College Ideas that Changed the World!!!

College is the place which is regarded to be the place for all the fun that comes once a lifetime. College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night. But that’s not all.
At this point, I would like to I recall the words of Thomas Ehrlich:
A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself. That is to say, Colleges have always been a place for initiating innovative ideas. Ideas that have come from a bunch of college students have already generated many success stories but there are some who have created history. Some of these ideas which were cultivated in some college students, with the help of their friend, later on emerged to be phenomenons. There are few such examples where college projects or Ideas grew to be something large than expected or even imagined.
With this Article, I pay my tribute to those guys, whose college ideas became larger than life.

Google Inc.

Lawerence Page & Sergy Brin

Google is the first thing that comes on mind when we want to search anything on the Internet. I don’t think there is anyone who is used to Internet and doesn’t know Google. Google has been more than a sensation. Well, the search Engine giant that is ruling the Internet today was a College project by Larry Page and Sergy Brin, when the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. What started as a little project from Stanford has grown into the Web’s most talked-about powerhouse. But this seems to be the start to the Google guys as they are trying to rule the every bit of Cyber space by owning and successfully managing sites like Youtube, Gmail, Orkut and so on. Apart from this, they are also coming up with various softwares like Google Sketch, Picasa, Google Earth, the browser Google Chrome and of course the Chrome OS.

Few Stats:

Founded on: September 4, 1998

Industry type: Internet and Computer Software

Revenue: US$ 23.651 billion

Employees: 21,805

Website: www.google.com

Watching the current scenario, it seems Google is in a hurry, to reach the top!!!

Facebook, Inc.

Mark Zuckerberg

If you talk about College Projects which were larger than life, you can’t miss Mr Zuckerberg, the founder of the so famous Social Networking Site, Facebook. The popularity of Facebook can be well described by the movie, The Social Network, which is loosely based on Facebook. What started as a college project in the Harvard, emerged to be the next big thing on the Internet and the social networking community. Along  with his college room-mates and fellow computer science student Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg created The Facebook, which was  only limited to the Harvard Students. Later on, with the increasing popularity of Facebook, Zuckerberg had to drop-out from Harvard and continue to lead Facebook.

Few Stats:

Founded on: February 4, 2004

Industry type: Social Networking Service

Revenue: US$ 800 million

Employees: 1400

Website: www.facebook.com

Today Facebook boasts of 500 million active users worldwide and that means one out of 14 people around the world!!! Incredible, isn’t it ?

Microsoft Corporation

Bill Gates & Paul Allen

The richest man on earth and what made him rich, the passion of programming. Gates was interested in programming since his childhood. After his graduation, he scored 1590 out of 1600 and got enrolled in Harvard. In Harvard he didn’t have a definite study plan and he spent a lot of time with the school’s computer. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, his childhood friend and later in 1975, he dropped from Harvard to form his own company called Micro-soft along with Paul Allen. This company started making software for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry systems (MITS) but it was in 1980 when IBM approached Microsoft to provide them an OS for their PC. This was the point where the entrepreneurship skills of Gates came into play. Since then, Microsoft has climbed new summits giving birth to hundreds of millionaires.

Few Stats:

Founded on: April 4,1975

Industry type: Computer software, Digital distribution, Computer hardware, Video games, IT consulting, Online advertising, Retail stores

Revenue: US$ 62.484 billion

Employees: 89000

Website: www.microsoft.com

I don’t feel Microsoft needs more explanation or Introduction.

Dell Inc.

Micheal Dell

Most of us know Dell, the company that develops, sells and supports computers and related products and services. But the history behind Dell is little known to people. Dell was initiated in 1984. Basically, it was not a college project, but as the idea was initiated while the founder, Micheal Dell was still in collage, I prefer to keep in the list of College Ideas. Micheal Dell created “PCs Limited” while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. His Dorm room was the Headquarter and the company sold IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components. With the success, Michael had to drop out in order to focus full-time on his business. In 1985, after the company designed its first PC “The Turbo PC” there was no looking back for Micheal Dell and made him the youngest CEO of a fortune 500 company ever.

Few Stats:

Founded on: November 4,1984

Industry type: Computer Systems, Computer Peripherals, Computer Software, IT consulting, IT services

Revenue: US$ 52.902 billion

Employees: 96000

Website: www.dell.com

Yahoo! Inc.

David Filo & Jerry Yang

Another web giant, Yahoo! was also the outcome of the hobby project of two Ph.D. Candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang. Everything started as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Eventually, Jerry and David’s lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories … and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”, though the website started as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.

Later Yahoo took over Four11′s webmail service, RocketMail, and made it Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger. Yahoo! acquired was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups.

Few Stats:

Founded on: March 1,1995

Industry type: Internet, Computer software

Revenue: US$ 6.460 billion

Employees: 13900

Website: www.yahoo.com

Today, Yahoo stands as one of the biggest player in the cyber world.

GNU\Linux

Richard Stallman & Linus Trovalds

Open source is emerging and slowly taking over the World. I am quite hopeful and sure that Open Source is going to be the biggest thing in the future. Thanks to Richard Stallman, who initiated the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and finally the Open Source Project.

The idea of GNU came into existence while Richard Stallman was still present at MIT. Stallman a system administrator at MIT felt the need of Free software. So, GNU Project was launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman originally to develop a Unix-compatible operating system called GNU, intended to be entirely free software. Many programs and utilities were contributed by developers around the world, and by 1991 most of the components of the system were ready. The kernel of GNU, The Hurd was a problem though. So, The GNU project was ready with a missing a Kernel.

Then, there came in Linus Trovalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland where he had been using Minix, a non-free Unix-like system, and began writing his own kernel. This kernel, which is called Linux, was afterwards combined with the GNU system to produce a complete free operating system also known as GNU/Linux.

Hence what started as a small Idea in College has been spreading throughout the world and taking over companies who are always sucking your pocket for some creepy software.

At this point, I would like to present the Words of Stallman:

Free Unix!

Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed…

- Richard Stallman; Posting to net.unix-wizards; 27 Sept. 1983.

And Linus Trovalds:

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…

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; Posting to comp.os.minix; 25 Aug. 1991.

So, they were the geeks who started something small in there college which eventually became the biggest thing for the world. Of course they can mean to be a source of inspiration for all the students and the most striking part to learn is that most of them were Sophomores…

What does that mean???

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