Biography: Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris, France and grew up in Maryland. He became interested in computer while still in high school. He graduated from Tufts University in 1988, with a degree in Computer Science. After graduation from Tufts he worked for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, he developed software for Macintosh. In 1991 he co-founded Ink Development Corporation. Part of the company was an internet shopping segment and later was named eShop, Inc. Pierre Omidyar worked as a software engineer until 1994. In 1994 he moved to become a developer services engineer for General Magic, a mobile communication platform company. The company eShops was sold in 1996 to Microsoft. Omidyar had developed interests in the technical aspects of online commerce and he continued to pursue those interests.
In September of 1995 he created a prototype on his personal web page, at that time he began an online service that was named Auction Web. He learned that a market existed for many items, and there was a need for people to be given a way to communicate with each other easily to enable this market to grow.. He added a forum on Auction Web for feedback that gave buyers and sellers a place to give each other ratings for the integrity of the products they traded on the website. The site began with collectibles and expanded to a large range of items. The Auction site grew from 250,000 auctions in 1996 to 2 million the first month of 1997. At the end of 1997 eBay was hosting almost 800,000 auctions in one day. (Omidyar changed the name to eBay in 1997). EBay expand in 2002 to include PayPal, which was used to process many of the online transactions. In 2002 eBay began to include “fixed-price” or “best offer” sales in addition to the auctions. EBay grew to include a diversity of products, and today eBay itself is used as a resource for companies in pricing their own services and products.
Omidyar today serves on the Board of Trustees of Tufts University, Santa Fe Institute and The Omidyar foundation. In 2005 he and his wife gave a gift of $100 million to endow the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund. World emergencies, have been aided with the application that allows users to create maps from data submitted by cell phone users, it was used in the 2010 earthquake