IndexChildhood BiographyFaceMash – A Fun Site to VoteThe Rise of FacebookFacebook LogoLawsuits Against FacebookBill Gates and FacebookHow Facebook Makes Money Acquisition of Instagram, Oculus Rift and WhatsAppIn this success story, we will share Mark Zuckerberg's biography , the youngest billionaire on the planet who created the social network Facebook which now has 1 billion monthly active users. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Thanks to Facebook, people all over the world can easily stay in touch with all their friends. Not so long ago, the company did not have this opportunity, but now everything has changed. Childhood Biography Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 and grew up in the suburbs of New York, Dobbs Ferry. He was the second of four children and the only educated son in the family. Mark's father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist. His father owned a dentist's office near the family home. Mark developed an interest in programming in elementary school. The fact that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark discovered when he was 10 years old and received his first Quantex 486DX PC on Intel 486. From Mark Zuckerberg's biography we found out that his father taught him Atari BASIC programming , and when Mark was about 12 years old, he used Atari BASIC to create a messenger, which he called "ZuckNet". It made all computers connected to each other and allowed messages to be transferred between the home and the dentist's office. His father installed the messenger on his computer in the dentist's office and the receptionist could inform him when a new patient arrived. Mark also enjoyed developing games and communication tools and, as he said, he did it just for fun. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor, David Newman, who gave his son some private lessons. While in high school, Mark wrote an artificially intelligent media player Synapse for MP3 playlists that carefully studied a user's preferences and was able to generate playlists by "guessing" which tracks a user wanted to listen to. Microsoft and AOL showed an unusual interest in the Synapse media player and wanted to acquire it. However, the young talent rejected the IT giants' offer and then politely rejected their invitation to collaborate. That's right, Mark Zuckerberg turned down tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and worked at one of the top IT companies. Soon Mark Zuckerberg studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed good results in science and literature, earning a degree in classics. He also showed great talent in fencing and even became the captain of the fencing team. Yet Mark Zuckerberg was fascinated by programming and wanted to work on developing new software. In 2002, after graduating from Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard University. By his second year in the Ivy League, he had earned a reputation as a software developer on campus. That's when he wrote a program CourseMatch, which helped students choose their subjects based on other users' course listings. FaceMash – A Fun Site for VotingIn 2003, one summer evening when Mark Zuckerberg was suffering from insomnia in his dorm Harvard, he came up with the idea to create a site called FaceMash. Mark decided to hack the Harvard database, where students uploaded their profile photos. He quickly wrote a program that randomly selected two photos of tworandom students and put them next to each other, asking "Who is sexier?", giving them the opportunity to vote. The trial was in full swing and the site was visited by the majority of users. Harvard students. When the number of visitors exceeded the limit, the server crashed due to overload. Mark appeared before the computer hacking commission. Of course, no one told Mark Zuckerberg "Well done!" and received disciplinary action, and had noticed that this kind of thing arouses stormy interest in society. By the way, Harvard has so far refused to comment on the incident. The birth of Facebook About ten months before Zuckerberg's FaceMash epic, one of the Harvard students – Divya Narendra – had already spoken about the idea of ​​creating an exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom suffered from emotional rigidity. And in order not to have "aliens" involved in the network, Narendra suggested using the Harvard email address as the main username. Divya Narendra's partners were twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The father of the Winklevoss twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful financial advisor and invested a lot of effort and money in his children, so the problem with the start-up capital for the future network could be solved easily. In a conversation with Mark, Narendra said that the project would be called Harvard Connection (later renamed ConnectU) and that its members would post photos, personal information and useful links on the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg's tasks included programming the site and creating special source code, which would allow the system to work as quickly as possible. After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg agreed to join the work, but the potential of his new partners, he assessed with skepticism. While working on Harvard Connection, he came up with a fantastic idea for his social network. On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name TheFacebook.com, now known throughout the world at Facebook.com. However it only worked within Harvard. After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already 4,000 registered users on Facebook, they came to the conclusion that they needed the services of new programmers. One of them was Mark's neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who further opened the Facebook service to students at Columbia University, Stanford and Yale. Around the same time after the IPO, Zuckerberg owned 503.6 million shares. And now Zuckerberg controls almost 60% of the company's votes, 35% – Eduardo Saverin, and 5% went to the newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark's, Chris Hughes, was assigned as Facebook's press officer. Some time later, registration was opened to all students. The main condition was the availability of an email address in the .edu zone, which also indicated the person's belonging to the education sector. It must be said that at first this tactic worked well. The project attracted public attention of sufficient quality. When a user attempted to register, they had to fill out a detailed profile and, in addition to their email address in the .edu area, they were asked to add an actual profile picture. If people used avatars instead of real images, their profiles were deleted. Facebook soon moved beyond the education sector, becoming increasingly popular. Mark Zuckerberg has started looking for investors. The first investments Mark received from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter Thiel, well known throughout Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated $500,000 and this amount was enough for immediate purposes at Facebook. The projectbegan to evolve rapidly. In less than a year since its founding, more than 1 million people have signed up to the social network. More investments were needed for the further development of Facebook. Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook and then Greylock Partners added $27.5 million to this figure. In 2005, Facebook became accessible to all educational institutions and universities in the United States. Zuckerberg still believed that his project was a social network for students, but user interest in Facebook grew exponentially. Subsequently it was decided to make a recording accessible to the public. And after this, an "epidemic" began on Facebook. Facebook LogoThe main thing is that Facebook users immediately attracted attention because friends who meet in real life can now communicate with each other online. It was something new. Facebook's audience grew rapidly, but monetization of the project still remained unclear. Everyone expected the main tool to be contextual advertising. The fact is that each Facebook user fills out a sufficiently detailed profile, which can be used to show relevant advertisements. Obviously, this would open up enough options for advertisers, which could interest their audience. But Facebook continued to grow its audience. When they surpassed 50 million users, large companies began to offer Zuckerberg to sell the project to them. So, once Yahoo! offered $900 million for Facebook. An impressive sum, but one that did not satisfy Mark at all. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook bio and success story are quite intriguing, right? Lawsuits against FacebookThe launch of the Facebook project was accompanied by a series of scandals. Six days after the site's launch, senior brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. They claimed that in 2003 he hired Zuckerberg to complete the creation of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to their testimonies, Zuckerberg did not provide them with the results of his work but used the original source code to create Facebook. In the same year, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins launched their own network renamed ConnectU. And they continued to attack Mark Zuckerberg, complaining about the Harvard administration and The Harvard Crimson newspaper. Zuckerberg initially urged journalists not to publish the investigation: he showed them what he would do for HarvardConnection and explained that those developments had no relation to Facebook. But very inappropriately, another Harvard student – ​​John Thomson – in personal conversations began to say that Zuckerberg had stolen one of his ideas for Facebook. The newspaper decided to publish the article, which greatly offended Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg took revenge on The Harvard Crimson. According to Silicon Alley Insider, in 2004, he broke the mailboxes of two journalists from The Harvard Crimson, using the new Facebook. He found the users involved in the paper and looked through their logs (i.e. history) of incorrectly entered passwords on Facebook. Zuckerberg's expectations were met: two newspaper employees absentmindedly attempted to log in to Facebook with their inbox passwords. Silicon Alley Insider wrote that Zuckerberg was lucky: he had the opportunity to read the correspondence about him between the editorial team and HarvardConnection. Twins Winklevoss and Narendra filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, but the court rejected their request. They were persistent and they filedanother cause. This time the court examined the sources of the code to see if they were actually stolen. But the truth was not yet clear. The results of the exams have not been announced. In 2009, Zuckerberg agreed to pay $45 million ($20 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock) to ConnectU as part of the court settlement. The case was closed. At the time ConnectU had fewer than 100,000 users, Facebook boasted around 150 million users. The Winklevoss twins still did not calm down and filed an appeal with the US Court of Appeals, but were denied a new trial. According to their lawyer Jerome Falk, the appeals court refused to take a review of the case based only on the settlement agreement between the parties, according to which the trial members after signing the document have no right to resume the trial . According to the lawyer, the decision was illegal, since Mark Zuckerberg in a proceeding in 2008 provided false information about the value of the company. On May 17, 2011, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed another lawsuit against Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg in the United States Supreme Court. This was the brothers' last attempt to force the court to reconsider the case. Bill Gates and Facebook In 2007, a significant event happened on Facebook. Microsoft has acquired a 1.6% stake in Facebook for a whopping $240 million. On this basis, several analysts have suggested that Facebook's total value has reached $15 billion. Quite good results for the company, whose revenues did not exceed $200 million a year. After the deal, Bill Gates created a Facebook account. He spent several hours a day communicating via Facebook with everyone, but after a while he decided to close his account for a while, because there were too many people willing to chat with him. He was physically unable to chat with all of them. However, Gates provided a major public relations campaign for Facebook around the world. This is of particular importance for Microsoft, given that until 2011 it had an exclusive advertising agreement with the social network. How Facebook Makes Money In 2013, Facebook, Inc.'s revenue reached $7.87 billion and net income reached $1.5 billion. The growth rates are also impressive: in three years the turnover increased six times. Facebook's basic earnings come from contextual ads on the social network's pages. The growing number of users and the time they spend on the site is converted into advertising revenue. 85% of the cash flow that passed through the company last year was earned through contextual advertising. Most of the remaining 15% are deductions from purchases made through Facebook's payment system. In most cases these are not real goods, but virtual ones. For example, seeds, fruits and vegetables purchased by fans of the popular Farmville game developed by Zynga.FarmVille – a popular Facebook game developed by Zynga. Despite the apparent frivolity, virtual goods are serious business, and Facebook's report confirms this. The company estimates that revenue from the global virtual goods market reached $7 billion in 2010 and rose to $15 billion in 2014. In early January 2013, Facebook Inc. began testing paid private messaging service. Facebook charges $1.00 for a private message that you can send to users who are not on your friends list. And the message goes directly to your Inbox folder, rather than another. But Facebook went further and realized that some users are worth more than $1. If you would like to send a message to the CEO of.