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Dom Hofmann : The Founder of Vine “A 6 Second Entertainment App”

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In this era, where everything is becoming instant and fast, everyone wishes that their entertainment also becomes very instant, quick. Besides, these days, in the hectic schedules, who has the time to take out an hour to watch a TV show or a live comedy show to please themselves. People wish that their source of comedy becomes shorter and shorten in the time perspective and holds enough interest that cam amuses them. Such was the vision of Dom Hoffman when he built the app Vine which turned out to be a wide success all over the world and gained a fan base very much faster than ordinary start-up apps.

So, “What makes Vine so special?” you may ask. The standout in this app was that it made short videos. And by short, I mean, indeed very short! It produced not more than 6-second videos. This was something ‘new’ to the entertainment industry, which shook it! People went nuts over Vine because it brought a sense of an innovational challenge to make fun and creative videos in a time period of just 6 seconds.

Dom, born on 27th September 1986, is what we can say a creative entrepreneur. He created ‘Vine’ with his partners, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. He feels, Vine becoming the internet’s most chosen video making tool, was rather an ‘accident’. He said that they imagined the tool would help people capture small moments of their lives Dom Hofmannand share them with their friends.

Vine was founded in June of 2012 and before even the official launch, Twitter bought it 30 Million $. The microblogging site, Twitter, thought of it as the perfect combination to its ‘short’ text way of socializing. The videos made by tool were published through the Vine’s social network and could be shared on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Vine is short of Vignette which is defined as a short impressionistic scene.

The tool was launched on 24th January 2013. In this, the videos could be surfed in accordance with theme, trending etc. It gave a tough competition to Instagram and Mobli.

“It became pretty clear as soon we launched it”, said Hofmann as the app gained a huge user base in just the span of less than 2 years. By December 2015, the tool had already surpassed 200 million active users. He (Dom), was surprised and excited about the way that people were using the app in strange ways. “Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation,” he said. Vine’s symbol displays an inverted 6 if you look at it closely.

But it eventually came to an end, when Twitter announced that it would be shutting down the Vine app on October 27, 2016. But Twitter said that viewing and downloading vines would continue. On January 20, 2017, Twitter launched an archive which contained all the previously captured vines.

Some of the reasons listed by the Vine community for the shutting down of Vine services were that Twitter’s own uncertain future in social networking and also the increasing competition from Snapchat which rolled out 10 seconds clip service to broadcast in the app itself.

Dom, even after the closing down of the app, did not close on the Vine community. He has been tweeting recently about ‘Byte’, the successor of Vine. Byte’s logo was tweeted by Dom on November 9th, 2018, and said that ‘Byte’ could be launching anytime soon in the Spring of 2019. The successor of Vine was supposed to come out early but Hofmann said that it was due to some “financial and legal issues.” He also said that ‘Byte’ would function independently and not under Twitter.

Vine was viewed by the users as both creative and monetary. Some of the famous Vine artists are Zach King, the magician who earned more than 1.4 Billion views. Other than this, Amanda Cerny, Logan Paul, Meghan McCarthy, Dwarf Mamba and KingBach. You can also check Vine compilations on YouTube.

Dom Hofmann showed us that entertainment does not need two-three hours of time. Even a small amount of time is sufficient enough to show one’s creativity and bring a smile on to people’s faces. He, in one way or the other, made us realize that happiness can be found even in the splits of seconds. The 6-second entertainment inventor is all prepped up to bring another entertainment app soon.

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

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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.

Jacob Blackstock : The Person who Transformed the Emojis into More Realistic Bitmojis

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These days, we all are on social media sites, chatting our whole day away. Yes! And when it comes to expressing what we feel, words come after the emojis. Emojis is the integrated way of telling how you feel, and who knows better about Emojis than ‘BA’.

Confused about who is BA? BA is none other than Jacob Blackstock, the man behind “Bitmojis.” If you are an active social media user, you probably know what Bitmojis are. Bitmojis is an advanced version of emojis. it’s nothing else but ‘you’. Yes, Bitmojis is what you would see yourself as in an animated fantasy world. And the man behind this beautiful fantasy world, Jacob Blackstock or as he prefers himself to be called, ‘BA’ has a story which stands a must listen one.

Jacob
Image Source: businessinsider.com

The Toronto born boy had an exquisite interest in movies and drawings. Jacob was deeply influenced by some of the movies like Mary Poppins and Poltergeist. He believed in himself and saw his future in them. The day he got to know that only the humans create those movies, he decided to do something in the same field. His mother gave him tips about his speech and told him he must not forget about mentioning her when he would receive an Oscar. His passion for his dream to do something in movies led him to write a short story, “ Mr Beaver in Space”, at the mere age of four. While in school, he not only wrote but also, produced and acted in a play.

He also had quite an interest in drawing. It was almost like that he started drawing the day he learnt how to hold a pencil. He was too much into cartoons and comics and who knew that he would do something so extraordinary out of something so simple.

The ‘movies’ interest was not over yet. He got a job in a film studio and made an 11 minutes movie, which was animated using stop motion. It took him three long years to create the 11 minutes movie. It was Outrageous, but at the same time, he was also exhausted by this. He wanted to do something else, something different.

Keeping this in mind, he started working on a new idea. The project got the funding of the Canadian government, and all BA did was that he would sit every day on his desk, take a drawing sheet, and draw a 10×8 inches panel. He drew, drew and drew. Not thinking about what is going wrong, or without detailing, beautifying all the stuff he made, he drew and drew. Although he was not completely sure about what he was doing, he went on for a few months, and considering the work he was doing, he decided that something has to come out of it, and it cannot belong to the garbage.

Soon, he realised that it was too much work for him. He became tired of drawing, and that’s when he created an online comic builder. It was an easy-to-use tool and created comics faster than ever. The real strike for him was when he discovered that this comic builder designed people. The comic builder turned out to be wilder than his own imagination.

That’s when he came up with Bitstrips with the help of his high school friend Jesse Brown, in 2007. Based on his thinking that the comics take a lot of time, Bitstrips allowed people to make comics even with little artistic skills. Jesse referred it to as “YouTube for comics”. At first, it was meant for the educational purpose, i.e. was used in schools, but soon they noticed that it was also being used outside the class. In 2012, a Facebook version for Bitstrips was launched, and within months, it gained heavy user amount, i.e., more than 10 million users. An app was launched, and just in the time of few months, it became a hit. It was among the most downloaded apps across the globe. Upon which, BA and Brown received funding from Horizons Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
In October 2014, BA came with Bitmoji, which gave users the independence to create stickers which featured comic characters of Bitstrips.

“Texting is making the conversation more convenient than ever, but it’s also stripped away a lot of the things that make communication human, we think one of the most important things that are still missing is identity. If you think about history, 99 per cent of human communication has been face-to-face,” said BA upon the purpose of Bitmoji (Source- Business Insider).

He further said that Bitmoji expresses what’s inside you. “Your avatar doesn’t have a bad hair day,” he said. Bitmoji really stood as the perfect animated avatar of the person who used it. It relevantly shows the best you!
In the year 2016, speculation started rising that Snapchat wanted to buy Bitstrips, which it did around for $100 Million. Bitstrips now only focused on ‘Bitmoji’, and soon after, a Snapchat update with integration with Bitmoji was released. Bitmoji became the most downloaded app on the iOS app store in countries like Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom and the United States.

According to BA, Bitmoji is the “next level” or “beyond” emojis. Bitmoji releases new updates very quickly and sometimes even within 24 hours. Bitmoji currently, is a part of emoji and is gaining its spice by getting involved to Tinder to create something that shows the love side of ours.

BA predicted the needs of the communication of the future, and he presented it to the world which got famous just in a jiffy. Such is the power of imagination. And so is the story of BA or we may say, the CEO and Co-Founder of Bitstrips.

Drew Houston : The Co-founder & the CEO of Dropbox

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Drew Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur, who co-founded the multi-billion company Dropbox at the mere age of 24. Once just an idea, now has more than 500 worldwide users subscribed to it. Houston a computer enthusiast, gives the credit of his success to his partner and co-founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, and the education he received at MIT. In one of his speeches at MIT, he said that people should surround themselves with inspiring people. He said, “Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”

Drew Houston
Image Source: nytimes.com

Early Life

Houston was born on 4 March 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. His father was an electrical engineer. Houston was a student at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. Initially, he was influenced by video games and had decided that he would become a video game tester. But as soon his father introduced him with programming, his focus diverted towards the computers. At the age of 14, while playing a video game, on his father’s Pcjr computer, he found a bug in the game and reported to the video game company, upon which he was offered a job at the same company. In 1990, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where he earned a graduate degree in Computer Science.

Career & Founding Dropbox

Along with an offer for a job at the early age of 14, he had also been a part of many startups including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Houston was still in college when he thought of developing Dropbox. He wrote the first line of code for Dropbox, while he was travelling on a bus, as he had forgotten his USB drive. At the time he was frustrated with his habit of forgetting and losing those USB flash drives all the time. So he conceived the idea of creating a cloud-based system for keeping the files in it. At first, he started working on the project for his personal use, but then he realised that the product could benefit other people too.

Houston released a video regarding the idea, his college mate Arash Ferdowsi being one of the viewers of it. Ferdowsi was really impressed by the idea and contacted Houston for partnership. From here the two started working on the project together.

In May 2007, Houston founded the parent company to Dropbox, Evenflow, Inc. In the same year, the company was able to get a seed funding from venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Y Combinator. In 2008, the company launched Dropbox at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Within one year, Dropbox had more than 3 million registered users. By 2011, the number of users reached 50 million, and in March 2016, it had 500 million users.

During the evolution of the company, it also went through some successful acquisitions including TapEngage, Audiogalaxy, Snapjoy in 2012, Bubbli in 2014, CloudOn in 2015, etc. In 2011, the total revenue earned by the company was over $240 million. Dropbox is considered as one of the twenty best startups of Silicon Valley.

In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the Nasdaq.

Personal Life

Houston is a huge video game lover. He also likes to sing, and during the college, he was a part of ’90s cover band. Business Week named Houston as one of the most promising players aged 30 and under. He was also named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com.

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.