Engine Company and tips about Search Engine Optimisation SEO

1. SEO blogs and articles are a really, really important part of our online PR services and social media management. At The Content Factory, we write around 40 SEO blogs and articles per week for our clients — not including landing pages — and each one helps drive traffic to their websites. Regularly posting fresh content on your site is one of the easiest ways to introduce potential customers or clients to your brand.

   Of course, you can't just throw a bunch of words on a page and expect people to come running. Pro SEO article writing services know that if you build it, they will come…but only if you build it the right way.

   Engine Company and tips about Search Engine Optimisation SEO:

   1. Get your keyword research
      
      on. If you're going to post content on your site anyway, you might as well take the time to make sure Google takes notice of your effort. Find out which keywords and phrases people are searching for (as well as what you can be competitive in), and make yourself a spreadsheet. Keep track of how many times you work the keywords into your web content writing, and use the right tools to track where you rank for the keywords you target. Don't know where to get started? Check out our comprehensive guide to keyword research for SEO.
   2. Put the keywords to work. It's not enough to just use the keywords in 2-3% of the copy. You need to put the primary keyword in the title of the blog/article, as well as in the first and last sentence. By doing this, the keywords stand out to the search engine crawlers, as well as the eyes of the readers. Remember, the people using search engines are searching for that particular phrase because they want to know more about it/buy it, so it makes sense to give them what they're looking for. You'll get more clicks if you do — it's one of the tricks of the trade for professional SEO article writers.
   3. Write about something people care about. Nobody knows your business like you do — so what kind of expert advice or tips do you have that you can share? If not, you can at least discuss news relating to your business. When in doubt, look at your list of SEO keywords and see what kind of list, link bait or in-depth posts you can work those keywords into. Don't be afraid to interview some experts, either (if you quote them and feature their expertise in your post, they'll be likely to share your content via their social channels — this way, you can leverage larger networks to increase the size of your own). 
   4. Make it long enough to count. Sure, 100 words of fresh content is better than no new content at all. Still, search engines tend to give preference to longer blogs and articles. Try to shoot for at least 300 words, but if you can get to 500 or more, go for it. There has been a lot of research that shows that search engines tend to favor "in-depth" content of at least 2,000 words — we've seen this work for ourselves and our clients, and many of TCF's most popular blog posts are at least 1,500 words.
   5. Optimize the optimization of your web content writing. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform, there are lots of free online PR tools (in the form of plugins) you can take advantage of. At The Content Factory, we use Yoast and Shareaholic, along with several others. Free and easy web PR is as simple as hitting the "install now" link.
   6. Edit your work. The only difference between professional SEO article writers and regular people is an eye for self editing. Programs like OpenOffice, Google Docs and Microsoft Word make it easy — the red and green squiggleys give most of it away. Having an eye for aesthetically pleasing formatting is also important. Stay away from super long paragraphs and sentences that go on for miles.
   7. Become your own online PR agency. Once you've written and posted the fresh content, the work is only half complete. The final step of all web content writing is acting as your own online PR agency — link to your content all over the place. Comment on blogs and link back to your site. Submit your content to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Social media management and web content writing go hand-in-hand, and as soon as you hit the "Publish" button on your fresh article or blog, you should tweet your heart out. Want more tips? Check out our 5 DIY Internet Public Relations Tips

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Search Optimisation Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

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The journey of Nintendo’s gamer CEO Satoru Iwata

Though Satoru Iwata was a corporate president but at heart he was always a gamer. R.I.P.

Satoru Iwata, beloved CEO of Nintendo died on July 11, 2015 at the age of 55 after battling cancer. His death has not only started an outburst of grief online but it is also celebrating his contributions to the world of video gaming as well.

Satoru Iwata stood out due to his friendly and outward behavior and unabashed love for games amidst a sea of “professional CEOs”,

In the 2000s, he won laurels for restoring Nintendo’s flagging fortunes, guiding it towards more user-friendly consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Wii. Here are some of the crucial moments in his life story.

The self-taught video game programmer was also loved for his modest approach and his imagination of making gaming more inclusive.

Born and brought up in Sapporo, Mr Iwata’s everlasting passion for games began in high school, where he found out how to programme a baseball game on a calculator.

When he shared the anecdote in a 2005 speech, he jokingly said that “I don’t think anyone can say it had bad graphics because it had no graphics.”

“But when I saw my friends playing that game and having fun, it made me feel proud. To me, this was a source of energy and passion… I think my life course was set.”

He moved to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978, where he studied computer science and engineering.

Mr Iwata along with a group of friends started fiddling with video game programming and they in the end formed a company called HAL – named after the villainous and sentient computer in the film 2001 Space Odyssey.

Soon, game machine pioneer Nintendo hired HAL, and designed popular games like Super Smash Bros and Kirby for the company.

Mr Iwata joined Nintendo full-time as a director in 2000, and just two years later with the blessing of his respected predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi became its president. He became the first person outside of the Yamauchi family to head Nintendo.

Nintendo was reeling from the dull reaction to its GameCube console when he took charge. The sales of GameCube console was overtaken by that of competitors’ machines such as Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 2.

However, the Wii consoles and Nintendo DS gained ground when they were rolled out, which rapidly became successful throughout the world.

What made them different was their appeal to a broader market beyond hardcore gamers and their accessibility. The DS featured educational and puzzle games, most famously Brain Age, while the Wii was created as a family-friendly console.

In 2008, he told the BBC that he believed the key was to “increase the number of people gaming” and draw attention of those outside the usual gaming demographic of young men.

He frequently advocated this inclusive approach, persuading developers to design games for different audiences and of varying skills.

At a 2005 game developer conference, he asked: “As we spend more time and money chasing exactly the same players, who are we leaving behind? Are we creating games just for each other? Do you have friends and family members who do not play videogames? Well, why don’t they?”

Mr Iwata’s humble hands-on approach to his company also endeared himself to gamers. He also did behind-the-scenes interviews with game developers called Iwata Asks, produced game titles, and assisted in programming when coders found it difficult to meet their game release deadlines.

He once said that immediately after he became Nintendo’s president, he appointed himself to a team developing a game as “my heart told me I was still a developer… Once again, I was living on the developer’s diet of chips, pizza and rice balls, and working through the night.”

Mr Iwata’s time at Nintendo was not all that smooth sailing. The company saw fall in profit in recent years, as popularity for its games and consoles decreased.

Some analysts contributed the decline due to the company’s resistance to enter the market of mobile gaming.

As a reply, Mr Iwata took a cut in his salary and ordered his executives to do the same as well, continued to work even as he fought cancer of the bile duct. Nintendo finally announced in March that it was entering into mobile gaming.

Nintendo’s unsteady journey did not go wrong among gamers. “Nintendo might not be the most profitable company, but it’s always made games with a heart,” tweeted one game designer.

It is likely Mr Iwata’s key legacy. “Like any other entertainment medium, we must create an emotional response in order to succeed,” he said at a conference.

“Laughter, fear, joy, affection, surprise, and – most of all – accomplishment. In the end, triggering these feelings from our players is the true judgment of our work.”

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First Ubuntu powered Drone launched

Erle Robotics launches the first Ubuntu powered drone

It seems world is slowly and steadily moving towards Linux powered devices. After Linux was used to power destroyers for US Navy, now Erle Robotics has used Ubuntu to power a drone.

Erle Robotics, a Spanish company, has been at the forefront of using Linux in devices and had introduced the Erle-Copter drone powered by Ubuntu Snappy Core back in February 2015, has launched the world’s first Ubuntu powered Drone on 3rd May.

The Erle-Copter Drone is powered by  Snappy Ubuntu Core and the ROS framework and has a flight time of approximately 20 minutes according to the company. It can also support a payload of up to 2 kgs which means that it can mount cameras for aerial photography.

The Erle-Copter Drone comes with APM Copter and Plane pre-installed as applications with support for utilizing either the 2.4 or 5 GHz frequency bands for Wi-Fi, and 536 MB of free space for user data.

“Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone is a Ubuntu-powered quadcopter that includes official support for new app store for drones and robots. It has official ROS support, capable of the different flight modes and ideal for outdoor operations,” says Alejandro Hernández.

The price for Erle-Copter Ubuntu drone starts from €399 ($455/Rs.28,000.00) for the basic version while the fully loaded drone will be available for Rs.€574 ($640/Rs.40,000.00) and will be available worldwide.

According to Hernández is ideal for various outdoor operations and supports the installation of additional apps via a special App Store of Snappy and Snappy-go packages for drones and robots, has official ROS support, supports automatic launching of mavros bridges over WiFi, Telemetry, or USB, and supports different flight modes.

Check out the video of the Erle-Copter Drone in action below.

You can visit Erle Robotics website to know more about the drone

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Real-Time Cyber-Attack Map Shows the Truth of Global Cyber War

This real-time global cyber attack map is trending in the social media since couple of days. Colorful lasers depict the attacks that are currently occurring across the world, making the real-time map pretty dazzling. The map shows a huge amount of cyber attacks being carried out between China and America.

Created by Norse, it is an effective way to detect the malware attacks on the real system beforehand. Norse is an attack intelligence firm that detects, blocks, and even tracks the threats and check out the hidden breaches all around the globe. They, then alert their customers to block the tracked IPs that are trying wage the cyber attacks.

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Self Marketing – Let Your Personality Shine

Personality marketing is one of the simplest ways to market and brand a product or service. Take Oprah Winfrey for example. 

Oprah is one of the most powerful women in the world. She can take any unknown author into a top New York Times bestseller just by giving her endorsement. Her entire business, and businesses, is built around her personality. People often follow websites but because of the people behind the site – not just because of the content. In many industries, like weight loss for example, success is determined much more by the personality or face of the product than by anything else.

That is why companies pay big money to sponsor sports celebrities to use them in their marketing. Are you likeable, are you real, are you authentic, do you represent something that your target audience is looking for and that is relate-able? 

Marketing Yourself is Easy! Think about it.

 You are already you. You don’t have to practice to be your self… I hope! There is nothing to do so in theory being yourself should be natural and easy to do. Even people boring or dry personalities can be funny, fun, and engaging. There are people like that everywhere. Your uniqueness, or even the things you may not like about yourself may just be your greatest asset. When creating a brand around a product, service, or a company, there is a lot more thought required. More strategy, more writing, and a certainly level of professionalism and thought that is required. In the age of YouTube, Pod Casts, and Social Media, you can bypass all that and just stick a camera on yourself, or grabbing a mic, and talk about whatever you feel passionate about. The rest unfolds naturally as you find your groove and fell more comfortable over time… but the point is to just start now. 

Who cares how you look or what your think about yourself, or if you think your good or not. It does NOT matter. Heck, review products or services, be funny… go viral using ads to monetize, or use yourself as a spokes person for your product or service, and let the people know who you are. 

Your Personality Can Become a Marketing Weapon Everyone has a personality. It is what makes you… well… YOU! When you’re with your friends, you probably say things spontaneously that could come off as hilarious or funny, or people may find some things you have to say as engaging, or your passion just oozes from you. In those “normal” settings you probably aren’t even aware of how people are reacting to you as you express opinions and thoughts or are acting out, etc. People may or may not agree with you or everything you say, but they are your friends and family yet you do it anyway. But online, or in the public, people tend to tone down their personality. 

They try to sound “correct” or “proper” rather than just be spontaneous and in the moment. They err on being right down the middle, rather than speaking an opinion, and just being themselves. This can sometimes come off as being fake, contrived, or inauthentic even with best intentions. Trying to be similar to others, is not always a bad thing, but you do not want to be the same. There is only one of you on the entire planet… so don’t hide it. You will be surprised. There is nothing wrong with acting, or being in character, if that is what works for you and come naturally. People love controversy, a little spice, humor, or something they can relate to… so be the “real” you. When you withhold your personality, or your characterization it contrived, it is difficult to grow your audience and come off well. When you hold back, then people won’t comment, and a discussion that could have promoted you and given you some level of fame will not have even started. 

Negative reactions can do more good for you than none at all. People don’t just want to be drawn to your work, there are plenty of people in every niche, they are drawn to you… in some cases what you say is less important than how you say it and who they perceive you to be as a person. It’s true that some people won’t like you, but so what? 

That is already the case right? Those people aren’t really your audience anyway. It is foolish for anyone to expect every person on the entire planet to like you, agree with you, so why even try. Look at how even the best of celebrities get trashed in the media. Some deliberately insight controversy just for the publicity.   

How to Let Go and Let Your Personality Shine Of course, telling someone to just express their personality can be about as useful as telling someone to just “be yourself” in tense social situations or go on stage in front of hundreds of people and don’t be nervous. For some, it just doesn’t come that easily. So what can you do? Take out a journal and a pen. Write your opinion about a topic or subject that you are passionate about, it could be your business or product, but do it as if you were ranting to yourself or to an imaginary friend. 

Talk as if nobody would ever read it. Pour your emotions and inner thoughts onto the page. Once you’re done, let it sit for a day, then use that journal entry as the outline or foundation for your post, video, audio or whatever. 

This can be a very useful technique for circumventing your mind’s resistance to expressing your personality. You can also do this with your partner, or make a conscious effort to talk about this subject and bring it up around people you are comfortable to practice refining how you talk, what to say, and how they react and engage with you. 

Make note of the questions they ask, and add that to your arsenal to be able circumvent objections, or to be able to find better and more confident ways of communicating in ways that people can hear or understand, and ask for feedback.  

The bottom line is, the best cure for inaction is to take action. In other words… any action is better than no action!!! If you look back at the careers of any famous celebrity or person, and see their body of work, I am sure in the early stages they have plenty of embarrassing and long forgotten moments that most are not even aware of. 

Use What You Have Now – Practice Make Perfect! Perhaps the best advice overall is to just do something. Using yourself, running webinars, recording videos, and branding you to support your business, will help in more ways than one. 

But just pour yourself into it. People will be much more excited about your work when you’re pouring your heart into it. Letting your personality out to your audience will help them connect to you. Then listen to their feedback. Let the excitement from your audience pour over into your own excitement, and let the criticism help you improve, and bring that emotion into your personality marketing.

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.BANK domain is the future of online security - so why have so few heard of it?

The real battle isn't about rolling out secure domains. It's about getting people to trust them.

With the arrival last week of the brand new .bank (or .BANK) top-level domain (TLD), everything to do with global online banking is about to get more expensive, more complex but, the experts claim, a lot more secure for both banks and consumers.

Never heard of .bank or have any idea how it or any other secured .TLD will improve the world? Join a long queue made up mostly of consumers who have grown used to a chaotic world in which telling real bank domains from fraudulent ones is pretty much impossible. Today’s .com, .co.uk and .org TLDs are for the most part just inscrutable Internet furniture so any improvment that might arise by adding a new one could strike one as moot.

Undeterred, advocates of .bank have high hopes that this is about to change and according to reports from the company set up to manage registrations, fTLD Registry Services, things have been going well during the domain sunrise which began in May, with a reported 700 applications submitted. With general availability from last week this has risen to 3,000.

Banks seem to like the idea, or perhaps are so terrified of the chaos wrought by ICANN’s massive expansion of domain possibilities and its potential effects on fraud and phishing that they are running scared to anything that offers a safe haven against an expected avalanche of spoofing.

What they are being offered with .bank is on the face of it a major step up in security. Anyone trying to register or renew a .bank domain (or .insurance, another one worth watching) will have to work for a regulated bank associated with that domain or trademark, be able to prove they work for them and have permission to carry out this action, a verification process that has sub-contracted to security-to-services firm Symantec.

The basic registration costs a reported $1,000 to $2,000 per application (perhaps £1,300) which includes the cost of ongoing verification (making sure nothing bogus slips through the net). Added to this will be the cost of complying with the strict technical requirements for running a domain in a secure state, such as adopting technologies such as DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions), a way of authenticating domains, and perhaps most important of all, email authentication standards many still don’t use such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance).

This has always been the bit that has stresses banks - not so much the why as the how. Buying all this infrastructure will take time and money. For the time being it looks as if many banks will apply for .bank domains while continuing to operate conventional .com domains alongside them. This could turn out to be one of those paradoxical-sounding revolutions that happens so slowly nobody notices.

Secure domains are not a new idea as anyone familiar with the short history of the much-vaunted .secure and .trust domains (the latter launched by UK firm NCC Group last year) will tell you. It is early days but it’s hard to escape the impression that interest in paying high registration fees to buy into a world of expensive mandatory security upgrades has so far proved less than alluring for businesses.

Let’s not be too churlish about this. Banks today are a sitting target for fraudsters, phishers and bogus domains, a situation made even more toxic by something they didn’t ask for, ICANNS’s big idea that the world needed and was going to get thousands of new domains at a time when the expansion of mobile computing has made these less important anyway.

The arrival of .bank is a rational reaction to a big problem: how to tame chaos and make the space banks inhabit on the Internet as simple as possible even if that means raising costs in the short term.

“While trust is fragile and will need to be built and nurtured over time, today is a major step forward in restoring vital trust in the banking industry and taking a stance against rising cyber threats and attacks,” said Robert Holmes of email security provider Return Path, only one of a selection of generally positive comments sent out to journalists in recent days.

However, there remains a small problem - almost nobody outside the bank industry has heard of .bank let alone grasped the concept that a secure verified domain offers enhanced security compared to anything else. Consumers will continue to receive phishing emails without a clue that the domain might offer them some hope of verification. As with so much of the way the domain expansion has been handled, consumers are once again the last to hear about any change.

Unless banks put some effort into publicising .bank and its benefits - and quickly - it will turn into yet another confusing initiative people take five years to get to grips with. With cybercriminals attacking banks from every direction, and the Internet's middlemen making a packet from domains nobody asked for, the industry might not have the luxury of time.

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One of The best-armed Government on earth can’t defend itself

The revelation that personal information records of 4 million US federal government workers has been hacked raises real concerns for health of the digital economy.

While commentators were busy once again pointing the finger of blame at China for what could be the largest ever theft of government data, the ramifications are likely to be felt across the global digital economy.

The hack was uncovered as the US Department of Homeland Security tried to harden federal government defences against cyberattack in the aftermath of high profile breaches such theSony hack and revelations increasingly public revelations on the scale of cyberwarfare.

The US Department of Homeland Security has dubbed the intrusion detection system, which uncovered the latest attack, Einstein, but you don't need knowledge of quantum physics to understand the threat that a combination of basic security concerns and fears over state surveillance of private data could have on the digital economy.

While high profile security failures at giant retailers have not, so far, slowed down the growth of e-commerce among consumers, continued such failures could take a toll over time. At the very least such incidents will increase compliance and IT security costs among enterprises and are likely to lead to see retailers and financial services providers tussling with each other about who bears the costs of securing e-commerce.

For the US and UK governments in particular, news of this latest attack could hardly come at a more embarrassing time. Both the Obama and Cameron administrations are fighting to extend their powers of surveillance over the population, citing the threat of terrorism as justification.

Critics can now not only rail against what they dub as "Big Brother" tendencies of the state, but also cite the obvious inability of governments to keep both their own secrets and basic staff and citizen data safe. The target of the latest attack, the Office of Personnel Management, the government agency tasked with hiring and retaining government workers had plenty of warning that it was vulnerable - it was breached last year - but not enough has been done to secure it.

This latest failure also complicates the increasingly fractious relationship between the US government, which is demanding backdoors into IT products and data from digital organisations, and the companies themselves. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and many others see this as a threat to their business model and their customers.

A healthy digital economy depends on trust between individuals, organisations, enterprises and governments. It depends on individuals and organisations controlling the data they share with others. It depends on those holding the data to do so securely and to be seen to do so securely.

That requires innovative thinking about security and about identity management and it opens the way for innovative young companies to bring to market new approaches and new solutions to a problem than if not tackled, could drag the digital economy down to the lumbering, sluggish pace of the analogue economy it is seeking to transform and replace.

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Chrome spell-checker works for multiple languages at the same time in Dev channel update

Above: Hallo would be the correct choice, for those who don't speak German.

Google has made a useful improvement to its spell-checking in the latest,version of the 

Dev channel of the Chrome browser. 

Thanks to the tweak, you can now run the spell-checker tool for multiple languages
at once — there’s no need to switch.

The new feature is included in the log for version 45.0.2453.0 of the
Chrome Dev channel, which became available earlier today.

Once you install this new version, you have to turn on the feature by going to
chrome://flags page and clicking the enable button under “Enable Multilingual Spellchecker.”
From there, you can go to chrome://settings/languages and add multiple languages,
or adjust the spell-checking options in the right-click menu.
Note that the feature works only on Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.

Once I got the feature running successfully on a PC running Windows,
I was able to spell-check text simultaneously in English and German.
Some languages listed in the Chrome language settings don’t work with spell-check,
leading me to think that results may vary.

Until now, you could only run the spell-checker for one language at a time.
You could change the language by selecting a different one in the right-click menu.
Today’s update makes it easier to write in two or more languages.

This isn’t a huge move forward, but it should be convenient for people
who type in multiple languages while using Chrome.
Other recent feature experiments in Chrome include
a way to automatically pause less important Flash content,
so you can reduce battery consumptionon your device.

Such Chrome updates count for a lot, given that
 more than a billion people use the Chrome browser.

It’s unclear if this feature will be released for the Mac.
And there’s no guarantee that it will be rolled out to Chrome’s Beta or Stable channels.
But hey, it’s working in the Chrome Dev channel on this Windows computer.

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800+ tech leaders coming to MobileBeat 2015: Join our biggest mobile-focused party ever

We’re throwing a party and we’d like you to come. MobileBeat 2015 is Monday and Tuesday July 13-14 in downtown San Francisco and it’s almost full up.

Currently over 900 people are coming.

That includes attendees from brands like Adidas and Staples, and tech heavyweights such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook. Top leaders from Microsoft, Vevo, Airbnb, BitTorent, Lyft, Walmart, and hundreds of other companies will also participate.

Above: Some of the MobileBeat 2015 speakers

We’ll be talking about cutting-edge themes like hyper-personalization, growth hacking and user acquisition, the mobile video explosion that we’re seeing right now, and the art of mobile design. Walking us through the newest parts of that territory will be an all-star cast of speakers from mobile-native companies like Flipboard, Pandora, Evernote, and OpenTable, plus enterprises that are starting to fully exploiting mobile, such as Visa, MGM, Fedex, Sephora, and Home Depot.

StubHub will be there. Deezer. Chegg. Ancestry.com, Machine Zone, Forbes, Flipkart, and Starwood Hotels all have representatives there sharing their stories.

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Get your ticket now …

(And here’s a last-minute 20% off coupon code: VBFriends20)

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But it’s not just about the speakers. It’s about the attendees from top-flight startups and major Silicon Valley technology names. It’ll be an elite crowd, and there’s typically even more learning and networking in the hallways than in the sessions.

While we currently have over 900 attendees, we still have some room. (For you.)

There’s room for a few more to join the crowd and not miss the party. So we’re releasing a few more tickets over the weekend and offering them at a 20 percent yeah-sure-it’s-last-minute-but-we-still-love-you discount.

Meet the VB writers

Above: Ruth Reader, one of the VB editorial team

Just about the entire VB editorial team will be in attendance, including Dylan Tweney, Harrison Weber, Jordan Novet, Mark Sullivan, Ken Yeung, Ruth Reader, and more.

MobileBeat is a good opportunity to say hi, establish a personal relationship, and (gently) pitch any upcoming announcements or news you might have … or to get their front-line opinions on the latest trends in mobile.

Meet the VB research team

Above: Stewart Rogers, one of our analysts

The VB research team, led by yours truly and including Stewart Rogers (who is MCing), Jon Cifuentes, Andrew Jones, and Wendy Schuchart, will be there as well.

It’s a good opportunity to find out what’s coming up next from VB in research, and chat to the analysts about what they see coming up soon in marketing technology, which is our first research focus at VB.

Meet all the other press

We also have a huge contingent of other press at MobileBeat.

That includes reporters and editors from the WSJ, CBS, IDG, C|Net, eWeek, Business Insider, and Re/Code, plus writers from the Financial Times, the Examiner, and the MIT Technology Review.

We’d love to see you there to join the party.

This Article Appeard First on http://venturebeat.com

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See 12 most influential programmers working today

Above: Richard Stallman, software freedom fighter

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The apps and games you use every day don’t exist in a vacuum —
someone, somewhere, wrote the code.

That also goes for the underlying platforms and hardware that those apps run on.
And the web. And the entire Internet itself.

Even the programming languages that people use to build this stuff first had to be written by somebody else.

So who’s at the top of the programming pyramid?

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Linus Torvalds created Linux, a free operating system, in his dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux is the operating system of choice for data centers, supercomputers, and server farms everywhere — as well as a dedicated cadre of enthusiasts.

Above: Linus Torvalds

Image Credit: Linux Foundation

Torvalds is also well known for his sharp tongue — when an audience member at a recent talk asked Torvalds if he thought his manner was turning off members of the Linux community, he replied “I don’t care about you.”

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the only entrant on this list to earn a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. He invented the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the technology on which the entire World Wide Web is built.

Above: Tim Berners-Lee

Image Credit: Campus Party Brasil/Flickr CC

These days, Berners-Lee is leading the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a non-profit backed by the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, that’s trying to make broadband Internet access more affordable for everybody in the world.

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Donald Knuth’s academic work in computer science has earned him the title of the “father of the analysis of algorithms.” Everything from the Facebook news feed algorithm to Amazon suggestions owes something to his work.

Above: Donald Knuth, the “father of the analysis of algorithms”

Image Credit: Knuth

At 77 years old, Knuth is still writing his multi-volume work “The Art of Computer Programming,” with the most recent installment coming out in 2011. He’s also a professor emeritus at Stanford University.

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Brendan Eich is the inventor of JavaScript, which is basically the de facto standard for web app development.

Above: Brendan Eich.

Image Credit: YouTube

More recently, Brendan Eich was the source of a lot of controversy: Shortly after being appointed the CEO of Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox web browser, it came to light that he had made a personal donation to the National Organization for Marriage, a group that supported California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. He stepped down shortly after that.

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Solomon Hykes was the originator of Docker, a super-hot technology that developers love because it lets them write code once and run it anywhere.

Above: Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes

Image Credit: Docker

Docker actually started as a side-project of a company called dotCloud. But when Docker took off, the company pivoted to support it. Today, Docker is rumored to be valued at over $1 billion.

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Mark Zuckerberg famously created Facebook in a Harvard dorm room. Today, Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things” motto informs startup culture the world over.

Above: Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg

Image Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Zuckerberg’s personal philosophies around universal connectivity and social engagement continue to drive Facebook forward.

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Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson (known to the programming community as DHH) created Ruby on Rails, a super-popular web programming framework that earned him the 2005 “Hacker of the Year” award from Google.

Above: David Heinemeier Hansson

Image Credit: Courtesy of David Heinemeier Hansson

Hansson is also an avid racecar driver, and has driven in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race since 2012. In 2014, he took first in his class.

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Richard Stallman has been fighting for software freedom since the eighties, spearheading multiple successful projects to spread programs and tools that aren’t owned by any one company.

Above: Richard Stallman, software freedom fighter

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Stallman is perhaps best known for coming up with the concept of “copyleft,” which is the idea that copyright law can be applied to make sure that software stays in the public domain — the same concept that’s led to the open source movement that’s given us hot technologies like Docker, Linux, Hadoop, Spark, and many more.

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Bram Cohen invented the BitTorrent protocol in 2001, which broke new ground in giving users faster downloads by breaking up a huge file to a bunch of smaller ones that could be downloaded concurrently.

Above: Bram Cohen, CEO and Founder of BitTorrent

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

BitTorrent is tremendously popular, with an estimated quarter of a billion users worldwide. Last year, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke distributed a new album exclusively on BitTorrent, which made him millions. Still, BitTorrent’s anonymous nature and rapid download speed have made it a popular format for music, movie, and game piracy.

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James Gosling invented Java, which is tied with JavaScript as the most popular programming language in the world. (The two languages are actually not very similar at all, except for their names.)

Above: James Gosling, inventor of the Java programming language.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Gosling invented Java while working at Sun Microsystems, a pioneering technology company that Oracle purchased in 2010. After the acquisition, he left the company and became one of Oracle’s biggest critics. Since then, he worked a short five-month stint at Google before joining a startup called Liquid Robotics.

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Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup invented the C++ programming language in 1978, taking the C language invented by the late Dennis Ritchie and adding new features that made it more usable by the masses.

Above: Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Stroustrup stays busy: He’s the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University, a visiting professor at Columbia University, and works at Morgan Stanley.

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John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, is best known as the creator of Doom. But he pioneered 3D graphics tricks and techniques that are still at work today.

Above: John Carmack

Image Credit: Flickr

Nowadays, Carmack works at Facebook’s Oculus VR as its Chief Technology Officer, bringing his graphical know-how to the next-generation virtual reality headset.

This story originally appeared on www.businessinsider.com.

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