Quan Zhou

Case Study - Viaweb

            Paul Graham together with his friend Robert Morris founded ViaWeb in 1995 for building online stores. It is well known as the first application service provider and for being written in the Lisp Programming Language. It was a crazy idea, they want to make a software that runs on the server and letting the users to control it through their browser. Using Viaweb’s software, the small businesses could make online stores as good as those build by big companies and it became the most popular e-commerce software.

            Viaweb is a web-based application that allows users to build and host their own online stores with little effort and technical expertise from their own web browser in their house. It was named Viaweb because “it worked via web” and it was acquired by Yahoo in June 1998 and renamed it to Yahoo! Store.

            As an advice from Paul Graham, make something that can be appreciated and something that would make people happy because they will be the future customers. This is the basis of a startup, because it is something that builds some kind of technology that people want. The mistake that a lot of founders make is to build something they think users want. So we should think things that will make our customers satisfied.

Case Study – Bloglines

Mark is a serial entrepreneur who began his start-up career as a senior engineer at Diba, an information appliance technology company acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1997. Mark Fletcher founded and leads Bloglines, the world’s most popular free Internet service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds and blogs. Bloglines was acquired by Ask in 2005, and operates today as a distinct web property within the Ask family.

Bloglines offers the most features for people who like their online news to be fresh. It’s the most popular website of its kind, indexing millions of new online articles every day. This site contains feeds, blog, clippings, playlists, forums, search and you can use whether your language is. Bloglines offers the most features for people who like their online news to be fresh. It’s the most popular website of its kind, indexing millions of new online articles every day.

For Fletcher, it is okay to start a startup while you are employed to other company because sometimes that’s the only way you can do it. It is a way of lessening the risk of failing because if you do it on the side and it doesn’t work out, you still have a job to pursue and it worked for Mark Fletcher. And Now because of his bright idea, blogline is still in the industry and continuing to serve people.

Case Study – Del.icio.us

            Joshua Schachter is the creator of del.icio.us, creator of geoURL and co-creator of Memepool. He has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He started the collaborative bookmark because he needed a way of organizing his collection of 20,000 bookmarks and he hit on the idea of tagging them with brief text phrases to help him finds links later.

Del.icio.us pronounced as delicious, it a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. It has more than three million users and 100 million bookmarked URLs.

This is an advice from Joshua Schachter to all technical people who wanted to start a start up. First is to reduce, do as little as possible to get what you want to be done. For example, if you have two in minds, just pick one until they go together and don’t add another thing. Do little as much as possible and it will get bigger when time comes like what he did. Because del.icio.us began as something Schachter built for himself and it became for all people who needed a social bookmarking web service. Doing less is so important because it will help us to understand it better and you can realize it more cleanly.