Seriously Business - Entrepreneur, Business, and Inventions Blog

Name: Pierre Omidyar

Date of Birth: 21/6/1967

Mini CV: - Helped write MacDraw when working for Apple subsidiary Claris

- Founded Ink Development, later renamed eShop, in 1991

- Launched eBay, previously Auction Web, in September 1995

- Achieved billionaire status after company went public three years later

- Formed the Omidyar Network for investment in various enterprises and efforts in 2004

Among the mottos displayed on the front page of the website for the Omidyar Network, among whose aims is to promote self-sufficiency and empowerment in business, is the statement: “We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen.” Having soared to billionaire success through eBay, now one of the most recognised and highly-valued online brands in the world, the Paris-born Pierre Omidyar is well placed to assist in this voyage of discovery. eBay started out as, effectively, an experimental side-venture for Omidyar � even though the story that he only set eBay up to help his then fiancee expand her collection of Pez dispensers was proved to be a PR ruse - and he has seen it grow into something which thrives on a remarkably firm sense of trust and social responsibility between strangers. (more…)

Names: Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Dates of birth: 26/3/1973 (Page); 21/8/1973 (Brin)

Mini CV: - Met in 1995 as PhD computer science students at Stanford University

- Created Google as a research project early the next year

- Still co-running the company along with - since 2001 - Eric Schmidt

Larry Page and Sergey Brin provide the classic example of a pair of entrepreneurs who latched onto an existing concept and took it further than anybody else could imagine - creating what is now ranked as the world’s third most valuable technology company. Seeing a gap in the nascent search engine market of the mid 1990s (essentially that search engines might better analyse the relationships between website than rank according to search term occurrences), they created Google after using its concept as a base for their research theses, seeing its popularity and profitability mushroom soon after. (more…)

Names: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

Dates of birth: 24/2/1955 (Jobs), 11/8/1950 (Wozniak)

Mini-CV: Co-founded Apple (along with Ronald Wayne, who sold his share to them soon after), on April 1^st 1976. Prior to this, Jobs had been a technician at Atari and Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard. Both were members of the pioneering Homebrew Computer Club. Met as summer employees at Hewlett Packard while they were students. (more…)

Name: Michael O’Leary

Date of Birth: 1961

Mini CV:

- Pre-1991: Tax consultant for KPMG
- 1991 - 1994: Deputy chief executive, Ryanair
- 1994 - present: Chief executive, Ryanair

How did Michael O’Leary muster the wits and wherewithal to transform a struggling regional airline - whose annual passenger numbers barely broke six figures at the turn of the 1990s - into the most profitable carrier on the continent? Any man who pays £4,000 for a taxi licence so that he could bypass congestion between his home and Ryanair’s headquarters is likely to push forward his business projects with a similar emphasis on velocity - and O’Leary’s pugnacious, aggressive style has served him well ever since he left his job as a tax consultant before leaving to work for one-time Ryanair boss Tony Ryan. (more…)

Name: Richard Branson

Date of Birth: 18/11/1950

Mini CV:

- Began selling records by mail-order in 1970
- Founded Virgin Records in 1973, a year after setting up a music studio
- Formed Virgin Airways in 1984 and Virgin Mobile in 1999, among other high-profile additions to the Virgin name
- Knighted in 1999 for ’services to entrepreneurship’

Entrepreneurs rarely come more high-profile than Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin empire has grown almost into part of the nation’s consciousness since it started out as a small record firm 33 years ago. Today he is seen as the shining example of an entrepreneur who blends a fierce drive with excellent personal skills and a deep public conscience - with his billion-pound successes proving to be the icing on the cake. (more…)

The world of online video has been growing at an enormous rate over the past year and many online companies have been trying to get in on what is the next big thing.

One of the major attractions for companies to video sites is simply the sheer number of people now using them. Websites such as YouTube and MySpace have seen a massive uptake in popularity and it is therefore little surprise that the industry is seeing considerable consolidation, with search engine rivals Google and Yahoo! among those moving into the arena. (more…)

It almost goes without saying that, in today’s consumer-focussed age, enterprises are incessantly seeking to find the magic advertising formula which will steal a march on their rivals. How to achieve this? Increasingly the focus seems to be falling on more personal means which involve the individual - and these can be divided into two categories. (more…)

Google’s acquisition of YouTube, the video-sharing website, for £883 million this week has thrust the role of internet TV and videos firmly into the spotlight - bringing into view the exciting possibility of an organised and archived video library which would be easily searchable. (more…)

By 2010 there will be 60 million podcast downloaders in the United States alone, according to research carried out last year. The average worldwide user already downloads up to six per month and, with this figure rising all the time, it is easy to see why companies small and large are paying podcasting serious attention as they look to map out their plans for the future.

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A former insurance loss adjuster from Coventry is preparing to launch his new business after putting his insurance knowledge to good practice.

Luke Brown has seen plenty of incidents of flood damage during his time as a loss adjuster and is acutely aware of the devastation that a flood can cause to properties. As such, he has developed a new product which can shut off the water supply as soon as a leak is detected. (more…)