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

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

booking.com office
Image Source: officesnapshots.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sennheiser Electronic: A Revolutionary Change in the World of Audio

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

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

The glorious past of the company

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

Fritz Sennheiser
Image Source: thetimes.co.uk

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

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

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

Achievements of Sennheiser Electronic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moral foundation of the company

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

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

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

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

Skúli Mogensen
Image Source: independent.ie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Success Journey of Freecharge from a Start-up to a $400 Million Business

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Western civilisation had a huge impact on the Indian start-up culture. If you look around, you will find many Indian start-ups taking ideas from Silicon Valley projects like PayTM inspired by PayPal, OYO followed the business concept of Airbnb, and there are many more examples doing the same. This lead to the accusation for the Indian entrepreneurs of recreating ideas instead of digging a new one. In the midst, Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon proved everyone wrong and built a start-up to address payment related issues and launched a product called Freecharge, which later, took the digital market space like a wildfire.

Origin of Freecharge and initial success

The foundation of Freecharge started in the year 2010 when Sandeep was an angel investor and met Kunal at his BPO Company. Sandeep recognised Kunal’s potential and admired his entrepreneurship skills. In the year 2009, Kunal started with his own venture Paisaback. The idea was to give cash back to the customers through local business tie-ups. For instance, the customers used to get cash back if they visit any local fast food restaurant like KFC or McDonalds on the reference of Paisaback. However, the business ideas did not work out well and soon collapsed.

Kunal Shah
Image Source: ishaeducation.org

Later, Kunal wanted to make a technology, which would eventually minimize payment-coupled complexities and ease the payment process. His focus was especially on mobile phone recharges. He had analysed it as a million dollar idea which would disrupt the market. The idea gave birth to Freecharge. Both Kunal and Sandeep started with the product development phase. Within no time, they launched Freecharge on Independence Day i.e. 15 Aug 2011. McDonald became their key partner for initial days. For the project, they received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from American Venture Capital firm supported by Tandon Group and Sequoia Capitals. Freecharge tool off their business exponentially and grew into tech giant in coming years.

Investment from top firms to selling out the company

After successful three years from its inception, Freecharge received another round of Series B funding INR 220 Crores from their trusting partner Sequoia capitals, Sofina and Ru-Net. Because of their exceptional business delivery, Freecharge again received 535 crores form Hong-Kong based funding firm Tybourne Capital, Valiant Capital Management and from existing funding partners. The Freecharge was killing the market space and shut down many businesses. Many entrepreneurs saw Freecharge as a big opponent. As a result, in the year 2015, Snapdeal, after realising the potential of Freecharge, acquired the company. Snapdeal bought Freecharge for a whopping amount of INR 2700 crore, which also became the biggest takeover in the Indian history of the start-up.

Kunal’s vision for success entrepreneurship

Before stepping into the entrepreneurship journey, Kunal had taken a bold step, as he dropped out from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) while pursuing his MBA degree. Instead, he pursued an education in Philosophy, preferably. He holds a B.A degree in Philosophy from Wilson College, Mumbai, India. According to his controversial statement, he regarded the MBA as a waste of time and money. He believes students should reach out to running companies instead of wasting so much money while studying theoretical pieces of stuff. However, many intellectuals criticised his theory, he remains adamant. Today, he inspires many through his Freecharge success.

Kunal credit his self-devised Delta 4 theory for building Freecharge a successful start-up. It was Kunal and Sandeep homogenize vision, dedication and honest is the reason why Freecharge has become a global name in mobile-based application software. Today, Freecharge has grown a thousand times and has a customer base of more than 30 million people. Freecharge also awarded as the best consumer mobile service at IAMAI Digital Awards in 2015. The journey of a Freecharge is a lesson to many who want to explore the entrepreneurship journey.

Talmon Marco – The Co-Founder of Instant Messaging Software Application ‘Viber’

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When technology, in its early years swooped into our lives and started developing, everyone hoped that it would connect people more efficiently than ever. The telephone was one of the best results produced from the growth of technology, but with the evolution of the internet, the demand for something new and instant started to increase. This demand sparked a lot of genius ideas across the world, which today, have given us n-number of mediums to connect that we operate on today. Talmon Marco, an American-Israeli entrepreneur, also had an idea in his mind, and that idea led to Viber, an interaction-based application software over call and messaging.

talmon marco
Image Source: zimbio.com

In 2010, Igor and Marco started their next startup, ‘Viber’. Viber is a cross-platform voice over IP and instant messaging software application. The inspiration for Viber was the love story of Talmon and his girlfriend (now wife). Talmon lived in New York, and his girlfriend lived in Hong Kong. They both talked a lot on the phone, which eventually, led to huge phone bills. This got Marco thinking that how he can stay in touch with his loved one without sacrificing much from the pocket.

The funds generated by iMesh supported the cause of Viber. Viber’s service started on December 2, 2010, in Israel, and it was rather a soft launch in a market that was willing to try a new app. The software uses telephone numbers to register, though it is accessible through desktop without needing any mobile connectivity. Viber did not receive any venture capital money, and the company was all funded by friends and family.

The company was producing a promising product from the very beginning, in fact, since it released its first iOS version. The latter gained Viber nearly 350 million users. The company also released an Android app six months later but at first, it was limited only to 50,000 users. A full version of the app was released a year later. In May 2012, Viber announced that it would be rolling out the software for Blackberry and Windows phones. In the span of two months, Viber gained a total of 90 million users. The company was progressing at a pace and decided to bring in the availability of high-definition voice calling, “Viber Out” and group messaging.

The app gave a tough competition to WhatsApp, Skype, and the other similar software present. It had an advantage over Skype. For using Skype, one had to register using password and had to maintain a buddy list, whereas to use Viber, the one simply needed to register using the phone number.

After 2 years, when the software established itself as one of the top connectivity apps, the company generated no revenue, and so it started to monetize itself via user payments for Viber Out voice and stickers store. The company’s support system was attacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. However, the company disclosed that there was no important information that was compromised.

On 13th February 2014, Viber was purchased by Japanese Electronic commerce and internet service ’Rakuten’ for a massive $900 million. The founders saw a 30-times return for what they invested. Rakuten merged its 200 million user client base with Viber. As of now, Viber has more than 650 million registered users. Marco stepped down as the company CEO in 2015.

The story of Talmon Marco’s founded Viber shows that anything can be done even when one has limited resources. All one needs is to find the light at the end of the tunnel.

Success Story of Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons – Founders of Yelp

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The entrepreneurship journey of Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, from working in PayPal to forming one of the world’s biggest business review website Yelp Inc., is a story of sheer dedication and creativity. It all started when both the founders who were working in PayPal as a software engineer dreamt of starting their own venture.

Russell and Jeremy
Image Source: http://brainprick.com

The inception of Yelp into market space

Jeremy attended Harvard Business School, after finishing his Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois. Meanwhile, Russel had already finished his bachelor’s degree, one year before Jeremy passed out from the college. He was working in PayPal as Lead Software Architect. Later when Jeremy joined PayPal, Russel and Jeremy get along really well and planned to start with their own venture. Their idea was to disrupt the market with a product that will help to resolve business issues. After endless brainstorming sessions in a business incubator, they founded Yelp in the year 2004. Initially, Yelp came out as an email recommendation service, and later, grew into a local business website for San Francisco.

Glory to success and eminence

After the inception of Yelp, it transformed drastically. By 2008, the company started offering services in most of the states of the U.S. By the end of the financial year, the co-founders started working on the Canadian project. Due to enormous success in such a short span, the vision of the company expanded to serve the world. In coming years, it grew exponentially and became an international social networking website as a local search tool. The success of Yelp did not stop just there; as a result, today, Yelp has more than 62 million unique visitors and approximately 177 million reviews on their website. Yelp has transformed into social networking, business review and local city guide, where people can search anything from finding a restaurant, shopping to almost anything. Yelp is now operational in more than 32 countries across the world and still holds the best interest of their customers.

Co-founders parting ways

Russel after serving several years as co-founder and CTO at Yelp, bid farewell to the company, in the year 2010. According to sources, he wanted to take time off to travel. Russel still holds significant shares of the company and continue his service as a consultant to the company. Jeremy, on the other side, still serving as a CEO to the company. There were several media trials on clashes between the two co-founders, but no evidence to solidify the case. Today, Yelp has the highest revenue per month compared to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram or any other major social networking platform. The company has a market cap of $3 billion and wish to grow more in the coming years.

Yelp business model captured the market with the ideology of solving customer’s issues, and hence, turn out to be one of the biggest social networking sites. The company is transforming with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence-based product and services. It will not be wrong to say that, the company has the potential to grow further. In the year 2009, the technology giant, Google, offered $500 million to buy Yelp. The CEOs politely declined the offer. Google is known for killing the completion; the gesture of buying Yelp shows its potential in the market.