The story of Tyler and Cameron, better known as the Winklevoss twins, is a fascinating tale about their alleged role in the conceptualization of Facebook. It's also a tale about their missed opportunity to popularize a social network. Not to mention alleged opportunism by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who beat them to the punch.
But this story isn't so big just because it involves one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It's because there is a huge amount of money at stake. It's also because there was an Oscar winning film about the whole thing.
Then there's also the fact that both Winklevoss twins are Olympic rowers who participated in the Beijing Olympics. They were born in Southampton in New York state on August 21, 1981. They were brought up in Greenwich, CT and ended up in Harvard University studying economics.
Halfway down their stay at Harvard, Tyler and Cameron teamed up another student named Divya Narendra and came up with a plan to connect Harvard students using a social network. It was to be called HarvardConnect and they were then planning on expanding it to include students from other universities. They hired a student as a programmer to write the code for the project.
After a couple of programmers had done some partial work on it and left, Mark Zuckerberg was brought in to finish it up. It was almost 2004 by hen and Zuckerberg continued to work on it while developing his own social network simultaneously. He launched his own version called thefacebook.com before HarvardConnection could be completed.
HarvardConnection was eventually launched and it was then renamed as ConnectU. This entity then proceeded to file suit against Facebook claiming that Zuckerberg had appropriated their idea for Facebook and even used source code that was developed for HarvardConnect. After years of wrangling and counter-lawsuits, both sides eventually agreed to a $65 million settlement in 2008.
This story has become part of Facebook's well-known history when it was portrayed in the film 'The Social Network'. The film garnered eight Oscar nominations and won three. To add some more fuel to the fire, ConnectU dragged Facebook back in court in 2010. This time, the claim was that Facebook had not correctly provided a value for the shares they were allotted under the settlement.
They say it was actually closer to $11 million than the $45 million figure given to them by Facebook. Based on the market value of their share, it was worth around $120 million in Aug 2010. If they got the bigger settlement they were now asking for, it would be worth around $466 million.
But that remained a pipe-dream, because the U. S. Appeals court rejected their claim and ruled that the earlier settlement was final and the matter had to end here. No surprise that the Winklevoss twins don't feel the same and say they want to pursue the matter further. It's a rather ironic story tinged with the harshness of life, and perhaps there's some more chapters of this saga yet to come.
But this story isn't so big just because it involves one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It's because there is a huge amount of money at stake. It's also because there was an Oscar winning film about the whole thing.
Then there's also the fact that both Winklevoss twins are Olympic rowers who participated in the Beijing Olympics. They were born in Southampton in New York state on August 21, 1981. They were brought up in Greenwich, CT and ended up in Harvard University studying economics.
Halfway down their stay at Harvard, Tyler and Cameron teamed up another student named Divya Narendra and came up with a plan to connect Harvard students using a social network. It was to be called HarvardConnect and they were then planning on expanding it to include students from other universities. They hired a student as a programmer to write the code for the project.
After a couple of programmers had done some partial work on it and left, Mark Zuckerberg was brought in to finish it up. It was almost 2004 by hen and Zuckerberg continued to work on it while developing his own social network simultaneously. He launched his own version called thefacebook.com before HarvardConnection could be completed.
HarvardConnection was eventually launched and it was then renamed as ConnectU. This entity then proceeded to file suit against Facebook claiming that Zuckerberg had appropriated their idea for Facebook and even used source code that was developed for HarvardConnect. After years of wrangling and counter-lawsuits, both sides eventually agreed to a $65 million settlement in 2008.
This story has become part of Facebook's well-known history when it was portrayed in the film 'The Social Network'. The film garnered eight Oscar nominations and won three. To add some more fuel to the fire, ConnectU dragged Facebook back in court in 2010. This time, the claim was that Facebook had not correctly provided a value for the shares they were allotted under the settlement.
They say it was actually closer to $11 million than the $45 million figure given to them by Facebook. Based on the market value of their share, it was worth around $120 million in Aug 2010. If they got the bigger settlement they were now asking for, it would be worth around $466 million.
But that remained a pipe-dream, because the U. S. Appeals court rejected their claim and ruled that the earlier settlement was final and the matter had to end here. No surprise that the Winklevoss twins don't feel the same and say they want to pursue the matter further. It's a rather ironic story tinged with the harshness of life, and perhaps there's some more chapters of this saga yet to come.
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