ENTRY #9

From interest to business

By the year 2005, Facebook has started to be commercial and became accessible by all of the educational institutes and University all of the USA. The purpose behind all this project is to create a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom were suffering from emotional stiffness and not have ‘aliens’ engaged into the network. But the amount of subscribers in Facebook grew exponentially throughout the years. Then Zuckerberg decided to make a registration accessible to the public for everyone to use it, not just for the students in the campus. And after this a Facebook ‘epidemic’ started.

www.facebook.com

Mark Zuckerberg started looking for investor. The first investor was from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has invested a total amount of $500,000 dollars into the company and it is sufficient enough fot immediate Facebook purposes. In that year itself, a big firm named Accel Partners has noticed the potential of Facebook and invested a total of $12.7 million into Facebook, from there Facebook began to improve their operating system and pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. Later Facebook began to attract some other big companies like Yahoo and MTV Network, who wanted to advertise with the well known social hub, Facebook. However, Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo offers when they offered Zuckerberg on buying over Facebook with the amount of 1 billion dollars. Instead, Zuckerberg fully focused on expending the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features. Since then Facebook seemed to be going nowhere but up.

The BIG obstacle

In 2006, the creator of "Harvard Connection" - Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss accused that Mark Zuckerberg has stolen their ideas and insisted Zuckerberg's company to pay a settlement of 65 millions dollars for their business losses. The "Harvard Connection" creator claimed that in 2003 Zuckerberg agreed to help them to complete the establishment of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to their testimonies, Zuckerberg did not provide them the results of his work, but used the original source code to create TheFacebook or now to be known as Facebook.

Later that year, the "Harvard Connection" creator launched their own network renamed to "ConnectU.com"

. They continued on attacking Mark Zuckerberg, this time complaining on Harvard administration and the Harvard Crimson newspaper. Zuckerberg did urged the journalist not to publish any of the investigation by showing them what supposedly he did for the HarvardConnection.com, and explained that there all of the development has no relation to what he did for Facebook. The newspaper are about to close this case until one of the student from Harvar - John Thompson started saying that Zuckerberg stole one of his ideas for Facebook. So the newspaper had no choice but publish the articles for it. This action has offended Mark Zuckerberg very much. 

Newspaper clip from the Harvard Crimson article published on May  28, 2004

After that incident, the ConnectU.com creator filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg but was rejected by the court. They were persistent filed another lawsuit again the Facebook creator - Mark Zuckerberg. In 2009, Zuckerberg agreed to pay the ConnectU a total of $45 millions ( $20 millions dollar in cash, and the remaining amount in Facebook shares) as part of the court settlement. By that time Facebook already has 150 millions subscribers, whereas ConnectU is 1500 times lesser subscribers compared to Facebook.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Astrumpeople.com, (2015). Mark Zuckerberg Biography: Success Story of Facebook Founder and CEO. [online] Available at: http://astrumpeople.com/mark-zuckerberg-biography-success-story-of-facebook-founder-and-ceo/ [Accessed 19 Jun. 2015].

2.Biography.com, (2015). About Mark Zuckerberg. [online] Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg-507402#time-at-harvard [Accessed 19 Jun. 2015].

3.McGinn, T. (2004). Online Facebooks Duel Over Tangled Web of Authorship | News | The Harvard Crimson. [online] Thecrimson.com. Available at: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/5/28/online-facebooks-duel-over-tangled-web/ [Accessed 20 Jun. 2015].