Now more than ever, digital technology has become a staple in our professional and private life.The revolution can’t be ignored as it is changing the way people travel, work, interact & organize their daily activities. And it does it at high speed.With some of the enthusiasm brought by this digital age, this podcast is about celebrating impactful innovations on their day of birth. We’ll find out how some brillant minds set the path with new ways to solve old business problems, create new opportunities, and changed the society entirely.I’m your host, Vincent Giraud. Welcome to the digital innovation days!

Google marked the release of its web browser on the 11th of December, 2008, when it launched the first stable public version of Chrome. Although the tech giant had previously released 3 versions for testing, they were beta versions. With the release of version 1, Chrome entered a market where users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was gaining momentum. By 2013, Chrome was dominating the web browser industry, clearly surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox.The software used certain features from Apple’s WebKit open-source rendering engine as well as Firefox, and its source code was made available by Google as part of its Chromium project. Google Chrome stood out due to a multitude of features. For starters, it strictly focused on web standards. This came at a time when Microsoft was struggling with proprietary web standards for its own web navigator, Internet Explorer. Chrome also introduced the idea of sandboxing in a web browser. By sandboxing individual tabs, if one of them crashed, the others would not be affected. This led to improved speed and stability although it required each tab to use as much dedicated memory as the first one. However, when any tab was closed, it released its allocated memory, effectively solving a problem many older browsers were facing and which could only be fixed by restarting them.Today, Google Chrome is the undisputed leader in web browsers. With a market share of nearly 65%, it is the most popular web browser in 2021. It is more than just a web navigator now. In fact, it can be viewed as a complete platform that can run on different operating systems including Windows, Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS. From its release till now, Google Chrome has added value for the users and helped drive innovation in the field.

Larry Wall released the general-purpose programming language Perl on the 18th of December, 1987. It was meant to offer text manipulation, web development, network programming, system administration, and Graphics User Interface (GUI) development, among other tasks. With its tagline, “easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”, Perl was designed to make computer programming easier and faster.With the advent of the web, Perl also gained momentum. In fact, it became the dominant language for Common Interface Gateway (CGI) programming. The regular expression and string parsing abilities that this language offered brought it immense popularity as well. System administration tasks that were too complex for a shell script but not worth the effort when coding in C, were easily done with Perl. This also became the perfect language to interact with databases, leading to its widespread use to implement dynamic websites. True to its motto of TIMTOWTDI (“there is more than one way to do it”), Perl cemented its position as a very versatile and flexible language since it allowed the user to adopt any kind of programming style, be it procedural or object-oriented.Although Perl may not be sitting atop the list of the most commonly-used programming languages today, its uniqueness largely stems from its compatibility with other programming languages. Perl is being used throughout the web and it is also termed as the “duct tape of the Internet” because it tied together systems and interfaces that could not work together prior to Perl. While many think that Perl has “died” as a language now, it is still being heavily used not just for maintaining existing projects but also for creating new ones. In fact, it is still considered among the best coding languages to increase one’s employability as well as remuneration.

When the world’s first ever web server (http://info.cern.ch/) went live at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on the 24th of December, 1990, it marked the creation of one of the four essentials of the World Wide Web: HTML, web protocol, web browser, and web server. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, set up a NeXT computer at CERN as the first ever server. However, this web server was more of a small intranet for information sharing among CERN physicists rather than being “world wide”.By 1991, several other web servers had been created, all located at CERN. By this time, it had been successfully tested that document retrieval could be performed from web servers on incompatible computer systems. However, since all the web servers were at CERN, the possibility of retrieving data from halfway across the world was questionable. To do so, a computer was set up with the help of Paul Kunz, a physicist at Stanford University. This server was located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the end of 1991, it went live, becoming the first web server outside Europe.What started from a single NeXT computer at a nuclear research lab in Europe has now grown into an indispensable part of the internet globally. A world without web servers means a world where information cannot be retrieved from any part of the world within an instant - essentially unimaginable. The millions of servers online are responsible for displaying website content by storing, preprocessing, and delivering the requested web pages to users. The sheer significance of this invention can be gauged by the fact that all data that are shared over the internet today are hosted on web servers. And while the first web server could only retrieve data from other servers located in CERN, today this retrieval can quickly be done across oceans and continents.

The creation of the Domain Name System (DNS) on the 1st of January, 1985 transformed the way the internet was browsed. Essentially the phonebook of the internet, the DNS allowed users to access information using domain names instead of IP addresses.Each machine or device connected to the internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that is used to find and interact with a particular device. These IP addresses can be in the IPv4 format (such as 192.168.1.1) or the newer, alphanumeric IPv6 format (like 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2). Web browsers interact and load internet resources using IP addresses. While this is completely understandable for machines, it is exceptionally difficult for humans to memorise more than a few IP addresses. To make accessing websites easier, the DNS was created which translates domain names (such as google.com) to IP addresses. While the way the DNS works involves several servers and can be a long-winded process, it takes a few milliseconds only to fetch an IP address given a domain name.If it weren’t for the DNS, we would still be using difficult-to-remember strings of numbers like 192.58.9.34 instead of the easy and memorable domain names that we use today. DNS enabled users to have a more user-friendly, collaborative, and diverse internet. With over 363.5 million registered domain names, the DNS is not only a fundamental part of the internet today but also its backbone. In fact, if a DNS is not responding, a connection to other websites over the internet cannot be established. Interestingly, before personal computing became popular, the few users over the internet could memorise and recognise some familiar IP addresses but this is beyond practical in today’s time and age with millions of domain names and even more IP addresses, which further underscores how significant the DNS is.

When Bitcoin was created by its mysterious pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto on the 3rd of January, 2009, the world was introduced to a completely new form of currency - cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a form of binary data which acts as a payment medium. Since then, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been launched taking the current total to over 7,812. However, Bitcoin remains the most popular and traded cryptocurrency in the industry. In fact, the price movement of Bitcoin strongly impacts the entire cryptocurrency market.Bitcoin was initially created to be an electronic, peer-to-peer cash system but now it is also viewed as a store-of-value currency, such as gold. The concept of this cryptocurrency was introduced in a white paper in 2008 under a pseudonym. To this day, the identity of the author is unknown; in fact, it is not even known whether this paper was by a single person or a group of people. What makes Bitcoin so valuable is its scarcity. With the maximum supply set at 21 million, there will not be any more Bitcoins - no one can create or duplicate them, not even the original inventor(s). As with all cryptocurrencies, the parameters (for example, the rules of buying and selling, the total amount, how new Bitcoins can be added to the market, etc.) for Bitcoin have been set.Today, Bitcoin is not only significant because it is merely at the top of all cryptocurrencies. It is crucial because it established an altogether new financial ecosystem. Cryptocurrencies offer multiple benefits, some of which are as follows. They provide anonymity which is paramount for many when it comes to financing. With the world economy shifting to digital currency in the future, the worth of cryptocurrencies will only increase. With cryptocurrencies, settlements are instant, transactions extremely simple, and availability is high due to easy internet access for many.The launch of Bitcoin created a digital currency ecosystem that has just truly begun and will inevitably transform the world economy in the future.

There are very few technological events in recent history that can rival the introduction of the iPhone by Apple on the 9th of January, 2007. Dubbing it the “reinvention of the phone”, the company claimed that it was a revolutionary product that was five years ahead of any other mobile phone. Starting at $499, this first-generation iPhone offered a 3.5-inch diagonal screen, had a 2-megapixel camera, and featured the then-new multitouch features. This device was marketed as a combination of three products - a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough internet communications device. The first iPhone sold 1.39 million units. Today, this device holds a major share in the global smartphone market revenue.With every new line of iPhone introduced, this smartphone has gained loyal fans and become a highly popular brand. A few of the aspects that make the iPhone so uniquely desirable are as follows. This device was not the first to feature a multi-touch screen but it was the first to make using one highly intuitive and easy. Using an iPhone is a luxury experience since it is made from high-quality products. The design is extremely simple and minimalistic yet elegant, adding to the ease of use. The seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem offers greater security and better software optimisation. And of course, the extremely positive perception and image attached to this phone are almost unparalleled.At the time of its release, critics did not foresee the iPhone performing well in the market due to its price range. Interestingly, since 2009, this product has been ranked among the top 5 smartphone vendors in the world. In the year 2020 alone, iPhone revenue was over $137.7 billion. In fact, this product is so revolutionary that it has separated the smartphone market into two categories - the iPhone and everything else.

On the 15th of January, 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, a free and collaborative online encyclopedia. Written and edited by the internet community, it is the largest of its type of websites and is available in over 300 languages besides English. With more than 6.3 million articles and 42 million users, it is ranked among the most visited sites on the internet today.In 2000, Bomis, a web advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, among others, launched Nupedia. This was a free online encyclopedia whose editor in chief was Larry Sanger. By January 2001, fewer than two dozen articles were completed and there were rarely any contributions. Concerned about the growth of Nupedia, Sanger and Wales decided to lend it support with an open-source encyclopedia based on wiki software. Initially, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia but following certain objections from the advisory board and reluctance among the editors and reviewers to associate Nupedia with a wiki-based site, Wikipedia was relaunched as an independent website a few days later. It grew at a staggering pace and by the end of the year, Wikipedia was available in around 19 languages.Throughout the years, the most serious challenges that Wikipedia has faced are plagiarism, inaccuracies, and vandalism. Despite this, impressively, Wikipedia has maintained its role as the go-to site for millions of users to access information online. It continues to be a reliable database of information without a large number of paid moderators and editors. Additionally, the site owners and policymakers have implemented various strategies to counter its problems and ensure that their original vision is truly fulfilled - allowing people to collaborate and build an online portal of easily accessible knowledge. Thus, what keeps Wikipedia relevant and reliable today despite its collaborative nature is the review of all information by broad groups of people, stringent requirements regarding the data, its transparent discussions, and the willingness to swiftly delete inaccurate content.

The introduction of Macintosh by Apple on the 22nd of January, 1984, revolutionised the computing industry by making computers easy to use for any and everyone, not just experts. The Macintosh, or Mac as it is now known, is a series of several lines of personal computers, developed by Apple. The original Macintosh was the first commercially successful personal computer that included two known yet unpopular features at the time - mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) instead of the command-line interfaces that were in common use. It was also the pioneer in print preview, the ability to see how a document would look once printed before printing it. However, while this computer was a visionary product, it did not offer very much to the users. In fact, when Macintosh was first launched, it was not a hit, was unaffordable, and was not completely workable. Today, there are more than 100 million Macs in use.Macintosh or Mac has changed computing significantly, introducing innovative concepts and inspiring breakthroughs in technology. It introduced the idea of icons and turned them into art. It made networking easy since Macs could be connected to each other using AppleTalk. Furthermore, Microsoft Office was born on Mac and following its success, Microsoft released a Windows version. It made pointing portable before touchpads and enabled playing digital videos with QuickStart. Moreover, it brought forward the idea of a backlit keyboard and light sensors.While the creation of Macintosh is undeniably a remarkable technological achievement, what’s even more inspiring is its relevance and significance even today, almost 4 decades later. Not only has it existed for this long but it also mattered all these years. A major reason for this enduring relevance is Apple and Mac’s commitment to staying fresh by getting rid of redundant and unnecessary features - truly incorporating the spirit of evolution.

Facebook was founded on the 4th of February, 2004, as “The facebook” by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, following the high popularity of Facemash. In 2003, these four Harvard students created Facemash, an online service to judge and rate how attractive their fellow students were. The pictures received 22,000 votes from 450 students. However, since this was in violation of the university rules, Facemash was shut down after just two days. Zuckerberg, however, noticed how well-received and popular Facemash was and registered the domain name: thefacebook.com. In February 2012, Facebook filed to become a public company, raising $16 billion in May - the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) for any internet company till then.What started as a Harvard social networking website is now the biggest global internet phenomenon today. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, it is the leading social media platform. However, today, Facebook has transitioned beyond just a place for people to share their lives with their friends. It is an entire ecosystem offering opportunities to thrive in multiple facets of life - business, entertainment, politics, journalism, communication, etc. In fact, this tech giant has grown to the point where it owns a few of the most popular social media networks available to us - WhatsApp and Instagram, for instance.Over the years, among the challenges that Facebook had to constantly battle, privacy and misinformation remain significant problems. Users have been sceptical of the confidentiality of their data and concerned over the veracity of the information they consume. That being said, it is undeniable that Facebook has forever altered computing and technology. It has been a driving force in open source for many years and shared its innovative hardware and software tools with the broader community. It has, furthermore, given birth to Big Data (in the form of Cassandra database), created millions of jobs, became a major platform for political parties to contest elections, helped organise revolutions, and decided what news is. To put it simply, we have not seen a bigger and more powerful internet phenomenon in our times than Facebook.

The revolutionary launch of Google Maps on the 8th of February, 2005, transformed the way we use maps for directions and navigate the world with our smartphones. Initially, it was launched for desktop as a solution for people to get from one point to another. Today, it’s a gateway to exploration - whether you are travelling by car, bike, public transport, boat, wheelchair, or on foot.Google Maps makes use of a combination of data sources such as aggregate location data, real-time users feedback, historical traffic patterns and local government data along with machine learning. There are multiple views that a user can switch between depending upon their need(s). With over 1 billion monthly active users, it ranks high among the leading mapping applications worldwide. It offers driving directions for 194 countries, spanning over 28 million miles of road. It can provide local information for more than 80 million places across the world and live traffic data from over 50 countries. All of this data is kept up-to-date and reliable with tens of thousands of updates daily.Although Google was not the first to introduce online maps (the world wide web supported the first online maps in 1993), it brought digital maps to the mainstream and popularised their usage. Interestingly, a wide array of other applications and services today rely on Google Maps - Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and UrbanSpoon all are based on Google Maps application user interface (API). This service was invented with the vision to “create one seamless, browsable map of the entire world” - a daunting task that Google Maps has accomplished exceptionally well. The marriage of complicated technologies and diverse data sources in Google Maps has humanised and contextualised location to make it more relevant to us, as should be the purpose of technology and innovation.

The introduction of the IBM Portable Personal Computer 5155 - a product whose roaring success surprised many, including IBM itself - on the 16th of February, 1984 popularised personal computers for everyday use. Weighing about 30 pounds, this computer had the following specifications: built-in ROM Basic, 256K memory standard, 9-inch 25x80 monochrome amber screen which could display graphics, DOS, and Intel 8088 4.77MHz CPU. The keyboard could be detached or folded and snapped shut in the case covering the computer. Priced at $2900, it was an immediate hit with the public and became the first personal computer to gain widespread adoption by the industry.Initially, IBM could not find enough applications for this PC to justify acceptance on a broad basis. Moreover, even if this idea could be approved, it would not have been completed in a short timeframe. However, Bill Lowe, a lab director at IBM, stepped forward and claimed that he could develop a portable personal computer within a year. It was then that a team consisting of 12 developers was established which set out to create this device in 12 months. They were tasked with devising a plan for the software, hardware, marketing setup, and sales strategy. As the plan progressed, more talent and expertise was brought into this project.Although personal computers were available as early as the 1970s, they provided very few applications that did not justify widespread and mainstream use. However, IBM offered a full suite of important applications that could justify broad adoption by the market. It became so popular that for a year or two, the Columbia Business School required every student to have this computer. In addition to this, it was IBM’s brand recognition as well as the massive marketing campaign that led to the fast growth of the personal computers industry. Furthermore, this computer was widely cloned and gave birth to a vast ecosystem of hardware, software, and peripherals to use with it.

On the 22nd of February, 1999, the First Internet Bank of Indiana (First IB) opened its virtual doors to the public. This was the first state-chartered FDIC-insured institution to operate only through the internet. Marketed as the first “extended value online bank”, it provided a full range of real-time internet banking products as well as personalised interactive services. Today, it offers services in all 50 states where customers can have checking and savings (both regular and money market) accounts with competitive interest rates. Besides this, First IB offers credit cards, instalment loans, mortgages, and personal lines of credit.Sitting at the intersection of finance and technology, First IB introduced a branchless financial institution that conducted transactions over the internet exclusively. This was at a time when only around 5% of the world population had access to the internet and only one-fourth of all U.S. banks had websites, with very few offering any kind of online banking services. To even consider that technology could do banking better than well-established financial organisations was a downright outrageous idea at the time to many. Interestingly, First IB was able to offer higher interest rates on deposits and charged no fees for most of its services since it did not have to maintain any branches and had lower overhead than most traditional banks. Moreover, such a bank has fewer access points than a brick-and-mortar structure, leading to stronger security.First IB made banking available and convenient outside of the regular hours and introduced a completely new style of banking. Above all else, this venture signifies how efficiently technology can rival traditional, non-technical solutions - even when masses are sceptical about its success initially. Additionally, the idea of First IB reinforces how technology is truly meant to be employed - to bring convenience to the lives of people.

Founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, graduate students at Stanford University, Yahoo! was incorporated on the 2nd of March, 1995. Initially, the site was called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but as it grew in popularity, it was renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Back then, it was only meant to be a useful guide to navigate the world wide web, and not a business. Today, Yahoo! provides users with information, online utilities, and access to other websites. Its features include a search engine, an email service, a news branch, and a directory.In the late 1990s, Yahoo! was among the major players in the internet frenzy. Although some losses were sustained, it even survived the collapse of numerous internet-based companies in 2001-2002. With multiple major moves, the company remained a notable name in the industry. It battled Google for many years to retain a higher share of the search engine market. It released its Yahoo! Instant Messenger and bought out Flickr, the internet photo network. Another astonishing step was its acquisition of a 40% share of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Throughout the years, Yahoo has made multiple attempts at reorganisation and reconstruction, with David Filo believing that “technology is about constant reinvention”.Although Yahoo! has lost its footing now, for some time in recent history, it was the biggest internet phenomenon. In fact, when the company was only 5 years old, it was worth more than Ford, Chrysler, and GM combined. Many of the apps and services that the internet is filled with today were either invented by Yahoo! or soon found a home there (Broadcast.com, Flickr, Yahoo Notebook, Yahoo Music, etc.). It was, additionally, the pioneer of the pay-per-click advertising model. In 2017, Verizon acquired Yahoo! for $4.8 billion, ending the run of what was once deemed the king of the internet.

When Hulu launched for the general public on the 12th of March, 2008, it offered access to all within the United States. Previously, a beta version of this video streaming platform had also been privately launched. Although Hulu offered only a selection of content (television shows, films, and news) free of cost, users could now watch content on the internet without paying satellite television or cable providers. It took this website only a year to become the fourth-largest video site in the United States. Owned by The Walt Disney Company and Comcast, today Hulu offers its services in the United States and Japan only owing to licensing restrictions.In 2016, the platform was overhauled and converted into a subscription-based model which gave Hulu the chance to exponentially increase its library. Additionally, Hulu offers live streaming from 21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Turner Networks, The CW, A+E Networks, and Discovery Networks, allowing its users to choose from a diverse selection set - a feature not common in streaming services. In addition to this, certain features set Hulu apart from other video streaming sites, Netflix included, showcasing why the name is still relevant and successful over a decade after its launch. It has a fast turnaround of current television, has impressively strong network partnerships, and offers competitive pricing (it even has a free option with a limited catalogue!).As it is important for any technological innovation aiming to stay relevant, Hulu has reinvented itself over the years to better suit its clientele’s requirements and preferences. It is no longer just the website users visit to watch the next-day TV show replays. It now offers its own live TV provider. Bringing convenience to its users, Hulu believes that TV should be mobile, suit one’s lifestyle, and be an application essentially. It is perhaps this user-centric approach to development and technology that helps Hulu stay a popular video streaming name.

With the first-ever tweet made by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, on the 21st of March, 2006, the immensely popular social media platform was launched. Interestingly, this tweet was sold for $2.9 million early in 2021 with its buyer Malaysian-based Sina Estavi likening it to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tweet, which said “just setting up my twttr”, laid the foundation to what has now become a company with a market capitalisation of around $50 billion. Today, Twitter boasts roughly 400 million users which include celebrities, politicians, and journalists among a bevy of other celebrated personalities.Essentially an online microblogging service, Twitter offers a network of users where communication is done throughout the day with brief messages called “tweets”. Initially, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two ex-employees at Google, created a startup called Odeo, which was meant to be a podcasting platform. However, with the launch and rise of Apple’s iTunes, Odeo was not relevant anymore. Therefore, these two along with Jack Dorsey, an Odeo employee, decided to reinvent themselves and brainstormed new ideas. It was then that Jack came up with the idea of an SMS (Short Message Service) that would allow users to communicate within a small group. This plan eventually evolved into Twitter.The real strength of Twitter lies in real-time. No other social media comes close to updating its users about the world and its latest happenings. Beyond technology, Twitter has also largely benefitted politics, science, business, journalism, and celebrity culture. By allowing far greater access to public figures than any other platform, facilitating and fueling activism (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo), and changing the way news is consumed by the masses (multiple perspectives of the same story and democratization of information), Twitter continues to change the world - as any revolutionary technology is expected to.

As the U.S. Census Bureau signed the contract for the first commercially produced digital computer in the U.S., it marked the beginning of a new era in technology. Short for “Universal Automatic Computer”, UNIVAC was dedicated a few months later and was able to perform classification for an average citizen, classifying them into categories of sex, age, marital status, birthplace, residence, education, and employment, etc. At the time of its creation, it was the fastest business machine built yet.UNIVAC was a stored-program computer with 5,400 vacuum tubes, used alphanumeric characters, consumed 125 kW, possessed the ability to tabulate 4,000 items within a minute, weighed 16,686 pounds, and could verify its own work. Termed as a mathematical genius, UNIVAC both surprised the masses with its stellar capabilities and scared them with its ability to replace numerous jobs. Interestingly, in 1952, this machine was able to correctly predict Dwight D. Eisenhower’s unexpected landslide victory in the presidential election after only a small percentage of the votes had been cast.The need for UNIVAC stemmed from the search for mechanical devices that aid and accelerate computation. Given the large volume of data associated with counting in a census, the bureau required faster processing speeds, which UNIVAC offered. It is undeniable that technology has evolved too rapidly for UNIVAC and similar machines to be of any practical use in this time and day. After UNIVAC, smaller and more power-efficient transistor computers were introduced, followed by the development of integrated-circuit machines. More recently, microprocessors enabled the development of personal computers and lastly, laptops. However, it is difficult to imagine all of these highly efficient machines into existence if it were not for UNIVAC and how it commercialised digital computers.

When Gmail was launched on the 1st of April, 2004, many considered it to be a huge joke by Google. Today, this free email service boasts a user-base of 1.8 billion users worldwide. Written in Java, C++, and JavaScript, Gmail is available in 105 languages. Gmail came with vast storage, a fresh new interface, and instant search, among other existing features. Initially, Gmail was an invite-only service and until 2007, users could sign up only through invites.From the very start, Google strived to set itself apart from its competition. Apart from enjoying high storage, users were able to search through their inboxes at immensely fast speeds. Attachment sizes were also increased to 25MB. What truly made Gmail stand out was the search feature whose capability was far beyond what was offered by even the major webmail services at the time. This was made possible by a serious increase in the storage space - 1 GB for each user - which allowed users to keep all their emails instead of regularly deleting them to stay under the limit. While this figure may not be groundbreaking by today’s standards, back then Hotmail and Yahoo Mail only provided 2 to 4 megabytes of storage.The launch of Gmail was a significant moment in tech history for various reasons. Not only was it the first true landmark service from Google since its search engine, but it also completely overshadowed Hotmail and Yahoo Mail - the two most dominant free webmail services of the time. With its array of advanced features, Gmail was the first major cloud-based application that had the potential to replace conventional personal computing software and not just complement it. Thus, what was naively presumed to be a hoax by many before its launch, turned out to be very real and revolutionary.

The development of Java, a high-level, object-oriented programming language, began on the 8th of April, 1991. An American technology company named Sun Microsystems started this project, with a team retreating to an unrevealed location to work on the development. It was initially called “Oak” and was later renamed to “Java”, as it is now popularly known. Today, Java is the number one programming language for developers and billions of devices run on this programming language.Java was marketed as a programming language that offered the best universal operating system to the online community. The aim was to make its applications available to all operating systems. This resolved the issues pertaining to translation between Macintoshes, Unix machines, and IBM-compatible computers. Apart from this platform independence, which was a highly celebrated and novel feature at the time, Java also offered object orientation. This essentially means that Java programs are made up of elements called objects. With Java, developers could write code that would run on virtually any machine, irrespective of the architecture or platform. While this may appear to be a simple benefit, it completely transformed the programming landscape.Having extensive usage, Having extensive usage, Java is being used in building Android, web, scientific applications and other software tools. Not only is this language found on desktops, mobile devices, and large-scale industry servers, it is also rapidly gaining credibility in cloud development and Internet of Things (IoT). Many of the popular websites that we regularly visit are powered by Java including YouTube, eBay, LinkedIn, Google, and Amazon. Additionally, Java has a very large and active community - a vital aspect for the survival and growth of any programming language. Decades after its release, Java shows no signs of decline and is constantly evolving by combining stability with innovation.

When Zoom was launched on the 21st of April, 2011, it entered a very competitive video conferencing market. Today, it stands as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the remote work boom due to the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. With astonishing statistics such as 300 million daily meetings and 3.3 trillion annual meetings, it is no wonder that Zoom is among the leading video conferencing giants in the world with a market cap of $78.92 billion.Funnily enough, Zoom was indirectly founded out of embarrassment. Eric Yuan, co-founder and CEO of Zoom, used to be the vice president of Cisco-WebEx. A year before he left the company, in feedback by customers, it was revealed that WebEx did not have a single happy customer. This was a huge wake-up call for Yuan who tried to introduce good services to customers. However, he left the company when he did not find success there and started Zoom. The aim was to build a simple but better video communication service.Zoom was a game-changer in the industry because of the ease it offered. All that is required is simply clicking the invitation link, eliminating the need to download software, understand the setup process, and work through the dial-in activities. In addition to this, Zoom was the first cloud-based video architecture in the world. This was to leverage public cloud platforms such as Amazon and Oracle Cloud, in order to scale business. Zoom also highlighted the significance of accessibility as it is available on laptops, Android devices, desktops, iPhones, and iPads. This service also stood out from much of its competition by offering free video hosting. Moreover, along with Zoom’s ease of use and scalability, the customers can have fun by using its filters and backgrounds - something most video conferencing services consider completely unnecessary.