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Mike Lazaridis : The Canadian Entrepreneur & the Co-Inventor of BlackBerry

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A lover of science and a visionary innovator, Mike Lazaridis, is the one, who is known as the father of Smartphones, in the global wireless community. A science lover and a philanthropist, he is the true supporter of the power of basic science to improve and transform the world. With the development of wireless technology, Lazaridis changed the world of communication to an extent. He is one of the most influential people of the world, who have contributed and are continuously contributing to the betterment of the world with their inventions.

Early life

Lazaridis was born on 14 March 1961, in Istanbul, Turkey. His parents belonged to the Pontic Greek dialect, who later moved to Canada, in 1966, when Lazaridis was just five years of age. The family settled down in Windsor, Ontario, where he found his first love, i.e., Science, in the Windsor Public Library. He loved reading the scientific facts and was fascinated by how things worked. His love for reading books led him to win an award, at the age of 12, for reading every science book in the Windsor Public Library. He was a science enthusiast and spent most of his childhood, in the basement of his house, assembling and building, rockets and radios, along with his friends. He even built buzzer for the popular game Reach For The Top, when he was in high school.

Founding RIM

In 1979, he entered the University of Waterloo, where he adopted electrical engineering with an option in computer science. But, only before two months of his graduation, he dropped out of the college, to found his company, Research In Motion (RIM), to fulfil a contract that he received from the General Motors, in 1984. The contract included the requirement for developing a network computer control display system. Lazaridis founded the company along with his friends Mike Barnstijn and Douglas Fregin, with the money Lazaridis’ parents had lent them through a loan. The company later developed barcode technology for a film, that was the greatest accomplishment for a newly set up company.

Mike Lazaridis
Image Source: www.wlu.ca

By 1988, RIM was the first North American wireless data technology developer company. It also developed connectivity products for Mobitex wireless packet-switched data communications networks, becoming the first company outside Scandinavia, to do so.

The company was involved in emerging wireless technology and in the year 1999, it had scored many patents based on the same technology under its name. It had developed the DigiSync Film KeyKode Reader, Mobitex protocol converter, Mobitex point-of-sale solution, RIMGate Mobitex X.25 gateway, Freedom-Type II PCMCIA radio modem for Mobitex. In 1996, RIM developed the first two-way messaging pager, a competitor of Skytel two-way paging network developed by Motorola, that was named as Inter@ctive Pager.

BlackBerry the Smartphone Startup

In 1999, under the name of RIM, Lazaridis, developed the BlackBerry 850 pager. The device was based on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, that could receive push email from a Microsoft Exchange Server. RIM, in April 2000, launched its first BlackBerry smartphone named as BlackBerry 957. The smartphone used the encryption and S/MIME, providing high security for the user data, making the phones popular in no time. The following smartphone range from RIM was also launched with the same prefix Blackberry, that became its trade name. The next smartphone launch included the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (the first BlackBerry phone having multimedia features), Curve 8300 series and Bold 9000.

As in 2007, Apple launched iPhone and encouraged RIM to launch its first touchscreen phone, the BlackBerry Storm, launched in 2008. Till the fall of 2010, the company had 21 million BlackBerry users in the united states. The company also expanded worldwide having 79 million BlackBerry users globally. In 2012, Lazaridis and Balsillie became the co-CEOs of the company. Only after one year of Lazaridis’ joining as the co-CEO of RIM, he resigned on 28 March 2013 from his post.

Personal Life

Lazaridis is married to Ophelia, along with whom, he has participated in various philanthropy works. The two have donated money for various research works, like for the establishment of the Perimeter Institute for Research in Theoretical Physics, the Institute for Quantum Computing in the University of Waterloo, and establishing a building for Nanotechnology Engineering program, in the same university. He is one of the members of the board of governors of the University of Waterloo and served as the vice-chancellor of the university between 2003 to 2009.

Lazaridis was awarded an Academy Award and an Emmy Award for his technical achievements. In 1999, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Waterloo.

Alan Mamedi : The Person Who Made the Phonebook of a Smartphone Smarter

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The telephone is the most useful invention by humans. The era changed and brought the revolution in the telephone industry, jumping from two-piece landlines to a chordless smartphone. But, one thing that was constant, the reception of blank calls and cold calls. Even at the time of landlines, people could not identify the caller, as there was no medium that could show the identity of the caller. But, yes, later on, the caller Ids, did help to an extent. However, it was still impossible to recognise the callers from the new numbers. The same problem remained in the time of the mobiles and smartphones as well. But, Alan Mamedi, a developer from Sweden, came to the rescue and gifted the much-awaited app Truecaller to the world.

Early Life

Mamedi was born on 30 October 1984, in an Iranian family. His mother was a Kurd, and his father was an Iranian political leader. After the Iranian revolution took place, his family brought him to Sweden. He was a bright student and completed a B.sc degree in Computer Science, from The Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm Sweden.

Alan Mamedi
Image Source: techinasia.com

After completing his education, Mamedi started working as a Salesman at The Phone House and stayed at the same company for two years. With an experience of two years and a graduate degree in Computer Science, Mamedi got inspired to start his own company. In 2006, Mamedi founded ‘Bidding.se’, an auction website, where the one with the lowest bid would win the auction. The website was a success, and Mamedi received an offer to sell it, within three months of its launch.

In 2007, Mamedi again came with another product, Möbeljakt.se, that became the largest search engine, working in Sweden, for the home interior. In 2008, he started working as the Chief Architect at Birdstep Technology and Företagsinformation i Mediaportalen, at the same position, for the next two years.

In 2009, Mamedi launched Jobbigt.se, an employer review website, known to be the biggest employer network in Sweden. Through the website, people could post reviews about their current or previous employers.

Founding Truecaller

After the launch of Jobbigt.se, Mamedi started receiving calls from those employers, who had got bad reviews on Jobbigt.se. The employers wanted Mamedi to delete those bad reviews as those were affecting their reputation.

This incident made Mamedi, think and discuss the matter with his old friend Nami Zarringhalam, as he was receiving unlimited calls regarding the same. The discussion also included the issue of increasing cold-calls, invading the privacy of people. At the time, there was no such software that could help in avoiding those kinds of calls and identify the new numbers. The two came to the conclusion that there must be a software that can handle those issues. The software must have a caller ID so that people could decide the priority of the call. With the intense discussion, Mamedi and Zarringhalam finally decided to create a new app; Truecaller.

On 1 July 2009, Mamedi released the initial version of Truecaller, under the name of his company True Software Scandinavia AB. The company was founded by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam in the same year and is situated in Stockholm, Sweden.

Initially, the app was launched for the BlackBerry smartphones, but due to huge success, it was also released for the Symbian and Microsoft Windows mobile phones. On 23 September 2009, the app became available for the iOS and Android phone users. By the year 2012, it was also launched for the RIM Blackberry, Windows Phone, and the Nokia Series 40, and it grew to five million global users in the same year.

Truecaller in 2012, received US$1.3 million funding from OpenOcean, a venture capital. In 2014, it also received an investment of $18.8 million from Sequoia Capital and $60 million from Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico investment firm and from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Due to the increased user base in India, Truecaller also launched another app, exclusively for India, with name Truemessenger, that can identify the sender of a message.

Samaira Mehta : Little Fingers Running from Coding to Entrepreneurship

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samaira mehta
Image Source: Facebook

Most of the children, at the age of six, are adjusting with their school’s environment, some have still not joined the school yet, and some brilliant minds of the same age, are working towards excellence, and making their ways into the tech world. Such gifted kid, from the Silicon Valley, is a ten years old Samaira Mehta, who has been into the limelight for her invention, at the age of eight, becoming one of the youngest entrepreneurs and a powerful motivational speaker.

Samaira Mehta, an Indian-American girl, was born on 4 March 2008, to Rakesh Mehta and Monica Mehta. Her father works as an engineer at Intel Co., and her mother worked in the field of marketing for more than a decade. Samaira was just six years old when her father started teaching her programming. The bright Samaira developed an immense interest in the same and started practising it. According to one of her interviews, she loved doing coding and playing the board games. Love for the two brought her the idea of mixing both of them and creating a board game that could help the people of age from 4-104, to learn to code in an easier way.

When Samaira turned eight, she finally decided to transform her idea into reality and launched a board game, naming it the CoderBunnyz. The game became popular in no time, and hence, Samaira co-founded a company, with her mother, given the same name to it as the game.

samaira mehta
Image Source: indiawest.com

Little Samaira became a self-made entrepreneur at the tender age of eight. After the success of CoderBunnyz, she came out with its sequel CoderMindz. CoderMindz is based on the concept of Artificial Intelligence and is another hit. The game is first of its kind, and Samaira gives half of its credit to her younger brother Aadit Mehta, who assisted her in the development and is just six-years-old.

From basic to advance, the CoderBunnyz has thirteen levels, that makes the players grow their skills, with every step. The game has made a place among the Five Best Board Games of the World, that is a huge thing for anyone, at the age of ten. Before making up to the top five board games, it had already won the second-place prize of $2,500, from Think Tank Learning’s Pitchfest, in 2016.

After the launch of the game, Samaira started providing demo classes in libraries and schools, so that the kids could learn how to play. Soon, she received invitations for large tech events. Her game also grabbed the attention of the to tech giants, like Google and Microsoft, and they also organised the demo workshops for the game. Until now, she has done over 50 workshops in Silicon Valley, teaching over 2000 kids, including over 50 at Google. After the workshop at Google, she also received an offer of working with Google, as soon as she completes her college, by Stacy Sullivan, Google’s Chief Culture Officer.

Samaira also developed another board game, especially for the underrepresented girls, named as Girls U Code. Her achievement also brought her a letter of appreciation from the White House. Samaira has been featured in NBC, Sony, ZDF, Mercury News, sina.com and several media in three continents (North America, Asia, Europe) and over 11 countries. She spoke at the CMG Impact 2016 Women in Tech (2017), becoming the youngest speaker at CMG. She also gave a speech at the MyPowerTalk at Silicon Valley tech forum, in the same year, where she received a standing ovation from more than 400 women. The Cartoon Network also profiled her as the real-life “Powerpuff Girl”. She has received the Young Entrepreneur Award from the Silicon Valley, in 2017.

The big tech companies are all set to hire the young entrepreneur, but, it all it is up to her whether she will go with a multinational tech company or will run her own business. Until then, we can just watch her progress. Along with playing with codes and creating unusual board games, Samaira also loves to play guitar and archery. She is a supporter of girls education and wants to make people of every age fall in love with coding and programming.

Garrett Camp : The Co-founder of the Online Discovery Platform StumbleUpon

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If you are skilled enough you are destined to achieve the goals you set even before you are a graduate. Garrett Camp, a Canadian entrepreneur, was still a student when he started his own business along with three of his college mates. The company gained popularity and within a year, bringing him into the spotlight and making him one of the Top Innovators under the age of 35.

Early Life

Garrett was born on October 4, 1978, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to an economist father and an artist mother. Later, his parents started a business of architecture. Garrett completed his high schooling from a local government school. Later, he joined the University of Calgary and received a degree in electrical engineering, in 1996. During his junior year, at the college, he went through an internship, in speech recognition technology from Nortel Networks, Montreal. After graduating from the University of Calgary, he enrolled in the Masters in Software Engineering, in the same University and researched on the collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval.

Garrett Camp
Image Source: designerfund.com

Founding StumbleUpon

Garrett was still in College when he came up with the idea of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon was the first discovery engine, that was used to find web content for the users. Garrett founded StumbleUpon, with his friends at the University and established its office in San Francisco. The company received its first funding from the Silicon Valley’s Angels Investors. In 2007, eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million. The company expanded its service to 25 million registered users in the next year. Camp re-acquired the company in 2015, as it went under debt, and helped the company recover its original status, once again. The company is still running its website successfully.

Other Ventures

In 2009, with Travis Kalanick, Garrett co-founded Uber, a transportation network company as UberCab. He made the initial funding for the project of $250K, himself. The idea behind Uber was to make the black taxis affordable for the people. Till mid-2012, Uber launched UberX and Uber SUV, making its way in the list of Forbes Top 10 Companies of 2012. Uber has become popular among the people as an affordable medium for travelling and is running its business in 500 cities across the globe.

In 2013, Garett started another venture named Expa that helps other startups financially, by raising funds from the major investors of Silicon Valley.

In 2007, Garrett was listed among the Top Innovators under the age of 35, at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference, at MIT and Bloomberg Businessweek named him one of Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in 2008. He spoke at the Wireless Influencers and South by Southwest, many a time and attended the DEMO Mobile 2013, as the judge and the panel member. In 2015, his total wealth was estimated to be US$5.3 billion by Forbes.

The Founders Behind the Worldwide e-Commerce Marketplace : Groupon

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In the industry, where most of the businesses want to earn more profit by avoiding bargaining and discounts on their services, Groupon.com brought a new way of earning profits with their different business model. The company is solely based covering the idea of selling discount deals on the services of local as well as multinational companies. The idea was unusual which gained huge popularity and benefits in a short interval of time.

It was Andrew Mason, who came up with the idea of creating such a business model for his first start-up company. Andrew Mason, who was first appointed as the CEO of the company, convinced Eric Lefkofsky, to invest $1 million in the idea, making the latter the co-founder of Groupon.

Early Life

Andrew was born in Pennsylvania and did his schooling from Mt. Lebanon High School, in 1999. In 2003, he received a bachelor’s degree in music from Northwestern University. After graduating from college, he joined a web designing company InnerWorkings, as a web developer. The company owner, Eric Lefkofsky, became his future partner and co-founder of Groupon.com. Andrew left the job to join the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy to pursue a master’s degree. However, he dropped out from the course after a few months of joining and again started working at Lefkofsky’s.

Founding Groupon.com

In 2006, the time, Andrew was working as a web developer, he was also dealing with the cancellation of a cell phone contract. He became frustrated with the client service and was looking for a solution. Soon, an idea lit Andrew’s mind and he started working on ThePoint, his first entrepreneurial venture. Lefkofsky also became interested in the project and offered a $1 million amount for the start-up. The two along with another business partner of Lefkofsky, Brad Kwywell, became the co-founders of ThePoint.

ThePoint was a platform developed for the purpose of getting people together to accomplish a certain goal, using the social media. Eventually, the main objective of ThePoint became saving money through various discounts from local vendors. In 2008, ThePoint was renamed to Groupon and was launched as the platform that focussed entirely on group buying.

The idea of Groupon was new in the market, and, in just one and a half year, the company valued at over $1 billion. The company became the first one, to join the $1 billion club in such a small time. In November 2011, Groupon was public, having the biggest IPO by an Internet company, since Google (2004). The concept behind Groupon was to provide deals to the consumers and sell the services of the companies, taking 50 per cent of every deal. Till 2014, it was noted that the company revenue hiked by 25% every passing year.

To avoid any kind of competition, Andrew and Lefkofsky started acquiring the local deal-of-the-day companies. Starting with the Europe-based MyCityDeal in 2010, Groupon also acquired other companies like ClanDescuento, the Japanese service Qpod.jp, Russian Darberry.ru, the Singaporean Beeconomic.com and the Indian deal-of-the-day website SoSasta.com. By March 2015, Groupon expanded in 500 cities worldwide, has 48.1 million registered users.

On February 28, 2013, Mason was dismissed from his post of CEO. Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell remain as the major investors of the company, and the former is serving as the chairman of the company.

Caterina Fake : One of the Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley

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In the past more than 15 years, Flickr has been the best Photo and Video hosting platform across the world. It allows you to share and host your pictures online, becoming the most favourite photo sharing website among all. At a time there was nothing like Flickr and then the idea of creating it hit two cleaver minds; Caterina Fake and her ex-husband Stewart Butterfield. Caterina is among the Time’s Magazine’s 2006’s list of 100 Most Influential People and was awarded the Silicon Valley Forum’s Visionary Award (2018).

Early Life

Caterina Fake was born on 13 June 1969, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child, she had a keen interest in poetry and classical music and was not allowed to watch TV. She became familiar with computers and the internet through her friends.

She went to Choate Rosemary Hall to pursue her high school and attended Vassar College to do her B.A. In English. Meanwhile, she was also an alumnus at Smith College.

Career

Even being an Arts student, her interest in computers and programming, led her to grab a job as the lead designer at one of the first web development companies, named as Organic Online. She worked on the first online ventures of many famous companies including McDonald’s, Nike, Levi’s, etc.

Caterina fake
Image Source: wikimedia.org

Caterina also operated as a research staff member of ‘Interval Research and in 1990, served as the Art Director at Salon.com, where she played a key role in creating an online community, social software, etc. In 1997, Caterina started working at Netscape, managing its community forum.

Founding Flickr and Rise as an Entrepreneur

In 2002, Caterina, along with Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon, founded a company and, named it Ludicrop. Together, they created a Game Neverending, that they somehow, could not launch. Later, she started working on a new project named as Flickr with Stewart and, launched it on 10 February 2004. Soon after its launch, it became a hit and Yahoo acquired it in 2005 along with Ludicorp, paying an amount of $25 million. Later, Yahoo! added more features to Flickr, like social media integration, community open APIs, tagging, etc to enhance its functionality. In the same year, Caterina also joined Yahoo! as the head of a Technology Development group, Hack Yahoo! along with Brickhouse.

After leaving the job at Yahoo, on 13 June 2008, Caterina started working on a new project named as Hunch, which she co-founded with an entrepreneur Chris Dixon, in June 2009. The website was acquired by eBay in 2011 paying $80 million. In 2012, Fake launched a website named Pinwheel later renamed to Findery, which is her latest venture.

Caterina won Business Week’s Best Leader of 2005, followed by Forbes 2005 eGang and Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs under 35 awards (2005). In 2006, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine. She has also received two Doctorate degrees (Honors), one from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and another from The New School 2013.

Caterina was a member of the board of directors of Creative Commons and for a time period, also invested in and chaired the Board of Etsy.

Personal Life

Caterina Fake was married to Stewart Butterfield the co-founder of Flickr and her business partner, for 7 years (2001-2007) and the two have a daughter together. Currently, she is living in San Fransisco, with her boyfriend Jaiku the co-founder of Jyri Engeström and their three children.