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iPhone 5, Amazon Cloud Player & NYT Paywall: This Morning’s Top Stories

Facebook-Web-Design — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:16:22 +0000

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.

Apple Might Delay iPhone 5 Release

Apple could be delaying the release of the iPhone 5 from summer to fall, possibly to dodge complaints from recent purchasers of Verizon iPhones.

Amazon Launches Streaming Music Player

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon’s servers and play them via the web or Android. We’ve got an early review here.

New York Times Paywall Easy to Subvert

Mashable readers have discovered that it’s breathtakingly easy to bypass the New York Times‘s newly erected paywall.

Further News

Note-taking platform Evernote has released a reworked version of Evernote Web that speeds up performance and adds Facebook sharing functionality.
Tickets are already sold out for Apple’s WWDC conference, which was announced Monday.
Warren Buffett warned investors that valuations for social media firms are unwarranted, though he has declined to name names.
A mere 20,000 Twitter users garner almost half of the attention on Twitter, which now ropes in a billion tweets every week, according to a new Yahoo Research study.
James Gosling, the man who created the programming language, Java, has joined Google.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59

More About: amazon, Amazon Cloud Player, first to know series, iPhone 5, media, new york times, paywall

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Buffett Declares Social Media Valuations Overpriced [REPORT]

Facebook-Web-Design — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:32:42 +0000

Warren Buffett warned investors that valuations for social media firms are unwarranted, though he declined to name names, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Speaking in New Delhi, Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said that most social networking websites “will be overpriced,” adding that “it’s extremely difficult to value social networking site companies. Some will be winners, which will make up for the rest,” according to the report.

Buffett’s comments come as social media companies, including LinkedIn, Groupon and Facebook prepare IPOs for this year and next. The valuations for the companies — particularly Facebook’s, which has run as high as $65 billion — has spurred talk of a dot-com-like bubble in social media, though not everyone agrees.

Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, has always steered clear of tech stocks, even Apple, which he recently said he avoids because the business is too unpredictable.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ethan Bloch.

More About: facebook, groupon, ipo, linkedin, Warren Buffett

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Mark Zuckerberg Pledges Majority Of Wealth To Charity

Facebook-Web-Design — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:11:26 +0000

Critics of Mark Zuckerberg should consider taking the day, week, month, year, or even decade off. Zuckerberg, whose net worth was calculated to be $6.9 billion as of September, has pledged to donate the majority of his fortune to charity.

Zuckerberg did this by taking the Giving Pledge, something organized by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates. The simple (and official) explanation is that it’s "an effort to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy."

Zuckerberg reasoned in a statement, "People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done? With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts."

This act establishes a definite pattern of non-greedy behavior on Zuckerberg’s part. The CEO of Facebook is known for favoring t-shirts over tailored suits. He drives an Acura TSX rather than an Italian sports car, and at least until recently, lived in a modest rented house.

Plus, in September, Zuckerberg volunteered to give $100 million to New Jersey public schools.

A round of applause for Facebook’s CEO, then. And while you’re at it: other people who just took the Giving Pledge include Carl Icahn and Dustin Moskovitz.

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Buffett-Invested Firm: Another iPad Wannabe?

Facebook-Web-Design — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:20:18 +0000

At the Computex trade show in Taipei this week, it’s clear Apple’s iPad has triggered a flurry of interest in tablets, and everyone wants in on the action. Maybe even Warren Buffett.

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Steve Jobs, Best CEO in the World?

Facebook-Web-Design — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:40:37 +0000

Last month, Fortune Magazine named Apple’s Steve Jobs CEO of the Decade. Today, the Harvard Business Review has released its list of the best-performing CEOs in the world and unsurprisingly, Jobs tops the list.

Looking at just the strict financial results, Jobs’s influence on Apple is astounding. Since 1997, Jobs has delivered an industry-adjusted return of 3,188 percent (which is 34 percent compounded annually) for shareholders and increased Apple’s market value by $150 billion.

How the List Was Created

The Harvard Business Review has included a rundown of all of the factors that influenced their rankings. First, it identified the CEOs of all publicly traded companies listed on the S&P Global 1200 or BRIC 40 since 1997.

Additionally, CEOs had to have assumed the job no earlier than 1995 and no later than December 2007. That’s why luminaries like Warren Buffett and Jack Welch aren’t on the list. Performance was then tracked until the end of the CEOs’ tenure at the company or September 2009, whichever was later.

HBR then calculated the daily company returns for the entire length of a CEO’s tenure, using country-adjusted and industry-adjusted returns, as well as market capitalization changes. CEOs were then ranked based on each metric and those rankings were averaged for the final number.

Looking at the final list, you can see that Jeff Bezos from Amazon has actually achieved a higher country- and industry-adjusted TSR than Steve Jobs, but his market cap is more than $100 billion less.

Other High Ranking Tech CEOs

In addition to El Jobso, other high-profile tech CEOs on the list included John T. Chambers from Cisco (#4), Bezos from Amazon (#7), Meg Whitman from eBay (#8) and Eric Schmidt from Google (#9).

Tags: apple, Harvard Business Review, steve jobs

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Bill Gates’ Plan for Fixing the World

BlogPoster — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:36:27 +0000

It’s been more than a year since Bill Gates stepped down from day-to-day operations at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation.

In that time, Gates has traveled the world (in the past week alone, he’s been in China, India, and today, New York), strategizing the best use of his enormous fortune and that of his foundation, which, also includes $31 billion of Warren Buffett’s money.

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Gates shared a progress report of sorts in an interview with Matthew Bishop of The Economist, which also included some broader questions from the audience.

What Gates Is Trying to Do

Rather than spread his money over dozens of causes, Gates is focusing on a few specific issues, where he hopes his hands-on approach and vast resources will make a significant difference. In his case, those causes include providing necessary medicine and equipment to help stop the spread of disease, finding vaccines for the likes Malaria and AIDS, and improving education, both in the US and around the world.

As for how he measures the success, at least on the healthcare side of things, it’s pretty simple: fewer people, especially children, dying. Gates is optimistic that the problems he’s focusing on can be significantly aleviated or outright solved within his lifetime. He doesn’t see an AIDS vaccine within the next 10 years, but thinks it’s possible within the next 20. He thinks by 2025, there’s a good chance that no one will have to die from (though the disease will likely still exist) Malaria.

Gates executes in these areas by talking to scientists, deciding where to invest, and hoping that in the long-run, some of those investments pay off in the form of successful vaccines and cures. He says this isn’t dissimilar to his work at Microsoft, where investments in things like speech recognition and robotics wouldn’t yield any tangible bottom results for many years, if at all. Here’s a map of where the Gates Foundation has issued grants to scientists around the world:

Even more related to Gates’ history in the technology world, his vision for education revolves largely around online universities, where lectures would be available to all, and anyone can complete coursework and receive the same accreditation as someone who attends a four year university. In this area, Gates believes we’ll see significant progress within the next 5 years.

Gates said if he could, he’d like to be able to use some of his resources to fight terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as well as rid African nations of corrupt governments. However, he doesn’t believe he’d be effective in those areas.

On Philanthropy and Getting Involved

Bishop asked Gates about comments that the Microsoft founder had previously made about the relative stinginess of some of those in a position to give major amounts of money (i.e. – the Forbes 400), as well as the role that the financial crisis has played on philanthropy. Gates jokingly said that last he checked, the people on that list are still in a good position to give, but it’s not his interest to go recruit people into philanthropy.

Looking around the globe, Gates is optimistic that emerging markets like China and India, where vast amounts of wealth are being created amongst the super rich, will eventually become #2 and #3 in the world in philanthropy, behind the US.

As for those of us without billions of dollars to spare, Gates believes the best way to get involved is with a similar approach to his, albeit on a micro scale. His theme can be summarized as ridding the world of inequality – which for regular people, means finding an inequality that you care about and doing what you can to help, first locally, and then if you can, on a wider scale.

Selective Sound Bites

Asked if he thinks that two of the world’s richest men (him and Buffett) working together creates the lack of a competitor in philanthropic efforts akin to the likes of Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs from his Microsoft days, Gates says “the fact that Malaria kills people makes it a bit worse than what those guys did.”

Moving on to the financial crisis, Gates offered a couple interesting pieces of commentary:

(1) He’s not so sure the government should have a role in running private companies like AIG. For example, he thinks the whole “sales trip to the spa” fiasco is a perfect example not necessarily of corporate excess, but of why the whole thing is a dicey relationship.

(2) He thinks the pay limits imposed on Wall Street were the biggest thing that’s ever been done to increase executive pay. Why? Because they’re simply finding other ways to compensate executives, like with stock options.

Gates’ Closing Advice

It’s hard to imagine a Bill Gates Q&A without someone in the audience asking for his business advice. And, sorry to tell you, there’s no cheap and easy secret to becoming a billionaire.

Instead, Gates’ advice is not much different than that you’ve likely heard from countless other successful entrepreneurs: don’t fit the business to an economic opportunity, but find something you have a passion for and do it. Gates says that when he founded Microsoft, he was passionate about software, had been doing it for the better part of his life, and at the time, didn’t completely realize the enormity of the economic opportunity.

In Case You Missed It

Earlier this year at TED, Gates touched on many of these same themes, while also offering the Web a memorable video moment by unleashing mosquitoes into the audience. It’s definitely worth a watch:

Tags: bill gates, microsoft, philanthropy

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Apple’s Steve Jobs Declared “CEO of the Decade”

BlogPoster — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:15:43 +0000

In 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was forced out of his own company after he and then-CEO John Sculley began to fight over the direction of Apple (this coincided with major layoffs at the time). For the next decade, Steve flexed his entrepreneurial muscle by starting NeXT Computer and turning Pixar into an animation powerhouse.

In 1996 however, NeXT was bought by Apple, returning him to the company he created. He quickly took the reigns as CEO. You probably know the rest of the story: iTunes, Mac, Macbook, iPod, iPhone, the iTunes and iPhone App Stores, and other products vaulted Apple from turmoil into one of the world’s largest and most respected companies.

It’s because of that story that Fortune Magazine has named Steve Jobs the CEO of the Decade.

Here’s a short excerpt from the Fortune piece on the decision:

“The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back.”

It’s hard to disagree with Fortune’s choice. Few CEOs have accomplished what Steve has with Apple, and in such dramatic fashion no less. Eric Schmidt (Google), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), and Bill Gates (Microsoft) have accomplished extraordinary things, but Steve’s transformation of Apple is the stuff of legends.

Congrats Steve. But now that you’ve won the title of CEO of the decade, can we please finally have the Apple Tablet?

Reviews: Google, iPhone, iTunes

Tags: apple, ceo, Fortune, Fortune Magazine, steve jobs

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Warren Buffett’s Advice to Budding Freelancers and Entrepreneurs

BlogPoster — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:54:23 +0000

In 2008, Warren Buffett was ranked the richest person in the world and now he’s got something to say to all your entrepreneurs and freelancers. Read on.

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