marc benioff is great person...
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Thursday, May 2, 2013
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225204
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225204
Ben Huh
Entrepreneur: Ben Huh, founder of Seattle-based Cheezburger, which owns the websites Fail Blog and I Can Has Cheezburger (home of the LOLcat).Setup: Huh was a 22-year-old journalism major when he moved to Chicago and founded software analytics firm Raydium in January 2000. He'd worked at startups but didn't have much experience or a network to raise money easily. Still, he cobbled together $750,000 over two rounds.
"Uh-oh" moment: Eighteen months later, he hit a wall. "You're hopeful to the end, but we were flat out of money and couldn't meet payroll," he says. Huh tried raising more money, but the dot-com crash was in full effect, and there was none to be had. For two weeks, he says, he could barely leave his room. "These investors had put a fortune on their faith in me, and you feel like you should have rewarded their faith," he recalls. "You feel like you can't do another company again."
Ben Huh, founder of Seattle-based Cheezburger
Success: Huh took over Cheezburger in September 2007. The blog network now receives 25 million unique visitors and half a billion page views per month, and has raised more than $32 million to jump-start a platform that will allow anyone to create memes. Cheezburger boasts 90 employees, a handful of whom star on the Bravo reality TV show LOLwork.
Take-away: Draw some kind of line between business and personal life, especially when it comes to finances. Huh mixed his credit cards and ended up shouldering company debt when Raydium folded. "But once you realize those limits, go for them," he says. "Think of it as the best education money can't buy."
Rob Kramer
Entrepreneur: Rob Kramer, co-founder and CEO of HipSwap, a Santa Monica, Calif., developer of a mobile and web peer-to-peer marketplace for used goods.
Setup: In 2008 Kramer started a politically minded social network called PopRule. A startup veteran with several successes under his belt, he and his business partner sank their own money into the venture, built the product and put together a talented advisory board. Things promptly went downhill. The social media team behind Barack Obama's presidential campaign built a popular social network of their own, and Facebook's star was rising in the political sphere. Investors began to grumble.
"Uh-oh" moment: Around the time of the '08 presidential election, Kramer put PopRule on hold. "The idea wasn't getting enough support. There was too much diffusion and fragmentation in the market," he says. Kramer's outside investments were taking a hit, too. He did the math and realized it would take far more money than they had to get the user numbers they needed to succeed. "Entrepreneurs need to get really comfortable with discomfort, but with PopRule, I didn't want to throw good money after bad. Everywhere I looked, it was clear I needed to end this as elegantly and quietly as possible," he says.
Kramer regrouped in January 2009 to try morphing PopRule into a "Digg for politics," but that lasted just a couple of months. "We had such a bad taste for the scene that we ended up shuttering that, too," he says. "It was the right decision but one of the most painful, because I had always been able to give investors a return."
The way out: Kramer did contract work while he and his partner came up with their next project. "Building companies is all I know how to do, and I love the process," he says. "If this is what you do for a living, you take the knocks and say, 'On to the next one.'" The answer came to them in 2011: a business that could address the problems of secondhand and peer-to-peer marketplaces.
Success: HipSwap has some 200,000 registered users, $250,000 in sales and has partnered with celebs and small businesses to drive traffic. The average sale price of an item on the network is an industry-topping $75. HipSwap has closed on a $1.1 million round of seed funding.
Take-away: After a setback, recalibrate. Entrepreneurs find it difficult to get away from their businesses, but breaks are vital. "You're coming up with ideas in your sleep and waking up with them," Kramer says, "but sometimes you have to stand back and not think about it. Allow your mind to rest in a different environment until you're ready again."
Nihal Mehta
Nihal Mehta, CEO and co-founder of LocalResponse
Photo © Angie Silvy
Setup: Mehta has dealt with the ups and downs of startups for 13 years. His first venture went bankrupt in 1999, but the assets were folded into a mobile-marketing company that eventually sold to Omnicom Group in 2005. In 2007 he started buzzd, a real-time mobile city guide that snagged $4 million in funding.
"Uh-oh" moment: This was before the iPhone kicked off the mobile revolution, and Mehta couldn't pin down a revenue model. He started running out of money in early 2010, and the next six months were torturous. Staff shrank from 20 to six, and he had to float the payroll personally. His co-founder burned out and left. "I remember negotiating his departure on the phone, on my birthday, April 22, 2010, walking around Central Park. Definitely a low point," he says.
The way out: A pivot. For half a year, Mehta negotiated with buzzd investors to recapitalize the company, touting a new "direct-response" product that could help big brands get high click-through rates. He ultimately convinced them to convert their preferred stock to common stock and leave the board. In October 2011 he raised about $7 million to scale the company, newly renamed LocalResponse.
Success: By the end of 2012 LocalResponse had hired more than 30 employees and was projecting a run rate of $10 million, with profitability just around the corner thanks to a flurry of campaigns with clients like McDonald's, Audi and FedEx.
Take-away: Stay in the game as long as possible. "I learned this the hard way--it was six years from my first company to my first exit," Mehta says. "Building products isn't easy, but if you keep working hard, keep throwing things at the wall, you will find a way."
Kathryn Minshew
Kathryn Minshew, CEO and co-founder of The Muse
Photo © Joseph Lin
Setup: In December 2010 Minshew quit her job at the Clinton Health Access Initiative to run Pretty Young Professionals (PYP), a women's networking site she had started with three co-workers a couple of months before. She bootstrapped the company and guaranteed a small payroll with personal savings, working as an unpaid CEO and editor in chief. By spring 2011 she'd managed to attract only 9,000 users. Then, a redesign increased users to 20,000, and the other members of the founding team began to get more involved.
"Uh-oh" moment: The group splintered in half after an argument about how best to run the company, and the threat of a lawsuit loomed. "We split our equity on a piece of notebook paper. We didn't have lawyers; I didn't think we needed them," Minshew recalls. "I spent three weeks alternating between the fetal position and the whiteboard trying to figure out how strongly I wanted to fight for the existing company vs. how prepared I was to strike out and do it over."
The way out: Minshew decided on a do-over, watching PYP's rebranding from the sidelines. In September 2011 she launched The Daily Muse (now called The Muse), and PYP's entire staff, plus another co-founder, joined her. The Huffington Post and TechCrunch covered the launch; the site drew more visitors in its first month than PYP had in its best. "The community knew what happened and stood behind us with tweets and shares," Minshew says. "It was painful, but being forced to start over was a unique sort of gift, because having been through a lot together, the team comes out of it with the confidence that nothing is going to stop us."
In November, she was accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. She added mobile, local and social media functionality to her platform to look more like a "billion-dollar" startup.
Success: She's still out $20,000 in savings, but by the end of 2012 the website had nearly 2 million users in more than 160 countries, increasing at a rate of 30 percent every month. The Muse, now with eight employees, has partnerships with 60-plus companies, including Intel, Sephora, NPR, Pinterest, Twitter and foursquare.
Take-away: In a business partnership, formalize the process and paperwork, and hire a lawyer who can spot problems you never dreamed would arise--just in case things get personal. And of course, choose your partners wisely. "It's so important to find people who share your values and ethics," she says. "There are a lot of things you can paper over, and having different sets of opinions is valuable, but not when it comes down to code of conduct."
Frank Jadhavji
Entrepreneur: Frank Jadhavji, co-founder and interim CEO of JustDeals.com, a flash-deal site specializing in consumer electronics and appliances.Setup: After many years in the computer and consumer electronics industry, Jadhavji decided to parlay his experience into his own company. He launched JustDeals in 2010 in Chatsworth, Calif., buying up closeout and refurbished electronics and appliances and offering them at discounted prices online. The self-funded company broke even its first year. He decided it was time to ramp up for the next stage of growth and purchased a large volume of cameras and other electronics for the holiday shopping season, working with consumer reporters to promote the deals.
"Uh-oh" moment: Soon after the inventory arrived at the warehouse, it was stolen. At 6 a.m., a red van slammed into the cargo door; two minutes later, a group of thieves had taken more than $300,000 worth of merchandise. The worst part, Jadhavji says, was that the cameras had already been sold, and customers were waiting for them. "We had to bring in the executive team on Sunday to talk about how we were going to handle it," he says.
"It was demoralizing," adds Richard Chemel, co-founder and executive vice president of merchandising. "In e-commerce, reputation is all on what you sell, and we were scrambling."
The way out: Old-fashioned crisis control. The team members put their heads down and got to work, dealing with insurance companies, contacting customers and explaining the situation, offering discounts and coupons and negotiating with vendors to find similar products.
Success: Customers were satisfied, and business is booming. JustDeals' traffic tripled in the last year.
Take-away: Sometimes shit happens that's out of your control. Jadhavji recommends hiring a management team that's able to make crucial, turn-on-a-dime decisions during times of emergency.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Computing: The Science of Nearly Everything
Computer Science…Research, Education and Policy
A set of top Computer Science blogs
with 35 comments
This started out as a list of top Computer Science blogs, but it more closely resembles a set: the order is irrelevant and there are no duplicate elements; membership of this set of blogs satisfies all of the following conditions:
- they are written by computer scientists and focus on computer science research;
- they are of consistently high quality;
- I regularly read them.
N.B. I have deliberately excluded blogs primarily focusing on computer science education (for another time).
- The Endeavour by John D. Cook (@JohnDCook)John’s blog cuts across using computing, programming and mathematics to solve real-world problems, pulling in his wide expertise as a mathematics professor, programmer, consultant, manager and statistician. Some great posts across the technical and socio-technical spectrum. Also runs a number ofuseful Twitter tip accounts, including @CompSciFact, @UnixToolTip, @RegexTip and @TeXtip.
- Serious Engineering by Anthony Finkelstein (@profserious)Anthony is Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL, having previously been the Head of the UCL Computer Science. His regular blog posts are an insightful and thought-provoking journey across computer science, engineering, research and academia.
- Computational Complexity by Lance Fortnow (@fortnow) and Bill GasarchSince 2002, the first major theoretical computer science blog; computational complexity and other fun stuff in mathematics and computer science.
- Daniel Lemire’s blog by Daniel Lemire (@lemire)Daniel Lemire is a professor in the Cognitive Computer Science research group at LICEF in Canada, with his popular blog covering topics across his research areas (databases, data warehousing, information retrieval and recommender systems), as well as programming, education, economics and open science.
- Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP by Dick Lipton (@rjlipton) and Ken ReganThis is a blog on
and other questions in the theory of computing, named after the famous letter that Gödel wrote to von Neumann which essentially stated the
- Editor’s Letters by Moshe Vardi (@vardi)Moshe Vardi, a distinguished and award-winning theoretical computer scientist, has served as Editor-in-Chief of Communications of the ACM since 2008, discussing a wide range of topics across computer science, research and technology. Certainly worth following on Twitter too.
- Alan Winfield’s Web Log by Alan Winfield (@alan_winfield)Alan is the Hewlett-Packard Professor of Electronic Engineering at UWE and his blog is mostly, but not exclusively, about robots. It also touches upon artificial intelligence, artificial culture, ethics and biology, highlighting his definition of robotics as both engineering and experimental philosophy.
- Lambda the Ultimate, the Programming Languages Weblog (@lambda_ultimate)This site deals with issues directly related to programming languages and programming language research, as well as forays to bordering issues such as programmability and language in general. This is a community, but not for specific programming problems in some language; unfounded generalisations about programming languages are usually frowned on.
- BLOG@CACM by Communications of the ACM (@blogCACM)The Communications site publishes two types of blogs: the on-site BLOG@CACM expert blogs, as well as a blogroll of syndicated blogs, essentially covering the spectrum of computer science, research, education and technology. Something for everyone!
- Google Research Blog by Google (@googleresearch)The latest news on Google research, focusing on some of their key areas of interest: e-commerce, algorithms, HCI, information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, NLP, multimedia, computer vision, statistics, security and privacy.
Clearly this set is incomplete — please post your CS research blog recommendations in the comments below; I’d be particularly interested in blogs covering hardware and computer architectures.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
History of Linux
The History of Linux began in 1991 with the commencement of a personal project by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, to create a new operating system kernel.Since then, the resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to its state in 2009 of over 370 megabytes of source under the GNU General Public License.[1
Events leading to creation
In 1983, Richard Stallman started the GNU project with the goal of creating a free UNIX-like operating system.[2] As part of this work, he wrote the GNU General Public License (GPL). By the early 1990s there was almost enough available software to create a full operating system. However, the GNU kernel, called Hurd, failed to attract enough attention from developers leaving GNU incomplete.
Another free operating system project, initially released in 1977, was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). This was developed by UC Berkeley from the 6th edition of Unix from AT&T. Since BSD contained Unix code that AT&T owned, AT&T filed a lawsuit (USL v. BSDi) in the early 1990s against the University of California. This strongly limited the development and adoption of BSD.[3][4]
In 1985, Intel released the 80386, the first x86 microprocessor with 32-bit instruction set and MMU with paging.[5]
In 1986, Maurice J. Bach, of AT&T Bell Labs, published The Design of the UNIX Operating System.[6] This definitive description principally covered the System V Release 2 kernel, with some new features from Release 3 and BSD.
MINIX, a Unix-like system intended for academic use, was released by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in 1987. While source code for the system was available, modification and redistribution were restricted. In addition, MINIX's 16-bit design was not well adapted to the 32-bit features of the increasingly cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers.
These factors and the lack of a widely adopted, free kernel provided the impetus for Torvalds's starting his project. He has stated that if either the GNU or 386BSD kernels were available at the time, he likely would not have written his own.[7][8]
The creation of Linux
As Torvalds wrote in his book Just for Fun,[9] he eventually realized that he had written an operating system kernel. On 25 August 1991, he announced this system in a Usenet posting to the newsgroup "comp.os.minix.":[10]
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.—Linus Torvalds [11]
| No. | State | Capital | Chief Minister |
| 1 | Andhra Pradesh | Hyderabad | Kiran Kumar Reddy |
| 2 | Arunachal Pradesh | Itanagar | Nabam Tuki |
| 3 | Assam | Dispur | Tarun Gogoi |
| 4 | Bihar | Patna | Nitish Kumar |
| 5 | Chhattisgarh | Raipur | Dr. Raman Singh |
| 6 | Goa | Panaji | Manohar Parrikar |
| 7 | Gujarat | Gandhinagar | Narendra Modi |
| 8 | Haryana | Chandigarh | Bhupinder Singh Hooda |
| 9 | Himachal Pradesh | Shimla | Prof. Prem Kumar Dhumal |
| 10 | Jammu and Kashmir | Srinagar | Omar Abdullah |
| 11 | Jharkhand | Ranchi | Arjun Munda |
| 12 | Karnataka | Bengaluru | Jagadish Shettar |
| 13 | Kerala | Thiruvananthapuram | Oommen Chandy |
| 14 | Madhya Pradesh | Bhopal | Shivraj Singh Chouhan |
| 15 | Maharashtra | Mumbai | Prithviraj Chavan |
| 16 | Manipur | Imphal | Okram Ibobi Singh |
| 17 | Meghalaya | Shillong | Dr. Mukul Sangma |
| 18 | Mizoram | Aizawl | Pu Lalthanhawla |
| 19 | Nagaland | Kohima | Neiphiu Rio |
| 20 | Orissa | Bhubaneswar | Naveen Patnaik |
| 21 | Punjab | Chandigarh | Parkash Singh Badal |
| 22 | Rajasthan | Jaipur | Ashok Gehlot |
| 23 | Sikkim | Gangtok | Pawan Chamling |
| 24 | Tamil Nadu | Chennai | Ms. J. Jayalalithaa |
| 25 | Tripura | Agartala | Manik Sarkar |
| 26 | Uttar Pradesh | Lucknow | Akhilesh Yadav |
| 27 | Uttarakhand | Dehradun | Vijay Bahuguna |
| 28 | West Bengal | Kolkata | Ms. Mamata Banerjee |
| http://www.go4quiz.com/955/list-of-indias-28-states-capitals-and-chief-ministers/ |
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Difference between Long Term Investments and Short Term Investments
There are a lot of different types of investments that are available these days like long term investments and short term investments. At the same time there are a lot of different investment strategies and investors. In some cases choosing between all these could be quite difficult because it is necessary to decide on how much risk you are ready to take and how fast you want your investment to grow.
The compromise between safety and risk and comparative growth rates is what differentiates long term and short term investments. You need to know that short term investments are made for a short period of time and show a significant gain at once while long term investments are designed to last for several years and thus showing a slow but steady increase. While investing for a long period of time you will see a significant gain only at the end of the term.
Usually short term investments tend to carry more risk and show higher rates of fluctuation compared to long term investments. There is a good chance that you will make money with a short term investment, but as well there is a chance that you will lose all your invested money.
Investing in bonds and stocks is a great example of a short term investment and precise timing in buying and selling of stocks can make you rich overnight. However, there is a disadvantage as well – you could end up losing all your money making a bad bet on an investment.
On the other hand, long term investments have an ability to gain amounts of money over a long period of time. With such investments you will have a greater degree of stability as well as a lower risk than with short term investments. Traditionally long term investments are chosen as an investment option when there is a lot of time on hand like a retirement fund which continues to grow over years, maturing as you need it.
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