Profile of David Karp, the founder of Tumblr.com
i. Photo of Entrepreneur
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| David Karp |
ii. Picture of Product/s
iii. Brief description of the products/services/business concepts.
Tumblr is a website and microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.
iv. A profile of the Entrepreneur and the business.
David Karp (born July 6, 1986, age 25) is an entrepreneur living in New York City. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr.
Karp grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Barbara Ackerman and Michael Karp. He attended The Calhoun School from 3rd to 8th grade, where his mother taught science, until high school when he briefly attended Bronx Science before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling.
Karp began interning for animation producer Fred Seibert at 14 and from there went on to work as a software consultant for UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum. Karp left UrbanBaby in 2006 and began working on Tumblr later that year.
Tumblr's original funding came from Karp's earnings as a software consultant at parenting site UrbanBaby. Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Martin Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, and Sequoia Capital (among other investors). Tumblr shares two lead investors with Twitter. President and COO John Maloney was the founder of UrbanBaby with wife Susan Maloney.
v. A brief introduction of how the business started.
David Karp founded Tumblr in 2007 with Marco Arment as lead developer. 75,000 existing bloggers soon switched to the platform, and since that time, the service has garnered more than 3 million users. In 2009, Tumblr acquired the Tumblr iPhone app, initially known as Tumblerette, that was created by Jeff Rock and Garrett Ross.
According to a March 8, 2010 post by David Karp to the Tumblr staff blog, the site is now averaging 2,000,000 new posts and 15,000 new users every day. As of 2009, Tumblr had an 85% retention rate, compared with 40% for Twitter.
vi. How the business gained success etc.
Maintaining a blog takes stamina: of the more than 100 million blogs surveyed by the search engine Technorati in 2008, fewer than 10 percent had been updated in the previous four months. David Karp thought that simplifying posting would stop users from falling away, so he created Tumblr, a streamlined blog platform. The result? Of the site's six and a half million registered users, 85 percent post more than 20 times a month on average.
vii. The ups & downs of the entrepreneur & his/her business.
On March 17, 2010, the Tumblr staff blog announced that Tumblr could be accessed on BlackBerry smartphones via an app created by Mobelux. On April 17, 2010, the application was made available on BlackBerry App World.
In September 2010, Marco Arment left Tumblr to focus on Instapaper
On December 5, 2010, Tumblr was inaccessible for about 47 hours due to errors during maintenance.
viii. Business Philosophy & Business Strategies used.
The goal of the tumbler is to get everyone in the world to do blogging and emphasizes the ease of use.
Lately, Tumblr has been adding 750,000 users a month, prompting Karp to try new ways to bring in revenue. He is charging for promotional spots that let users advertise their blogs and for premium page layouts to make blogs stand out.
ix. Achievements attained in terms of Market Share, Sales Turnover, Number of Outlets,
Recognition, Adoption & Acceptance of Product, etc.
In January 2009, Tumblr was named by the staff of PC World as one of "Obama's top five tech tools".
In August 2009, Tumblr's CEO, David Karp, was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek.
In August 2010, Tumblr was named as a finalist in Lead411's New York City Hot 125
In 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Dianna Agron, Zooey Deschanel, Mark Hoppus, Hayley Williams, Nikki Sixx, Graham Coxon, Tommy Lee, Eliza Dushku, Matthew Gray Gubler, John Mayer, the members of Odd Future, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brutus Gets The Girl, Barack Obama, Alex Gaskarth, Mike Shinoda, Lights, John Legend, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Gabe Saporta and Rebecca Black use Tumblr.
In 2011, “We are the 99%” tumblr went viral and became the unifying slogan for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
As of May 1, 2011 Tumblr included more than 5 billion total posts and over 17.5 million total blogs. In June of 2011, Tumblr surpassed Wordpress in total number of blogs, breaking through the 20 million mark.Tumblr has since surpassed 30 million total blogs.
x. How the product / company got its name.
According to David Karp when they are starting Tumblr, there was a burgeoning movement in the blogosphere towards a format called “tumblelogs” [a variation on blogs that tends towards shorter stream-of-consciousness posts, often with mixed media]. These are where the initial inspiration for Tumblr came from. They wanted to be the first and best platform for “tumblelogs”, so the name seemed appropriate."
This somehow says to be a speculation, because it believed to be based on the word tumblelogging which was based on blogging. It was made in the web 2.0 days when ending the name in r was in vogue.
xi. Unique features about the product /services/business concept that makes it outstanding.
Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme's HTML.
Tumblr was the first blogging platform to move away from the editorial magazine-column format, and make blogging accessible to everyone—even the less verbose.. The product is amazing and beautifully designed but what makes Tumblr Tumblr, are the people who are signing into Tumblr every day and sharing themselves and the things they make and love (or the things they have very passionate things to say about!).
xii. Key Factors contributing to the success of the business.
Tumblr is a free blogging site that makes it effortless not only to type in text, but to share photos, links, music and videos. There’s even an instant-post button to include quotes from other blogs.
Setting up a Tumblr blog takes about 35 seconds. When users hit the site, click on “Sign up,” then type in their e-mail address, a password and a name for the blog. Click once again and they are up and running.
Besides being easy to use, Tumblr has a very eye-pleasing layout with a minimalist Web-2.0 look. Everyone can customize it, but why bother? When you log in to add content, a row of giant buttons atop the page gives you one-click access to simple tools to insert text, a photo, a quote, a link, a chat session, an audio clip or a video clip.
Much like Facebook or Twitter, Tumblr handles all the formatting for each type of content automatically. The less the user thinks about it, the better Tumblr works.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Karp_(entrepreneur)
http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?trid=953&mod=tr35_riverofnames
http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-did-Tumblr-get-its-name
http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/molly-young/qa-david-karp-founder-tumblr
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