Alex Tew (born 1984) is a British entrepreneur and the co-founder of the meditation app Calm . He is known for The Million Dollar Homepage in 2005, at the age of 21, which earned him more than $1 million in five months. [1]
Alex Tew was raised in Wiltshire, England. He began meditating when he was fourteen and he frequently read books about concentration, memory, and cognition. [2] He attended a business management program at the University of Nottingham before dropping out in December 2005. [2]
After the success of The Million Dollar Homepage in 2005, Tew began several internet ventures including Pixelotto, which sold advertising space on websites. He founded humor-focused social network called PopJam, and a Million Dollar Homepage-inspired website site called One Million People which featured photos instead of advertisements. [2]
In late 2008, he made a Flash game called Sock and Awe, a gamified version of the George W. Bush shoeing incident.
In 2011, while he was the CEO of PopJam, he and developer Ben Dowling created a site called "Do Nothing For 2 Minutes". [3]
Tew moved to San Francisco and in 2012, along with Michael Acton Smith, he co-founded Calm, a company that currently operates a meditation app. He serves as co-CEO. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.
The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
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Gennady Alexandrovich Vaynerchuk, more commonly known by his alias Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary Vee, is an American businessman, author, speaker, and internet personality. He is a co-founder of the restaurant reservation software company Resy and Empathy Wines. First known as a wine critic who expanded his family's wine business, Vaynerchuk is now more known for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of New York–based communications company VaynerX, and as CEO of VaynerX subsidiary VaynerMedia.
Kevin Rose is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV.
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Sock and Awe is a minimalist 2008 Flash game created by British entrepreneur Alex Tew, recreating the Bush shoeing incident and putting the player in control of journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi who flung a shoe at George W. Bush during a news conference. Although the game was hastily put together, it went viral and received widespread news coverage right around its release, only a day after the actual incident. It is a well-known example of a newsgame. The name of the game is a pun on the US shock and awe military tactic.
Michael Acton Smith OBE is the co-CEO and co-founder of Calm, a meditation space company. He is also the founder of Firebox.com, and founder and chairman of children's entertainment company Mind Candy which the created the video game Moshi Monsters. He has been described by The Daily Telegraph as "a rock star version of Willy Wonka" and by The Independent as "a polite version of Bob Geldof."
Leo Resig is a U.S.-based entrepreneur in the sectors of digital media, eCommerce, and streaming television. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of the over-the-top video-on-demand service, Atmosphere.TV.
Sean Rad is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of the dating app Tinder. Rad launched Tinder in 2012 and by 2014 the company was recording one billion "swipes" a day.
Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American entrepreneur. She is the founder, executive chair, and former CEO of publicly traded Bumble, an online dating platform, launched in 2014. She is a co-founder of Tinder and was previously its Vice President of Marketing.
Jeffrey Todd Arnold is an American Internet entrepreneur and executive. He is chairman of Sharecare, a health and wellness engagement platform that provides users with personal health tools.
Tapas, formerly known as Tapastic and originally known as Comic Panda, is a South Korean webtoon and prose publishing website and app owned by Tapas Media, a Kakao Entertainment company. It was created by entrepreneurs Chang Kim and Young-Jun Jang in 2012, who is currently Tapas Media's CEO.
Alejandro Carlos "Alec" Oxenford is an Argentine entrepreneur. He co-founded OLX, and co-founded letgo, a mobile classified ad app in the United States.
Calm.com, Inc., doing business as Calm, is a software company based in San Francisco, California. It produces meditation products, including guided meditations and Sleep Stories on its subscription-based app.
Benjamin Pasternak is an Australian technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of SIMULATE, an American food technology company, that has raised US$57M in investment to date. SIMULATE's signature product, NUGGS, launched in July 2019. It is a plant-based alternative to chicken nuggets. Previously, Pasternak founded Monkey, a social networking app that enabled teenagers to video chat with like-minded people.
Baa Baa Land is a 2017 slow cinema film produced by meditation software company Calm featuring eight hours of footage of sheep standing in a field. The idea for the film was conceived by producer Peter Freedman, and was directed, shot and edited by art film director Garth Thomas. Each shot lasts between 30 minutes to over an hour. It was filmed at the Layer Marney lamb and sheep farm near Tiptree in Essex, England, and premiered at the Prince Charles Cinema in London's West End on September 27, 2017.
Tamara Levitt is a Canadian author, mindfulness instructor, and voice-over artist most widely known as the narrator for the Calm app.
"2 Hours Doing Nothing" was a two-hour video created by Indonesian YouTuber Muhammad Didit, published on his YouTube channel Sobat Miskin Official on 10 July 2020 at 11:21:44 UTC. The video features Didit staring at the camera in his bedroom for two hours. It was originally intended to be a 10-minute video. It surpassed four million views and a mobile game of the same name was later published. Along with the channel, the video is now deleted.