The Beginning…
Kevin Systrom had a marketing job at Nextstop. Even without prior knowledge or skill, he learnt how to program simple engineering ideas. One of his ideas led to combine the 'Check-in' ability of foursquare (which allows you to 'check-in' to a location on the map) with the elements of the popular game - Mafia Wars. He made a prototype and named it as 'Burbn'.
Luck was on his side when he met two prominent individuals from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz who were immensely impressed with his ideas and decided to fund his venture with $500,000.
As Mike Krieger joined Kevin, Burbn was almost coded into a neat HTML5 mobile app which allowed users to check into locations, make plans (future check -ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures and much more. However, Burbn seemed too cluttered as an iPhone app, overrun with features.
This led to a shift in focus as Mike and Kevin identified mobile photos as a worthwhile opportunity. An app was built, right from scratch - basically cutting everything from Burbn except its photo posting ability, comments and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram - a photo sharing application and a social-network.
Current scenario
A 1 MB application that allows users to post photos and share with other users - Instagram has more than 100 million users and 1 billion photos on its database today. As homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos in a shape of a square. Each second, a new user is added and on an average, 58 photos are uploaded. In its largest acquisition deal to date, Facebook Inc. purchased Instagram for $1 Billion in cash and stock but decided to keep it independently managed. Instagram is available as a free app in App Store and Google Play.
I remember the days when self-expression used to be challenging...
But then again, I have been brought up in a world where internet has always been a close friend. But this kind of nostalgia and reminiscing does lend a certain vintage feel to the piece, doesn’t it?
SlideShare, it probably seems like an obvious thing of existence today – what’s so special about it? Probably nothing. After all, it’s just a website that shares presentations – child’s play.
But the truth is actually far from it. In fact, the simple notion that people think it’s so obvious and simple makes its presence even more appealing. Drawing on a similar analogy, did you ever take a pause to contemplate what is so special about the telephone? Probably nothing, it’s always been there.
Except that there is something special about the telephone - it changed the world.
SlideShare aims to share a similar rationale; but apart from that, it’s a completely different being on its own. Let’s face it – being online today more or less refers to browsing only a particular set of websites over and over again. You know the ones that rhyme with "Blue Cube", "Space Hook", "Sticky Media" and “Quitter”. Now imagine, if you will, that you have a tool at your disposal that could actually educate you alongside providing such online entertainment. What you have in your mind now is about 1% of what SlideShare actually does - it’s much more than mere education along with entertainment.
Co-founded in 2006 by Rashmi Sinha, Jonathan Boutelle and Amit Ranjan, SlideShare is the world’s largest online community for sharing presentations. The idea came into existence when the trio realised that there was no decent way to share conference presentations online. So, it should not come across as a big surprise that it’s got fantastic numbers: over 50 million monthly visitors, over 130 million page views and a constant rank in the top 200 websites in the world.
At the heart of SlideShare is a vibrant professional and educational community whose presence on the website is always prominent in the form of comments, favourites and downloads. And its existence on the biggest network on earth – the internet ensures that its content spreads virally through organisations such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. With the help of SlideShare, people and organisations can upload documents, PDFs, videos, webinars, share ideas, conduct research, which helps them to connect with others, generate leads for their businesses and the list can go on and on. Its usage by the big guns like The Whitehouse, NASA, The United Nations, Hewlett Packard, IBM, The US Army and The US Navy gives us an insight on its efficiency and usefulness. Moreover, it provides us with the advantage of connecting with an enormous and instant audience. With SlideShare, everyone can become a master of showmanship and presentation.
SlideShare is known to recruit promising individuals for its offices, both in New Delhi and San Francisco. However, given that its current workforce itself is about 55 employees in total, sudden expansion of the company seems unlikely. Even after its acquisition by LinkedIn, future plans of the company are not especially known. But the future of SlideShare is, for lack of a better word, very bright. Thanks to services such as SlideShare, we all have a shot at being a celebrity of sorts. Commerce has become an art. Work is a stage.
Clearly, I need to raise my game and get back to work on my slides...
Zomato is one such startup of India which promises to draw a global picture. Seeing its steep growth in the last 6 months, it certainly deserves to be UE's Company of The Week.
Zomato.com started off as Foodiebay.com by Mr. Deepinder Goyal, an IIT Delhi Graduate and Mr. Pankaj Chaddah. It was in 2008 when they were working at Bain and Company when they decided to help their colleagues at Bain by scanning and uploading Food Menus online. What started on the office intranet with about 50 menus soon became popular as word got around. Goyal and Chaddah decided to make a business out of it and made the menus available on a public platform. From working at home to a 20,000 sqft. office in Delhi and branches in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Indore, Ludhiana, UAE and Sri Lanka, from initially investing Rs.50 lacs from their own pocket to getting Rs. 13.5 cr investment from Info Edge India Ltd. , the journey of Zomato has been stupendous. What took them to reach there? When you have a good paying job in one of the world's biggest management consulting firm, a degree from one of the India's best technical colleges and still you decide to follow that one thing that you love - that courage took them up where they are now today. Although they do not plan to stop here - afterall, sky is the limit. Future plans include expanding to Australia, Turkey and Hong Kong and hiring top-notch talent. Zomato also launched a print version of the content on the website in collaboration with Citibank in May 2012. The guides are marketed and sold under the name "Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide". As of now, Zomato has 50,700 restaurants in 17 cities in 3 countries. They have an iPhone App, Android App, Facebook App, Windows Phone App and Blackberry App. Zomato allows users to rate restaurants, write reviews, see menus, sort according to variety of fields and above all simplifies life for the consumer in market which is over-flooded with places to eat. Zomato also runs a unique photo blog known - www.zomato.xxx which it calls as 'Food Porn'. Indeed, the company promises a steep growth in future.
"Quora.com - It starts with a Q and ends with an A and seeing its recent outburst, it clearly deserves to be UE's Company Of The Week."Quora.com is a question and answer social networking website which allows users to ask as well as answer questions, upvote or downvote answers and interact with a highly intelligent and diverse audience in all fields. Quora was co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. One would now be led to wonder how Quora is any different from Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com. Here is a precise answer by a Quora user: "In my rough estimation, about 70 IQ points."Indeed, Quora's intelligent user base is its USP and puts it way ahead of its competition. Quora first launched in private beta on January 4, 2010. It was founded by two Ex-Facebook employees and raised $11 Million in March 2010 which valued the start-up at $86 million! What really inspired the co-founders to come up with Quora was the belief that the internet was short of a lot of useful information which is in people's mind, desperate to come out. In their own words: "The way we think about this is there’s actually a lot of information that’s still in people’s heads that’s not on the internet. And when you think about it you would say that probably 90% of the information that people have is still in their heads, not on the internet"It was only in June 2010 that Quora opened to the public. Since then, it has come a long way. As of June 2012, Quora has 1.5 million active users per month. The most addictive characteristic of Quora is that it makes one feel smart. To be a part of an intelligent discussion and sometimes being the expert in that field not only booms one's confidence but also aids in virally spreading the word about this social network to everyone else - as one would want one's friends to know about one's smartness. Here, talking what makes sense is fashion. Even the most simple questions would find a well researched answer. That is the beauty of Quora. Quora is certainly up up for a bright future. The Daily Telegraph has predicted that Quora will become larger than Twitter. Quora, along with Airbnb and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multi-billion dollar start-ups by the New York Times. Adam D'Angelo was ranked number 22 among the smartest people in the technology industry by CNN Money in 2010. Cheever and D'Angelo were both listed in the Inc. Top 30 Under-30 entrepreneurs list of 2011.
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