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Reynolds Johnson – The Man Who Created the First Ever External Hard Disk

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

Data storage – It certainly does not carve a niche in one’s mind. However, Imagine being able to save only 5 MB data in a machine that weighed a ton and measured a whole room. That machine was the start of a journey that has resulted in accommodating the technology to create better and higher standards of living. It was the first external Hard Disk ever invented. Well, and it was in 1952.

Reynolds B. Johnson was the ninth child of John and Elizabeth Reynolds and was born in Minnesota on July 7th,1906. He was a simple school going boy who displayed a keen interest in technical and mechanical sciences. Johnson was interested in workings of the machines and exhibited his ability to the world by creating and demonstrating a working model of a submarine in a horse trough. He graduated from one of the best private schools- Minnehaha Academy and went on to pursue a BS in Educational Administration as a part of his higher education from the University of Minnesota.

A teacher by profession, Johnson decided to return to his original occupation and improve its status quo. In 1932, Johnson had an idea to create a device that could grade the standardized tests and dissipate horrors associated with it. He tasked two of his pupils to work under his directions to create such a device. He called it the “mark-sense technology”, and this was the official start to his career as an inventor. Technology-giant IBM hired him as an engineer and bought rights over his invention. The company sold his test scoring machine from 1937 onwards. Other companies such as Bell System used mark sense technology to record calls, and utility companies used it to record meter readings. The government organizations used it under the name “electrographic” technology.

Since then, his role at IBM was not limited to an engineer, but further expanded, when he led a research team at IBM’s research laboratory, with the objective of improving current data storage and retrieval solutions. His ideas are being worked on even today.

He created a machine that could store data using aluminium and magnetic drums, making the first imprint of a data external storage device on the world. His inspiring work in the field of data storage made him known as the “Father of Hard Disk Drive”.

Johnson was one of the most influential inventors of this century. His life is marked with almost hundreds of patents relating to storage and technology. He was an influential figure in the toy industry, too. He implanted technology by inventing “microphotography” in simple toys. Fischer Price also used Johnson’s technology in their “Talk to my books”. He is also famous for creating handy videocassette tapes bettering the original ones made by Sony.

Johnson’s visionary mind was recognized throughout the world. He was a recipient of several awards such as Franklin Institute’s Certificate of Merit, in 1996, and the National Medal of Technology, in 1986. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers ( IEEE) established the “IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award” in 1991. The award is given to the inventors for their outstanding contributions.

Today, we dream of getting our desired things without making a splash in the water. It would be a disgrace if we do not remember a person who has provided the world with uncanny inventions, not only in the field of technology but also in the field of education. In 1966, Johnson made a bold prediction and a correct one, too, about the future of the education system: “The classroom of the future will be as different from today’s as the computer centre is different from the accounting room with its high stools of a few decades ago.” Such pioneering vision could only be compared to today’s Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks.

Brian Dean : The Founder of Backlinko, ‘the Future of Modern Day’s SEO’

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

Blogging is one trendy and the easiest business for earning some good cash. It has lured and helped a lot of young minds who can nurture their creativity through an online platform. But before one decides to open their own blogging site, there are certain rules and strategies one should get accustomed to. SEO, CRO, social media marketing, higher traffic, top ranking are some of the common terms that one usually comes across while blogging.

So, what if we tell you that you can get online training for becoming a good blogger, increase more traffic over your blogs, and even, get your site to the first page of Google? Backlinko, a site that maintains its own blogs and SEO expertise, is an awesome guide for all potential bloggers, digital marketers, and entrepreneurs out there.

Brian Dean, founder and CEO of Backlinko, formed the company back in 2013, to teach people more about practical blogging strategies. In no time, he became a very significant figure in the world of SEO and content marketing. But, success did not come to him overnight. He went through a number of failed businesses and tight financial circumstances before Backlinko happened. The flawless strategies of Backlinko seized the attention of the innumerous audience and brought immense success to the company in just a few years.

Early career of Brian Dean

Dean quit his job in 2010 to focus more on creating a niche in the world of SEO, but initially, there were a lot of failed attempts. The most fascinating thing about Dean is he always accepted failure as a path to success. He never thought of giving up even though he didn’t have sufficient money to invest in his business. Before his own startup, he worked as a freelance writer on Elance and Livestrong.com. After Demand Media (a company that owned Livestrong.com) went out of business, he was able to think of starting something of his own.

Backlinko

Starting from scratch, he started the business all by himself. His first successful website was live in 2012, achieving immense traffic. He started reading more SEO blogs to take this to the next level, but he was utterly disappointed. And, that is when he started to create his own blogs, and eventually, built Backlinko. The first blog of Backlinko was posted in 2013, and it attracted a lot of readers. With the overwhelming response, the company decided to take a step ahead and created its first flagship course, ‘SEO That Works’, in the same year.

Since he was the only member of Backlinko at the beginning, he did not have access to many amenities to shoot the videos for the courses. So, one of his friends helped him out by shooting the videos in Dean’s apartment. It took him around four months to deliver the first version of this course. But once it became popular, it started receiving around 200,000 unique visitors per day.

Business strategy

Dean, from the very beginning, focused more on the content, rather than the products of the platform. He was aware that most of the audience will gather around the unique blog titles and their content. So, he decided to focus on the quality of the content and posted one blog per month. These blogs comprised of unique content and effective strategies that, at the same time, were practical and achievable, too. Instead of writing several paragraphs, he crafted his articles in the form of tutorials and focused on making them easier to comprehend for the readers.

The first launch of Backlinko made around $80,000, and since then, it is only rising. The company also focused more on email marketing, and according to Dean, it is the key to the success of every business. The company also focused more on gathering customer stories and interviews. The process was time-consuming but quite fruitful. It helped the company grow and move ahead of its competitors.

Within a span of six years, and with only three team members, the company has become one of the top small online businesses. Currently, the site receives 25,000 visitors per month, and thousands of subscribers are regular over the Backlinko newsletter.

Dean targets on understanding his audience thoroughly, and according to him, once he figures out the type of audience he is dealing with and their demands, it becomes a lot easier for him to write the right content for them.

Yatra.com : How a Local Travel Agency Reached Millions of Indians

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

Planning a trip, used to be a very hectic task before any of the online travel portals got launched. Now that, we have online travel agents, hotel and flight booking; checking availability of rooms, flights, and other accommodations, seems like a piece of cake.

One such online portal is Yatra.com, one of the most popular online Indian travel companies, that provide the finest travel services starting from booking hotels of your choice to create your own holiday packages. The company was founded on 1 August 2006 by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. It is a Haryana-based online travel agency with a wide spectrum of services and a large customer base.

Dhruv Shringi, CEO of Yatra.com

One of the founders of Yatra.com, Dhruv Shringi, as well as the current CEO of the company, holds an MBA degree from INSEAD. He is also a certified Chartered Accountant who gathered a lot of experience before launching Yatra.com. Before Yatra.com, he worked for Ebookers where he was responsible for sales of $850 million that occurred through multiple channels. The other two founding members also worked with Shringi at Ebookers from 2000-2005. And in the period of working together, these three came up with the idea of Yatra.com.

CEO Yatra.com Dhruv Shringi
Image Source: business-standard.com

Shringi had also worked for the London branch of Ford Motor Company and for 6 years he worked with Arthur Anderson in India. He provided business strategies as well as teamed up with the IT sector of the companies he worked for. A man with such calibre and occupational background is likely to bring some lucrative investors in house, and so he did for Yatra.com.

Growth, Acquisitions, and Strategies

The company started in 2006, with only three members, and crossed 1,000 employees by 2016. Yatra.com is a B2B type business providing flight tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals and holiday packages throughout the entire world. The company started growing rapidly in India from the very beginning and with some strategic acquisitions and investors, the company is now growing roots in international lands as well.

In June 2007, Yatra online was nominated for prestigious 14th Annual World Travel Awards. The company came in partnership with Sify.Com in November 2007. In 2010, Yatra.com became the first online travel company to launch India’s first online ticket cancellation service. The company established a contract with IRCTC on 4 January 2010, and the next month, it tied up with Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation.

On 17 February 2010, Yatra.com came in partnership with Tyroo, followed by a partnership with eBay India and Tripadvisor, the world’s largest travel community, in the month of April of the same year.

On 17 May the same year, the company was awarded the ‘Best Domestic Tour Operator’ award by the Ministry of Tourism. In November, Yatra.com came in a joint venture with American Express. This partnership and the acquisition of TSI, helped the company expand its business, especially for the international flight ticketing. At the end of 2010, Sabina Chopra got felicitated at the Second Annual Women Leaders in India Award 2010. A lot of exclusive holiday packages were launched in this year, which attracted different kinds of travellers.

In 2011, Yatra.com, for the first time, introduced holiday packages to Spain. And, to lure more Indian customers, it launched exclusively ‘Love, Breakups and Zindagi’ package. In April 2011, the company raised funding of $2 billion from blue-chip investors, including Valiant Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners, and Intel Capital. In November 2011, the company was honoured with CNBC Awaaz Travel Awards for Best Online Travel Agency.

In 2012, Yatra.com won the award for ‘Best Travel Website’ in IAMAI’s 2nd Annual India Digital Awards. The company partnered with ZenithOptimedia Media in the month of March of 2012. It also launched a new credit card in association with SBI. By the time, it became the second largest online travel website in India and owned a 30 per cent share of the travel market related online transactions. The company also acquired a 100 per cent stake in Travelguru.com. In December 2012, Yatra.com, in association with Microsoft, released an app on Windows 8 for its customers.

In 2014, the company came in association with McDonald’s, and also, Rajasthan Royals (Official Travel Partner for IPL 2014). By August 2015, the company dominated the online travel market with booking in over 40,000 hotels. In 2016, Yatra.com incorporated Homestays in its mobile and website app. The statistics showed that in November 2016, 67 per cent of the total Indian travellers where booking holiday packages through Yatra.com. In the same year, Yatra merged with Terrapin 3 Acquisition Crop, which made the company worth $218 million.

The Success

In this journey of 19 years, the company has gained immense trust from its more than 31 million customers. Yatra.com books around 50,000 hotels in more than 500 destinations of India and over 430,000 hotels around the world. On an average rate, Yatra.com hosts more than 20,000 domestic flights and 5,000 hotels bookings per day, through online media and call centres.

Bigbasket : The Success Story of India’s Biggest Online Grocery Store

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The days are long gone, when we had to wait for our turn in the long queues at a grocery store after roaming around and shopping for hours. Since online trading has seized a bigger part of marketing, the grocery stores are also getting modernised. And with this revolutionary change, a lot of online grocery stores came up in the digital market, such as Farm2Kitchen, ZopNow, etc. But only a few of them were able to stand high after multiple business turmoil, especially after the dot-com boom. Bigbasket is one of those successful start-ups that became India’s largest supermarket within a few years. Though the founders of Bigbasket started their start-up journey around the time of the market crash in 2000, they were able to establish as one of the leading online grocery stores.

Founders of Bigbasket

Conventionally, when we hear about recent start-ups, we think of young minds with brimming enthusiasm in the business field. But, it has always been that extraordinary ideas come from experienced minds.

Bigbasket founders
Image Source: thenational.ae

Bigbasket is one such start-up whose five founding members already had enough experience in this industry and were skilled in their fields.

Mr Hari Menon, the current CEO, and one of the founders of Bigbasket, also served as the CEO of IndiaSkills, Co-founder of Fabmall, Country Head at Planetasia and Business Head at Wipro.

The four other founding members of Bigbasket includes Mr V S Sudhakar, Mr Vipul Parekh, Mr Abhinay Choudhari and Mr V S Ramesh.

Each of the founders has a unique vision about the business, and their ideas complement each of them. Sudhakar has got a vast experience in the IT sector, and he is also the founder and CEO of Fabmall. Parekh is the Head of Finance and Marketing at Bigbasket, whereas Choudhari serves as the Head of New Initiatives. With 21 years of experience in the logistics sector of the Indian Navy, Ramesh is currently the Head of Logistics and Supply Chain of the company.

History

The five founders started their first online business, Fabmart.com, in 1999. The online grocery division of this business was launched in 2001, and the company grew exceptionally. They also started a succession of grocery supermarkets called Fabmall in Southern India, which the Aditya Birla group acquired in 2006, rebranding it as More. But the founders were still too adamant about establishing something bigger in the grocery market of India and finally launched Bigbasket in 2011.

The Journey Towards Success

The company raised around $10 million in the first round of funding from Ascent Capital. By 2014, the company was growing massively in three major cities, confirming over 5,000 orders every day. In March 2016, the company raised $150 million from Abraaj Capital in Series D funding. In the same year, the company also crossed targeted 10 million customers orders and also received 1million orders in a single month. By June 2017, the company raised around $290 million in total from 8 rounds of funding and 11 investors. In the same year, the company’s most lucrative investors were Paytm and Alibaba, from whom the company raised $280 million in the Series E funding. Some of the investors who participated in the investment rounds of Bigbasket are Bessemer Ventures, Helion, Zodius, LionRock Capital and Meena Ganesh.

With all the investments it received, Bigbasket decided to expand the business in other cities of India, too. The company also built several warehouses and invested in cold room facilities to enhance the range of fresh products. It also invested in technology to make delivery more efficient and shopping easier, both from the browser and mobile application. But amid the growing competition in the market form other companies, like Grofers and LocalBanya, Bigbasket started focussing more on personalized shopping.

After deep research of 5 years, Bigbasket figured out that the products in demand varied from city to city. This helped the company to put more emphasis on those products and expand the number of brands. For example, for the city with more demand for dairy products, Bigbasket introduced an extended range of brands of the milk products for that particular city. This strategy escalated the profit of the company and helped outdo its rivals.

The Future

The company allows customers hassle-free browsing through the products and relaxed shopping. Today, Bigbasket sells more than 12,000 varieties of products of 1,000 different brands in 25 cities.

According to some estimates from the experts, the company may value over $1.2 trillion by 2020.

Founders of Google Map, From Doodling on a White Board to Monitoring the Roads

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

Before settling down in the technical sector of Google and long before founding ‘Where 2 Technologies’, all the four founders of Google Map, Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma and the Rasmussen brothers, Lars and Jens, had totally divergent lifestyles. Initially, they had no plans on starting something of their own, but they somehow ended up creating a Sydney-based digital mapping start-up, ‘Where 2 Technologies’, which came under the acquisition of Google after a year of its launch.

Noel Gordon, Stephen Ma, Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen are the founding members of Google Map. The story starts with the Rasmussen brothers, at the time, when they started from zero with a sky-high dream of becoming millionaires, later, joined by Gordon and Ma.

Before Founding Where 2 Technologies

Born in Denmark, Lars always wanted to become a veterinarian. But, his mindset was changed after a terrible incident happened when he was 13. The Rasmussen brothers started taking programming lessons after school. Lars graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Computing in 1998 and moved to the US in 2000. In the US, he worked for a company, prior to dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. Dot-com or Dot-com Bubble was a business model that was followed by many companies to expand rapidly and capture the market.

After the stock market crashed in the year 2000 (also known as the dot-com boom), the Rasmussen brothers went through a $45 million loss in start-up capital. Though it was a major loss, they didn’t consider giving up as an option. With no savings and a mere $16 in their pockets, they started thinking of building a start-up. After the dot-com bust, the two needed to come up with something very unique, and something which, people would be interested to invest in. They started to work with mapping and navigation systems, to create something unusual and to set their application apart from already existing mapping software. And that is how they developed the idea of Where 2 Technologies, one of the most widely used platforms for navigation.

Google Map
Image Source: medium.com

After six months of diligent hard work, they finally had a prototype to show and went to meet Frank Marshall, a private investor, to discuss fundings. Marshall was a very influential person, and it was him, who set all the meetings between Rasmussen brothers and high profile investors.

Where 2 Technologies really started taking shape after the other two founders joined Rasmussen brothers in the venture. Before joining Where 2 Technologies, Ma worked at a petrol station, and Gordon worked in his father-in-law’s clothing factory.

The Real Struggle

When the two bothers were still struggling with the idea of a new mapping system, Lars flew to Australia to live with his girlfriend. In Australia, Lars sought out Gordon and Stephen, when the brothers were already bankrupt. Then, with a little funding from Gordon, Where 2 Technologies was actually created and started shaping towards perfection. The team worked in the spare bedroom with conditions led by Gordon’s girlfriend. They didn’t work after 5, and also, spared the weekends. Gordon, in one of his interviews, said that they might be the only start-up in the entire world that worked from 9 to 5.

The next step was to get the right investors for the idea. They jot down the list of potential competitors, list of buyers, capital firms and technical strategies for Where 2 Technologies. By this time, they were already living lives with maxed out credit cards, but the zeal to achieve the goal was untamed. After showing a few prototypes to some of the huge investors, the real deal began when they had to represent the idea of advanced digital mapping to Google’s co-founder, Larry Page.

At first, Where 2 Technologies created an application for mapping which was supposed to be downloaded, installed, and then used for navigation. But Google wasn’t interested in application software, so it gave the team a deadline to get an idea for a web browser. Within a time span of only three weeks, they required to create a prototype, and that is how the scribbled whiteboard became famous. Finally, the team was able to successfully deliver it in August 2004. And with an unrevealed sum, Where 2 Technologies came under the acquisition of Google. This was Google’s second acquisition.

The Triumph

Even before the founders could embrace success, they found themselves working as Google employees. These Nooglers, that is, new recruits of Google started working at the Australian headquarters of the company. The company launched its IPO soon after they were recruited, where Google valued $23 billion. Among the four of them, Gordon still works at Google, and Ma retired a few years ago.

Google Map was founded on 8th February 2005, and by 2012, the company had over 2,100 employees working in the mapping sector.

The hard work of those four men paid off well because they were never ready to give up.

Flipboard: An Application that Creates Digitalised Magazine With Curated Contents

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

Newspapers and magazines have been the biggest source of information. But the time has gone, when people used to sit on their breakfast table and read the entire newspaper, or the time when they would relax in their couch and flip the pages of their favourite magazine. Everything, today, is moving at a faster pace, and people, too, want everything accessible through the swipe of their finger.

But there comes Flipboard for the rescue, which is an application aggregating the news, especially the top stories from social media, photos and videos from different websites and presents it in the form of the magazine to the users. So, you can flip the pages of your virtual magazine through your phone screen and also create one to contribute to this inspiring innovation. The application was developed by Mike McCue and Evan Doll and was released for the first time, exclusively for the iPads, in 2010.

Mike McCue

Mike McCue is an American entrepreneur, who has a great career graph. He has worked with companies like Netscape and Microsoft. In fact, he worked as the Vice President of Technology at Netscape but left the company to co-found his first startup, Tellme Networks, with Angus Davis, in February 1999. In March 2007, the company came under the acquisition of Microsoft, McCue taking the place of General Manager in the company. But in June 2009, he left Microsoft to co-found Flipboard, the world’s first social magazine, with Evan Doll. Along with Tellme Network and Flipboard, he has also founded Paper Software.

Evan Doll

Before founding Flipboard, he worked with Apple as a software engineer. He primarily worked with the iPhone team, Final Cut Pro and Aperture. He has a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University where he also taught the first university-level iPhone application development course.

Founders Flipboard
Image Source: zimbio.com

History of Flipboard

At first, the app was launched only for iPad users, and later, was followed by the release of iPhone and iPod versions in December 2011. The app looked extremely lustrous and allured a good number of users from the very beginning. The wide range of publishers, an arsenal of features, innumerable customization options, glossy advertisements, and most importantly, the touch screen enabled swiping feature made it popular in the digital world in no time. It became a source of amusement for every magazine lover. Since the readers were also able to create their own magazines, there were approximately 8 million customized magazines, soon after a year of its launch.

The Android version of the app was released on 5th May 2012. After modifying and releasing updated versions for a couple of years, after its launch finally, a stable version of Flipboard for Android was released on 22nd June 2012. Since then, it has been available on Google Play.

In 2013, the company raised a fund of $161 million, after completing a series C funding round, escalating the value of Flipboard to reported $800 million. Later, the Windows 8 version of the app was demonstrated at the ‘Microsoft 2013 Build Conference’,.

In 2014, four years after the launch of Flipboard in Apple’s App Store, the company witnessed more than 100 million active users with more than 300,000 readers per day. By this time, the company already established a direct partnership with around 8,000 publishers, thus providing brand new stories to the readers every day. In March 2014, Zite’s (a magazine-style reading app from CNN television network) acquisition by Google enhanced the styling of Flipboard’s page, and it also agreed upon publishing global contents of CNN. But, Zite was shut down after a year. In October 2014, Flipboard unveiled the Windows 8 version for Windows phones and other devices.

In 2015, the company received a funding of $200 million from investors, like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers, Index Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, and Rizvi Traverse Management. In the same year, the company also raised an additional $50 million from JPMorgan Chase. Previously, Flipboard was only available as an app for the smartphone and tablet users, but from February 2015, Flipboard was up in the web, thus enabling users to use it even from the desktops.

New updated versions of the mobile app for both iOS and Android were released in 2017, implementing many new and smart features. In 29th May 2019, Flipboard announced a security breach which allowed the flow of private information of the users to the unauthorized third party. It was taken care of at the earliest, and the company reset all the passwords and authentication tokens.

Future of Flipboard

McCue, in one of the interview, said that this is his last startup, and he will stick to it till the end. This tech-obsessed American native keeps on improving the user interface of the app. He is also looking into building a stronger algorithm for the entire system and better contents for the next generation of the readers.