.png)
INTRODUCTION
Can we imagine a day without Facebook or Google? Can any employee think of a day without Google-Drive or Dropbox?
It’s a technical world out there and we use all these tools to connect and know about everything under the sun. We use Facebook to learn about our friends, Google is our gateway to the internet and Dropbox is used for sharing and uploading files.
But no one tries to know about Facebook or Skype or Google and how they originated. So here’s a few interesting facts about some regularly used online tools.
1. GOOGLE
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
It was originally nicknamed “BackRub”. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros.
After the company’s IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Before 2004, Schmidt made $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each received an annual salary of $150,000.
One interesting little tidbit about Google is that all new employees are called “Nooglers,” and are given a propeller beanie cap to wear on their first Friday.
2. DROPBOX
Did you know that the founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, conceived the idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT.
He founded Dropbox, Inc. in June 2007 and was officially launched at 2008’s TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference.
Dropbox has been named as the world’s fifth most valuable web startup after Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and Groupon.
But Dropbox’s fast growth hasn’t always been smooth. It burst into China, only to find itself blocked by the Chinese government.
3. SKYPE
Skype’s original proposed name was Sky Peer-to Peer. It was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklenstrom from Sweden.
Skype comes bundled with a mind-boggling number of exotic and unlikely locales and languages. Here are just a few of them….Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan,
Chinese (Traditional and simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Did you know that a Skype user can have local numbers in any country, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country. The countries on this growing list are referred to collectively as the Skype.
4. FACEBOOK
Facemash is the original name of Facebook. Did you know that at first it was used to rank girls of Harvard University and the ranking was done only by the Harvard students?
It was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Did you that Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage.
The “Social Network ” Movie based on the Facebook has won Four Golden Globes.
The founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which means blue is the colour he can see best. No prizes for guessing why his favourite colour is the dominant palette for the Facebook site.
Moreover it is reportedly impossible to block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
CONCLUSION
We are the children of a technological age and we have found streamlined ways of doing our everyday work by using hundreds of online tools. we use all these tools to connect. Today I have provided some tidbits of information about a few of them. So that when you use them next, you will be be better informed not just about the usage of the tool but also about the tool itself.
