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Expedia Group

Expedia Group – A Travel Technology Company leveraging its platform for connecting Travelers with Brands.

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Expedia Group is one of the world’s largest travel platforms founded by Rich Barton in 1996. The company was founded as a division of Microsoft twenty-four years ago. The company’s headquarters are based in Seattle, Washington, US. Travel technology is a sector that has gained huge demand and unleashed the potential for many companies in the past few decades.

Expedia provides a platform where travelers can connect with hotels, find different tour packages, and most importantly offers plenty of choices. A company like Expedia helps out every kind of tourist and traveler to have the best travel experience at the same time gives a platform for small travel businesses to grow. Since Expedia has a strong online presence, it provides exposure to local companies in the travel sector thus uplifting small businesses.

A Brief Introduction of Expedia Group

Expedia Group can be best described as a group of travelers and technologists working around the clock to make your journey memorable and worthy. The company is highly dedicated to connecting travelers with the right partners across a global platform. Throughout the past twenty-four years, Expedia has acquired and partnered with several companies creating extensive portfolios of many businesses and brands.

Expedia Group
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Today, Expedia has more than  70 terabytes of data which helps them show the most optimized path for both the business and the traveler to gain the best experience. Expedia has many products under its brand name such as BedandBreakfast.com, CarRentals.com, Hotels.com, Local Expert, etc. So, let’s have a glimpse at how this journey started.

History of Expedia Group

Back in 1996, there weren’t many online travel agencies and hence the market had lesser competition. Expedia was established as Microsoft Expedia Travel Services and soon the word Expedia became very common every time traveling came up as a topic of discussion. The word Expedia was born from two words “Exploration” and “Speed” and the quality of work justified the name of the company. The company went public in 1999 and got spun off as an independent business.

In 2001, IAC/InterActiveCorp showed interest in the company and bought shares worth $1.5billion. After two years, Expedia was fully acquired by IAC/InterACtiveCorp and it became a part of IAC Travel. After the acquisition, Rich Barton stepped down from the position of CEO and he was replaced by Erik Blachford. Next year, IAC Travel was spun off into Expedia and the former CEO was replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi. After IAC Travel and Expedia became a single entity the parent company spun off Expedia Inc in 2005. Many businesses were under the name of Expedia Inc such as Expedia Corporate Travel, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, etc.

Expedia Group
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In 2011, TripAdvisor media group was spun off from Expedia Inc and the latter got to keep the portfolio of travel transaction brands. This year the company also showed interest in gaining market presence in the Asia Pacific region and hence partnered with Air Asia, Tencent, and eLong. Under the leadership of Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia became a Fortune 500 company. Gradually, the lines of businesses started expanding for Expedia as it started providing technology solutions and acquired companies in the same field. In 2013, the company invested in metasearch and partnered with Citigroup to create Expedia+cards so that members can earn points and certain benefits. The company went through a rather rough year in 2019 which led to cutting off 3,000 jobs in the next year.

Acquisitions

Expedia Inc acquired a lot of companies since it was born. Most of the companies are US-based businesses while a few are from European countries as well. Expedia made its first acquisition in 2000 when it bought Travelscape, an internet service provider company. Next year, Expedia bought Vacation spot which was also an internet service provider. Expedia bought a handful of travel agencies including Classic Custom Vacations, Metropolitan Travel, Egencia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc. Recently it acquired CanadaStays, a Canadian holiday rental service.

The CEO: Rich Barton

Richard Barton commonly known as Rich Barton is a very famous American internet entrepreneur currently serving as the CEO of the Zillow Group. In 1989, he graduated from Stanford University with an engineering degree and started working for Microsoft in 1991. He founded Expedia while working in Microsoft as the company was planning to build a travel guidebook back then. Later, Barton understood the potential of Expedia and it was officially launched in 1996. Barton’s successful career made him a billionaire in 2020.

China Mobile

China Mobile – China’s Largest Mobile Network Operator.

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China Mobile is the largest mobile network operator in the world based on capitalization. It was founded in 1999 as a result of the spinning off of China Telecommunications Corporation. Previously, it was known as China Telecom (Hong Kong) Limited, incorporated in 1997. The company is serving over 946.73 million people globally. China Mobile trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as SEHK.

CMHK, Zong, and CML ink are some of its subsidiaries, and over 456000 people are working for the company in its global offices. The company recorded revenue of CNY746 billion in 2019, and total assets owned by the company in the same year were CNY1629 billion. The company is operational in countries like China, Hong Kong (as CMHK), Pakistan (as Zong), Japan, Thailand, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Canada.

The Founding of China Mobile

China Mobile Limited is a China state-owned and publically traded company. It was founded as China Telecom (Hong Kong) Limited, on 3 September 1997, in Hong Kong. With the inception of the company, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 22 October 1997, and on the very next day, it was also listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. The company raised a sum of US$4.2 billion in its Initial Public Offering.

In the three years of its beginning, China Mobile made acquisitions of companies like Beijing Mobile, Shanghai Mobile, Tianjin Mobile, Hebei Mobile, Liaoning Mobile, Shandong Mobile, and Guangxi Mobile, to expand its operations as a telecom company. In November 2000, the company partnered with Vodafone Group Plc., where the latter acquired new shares of China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited. The company name was also changed from China Telecom (Hong Kong) Limited to China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited in the same year.

China Mobile
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On 23 October 2001, China Mobile listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, issuing an aggregate of  RMB5 billion of corporate bonds in China. The same year, the company also operated its network service on Mount Everest for the first time. In 2004, the company went on to acquire few more telecom companies, including Guizhou Mobile, Yunnan Mobile, Xizang Mobile, and Gansu Mobile. It also bought the shares of China Resources Peoples Telephone Company Limited through its subsidiary company Fit Best Limited in 2005. The next year, the company was renamed China Mobile Limited.

In June 2006, China Mobile partnered with News Corporation and STAR Group Limited to enter the wireless media business. Later, in 2010, the company also stepped into the mobile finance and mobile e-Commerce businesses through a partnership with SPD Bank.

China Mobile obtained the 4G (TD-LTE) license in 2013 and launched a 4G commercial service in 16 cities of China, and also, launched a new brand ‘and!’ in China. In 2014, the company established China Communications Facilities Services Corporation Limited in partnership with China Telecom and China Unicom. It also launched MIGU, a company dedicated to mobile internet, in 2015, which also specialized in digital content services. At the end of 2017, China Mobile launched a free call service for the Chinese people living in the UK with the name CMLink. In 2020, the company valued at HK$965 billion and became the largest red chip company in the world.

Products and Services

China Mobile mainly provides the GSM network service in mainland China and Hong Kong. It also provides data transmission services through GPRS. The company offers the 3G services under the name G3, and for 4G, it uses the trade name and和. Easyown, GoTone, and M-zone are some of its other trade names, providing fixed-line telephony, mobile telephony, broadband internet, digital television as well as internet television services.

The CEO at China Mobile

Li Yue is a renowned Chinese businessman, who is serving as the CEO of China Mobiles since September 2019. Yue is born and brought up in China. He went to the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications to obtain a bachelor’s degree in the telephone exchange and joined Tianjin University to complete a master’s degree in business administration. Later, he joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and earned a doctorate in business administration.

Murata Manufacturing

Murata Manufacturing – A Japanese company famous for manufacturing Electronic Components.

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Japan is one of the tech-driven nations that is growing in every aspect very rapidly. The country is not making impressive breakthroughs exclusively in the 21st century, as history is proof that Japan has always been a nation trying to uplift its economy. Many famous multinational conglomerates have their origin in Japan and one such company is Murata Manufacturing.

About Murata Manufacturing

Murata Manufacturing is a Japanese company established in 1944 in the electronic industry. The founder of the company is Akira Murata who started the company as a personal venture in  Kyoto, Japan. Murata Manufacturing develops a wide range of electronic products from power supply equipment to communication modules. The company is famous for manufacturing ceramic passive electronic components and dominates the market when it comes to ceramic filters. Currently, Murata Manufacturing has expanded its market beyond Japan to other Asian countries and in America and Europe as well. 

Founding History of the Company

The story of Murata Manufacturing began in 1944 when Akira Murata decided to go on a personal venture in the city of Kyoto. Akira started his business in a small factory of 150m2 where he manufactured titanium-oxide ceramic capacitors. The main use of these capacitors was in heterodyne radios. Since people had radio as the only source of entertainment and news back then, the superheterodyne radios became very popular.

In 1947, Akira started working with an assistant professor from Kyoto University and developed a practical barium titanate capacitor. This was a breakthrough for the company as it became the world’s first manufacturer to commercialize a practical barium titanate piezoelectric transducer for fishfinders. After some time, the market for Murata was going very slow as its AM radio ceramic filters took some time to gain demand in the market, and the quality of products also dropped due to compromise in raw materials after WWII. So, the company also started producing insulators and also built equipment for quality checks.

Murata Manufacturing
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In 1952, the headquarters of Murata Manufacturing was moved to another part of Kyoto City called Yamashina. The company started investing in research and development very early and its research division is called Murata Technology Research Laboratory Co. Murata’s research department introduced an electron microscope and spectrometer in 1956.

Growth and Expansion

The 1970s witnessed expansion in the international markets as Murata opened its business in Georgia, USA. Murata started expanding the range and production rate of its products and became the mass producer of SAW filter and dielectric filter for consumer products in 1975. In the 1980s, Murata introduced CERALOCK, a ceramic resonator for the PCs and it became a hit. In 1983, the company established Izumo Murata Manufacturing followed by a plant in Yasu-Cho in 1987 and the Yokohama R&D center in 1988. In 1988, the company also opened its business in Thailand.

In 1990, the company developed a very innovative design for gyro sensor technology to make it cos-effective and a comparatively smaller size for general customers. This new sensor was equipped with image stabilization and also detected travel directions in automobiles. Murata pitched this product using a small robot cyclist and the picture went viral all over the media. In 1994, Murata opened a sales and production company in Wuxi, China.

Murata in the 21st Century

Many new products came up in the 21st century and the company also evolved with time with the advent of the digital era. In the 2000s, Murata focused on developing equipment for wireless technology as the demand for communication through PCs was increasing rapidly. This was the time when the internet started ruling the digital market and everyone wanted an internet connection in their computers and smartphones.

In 2010, the company developed the world’s first smallest and thinnest pyroelectric infrared sensor and an ultra-thin piezoelectric speaker. The company acquired Peregrine Semiconductor Corp in 2014. Last year, the company announced the opening of a new R&D center in Yokohama. Currently, the company has more than 60,000 employees spread across the globe.

The Founder: Akira Murata

Born in 1921, Akira Murata is famous for establishing Murata Manufacturing and served as the President of the company from 1950 to 1991. From 1995, he served as the Honorary Chairman of the company until he passed away in 2006. Throughout his professional life, Murata was awarded many prestigious accolades including the Medal with Blue Ribbon of Japan (Ranju Hosho), Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany First Class, Order of the Sacred Treasure, etc.

Tableau Software

Tableau Software – The most Powerful, Secure, and Flexible end-to-end Analytics Platform.

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Tableau Software, the market-leading choice for modern business intelligence, makes it easier for people to explore and manage data, as well as faster to discover and share insights that can change businesses and the world. Everything they do is motivated by their mission of assisting people in seeing and understanding data, which is why their products are designed with the user in mind—whether they are an analyst, data scientist, student, teacher, executive, or business user.

Since their inception, they have consistently invested at an unrivaled rate in research and development, developing solutions to assist anyone working with data in getting answers faster and uncovering unexpected insights.

The Story Behind Tableau Software

Tableau was founded in January 2003 by Pat Hanrahan, Christian Chabot, and Chris Stolte, and relocated its headquarters the following year to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. Since then, the company has expanded its Fremont headquarters and announced plans for an auxiliary campus in Kirkland, Washington, in 2016. In March 2017, a new headquarters building near Gas Works Park in Wallingford opened, followed by a new building in Fremont in 2018.

Tableau Software
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Tableau announced in August 2016 the appointment of Adam Selipsky as president and CEO, effective September 16, 2016, succeeding co-founder Christian Chabot. Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, an artificial intelligence startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 2018, with plans to integrate the company’s technology into the Tableau platform. As a result of the agreement, Tableau plans to open an office in Cambridge.

Some of their Products

Tableau capitalizes on people’s natural ability to recognize visual patterns quickly, revealing both everyday opportunities and eureka moments. With Tableau Server, you can extend the value of your data across your entire organization. Give your company the freedom to explore data in a secure environment, without restricting them to pre-defined questions, wizards, or chart types. Tableau Prep alters the way traditional data preparation is done in an organization.

Tableau Prep makes it easier for analysts and business users to start their analysis faster by providing a visual and direct way to combine, shape, and clean data. Tableau Prep is made up of two products: Tableau Prep Builder, which is used to create data flows, and Tableau Prep Conductor, which is used to schedule, monitor, and manage flows across the organization.

Tableau Online is your cloud-hosted analytics platform. Create dashboards and share your findings with anyone. Invite colleagues or customers to investigate hidden opportunities using interactive visualizations and up-to-date data. All of this is easily accessible via browser or on the go with our mobile apps.

Tableau Public is a free online platform for exploring, creating, and sharing data visualizations. Tableau Public facilitates the development of data skills by providing access to the world’s largest repository of data visualizations.

The Founders of the Company

Tableau’s Chief Scientist is Pat Hanrahan. He also teaches computer graphics as the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Pat is the recipient of two Academy Awards in Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualization Career Award. He is a National Academy of Engineering and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences member.

Tableau Software
Image Source: incimages.com
Founders: Chris Stolte, Christian Chabot, and Pat Hanrahan

Tableau Software’s Chairman of the Board and Co-Founder is Christian Chabot. Christian previously worked at Softbank Venture Capital, where he specialized in enterprise software. Christian was previously the CEO and co-founder of BeeLine Software, a pioneer in next-generation digital mapping technology that was acquired by VicinityCorporation.

Chris Stolte is a Tableau co-founder who now works as a Technical Advisor for the company. Chris was also the CTO and co-founder of BeeLine Systems, a visualization software company that created a revolutionary map rendering system before being acquired by Vicinity Corporation. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his B.S. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University.

Adam Selipsky, CEO of Tableau Software

Tableau’s former President and CEO is Adam Selipsky. Selipsky spent over a decade developing Amazon Web Services, one of the world’s most successful technology platforms. His leadership aided in the growth of AWS from a start-up to a multibillion-dollar company, establishing it as the undisputed market leader in cloud computing.

Selipsky was AWS’s Vice President of Marketing, Sales, and Support. Prior to joining Amazon, he was a senior executive at RealNetworks, where he oversaw the video subscription and media player divisions. Prior to that, he was a Principal at the strategy consulting firm Mercer Management Consulting. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in government and an MBA.

Maxim Integrated

Maxim Integrated – Developers of Innovative Analog ICs

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Maxim Integrated is one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits. The company is over 38 years old and was established by a nine-member team following a two-page business plan. Today the company trades on Nasdaq as MXIM, NASDAQ-100 component, and S&P 500 component and has its headquarters located in San Jose, California, U.S. Based on the 2020 records, the number of employees working for Maxim is over 7000 people and recorded annual revenue of the company is US$2.191 billion.

Founding History of Maxim Integrated

Maxim was founded by a bunch of semiconductors design and sales experts in April 1993. The team included Jack Gifford, Fred Beck, Dave Bingham, Steve Combs, Lee Evans, Dave Fullagar, Roger Fuller, Rich Hood, and Dick Wilenken, Jack Gifford leading the team. All of these members were related to the semiconductor industry in terms of having contributed to the semiconductor industry on a major scale.

The nine-team members of the company represented a two pages plan in front of a local investor and raised a US$9 million capital in the venture to start the company. The company started by developing 24 second-source products, and later in 1985, it launched its first proprietary product MAX600, which won the company an industry award. This was the beginning of the innovative journey for the company.

Maxim Integrated
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In 1987, Maxim had its first IPO, and in the same year, the company introduced its first most successful product, MAX232, leading to the most successful fiscal year. In the second quarter of 1988, Maxim recorded sales worth 28.3 million. In 1989, after it acquired its first wafer fabrication plant from Saratoga Semiconductor, the company started the in-house manufacturing of the IC wafers.

In 1991, Maxim made a policy of working 24 hours a day, skipping all the holidays, leading to a hike in profits, from $7.6 million to $13.7 million, for that year. Maxim also made it to Business Week’s Top 100 Small Companies and Forbes’s Top 200 in both 1991 and 1992 for being a good place for work and having the best customer service. By the beginning of the 90s, Maxim had bagged contracts from companies like International Business Machines, Motorola, and Hitachi and had introduced more than 600 new chips. The acquisition of Tectronix in 1994 helped Maxim to enter the wireless and fiber-optics communications businesses.

The company recorded annual revenue worth $500 million in 1998, and in 2005, it was listed in the Fortune 1000 company. By 2008, the company had registered 50% more patents in its names, whereas in 2010, it built the first analog product on a 300mm wafer. Maxim’s total revenue for the fiscal year 2011 was over $2.47 billion, and as per 2019 records, Maxim Integrated was serving 35,000 global customers.

Acquisitions by Maxim

Maxim is known for the lucrative acquisitions that it made in the past 38 years. The company started off by acquiring the first wafer fabrication (fab) facility in Sunnyvale, California in 1990, The company then acquired the semiconductor division of Tektronix in 1994, followed by acquiring an additional wafer fab from IC Works in 1997 and Dallas Semiconductor in 2001. Later Maxim purchases the CMOS fab from Philips in 2003, a 0.18-micrometer fab from Atmel, and Vitesse Semiconductor’s Storage Products Division in 2007. In 2008 and 2009, Maxim acquired Mobilygen, Innova Card as well as two product lines from Zilog, Inc.

Starting from 2010, the next decade included the acquisitions of Teridian Semiconductor Corporation (2010), Trinity Convergence Limited (2010), Phyworks (2010), SensorDynamics (2011), Cambridge Analog Technologies, Inc. (2011), Genasic Design Systems Ltd. (2012), Volterra Semiconductor (2013), Icron Technologies (2018), and Trinamic (2020).

The CEO at Maxim Integrated

Tunç Doluca has been serving Maxim Integrated as the President and CEO since January 2007. He was born in Ankara, Turkey. He has a BSEE degree from Iowa State University and an MSEE degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Doluca joined Maxim Integrated in 1984 as a member of the technical staff. In 1993, he was appointed as the Vice President of R&D at Maxim, and the next year, he was named leader of the first vertical business unit for portable power-management products at Maxim. At the beginning of the 2000s, Doluca was heading seven business units in the company and became the Group President in 2005. Doluca has 11 patents under his name and has designed 40 products for Maxim. He has also designed the industry’s first high-integration, notebook power-supply IC (the MAX786).

Arista Networks

Arista Networks – An American company Pioneering in Cloud Networking Solutions since 2004

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Arista Networks is famous for providing cognitive cloud networking solutions for large data centers, high-performance computing centers, and high-frequency trading environments. The company is based in Santa Clara, California and it offers a wide range of products and solutions from cloud networking to telemetry and analytics. Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Kenneth Duda co-founded Arista Networks in 2004. The founders came from a background with rich experience in semiconductor and hardware design.

Introduction to Arista Networks

Arista Networks provides a highly efficient networking solution to big data centers as the products include an array of Ethernet speeds from 10 to 400 gigabits per second. The platform of Arista is also made highly secure with CloudVision and Arista EOS (Linux-based network operating system) which is installed in all Arista products. Apart from the highly experienced co-founders of Arista, the current President and CEO of the company is Jayshree Ullal who also has a luminous career history. Arista is very famous around the world for picking up a team of intellectuals who have a rich professional history thus operated by a team of visionaries. The company went public in 2014 and is listed as ANET in NYSE.

Arista Networks
Image Source: fortune.com

Founding History of Arista Networks

As mentioned earlier, all the founders are from an industrial background as they were associated with large enterprises before co-founding Arista Networks. Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems back in 1982 and he served as the chief hardware designer of the company. Andy, along with David, co-founded a new company called Granite Systems in 1995 where they started developing Gigabit Ethernet products. After a year, the company was acquired by Cisco Systems. After a few years, Andy and David again opened up a new start-up called Kealia but again it was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

After this acquisition, David and Andy worked at Cisco in executive positions and along with Kennetth Duda. Kennetth Duda was the first employee of Granite Systems and that’s how he met the other two co-founders. They successfully developed a product line for the Cisco company called Catalyst and decided to establish their own company in 2004 which is currently known as Arista Networks. Jayshree Ullal, the current CEO of the company is also an ex-employee of Cisco who worked there for fifteen years. From 2014, there have been several differences followed by filing lawsuits between Cisco and Arista and the latter agreed to $400 million as a part of the settlement.

Customers and Acquisitions

Arista’s customers mainly include big enterprises around the globe that require highly efficient and fast networking platforms. Currently, Arista has many big customers who are in the list of Fortune 500 companies. Arista delivers its products across the data centers and campus with routing and software solutions in order to monitor and be responsive globally. There are around 7,000 customers worldwide served by Arista Networks on a daily basis.

Arista Networks
Image Source: arista.com

Arista Networks have acquired quite a few companies in the last few years. It’s latest acquisition is Awake Security which is a network detection and response platform that uses AI to prevent both internal and external threats. Along with Awake Security, the company also acquired Big Switch Networks last year. This acquisition led to the availability of DANZ Monitoring Fabric, a network observability software across all switching networks of Arista. In 2018, the company acquired Mojo Networks which provides Arista with Wifi solutions for networks across campus and enterprise. Arista also acquired Metamako in 2018 which augments Arista’s low latency platforms.

The Founders of Arista Networks

Andy Bechtolsheim is currently serving as the Chairman and the Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks. Previously, he worked at Sun Microsystems where he was in charge of next generation server, storage, and network architectures. Andy is a computer engineer who went to Carnegie Mellon University and received his doctorate from Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

After co-founding Arista Networks, David Cheriton co-founded a couple of more companies like Apstra Inc and BrainofT Inc. He received his bachelor’s degree from University of British Columbia and his masters and doctorate from the University of Waterloo. Currently, he is a computer science professor at Stanford University.

Kenneth Duda is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering at Arista Networks. He also worked as the CTO of There.com where he built a real-time 3D distributed system. Kenneth went to MIT where he graduated in three different engineering courses.