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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.

Tumblr

David Karp : The Young Entrepreneur Who Founded the Biggest Microblogging Website Tumblr

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Experience matters, and when it is earned since childhood, it can help you achieve many things. As a kid, humans are sharper than adults and capable of learning even the toughest of things. These days we see many little kids coming up and showing off their skills and knowledge, whereas many are already launching their startups in the various fields. Thanks to the evolving technology. Though David Karp is not a teenage entrepreneur, he had achieved a lot before he passed his teens. David Karp is the founder of Tumblr, the microblogging website, and has an interesting success story to follow.

Early Life

Karp was born to a science teacher and a film and television composer, on 6 July 1986, in New York City. He was a bright student and got his primary as well as middle school education from Calhoun School, at the same place where his mother worked. Karp, at the age of 11, started learning HTML and was soon developing websites for businesses.

Karp always wanted to join MIT for his graduation, so, he after studying for one year at The Bronx High School of Science, dropped out and opted for homeschooling, to make his resume interesting for admissions in the university.

Career

David Karp
Image Source: charitybuzz.com

Things to go according to one’s will is not always possible. Karp wanted to add more to his resume, so he was doing many things alongside his homeschooling. He started working at the Frederator Studios as an intern when he was 14. At that time, he was also learning Japanese and had joined maths classes. Along with his maths tutor, he learned some of the programming skills. At the Frederator Studios, he got to work on various software products, and he even developed studio’s first blogging platform and its first internet video network, named Channel Frederator.

Later, he got to work with UrbanBaby. One day, at the firm, he solved a glitch in the software successfully in a comparatively lesser amount of time. The incident helped him to win the attention of John Maloney the founder of UrbanBaby.

Maloney appointed Karp as the head of product at UrbanBaby. Karp continued to work with the company for four more years and left it in 2006 after the company was acquired by CNET. Four years spent in a company made him leave the dream of joining MIT behind, as he had also not received a high school degree yet and he was doing great as a programmer.

Entrepreneurial Journey towards Tumblr

Karp work and experience opened new doors for him, and he went on to start his own development consulting company named Davidville. He hired a programmer named Marco Arment, through Craigslist, with the help of whom, Karp started to work on a new project. Karp had grown an interest in microblogging and was looking forward to developing a platform based-on microblogging. It took him a year and a half on deciding to finally work on his interest, and he launched Tumblr in February 2007.

David Karp was aware of the scope of a microblogging website, but he did not know that his website will gain 75000 users just within two weeks of its launch. In six months, he realised that Tumblr has got huge potential, so to focus on it, entirely, Karp shut down his consulting business and rebranded his company as Tumblr, Inc.

The Rise of the Company

In 2009, the company launched an iOS app for Tumblr, and in 2010, another app was launched for Blackberry phones. In 2011, the company valued at $800 million, and in the same year, raised a funding of $85 million. In October 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging website that hosted American President Barak Obama’s blog.

The 3.0 version of Tumblr launched in 2012, which also included support for Spotify. This way, the users could now post HD pictures on the platform and also use it at offline mode. In August 2012, the company monetized the platform through advertisements.

Major investors including Union Square Ventures, Fred Seibert, John Borthwick, and Sequoia Capital, etc. were the major investor in the company at that time. Karp sold 25% of the company share to few of its investors.

On May 20, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it will be acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Karp remaining the CEO of the company. After working together with Yahoo! for four years, Karp resigned from his post.

David Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek in August 2009. He was also named in the list of MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

4chan

Christopher Poole : The Founder of 4Chan Who Tasted Success Without Being Known

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The rise of computers and programming languages has brought a revolution in the world. The programming languages have become the biggest contribution to the world and the growth of the economy. That is why most of the people are not hesitant about taking a step in the same field. Little kids and teenagers are the ones who are more curious about them, and there is another reason behind it. The magic a person feels behind building things only by coding makes it interesting enough for the kids and the adults. Also, it has helped many people to grow financially as well.

One such teenage coder was Christopher Poole, who was only fifteen when he founded one of the biggest forum-based social network 4chan. An American enthusiast, Chris was always into programming and loved what he could do with it. Without letting people know, he used to code almost every night.

Chris Poole was born in 1988 in New York City. He lived with his mom and wanted to build a platform that would help him earn some extra money. While in school, he used to create comedy content and post it on ‘Something Awful’, a comedy website.

chris poole 4Chan
Image Source: cdn.vox-cdn.com

Chris was inspired by Japan’s famous imageboard of ‘Futaba Channel’ (2Chan) and wanted to create something similar for America as well. When he was still in school, he started working on a new project and developed 4Chan, the American version of the Japanese imageboard. He went on to follow the source code of Futaba Channel and took the help of AltaVista’s Babel Fish online translator to translate the code.

On 1 October 2003, when he was just 15, he finally launched 4Chan by pseudonym ‘Moot’. He used the name Moot as he did not want to mix his private and professional life. That is why there is not much information about Chris’s early life. His real identity was only revealed on 9 July 2008, after five years he launched 4Chan, that too, by The Wall Street Journal.

After launching 4Chan and completing his school education, Chris joined the Virginia Commonwealth University. But eventually, he had to quit college only after a few semesters, such that he could focus on his startup.

Soon, 4Chan emerged as a place where people could create and share meme and animes. They had the facility to share the content anonymously as well as non-anonymously. The platform was a great success, and even before revealing his real identity, he got the chance to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University as Moot. He had become an influencer in no time.

In 2008, Leopoldo Godoy of Brazilian TV Globo called the site as “the ground zero of Western web culture”. He was named as the world’s most influential person of 2008 by the ‘Time’ magazine after it conducted an open internet poll.

In February 2010, Chris spoke at the ‘TED2010’ conference held at Long Beach, California. In the same year, he also raised a $625,000 for his next startup ‘Canvas Networks’, which he launched in January 2011. But unfortunately, he had to shut the platform due to the security breaches the site was facing.

Though he was running 4Chan with the name of Moot, he always conducted Q&As for the users and answered their questions. Chris worked for 4Chan as the administrator and had already left the job of programming at his company. He, after working for more than 10 years for the company, decided to step down from his post of administrator in 2015. During his career with 4Chan, he achieved a maximum user engagement, i.e. over 20 million monthly visitors to the site.

He announced the news on 21 January 2015 and on 23rd January conducted another Q&A on the platform and a live stream on YouTube.

In September 2015, 4Chan was acquired by Japanese internet entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura for an undisclosed amount. In March next year, Chris revealed through a blog post that he will be joining Google. He joined the company and is still working as an employee.

Though Chris has been secretive about his life, one thing he has always been clear at the right to anonymity. The success he received at such an early age never put a bad influence on him. In fact, he always stayed away from the limelight.

sharechat

ShareChat Raises a $100 Mn in a Twitter Led Funding Round

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After a long struggle, India has also become home to many creative and useful startups, and even the global tech companies agree with that. Following that very fact, Twitter, one of the biggest technology company, just closed the D series funding as the lead for a four years old Indian company ShareChat.

Where Twitter led the funding, major investment brands including TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital took part in the investments, among which a few are the company’s existing investors. With the latest round of funding, the company was able to raise a $100 million, and with that, the company now values at about $650 million. Till now, the company has raised around $224 million.

ShareChat is an Indian social network that allows people to chat in the regional languages. This is the reason why despite tens of popular chat apps, ShareChat has grown to tens of million users in just four years. Twitter also sees the potential in the startup that is why it took the privilege to lead the funding for the company.

sharechat
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

There has been no statement from Sharechat on the matter. But the managing director of Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari said in a statement, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”

Twitter just appointed Manish Maheshwari in April 2019 for its India office after it started facing a decline in its growth in India. After his appointment in Twitter, Maheshwari has said in a statement, “With premium Indian content on the rise in multiple regions across the country, I believe we are scratching the surface of what’s possible with Twitter in India.”

ShareChat supports almost every regional language except English, which has been the unique feature to attract its 60 million users to the platform. And, the company has no plans to change that in the coming future. So investing in ShareChat can be a step forward for the company to expand its limits to different regions, regional languages and people from different background.

twitter new feature

Twitter Wants You Follow Your Interest With its New Feature

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The tech industry is evolving every day, and every big tech company, as well as the startups, are coming up with new service, products and updates every sing day. So there has to be something that the other existing companies have to do to sustain through the increased competition. Despite being one of the biggest social media networks, Twitter also knows that it has to experiment with new things so that it can maintain its position in the market.

Taking a step in the same direction, Twitter announced that is working on a new feature to be included into the platform, that would allow the users to see tweets based on their chosen interest on their timeline. For now, the company is still testing the feature and will be launching soon after the successful tests take place.

With the new feature, the users will be able to follow their interests as they do for any individual’s account, and this way, Twitter will curate a relevant feed for the users. The platform is going to take the help of machine learning to bring the tweets based on the user’s interest together and show it up in their feed.

twitter new feature
Image Source: sciencemag.org

The company is calling the new feature “dedicated interest experiences”, which it has already talked about in recent years and finally it is conducting tests with them. The topic of interest for the users can be any of the sports teams, celebrities, or the television shows, but according to the product manager at Twitter, Rob Bishop, for now, the interest will only be based on sports. The initial tests are being carried out on the android devices only.

With the feature, Twitter will also bring up topic suggestions for the users, so that they can find their interest among the suggestions and follow them. Also, there will be an option to mute a particular topic you do not want to see the tweets about.

Twitter is also testing another feature, through which the users will make a list of their interests they follow and want to follow. The company even demonstrated the feature, where a product manager mixed hashtags and a few individual accounts to make a list. The list was accessed by swiping the app’s home screen.

The company is also looking forward to testing the other features like search option in DM, reordering a certain photo in a posted tweet, customizable timeline and support for Apple’s Live Photos.

tumblr

Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic the WordPress.com Owner

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Verizon Media, who last year acquired the microblogging site Tumblr has agreed to sell it off to Automattic Inc. According to The Wall Street Journal reports, the WordPress owner company, Automattic, will be acquiring Tumblr for an undisclosed amount soon.

Verizon bought Tumblr after it had acquired Yahoo, last year. Tumblr was the Yashoo’s subsidiary, and for the last year, Verizon Media was taking care of its operations and actions. The company had also imposed a ban on the adult content sharing over the platform, which got the platform to lose most of its user base.

Tumblr was one of the first and the most popular social media platform, but for the past couple of years, it has been struggling with its position in the market. Though before Verizon bought the company, many preferred Tumblr over any other social media platform. The ban that Verizon had put on the company has made many of its users boycott the platform. Since then, the companies, including Instagram and Snapchat, that came after Tumblr into the field of social media, are taking over the whole business game.

tumblr
Image Source: forbes.com

Even though the ban has led to the fall in the number of users for Tumblr, Automattic Inc. has no plans to remove the ban and continue with the Tumblr operations as it is.

“Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety,” said Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg on Monday. “It’s a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different,” he added further.

Mullenweg also said that the company would be using Tumblr as complementary to its current platforms, and it won’t receive any changes shortly. Since Tumblr also has its app, Automattic may use its app for the expansion for its other products and services.

“Today’s announcement is the culmination of a thoughtful, thorough and strategic process,” Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan said. “Tumblr is a marquee brand that has started movements, allowed for true identities to blossom and become home to many creative communities and fandoms. We are proud of what the team has accomplished and are happy to have found the perfect partner in Automattic.”

But for everyone’s surprise, according to a report from Axios, the acquisition will take place for a sum of 3 million, which is way less than the amount that Yahoo paid for to buy it in 2013, i.e. $1.1 billion.

discord

Jason Citron : A Video Game Lover and the Founder of the Digital Distribution Platform Discord

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The video game industry is vast and is growing even more through online gaming and live game streaming. Over a decade ago, people could only play games on the desktops or gaming consoles. But now, they can play games online with other gamers as well. While playing, they can even talk to each other in real-time. This is called the real evolution of technology. Earlier, the gamers made the use of other expensive chat apps, like TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Ventrilo to communicate through chat at the time, they played games. But soon, they got their hands on more convenient and a lighter platform, i.e. Discord.

Discord is a VoIP application that Jason Citron, an American developer and entrepreneur, developed for the video gaming community. With Discord, the gamers are capable of sending and receiving texts, images, videos and communicate, while playing a game using the internet in real-time.

Early Life

Jason Citron, the founder and CEO of Discord, had always been a video game lover. His father, and his grandfather, both were businessmen. His first encounter with video games was through one of his childhood friends, who introduced him to NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). Later, when in middle school, in Florida, he opted for computers as one of his subjects in school. One of his friends at school was good at fundamentals of QBASIC and taught him the basics of programming.

Jason Citron
Image Source: vox.com

Inspired by his father, he also aspired to be an entrepreneur. By the time he was 13, he had learned a lot about computers and started teaching the basics of computers to people older than him and charged them a small amount of fee. When he was sixteen, he started part-time freelancing and wrote codes for different companies.

Since, he had always been into gaming and coding, after completing his graduation from the Full Sail University in Florida, he started working for a game company, where he worked on a gaming console in San Rafael. Meanwhile, he moved to a new apartment where he lived with the students of the University of California, Berkeley, where he got to meet Rohan Relan. Rohan’s uncle, Peter, was the owner of an incubator called YouWeb that supported mobile and gaming-focused businesses.

Building Aurora Feint; The First Startup

As Citron was into starting his own business, he met Peter and joined his company as one of the developers. At the incubator, he started working on a new iPhone game and built a company named Aurora Feint along with a fellow developer Danielle Cassley.

With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Jason Citron got the opportunity to build new games that would work with the small screens. He focussed on creating games based on RPG and puzzles. The company launched the first version of Aurora Feint for free to use for iOS during the Christmas in 2008. The game was a success but was not making any revenues. Citron was looking for a better business model but had no clue how to work with newly built iPhones.

After just a few months the game reached one million people, but still, there was nothing that would pay back Citron and his company.

Founding OpenFeint

One day, while discussing with the YouWeb Owner Peter, Citron realised that the iPhone did not have Xbox live in it, but their Aurora Feint 2 did have a similar feature. It was the kind of first asynchronous MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). So they decided to build a separate SDK that other platform could integrate and use.

In February 2009, Citron launched the beta version of the software at TechCrunch, where he got to showcase it in front of hundreds of developers. This way, the software also got hundreds of signups, and thus, he was able to raise the money to produce the next version of the product. The software was free, but the company monetize the sale through revenue sharing, mobile storefronts, and game features.

The company carried out its first round of funding at the end of 2009, which was led by DeNA in Japan and raised $6 million. In the second round of funding, the company raised $5 million. By 2010, the company had more than 10 million users registered on the network. In October 2010, Intel Capital also invested a $3 million in the company. The next year, Japanese company GREE, Inc. acquired OpenFeint for a whopping amount of US$104 million.

The Journey from Hammer and Chisel to Discord

After selling the company, Jason Citron started another startup named Hammer and Chisel, a game development company, that launched its first game named Fates Forever, in 2014. Citron tried to launch the game as the Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), but due to the lack of good communication methods, it could not be commercially successful. This led Cistron to develop a new chat service, that would help people to chat in real-time while playing video games online.

Citron was able to get a sufficient amount of funding from YouWeb, Benchmark capital and Tencent for the development. Finally, he launched the first version of the product in May 2015, with the name Discord. Soon, the platform was famous and was used by the esports, LAN tournament gamers, and by the Twitch.tv streamers. In January 2016, the company received an investment of worth $20 million. In the same year, the growth rate for the software had reached a million users per month. By the end of the year, the software had registered 25 million users worldwide, and in December 2017, it recognised a total 90 million users, subscribed to the platform and raised $50 million by December.

By the end of 2018, the company valued at $2 billion and raised an additional $150 million, in a round of funding, led by Greenoaks Capital. In May 2019, the company announced that it has more than 250 million users across the world, who use the software.

The reason behind the success of Discord has been the consistent hard work of Jason Citron, and the skills, as an entrepreneur he possessed in his genes.