Category Big Business1

           Imagine your childhood without the fun loving, adventurous Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White, Cinderella and Rapunzel are some of the characters that filled our childhood. All these names can be traced to Walt Disney, the brain behind the Walt Disney Company.

          Walt Disney arrived in California in the summer of 1923, hoping to make money. He had made a cartoon about a little girl named Alice. A distributor in New York agreed to distribute the Alice Comedies and this was the start of the Walt Disney Company with Walt and his brother Roy as equal partners.

           Disney continued with Alice Comedies for four years, till he introduced a new character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Though the Rabbit conquered children’s minds, Walt lost the copyright of the character and in order to make up for the loss, he created Mickey Mouse. Sound films came out around the same time and Mickey Mouse became a cartoon star in no time.

Picture Credit : Google

          In I995, two computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University collaborated on writing a program for a search engine. Working from their dorm rooms, the pair built a server network using cheap, used, and borrowed personal computers. It was not a cakewalk, but they managed to come up with a path-breaking search engine- Google.

          Their attempts to license the product failed miserably. Nobody wanted to take the risk of investing in an advanced product at an early stage of development. When all the doors closed, Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystem appeared as a saviour; he was so impressed by a quick demo of Google that he instantly decided to invest in it. Google Inc. formally came into being in 1998 with the mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google achieved a steady growth since then.

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          For a long time, people relied on volumes of encyclopedias for all the information they needed. But the idea of an online encyclopedia is not more than 35 years old.

          Search engines, a sort of online encyclopedia came into being at the beginning of the Internet era. The most popular of them is Google. Got questions or need information about anything under the sun or beyond? Google has got it all.

          A search engine is a program that searches the internet and finds webpages based on the keywords that you provide. When it was first released in 1995, Google was considered unique because of the technology it used. In those days, search engines ranked results based on how often a search term appeared on a webpage.

          Google used something called PageRank, which allowed them to determine the relevance of a website by considering the number of pages, along with its importance using a technology known as backlink analysis. This simplified web searches.

Picture Credit : Google

           Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking page. Its popularity spread like wildfire when Mark Zuckerberg along with his classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes set up Facebook.

           It was launched in 2004 as ‘The Facebook’ and the access was restricted to Harvard students. The website allowed students to rate the photographs of other students. Students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives. Its popularity increased; within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and in a month’s time, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.

          The network soon extended to other universities and high schools in the US and later to the UK. In 2005, it was renamed as Facebook and a year later, it went beyond educational institutions. Anybody who was thirteen years of age with a registered email could create an account on Facebook.

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          Alibaba, one of the world’s largest e-commerce ventures came into existence in 1999. It was founded by Jack Ma along with 17 others. Jack Ma was a Chinese who taught English. During one of his visits to the US, he learned about the growing internet market. He then decided to start one in his country.

          While sitting in a cafe in San Francisco, he thought of the name Alibaba. Alibaba is a famous character from Thousand and One Nights. He asked the waitress if she knew Alibaba. The waitress nodded and said, ‘Open Sesame’. He asked the same to many others and none of them found it difficult to recognize the name. The name was easy to pronounce and globally known; therefore he chose it for his company.

           Luck and time favoured Jack Ma. When he launched Alibaba’s online retail platform, the consumer internet boom had just arrived in China. The company made money from commissions on sales, fees for memberships, advertising and other services. When it needed technological assistance, Alibaba partnered with Yahoo. In 2016, Alibaba made a mark when the company crossed the revenue of its American counterparts such as Amazon and eBay. Two years later, Alibaba became the second Asian company to cross the $500 billion valuation mark.

Picture Credit : Google