Find a technology entrepreneur or someone affiliated with any kind of media. Here are some ideas: the founders of Apple, Microsoft, google, youtube, jibjab, Amazon, etc. Even MC Hammer is a techie!
Still not interested? Select a name from the Levison book. Your goal: In 150 words, tell us something about the person. Where are they from? What are they famous for? Did they go to college? What kind of childhood? What have they done with their wealth?
EVERYBODY: Please pick someone different from the other class members. There are plenty of people.
EVERYBODY: Please pick someone different from the other class members. There are plenty of people.
Due Feb. 15
Chad Hurley co-founded YouTube with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. According to an article in the LA Times, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, just over a year after it was founded. Hurley's share was close to $350 million.
ReplyDeleteAsk.com states that: Chad grew up near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Twin Valley High School, Elverson in 1995, and received his B.A. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1999.
Hurley went to work for the company PayPal. At PayPal he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. In 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.54 billion, Hurley received a bonus which he used to finance their venture.
Presently, Chad is involved as an investor with Team US F1; US F1 is Formula One race team, however, its car and did not compete in 2010. Hurley is still trying to get involved with F1 via other teams.
Sources:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/10/chad-hurley-exits-youtube.html
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Chad_Hurley
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, and according to Forbes.com. Jobs net worth was to be around 5.1 billion dollars. Before his fame and success, Jobs was raised in the San Francisco suburb of Palo Alto, California. There is where his passion for gadgets commenced. After high school, Steve Jobs attended Reed College but would later drop out to pursue his dreams. His decision proved to be worthwhile as he went on to co-found Apple which as of 2010 was the number one technological company. Steve Jobs has done a lot of good with his money. But something great that he did was buying Pixar from George Lucas in 1986. That proved to be a great investment as Pixar is one of the most successful animation film studios. Steve Jobs had a vision of change and in the past decade, Jobs has changed the way we communicate with the world.
ReplyDeleteSources:
http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/jobs.html
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/54/rich-list-09_Steve-Jobs_HEDB.html
Because of “Please pick someone different from the other class members,” so I decided to choose a Chinese, maybe everyone never heard him before, but he plays the most important role in our country, the Country which has over 13 billion people.
ReplyDeleteHis name is Huateng, the founder of Tencent Company, it stand absolute as the dominance in the IT industry in China. The famous application of Tencent Company is QQ, an instant message tool based on Internet, has over 6 billion users, and over 1 billion online users all the time. Huateng and his Company are the monopoly in Chinese internet.
Huateng, the CEO and founder of Tencent Company, born on 1971, get the Bachelor degree in University of Shenzhen on 1993, named on Forbes Rich List as 60 billion dollars assets. His Company is the first company in China valued 100 billion dollars. This is the man and his media products in China, he is the legend.
Everyone knows who founded Microsoft, and if you don't it was Bill Gates. William Henry "Bill" Gates III, born in Seattle to an upper middle class family, might not have ever thought he would become a billionaire, but he now donates a lot of his income to charities and research programs throughout the world. He was the middle child of the family, with one younger sister and one older sister. He attended an exclusive preparatory school at age 13, where he took interest in computer programming. By letting him explore this interest in school, he created his first computer program called tic-tac-toe that let the player compete against the computer. He studied at Harvard University in 1973, where he met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, too. This was just the beginning to his eventful life of fame and fortune, with his founding on Microsoft, when he dropped out of college his junior year for this business opportunity. Gates' vision was to see a computer in every home. Today, Microsoft is a huge reason why computers have soared, and his net worth is up to 55 BILLION dollars. that's right. Billion. incredible!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how famous our entrepreneur had to be but I really wanted choose a woman instead of a man. Eileen Brown is CEO at Amastra. Amastra is a company that helps other companies and businesses use social media to expand there audience and to better reach existing customers. She emphasizes on keeping up to date with social media forums; she checks her social media’s first thing every morning. Small companies now have the chance to have global reach. Eileen worked for Microsoft for eight years before branching out to start he own company.
ReplyDeleteI think what really sold me on Eileen (founder and chair at Connecting Women in Technology) is her feminist passion. She strongly talks about and promotes women to become more active in today’s technology and the importance of this connection. (http://eileenbrown.wordpress.com/)
She went to University of Wales, Cardiff and has a book out call Working the Crowd: Social Media Marketing for business.
Great job. We will use this soon.
ReplyDeleteJibJab is an entertainment website that was founded in 1999 by Gregg and Evan Spiridellis. They decided to put a few thousand dollars into making their own website dedicated to making people laugh. They picked up majo clients by making e-cards and then by 2000, they had created their first interacttive video about the founding fathers. This led to another viral video of the Presidential election that was being held that year. This rap video of George Bush and Al Gore landed them a spot with some major media outlets.
ReplyDeleteBy 2001, they had crashed and lost many clients and were on the verge of losing their business, so in 2002 they decided to move to Los Angeles, CA., and figure out how to make aliving making people laugh. They sold gag gifts, made short animation films, and began to make a name for themselves. As the years have passed they have continued to grow their company around 40 people on staff, they will continue to grow and keep their website and entertainment business afloat with the memberships and clients that keep their business thirving.
In the last decade we have seen a handful of inventions shape our everyday lifes. Most people would credit Facebook or Youtube as the most impactful inventions of the new millinium, but underneath the surface it is actually the fashion world that has been impacted the most.
ReplyDeleteThanks to the rise of "Under Armor". Sports fashion, two words that Sax 5th Avenu never thought would go together, have meshed into a global empire for founder Kevin Plank.
Plank's vision of a comofrtable and stylish solution to sweatey under-garmitts created a perfect storm with a newly health-concious nation 11 years ago. He orginaly got the idea for his company while playing football at the University of Maryland, where he got tired of having to play in sweat soaked t-shirts.
Under Armor now rivals Nike for the top seller of sports apperrell in the world. The company is worth $281 million.
In 1998, Sean Parker co-founded a file sharing website that would revolutionize the music industry. Napster was introduced as a free peer-to-peer file sharing program, and it was arguably the most popular of similar programs. Napster was shut down in 2001 following several lawsuits from the music industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich.
ReplyDeleteIn 2004, Parker began working with the creators of Facebook and advising them in an unofficial capacity. Parker later became a Facebook shareholder and was named the company's first president, but his involvement with the company ceased after he was arrested for drug possession. Parker still remains a Facebook shareholder, but he is no longer involved in the operation of the company.
Parker's work brought digital media, specifically music, to the general public. Napster changed the way music is bought and sold, and forced the music industry to market its product to consumers in new formats.
We have all heard of Dell computers, but I imagine few of us know anything about how it got its start.
ReplyDeleteMichael Dell was born February 23, 1965 in Houston, Texas. He is the son of an orthodontist and a stock broker. He attended the University of Texas as a pre-med major. His initial idea was to make personal computers afforable and available to college students. He started his business from his dorm room with only $1000. He dropped out of college when his computer business took off.
Dell is the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world and the largest online computer retailer in the world.
Michael Dell became the youngest CEO to ever earn a ranking in the Fourtune 500 in 1992. Today, he is worth a net amount of $13.5 billion. He and is wife started several organizations to help children and non-profit health organizations. They also contributed the highest legal amount of money ($250,000) to President Bush's second inaguration.
Something that most of the people in America can go without checking every few minutes in the day, the cell phone. Thank you Martin Cooper for being the inventor of the first portable handset and to be the first person to make a call on a portable cell in April 1973. On a street corner in New York near the Manhattan Hilton he made his first call was made to his rival, Joe Engel, Bell Labs head of research. Cooper grew up in Chicago and received a degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He served in the Navy for four years then after he worked for a telecommunications company for a year. In 1954 he was hired by Motorola as a developer of portable products, which included the first portable handheld police radio for Chicago police department in 1967. Then he led the Motorola's cellular research.
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