Nano Terra

Nano Terra, Inc. is a privately held nano and micro technology development company and is based in Brighton, Massachusetts.

Nano Terra was founded in 2005 and the company business model is based on establishing long-term collaborations with leading manufacturers and marketers in a wide range of industries.

The company develops surface features for anti-reflective and anti-smudge glass and engineers high-strength and low-abrasion materials. The company also offers displays and electronic packaging materials, fuel cells, batteries and solar power, sensors, and consumer goods.

In 2007 Harvard University granted Nano Terra a license to a portfolio of more than 50 issued and pending patents, which cover nano and microscope molecular fabrication methods for advanced materials and devices.

The deal is one do the largest patent portfolios ever transferred from university to a start-up company.

Around 2008 Nano Terra had a staff of about 30 people and laboratories in Cambridge, Mass. But it also tapped into a global network of academic and industrial collaborators, some of whom are co-inventors of Nana Terra’s IP.

In October 2008, Nano Terra and German drug maker Merck KGaA upgraded their existing product development partnership to a commercialization deal. Nano Terra helped co-develop Merck’s ‘printable electronics’ using nanometer-sized materials and a soft lithography techniques called micro-contact printing.
Nano Terra

Fortune magazine

Fortune magazine was the second major venture under the Time Inc. banner.  It is one of the oldest and most influential general business periodicals.

It began its life as a lavish folio-size monthly publication. In 1929, Time magazine publisher Henry R Luce decided to invert Fortune magazine. He expected it to be the most beautifully designed and illustrated magazine in the world.

After two years of planning, Fortune’s first number appeared in February 1930.  To head up the editorial staff, Luce chose Parker Lloyd Smith, a brilliant Oxford graduate who did an excellent job in the magazine’s early days.

In its early days, Fortune’s circulation stood at theory thousand; nine years later it was well over one hundred thousand and this during the bleakest decade in the history of Fortune’s subject – US capitalism.

It thrived during the Depression and in the widespread anti-business sentiment of the 1930s and grew to become extremely influential in industry and public circles with a circulation of 250,000 by 1945.
Fortune magazine 

History of Parker pen

The classic Parker pen dates back all the way to 1892 and played a vital role in world history during the course of the 20th century.

George Safford Parker was a teacher of telegraphy at the school in Janesville, Wisconsin. At that time, typewriters were not yet in use, and telegraphers used pen or pencils to copy message. Parker‘s students were suing the early version of the fountain pen and found them unreliable.

He gave up his teaching career and in 1888he began experimenting with the new pen. He established his own company and the following year he registered his first patent.

Lucky pen and ink-feed system was patented in 1894 and this was the real breakthrough for Parker and the pen was an immediate success.

In 1902, Parker pen was first sold to stationer in Denmark after seeing a Parker advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post magazine.

During the First World War, Parker introduced the Trench Pen for use on the Western Front. A tablet of pigment was inserted in a blind cap at the end of the pen.

In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower used his Parker pen to officially put an end to World War II when he signed the peace treaty in Paris.

When Japan surrender to the Allies latter the same year, the treaty was signed with General Douglas MacArthur old Parker pen onboard the warship USS Missouri.
History of Parker pen

Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company

Hawaiian Pineapple Company was capitalized in 1901 who $16,240. It is small company but the timing and connections were impeccable.

Fresh graduate from Harvard, James Drummond Dole converted a 44 by 80—foot barn in Wahiawa into cannery and using some crude, hand operated equipment , began canning the pineapples from his homestead.

Dole’s company employees invented machines to streamline the pineapple’s canning, including a feeder and slicer to cut into uniform shapes and sizes, an ‘eradicator’ to scrape the skin clean of its flesh and juice.

In 1903, James Dole’s first batch of canned pineapples filled 1893 cases with each case contained 24 cans of pineapple: each can weight two pounds. The year after that this figure shot up to 8,810 cases.

Dole moved his pineapple cannery to Honolulu in 1907, and placed ads in US magazines to promote the fruit, undertaking one of the first nationwide consumer ad campaigns in America.

James Dole’s idea to advertise pineapple under multiple labels was so successful that between 1910 and 1911 pineapple consumption quadruple, and production increased fr0m 300,000 cases in 1911 to 600,000 in 1913 and over a million in 1918.

In 1922, Dole purchased nearly the entire island of Lanai, making it the largest pineapple in the world.

Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company was later acquired by Hawaii agriculture firm Castle & Cooke. David Murdock, a Los Angles billionaire, took over Castle & Cooke in the mid 1980 and changed the brand name back to Dole Food to capitalize in name recognition.
Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company

Chevron Corporation

Chevron Corporation
Chevron Corporation is one of the world’s largest integrated petroleum companies.

It is involved in every aspect of the industry, from exploration and production to transportation, refining and retail marketing, as well as chemical manufacturing and sales.

It operates in more than ninety countries and employs about 28 000 people worldwide.

The company turns crude oil into a variety of products, including motor gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels, lubricants, asphalt and chemicals.

Chevron Corporation started business in Los Angeles in 1879 as the Pacific Coasts Oil Company.

In 1900, the thriving company was acquired by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company began investing in international exploration and made the first major discoveries in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

In 1936, in partnership with Texaco, it formed Caltex, bringing in new markets in Asia, Africa and Europe.

After the Second World War, continued expansion led to major discoveries in Indonesia, Australia, the UK North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1984, the company nearly doubled its size by acquiring Gulf Oil Corporation in what then was the largest corporate merger in US history.

That same year, Standard also changed its name to Chevron, the well-known brand name of many of its products.

In 1993, Chevron achieved another milestone when it joined the Republic of Kazakhstan in the largest joint venture between a Western company and a member of the former Soviet Union.

A new company, Tengizchevroil, was formed to develop the Tengiz oil field the largest discovery in past thirty years.

By 1999 Chevron’s net income was $2.070 billion (up to 55 percent from 1998), and opening earnings were $2.3 billion (up from $1.9 billion in 1998).
Chevron Corporation

Brief History of IBM

Brief History of IBM In 1911 IBM was first incorporated in New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recoding Company. 

The company’s history, however, can be traced back to 1890, when the United States was receiving waves of immigrants. To meet the needs of measuring population the US Census Bureau sponsored a contest to find the most efficient means of tabulating census data. 

The contest was won by German immigrant and Census Bureau statistician, Herman Hollerith. Hollerith formed the Punch Card Tabulating Machine Co. in 1896. 

In 1911 Hollerith’s company merged with Computing Scale Co. of America and International Time Recording Co. to form Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. The company manufactured and sold products ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorder to meat and cheese slicers, tabulators and punch cards. 

In the beginning the company operated in New York City only. Within a short period of time, however, it quickly expanded its office and plants to other parts of New York State, Washington, DC, Ohio, Michigan and Toronto, Canada.

In 1914 Thomas J. Watson joined the company and became the president of the company within eleven months. Under his leadership the company continued to expand its products and services. At that time the company focused on producing large scales custom built tabulating solutions for businesses. 

Within ten years Watson had expanded the company’s business operations to Europe, South America, Asia and Australia and in 1924 the company was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to reflect the firm’s worldwide expansion. 

IBM refers to the decades between 1939 and 1963 as the ‘Era of Innovation’. During this period the company’s product line expanded significantly. 

In 1985 IBM introduced local area networks (LAN), which permitted PC users to exchange information and share printers and files within a building or complex. IBM established a foundation for network computing and numerous applications of PCs. 

In 1993 Louis V. Gerstner, Jr, a former executive at American Express, Nabisco and McKinsey & Co., joined IBM as CEO. Gerstner emphasized the need to provide integrated solutions for the company’s customers. He also decided to keep company, together instead of splitting it into separate independent companies. Today IBM’s strength lies in its combined expertise in solutions, services, products and technologies. 

Brief History of IBM

The Google Story

The Google Story
Google was founded by two Ph.D. computer science students at Stanford University in California – Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Page and Brin began their hero’s journey, they didn’t know exactly where they were headed.

Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing. Both of his parents were computer scientists. His father was a university professor and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, while his mother was a teacher of computer programming.

Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist. His entire family fled the Soviet Union in 1979 under the threat of growing anti-Semitism and began their new lives as immigrants in the United States.

According to Brin, the research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.

Within the next few years, the prototype system had been converted into progressively improved versions, and these were substantially more effective than any other search engine then available.

As the buzz about their project spread, more and more people began to use it. Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at on their system.

They named their successor search engine Google, in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term googol, which is the immense large number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google Inc. opened its door as a business entity in September 1998, operating out of modest facilities in a Menlo Park, California garage.

Google was also in the process of developing a unique company culture. It operated in an informal atmosphere that facilitated both collegiality and an easy exchange of ideas.

By the end of 2000, Google was handling more than 100 million searches each day. Shortly thereafter, Google began to deliver new innovations and establish new partnerships to enter the burgeoning field of mobile wireless computer.

By expanding into this field, Google continued to pursue its strategy of putting search into hands of as many as possible.
The Google Story

History of Mitsubishi

History of Mitsubishi
The first Mitsubishi Company was a shipping firm established by Yataro Iwasaki (1834–1885) in 1870. In 1873, its name was changed to Mitsubishi Shokai.

The company bought into coal mining in 1881 by acquiring the Takashima mine and Hashima Island in 1890, using the produce to fuel their extensive steamship fleet.

They also diversified into shipbuilding, banking, insurance, warehousing, and trade. Later diversification carried the organization into such sectors as paper, steel, glass, electrical equipment, aircraft, oil, and real estate.

During the Second World War, Mitsubishi manufactured aircraft, under the direction of Jiro Horikoshi. The Mitsubishi Zero was a primary Japanese naval fighter in World War II.

As well as building prominent fighters, Mitsubishi also built many of Japan's most famous bombers of the war, such as the G3M, the G4M, the Ki-21, and the Ki-67.

During the 1930s, Mitsubishi had also built the single-engine Ki-35.

At the end of the Second World War Japans large industrial groups were dismantled by order of the Allied powers and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was split into three regional companies, each with an involvement in motor vehicle development.

By the beginning of the 1960s, Japans economy was gearing up: wages were rising and the idea of family motoring was taking off.

It was decided that the company should create a single operation to focus on the automotive industry and, in 1970 the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC) was formed.

In 1970, the company signed an LNG purchase and sale agreement in Brunei, marking the start of the global development of an investment-based business model transcending simple trading company activities.

Together with its over 500 group companies, Mitsubishi employs a multinational workforce of approximately 54,000 people. Mitsubishi has long been engaged in business with customers around the world in many industries, including energy, metals, machinery, chemicals, food and general merchandise.
History of Mitsubishi

Business History of Nokia

Business History of Nokia
Nokia is a Finnish company that since 1995 has become a global leader in the production of cellular phone.

Traditional images of Finnish industry are associated with timber forest products, furniture, ships and Valco (a government television picture tube company). The importance of the forest industry was evident in the slogan Nokia used during 70s, “Finland lives from its forest”.

Nokia is an old Finnish industry; it origin are traced to 1865 when an engineer named Fredrik Idestam built a pulp mill on a river in southwest Finland to produce paper. A small town eventually grew up around this mill site, and a company formed and achieved success in the production of paper and cardboard products.

In 1966 Nokia entered the electronics field. Initially it employed only 460 people and it was the country’s fourth largest employer in electronics. 1966 was also the year that Nokia’s three industries – forest products, rubber, and cable – merged. Thus when Nokia entered the production of consumer electronics and later, mobile phone, it was already a familiar industrial name to Finns.

Nokia was involved in eleven different industrial fields during the 1980, and difficult for foreign investors to understand the corporation. Nokia’s entry into high technology field began in the 1980s, when the CEO Kari Kairamo took the helm. He favored an active foreign policy for Finland, and as early as 1987 supported the country’s entry into European Union.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Nokia pursued an active acquisition policy and sought a refashion itself in several ways. The company’s strategy sought to develop a corporate structure modeled after General Electric. One of these was the purchase of Luxor, television maker.

Telecommunications has always been a strong industry in Scandinavia. Nokia’s particular success came as it acquired the technology for producing cellular phones from a joint venture that it initiated. International success finally came in 1984, when the Mobira Talkman, a portable cellular phone, came on the market and captured attention as a result of its innovativeness.

In 1992, Nokia decided on a new radical strategy. Nokia would become a mobile-phone pure play and sell off all other nonmobile phone assets, Nokia’s core business would henceforth be technology, not paper products, and not even computer or television technologies. This decision came as Nokia launched its 2100 series GSM cell phone, which was an incredible success. Nokia manufactured and sold 20 million.
Business History of Nokia

History of Pepsi Cola

History of Pepsi Cola
Summer 1898, the weather was hot and humid. In New Bern, North Carolina pharmacist named Caleb Bradham began experimenting with combinations of spices, juices, and syrups trying to create a refreshing new drink to serve his customers. He invented the beverage known around the world as Pepsi-Cola.

His creation, a unique mixture of kola nut extract, vanilla and rare oils, became so popular his customers named it "Brad's Drink." Caleb decided to rename it "Pepsi-Cola," and advertised his new soft drink. People responded, and sales of Pepsi-Cola started to grow, convincing him that he should form a company to market the new beverage. In 1902, he launched the Pepsi-Cola Company in the back room of his pharmacy, and applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a trademark.

At first, he mixed the syrup himself and sold it exclusively through soda fountains. But soon Caleb recognized that a greater opportunity existed to bottle Pepsi so that people could drink it anywhere. The business began to grow, and on June 16, 1903, "Pepsi-Cola" was officially registered with the U.S. Patent Office. That year, Caleb sold 7,968 gallons of syrup, using the theme line "Exhilarating, Invigorating, Aids Digestion." He also began awarding franchises to bottle Pepsi to independent investors, whose number grew from just two in 1905, in the cities of Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina, to 15 the following year, and 40 by 1907. By the end of 1910, there were Pepsi-Cola franchises in 24 states.

Building a strong franchise system was one of Caleb's greatest achievements. Local Pepsi-Cola bottlers, entrepreneurial in spirit and dedicated to the product's success, provided a sturdy foundation. They were the cornerstone of the Pepsi-Cola enterprise. By 1907, the new company was selling more than 100,000 gallons of syrup per year.

Growth was phenomenal, and in 1909 Caleb erected a headquarters so spectacular that the town of New Bern pictured it on a postcard. The previous year, Pepsi had been one of the first companies in the United States to switch from horse-drawn transport to motor vehicles, and Caleb's business expertise captured widespread attention.

Pepsi-Cola enjoyed 17 unbroken years of success. Caleb now promoted Pepsi sales with the slogan, "Drink Pepsi-Cola. It will satisfy you." Then came World War I, and the cost of doing business increased drastically. Sugar prices see sawed between record highs and disastrous lows, and so did the price of producing Pepsi-Cola.

Caleb was forced into a series of business gambles just to survive, until finally, after three exhausting years, his luck ran out and he was bankrupted. By 1921, only two plants remained open. It wasn't until a successful candy manufacturer, Charles G. Guth, appeared on the scene that the future of Pepsi-Cola was assured. Guth was president of Loft Incorporated, a large chain of candy stores and soda fountains along the eastern seaboard. He saw Pepsi-Cola as an opportunity to discontinue an unsatisfactory business relationship with the Coca-Cola Company, and at the same time to add an attractive drawing card to Loft's soda fountains. He was right.

After five owners and 15 unprofitable years, Pepsi-Cola was once again a thriving national brand. One oddity of the time, for a number of years, all of Pepsi-Cola's sales were actually administered from a Baltimore building apparently owned by Coca-Cola, and named for its president.

Within two years, Pepsi would earn $1 million for its new owner. With the resurgence came new confidence, a rarity in those days because the nation was in the early stages of a severe economic decline that came to be known as the Great Depression.
History of Pepsi Cola