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Sean Rad : The Founding Memeber and Former CEO of Tinder

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

Digitalization has made every activity so convenient for us that we can literally do anything with a swipe of our fingers. Moreover, the younger generation prefers doing everything through the internet, starting from shopping, payment, booking shows, and even, finding a perfect date unless they happen to meet under the mistletoe. Now, how great it would be to use a mobile app where you can find a perfect match only by swiping left or right? Tinder is one such mobile dating app, using which you can chat with other users and find a ‘good match’ for yourself.

The app provides the option to swipe right if you like someone’s profile and the other way around if you don’t like any. The app was launched in 2012, and in less than a couple of months, it grew to a million users. Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, along with Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and many other executive members. Rad was also the former CEO of the company. One of the founding members, Whitney Wolfe, left Tinder after some time to work on another dating app, Bumble.

Early Life

Born into an Iranian family, Rad moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1970s and settled in Beverly Hills. His parents worked in the technology industry, which might be one reason why he knew tech very well. Since his childhood, Rad was passionate about doing something big in life and making his life worthy.

Sean Rad
Image Source: businessinsider.in

When Rad was in high school, he did an internship as an entertainment manager, and that’s how he realized that he can make money even from the things he enjoyed doing. Though Rad and Mateen went to different schools, they knew each other since they were fourteen.

Higher Education and Career

Rad started pioneering in the world of technology since he was just eighteen and launched Orgoo, his first startup that was envisioned to build a webmail service. Both Rad and Mateen went to the University of Southern California, but Rad dropped out after a couple of years, to explore the entrepreneurial world and developed a platform called Adly, in the mid-2000s.

These two young entrepreneurs, along with other members, launched Tinder in 2012 and promoted the app heavily in various college campuses. They knew very well, where they could grab the most attention, and thus, gained a billion swipes per day, within a couple of years of Tinder.

Success of Tinder

A year after the release of Tinder, the app received TechCrunch’s Crunchie Award for ‘Best New Startup of 2013’. In March 2013, the company realised the application was used only in a few localities, and hence, Alexa Mateen, social media director, promoted it in other college campuses as well. And by May 2013, Tinder became one of the top twenty-five social networking apps on the basis of users. The frequency of users kept rising, which made Tinder the first online dating app as one of the top five online utilized applications.

In 2014 Webby Awards, the company was named as ‘breakout of the year’, and by October 2014, the application finally incorporated swiping motion and processed more than a billion swipes per day. It made around twelve million matches per day, which is appreciable for a company, which is only two years old. In 2015, the company launched a new feature to let the user access the profiles they rejected earlier, but chatting of two users was only possible when both of them swiped right. Apart from this, a lot of new features were added and deleted from the app in 2015. Tinder’s main complementing site was Facebook, as the user needed to connect their Facebook account with the app for profile verification.

In September 2016, Tinder came in partnership with Vina, a social networking app, and tested ‘Tinder Boost’ in Australia. In October 2016, it went live around the world, which basically, allowed your profile to be on top in your area for 30 minutes. In the same month, Tinder announced the opening of their first office in Silicon Valley, such that to enhance the quality of the employees. In November 2016, the app introduced more freedom on the grounds of choosing gender, breaking the typical mindset of society. This feature raised the number of users by a hefty amount, and by 2018, Tinder had over 3.7 million paid subscribers. The company is now deciding to launch a lighter version of the app, called Tinder Lite, which will take relatively less storage space and consume lesser data.

Majority of the Tinder, today, is under the acquisition of IAC and its subsidiary, Match Group. Till 2018, Rad changed positions quite a number of times, stepping down from the position of CEO and getting back in the helm again. But, in August 2018 a lawsuit was filed against IAC by a group of Tinder employees including Rad. They are suing IAC of alleged stock information and seeking at least $2billion in damages.

Threema : Small Step to Enhanced Security in Conversations

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What if we told you that there exists an application which completely secures your data privacy? Amid the data breaches taking place, you probably might not believe us. However, it is true, and the app we are talking about is Threema; an instant messaging application, similar to our favourite Whatsapp. The app has been the one-time ‘Android App of the Year(2015)’ and two-time ‘Best Selling iOS App (2014, 2015)’ winner.

Manuel Kasper founder threema
Image Source: 20min.ch

Threema was founded by Manuel Kasper, an entrepreneur from Switzerland, in 2012. The country is known for its pro-data privacy laws, so do the app. The app is also subject to strict European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It, basically, functions on unique identification, unlike other apps which function on Private information such as a mobile number.

In 2013, Threema expanded its user base on an exponential scale. This sudden rise in users came from Europe, particularly from Germany. This was a primary result of the infamous Snowden’s revelations. These revelations had a two-fold effect. Firstly, it exposed the American surveillance network and its outreach. Secondly, there was an outbreak of public awareness of the importance of data privacy. Suddenly, the topic of Data Privacy became of broad and current interest. People started paying closer review to it.

Since then, many people have commented on data privacy issues. In a recent interview, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, said, “Lately, it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation – the belief you can claim the credit without accepting responsibility”. Cook also blasted corporations on data privacy issues, breaches, violations. Facebook’s recent scandal, where the people’s information was harvested without their permission. It shook the world. However, Mark Zuckerberg dodged punishment in a seemingly unconvincing way.

Threema aims to securely protect user data and exhibits some characteristic features, which distinguish it from the competition. It promises the security of the user’s data by way of end-to-end encryption technology, which is not limited only to a ‘person to person’ conversation, but also to group chats, voice messages and media files. The technology ensures the singular ability of the recipient to decrypt the messages. Neither any service provider nor any person can decrypt them.

We all know that technology giant ‘Whatsapp‘ has been creating data profiles of users for its parent organisation ‘Facebook’. However, Threema does not fiddle around with “Metadata”, meaning that the app collects the particular data which is “sine qua non” for the conversation between people. Such an approach has appealed to the people. However, every coin has two sides. Threema’s enhanced security has been misused by terrorist modules such as ISIS and Hizbul to converse freely in a secure environment.

Threema also ensures safe and anonymous data recovery through its platform. Threema Safe is an automated self-hosted platform for the purpose of data recovery. The backup is processed by ‘scrypt’ algorithm, which creates a near-impenetrable cryptographic key. Such an algorithm leaves brute-force attacks useless.

Threema has based its success purely on its exceptional security protocol. If you look at data privacy as one of the major concerns, you don’t need to look beyond. It has been widely praised as one of the most secure messaging apps. And if that is not enough, the app has also scored perfectly well on several tests and studies. While this has happened, the app has treaded on the lines of secure communication diverting from the apathetic chaos created by certain organizations, making our life little more secure.

Cleartrip : The Success Story of Travel Aggregator Website of India

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There will rarely be any person who doesn’t want to travel. Travelling is fun, exciting and connects you to a new world. Thanks to the various portals for ticket and hotel bookings, travelling has become easier and relaxing. But if we go over 15 years ago, the case was not the same. There were no online portals for bookings, and people relied upon the traditional inconvenient methods of travelling. This was the same time when not everyone had got access to the internet.

In the mid-2000s, Facebook was making the buzz and no one, at least in India, was thinking of making train and hotel bookings over the Internet. But then, Hrush Bhatt came with the idea of establishing an online website, where people could easily book hotels, trains and even flights.

Cleartrip founder Hrush Bhatt
Image Source: vervemagazine.in

Bhatt is an Indian entrepreneur, who used to travel across India, with his maternal family, a lot. He loved travelling and had been to the U.S. quite sometimes. Bhatt was an alumnus at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, where he studied economics and history. While studying, he wrote for the college newspaper, and even, received an Apple Macintosh for his work, upon which he started learning to design.

Bhatt completed his graduation in 1998 and came back to India, where he started working at Plexus Technologies as the lead designer. Here he worked for a year and got to learn a lot about eCommerce. During his job at Plexus Technologies, he became the part of the launch team of Indiatimes.com, as the lead consultant.

After leaving the job at Plexus Technologies, Bhatt launched a startup named Paper Plane, a consulting firm and a digital agency. But like every other startup, this one also could not do very well.

With the failure of Paper Plane, Bhatt was quite discouraged and frustrated. But this frustration led him to found Cleartrip, India’s biggest travel booking portal. Bhatt, along with his co-founders Stuart Crighton and Mathew Spacie, started building a website for his new startup, i.e. a travel booking agency. Stuart Crighton has the experience in the field of hospitality as he was the former COO at Cox n’ Kings.

It just took nine months for the co-founders to build a good website and invite investors to invest in their idea. In 2006, they officially launched Cleartrip. Since it was quite an unusual idea for the investor of India, the company had to struggle to convince them. Despite the uniqueness of the startup idea, Cleartrip took no time to reach people and become popular, as soon as it was launched. Interestingly, the company did not offer any discounts to the users, but its quality service drew most of its customers. The company mainly focused on travellers who travel a lot, instead of the ones who made trip plans once in a year.

In 2011, Cleartrip launched Express Way, a one-click method, to help the users to store their travel and payment details securely on the platform. The company introduced its first mobile app in 2012, both for iOS and Android, providing its users with an intuitive interface and seamless booking processes. The company was dealing in booking for flights, trains and hotels in all parts of India.

In 2016, Cleartrip introduced a new feature to its users, PriceLock that, as the name suggests, allows the users to lock the prices of flights. In the same year, it also launched Cleartrip Local, another feature that enables the users to find out activities they can do in the nearby area.

In 2017, the company offered the users to pay through Apple Pay and also introduced new features named Cleartrip Stories and Instant Search. Cleartrip Stories allowed users to share their experiences with their friends and family over their Cleartrip profile. Instant Search helped the users to search and make bookings even faster. In the same year, Google partnered with Cleartrip for its flight search application, Google Flights.

In 2018, the company expanded its services to the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region, and in July month of the same year, Cleartrip acquired Flyin, a Saudi Arabia-based online travel aggregating company.

After acquiring Flyin, Cleartrip started working in Arabic countries more actively. So to make the processes more convenient, the company launched the Arabic version of the website in 2018.

The maximum average revenue that the company makes is worth $110 million, selling over seven million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights a year. Cleartrip, currently, is serving in 48 European and 18 Southeast Asian countries. The company has also established separate services for corporate users named Cleartrip Business. It has also introduced a travel tool, Agent Box, for the agents.

Cleartrip has won many awards for its service in India and abroad, including ‘Most Innovative Companies in Asia’, ‘India’s Best Travel Website’, ‘Product of the Year – Travel Category’, ‘Best Mobile App for Travel’, etc.

Inshorts : An App that Brings to You Crisped News from Around the World

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

Most of us, especially, the working class of our society, hardly get any time to go through the newspaper every morning. Reading each and every news in details and catching the office bus on time is next to impossible. But, it is like one of the fundamentals of our life to stay updated and follow up with the current news. Majority of the population rely on Google for that, just reading the headlines every day. But, India has brought something better for you.

An Indian company, Inshorts, has created a mobile app that summarizes the news for you in less than sixty words, covering all important highlights of the news. The app includes global news on business, education, politics, sports, technology, and everything you need to know about. The application is available for both Android and iOS.

Inshorts founders
Image Source: financialexpress.com

Inshorts was founded in 2013, and within a span of six years, the app received more than 6 million users. The company was founded by Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav. All of them dropped out from Indian Institute of Technology to start a business of their own. Azhar Iqubal and his friend, Anunay Arunav, were from IIT Delhi, whereas Purkayastha was from IIT Kharagpur. These three young potential entrepreneurs were pursuing computer science.

History

All of it started with creating a Facebook page on 23rd March 2013. Iqubal created the page to deliver summarized news for the readers. This caught the attention of many social media users, as it helped them stay updated about the whereabouts, without spending too much time in reading the entire stories.

The company, first, released its application in 2013 for Android, and for iOS, in 2015. After Inshorts started gaining popularity, it was admitted to the TLabs startup accelerator (it helps new startups to reach their full potential by proving them with capital and proper mentor). Soon, the company was shortlisted as one of the Nasscom’s 10,100 startups, and by December 2014, the company’s app had 1 lakh subscribers. In the same year, the company received funding from Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of Flipkart. Other early investors, include Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra, Ankush Nijhawan and Times Internet.

In February 2015, the company received funding from Tiger Global, Rebright Partners and raised $4 million in Series A funding, which was followed by raising another $20 million in Series B funding by the Bansal brothers and existing investor Tiger Global. In one of the interviews, Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners, said that Inshorts has a very bright and enthusiastic founding team, which is a pre-requisite for any startups at the initial stage. In the same year, the company was rebranded as Inshorts from its previous name News in Shorts.

The company announced that it intended to hire over a hundred content writers, by the end of 2015. In October 2015, Inshorts acquired a Bangalore-based company, Betaglide, the originator of Retention.ai. Retention.ai is, basically, a technology that helps to track the number of users uninstalling the app, the reason behind it and reducing the maintaining cost for the user. So, this was incorporated in the app of Inshorts to track the number of uninstallation, and thus, make strategies to perk up user retention.

By the end of 2015, the company already started adding images and videos along with the news, and also, added links which directed the user to the entire news if somebody wished to read it. Thus, the company collaborated with many news websites to ensure better news reporting. Though the company raised an appreciable amount of fund and reputation within a couple of years, there was a lot of criticism labelling Inshorts as a startup without a firm strategy. Iqubal, in response to these disparagements, said that they are looking forward to experimenting with the revenue models, and it might take another couple of year for the company to settle with one.

In 2016, the three co-founders got featured in Forbes magazine’s ’30 under 30′ list. They also received the award for ‘Best Innovation App’ by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Understanding that India has stepped into the digital era, wrapping it within the cloak of advertisement, it can bring massive profit to the company. So, in July 2016, the company launched the first ad on the platform, which ultimately ended up having more than a hundred advertising partner on board till 2018.

Future Plan of Inshorts

Since digitalized advertisement has become a key to make more profit, the company looks forward to luring more advertisers and increase the net revenue rate by four times. Also, the purchases through the app have increased significantly, and hence it plans to direct the readers to sites, like BookMyShow, MakeMyTrip, etc. The company also aims to incorporate more video contents, even for the ads, and put more emphasis on the regional languages. They are planning to curate more Hindi content as a major part of India’s population is still not comfortable with English. So, focusing on languages, apart from English, has produced more room for growth.

John McAfee : The American Computer Programmer and the Founder Antivirus Firm McAfee

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

The rise of the internet has brought a lot of facilities for humans. But for every good thing, one has to pay the price. With the increased facilities, there is another thing which is growing at a fast pace, i.e. Cyber Crime. As much as your valuables are important, your identity is too. But with cyber-crimes expanding, it is very hard to keep one’s identity inclosure. Hacking is at its prime with hackers have been spread all over the world. But how could it be possible that humans would not look out for a solution to this problem, too?

There exist antiviruses and several other safety measures that make one’s data safe from those hackers. One of these antiviruses is McAfee Antivirus, which, as of now, is the largest dedicated security technology. The founder of McAfee, John McAfee, also shares a story which is none the less than the rise and falls of a rollercoaster ride.

Early Life

McAfee was born in Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, the United Kingdom on September 18, 1945. He was raised by his mother in Virginia. His father, at quite a young age, committed suicide. This incident left McAfee with a scar in his memory. He received a bachelor’s degree from Roanoke College. And, the same college awarded him with an honorary Sc.D. degree in 2008.

Career

McAfee always had an entrepreneurial spirit in him. During his college days, he started his business career by selling magazines door to door. Alongside, he started working at a company that coded punch card systems in the late 60s. With this job in the hand, he learnt basic computer operations. And, with this computing knowledge, he acquired a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad, where he helped the company to use IBM systems to calibrate train schedules. During this time, he got addicted to drugs and with time the addiction was only increasing.

John McAfee
Image Source: newyorker.com

One of the interesting stories that revolve around this is that once McAfee was sold a bag of DMT (Hallucinogenic drug). He sniffed a little bit of it and felt nothing. So he decided to sniff out the whole bag. When he did, the world around him changed as if the hell breaks loose. He ended up hiding behind a trash can hearing voices and hoping that no one would look at him.

After this incident, he never went back to the Pacific job. He moved to the Silicon Valley, in the 1970s, where he was employed as a programmer by NASA’s Institute for Space Studies in New York. McAfee switched many jobs starting from NASA to Univac as a software designer, to Xerox as an operating system architect, and then moving to Computer Sciences Corporation. He also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. This was all going on, while he remained high on drugs. It was until 1983 that he got clean. While working for Lockheed, he came across the first computer virus. Computers in that era were still a new concept, but for McAfee, the virus situation became an opportunity. He decided to start his own company to fight back viruses.

Founding McAfee

In 1987, he founded McAfee Associates, a computer anti-virus company. He started working full time at the company. Initially, the company operated through his home in Santa Clara, California, which now is the headquarters of the company. By the end of the 1980s, the company made around $5 million and was the best anti-virus software that was in the market.

The company’s large popularity was due to the virus “Michelangelo”, which entered the digital scenario in 1992. Due to the rise of Michelangelo, McAfee Associates too rose, as the fever of security got into many minds. In 1992, it was incorporated in Delaware, and in 1994, McAfee resigned from the company keeping some shares to himself. As McAfee Associates became a multimillion-dollar business, the company went public, and McAfee sold all the remaining shares giving him nearly $100 million. McAfee Associates was merged with Network General to form Network Associates. In 2004, the name of the company changed to McAfee Inc.

In August 2010, Intel announced that it would be acquiring all the services of McAfee Inc., keeping the company separated. The deal was valued nearly $7.68 billion and $48 a share.

John, when asked about the acquisition, gave a surprising expression by saying, “I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users.”

Life After McAfee

After leaving McAfee, John looked for a low-profile life. He started giving lectures at business schools, startup advice to the young and worked on his own projects. He worked on ‘Tribal Voice’ and ‘PowWow’ which, however, could not make the mainstream. In 2009, a report from The New York Times suggested that McAfee was hit hard by the global recession of 2008, which reduced his $100 million to a mere $4million. Although, McAfee denied the report and has always referred it to as false. In the late 2000s, McAfee sold his land and decided to move to Belize. He believed that he could enter the Antibiotics industry and make a product that would, eventually, cure illness using plants. In February 2010, he alongside his microbiologist friend Allison Adonizio opened a company, named QuorumEx. The company was headquartered in Belize and aimed to produce natural antibiotics.

The Journey of McAfee (The Company)

McAfee is premium in its services. It provides digital security tools for every bit of your computer. Some of the services that it provides are – IntruShield; McAfee Anti-Malware Engine Core; Change Control; DAT Reputation; Site Advisor; Virus Scan.

The company also has come with important acquisitions to strengthen its build. It acquired Nitro Security in October 2011, which enabled McAfee to provide high-performance security and event management solutions. Another acquisition that the company made is tenCube. This allowed it to provide mobile security for anti-theft and data security. Several other purchases the company made are Trust Digital, Sentrigo, ValidEdge, Stonesoft, Site Advisor, Foundstone, Onigma Ltd., TunnelBear, and many more. McAfee is today, the largest firm when it comes to security technology.

Hence, the story of the McAfee, the company, and its founder, John McAfee, vividly say that fortunes do come with hard work but they need to be preserved using one’s persona and attitude.

orkut

Orkut Buyukkokten : Founder of Orkut, One of the First Social Media Network

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The power of social networking sites has made our public life more scintillating and invigorating. Updating every single incident occurring in our life and getting to know about other people’s status, all at once, have attracted the audience, especially, the youngsters around the globe. But the history of social media dates back to long before you used a filter on Instagram or even updated the status on Facebook. On 24th January 2004, Orkut Buyukkokten created one of the first social networking websites, Orkut, which was under the acquisition of Google. Buyukkokten is a software engineer who worked at Google and did much more than creating Orkut.

Early life of Buyukkokten

Orkut Buyukkokten was born on 6th February 1975, in Konya, Turkey. After a year of his birth, the family shifted to Germany and came back to Turkey a few years later. Buyukkokten had already adopted a German accent by then and got admitted in the second standard after they moved back to Turkey. Buyukkokten always maintained good grades in school and started coding when he was only in the fourth standard. Büyükkökten, in one of his interviews, said that a bunch of students always bullied him at school.

Higher studies and career

Buyukkokten went to Bilkent University in Ankara, from where he graduated with a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science. The time he had to go for his master’s, he almost had thought of dropping the idea of applying in Stanford, due to the high application fee. But, he eventually applied and made it to Stanford University.

Orkut Buyukkokten
Image Source: vox.com

After completing his M.S, he pursued a PhD degree from Stanford as well. He researched mainly on how to create a better and more efficient way of web browsing based on the devices used by individuals. And during his days in Stanford, while working for his thesis, he created a social network, Club Nexus, in 2001, for the students of Stanford University. The students of the university used the platform for chatting, finding people with similar interests, buying and selling products and many other things. He received a good response from the students, especially the undergraduates, and by opening this platform, he actually enhanced the interaction between the undergraduates and graduates.

Buyukkokten also introduced another social network, inCircle, which was for the Stanford Alumni Association. He wrote the entire code for these networking websites in C#, and as the number of users increased rapidly, he started using different serves to reduce the traffic.

In 2002, When Buyukkokten was in his final year, he eventually, started receiving job offers, and finally, he ended up in Google. Even after he joined Google, he worked hard to develop better social networking sites. He believed in bringing the entire world together on a single platform where people can enjoy, make new friends and socialize. Buyukkokten also launched a company, Affinity Engines, which later, sued both Google and Buyukkokten for trading secrets.

Success of Orkut.com

Since Buyukkokten gave 20% of his time to create a new social networking site, he finally, built one and, named it Eden. And then, after a suggestion by Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, the name was changed to Orkut.com. Google launched Orkut on 22nd January, Buyukkokten being the creator of the platform. Starting it as a 20% project, it turned into a massive success that the company and Büyükkökten, himself, never expected. Though Affinity engines claimed the code of Orkut to be theirs, the lawsuit they filed against Google and Buyukkokten was settled in 2006. A lot of new features were added once the website went live. A logo was resigned in 25th August 2007, followed by second redesigning in 27th October 2009.

As the number of people making profiles in Orkut increased, Buyukkokten declared that it will also be released in 6 different languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu). Orkut was launched worldwide and gained the most popularity in Estonia, Brazil and India. Buyukkokten decided to leave the team of Orkut.com in 2008 and started working as a product manager at Google.

In 30th June 2014, Google announced that it will be closing Orkut.com by 30th September 2014. But for the time span it existed, Orkut changed the face of social media by giving the common people a real experience of communicating virtually and socializing.

Hello

Buyukkokten launched another social networking site Hello, in 2016, which is having users from all over the world, and he, still, thrive to make the world a better place by connecting people through technology.

Personal life

His parent’s names are still unknown to most of the world. He was in an openly gay relationship, and eventually, married to Derek Holbrook. But later, they got separated. He has two children.