A Digital Retrospective: Inside the Black Creators who’ve helped society with Productivity-Improving Technology
As we celebrate Black History Month, it’s critical to have a reflective moment and appreciate our ancestors who sacrificed and paved the way for others to dare to dream big and achieve milestones beyond their wildest dreams. Moreover, in a tech-enabled world where productivity is paramount, Chindeu Echeruo and Marian Croak are a few names that we should remember because they’ve afforded us the ability to remove friction points in our daily lives. Take a journey with me as we examine the contributions of these historic individuals and how their foresight, genius, and execution have helped advance society with Productivity-Improving Technology.
Creator: Chindeu Echeruo
Technology: GPS Mass Transit
Company: HopStop
In the early 2000s, Chindeu began to develop a frustration with the complexities of New York City transit and decided to address it by building a transit-centric navigation app HopStop. By taking a Customer-Centric approach to the development of the product, he was able to identify areas of opportunities that the product can address that similar apps like MapQuest, simply couldn’t deliver. Prior to HopStop dwellers in metropolitan cities would have to memorize, document, or ask strangers how to get to and from destinations. Given the pain points experienced by himself and city commuters, he launched the product in 2005 with free public transit directions and was available on iOS, Andriod, and Windows platforms. The app was well received and there were clear signals that city expansion outside of New York City was needed in locations with similar challenges. In response to the identified needs around the US and abroad, Chindeu and his team were able to scale their technology into Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington D.C.
By applying a customer-centric framework along with investing in the infrastructure necessary to scale their operations, HopStop grew into the Top 100 fastest-growing companies by Inc Magazine in 2011. Subsequently, HopStop was acquired by Apple in 2013 for $1 billion. What started as a product to make the commuting lives easier for door-to-door directions, it organically grew into adjacent value propositions for users. Some of those propositions included the following:
- Nearby Stations locations that allowed users to find bus or subway stops near an address.
- City Guide would enable users to find attractions, bars, hotels, restaurants, shopping areas, and other businesses in the area.
- Community feature offered users the ability to plan a trip with multiple destinations for a curated itinerary for the morning, daytime, or evening activities
- Mass Transit maps and schedules.
At its usage peak, HopStop was live in over 140 markets and serving 8 million customers per month. The contributions of the app have influenced the customer experience of Apple and Google maps to serve our everyday transit needs.
After HopStop, Chindeu would found several other companies including MindMeet, Startup School of Alchemy. His contributions in the GPS Mass Transit tech space should be celebrated as our daily lives were impacted in ways that will proceed us for generations to come.
For supplemental resources on Chindeu’s work, please check out the following links below:
Creator: Dr. Marian Croak
Technology: Voice Over IP (VoIP), Text to Donate
Companies built from VoIP: WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger …..
When we think about who’s the real MVP in Technology, Marian Croak is a name that should be recognized as her VoIP technology is responsible for making all the video chat apps that we love today exist through her genius. She’s a New York City native with a Bachelor of Science from Princeton University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California where she earned a Ph.D. in social psychology and quantitative analysis.
She began her career at AT&T at Bell Labs in 1982. During this time period communication between individuals and families was all done through telephone lines. While placing calls was feasible; what became a challenge was placing phone calls when you’re not home. Marian advocated and committed to an audacious vision of leveraging public internet protocols to transmit signals between devices that would afford multiple devices connected on the same public internet connection to communicate with one another. Over her 30 year career at the company, she amassed numerous accolades including over 200 patents with 100 of them specific to VoIP. During her tenure, she also invented the technology that allowed people to securely donate to charity via text message following Hurricane Katrina.
After her time at AT&T, she joined Google in 2014 as a Vice President of Engineering where she focuses on reliability engineering to improve the performance of Google systems globally. She’s currently the Head of Responsible Ethical AI at Google to continue the work in AI research that will yield more equitable and ethical AI systems globally. Marian is a true pioneer in technology with her work in VoIP, text-to-donate technology, and now building more robust AI models for the future.
Let’s all collectivity take a moment and give Marian her flowers because our ability to communicate personally and professionally wouldn’t have been possible. For supplemental resources on Marian’s work, please check out the following links below:
Black Excellence will continue to be the North Star for sustainable progress in society and the contributions of these technologists are evidence of the ongoing efforts to amplify the vision of our ancestors. In closing, I’ll leave you with the below quote to identify, create and execute your ideas for positive change in your community.
“Whatever you do , strive to it so well that no man living and no man dead, and no man yet to be born can do it any better”
~Benjamin E. Mays, Civil Rights Activist, Credited as “ The Dean of the Civil Rights Movement”
Thank you for taking the time to read my post and welcome feedback as we go on this #techintuitions journey together. 💯🖤
