Mark+Zuckerburg

[[image:da103-keyinnovatorscaitophilminer/Mark-Zuckerberg-CEO-Of-Facebook.jpg width="249" height="167" align="left"]]Background Information
He is Businessman, co-founder of Facebook. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in Dobbs Ferry, New YorkHe was born into a nice family and a very educated one too. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice. The dental practice was attached to his home. His mother, Karen, was a psychiatrist beforeshe had their four children—Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Getting Started
Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at a young age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to make a messaging program. He named it "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office this allowed the receptionist to inform him of a new patient. This would stop the yellin across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Him and his friends together created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."

Schooling
To keep up with Mark's mounting interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come into the house once a week and work with Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of him in the studies, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time. Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, this was an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He showed his talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also showed excellance in literature and he earned a diploma in classics. Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on creating new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse, Pandora is still used today. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—showed an interest in purchasing the software, and hiring Mark before graduation. He refused the many offers he recieved.

College
After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By his sophomore year at the ivy league institution, he had created a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he invented a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. This program became wildly popular, but was later stopped by the school administration after it was seen inappropriate. Based on the craze of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss worked on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but as soon as he began he dropped out to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. This later become known as the web phenom Facebook.

[[image:da103-keyinnovatorscaitophilminer/The-Social-Network-movie-poster-David-Fincher.jpg width="167" height="216" align="left"]]Aftermath
Mark Zuckerburg as of March 2011 is worth 13.5 billion dollars and Facebook is worth 50 billion. Recently the movie //The Social Network// was released on Blueray and DVD. The movie documents how Facebook came to be and was rated one of the top movies of the year. Facebook has evolved into one of the most popular websites in the world. It is currently second in most vistited website behind //Google//. It currently has 500 million users and has really been one of the most usefull information websites in the world. You can send messages to new friends and recconect with old friends. You can post pictures of yourself and friends and it's really just a great and addicing website.