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Sina Corporation

Sina Corporation – A Chinese Tech Company Providing A Microblogging Platform Similar To Twitter.

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Sina Corporation is a famous multinational conglomerate based in China. It has three headquarters in Shanghai, Beijing, and the Cayman Islands. In November 1998, Wang Zhidong, Wang Yan, Ben Tsiang, and Hurst Lin founded Sina Corporation. The company had mainly four lines of business which are Sina Weibo, Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sinanet. Currently, Charles Chao is the CEO of the company has more than 60,000 employees. There are more than 100 million people worldwide who use the products and services of Sina Corporation. In 2003, the company was named “China’s Media of the Year” by Southern Weekend.

About Sina Corporation

The four founders founded Sina Corporation in Beijing in 1998 and after a couple of years established its financial headquarters in Shanghai. The company mainly focuses on offering its platform and services to Chinese users globally. It has 100 million registered users of which 10 million engages in free-based services. Apart from the users of China, the company also has Chinese users from North America.

Sina provides different types of services worldwide and has thirteen access points within Greater China and also tailored pages for overseas nations. International markets include Japan, Korea, the US, Australia, Europe, and Germany. The microblogging platform of Sina is also very famous such that more than 5,000 companies and across 2,500 media organizations in China use it.

Sina Corporation
Image source: g.foolcdn.com

Major Sina Businesses

Though the company has four business lines, Sina Weibo is the most famous and revenue-generating of all. Sina Weibo is a microblog social network, a platform similar to Twitter, and the largest social networking service in the Chinese language. Based on the number of active users, Sina Weibo dominates 56.5% of the microblogging market in China. In the Sina Weibo platform, the company has more than 500 million active users and the browsing time is also comparatively more than any other competitors of Sina.

The cloud computing market of Sina Corporation also dominates the Chinese market. This is because Sina App Engine (SAE) is the earliest and the largest such platform in the country. Sina launched this platform in 2009 and this product is dedicated to web deployment, and hosting services for various corporations as well as independent developers. Currently, more than 300,000 developers in China are using the SAE platform.

History Of The Company

Sina Corporation was founded as a result of the merger between the two largest Chinese websites. In 1996, the most traffic generated internet portal of China SRSNet was established which later merged with Sinanet, a website that was developed in 1995 for the American Chinese community. After the merger of these two websites, Sina Corporation was founded and the services were extended to North America and Hong Kong. The merger lead Sina Corporation to outrun its rivals like Sohu and NetEase in terms of the most visited portal site. Sina Corporation started expanding very quickly in terms of launching new services and that way it attracted new customers.

In April 2000, Sina Corporation became the first company to get approved for listing in the Nasdaq National market through a variable interest entity (VIE) in the Cayman Islands. Sina was closely followed by its rivals in the following months of the same year to get listed in the same. In 2000, the official website of the company was selected for online coverage for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. In 2015, the online portal of Sina was attacked as there were certain allegations that it contained distorted facts and violated morality. Recently, Blizzard Entertainment sued Sina Games related to a game called Glorius Saga.

Charles Chao – CEO of Sina Corporation

Charles Chao is the current president and CEO of Sina Corporation. He joined the company back in 1999 when Sina faced various obstacles to get listed in NASDAQ. Charles made great efforts to establish Sina as a VIE which cleared the path for the company. Charles, before becoming the CEO of the company, also served as the CFO and COO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Sina Corporation.

Tumblr

David Karp : The Young Entrepreneur Who Founded the Biggest Microblogging Website Tumblr

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Experience matters, and when it is earned since childhood, it can help you achieve many things. As a kid, humans are sharper than adults and capable of learning even the toughest of things. These days we see many little kids coming up and showing off their skills and knowledge, whereas many are already launching their startups in the various fields. Thanks to the evolving technology. Though David Karp is not a teenage entrepreneur, he had achieved a lot before he passed his teens. David Karp is the founder of Tumblr, the microblogging website, and has an interesting success story to follow.

Early Life

Karp was born to a science teacher and a film and television composer, on 6 July 1986, in New York City. He was a bright student and got his primary as well as middle school education from Calhoun School, at the same place where his mother worked. Karp, at the age of 11, started learning HTML and was soon developing websites for businesses.

Karp always wanted to join MIT for his graduation, so, he after studying for one year at The Bronx High School of Science, dropped out and opted for homeschooling, to make his resume interesting for admissions in the university.

Career

David Karp
Image Source: charitybuzz.com

Things to go according to one’s will is not always possible. Karp wanted to add more to his resume, so he was doing many things alongside his homeschooling. He started working at the Frederator Studios as an intern when he was 14. At that time, he was also learning Japanese and had joined maths classes. Along with his maths tutor, he learned some of the programming skills. At the Frederator Studios, he got to work on various software products, and he even developed studio’s first blogging platform and its first internet video network, named Channel Frederator.

Later, he got to work with UrbanBaby. One day, at the firm, he solved a glitch in the software successfully in a comparatively lesser amount of time. The incident helped him to win the attention of John Maloney the founder of UrbanBaby.

Maloney appointed Karp as the head of product at UrbanBaby. Karp continued to work with the company for four more years and left it in 2006 after the company was acquired by CNET. Four years spent in a company made him leave the dream of joining MIT behind, as he had also not received a high school degree yet and he was doing great as a programmer.

Entrepreneurial Journey towards Tumblr

Karp work and experience opened new doors for him, and he went on to start his own development consulting company named Davidville. He hired a programmer named Marco Arment, through Craigslist, with the help of whom, Karp started to work on a new project. Karp had grown an interest in microblogging and was looking forward to developing a platform based-on microblogging. It took him a year and a half on deciding to finally work on his interest, and he launched Tumblr in February 2007.

David Karp was aware of the scope of a microblogging website, but he did not know that his website will gain 75000 users just within two weeks of its launch. In six months, he realised that Tumblr has got huge potential, so to focus on it, entirely, Karp shut down his consulting business and rebranded his company as Tumblr, Inc.

The Rise of the Company

In 2009, the company launched an iOS app for Tumblr, and in 2010, another app was launched for Blackberry phones. In 2011, the company valued at $800 million, and in the same year, raised a funding of $85 million. In October 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging website that hosted American President Barak Obama’s blog.

The 3.0 version of Tumblr launched in 2012, which also included support for Spotify. This way, the users could now post HD pictures on the platform and also use it at offline mode. In August 2012, the company monetized the platform through advertisements.

Major investors including Union Square Ventures, Fred Seibert, John Borthwick, and Sequoia Capital, etc. were the major investor in the company at that time. Karp sold 25% of the company share to few of its investors.

On May 20, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it will be acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Karp remaining the CEO of the company. After working together with Yahoo! for four years, Karp resigned from his post.

David Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek in August 2009. He was also named in the list of MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

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Evan Williams : The Man Behind Major Startups Including Blogger, Twitter, and Medium

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Entrepreneurship demands skills and experience, but for some people, it comes all by birth. They do not need much experience, instead, their passion helps them to reach their goals. One such name is Evan Williams, who is the founder of the biggest blogging websites, Blogger and Medium. He has also co-founded some other ventures and is one of the co-inventors of the largest micro-blogging website, Twitter. From a part-time farmer to an internet entrepreneur, Williams’ story, definitely, includes motivation for people.

Early Life

Evan Williams was born as Evan Clark Williams on March 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska, to Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. His family was into farming, so he also worked in the farms in the summer holidays as help. After completing high school from a local government school, Williams joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also became a member of the FarmHouse Fraternity. But as he was more into starting his own business and making a career, he left college only after a year and a half.

Career

Blogger co-founder Evan Williams
Image Source: wefornews.com

Looking for a better work opportunity, Williams ended up working with a few startup companies based in various parts of Florida, Texas, and Austin. Later, he moved to Sebastopol, California, to join the marketing team of O’Reilly Media. While working at O’Reilly, he switched to the coding department of the company. He was successful in learning the required skills and developed a personal blog website EvHead.com. Eventually, he left the job to become a freelance coder. As a freelancer, he worked with companies, like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Founding Blogger

Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs. The aim behind founding the company was to create management software for businesses. The first product that the company produced was a web application named ‘Pyra’, which included a project manager, contact manager, and a to-do list.

I999, they used the elements of ‘Pyra’ and created a blog-publishing tool named Blogger. It was officially launched in August in the same year. The platform was entirely free, so it faced a lot of trouble to survive. But soon, when it started getting ads, it began to stabilise. Soon Williams added some premium features to the platform, to monetise it. Hourihan left the company just after a few years of the inception of the company.

In February 2003, Google acquired PyraLabs, and eventually, Blogger. With the acquisition, the premium features of Blogger also became free to use. Williams continued to work with Google for one year after the takeover and left the company in 2004.

With Google, Blogger got new redesigns every few years and became the number one blogging platform. Blogger has provided its users with the freedom to create blogs for free. It provides the users to create beautiful looking designs for their blogs, and also, buy a separate domain to host their blogs as a distinct channel.

After PyraLabs: Obvious Corporation, Twitter, Medium

After PyraLabs, Williams went on to found Odeo, a podcast company, in October 2004. Sonic Mountain later acquired the company in 2007. He also co-founded Obvious Corporation in late 2006.

The famous micro-blogging website, Twitter, was one of the various projects that Williams co-worked on along with other key members of Obvious Corporation. Later April in 2007, Twitter was spun off to become a separate company. Williams held the position of the CEO of Twitter, the most successful venture he has worked on, in 2008. After serving the company for two years, Williams stepped down as the CEO to focus entirely on product development. Williams holds around 30-35 per cent stake in Twitter.

After Twitter, Williams wanted to develop a platform that would provide the users with an increased character-limit to write their blogs, as in the beginning, Twitter allowed writing 140- characters. So, in 2012, he founded Medium. Initially, it was only open to the early adopters, but later, it was opened for public.

In the first two years of its inception, the platform did not have much of users, but by March 2015, the platform recorded over 1.5 million hours reading time by its visitors. The company hired a staff of writers and editors to put good content over the platform. In 2015, the platform was nominated for the National Magazine Award.

In May 2017, Medium.com had gained an average of over 60 million unique monthly readers. By this time, the company started paying the writers based on the likes and the number of readers their posts had on Medium. Williams added ad banners to the platform, such that to make some profits through ads, but this business model did not work for the company, and he had to remove those ads from the platform.

Personal Life

William is married to Sara Williams and has two children. He lives in San Francisco with his family. He has a net worth higher than $1 billion.

William got his name under the list of top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 in the MIT Technology Review TR100, in 2003. In the next year, he was named “People of the Year” along with his partners Hourihan and Paul Bausch in one of the PC Magazines.