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George Hotz : The First Person to Unlock the iPhone & the Founder of AI Startup comma.ai

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

iPhone indeed is the most loved smartphone and was one of the first keyboard-less mobile phones available in the market. iPhone is not only known for its unique features, but also for the high security it provides to its users. But there was a 17 years old hacker, George Hotz, from New Jersey, who unlocked the newly launched iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers and became the first person to do so. He is not only a famous hacker but has also founded his vehicle automation machine learning company named comma.ai. Also known as Geohotz, even having hacked major security programs, Hotz has always said that he never support hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user information.

Early Life

Hotz was born on 2 October 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, as George Francis Hotz Jr. He completed his high school from Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology. Hotz also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for a brief time.

Being a brilliant student and always ahead in every competition in science and technology in middle and high school, he even won the $15,000 scholarship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007.

Hacking Career

Hotz was always interested in programming and had developed his interest in hacking. In August 2007, only after two months of the launch of the iPhone, Hotz was able to unlock the iPhone. After doing so, he became the first person to unlock an iPhone. Also in 2009, he released a jailbreaking tool for the iPhone 3GS on iPhone OS 3.0. Though in 2010, he discontinued the jailbreaking software.

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

In December 2009, he started working on a new program to breach security on the Sony PlayStation 3. by January 2010, he was able to create a thesis on the hack, but soon in July 2010, he abandoned the idea of entering the security of PS3. But another hacking group fail0verflow also started working on the same, generating the root signing and encryption keys for PS3.

Hotz too published those root signing and encryption keys over his website that led to a serious lawsuit from Sony for both Hotz and fail0verflow. After many court sessions, Sony and Hotz settled the matter outside the court on the condition that Hotz will never try to do any hacking work on Sony products.

Career with Facebook and Google

Hacking had always been his hobby, and his early achievements and knowledge of security algorithms landed Hotz a job with Facebook in 2011 for an unknown role.

Later in July 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with its security auditing team on Project Zero. He stayed in the team for five months and developed an open source program, for dynamically analysing application binaries, named Qira.

In January 2015, he joined Vicarious.com where he worked for 7 months and developed AI algorithms for the company.

Founding Comma.AI

In September 2015, Hotz founded comma.ai, that works on building AI based vehicular automation technology. In 2016, the company built a working self-driving Acura ILX. Later, the company started working on Comma One, a $1,000 software kit that could allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. But after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the further production of the software was cancelled.

During the same time, he was also in talks with Elon Musk to sell his autonomous software for Tesla cars, but the talks never met any conclusion.

On 30 November 2016, the company open sourced its self-driving car software. The open source driving agent from the company runs on some of the car models from companies like Honda, Toyota, and GM, making those models semi-autonomous. Reportedly in 2018, the company served over 4,500 drivers.

Personal Life

Hotz aka Geohotz has been always a keen learner for AI and software development. In 2004 he participated in the ISEF competition in Portland where he demonstrated “The Mapping Robot”. He was among the finalists and got featured on the Today Show and Larry King. He also developed another project named The Googler in 2005 and participated in the ISEF competition with the project, here too, he was one of the finalists.

In 2008, he was among the top 10 Overachievers under 21 listed in the March edition of PC World magazine. In 2014 he won the DEF CON CTF tournament for the second time in a row.

On 14 September 2018, Hotz stepped down from the post of the CEO of the company and became the Head of Research Team.

Houseparty : A Social Network that Claims to Connects People in More Real Way

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

Social media not only provide you with the means to connect with your dear ones but is also a place where you can share your thoughts with the world. But with the rise of social media, the pressure on the users have also increased, and the originality of connecting with the people close to them has lost somewhere. Houseparty is also a social network which has been specially built to solve this problem.

The founder of Houseparty Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, came together to build a platform, which is solely for the people who want to spend real time together even being physically apart. The app allows a group video chat of up to eight people, giving the feel similar to friends sitting in a living room.

The Founders

Ben is an entrepreneur of Israeli descent, who had joined the army when he was 18 years old. He had always intended to become an architect and even studied architecture but ended up building mobile applications.

When Ben was in the third year of his college, he was introduced to the famous social media platform Instagram, which became the inspiration for his first project ‘Yevvo’. Yevvo was a social media platform, which became popular in no time. Ben started adding new features to the app, but was unable to handle the pressure and soon he had to shut down the app.

Next startup app that Ben came with was Meerkat launched in February 2015. Meerkat was a social media app that enabled its users to tweet live videos and comment on the tweet.

Houseparty co-founders
Image Source: greylock.com

Sima Sistani is an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and was working as the head of media at Tumbler when she met Ben. The two got introduced through a common friend. Sima was already aware of his startup Meerkat and was quite impressed by the success of Meerkat.

After four months from the inception of Meerkat, Ben and the co-founder of Meerkat, Itai, realised that the tweeting live video was only working for people who were famous or were celebrities, and the common people were not getting much of the benefits from the service. At the time Sima had also joined the team Meerkat.

Founding HouseParty

The problem with meerkat was that it was not applicable for the common people, so it led the two future co-founders, Ben and Sima, brainstorm about the concept of live video streaming for the common people. Since it was clear that not many people are interested in watching common people live stream, they reached to the conclusion that why not make the live streaming more personal?

The answer to this question was the private synchronous social network Houseparty. In the first six months of its development, Sima went to different schools to test the features of the app and Ben was constantly working on adding relevant features to it, including personal notifications and locked room.

Houseparty is not only providing its service to common people for live video chats but also offers the advertiser a cheaper platform to advertise their services and products.

By September 2016, after a rewrite of the code, the company was serving over 1 million people in all 50 US states and other countries. Houseparty is mostly focused on Generation Z: 60% of its users are 16 to 24 years old. Currently, Ben is serving the board of the company, and Sima is promoted to the post of CEO of the company, who previously held the position of COO in the company. Till now the company has raised over $70 million from Silicon Valley investors and is growing at a rapid rate. For the success of Houseparty, Ben says that he is happy that his first two startups were failures and he came up with a more feasible business model, that has its own future.

Larry Kim – The Man Providing Ultimate Solutions To Advertising Industry

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Businesses are a great way to provide something to the world. But at the same time, businesses are also a big risk, because you never know what will happen at what time in the market. You also can’t assure whether your business will bloom or not. Being an entrepreneur means that you are always under immense pressure. One of the things that bug an entrepreneur is how to advertise their business. Advertising online is easy but tricky and takes a lot of expenditure. But with every problem comes a solution and that solution is provided to you by Larry Kim – the founder of Wordstream.

Wordstream is a company that provides services and software that help marketers get more out of online advertising. The company has been in the market for more than a decade now. The company is a Google Premier Partner and Bing Elite Partner. The company was founded by Larry Kim, which provides a suite of cross-platform advertising solutions. Wordstream started from a keyword research tool and has since evolved.

larry kim
Image Source skyword.com

Larry opening Wordstream is something that he himself had never expected. The story behind this journey is inspiring and explains how life throws random opportunities at us.
Larry, who is also known as ’Larry the Marketing Hack Artist’ never planned to be an entrepreneur. Brought up in Winnipeg, Larry joined the University of Waterloo through the tests the university held and enrolled self in Electrical Engineering. He was maintaining an excellent academic record and joined a co-op program. The program, however, was not much appealing to him. 

“I learned what I was not interested in, which is as important as learning what you’re interested in,” said Larry about his co-op program. He was employed in a software company, and that’s when he sensed the opportunity. The company introduced Larry to paid search as they wanted to look over their AdWords account.

Of course, Larry was no expert, but he soon evolved very fast in this job. His AdWords account generated a ton of clicks and millions of dollars in revenue. “The co-op program made me work in the Silicon Valley, and that is something magical. When you work there, the mind bug you to start your own startup.” But Larry faced a problem here. The question that bothered him was how will he turn his visionary idea in reality as it would take a lot of investment to build a company. 

He determined himself to get a venture capitalist to invest in him but a dozen meetings, hundreds of emails and calls resulted in nothing. Larry never gave up and ended up investing his own money to at least bootstrap the business. He hired two-three engineers and a marketer and started to work at Panera Bread. After some time, when Larry got his product right, he returned to the VCs. The VCs were surprised yet impressed by his efforts and decided to invest in the idea. (Two investors)

Since then, the company grew, and today is one of the top choices when it comes to learning to advertise. Wordstream analyzes, optimizes and maximizes your business advertisements. The rise of the company has also led it to win many awards including the Boston’s Globe ‘Best Places to Work’ in 2017. The service reduces the hassle of long PPCs by converting them into shorter time periods which is done week by week.

A year after the launch of Wordstream, Larry stepped down as the CEO of the company to become the CTO, so as to focus solely on marketing and product management. He left the company in early 2017 to start a new gig, ‘MobileMonkey’ which builds marketing bots for messaging platforms.
When enquired about leaving Wordstream, he said, “It’s a big company now, and I’m looking to go back to my roots as a product developer. I’m very excited about chatbots and AI, and there are some really interesting applications of this technology in marketing. I want to be one of the leading companies bringing this to market.”

Larry has been named Search Marketer of the Year by PPC Hero several times (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017). He is also, very active on social media and is ranked #8 most popular author on Medium. The story of Larry Kim gives us the inspiration to not give up in hard times and get back up every time one gets a huge blow in life. He surely is the one to follow if you have an interest in businesses and entrepreneurship.

Evernote – Revolutionizing the Way You Manage and Remeber Things

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One of the key ideas for a better life is to keep the notes of everything important that goes on. But, is it feasible to keep a notepad, and a pen, every single time with you? Well, the answer is a straight ‘NO’. But technology extends at all scales, and one such wonder of technology is ‘Evernote.’

Evernote
Image Source: androidpolice.com

Evernote is a mobile app for taking notes, that has solved the problem of keeping a diary and a pen. The app has been a success since its launch. But like any other success story, it also has a story full of ups and downs.

Evernote is a multi-platform app, enabling its users to capture, organize and share notes from anywhere. It is described as a tool to store images, photos, files, audios, etc. Stepan Pachikov, the founder of the company, was working on the idea for a long time. He recognized three things that our brain does: remembering the past, building connections and creating new ideas for the future. Keeping this in mind, he started Evernote as an extension for the brain. The clear-cut mission that it presented was ‘Remember Everything.’

The Evernote web service was launched on June 24, 2008, and went through a series of funding problems. As the company started, there were never more than a few weeks of cash flow. As they had the money things turned worse, they faced a financial crisis. The company decided to stop, as all the investors backed out, and it ran out of money.

But the story didn’t end here. A phone call saved Evernote from shutting down. A passionate Evernote user from Sweden called Phil Libin (the then CEO) and told him how significantly Evernote made his daily life productive. The caller went on and offered an investment to the company. Phil and the caller eventually ended up on a Skype call after twenty minutes, and a week later, the company drew half-a-million dollars to its name.

Since then, there’s been no looking back. Evernote got its 1 million users in almost 446 days and nearly 223 to double it. The service was rapidly growing, and the growth was impeccable. In 2011, the company reached to more than 11 million people worldwide. Evernote has also launched many products suiting one’s daily life comfort. Evernote is more than just an app.

When asked the secret of growth, Phil discussed eight mindsets that routed Evernote’s road to success.

1. Working with Friends – Phil recruited people he previously had worked with. “I think the most important thing at a young age that you can do is, cultivate a group of brilliant, high-energy, willing-to work-for-free, best friends for life,” he quoted.

2. Product Based on Own Needs – What really makes a product great is its simplicity and its need in your daily life. Evernote stood on both of the parameters.

3. Timing is Everything – Evernote’s timing was perfect because it grew alongside the growing market of mobile apps. App stores were launching back to back new apps, which meant the Evernote had an instant reach to the millions.

4. Freemium Model – Freemium model played a key step in Evernote’s success. It held the free customers around and converted them into paying customers with everything that was being provided to them.

5. Focus on Product – Evernote never spent a penny on Search Engine Optimization. It focused on the product itself that made their users, their biggest strength.

6. Closed Beta Success – The beta program launched by the company built a community which worked big time for them.

7. The Hundred Year Company – Evernote, in 2012, raised a $70 million funding. The funding, however, was not meant for the cash they needed. The company wanted to build a financial and technical structure to make it, as suggested by Phil, a ‘100-year startup.’

The service supports formats like formatted texts, web pages, web pages, excerpts, photographs, voice memos, handwritten ‘ink’ and notes. The supported platforms are iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry and others. Evernote was initially built on C#, and in 2010, C# was replaced by C++ to improve the performance.

As of now, the company has more than 225 million active users all over the world. At its IPO valuation, the company was valued at a massive $1 billion. The company sails smoothly now, with it being the number one app when it comes to productivity. The success story of Evernote shows that sometimes, a little ray of hope can pull you through the darkest times, gifting you the light, the legacy that you will carry forever after.

Harsh Agarwal : The Success Story of Indian Blog Scientist & the Founder of ShoutMeLoud

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“Follow your passion and the success will follow you!” the phrase that has become quite common today, and actually has done wonders for many. Same is the story of Delhi-based entrepreneur, Harsh Agarwal, who left a job (many of us dream of) just to follow his passion, and indeed the phrase set true for him, too.

Early Life

Born on 22 June 1987, Harsh Agarwal was a curious child and was always into learning new things. When he was 14, he became interested in computers and started saving to buy one. In 2002, he along with his family moved to Delhi, where he joined the Laxman Public School to pursue high school. After completing his school education, he joined the Sharda University and pursued a B.Tech degree in Information Technology.

Like any other parents, it was expected from him, too, to get a good job in an MNC and settle for a regular life. But it was not what Agarwal had ever thought. Having a curious mind, he was always into creative things and even got a certification in ethical hacking while in college.

Career

Soon the time for the placements came, his knowledge and creativity landed up him getting a job with one of the biggest MNCs, Accenture, in 2008. Since there was enough time between his graduation and joining with Accenture, he started working for Convergys.

harsh agarwal
Image Source: Twitter

Along with his job with Convergys, he started writing about things he knew and the things he was learning, at the BlogSpot platform. At that time, blogging was not as popular as it is today. Soon he also received his acceptance letter and joined a regular job at Accenture.

Along with his job, Agrawal was continuously working on his blog. He was interested in network and computer security, so he started a community named Underground World on Orkut. Soon the community started approaching more people, and Aggrwawal decided to build a blog with the same name. He tried to get a domain with the same name on BlogSpot, but the domain was not available, so he started a blog with name virgintech.blogspot. The first paycheque that he received from his online job was of $10, and the first money that he earned from AdSense was of $40.

Soon, the blog was making enough money with AdSense and other sources, such that Agarwal was able to pay his daily needs. After six months of his blogging career, he decided to devote all his time to his blog and left his job. His prime focus was to work on his blog, so he migrated his blog to a WordPress website and chose Shout-Me-Loud as the name for his blog.

Turning Point

On 29th June 2009, Agrawal met with a terrible accident, and the doctors advised him to stay on bed for the next six months. The accident was so bad that doctors had informed him that he won’t be able to walk again. Agarwal was shaken and had lost all hopes. But all he could do was try. Being bedridden, Agrawal had plenty of time to study and work on his blog. Along with working on his health, he was constantly working on the growth of his blog. According to Agarwal, it was a life-changing experience for him.

After seven months of practice and treatment, he was back on his feet. In December 2009, he met with another Blogger from Pune and partnered with him for a new venture. The two started working on a new project, and Agrawal became the B.D.O. of the firm. In just six months the company was financially independent, but the partnership was not going quite well. So, Agarwal decided to end the partnership and move back to Delhi.

ShoutMeLoud Growth

When Agarwal moved to Pune, he hardly got time for ShoutMeLoud, but when he came back to Delhi, it was the only thing which he was dedicated to. Soon the blog came back on track, and Agarwal started blogging to create awareness about making money from blogging. In just two years, ShoutMeLoud became one of the best blogs in India, and in 2013, even won the “Best Indian blog by Indiblogger” award.

By the year 2014-15, Agarwal received recognition as a public speaker, too. He organised plenty of workshops, and also, organised a blogger awareness trip ‘ShoutMeet’ from Delhi to Kanyakumari, in 2015.

Currently, ShoutMeLoud is operating under its parent company ShoutDreams and other than ShoutMeLoud, ShoutDreams is hosting WPhostingDiscount, ShoutMeTech, WPSutra, and CoinSutra blogs. In the past ten years, ShoutMeLoud has grown to a company of its own name, and many other bloggers are getting inspiration from the success story of Harsh Agarwal.

Ankit Singh : The Success Story of the Founder of Techugo

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The Internet has helped many people to bring out the entrepreneur in them and establish their own startups successfully. The idea of a startup is interesting, but the obstacles that one has to face in this journey always get registered to a separate big book of failure and rejections. One such startup is Techugo, a four years old startup, which has established its name as one of the leading software development companies, despite going through big challenges and hurdles.

Ankit Singh, the founder of Techugo, was born in Varanasi, India, in a working-class joint family. He was born to a lawyer father and was pursuing electrical engineering from Uttar Pradesh Technical University (UPTU). Studying at the university, he was determined that after completing his education he will join an MNC. His aim was clear, but when the placements came, he found out that the students with a good personality and the ones who could present themselves well were getting the jobs, and even the toppers of the class were rejected at the placements.

Ankit Singh

It was a reality check for him, and Singh realized that this has been happening to many talented candidates for years. Even being much skilled, the ones lacking at personality were not able to get the opportunities. The incident was enough for him to rethink about working with an MNC. At the same time, Singh started thinking about ways to help such candidates with their interviews. He did not know about what but definitely wanted to do something for them.

Being good at academics as well as capable of representing himself in front of others, he was able to go through the interviews and get a job in a famous MNC at the placements. Even have got a good job, he was not excited about the opportunity he had received. Even before a week from the date of the joining, he became confused about joining the job or dropping the offer. But like any other college graduate, accepting the offer was more reasonable at the moment, and he became prepared for starting his career as an employee at the MNC.

“Just a day before my joining, I called my mother, and she sensed the agitation and discomfort in my Voice and without blinking the eye, she simply said, ‘Don’t you think somebody more deserving than you need this job? You are born to make it different in your family, go ahead, we are with you.’ ” said Singh in an interview.

This was the Eureka moment for Ankit, and he decided to drop the job and start his own company, where the candidates will be chosen on the basis of their talent.

A startup needs a good team, and before that a good investment. Being a fresher, and the owner of the idea of a startup, he only seemed to be an immature young graduate to the investors and was rejected at the very first business pitch. One after another, he was rejected by eleven investors. People learn from mistakes, and Ankit also was among those people. The 12th pitch he made became more polished than the previous ones, and within fifteen minutes of his presentation, the US-based investor Sumer offered him the initial investment.

Finally, on June 13th 2015, Ankit started his company from a shared office space, where at first he played the role the owner, HR and the office boy of the company. Sumer became the co-founder of the company and Ankit started hiring other people too. But again it was also not easy for a startup, as no experienced people wanted to join a freshly started company.

After becoming a team of three, Ankit hired one of his friends in college as the tester. Within the next fifteen days, the company had a CEO, CTO, a professional HR and started adding up more people in the Techugo family. Today the company has raised to 143 employees including Ankit, all under the age of 30.

With the inception of the company, Ankit has been hiring employees who are technically skilled, even if they are not good at communications. The company hires such candidates and help them to grow confidence and improve their communication skills with the help of personal training.

The company currently works on building mobile applications for its clients with businesses of every scale. The most successful project that the company carried out was Fanzir app which is powered by Euroleague. In the first five days of launch, the app received the 5,000+ installations, and in mere 15 days, it made $1M.

Techugo has provided its services for the Fortune 500 Company Airtel, Global 2000 Company like Godfrey Phillips, the largest political party in India BJP, and the budding and successful startups like Prozata, Fanzir and many more.

The company, currently, along with its India office has established its branch offices in the US and Dubai. Soon the company will also be opening its off-shore offices in Australia and Canada.