Webupon

A handsome pair, Larry and Sergey are the chaps responsible for unleashing Google on the world. Originally it was Larry’s baby but in 1996 he was joined by Sergey. They were both Phd students at Stanford. Incidentally, if you want your child to be an internet billionaire, then send them to that University. It seems to yield an unfeasibly high rate of IBs (Internet Billionaires), so that one might wonder who at that august institution is leeching out alien technology bit by bit to the wider world and the rest is history!

This aside, Google was incorporated as a company in 1998 and floated in 2004. People sometimes think that the name Google is something to do with goggles, that is looking for something as it were. In fact it is a mis-spelling of the word googol which is the word for ten to the power of one hundred. In other words, the number that is represented by a 1 and then followed by exactly one hundred zeros. Phew.

People seem to either love or hate Google. As well as having over half the search engine traffic in the world, there is now a philanthropic wing, Google.org, which was set up in 2004 to help combat climate change. However, its partnerships with governments of countries such as China has led to finger pointing and accusations of censorship. Whether you love them or hate them, it looks as if they will remain in the Forbes Top 100 Rich List for a long time.

Loath it or love it, Wikipedia now attracts over 680 million visitors a year. It was launched in 2001 by the pair above, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. The number of articles in the English language section alone exceeded two million on this free project which takes the concept of open content to, some say, its illogical conclusion. Being in the top ten most visited websites does attract criticism and many say that Wikipedia values consensus over credentials. Put simply, people say that it places more importance on the likes of Madonna than on figures such as Martin Luther-King.

The formation of Wikipedia brought together Wales, an internet entrepreneur and the more scholarly Sanger – who was then the Editor of Nupedia. They fell out in 2005 when Wales airbrushed his own Wiki biography and removed any mention of Sanger as the co-founder. Naughty man, there was further controversy about Wales’ birth date and the fact that he edited his own wiki profile no less than eighteen times in one yea (2006). It is supposedly very much frowned on at Wikipedia for people to edit their own entries!

Sanger seems almost an opposite. He is a philosopher and professor and is currently the editor and creator of Citizendium, which is an encyclopedia which is expert guided rather than consensus centered.

Stanford. There goes that name again! Seriously, parents, get you kids to that university of you want them to get rich! Yang had by 1994 developed a site that he had called Jerry’s Guide To The World Wide Web. When Filo joined forces with him they changed it to the far snappier Yahoo! In its first year alone the site received a million hits and they realized they were on to a fast cooking hit. Yahoo! was incorporated in 1995. They had to add the exclamation mark because the name was already a trademark – for a barbecue sauce!

Born in Taiwan, Yang arrived in America at the age of ten and had mastered the English language in three years. Filo is from Wisconsin but moved to Louisiana when he was six. They are rated the 520th and 240th richest people in the world respectively.

Yahoo’s popularity has suffered because of accusations that it enables the Chinese government to censor the web. Additionally, the company has been accused of aiding the Chinese government of helping in the trials of dissidents. Yang has recently written to Condoleezza Rice, requesting her help to free the dissidents.

YouTube, is of course the video sharing website of which a million parents despair (it seems to be the chief distraction keeping young people from essay, homework and revision!). It was founded in 2005 (it seems to have been around for so much younger) it was founded by Hurley and Chen when they left PayPal (now an owned subsidiary of eBay, to give this list an incestuous twist!).

Chen, who is originally from Taipei, is at the moment the Chief Technology Officer of the website. Hurley was, it seems, responsible for the video sharing and tagging side to the site. He designed the still used logo for PayPal.

YouTube was originally set up because the pair wished to send videos of friends via email but found that, due to the size of the files involved, their emails were being bounced back. So, they set up YouTube (just like that!) and it was an instant hit. In 2006 the pair sold YouTube for $1.65 billion, which is an awful lot of money.

Ah, love’s young dream – and what a dream! Some mythologizing however, has led many to believe that eBay was first set up by the goatee-bearded Pierre to help fiancée to sell candy dispensers. Unfortunately, this cute story is not true and eBay finally admitted this in 2002. However, the tale still persists.

eBay is of course, the premiere on line auction house in the world under one name or another. Started in 1995, it now boasts localized websites in over forty different countries. A laser pointer (broken!) was the first thing to be sold on eBay and when the company went public in 1998 Omidyar became an instant billionaire. The site now attracts almost a billion hits a year.

Pierre is listed by Forbes as the 120th richest person in the world and like Larry and Sergey of Google, he and wife Pam have set up a philanthropic trust, the Omidyar Network. As of 2008, eBay and Craigslist are in dispute. eBay is suing the latter to “safeguard its four year financial investment” while Craigslist is counter suing because they say eBay has unfairly cornered the marker. Calm down now, children!