Andrew Mason

THE MAN BEHIND

GROUPON

This man is the founder of Groupon. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1981. Unlike other internet billionaires, he attended Northwestern University in Chicago in music course. But in 2006, he won a scholorship to attend the University of Chicago Harris School of Policy. He was there just for three months and then he dropped out to set up The Point, a web service focused on online collection action and fundraising.

Andrew Mason founded Groupon one year later.

GROUPON.

Groupon grew from ThePoint.com campaign website in November 2008. Its name was a combination of "group" and "coupon". The first deal of Groupon was offering half-price for the pizza to the first floor restaurant in Chicago.

 In January 2011, Groupon has purchased the Indian deal of the day website SoSasta.com and re-branded it as 'Crazeal by Groupon Inc'. It is headed by Ankur Warikoo The Groupon acquisitions of uBuyiBuy launched services under the Groupon name in Hong Kong. Groupon also acquired GroupsMore.com in Malaysia to expand its business there.

Andrew Mason was given 1 million dollers by his previous employer, Eric Lefkofsky to develop the idea. Groupon was launched in November 2008 and Chicago was the first market for Groupon followed by Boston, New York City and Toronto. By October 2010, Groupon served more than 150 markets in North America and 100 markets in Europe, Asia, and South America and had 35 billion registered users. Since its beginning, more than 6 million deals has been sold by Groupon. Groupon taking 50 percent of every deal and a small credit card handling fee makes Groupon's revenue is expected to top 350 million by the end of 2010. It was reported that the annual revenue was jumped up to 800 million in late 2010.

I am very sure that we can expect more from him in the future.

Blake Ross

 

FIREFOX CREATOR

Blake Ross

Blake Aaron Ross is a Young Successful Entrepreneur Online. He was born on June 12, 1985 at Miami, Florida. He is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser.  At first sight, Blake Ross looks like a common guy until you know that he programmed web site at 10, coded for Netscape at 15, and co-created the Firefox browser at 17.

 He started programming since he was very young and he moved from Florida to California to take an internship with Netscape at aged 15. I think this was an incredible thing for a 15-year-old to do.

 In 2002 Ross and his colleagues decided to start up a new version of Netscape, which remove all the luxury features and go for simplicity, stability and speed. They called the new Firefox browser. When Firefox 2.0 appeared in October, it recorded two million downloads in the first 24 hours. Web surfers are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million a month.

Firefox was more secure and faster than Microsoft and unlike Netscape. It is because since it is an open software it continues to be improved by thousands of Programmers around the world. People keep talking and  that makes Firefox spread rapidly.

 

He later founded a new start up with Joe Hewit and created Parakey which is a web operating system that can do everything an O.S can do. Parakey makes it easy to store all your stuff and share it to the world, bridging the gap between your desktop and the web. Ross revealed several technical details about the program and his new company when featured on the cover of IEEE Spectrum in November 2006. By July 2007 Facebook bought Parakey.

 

 

 

             ACHIEVEMENT

 *In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine’s top Rave   Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine’s 2005 hot list.
*He featured on the cover of the February Wired magazine as part of their lead story on Firefox’s development.
*Blake Ross is the author of Firefox for Dummies (published January 11, 2006)
He is Currently the Director of Product at Facebook.



   In 2004,  Mozilla Firefox web browser obtain over 100 million downloads in less than a year. This made him a millionaire at 19 then. Though he shares some ownership of the company with associate David Hyatt, one can easily split his net worth in half and he still has more than a majority of his co-owners.

Mark Zuckerberg

                              THE FACE OF                      FACEBOOK.

 GENERAL INFORMATION

Birth Date                   5/14/84  
Born in                        New York state
Degrees                       Harvard
Company                    Facebook. 
                                   - Founder and CEO,
                                    Board Of Directors  
Web Presences            Facebook Profile
                                    Twitter profile
 

  Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, the world's largest social network, with nearly one billion users around the world. He founded the site in his college dorm room in 2004 with his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. 

              Facebook is a directory of people in the world and a place for private citizens to create public identities. you sign up and start posting information about yourself such as photographs, employment history and others. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends and some are available to anyone. Facebook Privacy policy confusing  to many people, and the company has changed them frequently.

 EARLY LIFE.

    Mark Zuckerberg is the son of Edward Zuckerberg who ran dental practice and his mother, Karen,worked as psychiatrist before the birth of her four children, Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

    Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers when he was in middle school. He used Atari Basic Programming to create  mesaging program he called 'ZuckNet'. The program allowed  all  the computers between the house and dental office to communicate by pinging each other. The family used 'ZuckNet' to communicate within the house and also in his father's dental office. Zuckerberg also created computer games for fun and his friends played it.

COLLEGE YEAR

      Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and studied computer science. While at Harvard, he built programs called CourseMatch and Facemash. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration.

      A few months later, Zuckerberg founded and start to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.

      They created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users which first called The Facebook. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.

ACHIEVEMENT

• Time magazine has named  Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year in 2010.

Mark Zuckerberg is recognized as one of the youngest billionaires since Facebook has achieved fame with more than 500 million users and gets the title as the world's largest social network.

• Mark Zuckerberg earns top spot on Fortune's '40 Under 40' list in 2011

Fortune put him on top of their “40 Under 40″ list, the second annual celebration of brilliant twenty- and thirty somethings whose relentless innovation and business savvy have transformed our world

• In 2012, Facebook raised $16 billion in an initial public offering that valued the company at $104 billion. 

It was the third-largest public offering in the history of the United States, behind General Motors and Visa.


Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world and he is such an inspiring entrepreneur.  A lot have been said and written about this young billionaire entrepreneur but I am going to focus on his entrepreneurial achievements.