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Larry Page - Google _____________________________________________________________________________________________
Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence's mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming. The Page family home was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called, immersed himself in them. Significantly, his older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful Internet entrepreneur.
Larry Page attended a Montessori school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School. He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the University's solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a B.S. in computer engineering, he undertook graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was here that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.
The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of web sites of very little pertinence to the user's query. Page soon found that ranking web sites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document's relevance to a user's search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new "PageRank" mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey .
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1973. He immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of six and grew up in Adelphi, Maryland. His father, Michael Brin, was a professor of mathematics a the University of Maryland. Like Larry Page, he attended a Montessori school as a small child. He graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 1990 and entered the University of Maryland, College Park. In only three years, he graduated with highest honors in mathematics and computer science. He entered graduate school at Stanford University with a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Brin soon authored more than a dozen papers on data mining and pattern extraction for leading academic journals, including "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web," "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures," "Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data," and "Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations." He also created a web site for film ratings and designed a software application to translate documents from TeX, the text processing language often used for scientific papers, to HTML (hypertext markup language), the code in which Web pages are written.
Together, Page and Brin wrote the paper "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," and followed it with "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." The latter paper quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named "BackRub," on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored in Larry Page's dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than existing search technology.
They registered the domain name google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term "googol," the very large number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was designed to explore. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company in 1998 and relocated their servers from Larry Page's dorm room to a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their Master's degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company's CEO, Sergey Brin as its President. Their stated mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
After quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased the entire property, known as the GooglePlex, one of the most unusual and innovative workplaces in the world. In 2000, they began selling text-based advertisements associated with search keywords. The text-only ads on their graphics-free home page kept their download time to the bare minimum, and their ability to deliver ads directly related to the interests of the user made the ad space highly valuable.
That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement's International Achievement Summit in London, England as graduate student delegates. The interview recorded at that time can be read on this web site. They returned to the annual event in 2004 as recipients of the Academy's Golden Plate Award.
By 2001, a vast number of once-promising Internet start-ups had folded, but Google was growing explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for Products, and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have continued to run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since.
Google's initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves multi-billionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with individual investors and the stock price has soared. All three top executives -- Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt -- have reduced their annual salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the company's performance in the stock market.
The company has continued to grow dramatically, through strategic alliances with AOL and Netscape, along with a number of cunning acquisitions, most spectacularly that of online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Google has introduced a number of popular new services and applications, including a toolbar that allows users to perform searches from their desktops, without visiting the Google web site. The web site itself enables searches for video and still imagery as well as HTML documents. Google also provides a free web-based e-mail service called G-Mail. Google Apps Premium Edition offers a suite of business tools including e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet applications at a fraction of the cost of competing office software packages. One of Google's most dramatic projects is Google Earth, which allows users to access satellite imagery to zoom in on locations all over the world. The most ambitious project of all, Google Book Search, aims to make the contents of vast libraries of books available and searchable online.
By the end of 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and annual revenues well over $10 billion. Various estimates place Larry Page and Sergey Brin among the two dozen richest people on earth, and the dozen richest Americans. Despite its enormous success, Google has largely succeeded in preserving a uniquely informal and creative atmosphere at its Mountain View campus. In 2007, Fortune magazine, in its annual Top 100, ranked Google as the best company in the world to work for.
It just Beginning......
Sergey Brin $28.4 billion Profession: Entrepreneur | Businessperson | Computer Scientist | Internet Entrepreneur | Executive Management Date of Birth: 1973-08-21 Height: 1.73 m Ethnicity: Jewish people Country: Moscow
ABOUT Sergey Brin is a Soviet-born American computer scientist and co-founder of Google who has a net worth is $28.4 billion. Sergey Brin immigrated to the United States with his parents while very young – at age 6. Several years later, while at Stanford University, he teamed with close friend Larry Page to apply his data mining system to a computer technique for the sole purpose of creating a superior search engine. The result was Google. Sergey Brin, like his good friend Larry Page, has won professional recognition and many awards, often the same awards as Page. He was also inducted into The National Academy of Engineering in 2009, the highest accolade an engineer can receive. Sergey Brin is actively engaged in many philanthropic endeavors. He is particularly interested in dealing with environmental issues.
Stefan Persson
$28 billion
Date of Birth: 1954-12-22
Weight: 86.1825503
Country: Bjurholm
ABOUT
Stefan Persson is a Swedish business magnate who has a net worth of $28 billion dollars. Stefan Persson has accumulated this net worth largely through the earnings of Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), the fashion company started by his father Erling Persson. In addition to the company, Persson is known as the richest person in Sweden, which ranks him as the 16th richest person on the entire planet. One particularly ostentatious symbol of his immense wealth is the English village Linkenholt, which is owned entirely by him. From 1982 to 2009, he served as the president and chief executive officer of Hennes & Mauritz, before being replaced by his son, Karl-Johan Persson. Since his departure, Hennes & Mauritz has been embroiled in several public relations controversies, including one involving poor working conditions in a supply factory in Cambodia. Workers there are said to be subject to "fumes from chemicals, poor ventilation, malnutrition and mass hysteria." Some other controversial practices of the company include the destruction of unsold merchandise and the alleged use of artists' work without proper credit being given. Persson's personal life is much less cluttered with difficult problems, as evidenced by his family life: He and his wife have three children and live in Stockholm, Sweden.
Karl Albrecht
$26.9 billion
Profession: Businessperson | Entrepreneur
Date of Birth: 1920-02-20
Nicknames: Karl Hans Albrecht
Ethnicity: Germans
Country: Essen
ABOUT
Karl Albrecht net worth: Karl Albrecht is a reclusive German billionaire tycoon who has a net worth of $26.9 billion dollars. Karl Albrecht is the richest man in Germany and co-founded the Aldi chain of grocery stores in Germany with his brother Theo. The brothers created the chain after they took over their mother's small neighborhood grocery. He relinquished his position at Aldi in 2002 at the age of 82. Albrecht is notoriously secretive and has never given a single public interview during his lifetime.
David Thomson
$25.8 billion
Profession: Businessperson
Date of Birth: 1957-06-12
Nicknames: David Thomson, David Kenneth Roy Thomson
Ethnicity: English people, Scottish people
ABOUT
David Thomson, the 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet, is the Chairman of the Thomson Reuters corporation who has a net worth of $25.8 billion dollars. His family is the richest in Canada and he is the 20th richest person in the world. David Thomson lives in Toronto where he guards his privacy closely. Thomson rarely gives interviews but does support many art foundations and The Winnipeg Jets NHL team, which he owns.
David Thomson's career in business has largely been characterized by his work within companies controlled by his family. That business, known up until 2008 as The Thomson Corporation, specializes in "financial services, healthcare sectors, law, science & technology research, and tax & accounting." In 2008, they merged with famous media company Reuters to form Thomson Reuters, which continues to be a big part of the information world to this day. Thomason himself is known for his somewhat unorthodox lifestyle compared to other wealthy businessmen, keeping a very low profile and having "little positive to say about many people in the business world." Perhaps Thomson's philosophies about life can best be summed up by this quotation, taken from a 2006 New York Times interview: "When you try to live a more balanced life, traditional businessmen think that you are not a real man. But who is not the real man? You are telling me? You have not taken a weekend with your wife, you have no spare time that you use constructively, you do not have any hobbies, you do not know how to spell Mozart. And here you are telling me that I am weak?"
Michele Ferrero
$24.8 billion
Profession: Businessperson
Date of Birth: 1925-04-26
Nicknames: Michael Ferrero
Country: Ogliani, Italy
ABOUT
Michele Ferrero is an Italian businessman who has a net worth of $24.8 billion dollars, making him the richest man in Italy. Michele Ferrero is the owner of Ferrero SpA, the chocolate company responsible for Nutella, Tic Tacs, Ferrero Rocher, Mon Cheri, Kinder Chocolate, and Kinder Eggs, among others. Born April 26, 1925, in Dogliani, Italy, Ferrero accumulated the majority of his fortune via his father's chocolate company Ferrero SpA. He inherited the chocolate maker in the 1950′s, and he has since helped it become the fourth-largest manufacturer of chocolate and other confectionery products in the world. Maybe his father Pietro Ferrero was the mastermind behind the creation of today's Nutella, but it was Michele's business acumen that turned the product into a global brand. Under his leadership there will be created numerous other brands like Ferrero Rocher, Mon Cheri, Pocket Coffee and the famous pocket mints Tic Tac. Nowadays, the company operates more than 70 affiliated companies, has 15 production plants and numbers nearly 22,000 employees worldwide. In 1997, Michele's two sons, Giovanni Ferrero and Pietro Ferrero, took over the lead of the company, while he remained the patriarch of the Italian chocolate dynasty. The unfortunate death of Pietro left his brother a sole CEO of the group. Despite being one of the richest people in the world and the richest person in Italy, Michele Ferrero is widely known for being very secretive and is rarely seen in public without sunglasses.
Dieter Schwarz
$24.8 billion
Profession: Businessperson
Date of Birth: 1939-09-24
Country: Heilbronn
ABOUT
Dieter Schwarz is a German entrepreneur who has a net worth of $24.8 billion dollars. Dieter Schwarz was born in Heilbronn, Germany and inherited the supermarket chain Lidl from his father, Josef Schwarz, in the late 70s. He is the current CEO and chairman of Lidl, which operates under the umbrella of the Schwarz Gruppe. Lidl currently has nearly 10,000 locations spread out around Europe. In addition to owning Lidl, Dieter Schwarz also controls Handelshof and Kaufland, a chain of retail stores, and a hypermarket, respectively. He was on the Forbes Billionaires List for most of the 90s, but was taken off for one year in 1999. He has since returned to the list. Schwarz Gruppe also oversees the Schwarz Foundation, which supports various educational and daycare institutions. Dieter Schwarz is notoriously private, and avoids publicity as much as possible. He currently lives in Germany with his wife and two children.
Lee Shau-kee
$24 billion
Profession: Businessperson | Real estate development
Date of Birth: 1928-01-29
Country: Shunde District
ABOUT
Lee Shau-kee was born in Shunde, Guangdong, China is a property developer and majority owner of Henderson Land Development. Lee Shau Kee has a net worth of $24 billion. Lee Shau Kee has built that net worth from his company, a property conglomerate with interests in properties, hotels, town gas and Internet services. In 2006 Lee received substantial profits from his holdings of Mainland-controlled stocks. In Hong Kong, and the greater China Region he is the second wealthiest person.
Aliko Dangote
$23 billion.
Profession: Businessperson | Entrepreneur
Date of Birth: 1957-04-10
Ethnicity: Fula people
Country: Kano
ABOUT
Aliko Dangote net worth: Aliko Dangote is a Nigerian Businessman who has a net worth of $23 billion. Aliko Dangote earned his net worth by founding The Dangote Group which now controls much of Nigeria's commodities trade. He was born in Kano, Nigeria and founded the Dangote Group in 1977. He currently serves as CEO and Chairman.
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