Name: Jecca Cervero
Case Study
Chapter 19
Flickr
Caterina Fake, Founder
Caterina Fake is one of the founders of Flickr. She’s married with Stewart Butterfield, a husband and a business partner. Caterina was living in San Francisco while Stewart lived in Canada. Both of them were doing web development at that time and his idea was that they do something some type of transitional web Development Company which is kind of a scheme. Caterina eventually moved to Canada with Stewart and they got married.
Flickr is a photo sharing website. Flickr is one of the most commonly cited examples of Web 2.0 companies.
After their honeymoon, two days later, they started Ludicorp. They were building a multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. Neverending was very much based around social interactions that you could form groups, instant message each other and a social network associated with it.
Caterina focuses on social software. Before Ludicorp, she worked on or participated in an online community including the WELL, Electric minds, and various sites she started on her own. At interval research, she worked on a collaborative animation game, which was a cousin to the Game Neverending idea. At the beginning, it was Caterina, Stewart and Jason Classon. Jason and Stewart had a company together in 1999. Jason went and worked in Boston for a year and came back and then the three of them started working on the game together. Caterina did the game design, Stewart did the interaction design and Jason did the PHP for the prototype. In 2004, they added a new feature, a feature that has a chat environment with photo sharing; which quickly top Game Neverending in popularity of Flickr.
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0C
Case study Chapter 20
Brewster Kahle
WAIS, Internet Archive and Alexa Internet
Brewster started WAIS in the late 80’s while an employee of thinking machines. He left in 1993 to found WAIS. It is one of the earliest forms of internet software developed before the web. Brewster Kahle sold WAIS to AOL in 1995. WAIS was to make network services, stuff that you take completely for granted now, but the idea was that you could use remote machines to answer questions.
The thinking machines team was founded by Danny Hills and Sheryl Handler. Brewster Kahle was on the project team at MIT. They had been working for years before they created their own company. It was very helpful to get your lessons learned basically on somebody else nickel, in a research phase. Kahle learned if you are trying to get your company to think differently to do something interesting, pick your setting carefully.
Thinking machines was set in an 1800’s Victorian mansion on 100 acres of forest just outside of Boston. Thinking machines had the great fortune of starting with millions of dollars in the bank because some rich individuals really believed in it. It was not risk funded and it was not founded with the idea that it was going to take years to actually get something real done. It allowed thinking machines to attract group of people. People who worked there were Richard Feyman, Stephen Wolfram and Marvin Minsky. They hired a person from Digital Equipment Corporation and he was VP of reality.
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0C
Case study Chapter 21
Charles Gechke
Cofounder, Adobe Systems
Charles Geschke came to Xerox PARC in October of 1972. He had a task of bringing up a machine that simulated a mainframe computer. He was also involved in programming language and developed the tools that were used to build the Star Workstation. Charles and John Warnock developed a language called Interpress that would allow any computer to talk to any printer. but Xerox seemed so slow to commercialize this technology so, they started their own company, Adobe, to produce a successor of Interpress called Post Script. Post Script made it possible to describe complex documents in a simple form.
In Post Script, you didn't have to program at the level of the machine. you can program it at a higher level, in a language that is more in tune with what you wanted to print as opposed to how it printed.
Apple also bought 20 percent of the company. In December of 1983, they began developing the laser printer for Apple, which eventually became the LaserWriter. At the same time, the LaserWriter was introduced. They also introduced a piece of typesetting equipment, which was a full image setter, with Linotype corporation.
Desktop publishing became very popular that you could be your own printer and publisher, so it opened up a whole lot of new businesses. All of a sudden, the whole industry began to move, and within less than a decade, the entire printing and publishing industry went from the old analog world completely over to the digital world.
Geschke’s advice is “ If you are not passionate about what you are going to do, don’t do it. Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all of your life, not just your work life.
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