Tech - Bucks: I
Offlate, back-door garrage tech companies are raking some big bucks either by advertising or getting purchased, after having initial market success of their ideas.
One of my buddies (Pichuck) has the following opinion: "I think this is just the beginning of a trend. This is about a technology called web2.0. All the websites fall in one of the two categories. Web1.0 or web 2.0."
"Web2.0 is basically a user driven website.Think about some thing like youtube, ebay, orkut, wikipedia etc.The concept is simple, the company provides the infrastructure and users from various corners build up the real material for the core part of the website"
"They just advertise and make money. All they do is take suggestions from people and add new features. Wikepedia was built and is being run by end users mostly.If there were to be a burst like the dot com bubble burst these companies get to loose very less compared to others.But thats not the case with some websites like yahoo (partly)...So this is where things change..Google or who ever is going to go big on this web2.0 stuff...and ppl say its the only future for all these tech firms.."
One of my buddies (Pichuck) has the following opinion: "I think this is just the beginning of a trend. This is about a technology called web2.0. All the websites fall in one of the two categories. Web1.0 or web 2.0."
"Web2.0 is basically a user driven website.Think about some thing like youtube, ebay, orkut, wikipedia etc.The concept is simple, the company provides the infrastructure and users from various corners build up the real material for the core part of the website"
"They just advertise and make money. All they do is take suggestions from people and add new features. Wikepedia was built and is being run by end users mostly.If there were to be a burst like the dot com bubble burst these companies get to loose very less compared to others.But thats not the case with some websites like yahoo (partly)...So this is where things change..Google or who ever is going to go big on this web2.0 stuff...and ppl say its the only future for all these tech firms.."
Let us speak of some examples here...!
1) Answers.com
This site launced during early 2005 has raked biggggg in months...
Answers.com has been online since January 2, 2005. Rave reviews helped Answers.com crack the top 500 on Alexa.com’s website ranking within six weeks of its launch (Forbes magazine called it “the most useful, smartest, coolest, easiest-to-use Web innovation to come around in years”). In June 2005, Answers.com was named one of 2005’s “10 Cool Websites” in Time magazine’s annual survey of the most useful and interesting sites on the Web.
They have altogether at this present time 58 employees; Answers reported revenues of $889,000 for the fourth quarter of 2005, an increase of 58% compared to the third quarter of 2005.
As of December 31, 2005, Answers had cash, cash equivalents and investment securities of approximately $14 million.
2. youtube
YouTube, Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, [3] and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.
The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months.
At present, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web, and is ranked as the 13th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. According to a July 16 announcement, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
September 2006: Google purchases youtube for ~$1.65 billion. youtube which went live last year has less than 60 employees. Founders are from Paypal. They jus got rich in less than a year!!!!!!!!
3) Yodlee
spending sleepless nights and days, five guys from IIT, Madras in the backroom of a Sunnyvale building -- slogging their way for over 12 hours a day....
All this, to launch a new product and start a new company. They have launched Yodlee.com, which as Venkat Rangan, its co-founder and CEO says, "is delivering on the true promise of the Internet - to make people's lives easier."
Yodlee.com provides consumers with one-stop consolidated access to their personal Internet accounts, including e-mail, banking, news, travel, shopping, bills, and investments.
"With the launch of Yodlee.com, I can now find all my personal information on the web in one place," says Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, who was one of the angel investors in yodlee.com.
On October 26 about four months after they had raised $ 2 million from angels such as Junglee and Exodus, Yodlee.com completed a $ 16 million first round of venture funding led by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Yodlee.com also announced that Bud Colligan, partner at Accel Partners, and Mark Stevens, partner at Sequoia Capital, joined Yodlee.com as directors.
Started with a handful of people, the Sunnyvale-based firm has 45 employees.
Nearly a dozen students from Stanford and other universities who interned in summer for Yodlee.com loved the atmosphere and challenge of working for the company they decided to skip a semester and work for it. Some may not back at all.
"What would the professors at Stanford do without their students," a visitor asks the founders, who laugh loudly.
Yodlee.com is the brainchild of five Internet entrepreneurs -- Venkat Rangan, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and an internationally recognized pioneer in multimedia; Sam Inala and Ramakrishna "Schwark" Satyavolu from Microsoft; Sukhinder Singh from Amazon.com and Junglee; and P Sreeranga Rajan from the Stanford Research Institute. The founders -- who are in their mid-20s -- are credited with more than 80 published works and 30 patents.
Yodlee is supported by an elite group of private investors and advisors, which includes the founders of Hotmail, Junglee, Exodus, and Integrated Systems, as well as executive leaders from Amazon.com, Netscape, Microsoft, Checkpoint Software, AT&T, AOL, and VXtreme.
This site launced during early 2005 has raked biggggg in months...
Answers.com has been online since January 2, 2005. Rave reviews helped Answers.com crack the top 500 on Alexa.com’s website ranking within six weeks of its launch (Forbes magazine called it “the most useful, smartest, coolest, easiest-to-use Web innovation to come around in years”). In June 2005, Answers.com was named one of 2005’s “10 Cool Websites” in Time magazine’s annual survey of the most useful and interesting sites on the Web.
They have altogether at this present time 58 employees; Answers reported revenues of $889,000 for the fourth quarter of 2005, an increase of 58% compared to the third quarter of 2005.
As of December 31, 2005, Answers had cash, cash equivalents and investment securities of approximately $14 million.
2. youtube
YouTube, Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, [3] and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.
The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months.
At present, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web, and is ranked as the 13th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. According to a July 16 announcement, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
September 2006: Google purchases youtube for ~$1.65 billion. youtube which went live last year has less than 60 employees. Founders are from Paypal. They jus got rich in less than a year!!!!!!!!
3) Yodlee
spending sleepless nights and days, five guys from IIT, Madras in the backroom of a Sunnyvale building -- slogging their way for over 12 hours a day....
All this, to launch a new product and start a new company. They have launched Yodlee.com, which as Venkat Rangan, its co-founder and CEO says, "is delivering on the true promise of the Internet - to make people's lives easier."
Yodlee.com provides consumers with one-stop consolidated access to their personal Internet accounts, including e-mail, banking, news, travel, shopping, bills, and investments.
"With the launch of Yodlee.com, I can now find all my personal information on the web in one place," says Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, who was one of the angel investors in yodlee.com.
On October 26 about four months after they had raised $ 2 million from angels such as Junglee and Exodus, Yodlee.com completed a $ 16 million first round of venture funding led by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Yodlee.com also announced that Bud Colligan, partner at Accel Partners, and Mark Stevens, partner at Sequoia Capital, joined Yodlee.com as directors.
Started with a handful of people, the Sunnyvale-based firm has 45 employees.
Nearly a dozen students from Stanford and other universities who interned in summer for Yodlee.com loved the atmosphere and challenge of working for the company they decided to skip a semester and work for it. Some may not back at all.
"What would the professors at Stanford do without their students," a visitor asks the founders, who laugh loudly.
Yodlee.com is the brainchild of five Internet entrepreneurs -- Venkat Rangan, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and an internationally recognized pioneer in multimedia; Sam Inala and Ramakrishna "Schwark" Satyavolu from Microsoft; Sukhinder Singh from Amazon.com and Junglee; and P Sreeranga Rajan from the Stanford Research Institute. The founders -- who are in their mid-20s -- are credited with more than 80 published works and 30 patents.
Yodlee is supported by an elite group of private investors and advisors, which includes the founders of Hotmail, Junglee, Exodus, and Integrated Systems, as well as executive leaders from Amazon.com, Netscape, Microsoft, Checkpoint Software, AT&T, AOL, and VXtreme.
so what's next? Wait and watch....
Meanwhile, I will get some lessons on web2.0 and will get back with more info and examples :)
posted by sherry @ 4:31 AM
2 Comments:
hmmmmm i have a question..how hard is it to make these kind of platforms and websites....i mean for the search engines and the large databases...do they use any databases already available on the net...or do they have to start from the scratch?
as pichuck said, itz all abt web2.0 and if u hav an idea...there are angel investors all desperate to provide you with all required money.
It is highly techy,(my perception)...cos all the video formats need to be converted to flash,all search features etc
Having Right Resources is Key! The youtube guys did awesome job in short time.
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