pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Ken and Linda Rosenthal opened the Saint Louis Bread Company in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1987, after Ken spent a year learning sourdough from Roger Brunello at La Boulange in San Francisco, using $150,000 of his own money and a matching SBA loan. Au Bon Pain bought it for $23 million in 1993, rena...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Konosuke Matsushita founded the Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works in 1918 with a duplex lamp socket that let a home with a single ceiling socket run a light and an appliance at once. In 1927 he sold battery-powered bicycle lamps under the brand National. During World War II the...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In August 2011, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee and the investigator who named Night Dragon and Operation Aurora, revealed Operation Shady RAT, an espionage campaign that had been running since mid-2006. RAT stands for remote access tool, software that gives an a...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On January 12, 2010, Google disclosed that it had been attacked in mid-December 2009, though forensics traced the campaign back to mid-2009. More than 34 organizations were targeted, including Adobe, Akamai, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Dow...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Colonial Pipeline carries gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas refineries through the Southeast to New York, about 45 percent of the fuel used on the East Coast. On May 6, 2021, the Russia-based group DarkSide stole 100 gigabytes of data, and on May 7 it deployed ransomware. The entry p...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1923, Danish Nobel laureate August Krogh and his wife Marie, on a U.S. lecture tour, went to Toronto to meet insulin's discoverers Frederick Banting, John Macleod, Charles Best and James Collip, and won permission to produce insulin in Denmark. With Hans Christian Hagedorn and backer August...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Norwegian Cruise Line began in 1966, when Norwegian shipping executive Knut Kloster and Israeli businessman Ted Arison launched the car ferry Sunward between Southampton and Gibraltar. When that route failed, they moved to the Caribbean as Norwegian Caribbean Lines, and Arison left to found Car...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On Monday, November 24, 2014, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment found their computers frozen by a warning from a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. Investigators later found the attackers had been inside for at least two months, and some claimed a year. The hackers said they to...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Nikon was founded in 1917 as Nippon Kogaku Kogyo, a merger of three Japanese optical makers producing microscopes, binoculars and telescopes, and later periscopes and bomb sights for the Japanese military. The Nikkor lens name arrived in 1932 and the Nikon camera name in 1946, and early Canon c...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1987, telecom lawyers Morgan O'Brien and Chris Rogers and investment bankers Brian McAuley and Peter Reinheimer founded Fleet Call. Rather than bid for costly cellular spectrum, they bought 800 MHz specialized mobile radio frequencies set aside for fleet dispatch such as taxis, delivery truc...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Newark Metropolitan Airport opened in October 1928 on 68 acres of marshland, pushed by Mayor Thomas Raymond. To support the first paved runway in the country, builders hauled in 6.7 million cubic yards of earth, 7,000 discarded Christmas trees and 200 bank safes donated by a junk vendor, making...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 2007, Netflix engineer Anthony Wood, whose earlier DVR company ReplayTV had lost to TiVo, built a Netflix streaming box called Project Griffin. Weeks before launch, Reed Hastings killed it, reasoning that Netflix hardware would push Apple, Sony and Microsoft to keep the Netflix app off their...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, short for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage, stood 10 inches tall before its rubber duck antenna, weighed about two and a half pounds, took 10 hours to charge and lasted 30 minutes of talk. It depended on a cellular concept Bell Labs proposed in 1947: the AMPS net...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Miami International Airport began in 1928, when Pan American Airways bought a 116-acre plot on Northwest 36th Street. By 1929 it was Pan American Airport, the first mainland U.S. airport with international port of entry facilities, with a domed terminal by Delano and Aldrich built for Sikorsky...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Medtronic was founded in 1949 by Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie as a Minneapolis medical equipment repair shop that mostly fixed centrifuges. On Halloween night 1957 a power outage across Minnesota and western Wisconsin cut power to a wall-plugged pacemaker, and a pediatr...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Magnavox, Latin for great or loud voice, grew out of a Napa, California lab, the Commercial Wireless and Development Company, run from 1911 by engineers Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen. In 1914 they patented the moving coil loudspeaker, U.S. patent 1,105,924, which used an electromagnetic coi...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John D. Goeken founded Microwave Communications, Inc. in October 1963 to run a microwave radio relay between Chicago and St. Louis, with towers about 30 miles apart, serving truck fleets and Illinois Waterway barges. The company soon targeted small and midsize businesses priced out of AT&T'...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! New York's LaGuardia Airport traces back to a 1934 protest: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, holding a ticket to New York, refused to leave his plane in Newark and made the airline fly him to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The site he later chose in Queens had been Bowery Bay Beach, a resort the St...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Kimberly-Clark began in Neenah, Wisconsin in 1872, when four men put $42,000 into paper mills. After the Atlas paper mill burned down in 1888, workers rebuilt it with more capacity in five months, and the company became the first firm west of Pennsylvania to adopt the sulfite pulp process for s...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Kayak was founded in January 2004 by Paul M. English and Steve Hafner, a co-founder of Orbitz, under the name Travel Search Company Inc. It became Kayak Software Corporation in August 2004 and launched its site in February 2005. Unlike an online travel agency that handles bookings and customer...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In 1984 John Schnatter sold his 1971 Camaro Z28 for $1,600, bought used pizza equipment and set it up in a converted broom closet at the back of his father's tavern in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The bar's patrons were his first customers, and within a year he took over an adjoining space. A free...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! John MacFarlane earned electrical engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, in 1990, UC Santa Barbara. In the 1990s he built an enterprise messaging business, Software.com, with longtime collaborator Craig Shelburne, sold its systems to customers such as AT&T, and merge...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! International Harvester traced its roots to Cyrus Hall McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper of the 1830s. In 1902 banker J.P. Morgan and negotiator George W. Perkins merged McCormick's company with its rival, the Deering Harvester Company, and three smaller competitors into a $150 million...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The International House of Pancakes began in Burbank, California in the late 1950s, founded by brothers Jerry and Al Lapin with commercial artist Albert Kallis, whose wife Trudy reportedly came up with the name. Its steep A-frame buildings with bright blue roofs, built through the late 1970s, w...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with about 21,000 yuan, roughly $5,000. The name came from a wall slogan meaning roughly "China has achievements," and the company later ran a campaign teaching foreigners to pronounce it rather than re...