While Kodak cameras are now a beloved relic of the past for amateur and professional photographers alike, the company’s long-winded decline was quite meteoric given their previous heights.

Throughout the late-20th century, Kodak was the brand on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Due in large part to a high demand for film cameras among Americans especially, Kodak was a billion-dollar company.

So, what happened?

Kodak was among the most popular camera companies throughout the 20th century (SSPL/Getty Images)

The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and while they are still operating today, they are widely (and understandably) considered a shell of the juggernaut company they used to be.

However, the reason for this downward spiral is oftentimes misjudged as being a failure to adapt to a changing industry rather than the company’s true mistake.

You see, in 1975, one of Kodak’s engineers made a brand new invention that you might’ve heard of: the digital camera. A camera without film was a legitimately revolutionary idea at the time, and Steve Sasson – the engineer who created it – knew as much, showing it to everyone he could within the company.

However, Kodak ultimately made the decision to pass on the invention, instead asking Sasson to bury it and not speak too openly about the new, potentially disruptive technology.

Can you imagine the world without the digital camera? (Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)

Ultimately, selling film separately from the cameras themselves was far too profitable for the company, and the idea of purposefully hindering film sales by releasing the digital camera was just not deemed to be financially wise. And, for the time being, they were right.

By not releasing the digital camera and instead continuing to ride the wave of sales from both cameras and their film, Kodak thrived for decades without publicizing its digital camera discoveries.

At the height of its strength in 1996, Kodak was worth $31 billion, and while competition was fierce, the company was still at the forefront of the camera industry.

With the power of hindsight, though, not pushing digital cameras was among the greatest mistakes the company ever made, and even worse–they doubled down on it.

Kodak’s commitment to film cameras led to its eventual downfall (Chris Furlong/Getty Images)

Once the technology for digital cameras was fully developed and became a worthwhile alternative to film cameras, most companies hopped on the bandwagon or got left behind completely.

For Kodak, their commitment to film cameras resulted in them being among the latter examples, as the company began struggling greatly by the mid-2000s when the digital camera boom entered full swing.

So today, while digital cameras and phones are the norm for taking photos, film cameras like the ones Kodak has been selling for decades are mostly reserved for photographer aficionados and lovers of 20th-century nostalgia.

An influencer who bought her ‘dream home’ quickly discovered it has turned into a bit of a nightmare after she’s been beset by problems.

Buying a house is one of those major milestones in life which you really need to go well.

It’s one of the most expensive things you’ll ever do and if it works out you will finally have a place to call home, at least as long as you can keep up the mortgage payments.

No longer are you shovelling a big chunk of your paycheck directly into a landlord’s pocket where you’ll never see it again, now you’re paying into solidifying your future.

Or that’s how it’s supposed to go, because when it doesn’t work out you’re left with something really expensive which the bank mostly owns that you’ll be paying off forever.

She bought a home in a lovely woodland area, unfortunately the woodland wanted in (Getty Stock Image)

Spare a thought then for TikToker and influencer Laureise Livingston (@laureise), who bought a house a couple of years ago and started finding all sorts of issues with it.

It’s not actually the house itself which is the problem, even though it is 100 years old and Laureise said there were ‘a lot of opportunity for issues’.

Instead it’s the ‘very woodsy, very beautiful’ part of the world the house is located in.

“It has been rodents and bugs and beetles that have just been eating us alive financially,” she said as she explained that living in a picturesque woodland area isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Laureise explained that she’d been relaxing on her couch one night when she heard a scratching beneath her floorboards, rather than being the prelude to some horror film it turned out to be an infestation of Norwegian rats, also known as Brown rats.

She said the ‘ginormous’ rats were chewing through the heating pipes in her house, and even worse there’s asbestos in there which is now being exposed due to their persistent gnawing.

“That’s a nice house, shame if someone made asbestos nests underneath it.” (Getty Stock Image)

To make matters worse the rats were ‘using the asbestos to make nests underneath our house’, and to sort it all out cost her ‘about $10,000’ while her home went without heating for ‘maybe six months’.

Having finally dealt with that problem the next one promptly showed up as one of their neighbours got a termite infestation.

Getting their own home checked out as a precaution they were happy to discover a lack of termites, but not so jazzed to find out they did have ‘woodboring beetles’.

It turns out those are ‘just as bad as termites’ and there were two solutions to dealing with them.

Option one reportedly cost $4,500 and would ‘heat treat’ the home, meaning they’d have to take everything that could melt or catch fire out and then blast the beetles.

Alternatively, she could spend $7,000 and get the place fumigated, spending four days out of the house while it was pumped full of poison.

In the end she went for the heat treatment, the perils of being a homeowner, eh?

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and this guy’s endeavors proves just that.

In the internet era, there’s dozens of ways you can make money. From affiliate marketing and social media influencing, to being paid to take online surveys and selling your clothes on Vinted – the world is your oyster.

One person who decided to embrace this is Leonardo Urbano, 30, from Australia and in 2023 alone he raked in a whopping $100,000 AUD (around $66,000 USD).

How did he do it, I hear you ask? Collecting trash.

Leonardo Urbano has made thousands of dollars from other people’s unwanted items. (Leonardo Urbano)

When we say ‘trash’, we don’t mean empty M&M packets and abandoned water bottles, we mean things like furniture and clothing.

Over the course of last year, Leonardo would spend his days rummaging through trash piles in Sydney in the hopes of finding hidden gems.

Some of the goods he got his hands on included fridges, Fendi handbags and jewelry – to name a few.

Leonardo would then sell these items online on platforms such as Facebook Marketplace.

In Australia, local councils offer free trash pickups in what they call a ‘council cleanup’.

Leonardo would sell the items online. (Tfilm/Getty Stock)

“A council cleanup is a free rubbish pick up service offered by local councils in Australia,” explains the Sydney City Rubbish site. “The local waste management team will come and collect certain items from your home for free.

“Usually, this is offered twice a year for residents. However, some council municipalities may have different frequencies, like once a quarter.”

But until these cleanups are arranged, many people will abandoned their items on the roadside, perfect for people like Leonardo on the hunt for hidden treasures.

Apparently there would be ‘mountains’ of things for him to sift through.

Leonardo would find huge piles of trash in the streets. (Leonardo Urbano)

“You could see mountains of stuff — like literally, mountains. And that’s when I find most of the stuff,” Leonardo said, as per NBC Los Angeles. “That’s where the big items will be, like fridges and wardrobes and couches.”

Some of his more expensive finds has surprised his friends.

“My friends are shocked at how much good clothing, like perfect clothing, ends up in the trash,” Leonardo shared.

Some of the items he discovered last year include over 50 TVs, over 20 washing machines, 50 computers/laptops and 30 fridges.

One of his most notable finds was a painting by two-time Archibald Prize finalist Dapeng Liu thought to be worth $3,000.

Leonardo also dug out a $400 Italian coffee machine. Impressive!

A tech giant boss has revealed the way he made his 400 employees millionaires and maintains that his plan was for their future.

Before Jyoti Bansal sold his software startup, AppDynamics in 2017, he couldn’t have known the ripple effect it would have had on those who worked for him.

It was days before his company was due to go public that Cisco, a communication tech company made him an offer he decided was the best deal for everyone involved.

Bansal made a tough choice (Kimberly White / Stringer / Getty Images)

The offer price was $3.7 billion, and the chairman was going to make big bucks regardless of whether he took the sale or not.

But what would happen to his employees if he chose either way?

He explained that one option would guarantee the wealth of his employees and decided that this would be the best thing for him and his company.

Bansal quickly accepted the offer and suddenly, around 400 of his employees became millionaires.

Bansal told CNBC Make It: “We had dozens of employees with $5 million-plus outcomes. These are life-changing outcomes.”

The decision to sell came down to whether AppDynamic’s software products could fit within Cisco and how the sale would impact his 1,200 employees.

This included cultural and financial implications.

He went on to estimate his own post-IPO projections and compared them to Cisco’s valuation of the startup, to figure out which was most beneficial.

He estimated that to reach a $3.7 billion market capitalization, the company would have had to have been running ‘three [to] four years of great execution’ and said: “That means three [to] four years of risk that we … reduced for all of the employees there. [That’s] a significant impact.”

Had Bansal decided to refuse the selling offer, his employees probably would have continued making their usual salaries and working for the company.

But because a lot of employees bought shares, they saw an amazing rise in the value to at least $1 million, a spokesperson for Bansal confirmed.

His company was bought out by Cisco ( SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images)

After the sale, Bansal felt like he needed something new in his life, and started the Traceable and Harness companies to fill his time, with Harness actually valuing $3.7 billion in 2022.

However, it wasn’t just his employees who felt the weight of money in their pockets. It was him too.

He said: “As the founder, it was much more than life-changing money for me, personally.

“I would be in a good place. So that was a factor for me, but not the biggest factor. The biggest for me was our employees.”

Bansal made a significant impact on his employees’ lives, just but considering their lives and needs during the offer of a sale.

This is a rarity, but it’s also happened before when SecureIT got acquired by VeriSign for $70 million in 1998.

The founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry didn’t know how impactful the sale was until he left a company party.

He told Make It that around 70 of his 80 employees became millionaires when VeriSign’s stock increased two years later.

He said: “People were going crazy in the company, because they had never thought of so much money.

“A lot of them were buying new houses. They were buying new cars. I know one guy, he took six months off, rented a [mobile home] and went around the country. They could do what they wanted to do.”