Maybach-Motorenbau GmbH is a German luxury car manufacturer. It was founded in 1909 by Wilhelm Maybach with his son Karl Maybach as director. The company was originally a subsidiary of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin until 1918. Today, the brand is owned by Daimler AG and is based in Stuttgart.
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Indian Railways is one of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world, transporting seventeen million passengers and more than one million tonnes of freight daily. IR is the world’s largest commercial or utility employer, with more than 1.6 million employees.
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The world’s costliest coffee, at $130 a pound, is called Kopi Luwak. It is in the droppings of a type of marsupial that eats only the very best coffee beans. Plantation workers track them and scoop their precious poop.
Sidamo is a town and a coffee growing region of Ethiopia.
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Chester Floyd Carlson, a physicist, born in Seattle, USA invented the process of instant copying which he called electrophotography. It later came to be known as xerography.
Carlson, who worked at the patent office in New York found the job of taking copies of documents very exhausting.
This prompted him to find a solution and experiment with photoconductivity and electro-photography.
It took Carlson ten years to convince a company to accept his invention. He was rejected by companies like GE, IBM, Kodak and RCA.
In 1947 he finally sold the commercial rights to his invention to the now famous Xerox Corp. Eleven years later, Xerox introduced its first office copier.
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The Four Cylinders Tower is the BMW headquarters in Munich. It was built between 1968 and 1972 and was ready just in time for 1972 Summer Olympics. The building stands 101 m (roughly 331 feet) tall, is located in direct proximity of the Olympic Village and is often mentioned as one of the most notable examples of architecture in Munich. The large cathedral exterior is supposed to mimic the shape of a tire in a race car, with the garage representing the cylinder head. Both buildings were designed by architect Karl Schwanzer.
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Construction of the New Howrah Bridge was started on 1937. This bridge is one of the finest cantilever bridges in the world. After considering the quotation from various firms, the contract was awarded to Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Co. Ltd of Darlington. Out of the total 26,500 tons of steel used, Tata Iron and Steel Company supplied 23,500 tons of steel and fabrication was done by Braithwaite, Burn and Jessop Co. at four different shops in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
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Generally the origin of the stock exchange is traced back to the stock exchange in Antwerp (1460). Still the Amsterdam Stock Exchange is considered as the oldest stock Exchange in the World. This was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or called VOC) that issued the first shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
The company was the first in issuing the stocks and bonds. It was later renamed as the Amsterdam Bourse and was the first to begin trading in secuirities.
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The concept of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International.
Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having ‘crashed’ (after the dot com bubble), the Web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity.
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IBM has been known through most of its recent history as the world’s largest computer company; with over 388,000 employees worldwide, IBM is the largest information technology employer in the world.
IBM holds more patents than any other US based technology company.
It has engineers and consultants in over 170 countries and IBM Research has eight laboratories worldwide.
IBM employees have earned three Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.
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Edmund S. Phelps is McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics.
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SWISS is Switzerland’s national airline, and its 76-aircraft fleet serves 76 destinations around the world from its Zurich hub and from Basel and Geneva international airports. As part of the Lufthansa Group and a member of the global Star Alliance, SWISS provides quality air services that link Switzerland with Europe and the world.
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Iridium, the satellite telephone service promoted by Motorola, planned to link up the earth with 66 low-orbit satellites. ‘Geography is history’ is the line with which the company launched its services. By the end of the year, the idea was declared a dud. Mixing up geography and history makes bad economics too.
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Michelin (full name: Compagnie Generale des Etablissements Michelin) is based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region of France. Michelin has made a number of innovations to tyres, including in 1946 the radial tyre.
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The cute little penguin is the official logo of Linux.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, chose Larry Ewing’s design simply because he likes penguins. It is said that the name Tux was the winning entry in the ‘Let’s Name The Penguin While Linus Is Away Contest’ with the ‘T’ standing for Torvalds and the ‘U’ and ‘X’ for Linux.
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Tucked within the Himalayas, Tibet in the Republic of China has the two highest airfields in the world. Bangda airport in eastern Tibet, which lies 15,548 feet above sea level, was opened on Oct. 22, 1994. It relegated Lhasa airport (14,315 feet) in Tibet’s capital to second place among the world’s highest airports. Keflavik is the main international airport for Iceland