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Kahoot!: A Platform, Where You Learn While You Play

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

How many of you really enjoyed the last lecture you attended, or you literally dozed off and lost track of time? I guess most of the answers won’t be in assertive. Well, that is true. Every one of us gets tired of listening to a monotonous speech for several hours, which also make us lose our interest to learn something new. At times to really grow our curiosity and to really nurture the young minds, we should find innovative ways to learn. We should also discover more ways to teach that crosses the boundaries of the four walls of our classroom.

The learning platform Kahoot has already made it possible. Kahoot is a game-based learning app, which allows you to learn new things through many intellectual games. You can create your own games, and especially, if you are a teacher you can make your students learn by playing over this platform. It makes students put their minds together, which also help improve their communication skills and will help them get better overall. Now, before we learn more about how this app works let us delve deeper into its history.

Kahoot Founders
Image Source: medium.com

The history behind the success of Kahoot!

The five great minds that were mainly behind the development of this application are Johan Brand, Jamie Brooker, Morten Versvik, Prof. Alf Inge Wang and Âsmund Furuseth, a Norwegian entrepreneur. The entire idea of transforming the tiresome methods of teaching to eye-catchy fun games came from Prof. Alf Inge Wang, who was from the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology.

At first, multiple tests were carried out on the prototypes of the app, and the first one tested successfully was named Lecture Quiz 1.0, which was developed in 2006. The first experiment was carried out with 20 students in a classroom, where they concluded that Lecture Quiz is easy to use and entertaining. This way, the regularity of the students in the class was started to increase. Since then, four new versions of Lecture Quiz were developed, and as new updates were implemented to each one of them.

The prototype of Lecture Quiz 2.0 was much user-friendly, which implied in an increased number of students using it. On the other hand, the latest version of Kahoot, i.e. Lecture Quiz 3.0, has got a much better user-interface, helping the students in better understanding as well as help in increasing the motivation and enthusiasm to learn. This prototype was tested both inside and outside the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and received appreciation for its features.

The app was first launched in private beta in March 2013, which later was publicly released the same year in the month of September. Since then, a lot of experiments have been carried out among different groups of students, to see how it affects the majority. One of the experiments revealed that the students put more effort and concentration when it comes to learning through games than giving just a dull pen-paper test. Though a few students reported that this application is very time consuming, but overall, Kahoot became a grand success. Many such experiments were carried out to check whether the students lose motivation after a particular point or not, whether it is having a negative impact on their concentration but every outcome of these experiments was clearly in favour of Kahoot, and hence, today it has reached the apex.

The entire idea of launching this app proved advantageous to both students and teachers because it became less laborious for the teachers. This time, the students would actually put their brain together to win the learning games on Kahoot, which ultimately, meant learning new topics. The audio effects, later added to the platform, made the app even more attractive and alluring.

Where Kahoot! stands today

Johan Brand, the co-founder and the CEO of Kahoot, played a major role in converting this project to massive success. Kahoot started growing very rapidly, especially, among the young students and teachers. It, especially, captured the attention of U.S. K12 classrooms. By May 2017, the company showed statistics of 50 million active users, and currently, Kahoot! is worth $300million.

Thus, from checking the prototypes of this application among a handful of students to currently having more than 70 billion active users in 200+ countries, narrates the grand success story of Kahoot. With the help of this very platform, people are only a few clicks away from learning in a better way. Also, the idea of learning anytime, anywhere, has helped Kahoot grow at a faster pace.

In a nutshell, this application helps you learn a topic, play a Kahoot, practice and get through with it. You can also try helping out your peers, by creating your own Kahoot and sharing the link. Since the app is free, the number of users seems to increase exponentially. These small tactics on how to approach the users in a much better way have provoked the growth of Kahoot to many extents.

Booking.com – The Company that Changed the Course of Online Hotel Booking

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

One of the challenges, while travelling and touring, is ‘staying at a hotel.’ Staying at a hotel gives a traveller either the best comfort in the trip, or it becomes the worst part of the vacation. That being said, it is undeniable that booking a hotel is the key to a perfect vacation. However, booking a hotel in a place that is unknown to self is a challenge, and hassle to the mind. Booking.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations, and steps in to help you with booking a hotel.

booking.com office
Image Source: officesnapshots.com

Booking.com’s journey started when Booking.nl was founded in 1996 by Geert-Jan Bruinsma after he graduated from college. He discovered the internet and borrowed code from Hilton.com to open a hotel website. Booking.nl was merged with another hotel-booking site Booking online, which operated as Booking.org. On the other hand, in Cambridge, UK, in 1999, cousins Andy Phillips and Adrian Critchlow founded Activebooking.com, which focused more on independent hotels. Later, the name of the internet website was changed to Active Hotels. It too copied some of the basics from WorldRes business model.

Active Hotels and Bookings went on to become the leading hotel-bookings in their respective markets and beyond. Both the ventures met at a travel trade show in London. Years after, both caught the eyes of Priceline.com’s chief mergers and acquisitions master, Glenn Fogel. He put in the efforts to buy both the ventures. The deal took place in 2004 for Active hotels, and in 2005 for Bookings. Priceline then merged both the companies and created Booking.com (Under Booking Holdings), which changed the course of online travel history.

Booking.com took the competition by storm. It kicked its rival companies out of the competition and changed the way consumers book hotels. The company started with setting the prices lower than their competitors which eventually helped them to gain a wide customer base. One of the most prominent features on the website was the search engine. The hotel search engine of the company is still compared to the websites that have emerged in recent times. Also, Booking.com looked out for the best online marketing by posting ads on Google and other internet websites. At the time, the concept of online marketing was less known which gave the company an advantage.

Another change that made people switch from Expedia and other hotel-booking websites, was the way customers pay for their hotels. Unlike Expedia, Booking.com allowed its customers to pay on the spot rather than prepaying months before their journey. The company started the new payment method in 2009, which tripled the bookings made on the site. It ensured its customers, ‘a top-quality service’, including offering 24/7 support to them. It attracted a large hotel database, due to the favourable commissions and great services, they gave to the hotels.

Another formula that they applied was showing the most recent booking and displaying the number of users currently viewing a hotel. The wildly successful “one room left” message is the signature technique that Booking.com uses to get its customers cash-in the booking as fast as possible. One of the major factors that made Booking.com successful was their conversion to an agency model from a merchant model. It allowed the company to ease out its operations and processes.

Since the merger of Active Hotels and Booking in 2006, Booking.com has been touching the heights of success. Booking.com is largely responsible for making Booking Holdings, a $100 Billion Dollar company. The website has massive 28,425,726 listings in 148,470 destinations from 228 countries. Each day, more than 1,550,000 rooms are reserved on the website. The site is available in 43 languages. It has been constantly perfecting its user experience displaying that in business, customer satisfaction means the most.

Sennheiser Electronic: A Revolutionary Change in the World of Audio

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It is no wonder that earphones and wireless headsets have become such an integral part of our lives. Whether travelling on public transport and trying to avoid the unwanted noise or taking a long walk all alone, we always manage to carry one of these viable inventions. But with time we all expect some advancement of products especially when it comes down to gadgets.

Sennheiser Electronic is one such company which specializes in the production of far-ranging audio streaming products with latest designs and flawless modifications. The company mainly focuses on producing headphones, earphones, microphones and other such accessories which are useful to people on both personal and professional level.

The glorious past of the company

Sennheiser Electronics was founded in 1945 by Fritz Sennheiser, and with only seven engineers the company created their first product, a tube voltmeter. Initially, the name of the company was Labor W, where W was the shortened form for Wennebostel, the village, where they formed the laboratory and built their first product. In 1946, the company started producing microphones with DM 1, followed by developing microphones with DM 2 in 1947. The company manufactured their first geophysical equipment in 1949, along with geophones and the first noise compensated microphone.

Fritz Sennheiser
Image Source: thetimes.co.uk

In 1950, the company, then known as Lab W, manufactured their first microphone transformers, mixing amplifiers and pre-amplifiers. The company excelled in designing their products in such a way that it attracted audience throughout the world. And by the time their products were in huge demand, and they started focusing on miniaturization which led to the designing of magnetic miniature headphones in 1952. In 1953, they started building miniature transformers used in hearing aid which was followed by the launching of classic MD 21 microphone. By the end of the first decade since the establishment of Lab W, they created the first interference tube microphone for the television industry and also hired 250 employees. This was just the stepping stone towards something way bigger and innovative!

In the next decade, the MD 83 microphone was built with a reversible transducer that was used as both microphone and loudspeaker. In 1956, they invented a wireless system in association with German Broadcaster NDR. And it was in 1958 that the company was renamed as Sennheiser Electronic from Labor W. In the following years the company built stereo microphones, first answering machine, baby monitor and active loudspeakers.

In 1968 the company built the world’s first open headphones which marked one of the huge successes in the history of Sennheiser Electronics. In 1973, the company got transformed into a limited partnership (KG). The company also built a lot of accessories for wireless transmission and started using infrared technologies from 1975. Till date, the company has developed innumerable technologies to enhance the level of the sound system, especially, the new shotgun microphones which have truly set some new standards in the world of audio transmission.

Achievements of Sennheiser Electronic

Well, the exceptional achievements of the company are truly phenomenal. Starting from a small group of seven engineers to producing more than 10 million units of a product to quench the need of customers is a real success indeed!

Though it is next to impossible to mention all the achievements of Sennheiser Electronics because they are uncountable, here are a few majestic triumphs that are worth mentioning:

• In 1959, Fritz Sennheiser was made an honorary professor of Hanover Technical University.

• In 1977, the company formed a second production plant Burgdorf.

• In 1982, the company was handed over by Fritz Sennheiser to his son Jörg Sennheiser.

• In 1987, Fritz Sennheiser received a prestigious award from 59th Academy Awards for manufacturing MKH 816 shotgun microphone.

• In 1988, the foundation of Sennheiser France took place followed by Sennheiser UK in 1990, Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, USA, Sennheiser Canada and Sennheiser Belux in 1991.

• In 1990, a third production plant was built in Tullamore, Ireland. This is a very vivid example of how rapidly the company was growing.

• In 1991, they launched the best headphones in the entire world, the electrostatic Orpheus.

• In the following years founding of Sennheiser Asia (1992), Sennheiser Nederland (1995) and Sennheiser Mexico (1995) took place.

• In 1996, the company was awarded Emmy Award for reaching the pinnacle in wireless technology. The company was also transformed into a private limited company in this year (GmbH & Co. KG).

• In 1997, the second unit of R&D was opened in Burbank, California.

• In 1999, Georg Neumann GmbH was awarded Technical Grammy of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the company received German Industry Innovation Award for the optical microphone.

• In 2000, the company built its fourth production plant in Albuquerque, USA.

• In 2015, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the company, it opened its innovation campus, which has the most modern technologies in the entire world of communication technology.

These are just a few grand achievements among the arsenal of glories it received from the entire world.

The moral foundation of the company

Sennheiser believes in strong passion, curiosity, dedication, and a clear vision to mould a perfect tomorrow. They believe in fulfilling the need of their customers, which truly is the most important hack to grow an industry. Ever since the company has been founded, it has only witnessed the sweet success or that is what it appears to be. The company believes in sustainability, cooperative work, maintaining ethics, and respecting human dignity. And, their strong belief and dedication, have helped them reach where they are today, to set a perfect example of a grandiose foundation.

WOW Air – The Success Story of the Ultra Low-Cost Airline

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Travelling by air is leisure. The comfort it provides is ultimate in nature but this leisure comes at a pocket-emptying cost. Leisure flights’ tickets often come at a quite high-cost, disturbing one’s travel budgets. WOW Air was an Icelandic carrier service and a perfect solution to high-cost flights. It was an ultra-low-cost service that operated services across continents. Sadly, the company ceased its operations on 28th March 2019 due to some operational issues.

WOW Air was founded by Skúli Mogensen, an entrepreneur with an experience of years in the field. Mogensen was born on 18th September 1968 in Iceland and spent most of his childhood in Sweden with his father. He was an exchange student in San Diego in California, then studied philosophy at the University of Iceland. During his college time, he co-founded his first business ‘OZ.com.’ He dropped his college studies as soon as his business flourished.

Skúli Mogensen
Image Source: independent.ie

Mogensen founded OZ.com, a software company which provides consumer mobile messaging solutions, in 1991. The service involves various telecommunication benefits for the consumer, including social networking, e-mail solutions, instant messaging communities. It has strategic partnerships with America Online, Inc., Microsoft, and Yahoo!. The company’s name was later changed to OZ Communications. Mogensen sold the company to Nokia Corp. on November 4, 2008.

Skúli also co-founded ‘Scandif hf’ and ‘Arctic Ventures’. He also led a buyout of MP Bank. After selling OZ Communication, Skúli had thought to retire. A few years into his retirement made him miserable, and he decided to return back to his entrepreneurship days. “I was a failure at retirement. I wanted to use technology and disrupt the market, and the airline industry is a good sector for that,” said Mogensen ensuring his return to the business market.

In 2011, Mogensen founded WOW Air. It had its first inaugural flight on May 31st, 2012 to Paris. The air service was surprisingly very cheap with fares as low as $99 from select US cities to Iceland and Europe. The fair provided the most basic seats and services.

In 2012, Mogensen took over the company as the CEO. In October of the same year, WOW Air acquired Iceland Express’s operations and network. At the end of the year, WOW Air expanded its services to Berlin, Kaunas, Salzburg and Warsaw. Flight frequencies to Gatwick and Copenhagen also saw an increase. A year later, in October 2013, the airline was awarded the Air Operator’s certificate (AOC) by the Icelandic Transport Authority.

The service rapidly became popular in Iceland and all over Europe. In 2013, it carried over 400,000 passengers and was the most punctual airline in Iceland. In December 2014, the company achieved a milestone by reaching its one-millionth passenger. In 2015, WOW Air expanded to North America and Canada the following year. Its annual passenger count increased from 740,000 in 2015 to 1.6 million in 2016. The airline went on to grow its annual passenger number to 3.5 million in 2018.

Mogensen spoke, “I often say it was a moment of insanity. When I started, everyone thought I was completely crazy and wanted to stay far away from me. I chose to go all in on my own,” on the success of the airline service.

In late 2018, Icelandair Group decided that it would acquire the entire share capital of WOW Air with both airlines operating under separate names. However, the conditions of the deal were unlikely to be met and Icelandair abandoned the deal. Indigo Partners, on the same day as the abandoning of the deal with Icelandair Group, reached a preliminary deal to buy WOW Air. The airline cut down its working staff, cancelled flight routes to Delhi, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver. The deal again was cancelled as Indigo Partners withdrew their offer to buy the company. The airline fell into multiple cancellations, technical failures and more knock-on effects. On 28th March 2019, WOW Air announced that they will be ceasing all the operations. The action left many passengers stranded as they were advised to book flights from other airline services.

Skúli wrote to his employees, expressing his regret for not acting sooner to stabilize the airline’s finances. “I will never be able to forgive myself for not taking action earlier, as it is obvious that WOW was an incredible airline, and we were on the right track to do great things again.”

In an interview with Business Insider, Mogensen said, “One of the mistakes that we made in the last 18 months, was that we were moving away from the low-cost model. Most significantly we made our fleet structure unnecessarily complex with the addition of the wide-body A330 to our fleet.”

However, Skúli is speculated to enter the airline industry soon with another brilliant idea. He was awarded Iceland’s Businessman of the Year in 2011 and 2016. The story of Skúli Mogensen speaks that failures are a part of the journey but can be avoided if suitable action is taken sooner.

Decoding the Life of Ruzwana Bashir: A Woman of Substance

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Hailing from a tight-knit Pakistani community to co-founding PEEK—the story of Ruzwana Bashir is an inspiration to many. Life was not easy for her; she had a tough time growing up. She explained how freedom for women was dreaded upon in her community. It was until college when she started wearing western outfits. Before that, she was obtruded to wear Salwar Kameez and Burkha all the time. Wearing western outfits were not so popular in her family and forbidden in her community. Such inferior experience at a tender age changed her as a person.

Ruzwana Bashir
Image Source: purposegeneration.com

Ruzwana grew up in a small community in Skipton, outskirt of Rotherham. She enrolled in Skipton High School, North Yorkshire. Talking about her childhood, Ruzwana was a brilliant student. With assiduous commitment and sheer dedication, she managed to get into Oxford University. She took Philosophy, Economics and Politics as her major in college. She became second-ever Asian female president of the Oxford Union debating society and remained actively involved in numerous extracurricular activities. Because of her outgoing personality, she became a popular face inside the campus. According to Ruzwana, the turning part in her life came after she got the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue an MBA from Harvard University. There was no turning back after then. After finishing her professional degree, she started working as an investment banker intern at Goldman Sachs. She went on to work with Gilt Groupe and was the founding member of the team for Art.sy before starting with her own venture.

Found glory as an entrepreneur

Ruzwana entrepreneurship journey started in the year 2012. Her idea was to create a market space to connect travellers to local service providers offering booking services to holiday destinations. The ideas worked like a charm. She along with her fellow co-founder, Oskar Bruening, was able to attract investors like Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, and David Bonderman for financial funding. By the end of 2013, Peek expanded exponentially by launching Peek Pro suite, an organized backend software to smooth tour related operations and at the same time launched a mobile application to maximize audience engagements.

In 2014, Peek received another $5 million round of funding. The success of Peek established Ruzwana as the most influential women in Silicon Valley alongside Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. Apart from several corporate awards, the company emerged out as the top 10 most innovation website by Fast Company. TIME defined Peek to be the top 50 most creative website of 2014. The initial success made Ruzwana the superwomen of Silicon Valley, and later, awarded as the most prominent entrepreneur by Fortune. According to Ruzwana, smart work and vision to think differently is a magical potion to achieve success in life.

Spotlight and the Controversies

Bashir came into the spotlight on 29 August 2014, when she wrote an article in The Guardian, where she delineates her story of survival as a child. Her article on Rotherham’s Asian abuse camp misery gained nationwide attention. In addition, became a shred of prime evidence to initiate an investigation. Once the investigation authority started digging up, more victims came forward. The special team prepared combined testimony of several victims, and later, all perpetrators were sentenced guilty. The whole incident shocked the world. It became clear women suffered sexual abuse and exploitation in captivities. To make matter worse the victims were beaten to the extent that they refrain from registering their complaints. It was Ruzwana initiative that helped in solving several heinous cases.

According to Ruzwana, the struggles she had gone through her life really helped her out how to handle the extreme situation and remain composed. She utilised those experience on her journey to entrepreneurship. Her calm temperament shows her mental toughness, she is not just an amazing person but also a woman of a substance.

Dennis Crowley: Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Foursquare

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Passion and dream when mixed together, results in great combinations, and when you meet with people with similar interest, the resultant is a success story. Crowley Dennis got lucky when he met his partner Naveen Selvadurai and both co-founded Foursquare. Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery mobile app, which became popular in no time, due to some of its unique features like Tips and Tastes. It offers awards to its old users and calls them Superusers.

Crowley was born on 19 June 1976, in Medway, Massachusetts, where he attended the Xaverian Brothers High School. After completing his school education, he went to Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he received a B.A. degree, in 1998. As soon as Crowley graduated, he started working with Jupiter Communications, and later, in 2000, became the product developer at Vindigo a mobile app development company.

crowley dennis
Image Source: irishamerica.com

After working for two years with the company, Crowley left his job, in order to complete his higher education, and in 2004, he received an M.P.S. master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. During his time at the NYU, he started working on his graduate thesis project, Dodgeball, along with one of his fellow student, named Alex Rainert, in 2003.

Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software, that enabled its users to enter their location and find out the locations of the friends as well as interesting venues nearby. The project later became Crowley’s first startup and earned popularity. In fact, only after two years of its inception, Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005, and Crowley started working with the company. But the company shut down all the operations of Dodgeball in 2007, and Crowley left Google.

In the same year, Crowley joined another tech company named, Area/Code. This was the place where he met his future business partner Naveen Selvadurai. Naveen belongs to the Indian descent and has got a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After working with tech giants like Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems, he was working with a startup company in the same office space as Crowley was.

The two met and shared a common interest, ‘location-based services’. Naveen had experience with iPhone stuff and was interested in hacking city apps. On the other hand, Crowley was working on mobile apps and has just sold his own location-based service to Google. After discussing ideas, the two came to the conclusion that they must build another location-based service similar to Dodgeball.

The two started working on the idea, Naveen working on the iPhone stuff, and Crowley handling all the website’s work. As a result, after working for a few months they developed FourSquare, in late 2008, and launched the service at the SXSW in 2009. The service was launched in 100 metro cities worldwide.

The service not only allowed to put the check-ins to find out nearby friends but also suggested the users of the nearby interesting places. The service provided a new feature a personalised list for the users titled To-dos.

In the span of 4 years, the company had registered over 7 million users, and by the mid of 2011, it was expected that the company would pass 750 million check-ins. In fact, the then President Barak Obama also registered to the service in 2011, in order to take tips from the White House staff from the locations he had visited.

The main reason behind the success of the app was the gamification it rendered. The gamification in the app helped it become more interesting and encouraged more user engagement. In the year of 2010, there were news making rounds that the major tech giants like Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft were rivalling to acquire Foursquare for a rumoured $100-150 million. The app offers services for both enterprises and consumers.

Crowley worked as the CEO of the company for a long period of 7 years, and later, became the Executive Chairman of the company.

Crowley was named in the list of Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for two consecutive years in 2010 and 2011, and further was named in the list of Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” in 2011 and 2012. He was also named one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 by MIT Technology Review TR35.