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Young Indians who make a difference
March 27, 2008
SABEER BHATIA
At age 19, Sabeer 'Hotmail' Bhatia left the Indian shores with just $250 in his pockets and a head full of ideas. Despite a few blips in his life, Bhatia is still regarded as a youth icon by many tech-savvy people.
His father, Baldev Bhatia, started as an officer in the Indian Army and later joined the Indian ministry of defence, while his mother, Daman Bhatia, was a senior official at the Central Bank of India
After a brief stint at Apple, Sabeer joined a startup company called Firepower Systems Inc, where he spent two years.
Frustrated by a corporate e-mail system which did not allow people to communicate privately, Bhatia, and his college friend and colleague from Apple, Jack Smith hit upon the idea of a simple, free and secure way of talking on the Net. They called it Hotmail. The original spelling was HoTMaiL -- the uppercase letters - HTML - is the language used to write the base of a webpage.
It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, American Independence Day, symbolising 'freedom' from ISP-based e-mail and the ability to access the inbox from anywhere in the world
Career graph:
In 1992, while working on his PhD, Bhatia dropped out and joined Apple Computers as a systems integrator. He worked for Apple Computer for a year.
Then he worked for another startup, Firepower Systems Inc.
In 1995, Sabir Bhatia co-founded Hotmail Corporation along with Jack Smith, a colleague at Apple Computers.
At the end of 1997, he sold Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million.
Bhatia worked for Microsoft for a year until March 1999
In the middle of 1999 he founded Arzoo.com, closed down soon
In 2006 Sabeer Bhatia relaunched Arzoo as a travel portal.
Bhatia has also started a new venture called BlogEverywhere with co-founders Shiraz Kanga and Viraf Zack.
In November of 2007, he released an online office alternative to Microsoft Office, called Live Documents
He has also pushed for enabling access to the Internet through cable television in Indian homes.
In January, 2008, Sabeer announced the launch of his latest venture SabSeBolo.com ('(Let's) talk to everyone', a free web-based teleconferencing system
Future plans o include the development of Nanocity in India.
Education:
Bishop's Cotton School at Pune
St. Joseph's College, Bangalore
BTech - Birla Institute of Technology (BITS), Pilani.
In 1988, he got a scholarship from the California Institute of Technology and moved to the Caltech. Considered to be the world's most competitive scholarship, at that time, Bhatia was the only applicant in the entire world to get a passing score of 62.
Earned his masters degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Awards
'Entrepreneur of the Year', awarded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (1997)
Named to the 'Elite 100', Upside magazine's list of top trendsetters in the New Economy
Recipient of the 'TR100' award, presented by MIT to 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology in the next few years
Selected by the San Jose Mercury News and POV magazine as one of the ten most successful entrepreneurs of (1998)
Named by TIME as one of the 'People to Watch' in International Business (2002)
His success mantra:
"I think you have some gut instincts and you have to go on those... and you have to give it a shot ... to an entrepreneur it's like a gamble, but you've got to take that chance."
"You have to be able to look into your adversary's eyes and try to figure out how much does he want this, and can I play on his weaknesses? ... And that's exactly what I did."
He got engaged to Tania Sharma, heiress of the Baidyanath group, in December 2007. They have known each other for eight years as friends. They plan to get married soon in a private ceremony in Langkawi, Malaysia.
Image: Sabeer Bhatia became an overnight celebrity with the sale of Hotmail, a free web-based email service.
Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
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