History of Facebook

Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time.

But Zuckerberg needed help to grow his little social networking site that could. He would not stop until The Facebook had been installed on all university campuses in America. In September 2004, they secured venture capital from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The $500,000 investment was a start, but Zuckerberg and friends had big plans for The Facebook. Seeing the potential value in The Facebook, Jim Breyer and Accel Partners ponied up $12.7 million to assist Zuckerberg in the expansion of his virtual empire.

So by October 2004, Zuckerberg had the money, the manpower, and the institutional backing to go global. Betatesting continued on within the American University population for the next year, and in August 2005, The Facebook dropped the “The” and Facebook.com was registered for $200,000. The network opened up, and within months anyone with a valid institutional email address from over 30,000 organizations across the planet were eligible for membership, including high school students, government employees and the corporate community.

History of Google

Google, the leading search engine worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who was later to become Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage.

In August 1998, thanks to David Cheriton, a Stanford professor, Page and Brin meet Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystem and working at Cisco.

After an hour, he makes a $100,000 check to “Google Inc.” without knowing the company does not exist yet.  Andy was one of the few to see true potential of what these boys had created. During their presentation to him, Andy said he had to duck out for another meeting and offered to write them a check. The check was for $100,000 and that indeed had got things moving for them. 

In October 1998, Page and Brin convinced a friend to rent a Garage and spare room for $1700/month. They quickly added 8 phone lines, a cable modem and a DSL line. After two months, they were 8 people and they moved again in February 1999. From a first office in a garage good for small team, they moved to 165 University Ave. in Palo Alto after 5 months This is the home of many other startups including Logitech and Paypal.

In September the boys moved into the their workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, CA. They then went on to file for incorporation in California on September 4 1998.  Shortly after completing this important task, the boys went an opened a bank account in the name of Google Inc., their newly established company, and deposited the $100,000 dollar check Andy Bechtolsheim had given them. Shortly after they have established there new business they began hiring employees. There first one was Craig Silverstein, a fellow grad student from Stanford as well.

 Early in 1999 they struck a deal with Sequoia Capitaland Kleiner Perkins for $25 million. In November 1999 Charlie Ayers joined Google as the company’s first  chef.  In April of 2000. Google announced the MentalPlex program, which envisages the software’s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. In June of 2000, Google partnered with Yahoo! to become their default search provider. Also in June they announced the first billion URL index, making Google become the world’s largest search engine. In September of 2000 they started offering searches in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean , bringing their total number of supported languages to 15. In December 2000 Google toolbar was released.

It is well known that it extremely difficult to keep on being innovative. Google has taken creative approaches: employees work in small teams (3ideally) and are free to use 20% of their working time personal projects that may become future Google Products. Google News, Froogle, Gmail have roots in this 20% time as well as Orkut.

And they do not seem to lose their humor.

"Feel free to write me or leave comments for me"

What is Nokia Symbian?

Symbian is an operating system (OS) and software platform designed for smartphones and currently maintained by Nokia.  Symbian OS has been used by a number of companies (totaling 400 million units and still making up 40% of the smart phone market) among which Sony, Ericsson (and later Sony-Ericsson), Siemens, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia and a few more.
as opposed to Maemo/MeeGo and, to a lesser extent Android which are rather new software w/ still a few "baby illnesses", Symbian is a very mature platform with a proven usability and functionality record.

History

• Psion founded by David Potter inn 1980 launched the Psion Organizer, the world's first volume-produced handheld computer in 1984.
• In 1991, Psion introduces the EPOC OS (Electronic Piece Of Cheese, according to the legend).
• In 1997, Psion Series 5 - the first EPOC32 (32-bit) palmtop.
• June 1998 - Symbian is established as a private independent company and is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion. From this point onwards has EPOC OS been called Symbian OS.
• 2000
• September - Symbian ships Version 6 of its software platform to licensees.
• November - The world's first Symbian OS phone, the Ericsson R380 Smartphone, ships.
• 2001
• June - The world's first open Symbian OS phone became available - the Nokia 9210 Communicator.
• November
• Nokia introduces the Series 60 - a licensable UI for Symbian.
• The first 2.5G Symbian OS phone, the Nokia 7650, is announced. The 7650 is the first mass-market Symbian phone and it is based on the Nokia series 60 reference design.
• 2002
• February - Symbian announces UIQ user interface application for Symbian OS.
• October - Samsung licenses Symbian OS for smartphones. World’s top five mobile phone manufacturers now Symbian OS licensees.
• December - Fujitsu has completed development of a Symbian OS smartphone for NTT DoCoMo's FOMA 3G network - The F2051.
• 2003
• April - Symbian launches Symbian OS v7.0s at Exposium03.
• October - Nokia announces the first "Media" phone, the TV-enabled 7700, based on the new "Series 90".
• 2004
• February - Symbian OS v8.0 is announced.
• March - Symbian leads smartphone market.
• February 2005 - Symbian OS v9 is announced.
• 2006
• May - 100th commercial phone model ships.
• November - 100 million Symbian smartphones shipped.

Advantages

1.   Greater range of applications.
2.   High quality games.
3.   Better inbuit wap browser.
4.   You can have pdf reader for your phone.
5.   Connectivity is lot more easier and faster.
6.   Real Player, Smart movie player etc sort of application are not available with java phones.
7.   You can download big files through your phone easily with 3G around.
8.   Unlike java phones they are prone to virus attack.

Disadvantages

1.   Not suitable for phones with low RAM and slow processor (minimum requirements for good performance: 369 MHz processor, 70 MB RAM).
2.   More chances of viruses (but anti-virus applications are available).