Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million

 

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin maxed out their credit cards for computers and office equipment, building Google's first data center in Larry's dorm. But since they needed more cash to move out of the dorm, the duo turned to an investor. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and friend of a Stanford faculty member, wrote a check for $100,000 to Google after only seeing a short demo.

 

 

Born into a family immersed in business and politics, William "Bill" Gates inherited quite a knack for running a business and managing people, which would ultimately lead him to a billion-dollar success. From an early point in his education, he was competitive, driven, and was striving to be on top.

This would prove to be the crucial ingredient in his ride to fame, success, and unimaginable wealth.

It was during his stay at Lakeside, a private school, that he first laid his hands on the tool that was to propel him to fame: the computer. Little did he know that computers would later on make his name known the world over.

Despite his attempt at education as a pre-law student at Harvard University, Bill Gates' fate was far too entwined with computers. He enrolled only to later on drop out, with the tempting challenge of rocking the computing world.

It was also there that he met Paul Allen, one of the first Microsoft programmers, who ventured into the computer business with him. Early on Bill Gates and Paul Allen studied and learned everything they could about those early computers and knew that they could take the world of computing to a different level.

As if destiny was playing a part in it all, Paul Allen came across a magazine that featured the Altair 8080, headlined as the World's First Microcomputer Kit. It was a golden opportunity that presented itself at just the right time, and having been born competitive and aggressive, Bill Gates immediately called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the Albuquerque - New Mexico company who manufactured the Altair and convinced them that they were working on a BASIC program that would work for their Altair computer - even though they did not yet have the software written!

It took them eight weeks, dividing the workload, to come up with a program.

Testing the program for the first time on the first Altair they had ever set eyes on, they were faced with a one-in-a-million chance, and they successfully closed a deal. At this point, Bill knew it was time and he dropped out of Harvard. Not long after that, Microsoft was born. This was in 1975.

1980 was the year that would finally bring the Microsoft name to the masses. IBM was on their way to creating their new personal computer and needed an Operating System for it. They had approached a leading It company at the time called Digital Research but could not get a contract that both parties could agree on.

By this time they had heard of Bill Gates and so met up with Microsoft to discuss the creation of an Operating System for their new PC.

For this contract, Microsoft negotiated a license for a "clone" of the dominant operating system at the time: CP/M (the clone was called 86-DOS because it was designed to run on the Intel 8086 processor) from a company called Seattle Computer Products. It cost $25,000 and they then re-licensed it to IBM.

IBM later renamed it to PC-DOS.

Microsoft then acquired all rights to 86-DOS Operating System for only $50,000 from Seattle Computer Products in July, 1981, shortly before IBM released the PC. he then went on to create his own Operating System from the 86-DOS Operating System and called it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System)

Bill Gates managed to convince IBM to let him retain the rights to MS-DOS and to sell it separately from the IBM personal computers with its PC-DOS. It was this wise business move that made him a computer tycoon up until now, earning huge amounts of money from the licensing of the MS-DOS.

Because of its history, MS-DOS was the key to the growth of Microsoft. License earnings funded the company's further efforts. They released later versions of the system, and were intent on upgrading and improving it for a while. The interest, however, in graphical user interface or GUI, prompted them to create an add-on to MS-DOS in 1985 called "Windows".

This marked the birth of the Windows operating system. Initially designed to run on top of MS-DOS, it allowed more user options such as multitasking, installation of devices, and to run applications for longer periods of time.

Finally, Windows became a world wide Operating System, and gave birth to a continuous stream of improvements and updates that finally brought to life the operating systems most of the world uses today.

After the release of Windows NT in 1993 version, there soon followed the "home user" version called Windows 95.

Then came Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME or Millennium Edition.

More recently, Whistler, or more popularly known as Windows XP became a huge hit, and Microsoft progressed on with Windows Vista.

Work has now begun on the replacement for Vista... make sure you have signed up for my newsletter below and I will keep you updated on its progress as Microsoft release information that I can share...

More info on the early years of Microsoft operating systems be found at:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx

 

Co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both college dropouts, began their partnership by selling boxes they built that allowed for free long-distance phone calls. In 1976, they started working on another box, the Apple I computer. Jobs and Wozniak sold their most valuable possessions, a van and two calculators, raising $1,300 to fund the company.

 

AN FRANCISCO — Jawed Karim doesn't begrudge the spotlight on YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen this week after they negotiated the video website's sale to Google for about $1.7 billion.
After all, Hurley and Chen took the germ of an idea — famously hatched at a San Francisco dinner party — and turned it into a Silicon Valley company that became a global phenomenon in less than a year.

Still, Karim, 27, would like more people to know that he was YouTube's third co-founder — and, he says, the guy who first suggested the idea that became the company. "It took the three of us," he said Wednesday.

The story of YouTube's birth, like that of many companies, is more nuanced than the one widely known. In many accounts, Hurley and Chen take center stage. If he's mentioned at all, Karim is cast in a bit part, ending when he assumed an advisory role after leaving YouTube last year for graduate computer studies at Stanford.

Other entrepreneurs lost their place in history, too, says James Hoopes, a business history professor at Babson College near Boston. Historians and journalists "like to write about personalities," so they often focus on individuals, brushing aside other co-founders. Popular wisdom, for example, says Bill Gates and Sam Walton single-handedly started Microsoft and Wal-Mart, respectively, but they were co-founders.

Karim says his idea for what became YouTube sprang from two very different events in 2004: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," during a Super Bowl show, and the Asian tsunami.

YouTube fizzled in an early version, Karim says: A dating site called Tune In Hook Up drew little interest. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects.

YouTube says Karim was part of the "core" team that developed the idea for the company and notes that he is listed as one of three founders on its website. "There's no question about that," spokeswoman Julie Supan says.

Karim is one of the company's biggest stockholders and is in line to get millions of dollars in Google shares when the deal announced Monday closes. He declined to reveal his stake, or the stakes of the other founders and venture-capital investors at Sequoia Capital.

Karim grew up in West Germany, and his family immigrated to Minnesota when Karim started high school. His Bangladeshi father is a chemist at 3M, and his German mother is a biochemistry research professor at the University of Minnesota. Karim got his bachelor's in computer science and engineering in 2004 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hurley, 29, Chen, 28, and Karim met as early employees at PayPal, the payment service sold to eBay in 2002. The three, newly rich after leaving PayPal, talked about a start-up of their own, possibly a database venture, Karim says.

Then, early last year, Karim recalled the difficulty involved in finding and watching videos online of Jackson accidentally baring her breast during the Super Bowl show. The same was true with the many amateur videos made of that winter's devastating tsunami.

Karim says he proposed to Hurley and Chen that they create a video-sharing site. "I thought it was a good idea," Karim says.

The three agreed within a few days in February, then divided work based on skills: Hurley designed the site's interface and logo. Chen and Karim split technical duties making the site work. They later divided management responsibilities, based on strengths and interests: Hurley became CEO; Chen, chief technology officer.

Karim had already planned to resume computer studies, so he opted out of management and agreed to take a smaller ownership stake than the other two founders. He continued advising YouTube and a growing number of employees — now 67 — as Hurley and Chen took his "little spark" of an idea and turned it into a fire.

"My only interest was in helping the company get off the ground, implementing it, and raising money," he says. Hurley and Chen handled the Google talks; Karim says he signed off on the deal once details were reached.

Now in a two-year master's program, Karim says he's considering another start-up but declines to give details.

For now, he's basking in YouTube's success and its eye-popping sale price. "I definitely thought that this was a possible outcome," he says. "But I didn't think it was the most likely outcome."

 

Orkut was launched in January 2004 by the search company Google, the brainchild of Orkut Orkut Buyukkokten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code.

Orkut Buyukkokten is the founder of orkut..There is a story as how & why he started Orkut.Dont know how far it's true..but yes,it's interesting.
Orkut Buyukkokten had a crush in school when he was a kid.That gal was in his class. Later when they moved to high schools,he lost her.This separation only made Orkut Buyukkokten crazy & he started searching for her. He started Orkut just with the hope that he'll find his 10yrs old crush someday. A very close friend of his was the 2nd person to join in...& the chain grew longer & longer as we see Orkut today.
At the beginning,it was not under google. It's only in mid 2004 that it was accepted by google....

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February 2004, while attending Harvard University, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[12] This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. At the end of the school year, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved out to Palo Alto, California with McCollum, who had a summer internship at Electronic Arts. They rented a house near Stanford University where they were joined by Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. Soon McCollum decided to leave EA and help with the development of Facebook and a companion website, Wirehog, full-time. In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website HarvardConnection, subsequently changed to ConnectU, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for the website they asked him to build for them.[13][14] Also at that time, Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base had exceeded one million

 

Jamsetji N Tata is the founder of the Tata Group. Born in a family of Parsi priests in Navsari, Gujarat, on March 3, 1839, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata came to Mumbai (then Bombay) at the age of 14. In 1868, at age 29, he started a private trading firm with a capital of Rs 21,000. His travels in the Far East and Europe had inspired in him the desire to manufacture cotton goods. In 1877, he launched the famous Empress Mill in Nagpur. He also set up the Central Spinning, Weaving and Manufacturing Company in 1874 and the Swadeshi Mills in 1886, both in Mumbai. He also set up the Taj Hotel in Mumbai and laid the plans for India's first steel plant.

A village called Sakchi was chosen as the site for setting up the Tata Iron and Steel Co. M/s Julian Kennedy, Sahlin and Co, of Pittsburgh, USA were appointed the construction engineers of TISCO. On January 2, 1919, Sakchi was renamed Jamshedpur.

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata's dream -- The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, Mumbai -- was opened on December 16, 1903. It is said to have cost £500,000 -- or Rs 25 lakh -- then. Legend has it that J N Tata was taking a foreigner to a dinner in a hotel, but was stopped at the entrance by the doorman. The reason? Only Europeans were allowed in, not Indians. That rebuff was enough to make Jamsetji decide to build a grand hotel in India.

In 1904, three years before the site of his dream steel plant -- Sakchi -- was discovered, Jamsetji died at Bad Nauheim in Germany. His cousin R D Tata and close members of his family carried forward the work he had started.

 

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, one of the leading Indian businessmen, was born on December 28, 1932 in Chorwad, Gujarat. Popularly known as Dhirubhai Ambani, he heads The Reliance Industries, India's largest private enterprise.

Dhirubhai started off as a small time worker with Arab merchants in the 1950s and moved to Mumbai in 1958 to start his own business in spices. After making modest profits, he moved into textiles and opened his mill near Ahmedabad. Dhirubhai founded Reliance Industries in 1958. After that it was a saga of expansions and successes.

Reliance, acknowledged as one of the best-run companies in the world has various sectors like petrochemicals, textiles and is involved in the production of crude oil and gas, to polyester and polymer products. The companies refinery at Jamnagar accounts for over 25% of India's total refining capacity and their plant at Hazira is the biggest chemical complex in India. The company has further diversified into Telecom, Insurance and Internet Businesses, the Power Sector and so on. Now the Reliance group with over 85,000 employees provides almost 5% of the Central Government's total revenue.

Dhirubhai has been one among the select Forbes billionaires and has also figured in the Sunday Times list of top 50 businessmen in Asia. His industrious nature and willingness to take on any risk has made him what he is. In 1986 after a heart attack he has handed over his empire to his two sons Anil and Mukesh. His sons are carrying on the successful tradition of their illustrious father.

Early life

'Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani' was born on 28 December 1932, at Chorwad, Junagadh in the state of Gujarat, India, into a Modh family of very moderate means. He was the second son of a school teacher. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Aden, Yemen. Initially, Dhirubhai worked as a dispatch clerk with A. Besse & Co. Two years later A. Besse & Co. became the distributors for Shell products and Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s oil-filling station at the port of Aden.

He was married to Kokilaben and had two sons and two daughters. He also worked in Dubai for some time during his early years.

Life in Aden

Kokilaben and Dhirubhai Ambani, In the 1950s, the Yemini administration realized that their main unit of currency, the Rial, was disappearing fast. Upon launching an investigation, they realized that a lot of Rials were being routed to the Port City of Aden. It was found that a young man in his twenties was placing unlimited buy orders for Yemini Rials.

During those days, the Yemini Rial was made of pure silver coins and was in much demand at the London Bullion Exchange. Young Dhirubhai bought the Rials, melted them into pure silver and sold it to the bullion traders in London. During the latter part of his life, while talking to reporters, it is believed that he said “The margins were small but it was money for jam. After three months, it was stopped. But I made a few lakhs. In short, I was a manipulator. A very good manipulator. But I don’t believe in not taking opportunities.

Reliance Commercial Corporation

Ten years later, Dhirubai returned to India and started the Reliance Commercial Corporation with a capital of Rs. 15,000.00. The primary business of Reliance Commercial Corporation was to import polyester yarn and export spices.

The business was setup in partnership with Champaklal Damani, his second cousin, who used to be with him in Aden, Yemen. The first office of the Reliance Commercial Corporation was set up at the Narsinathan Street in Masjid Bunder. It was a 250 Sq. Ft. room with a telephone, one table and three chairs. Initially, they had two assistants to help them with their business. In 1965, Champaklal Damani and Dhirubhai Ambani ended their partnership and Dhirubhai started on his own. It is believed that both had different temperaments and a different take on how to conduct business. While Mr. Damani was a cautious trader and did not believe in building yarn inventories, Dhirubhai was a known risk taker and he considered that building inventories, anticipating a price rise, and making profits through that was good for growth.

During this period, Dhirubhai and his family used to stay in an one bedroom apartment at the Jaihind Estate in Bhuleshwar. Mumbai. In 1968, he moved to an up market apartment at Altamount Road in South Mumbai.

 

Born in 1946, N. R. Murthy grew up one of eight children in a middle-class family of high caste but meager means. His father was a math teacher, and both parents taught him strong values, such as working hard and serving the public good. Murthy grew up a socialist, which was typical at the time in India. He studied electrical engineering, earning a master's degree at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

During the 1970s he worked for a computer company in Paris, France. In 1974 Murthy decided to return to India, first touring the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The harsh conditions there made Murthy realize that capitalism was not a sin. Before wealth could be dispersed, it must be created.

Back in India, Murthy began working in the software industry. There he saw how his country could harness its large pool of English-speaking, highly trained technical personnel who worked for a fraction of U.S. salaries. An Indian firm could supply Western companies with low-cost custom software by writing it in India. Murthy also wanted to contribute to his country, and by providing jobs locally large numbers of technicians would not have to leave India to find work. In 1981 Murthy and six other software engineers pooled their savings of about $1,000, and started Infosys in a Mumbai apartment. Murthy was the new company's chairman and CEO.

THE RISE OF INFOSYS
Infosys Technologies designed custom software for companies worldwide. But in 1981 the tightly regulated business environment of India made that difficult to accomplish. The company had to wait nearly a year for its first telephone line to be installed. It took over two years and 25 trips to Delhi to obtain import licenses for the company's first computers. Without computers at their Indian offices, employees had to travel abroad to work, often waiting weeks for travel permits and foreign currency. Despite these problems Infosys landed major accounts, including Reebok International, and managed to stay afloat.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism in Eastern Europe, the Indian government liberalized its attitude toward capitalism and instituted free-market reforms in 1991. This made it possible for Indian companies to move goods, services, people, and currency more freely across national borders. The impact on Infosys was direct and rapid. It experienced annual growth rates of 27 percent to 106 percent during the 1990s, and acquired over three hundred new clients, many of them American giants like Citigroup, Aetna, Gap, Dell, and Cisco Systems. In March 2000 Infosys became the first Indian firm traded on an American stock exchange, the NASDAQ. Infosys continued to grow even in periods of stagnation and downturn for the American software industry. In 2004 Infosys was one of India's top three information-technology services firms, along with Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. It had over 25,000 employees and earned record profits of $270 million on sales of $1 billion.

 

 

 

Wipro started in 1945 with the setting up of an oil factory in Amalner a small town in Maharashtra in Jalgaon District. The product Sunflower Vanaspati and 787 laundry soap (largely made from a bi-product of Vanaspati operations) was sold primarily in Maharashtra and MP. The company was aptly named Western India Products Limited.

The Birth of the name Wipro - As the organization grew and diversified into operations of Hydraulic Cylinders and Infotech, the name of the organization did not adequately reflect its operations. Azim Premji himself in 1979 selected the name "Wipro" largely an acronym of Western India Products. Thus was born the Brand Wipro. The name Wipro was unique and gave the feel of an 'International" company. So much so that some dealers even sent their cheques favouring Wipro (India) Limited. Fortunately, the banks accepted them!!

Born on July 24, 1945, Azim Hashim Premji was studying Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA when due to the sudden demise of his father, he was called upon to handle the family business. Azim Premji took over the reins of family business in 1966 at the age of 21.

At the first annual general meeting of the company attended by Azeem Premji, a shareholder doubted Premji's ability to handle business at such a young age and publicly advised him to sell his shareholding and give it to a more mature management. This spurred Azim Premji and made him all the more determined to make Wipro a success story. And the rest is history.

When Azim Premji occupied the hot seat, Wipro dealt in hydrogenated cooking fats and later diversified to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders. Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.

Under Azim Premji's leadership Wipro has metamorphosed from a Rs.70 million company in hydrogenated cooking fats to a pioneer in providing integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform. Today, Wipro Technologies is the largest independent R&D service provider in the world.

Azim Premji has several achievements to his credit. In 2000, Asiaweek magazine, voted Premji among the 20 most powerful men in the world. Azim Premji was among the 50 richest people in the world from 2001 to 2003 listed by Forbes.

The deal, coming as it does after a five-year stormy partnership between the two high-profile media majors, is seen as a victory of sorts for Corporate India over the multinational brigade. Chandra, a one-time rice packer in Hissar, Haryana, is being credited with outwitting News Corp's chairman and global media baron Rupert Murdoch, who is known for his ability to get what he wants.

And Murdoch sure wanted a pre-eminent role in the Indian entertainment and media sweepstakes. On the one hand, he had his own STAR platform, on the other, he became an equal partner in Zee and was at one time tipped to swallow the latter. He was well on his way, until he ran into the entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity of Chandra, whom big names do not seem to sway or intimidate.

Analysts say it is early days yet. For one, it would be foolhardy to write Murdoch off in a jiffy. News Corp has got rid of the partnership that forbade STAR TV from launching channels or programmes which would compete directly with Zee's. In other words, STAR TV is now free to do its own thing. STAR stands to pocket nearly $ 150 million in cash from Zee, and is expected to strengthen itself in the Indian market.

The time-frame for the deal has not been defined; it is still not clear how Zee will fund the $300 million deal without harming its other projects.

Chandra, who shuns personal publicity and the public glare, is not telling.

However, raising high finance may not be difficult for a man who has nurtured Zee into India's most popular satellite television network in less than seven years, and positioned it as a global brand with visibility in the US, UK and South Africa. His ambitious satellite communications project entails bigger investments. There is talk that Zee Telefilms may offload up to ten per cent of its equity to global media companies with high net worth, in order to pay News Corp.

With more than 200 million viewers, Zee Network would be the envy of any broadcaster. It commands 50 per cent of advertising revenues in a highly competitive environment. Chandra was listed by The Sunday Times of London as Britain's fourth richest Asian with a personal wealth of pound sterling 450 million. Chandra's interests range from a 65 per cent post-deal stake in Zee Telefilms to amusement parks, education, packaging, exports, publishing.

With Zee Telefilms firmly under his belt post-deal, Chandra will preside over what any media magnate would give his right arm for: software production (Zee Telefilms), broadcast (Patco) and ground distribution (SitiCable).

There was a time, not very long ago, when stories, within the realm of speculation, were in circulation that Murdoch dictates terms to Chandra. Today, Murdoch needs Chandra like never before, according to some analysts.

So far, Murdoch has pumped over $300 million in his Indian operation (Star Plus, Star Movies, Star World and Star News). But viewership has been low. An experiment to 'Indianise' the channels has yielded less-than-satisfactory results. There have been no decent returns on investment. All this at a time when Zee's bouquet of channels -- Zee Cinema, Zee TV and Zee India TV / Zee News which Chandra owns jointly with Murdoch through Asia Today Limited -- were proving money-spinners.

Though Sony Entertainment Television is still a challenger, the post-deal field is open for Chandra to emerge as India's undisputed media mogul. In the coming months, he expects to launch channels in Bengali, Punjabi, Malayalam, Gujarati and Telugu. At the launch of the Marathi channel on August 14, 1999, Chandra had said: "There should be something for everyone. Everyone in each corner of the country should enjoy television in a language they understand comfortably."

Zee insiders admire his commitment to make India a power to reckon with in animation films. "His conviction is that our folklore, legends, mythology, history are full of useful tales and moral stories. He wants these to be told to children in the new millennium through animation films. How many film-makers would dare to invest over Rs 50 million to make a full-length animation feature film (Bhagmati, on the legend of Golconda) in the mould of Lion King? His efforts at setting up infrastructure necessary for making animation films has inspired several other entrepreneurs," says a source.

 

 

Cisco's rise is so emblematic of the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon that it almost approaches allegory. The company was founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, academics who worked at Stanford University. Bosack was a scientist--a somewhat philosophical, nonconfrontational, "big think" kind of scientist--who ran the computers for the Stanford computer science department. Lerner, in most respects his polar opposite--flamboyant, driven, highly confrontational--ran the computer system at the business school. The two computer systems were, of course, unconnected, unable to communicate with each other or with any of the other computer systems scattered around the

Stanford campus.

What the Cisco founders did was devise the means to connect the different networks, thus creating one big Stanford network. Bosack came up with the crucial innovation: a high-speed, relatively inexpensive "router," not a power tool but a device that forwards data packets from one computer site to another. Just as important, its software allowed the packages to be read by any kind of computer on the network. This was something the university badly wanted done--though not necessarily by Bosack et al. It was funding its own large-scale attempt to link the university's computers; the work by the
future Cisco founders was largely a skunkworks effort. "We crammed it down Stanford's throat," Lerner says.

Did the founders realize what a bonanza they had? Not remotely. In fact, if Stanford had not refused to give them permission to make some routers for friends at Xerox labs and Hewlett-Packard, it is quite possible they would
never have started Cisco. But when Stanford stood in their way, they got so mad that they formed the company and took their new technology with them. Stanford responded by threatening to sue them, which of course only made them
madder.

Cisco was the kind of mythical Silicon Valley startup that almost never happens anymore. Bosack and Lerner mortgaged their house for seed capital. They borrowed against their credit cards. Lerner took a job with Schlumberger
to support herself and her husband, while working for Cisco in every spare moment. Friends would gather in their living room to build routers and write code.

 

Sometime before September, 1995, 28-year-old software developer Pierre Omidyar, who had previously worked with Claris developing software for Apple computers, sat down to write the code that would eventually evolve into what we know as eBay today.

Originally called AuctionWeb and hosted on the same server as Pierre's page about the ebola virus, the site began with the listing of a single broken laser pointer. Though Pierre had intended the listing to be a test more than a serious offer to sell at auction, he was shocked when the item sold for $14.83. Pierre knew that he'd created something big as soon as he contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the pointer was broken.

"I'm a collector of broken laser pointers," came the reply.

AuctionWeb soon took over Pierre's entire domain, www.ebay.com, short for Echo Bay, which was the name of his consulting firm at the time. By 1996 the company was large enough to require the skills of a Stanford MBA in Jeffrey Skoll, who came aboard an already profitable ship. Meg Whitman, a Harvard graduate, soon followed as president and CEO, along with a strong business team under whose leadership eBay grew rapidly, branching out from collectibles into nearly every type of market. eBay's vision for success transitioned from one of commerce—buying and selling things—to one of connecting people around the world together.

With exponential growth and strong branding, eBay thrived, eclipsing many of the other upstart auction sites that dotted the dot-com bubble. By the time eBay had gone public in 1998, both Omidyar and Skoll were billionaires.

 

 

 

Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder, Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Group can be labelled as the most ambitious telecom entrepreneur in India. Sunil a former student of Harvard Business School, graduated from Punjab University. The son of a parliamentarian, Sunil did not want to follow his father's footsteps. He had shown an interest in business even from his teenage days. So after graduation, Sunil got together with his friend and formed a small bicycle business with borrowed capital in the1970s. But by 1979, he realized that this business would remain small. So he moved out of Ludhiana, spent a few years in Mumbai and in 1981, was running an import and distribution operation out of New Delhi and Mumbai. By 1982, Mittal had started a full-fledged business selling portable generators imported from Japan and that gave him the chance to involve himself in activities like marketing and advertising. Things went smoothly until the government banned the import of generators as two Indian companies were awarded licenses to manufacture generators locally. Sunil Mittal got interested in push button phones while on a trip to Taiwan, and in 1982, introduced the phones to India, replacing the old fashioned, bulky rotary phones that were in use in the country then. Bharti Telecom Limited (BTL) was incorporated and entered into a technical tie up with Siemens AG of Germany for manufacture of electronic push button phones. By the early 1990s, Mittal was making fax machines, cordless phones and other telecom gear. The turning point came in 1992 when the Indian government was awarding licenses for mobile phone services for the first time. One of the conditions for the Delhi cellular license was that the bidder have some experience as a telecom operator. Mittal clinched a deal with the French telecom group Vivendi. Two years later, Sunil secured rights to serve New Delhi. In 1995, Bharti Cellular Limited (BCL) was formed to offer cellular services under the brand name AirTel. Within a few years Bharti became the first telecom company to cross the 2-million mobile subscriber mark. The company is also instrumental in bringing down the high STD/ISD, cellular rates in the country by rolling the countries first private national as well as international long-distance service under the brand name IndiaOne. In 2001, the company entered into a joint venture with Singapore Telecom International for a $650-million ubmarine cable project, the countries first ever undersea cable link connecting Chennai in India and Singapore.

 

 

Concentrating on the production of thin-rolled slabs, the facility, renamed Lazaro Cardenas, became a money machine selling to U.S. markets in Texas and California. Between 1992 and 1998, annual shipments jumped from 929,000 tons to 3 million tons, and output per employee-hour nearly tripled. Moving to London with his wife and two children, Mittal snapped up small-to-middling mills in Canada, Germany, and Ireland. But the heart of his operations remained in so-called “emerging economies.” The boldest example of his strategy was his 1995 purchase of the giant government steel works in Kazakhstan. A product of Soviet state planning (the mill had been established by Stalin with forced labor), Temirtau was a pollution-besotted Goliath with a labor force numbering 83,000. The workers had not been paid for six months, and heroin trafficking and AIDS plagued the company town. Mittal purchased much of Temirtau’s infrastructure along with the mill, including its streetcar system, electric company, and hydropower plant. “People hoped that he [Mittal] would be a rich investor and a rich master and that there would be more aid and assistance,” a resident told Kazakh Channel 31 TV. While workers started receiving their wages on time, they did not see a pay raise, not even after a third of the labor force was dismissed as redundant. The plant was technically purchased by a firm named Ispat International of Rotterdam, Holland. Ispat was formed when the Mittal clan partitioned its family business. Lakshmi formed two companies, Ispat and LNM Holdings, to assume ownership of the foreign steel mills, while his younger brothers, Pramod K. Mittal and V.K. Mittal, took over the steel operations in India that were started by their father. Ispat, which means steel in Sanskrit, was taken public by Lakshmi in 1997 and traded on the Amsterdam and New York stock exchanges. Backed by investor cash from the stock float, Ispat made its first foray into the U.S., buying Chicago-based Inland Steel in 1998. The Ispat/LNM empire swelled after 2002 as more state steel plants became available in Eastern Europe and Africa. By the start of 2005, the Mittal group trailed only Arcelor of Luxembourg as the world’s biggest steel producer. Among its new holdings were Huty Stali (Poland); Nova Hut (Czech Republic); BH Steel (Bosnia-Herzegovina); Ispat Skopje (Macedonia); Ispat Petrotub, Ispat Siderurgica, and Ispat Tepro (Romania); Annaba (Algeria); and a controlling stake in Iscor (South Africa). On the other hand, Mittal shut the steel mill in Ireland that he had purchased in 1996, giving the labor force a day’s notice. The mill was “no longer viable,” Malay Mukherjee, the chief operating officer, said, because of high energy and labor costs and the prospect of installing new pollution-control equipment. Management had earlier called on the unionized workforce for wage reductions, but closed the plant before the union could respond. Many creditors were left with losses after the mill was liquidated. In December 2004, Mittal Steel Co. NV was formed from Ispat and LNM. The company then hopscotched over Arcelor to become the world’s No. 1 steelmaker when it absorbed Wilbur Ross’s International Steel Group (ISG) in April 2005.

 

 

The Bajaj Group was formed in the first days of India's independence from Britain. Its founder, Jamnalal Bajaj, had been a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, who reportedly referred to him as a fifth son. 'Whenever I spoke of wealthy men becoming the trustees of their wealth for the common good I always had this merchant prince principally in mind,' said the Mahatma after Jamnalal's death. Jamnalal Bajaj was succeeded by his eldest son, 27-year-old Kamalnayan, in 1942. Kamalnayan, however, was preoccupied with India's struggle for independence. After this was achieved, in 1947, Kamalnayan consolidated and diversified the group, branching into cement, ayurvedic medicines, electrical equipment, and appliances, as well as scooters. The precursor to Bajaj Auto had been formed on November 29, 1945 as M/s Bachraj Trading Ltd. It began selling imported two- and three-wheeled vehicles in 1948 and obtained a manufacturing license from the government 11 years later. The next year, 1960, Bajaj Auto became a public limited company. Rahul Bajaj reportedly adored the famous Vespa scooters made by Piaggio of Italy. In 1960, at the age of 22, he became the Indian licensee for the make; Bajaj Auto began producing its first two-wheelers the next year. Rahul Bajaj became the group's chief executive officer in 1968 after first picking up an MBA at Harvard. He lived next to the factory in Pune, an industrial city three hours' drive from Bombay. The company had an annual turnover of Rs 72 million at the time. By 1970, the company had produced 100,000 vehicles. The oil crisis soon drove cars off the roads in favor of two-wheelers, much cheaper to buy and many times more fuel-efficient. A number of new models were introduced in the 1970s, including the three-wheeler goods carrier and Bajaj Chetak early in the decade and the Bajaj Super and three-wheeled, rear engine Autorickshaw in 1976 and 1977. Bajaj Auto produced 100,000 vehicles in the 1976-77 fiscal year alone. The technical collaboration agreement with Piaggio of Italy expired in 1977. Afterward, Piaggio, maker of the Vespa brand of scooters, filed patent infringement suits to block Bajaj scooter sales in the United States, United Kingdom, West Germany, and Hong Kong. Bajaj's scooter exports plummeted from Rs 133.2 million in 1980-81 to Rs 52 million ($5.4 million) in 1981-82, although total revenues rose five percent to Rs 1.16 billion. Pretax profits were cut in half, to Rs 63 million. New Competition in the 1980s Japanese and Italian scooter companies began entering the Indian market in the early 1980s. Although some boasted superior technology and flashier brands, Bajaj Auto had built up several advantages in the previous decades. Its customers liked the durability of the product and the ready availability of maintenance; the company's distributors permeated the country. The Bajaj M-50 debuted in 1981. The new fuel-efficient, 50cc motorcycle was immediately successful, and the company aimed to be able to make 60,000 of them a year by 1985. Capacity was the most important constraint for the Indian motorcycle industry. Although the country's total production rose from 262,000 vehicles in 1976 to 600,000 in 1982, companies like rival Lohia Machines had difficulty meeting demand. Bajaj Auto's advance orders for one of its new mini-motorcycles amounted to $57 million. Work on a new plant at Waluj, Aurangabad commenced in January 1984. The 1986-87 fiscal year saw the introduction of the Bajaj M-80 and the Kawasaki Bajaj KB100 motorcycles. The company was making 500,000 vehicles a year at this point. Although Rahul Bajaj credited much of his company's success with its focus on one type of product, he did attempt to diversify into tractor-trailers. In 1987 his attempt to buy control of Ahsok Leyland failed. The Bajaj Sunny was launched in 1990; the Kawasaki Bajaj 4S Champion followed a year later. About this time, the Indian government was initiating a program of market liberalization, doing away with the old 'license raj' system, which limited the amount of investment any one company could make in a particular industry. A possible joint venture with Piaggio was discussed in 1993 but aborted. Rahul Bajaj told the Financial Times that his company was too large to be considered a potential collaborator by Japanese firms. It was hoping to increase its exports, which then amounted to just five percent of sales. The company began by shipping a few thousand vehicles a year to neighboring Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, but soon was reaching markets in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and West Asia. Its domestic market share, barely less than 50 percent, was slowly slipping. By 1994, Bajaj also was contemplating high-volume, low-cost car manufacture. Several of Bajaj's rivals were looking at this market as well, which was being rapidly liberalized by the Indian government. Bajaj Auto produced one million vehicles in the 1994-95 fiscal year. The company was the world's fourth largest manufacturer of two-wheelers, behind Japan's Honda, Suzuki, and Kawasaki. New models included the Bajaj Classic and the Bajaj Super Excel. Bajaj also signed development agreements with two Japanese engineering firms, Kubota and Tokyo R & D. Bajaj's most popular models cost about Rs 20,000. 'You just can't beat a Bajaj,' stated the company's marketing slogan. The Kawasaki Bajaj Boxer and the RE diesel Autorickshaw were introduced in 1997. The next year saw the debut of the Kawasaki Bajaj Caliber, the Spirit, and the Legend, India's first four-stroke scooter. The Caliber sold 100,000 units in its first 12 months. Bajaj was planning to build its third plant at a cost of Rs 4 billion ($111.6 million) to produce two new models, one to be developed in collaboration with Cagiva of Italy. New Tools in the 1990s Still, intense competition was beginning to hurt sales at home and abroad during the calendar year 1997. Bajaj's low-tech, low-cost cycles were not faring as well as its rivals' higher-end offerings, particularly in high-powered motorcycles, since poorer consumers were withstanding the worst of the recession. The company invested in its new Pune plant in order to introduce new models more quickly. The company spent Rs 7.5 billion ($185 million) on advanced, computer-controlled machine tools. It would need new models to comply with the more stringent emissions standards slated for 2000. Bajaj began installing Rs 800 catalytic converters to its two-stroke scooter models beginning in 1999. Although its domestic market share continued to slip, falling to 40.5 percent, Bajaj Auto's profits increased slightly at the end of the 1997-98 fiscal year. In fact, Rahul Bajaj was able to boast, 'My competitors are doing well, but my net profit is still more than the next four biggest companies combined.' Hero Honda was perhaps Bajaj's most serious local threat; in fact, in the fall of 1998, Honda Motor of Japan announced that it was withdrawing from this joint venture.

 

 

Dr. Verghese Kurien is called the "father of the white revolution" in India. He is credited with architecting Operation Flood -- the largest dairy development program in the world. Verghese Kurien, set up the Anand model of cooperative dairy development, engineered the White Revolution in India, and made India the largest milk producer in the world. Born on 26th November 1921, Dr.Kurien graduated with Physics from Loyola College, Madras in 1940 and then did B.E.(Mech) from the Madras University. After passing out of the University, he joined the Tata Steel Technical Institute, Jamshedpur from where he graduated in 1946. He then went to USA on a government scholarship to do his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University. When he came back to India, he was posted as a Dairy Engineer at the government creamery, Anand, in May 1949. Around the same time, the infant cooperative dairy, Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Limited (KDCMPUL), -- now famous as AMUL -- was fighting a battle with the Polson Dairy which was privately owned. Young Kurien, fed up with being at the government creamery which held no challenge, volunteered to help Shri Tribhuvandas Patel, the Chairman of KDCMPUL, to set up a processing plant. This marked the birth of AMUL and the rest is history. The first Amul cooperative was the result of a farmers' meeting in Samarkha (Kaira district, Gujarat) on 4th January 1946, called by Morarji Desai under the advice of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, to fight rapacious milk contractors. It was Sardar's vision to organise farmers, to have them gain control over production, procurement and marketing by entrusting the task of managing these to qualified professionals, thereby eliminating the middle men, the bane in farmers' prosperity.

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