Larry Page
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the British singer and manager, see Larry_Page_(British_singer_and_manager).
Larry Page
Born
Lawrence Edward "Larry" PageMarch 26, 1973 (1973-03-26) (age 36)Lansing, Michigan
Alma mater
University of MichiganStanford University
Occupation
Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
Net worth
▼ $12 billion (2009)[1]
Known for
Co-founder of Google, Inc.
Spouse(s)
Lucinda Southworth
Larry Page
Larry Page in the European Parliament in 2009
Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page,[2] (born 26 March 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, US) is a US computer scientist best known as cofounder of Google Inc. He is ranked 26th on the 2009 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America.[3] In 2007 he and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.
//
[edit] Early life and education
Page was born into a non-practicing Jewish family in Lansing, Michigan.[4] During an interview, Page said that "their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." [5] His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said,"From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually." [5]
Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks"[6], (actually a line plotter) served as the president of the HKN, [7] and was a member of the solar car team.
[edit] Academic research
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[8] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got".[9] Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[8] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.[8]
John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." [8] Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:
"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
"The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry." [8]
Brin and Page originally met in March, 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer science Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends. [10]
To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones.[8] It relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. [10] In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.[8]
[edit] Business
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. [11] Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google.
According to the 2007 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $16.6 Billion, placing him and Sergey Brin at rank 26 on Forbes's list of the richest persons in the world.[12] They recently purchased a Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for business and personal needs.
In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.[13]
[edit] Personal life
Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island, on December 8, 2007.[14][15] Brin and Page are the executive producers of the film, Broken Arrows. In 2004, he and Sergey Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight.
Larry Page spoke at the commencement ceremony of the University of Michigan in 2009. The transcript of his speech can be found at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090502-page-commencement.html
[edit] Other interests
Page is an active investor in alternative energy companies, such as Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220-mile (350 km) range battery electric vehicle.[16] He continues to be committed to renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments.[5]
[edit] Awards and recognition
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...". [17] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..." [18]
The World Economic Forum named Page as a Global Leader for Tomorrow and the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.[6] PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards." [19]
Larry Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan on May 2, 2009 during the commencement ceremony exercises of the class of 2009.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sergey Brin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sergey Brin
Born
Sergey Mikhailovich BrinAugust 21, 1973 (1973-08-21) (age 36)Moscow, Soviet Union
Education
Univ. of Maryland (B.S., 1993)Stanford University (M.S., 1995)
Alma mater
University of MarylandStanford University
Occupation
Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
Employer
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CaliforniaTitle: Co-founder and President
Salary
USD free of wage (2008)[1][2]
Net worth
▼ US$12.0 billion[3]
Known for
co-founder of Google, Inc.world's largest internet company
Religious beliefs
Jewish
Spouse(s)
Anne Wojcicki[4]
Children
1
Websitestanford.edu/~sergey
Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union) is a Russian-born American computer scientist[5] best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology.[6] As of 2009, Forbes ranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.[3]
Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an “Enlightenment Man," and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance," a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful" [7] and "Don't be evil."
//
[[edit] Early life and education
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[8][9]
Childhood in the Soviet Union
In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,[10] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn't exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities (both parents are graduates of Moscow State University). Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular..." He therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. However, he said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."[11] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[11] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted," but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more," he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave...".[11]
Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired." For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[11]
At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."[12] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"[11]
Education in America
Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.[13]
Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993 he interned at Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.[14] He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.[15]
[edit] Search engine development
During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was in extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers." [7] Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."[16]
Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.[7]
As Larry Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. ... [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."[11]
The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful.'" Not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web," such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.[7]
Health Information
In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a B.S. in biology. [4][17] She has an active interest in health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the human genome project. “Brin instinctively regards genetics as a database and computing problem. So does his wife, who co-founded the firm, 23andMe,” which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup (consisting of 23 pairs of chromosomes).[7] In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, he said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.[7]
Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. In 2008, he decided to donate a large sum to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.[18] Brin used the services of 23AndMe and discovered that although Parkinson's is generally not hereditary, both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%.[7] When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he stated that his knowledge means that he can now take measures to ward off the disease. An editorial in The Economist magazine states that "Mr Brin regards his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky. ... But Mr Brin was making a much bigger point. Isn’t knowledge always good, and certainly always better than ignorance?" [7]
Views Chinese Censorship of Google
Remembering his youth and his family's reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he "agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government of China by allowing it to censor search engine results," but decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.[7] He explained his reasoning to Fortune magazine:
"We felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it." [19]
[edit] Awards and recognition
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...". [20] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..." [21]
In February, 2009, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is "among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer ... [and] honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice...". He was selected specifically, "for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web." [22]
In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
"he has been a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. ... PC Magazine has praised Google [of] the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards." [23]
[edit] Other interests
Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world’s energy and climate problems at Google’s philanthropic arm google.org. He had Google invest in the alternative energy industry to find wider sources of renewable energy. They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's supply.[24] He is an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile (356 km) range battery electric vehicle.
Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders." He and Page are also the executive producers of the 2009 film Broken Arrows.
In June 2008, Brin invested $5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.[25]
He and Page co-own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.[26][27]
Brin is a member of AmBAR, a networking organization for Russian-speaking business professionals (both expatriates and immigrants) in the United States. He has made many speaking appearances.[28]
[edit] Quotes
"When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley."[24]
"We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages."[29]
"Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power."[29]
"I think, if anything, I feel like I have gotten a gift by being in the States rather than growing up in Russia. . . . It just make me appreciate my life that much more."[12]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sergey Brin
Born
Sergey Mikhailovich BrinAugust 21, 1973 (1973-08-21) (age 36)Moscow, Soviet Union
Education
Univ. of Maryland (B.S., 1993)Stanford University (M.S., 1995)
Alma mater
University of MarylandStanford University
Occupation
Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
Employer
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CaliforniaTitle: Co-founder and President
Salary
USD free of wage (2008)[1][2]
Net worth
▼ US$12.0 billion[3]
Known for
co-founder of Google, Inc.world's largest internet company
Religious beliefs
Jewish
Spouse(s)
Anne Wojcicki[4]
Children
1
Websitestanford.edu/~sergey
Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union) is a Russian-born American computer scientist[5] best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology.[6] As of 2009, Forbes ranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.[3]
Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an “Enlightenment Man," and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance," a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful" [7] and "Don't be evil."
//
[[edit] Early life and education
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[8][9]
Childhood in the Soviet Union
In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,[10] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn't exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities (both parents are graduates of Moscow State University). Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular..." He therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. However, he said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."[11] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[11] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted," but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more," he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave...".[11]
Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired." For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[11]
At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."[12] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"[11]
Education in America
Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.[13]
Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993 he interned at Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.[14] He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.[15]
[edit] Search engine development
During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was in extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers." [7] Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."[16]
Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.[7]
As Larry Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. ... [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."[11]
The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful.'" Not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web," such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.[7]
Health Information
In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a B.S. in biology. [4][17] She has an active interest in health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the human genome project. “Brin instinctively regards genetics as a database and computing problem. So does his wife, who co-founded the firm, 23andMe,” which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup (consisting of 23 pairs of chromosomes).[7] In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, he said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.[7]
Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. In 2008, he decided to donate a large sum to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.[18] Brin used the services of 23AndMe and discovered that although Parkinson's is generally not hereditary, both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%.[7] When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he stated that his knowledge means that he can now take measures to ward off the disease. An editorial in The Economist magazine states that "Mr Brin regards his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky. ... But Mr Brin was making a much bigger point. Isn’t knowledge always good, and certainly always better than ignorance?" [7]
Views Chinese Censorship of Google
Remembering his youth and his family's reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he "agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government of China by allowing it to censor search engine results," but decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.[7] He explained his reasoning to Fortune magazine:
"We felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it." [19]
[edit] Awards and recognition
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...". [20] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..." [21]
In February, 2009, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is "among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer ... [and] honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice...". He was selected specifically, "for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web." [22]
In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
"he has been a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. ... PC Magazine has praised Google [of] the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards." [23]
[edit] Other interests
Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world’s energy and climate problems at Google’s philanthropic arm google.org. He had Google invest in the alternative energy industry to find wider sources of renewable energy. They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's supply.[24] He is an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile (356 km) range battery electric vehicle.
Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders." He and Page are also the executive producers of the 2009 film Broken Arrows.
In June 2008, Brin invested $5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.[25]
He and Page co-own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.[26][27]
Brin is a member of AmBAR, a networking organization for Russian-speaking business professionals (both expatriates and immigrants) in the United States. He has made many speaking appearances.[28]
[edit] Quotes
"When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley."[24]
"We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages."[29]
"Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power."[29]
"I think, if anything, I feel like I have gotten a gift by being in the States rather than growing up in Russia. . . . It just make me appreciate my life that much more."[12]
Mark Zuckerberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Zuckerberg
Born
Mark Elliot ZuckerbergMay 14, 1984 (1984-05-14) (age 25)White Plains, New York, USA
Occupation
Founder, CEO & President of Facebook
Net worth
$100 million+[1]
Religious beliefs
Atheist[2]
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. As a Harvard student, he created the online social website Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes. Facebook is a social networking site popular worldwide. Zuckerberg serves as Facebook's CEO.[3] He has been the subject of controversy for the origins of his business[4] and his wealth.[5]
Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008. He fell under the Scientists & Thinkers category for his web phenomenon, Facebook, and ranked 52 out of 101 people.[citation needed]
Contents[hide]
[edit] Early life
Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter Academy Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. While attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he built a program to help the workers in his father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead.[6]
[edit] Facebook
Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008
[edit] Founding
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the "Facebook". Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing", until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools with social contacts with Harvard.[7][8][9] By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools and hundreds of thousands of people were using it.[citation needed]
[edit] Moving to California
Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California. To date, he has not returned as a student to college.
[edit] News Feed
On September 5, 2006, Facebook launched News Feed, a product to show what your friends were doing on the site. Zuckerberg was criticized as some saw News Feed as unnecessary and a tool for cyberstalking.
[edit] Facebook Platform
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for building social applications on other websites.
[edit] Facebook Beacon
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon, enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, could let friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list items.
The program came under heavy privacy concerns from both privacy groups and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a blog post on Facebook[10] taking responsibility for issues with Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.
In 2008, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg as the 321st richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He is the youngest person ever to appear on the Forbes 400.[13] In 2009 it was reported that Zuckerberg's fortune had dropped below $1 billion.[1]
[edit] Microsoft investment in Facebook
On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc. This would indicate that Facebook had a market value of $15 billion at the time of the sale.[14]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Zuckerberg
Born
Mark Elliot ZuckerbergMay 14, 1984 (1984-05-14) (age 25)White Plains, New York, USA
Occupation
Founder, CEO & President of Facebook
Net worth
$100 million+[1]
Religious beliefs
Atheist[2]
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. As a Harvard student, he created the online social website Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes. Facebook is a social networking site popular worldwide. Zuckerberg serves as Facebook's CEO.[3] He has been the subject of controversy for the origins of his business[4] and his wealth.[5]
Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008. He fell under the Scientists & Thinkers category for his web phenomenon, Facebook, and ranked 52 out of 101 people.[citation needed]
Contents[hide]
[edit] Early life
Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York and raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter Academy Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. While attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he built a program to help the workers in his father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead.[6]
[edit] Facebook
Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008
[edit] Founding
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the "Facebook". Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing", until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools with social contacts with Harvard.[7][8][9] By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools and hundreds of thousands of people were using it.[citation needed]
[edit] Moving to California
Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California. To date, he has not returned as a student to college.
[edit] News Feed
On September 5, 2006, Facebook launched News Feed, a product to show what your friends were doing on the site. Zuckerberg was criticized as some saw News Feed as unnecessary and a tool for cyberstalking.
[edit] Facebook Platform
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for building social applications on other websites.
[edit] Facebook Beacon
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon, enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, could let friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list items.
The program came under heavy privacy concerns from both privacy groups and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a blog post on Facebook[10] taking responsibility for issues with Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.
In 2008, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg as the 321st richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He is the youngest person ever to appear on the Forbes 400.[13] In 2009 it was reported that Zuckerberg's fortune had dropped below $1 billion.[1]
[edit] Microsoft investment in Facebook
On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc. This would indicate that Facebook had a market value of $15 billion at the time of the sale.[14]
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