEO and chairman of the company for thirteen years and finally sold Bitauto in 2013.

A fine entrepreneur is never out of ideas and cannot stay idle. Only in a year after he sold his second company, he came up with a new luxury electric car manufacturer startup, Nio, in 2014. Since he had always been into the automobile and stuff related to it, he was inspired to start his own automobile business.

But to start a huge vehicle manufacturing business, one needs a lot of money. For that, he started looking for investments. Li has got great convincing skills, which can be estimated from how he changed the mind of Xiaomi from starting its own electric car manufacturing brand to investing money into another such startup.

Li had always been inspired by the founder of Xiaomi, and how its business model worked. He even implemented some of the strategies from the business model of Xiaomi into his own startup. In a year of struggle, Li was able to bag investments from the major tech companies, including Tencent, Temasek, Baidu, Lenovo and TPG.

NIO EP9 is the first sports car model that the company produced and was launched on the same day as the company. In 2016, the company raised over a billion-dollar from its investors. To expand its specializations, the company received the “Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit” from the California DMV, in October 2016. Since then, the company has been working on the level-three and level-four autonomy to build its own autonomous vehicles. By the end of the year, the company launched a new two-door coupé, named NIO EP9. Li being an experienced businessman is not afraid of taking risks, but he believes in steady growth. That is why Nio is still producing limited-edition vehicles. Though the company has now made some plans on mass production of its vehicles.

In four years of Nio, it produced over 14,000 units of electric vehicles, and by the end of 2019, the company expects to make the number 20,000 units. Till the year 2019, the company also raised over $2.5 billion through four rounds of investments. In September 2018, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange and raised a US$1.8 billion.

Nio participated in the Formula E in the 2014–2015 season and also the other race championships. It also won the 2015 Long Beach ePrix and the 2015 Moscow ePrix. NIO has even set five records in their track-only EP9 for the fastest lap for an electric-powered car.

Along with his three startups, Li has also made some good investments. In fact, he has invested in 32 companies from the transportation sector. Li was famous before he started Nio, but the success of Nio has made him known globally. He, in fact, is often termed as the “godfather of the transport sector” in China and sometimes the “Elon Musk” of China.

kurzweil

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

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

Early Life and Career

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

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

Journey as an Entrepreneur and Inventing OCR

Ray Kurzweil
Image Source: pinterest.com

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

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

After Kurzweil Products Company

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

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

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