Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
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Following above you will read today success story of Mr.Mark Elliot Zuckerberg :
An ‘accidental billionaire’ Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, popularly known as Mark Zuckerberg, is the brain behind the popular social networking site- Facebook that has the entire world hooked to it. A computer programmer and an Internet entrepreneur Zuckerberg is the chief executive and president of Facebook. In 2004, it was co-founded as a private company by him and classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while they were students at Harvard University.
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In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. As of 2011, his personal wealth was estimated to be USD 13.5 billion.
Born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family, his father, Edward Zuckerberg ran a dental practice attached to the family's home while his mother Karen worked as a psychiatrist. Since his childhood Zuckerberg showed signs of intelligence and a special interest in programming. In his spare time he developed different kinds of computer programs, with a particular emphasis on communication channels.
At the age of 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends he also created many computer games.
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A born prodigy, Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics but his fascination with computers remained intact and he continued to work on developing new programmes. In High School, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.
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After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became a rage but was later scrapped after it was deemed inappropriate.
Marvelling at his ‘revolutionizing’ projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called ‘Harvard Connection’. This site was meant to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg gave a nod to the idea, but soon backed out to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
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He was inspired in creating ‘Facebook’ by the student yearbook from his time spent at Phillips Exeter Academy. And that is when the real story began, the story of Facebook in Zuckerberg’s dorm room shared with his co-founders. In the initial stages of development the site catered only to the students at Harvard, but Zuckerberg and his companions saw the potential for it to become increasingly widespread, and make it available to other students.
Finally they created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site—first called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004. After this, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.
In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested USD 12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students. Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by the end of 2005. The site then began attracting the interest of other companies, who wanted to advertize with the popular social hub.
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Still not willing to sell out, Zuckerberg kept turning companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more attractive features.
As it said “that you don’t make 500 million friends without making few enemies” and in 2006 the business mogul faced his first big hurdle. The creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses. However, Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks.
In 2007 Mark set-up Facebook platform, something which enables social applications to be created within Facebook and therefore hosts great appeal to developers. Recent statistics show that there are 800,000 active developers using this spin-off service worldwide.
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Zuckerberg received another jolt when the 2009 book ‘The Accidental Billionaires’, by writer Ben Mezrich, hit stores. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story. Regardless of how true-to-life the story was, Mezrich managed to sell the rights of the tale to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and the critically acclaimed film ‘The Social Network,’ starring Jesse Eisenberg (as Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, went on to receive eight Academy Award nominations. Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later said that many of the details in the film were inaccurate.
Basking in his new found success Zuckerberg founded the Start-up: Education foundation. On September 22, 2010, it was reported that Zuckerberg had arranged to donate USD100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey. In the same year he along with Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett signed a promise they called the "Giving Pledge", in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to donate 50% or more of their wealth to charity.
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At 27, Zuckerberg has already achieved what many would be more than satisfied with in a lifetime in little over a quarter of a century. But the regular improvements and changes he makes to the website has succeeded where others failed (Orkut, Hifive) i.e.connecting the world almost seamlessly. Such is the case that today nothing is complete without associating one with Facebook.
Zuckerberg has not even reached his 30th birthday and it is the only early days of his success story. It looks as years from now his biography will be looked upon as a defining moment in social networking and entrepreneurship history.
Zuckerberg lives in a modest rented home in Palo Alto, California, with his girlfriend Chan. In 2011, they changed their status in their respective sites to ‘in a relationship’ and many fans ‘like this’.
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