Category IT Business Tycoons

       For the remarkable contributions made to the development of information technology, Caterina Fake remains an unmatched figure in a field that is dominated by men.

       Her career began as a chief designer for Organic Line, developing websites for companies including McDonalds, Levi’s, and Nike etc. She also served as the art director for Salon.com, before joining Netscape in 1997.

       It was after Netscape that Fake, along with Daniel Butterfield, and Jason Classon founded the Ludicorp. Butterfield and Fake later co-founded Flickr. Before its success, she had also faced failure after the first work by the company, ‘Game Never-ending’, ended up in a disaster. Yet Fake and Butterfield moved ahead confidently with Flickr.

       Fake’s innovative skills were seen again when she launched the website ‘Hunch’ in 2009. The site provided advice and recommendations to its users, based on their interests.

       The same year, Fake joined the board of directors of Creative Commons, an American non-profit organization, and was also made the chairman of the Board of Etsy, an e-commerce website. San Francisco headquartered Findery is Fake’s latest venture. 

       Caterina Fake is an entrepreneur known for co-founding the Flickr and Hunch websites. The success of these two sites helped her create a niche in the world of technological innovation and investment.

       Fake was born on June 13th, 1969 in Pittsburgh to an American father and a Filipino mother. She is a graduate in English literature from Vassar College.

       Fake’s career in the web world began when she started working as a lead designer at the web development agency ‘Organic Online’.

Continue reading “Why is Caterina Fake a renowned name?”

     Flickr is a successful image and video hosting website created by Daniel Butterfield through his Ludicorp Company in 2004. Launched on February 10th that year, the service enables users to share and embed photographs through their accounts.

     For sharing or uploading photos and videos on Flickr, users need to have an account. The user also gets to control privacy settings and decide whether the image should go ‘public’ or be restricted to just within the contact circle.

     The service allows users to release their images either under common usage licenses, or with copyrights reserved.

     As of August 2011, Flickr is known to have hosted more than 6 million images. By March 2013, it had a total of 87 million registered members, and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily.

     The creation of Flickr brought global recognition to Daniel Butterfield. 

      Daniel Stewart Butterfield is an entrepreneur credited to have founded the popular photo sharing website Flickr. He is also the founder of Slack, an instant message communication tool.

      Unlike other tech-wizards, Butterfield had no formal education in computer science or technology. After schooling, he graduated from the University of Victoria in philosophy, and went on to take a master’s degree in the same subject at the University of Cambridge.

      In 2002, Butterfield, and his future wife Caterina Fake, along with Jason Classon, co-founded Ludicorp, a company that developed a multiplayer online role-playing game called ‘Game Never-ending’. This however, did not turn out well, and the firm, in February 2004, started the famous ‘Flickr’ photo sharing service. The following year, it was acquired by Yahoo! Flickr became a massive hit among Internet users across the world.

      As of March 2013, Flickr had about 87 million registered users, and more than 3.5 million images uploaded daily.

      Butterfield worked with Yahoo! till 2008, before moving to found his new venture called Tiny Speck, a company that launched the game ‘Glitch’.

      In 2014, Butterfield released ‘Slack’, a message-based communication tool.

      Jimmy Wales is one name that will ever remain in the history of information technology. He is an American entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Wikipedia as well as Wikia, a web hosting company.

     Wikipedia, as we know, is a free content online encyclopedia that has helped people worldwide to access information on a wide range of topics.

     It started off in March 2000 as Nupedia, an open-content reference site. Wales was working on his startup named Bornis, when he conceived the idea of an online encyclopedia.

     Once Nupedia was set up, Wales hired academic Larry Sanger as its editor-in-chief. On January 15th, 2001 the duo launched the non-profit Wikipedia, an advanced version of Nupedia, that later came to become one of the most popular websites in the world.

    Wikipedia was just one of the ventures started by Wales to democratize IT. In 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation; a San Francisco based charitable organization, to develop wiki-based projects for the public, free of charge. The following year, he founded the company, Wikia Inc. 

     Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21st, 1967 in Paris to an Iranian immigrant parents. The family shifted to the US when Omidyar was a child.

     The bright kid that he was, Omidyar started showing interest in computers while in 9th grade. After high school, he joined Tufts University, and graduated with a BS in computer science. Soon after that, he started working for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer.

     Omidyar’s life as an innovator began in 1991, when he co-founded a start up called Ink Development. It was later rebranded as an e-commerce company, and renamed ‘eShop’.

     Four years later, he founded the ‘Auction Web’, a service that facilitated buying and selling through the Internet. The growth of the company was very rapid, and within a year, Omidyar acquired a license to sell airplane tickets on the site.

     In 1997, Auction Web turned into ‘eBay’. The success of eBay had also transformed Omidyar into a billionaire. Much before that, Omidyar had started donating money through the Omidyar Foundation which he founded in 2004, along with his wife Pamela. It mainly finances and helps smaller businesses to establish themselves, and make a difference in society.