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Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

belkin

Chet Pipkin : The ‘Low Profile’ Wealthiest Tech Person in the U.S.

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Most of the people are desperate to get fame, and for that, they don’t mind doing anything. But there are some people who believe in sheer hard work, and no fame is more important for them than their work. So despite having achieved a lot in life, the popularity does not affect them, and they rather try to stay away from the limelight. One such personality is Chester J. Pipkin (aka Chet Pipkin), the founder, chief executive and chairman of Belkin International, a company that manufactures and deals in computer hardware and peripheral devices.

Early Life

Chet Pipkin was born in a working-class family in California. His father worked as a machinist in World War II, and his mother was a machine operator in aircraft factories. Since his parents never had gone to a college, they wanted Pipkin to join one.

Pipkin was always interested in history, so he went on to opt for history as his major in college and joined the UCLA university. But soon, amid the revolution that the personal computers were ready to bring, he decided to switch to computer science as his graduation subject. Meanwhile, he also joined a part-time job at an electronics company to earn his daily expenses. He then joined the YMCA as a camp counsellor, he met his future wife Janice.

Chet pipkin
Image Source: theaustralian.com

Founding Belkin International

While working and attending school, he realised that though people are getting familiar with the new personal computers, they still find it difficult to connect the computers with the printers. This brought him an idea to invent cable assemblies that would help people easily connect computers with printers, and he started Belkin in his parent’s two-car garage.

Caught up between studies, job and his own business, he decided to drop off from the college. But soon, he realised that he was more focused on Belkin, so he had to leave his job too. So finally, he started to work solely on Belkin and established the company in 1983. In the beginning, he worked on inventing cables to connect printers and modems. The company’s first product was the Belkin Hamlet, which was made to connect an Apple IIc computer to the non-Apple printers.

While trying to establish the business, it was not a smooth ride, and like every other startup, he had to go through a lot of ups and downs. But he did not come out of these situations with regrets or discouragements, but life lessons. Despite the challenges, the company earned a $100,000 revenue in the first year of its inception.

Developing and selling the PC hardware for around 6-7 years, Belkin moved its focus to the USB storage devices in the early 90s. Since then, the company has focused on reinventing things and has become a leader in the field of IoT devices manufacturing and selling.

Since Chet Pipkin has always been low-profile about him as well his company, there has been no information on the revenues for the past many years. But the company is surely in profit. Pipkin has even kept the company private despite the trend of silicon valley companies going for their IPO within 4-5 years of tasting success.

In 2013, Belkin International acquired the Cisco Systems, and its further units, including Linksys. Since then, Belkin has been dealing in three divisions, Belkin International, Linksys and WeMo. Linksys deals in the data networking hardware products, whereas WeMo sells devices like wireless chargers, screen protectors, USB-C cables.

The success of Belkin has made Chet Pipkin one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.

Achievements

Belkin has been named in the Inc.’s ‘500 Fastest growing privately held companies in the United States’ list multiple-times. It has also been among the ‘Los Angeles Technology Fast 50 Company’ around nine times. The company also got featured around six times in the LA Business Journal’s list of ‘100 Fastest-growing Privately Held Companies’.

On the other hand, being the owner of such an innovative company, Chet also has been a finalist in the ‘Los Angeles Entrepreneur of the Year Awards’ three times. He even won the ‘Southern California Regional Award’ in 1996. He has also featured in the ‘Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame’ of the Dealerscope Magazine in 2006. Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce awarded him the ‘Lifetime Still Achieving’ in 2013.

virgin orbit

Virgin Orbit Plans to Be the First Company to Send Commercial CubeSats to Mars

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There are none of the companies which is not interested in exploring the Red Planet. Now the spin-off company of Richard Branson‘s space tourism company Virgin Galactic, the Virgin Orbit has also got new plans to explore the Earth’s neighbouring planet.

Today the company announced that it has partnered with a Polish satellite company, SatRevolution, such that together these will be working on building smallsat CubeSats and send them to Mars. The company has also got around a dozen Polish universities, including AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, having a vast experience in the space technology, onboard to work on the same project. Virgin Orbit also revealed that the company is trying to get its first satellite ready and send it as soon as 2022.

The company’s new mission is said to be inspired by NASA’s recent InSight mission. NASA under its InSight mission successfully sent two CubeSats (small spacecraft of the size of a cereal box) to Mars in November 2018, And now, Virgin Orbit wants to send a series of CubeSats to the Red Planet under its three robotic missions.

virgin orbit
Image Source: ukdefencejournal.org.uk

The company will carry out the three missions in the next decade starting from 2022. These missions will make Virgin Orbit the first private company to complete a purely commercial trip to Mars, as there are only four organisation that has successfully completed their Mars missions and that too, the government-owned ones. Even the Major player in the private space industry, SpaceX has not been able to do a similar mission till now.

So the mission might not only be to send the CubeSats to Mars, but to make Virgin Orbit the first company for bringing commercial CubeSats to the “Red Planet”.

According to the company, despite being small satellites, the CubeSats will help to dig deeper into Mars’ atmospheric conditions, its orbit as well as surface and help in researching on the planet by providing key information. The smallsats will be able to click and send in images, analyse the Mars’ atmosphere, and even look for water on and under the martian surface. The company has not given any other information but has revealed that the spacecraft can weigh around 50 KG.

The company will be operating from multiple spaceports including the Mojave Air, Space Port in California as well as Cornwall Spaceport in the U.K. The company will be making use of its LauncherOne rocket to launch the CubeSats from in between the air.

Playstation 5

Playstation 5 is the New Console from Sony Coming in 2020 Holidays

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Keeping the legacy, Sony has followed the tradition and has announced that its “next-generation console” will be called the PlayStation 5. The company also accepted that it would be simple for the users to call it a PS5. Though in April Sony had revealed that it is looking forward to selecting a fancy name for the console, it seems that there is nothing that would better suit it than being called PlayStation 5.

Along with the new name, the company has also revealed some details about its new and upgraded controller, which possibly will be called Dualshock 5. The new controller has been incorporated with new haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. The haptic feedback is a replacement for Sony’s rumble technology, which has been there in every console from the fifth generation consoles of the PlayStation.

With the new haptic feedback, the upgraded console will offer a “broader range of feedback.” The new update will make you feel different things in different ways, like the company said in its blog, the crashing on the wall and making a tackle on the football field will feel much different from each other. The upgrade will also make you feel the various textures when running through in the game while playing.

Playstation 5
Image Source: express.co.uk

On the other hand, the adaptive triggers will be installed in the primary R2/L2 triggers on the PS5’s controller. The new adaptive triggers are programmable ones, such that the developers can “program the resistance of the triggers.” As the name suggests, the controller will adapt to the scenarios in the game, and the players will get to feel the resistance and the increased tension in their hands through the controller. The company has already sent the early versions of the new controller to the creators so that they can make use of its features for the development of new games.

Sony said in the blog post that when the two features will work together the player will get a beyond realistic experience. The company did not confirm the name of the controller, but as it has given the latest version of the console a similar name, i.e. PlayStation 5, there is a possibility that the new controller will be called the Dualshock 5 as well. Other than these updates, the company has revealed that it will be launching the new PlayStation in the holidays season of the next year. So there is almost a year in between the launch of the new console. And meanwhile, the company will be making frequent about the new features of the console before the launch.

cookpad

Cookpad : Success Story of the Largest Recipe Sharing Platform

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In earlier times, it was the dinner table where people had most of their interactions and the family members connected with each other. Slowly, the time changed, and people were more into buying readymade food and eat it alone. We can call it a lack of time that people no more find time to sit and eat food with their family. This way, people also started forgetting the recipes of traditional food and preferred not to cook. But there is a man named Aki Sano, the founder of Cookpad, who understands the value of self-cooked food. It not only helps people save a lot of money but also keeps people in touch with their traditions.

Aki Sano founded Cookpad about 22 years ago in Japan. It is not that he hit the idea, and the startup was an instant success. There were a number of incidents that took place before Cookpad could really be one of the largest online recipe-sharing platforms in the world.

About the Founder

Aki Sano is a Japanese entrepreneur, who was born on 1 May 1973 in Tokyo, Japan and studied at Keio University, Tokyo. He had always been interested in technology as well as alternative energy. When he was in high school, he built solar-powered cars. Following his passion, he took alternative energy as a subject at the university. He then went to attend a one year Solar Summer Camp, too. Later, during his graduation, he also made it to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conference in New York. Though he found the conference quite boring and dull, he met an interesting fellow from West Indies named Abdu.

Aki Sano Cookpad
Image Source: cookpadteam.com

Abdu had got a degree from the US but returned to his homeland, where he grew his own vegetables and did farming. Sano found it quite interesting, and it had a great impact on him. Back to Japan, while buying vegetables from a supermarket, Sano realised that he was about to buy imported vegetables when he could get fresh ones from across the road from the local farmers. This incident and meeting with Abdu got him to sell vegetables from the farmers to the students at the university.

He managed to join in many farmers who would deliver vegetables to the students at the university who had placed the orders, and if there were any extra veggies, they would sell those to people passing by. This way, it became a huge business, and Sano had to build a website for the same. This, eventually, became his first startup. He managed the business for two years, and after two years, it was the time to graduate. His friends had started cracking the interviews with companies and were already placed. But Sano was still thinking of what he should do.

Founding Cookpad

With his experience with the vegetable selling business as well as his interest in corporate business, he decided to start his company and named it COIN. But despite he launched the company, he had no idea what he would be producing or selling. He ended up with three ideas, expanding his vegetable selling business, build products that endorse alternative energy or do something around housing. But eventually, he discarded all those ideas and came with Cookpad.

Initially, Cookpad was known as Kitchen@Coin, which was a side by side business that he was running along with a full-time job. The idea behind the startup was that people were avoiding cooking food and ultimately, buying the vegetables, just because they did not have the right recipes. With Cookpad, he wanted people to find the right recipe to cook the right food. It was a subscription-based service, where people could put their food recipes. The subscription fee for the platform was $5 per month. Sano set the target of 50,000 people joining the platform within two months, but only 100 people joined the platform and that too, in three months.

This discouraged Sano badly, and he asked his subscribers how he could return the money as he had decided to close the platform. But for his surprise, the subscribers were ready to pay more to keep the service going. This way, he made the service free for his subscribers and changed the name Kitechen@Coin to Cookpad in June 1999.

The Success

By March 2002, the company started advertising the business across the country. In September 2004, Cookpad launched premium service for the users. After two years, the company launched its first mobile service naming it as MOBAREPI. It then announced a premium service for the MOBAREPI users as well, in November 2008. Cookpad hosted its IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 2009. This was the time when the company really saw the success and had earned revenues increased by 80 per cent.

Cookpad was named in the list of the TSE Mothers in July 2009. By 2010, the company started expanding across borders and opened its first office in California, USA, followed by opening one in Singapore in 2011. Today, the company has its offices in countries, including the UK, Spain, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Hungary, Greece, Russia, etc. The company has established its international headquarters in Bristol, UK.

Today, Cookpad has got around 5 million registered recipes on it and hosts 40 million monthly unique users globally. Sano stepped down from the post of the CEO of Cookpad, and in 2014, he owned a 44% stake in the company, which valued more than $1 billion. In 2016, Sano ranked at #42 in the Forbes Japan’s 50 Richest 2016 list.

patreon

Patreon.com : An Online Crowdfunding Platform to Support Your Favourite Creators

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Today YouTube is the biggest platform for the creators from different fields to gain fame and money. But, in the beginning, there were not many creators on it, and it had not reached many people. There was a time when the creators did earn praise from the audience, and it was their passion that kept them hooked to the platform, not the money. But not many might know that there is a huge expenditure when it comes to creating a simple outdoor video. Considering this, a singer/computer science graduate/entrepreneur Jack Conte and his college buddy, Sam Yam from Stanford, came up with the idea of Patreon.com, a platform where the subscribers can support their favourite content creators financially, not only on YouTube, but also on many other platforms, to keep them encouraged to create more and more content.

About the Founders

Conte was studying at the Standford University, where he opted for music as major for his undergraduate. He formed a duo named Pomplamoose with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Nataly Dawn in 2008. At the time, YouTube had just started getting popular, and the two started their YouTube channel at the same time, along with working for some of the famous labels. They also registered to various other platforms, where they could connect with their fans directly.

On the other hand, a computer science student at Stanford University, Yam was doing significantly well at studies. He even got the letter of recommendation from Marc Andreeson for his Master’s in Computer Science from the same university. While studying at the university, he took leave of absence and joined a startup company named Loopt, as one of the first engineers. The company was acquired in 2006, and Yam went to found his own company named AdWhir, which he later sold to AdMob in 2009. Yam then joined Google as an engineer, but soon, he left the job to look forward to finding new ideas for his startup.

Patreon.com founders
Image Source: forbes.com

Founding Patreon.com

Despite being really popular on YouTube, the duo had to face a three-years long hiatus. The income was really low as compared to the investment Conte made on every video for YouTube. Conte thought of building a website, from where his fans could donate him some money as support. He then printed his whole plan and reached out to Sam Yam, who was his roommate at Stanford and a coder too. The two met at a coffee shop in March 2013 and started working on the idea. They, finally, built a website naming it Patreon in 2013. Yam, at the same time, was working on another startup named OurSpot a photography marketplace.

The next month, Conte built his account on Patreon and put a link to his account asking his fans to support him financially, in the description of his YouTube videos. He and Yam also asked many other creators to create an account on Patreon, but nobody really took an interest in the same. In the first few weeks of his announcement, Conte got over $5000 donation from his supports (also known as Patrons). This was one big achievement for both Conte and Yam, and the other creators also got attracted to the platform, creating their accounts on Patreon.

Raising Money & Growth

In June 2013, they received a funding of $700,000 from Josh Felser giving a kickstart to the company. Later in August, it raised a $2.1 million in the seed round of funding, led by CRV and Freestyle, including other investors like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. In June 2014, the company hosted the A-Series round of funding and raised a $15 million, and in its Series B round of funding, the company raised a $30 million in January 2016.

Patreaon.com was an instant hit, and in 18 months it had registered 125,000 users. By this time, the platform was receiving around $1,000,000 per month. In 2015, the company acquired a similar platform named Subbable, and the next year incorporated payment through PayPal feature into it. By January 2017, the platform had managed to bring in $100,000,000 for the different creators registered to Patreon.com from their Patrons. In the second quarter of the same year, 50,000 creators were active on the platform, and around 1 million monthly patrons were sending about $150 million to their favourite creators through the platform.

Jack Conte serves Patreon.com as the CEO and has also continued his career in music. Similarly, Yam, besides serving the company as CTO, is also working on other projects side by side. He has even joined Y Combinator as the YCE. Patreon has headquartered at San Francisco.

Busuu

Busuu : An Interactive Online Language Learning Platform

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There can be any reason if a person wants to learn a new language, whether it is required for a new job, or settling down in another country, or for fulfilling a long-time desire or hobby. But it is not necessary that one would get the required language’s classes near them, and that too, at affordable prices. But worry not. There are numerous mobile apps and online platforms that are helping people learn new languages. One such platform is Busuu, one of the world’s largest social networks for language learning, founded by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti as their MBA project, and today, over 90 million people are registered to the platform.

Bernhard Niesner was born and brought up in Vienna. After completing his school education, he joined the Vienna University of Economics and Business to get a graduate degree in business. On completing his graduate degree in 2003, he moved to Madrid to work with Roland Berger as a consultant. After working for a 9 to 5 job for two years, Niesner realised that he does not want to get stuck into a 9 to 5 job, but wanted to start a business of his own. He left the job and to enhance his business skills, he joined the IE Business School in Madrid and took an MBA for his post-graduation.

While at the business school, Bernhard met his future partner and co-founder of Busuu, Adrian Hilti, at a seminar. The two were sitting together and shared friendly vibes. Hilti was also a student at the business school. But before that, he had been worked with companies like Shockfish and Arthur D Little.

busuu founders
Image Source: ie.edu

The two became friends and collaborated for their MBA project. For the project, they decided to build a language learning platform that would ease out the process of learning for different types of people by letting them interact with each other. Though the project could not make through the Bootcamp, the two kept working on the same. By the time, they had realised that their idea may transform as a great project. Since they were studying in an international university, they got the opportunity to test their project on people from different culture and backgrounds. They also had the accessibility to the computer labs, as well, so they get to work on the project full time, even they were studying.

In 2007, eventually, they get to rent their own office in Madrid, and their project became their first startup. While their friends and colleagues were applying for jobs in big MNCs, the two remained focussed on their project and stayed in Madrid to grow it. The two officially launched their startup naming it Busuu in 2008 (named after the endangered language from Cameroon), a free version of an online language learning platform.

The two being business students knew that their startup needs more promotions. So they connected with a few bloggers and ran some ad campaigns as well. In fact, one of their video ads even won the Silver Lion award in the International Advertising Festival in Cannes.

In 2009, the company launched the premium version of the service, and the next year, the company introduced its first mobile app. The same year, the company even launched a short course to encourage the usage of Busuu language.

In 2012, the company hosted its Series A round of funding and raised 3.5 million euros. This helped the company expand to the international markets and add new features to the platform. In the same year, Busuu shifted its headquarters to London from Madrid. In 2014, the company partnered with London-based educational company Pearson, offering gSET certificate in English on Busuu. After another partnership with McGraw-Hill Education in 2015, the company started providing the users with the McGraw-Hill Education certificates for completing a course in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. The company also received a €6 million investment form the company.

Busuu then introduced educational courses for organisations, colleges and universities in 2016, which gave the learners the access to the Busuu premium service, and the platform acted as a Learning Management System. In 2017, Busuu partnered with Google, adding voice-activated lessons in Spanish to Google Home. It even built a VR app for Oculus Gear and Oculus Go to help people learn Spanish.

Busuu and its co-founders, since its inception, has won over 19 awards, including Best Language App by the German Association for Consumer Studies, the Bloomberg Innovator award, and was selected as ‘best of 2015’ apps by Google Play.