Caterina Fake is best known as the co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing service developed by Ludicorp in Vancouver and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Flickr ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 integrating features such as social networking, community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the best, or more interesting content. Prior to founding Ludicorp she was Art Director at Salon.com and heavily involved in the development of online community, social software and personal publishing.

Caterina graduated from Vasser College with honours in English Literature.

She has won many awards, including BusinessWeek’s Best Leaders of 2005, Forbes 2005 eGang, Fast Company’s Fast 50, and Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs under 35. In 2006, She was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. She sits on the board of Etsy, and advises many startups and new businesses. At Yahoo! she runs the Technology Development group, known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products.

She lives in San Francisco, California with her husband Stewart Butterfield and their daughter Sonnet Beatrice Butterfield. You can visit her at Caterina.net.

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Sumaya Kazi is the co-founder of The CulturalConnect, a site that publishes six weekly e-magazines for the young, driven and forward-thinking. It has over 600 published interviews of awe-inspiring young professionals, and a fast growing readership in over 100 countries. Each weekly magazine and website delivers accessible, must-read profiles of the professional world’s often overlooked population of driven, innovative, progressive and successful under-35 leaders to an expansive subscriber base of up-and-coming individuals of the same type. Each e-magazine connects young minority professional with each other and to the nonprofit world: The DesiConnect, The MidEastConnect, The LatinConnect, The AsiaConnect and The AfricanaConnect.

The site features the following three sections.

Young & Professional Profile where interviews shed the image of the suit-sporting, Blackberry-toting young professional, who spends the hours of 9am-5pm chained to his/her cubicle. It gives new meaning to what it is to be young and professional. The section spotlights a community of young leaders that are bonded by success digging through unmarked offices and use untraditional methods to find undiscovered young talent across various ethnic communities and across various industries.

Non-Profit Spotlight recognizes that young professionals also channel their passions toward non-profit ventures. These organizations, often glazed over or lumped together in mainstream press, are granted the Spotlight in each of our weekly issues. The Non-Profit Spotlights educate and awaken readers by spotlighting young individuals in the Non-Profit community - bringing issues affecting the young professional community to the forefront.

ConnectionPoint which is a new and highly popular feature of the site encourages and enables you to interface directly with Young Professional and Non Profit young professionals, allowing you to build both professional and informal networks with people you find inspiring.

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Three Brown University graduates, Elliott Breece, Josh Boltuch and Elias Roman, all 22 years old, founded AmieStreet in July 2006. AmieStreet, an online music retail site for independent content, uses a unique rating system where all songs are available for free at first. Then, depending on the popularity in the market, a song’s price is driven up. According to AmieStreet’s website:

Amie Street is the most fun way to discover and buy music online because we have a social network that facilitates music discovery and because we price music right - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. Our dynamic prices allow fans to buy music without breaking the bank and they serve as a useful tool for finding great music.

We know music is social, and finding new music needs to be fun. Music discovery is best served by communication between people, so we reward fans when they recommend songs to their friends by giving them credit to buy more music. Whether you spend two minutes or two hours on Amie Street you are connected to a world of music lovers discovering new music together.

We support our artists by giving them 70% of song sales and never taking ownership of their creative work. We want all artists on Amie Street to be successful and we believe that our unique marketplace will accomplish this goal to a degree never achieved before.

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Garrett Camp is the co-founder of StumbleUpon, a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user, or a Stumbler, clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles. There is also one-click blogging built in as well. Users can rate, or choose not to rate, any webpage with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and clicking the Stumble button resembles “channel-surfing” the web.

In the same way that it matches users with like-minded websites, StumbleUpon’s technology also pairs online ads with targeted demographics and interests.Toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite and Internet Explorer.

Camp came up with the idea as he was working on a master’s in software engineering. Frustrated while trying to find the best photo sites online, he created an early version of StumbleUpon with coding help from Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith. Soon, they realized that the service could be used with all sorts of media, and not just the photos.

eBay acquired StumbleUpon in May of 2007 for $75,000,000 USD.

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Kevin Rose was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek for the August 14, 2006 issue (see above). The cover text was “How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months”. The story mainly covered his success as a young entrepreneur and explained how he risked it all to make Digg.com a reality. It also says he lost his girlfriend during the launch and that money meant for a house deposit payment was instead used to fund his idea.

Since Digg.com was launched on November 1, 2004, it has made him an internet celebrity. Digg combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. According to a recent article from TechCrunch, Digg will soon be adding an Images category on top of the existing News, Video and Podcasts. Here is an overview of Digg from Crunchbase:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see.

In the fall of 2004, Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg. He found programmer Owen Bryne through eLance.com and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99 per month for hosting and $1,200 for the Digg.com domain. In December of 2004, Kevin launched his creation to the world through a post on his blog.

In February of 2005, Paris Hilton’s cell phone was hacked. Images and phone numbers from the phone were posted online and it didn’t take long for a user to post the link on Digg. The site started to receive an enormous amount of traffic and it was then, Rose says, he saw “the power of breaking stories before anyone else.”

Digg has been a force ever since. Acquisition offers have been made, Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek and according to Alexa, Digg is in the top 100 most trafficked sites on the internet. The success hasn’t come without its share of problems though. The site has had to face services aimed at gaming the way stories hit the front page, as well as a user revolt. Digg has however been able to get over these hurdles as it continues to be one of the social news leaders.

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Update: Yesterday, Microsoft agreed to pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, a deal that places a $15 billion valuation on the start-up. Facebook has received a total of $278.20M in funding.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is one of the youngest web celebrities, who, as a Harvard College student, founded the online social networking website Facebook with the help of fellow Harvard student and computer science major Andrew McCollum as well as roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He now serves as Facebook’s CEO.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. He was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his projects. An early project, Coursematch, allowed students to view lists of other students enrolled in the same classes. A later project, Facemash.com, was a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Hot or Not. A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg’s Internet access was revoked by administration officials. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board, where he was charged with breaching computer security and violating rules on Internet privacy and intellectual property.

The school alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard house websites to harvest images of students without their permission, for profit. Zuckerberg stated that he thought that information should be free and publicly available. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public. In 2004, Zuckerberg created Facebook and took a leave of absence from the college. A year later he dropped out.

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