Quan Zhou

Case Study – WebTV

            Steve Perlman, Cofounder and CEO, is an entrepreneur and inventor devoted to pioneering Internet, entertainment, multimedia, consumer electronics and communications technologies and services. He has more than 30 years of technology development experience, over 15 years of start-up experience and a track record of bringing media-rich products and services quickly to market.

            Sony and Phillips introduced the first WebTV set-top boxes from WebTV Networks, Inc. They became known as WebTV Classic, sometimes called the WebTV Internet Terminal. A second generation of set-top box was introduced, which is known as the WebTV Plus. The new unit includes a TV tuner and integrates the TV and Web worlds.

            I have learned that it is good to trust and work cooperatively with your members. This will easily solve the problem. Also, I have learned to use strategy to sell my product. This will help me gain more money.

Case Study - Gmail

                        Paul Buchheit was the creator, lead developer of Gmail and the 23^rd employee of Google. He is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He also developed the original and the first prototype of Google AdSense as a part of his work in Gmail. Buchheit probably not the founder of Gmail but he contributed more to Google.

                        Google Mail is a free web-based email and a service provided by Google. It is officially founded in

Germany and United Kingdom. It offers over 6800 MB of free storage with additional storage from 10 GB to 400 GB available for a certain price and it has a search oriented interface. Gmail is well-known for its use of the Ajax programming techniques in its design employing modern browser features such as JavaScript, keyboard access keys and has ten millions of users.

                        We all know that searching is very important for every one of us, it was central to what we were doing right now and it is really useful for managing our email. Buchheit wants to do more than that but it came to his mind that search seemed like the natural first step. You could search by using keywords, senders, etc. because it was a free text just like Google but it is for e-mailing.

                        This was really one of the successful startup in the field of web mailing. Buchheit really did his best out of it. The best thing to do when a problem occurred is to think and spend more time thinking about it. Looking at what the underlying problems are and how to come up with solutions to make it better for everyone.

Case Study - TiVo

                        Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay, veterans of Silicon Graphics and Time Warner’s Full Service Network digital video system founded TiVo in 1997. That was originally intending to create a home network device and then later developed the idea to record digitized video on hard disk. It became very popular to people because it took all the information that existed on television and gave the viewers the right to control it.

                        TiVo is a brand of a digital video recorder (DVR), it consumes video device that captures television programming to hard disk storage for later viewing. The device also provides an electronic television programming schedule, and provides recording options based on that schedule. It can skip commercials, pause a live TV and schedule the recording of every episode of a series, all of these in just one aspect. It clicked, especially to Hollywood and the networks were worried about how people lose their control on watching TV daily. 

                        Be original is what I got from Ramsay, he said that don’t take anything especially if you done something that is somewhat competitive with your former employer. According to him don’t be worried if you fail, just worry if you are successful because there is no one will sue you for failing anything until you are successful. It’s a funny thing to think and he just got it right.