By Dave Chase
Not a week goes by without seeing some headline about deficits pushing municipalities to desperation or Bill Gates describing state budgets using accounting techniques that would make Enron blush. Detroit is the most visible recent example. The common culprit: healthcare costs with Medicaid being the biggest driver. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Health
I am thrilled that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are busily giving away their wealth through charity. It is especially laudable that they are giving it away before they die rather than set up perpetual foundations as monuments. But despite these feelings, I take issue with those who feel that Gates has a moral obligation to “give-back.” It’s as if he stole his wealth and now must humbly make restitution for his crimes through charity. Bill Gates and many entrepreneurs like him often help their fellow man far more through their business success than they can through charity, and I am a living case study for my argument. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Looking for inspiration this week — for a 194th Forbes column, in the dead of summer, after 20 years of covering “endpoints,” facing the tired news of the day: Apple loses DOJ case, the meaning thereof; Microsoft reorganizes, discounts Surface; smart watch rumors fly; exploding iPhone chatter rattles; likely earnings numbers float, as PC unit shipments plummet and the smartphone market slows; Dell palace intrigue continues in the drum roll up to the shareholder vote; author stifles yawn — I stumbled upon the live Webcast of Bill Gates’s opening speech at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, which I found intriguing and almost enheartening. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Though roundly ridiculed when it debuted in 1995, Microsoft Bob, or something resembling the short-lived on-screen assistant, will ultimately return, vowed Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft.
“You always make mistakes on these things,” Gates said at the Microsoft Research Virtual Faculty Summit on Monday in Redmond, Washington. “We were just a bit ahead of our time, like most of our mistakes.”
Bob, one of Microsoft’s most notorious commercial failures, came up during a question-and-answer session at the summit when a researcher asked how software can be made easier to use.
Gates admitted this remains an ongoing challenge for the computer industry. “It’s a research issue, to make software better. The prize when you do these things is very large in a commercial sense,” Gates said.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates today briefly took attendees at a company-hosted research conference back decades to the failure of Microsoft Bob and the loathed “Clippy” to talk about preemptively helping tech users. …read more
Will the Internet relegate college professors to the dustbin of history?
Not entirely, according to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. But one important component of their jobs—the traditional lecture—may grow irrelevant as students begin casting about for alternatives on the Internet.
The implication is that students will use the Internet to begin learning online from major “brands” like MIT or the University of California, transforming the lecture from a live performance into something like the music industry, where most music is consumed in pre-recorded form.
We’re on the beginning of something quite profound,” Gates said, in his keynote address at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2013 Monday.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
The tech companies that have surged since Steve Ballmer took over at Microsoft from Bill Gates are headed by engineers. …read more
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto met Thursday with the world’s richest man, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) cofounder Bill Gates, and fellow billionaire Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.) CEO Warren Buffett, to discuss opportunities for investing in Mexico. The meeting took place July 11 during the Allen & Co. annual conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho. Neither side elaborated on the content of the conversation. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes Staff
At the Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi late last week, the world’s two richest men made a bit of philanthropic history. Carlos Slim announced his foundation will donate $100 million to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a Bill Gates-backed effort to eliminate polio. It marks what appears to be the largest collaboration among the two men. It’s also the second time this year the two have announced joint philanthropic efforts.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
On this day in economic and business history …
Several innovations reached critical milestones in their development on April 27. All three of those we’ll examine today have affected the companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average , but the effect isn’t always straightforward, nor is it always positive. In fact, the first development on our list never added much at all to its creator’s bottom line — but its influence on the computing industry (which has placed five companies on the Dow) is undeniable. Let’s take a closer look at these three developments, to better understand how they’ve helped shape the business world as it exists today.
Point and click, day one
Xerox introduced the world’s first commercially available computer mouse on April 27, 1981. The mouse had been invented way back in the 1960s by Douglas Englebart and his team of researchers at Stanford, but it would take many years for technologists to translate his innovations into commercially successful products. In fact, until the mouse was released as part of the Xerox Star workstation package, there had been no computers with graphical interfaces available for public purchase. Without graphical interfaces, there simply hadn’t been a reason for anyone to use a mouse.
The Star’s graphical interface and its mouse were both descendants of the legendary Xerox Alto, an experimental computer developed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center that is largely known now for its influence on young entrepreneurs Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. However, like the Alto, the Star was too far ahead of its time and wound up quickly eclipsed by a lower-cost but less-functional computer released later in 1981: the PC.
It was not until 1984, when Apple launched the Macintosh, that a computer purpose-built for mouse controls caught on with the public. By the time Dow component Microsoft‘s Windows 1.0 hit the market in 1985, the mouse era had taken hold. The combination of a mouse with a graphical user interface could have propelled Xerox ahead of PC creator (and longtime Dow component) IBM, but Xerox’s inability to capitalize on advanced technology is the stuff of corporate legend. IBM is no less to blame for its inability to maintain control of the standard it created. By allowing Microsoft to control the PC‘s operating software, IBM missed a golden chance to leverage its scale and technological expertise into a fully proprietary mouse-based computing experience.
How much longer will the mouse era last? The mouse may soon find itself relegated to technology’s dustbin as touchscreen devices gain prominence with the public. That won’t happen for some time, but it’s interesting to think about what our next control scheme will be. Beyond touch, will we move things on the screen with our eyes? Will our brainwaves be the next control scheme? The answer may be just around the corner.
The 747’s biggest threat
The
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Baseball is life, or so the saying goes. The release of “42” brings back to light a story that, among its many angles and nuances, turns that saying around — life is baseball. Sports not only mirrors life but also acts as a vehicle to influence and change it. Measured solely by revenues, sports rates a relatively minor player as industries go. Summed together, professional football, baseball, basketball, hockey and auto racing generate only about $30 billion per year. Even with the major football and basketball revenue producers among college teams lumped in, the total is well under $50 billion. That’s nowhere near the $100 billion-plus figures for the heavyweights among individual companies, much less entire industries. Yet, for enormous sales figures and cult-like following surrounding a company like , its ongoing buzz does not come close to sports. Steve Job and Bill Gates have enjoyed about as much celebrity as any corporate figures, but the events involving Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Brooklyn Dodgers took place over 75 years ago and continue to inspire. Babe Ruth’s exploits in Major League Baseball will soon be 100 years old, but his name is still widely known. After 100 years, I would expect very little public awareness of names like Jobs or Gates, unless it happens through the naming of some institution. A reply might be, the Jackie Robinson episode lives on because it centers on an important period of American history — breaking down racial barriers. Yes, but among all the individual stories that paralleled that of Robinson, it’s his that emerged into and has survived in the common public consciousness. This kind of influence, however, goes beyond Robinson and race. Sports is one of the few areas where revenues so radically understate the social impact and awareness of the business. The very existence of substantial merchandising revenues for sports teams is a tell-tale indicator of this non-monetary interest. ExxonMobil may generate $400 billion in revenue but hardly anyone walks around wearing caps, jackets, and shirts displaying their attachment as fans do for the Yankees, the Cowboys, the Crimson Tide, or Dale Jr. In this respect, sports fits with movies, vacations, special romantic moments, and a few other activities where individuals relive, retell, and rehash memorable events over and over, making the initial “consumption value” very durable. The involvement of thousands of other people in the initial enjoyment offers a relatively unique opportunity for social networking that long preceded the advent of the internet. It’s an interesting exercise to try to add up the non-revenue value of sports to fans. The amount of time alone, whether at reliving the game in the break room or at home, reading newspapers, blogs, or other sources is not trivial. Further, the time spent on fantasy sports ultimately derives its value from the sports themselves. With even modest estimates the number of people involved in these activities along with the time spent and at average wage rates, it’s easy to double the revenue
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briangoff/2013/04/17/42-and-the-intangible-impact-of-sports/
By Dan Caplinger, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Charitable giving is an important part of American society, and many corporate leaders, who’ve earned their wealth through the stock market or other investments, have gone on to become some of the most generous individuals in the world. Given the concentration of wealth that most of these donors have in a single stock, however, their capacity to give can change markedly from year to year.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the five most generous donors of last year according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. By looking not only at how much they gave in 2012, but also how the companies they’re affiliated with have performed so far this year, we should be able to tell whether they’ll be in a position to make even more generous gifts in 2013 and beyond.
|
Donor |
Company/Source of Wealth |
Amount Given or Pledged in 2012 |
|---|---|---|
|
Berkshire Hathaway |
$3.1 billion |
|
|
Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan |
|
$498.8 million |
|
John & Laura Arnold |
Centaurus Energy hedge fund |
$423.4 million |
|
Microsoft |
$309.1 million |
|
|
Sergey Brin & Anne Wojcicki |
|
$222.9 million |
Source: Chronicle of Philanthropy.
These donors have all earned reputations for their philanthropic efforts, with most of them having a long history of donations. Warren Buffett has been making regular donations of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation, founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, for years. Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other co-founder, made the bulk of his donations last year toward advancing brain research, with the goal of solving the mysteries of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has been giving substantial sums toward research into Parkinson’s disease for years, with a family history of the disease making the cause hit close to home for Brin. And for John Arnold, who worked as a trader for Enron before going out on his own to start a hedge fund, the foundation he and his wife established aims at improvements in a number of key areas, including the criminal justice, education, and pension systems.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett with President Barack Obama. Source: White House.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg‘s wealth is more recent, but he upped the ante last year after a $100 million gift to the Newark, N.J. public school system in 2010. Zuckerberg and his wife committed nearly half a billion dollars last year toward a foundation aimed at health and educational efforts.
Can they give more?
Thanks to recent gains in the stock market, most of the public companies tied to these donors’ fortunes have done fairly well:
Total Return Price data by YCharts.
Berkshire has seen the best return of the four stocks, as its core insurance business has produced good results, and its portfolio of well-known stocks and wholly owned subsidiaries have also performed well. <a target=_blank
From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/12/why-2012s-biggest-charitable-donors-should-give-ev/
In 1969 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross suggested that a person confronted with a catastrophic loss will react with five stages of grief. Thirty-one years later, in 2000, Forbes found clear traces of the grieving process when one of the greatest businessmen of all-time, Bill Gates, watched a federal judge order that his company be broken up.
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/04/11/jamie-dimons-five-stages-of-grief/
By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool
This is a 3-D printer, one of the largest Stratasys models available. It can print just about anything you can think of (within the limits of its print area), including
Filed under: Investing
In the 1970s, PARC, a Xerox company (formerly the Palo Alto Research Center), helped usher in an era of modern computing, as it built a graphical mouse-based operating system atop the foundations laid by Douglas Englebart’s NLS. The PARC Alto would inspire both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to develop the earliest consumer graphical operating systems, which continue to influence interface design today.
In the 2010s, PARC might again transform the world through technology. This time, the big step forward is “chiplets,” a minuscule form of printed electronic circuitry that can be created with modified laser printers, another PARC innovation from the 1970s. Each little chiplet is no larger than a grain of sand:
Source: PARC.
A New York Times feature published earlier this week highlights the potential this advance has in the field of printed flexible electronics, which PARC estimates will explode from a $1 billion global industry today to one worth $45 billion by 2016. Some possible applications:
These are just some of the ways in which printed circuitry might be used. As The New York Times feature points out, PARC‘s development represents a radical departure from the current chip-making model, in which a large wafer of silicon is processed, cut up into individual chips, and then reassembled into the various parts of a circuit board. Times writer John Markoff says: “The emerging printing technology poses a heretical idea: Rather than squeezing more transistors into the same small space, why not smear the transistors across a much larger surface?” The PARC laser-printing format (it’s not exactly a laser printer, but it’s quite similar) proposes to place sand-sized chiplets by the thousands onto the surface of flexible substrates, and these chiplets can be assembled to perform any of the diverse jobs undertaken in today’s dizzying array of electronics by an increasingly specialized array of components.
The opportunity to upend chip-making is clear. Where does manufacturing come in?
Source: Stratasys on Flickr.
This is a 3-D printer, one of the largest Stratasys models available. It can print just about anything you can think of (within the limits of its print area), including a scale-model Aston Martin. One thing it can’t do — the single most important thing it can’t do — is print electronic circuitry. It’s not designed for that.
Stratasys could print a plastic-based robot with articulated joints. Other printers, particularly the largest variants from 3D Systems and most of ExOne‘s small product line, can print in metal, rubber, ceramic, and an increasingly diverse range of materials — enough variety to create a functional robot. These companies may not even be necessary, as iRobot recently filed a patent for
From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/11/will-this-tiny-technology-mean-the-end-of-chinas-m/
By Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes Staff
For nearly a decade and a half until 2010, Bill Gates ranked as the world’s richest man –save for 2008, when he was overtaken by his pal Warren Buffett. (Gates recaptured the top spot in 2009). Then, thanks to a surge in the value of mobile phone carrier America Movil in early 2010, Gates was knocked off his pedestal by Mexico’s Carlos Slim. The telecom mogul has maintained his title as the world’s richest person every year since then. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Clare O’Connor, Forbes Staff
In the far corner of Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum in Seattle hangs a blown up photo of the tech billionaire with his Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates when the two were still boy wonders, at 26 and 28 respectively, in 1981. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
On this day in economic and business history…
At the tail end of 1974, close friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen first learned about the Altair 8800 microcomputer, built by MITS out in New Mexico. The young programmers saw an opportunity to make that bare-bones hobby kit useful by creating a BASIC interpreter for its users, which would allow Altair owners to use the popular programming language on their new toy right out of the box (or close to it). The pair traveled to New Mexico — Gates abandoned his degree progress at Harvard for the opportunity — to work alongside the Altair’s creators. To capitalize on their new business, Gates and Allen formed Microsoft in Albuquerque on April 4, 1975.
Paul Allen would later recount the race to complete BASIC and gain the business it would create in Idea Man, an autobiography excerpted in Vanity Fair in 2011:
Some have suggested that our Altair BASIC was remarkable because we created it without ever seeing an Altair or even a sample Intel 8080, the microprocessor it would run on. What we did was unprecedented, but what is less well understood is that we had no choice. The Altair was little more than a bare-bones box with a CPU-on-a-chip inside. It had no hard drive, no floppy disk, no place to edit or store programs. …
By late February, eight weeks after our first contact with MITS, the interpreter (which would save space by executing one snippet of code at a time) was done. Shoehorned into about 3,200 bytes, roughly 2,000 lines of code, it was one tight little BASIC — stripped down, for sure, but robust for its size. No one could have beaten the functionality and speed crammed into that tiny footprint of memory: “The best piece of work we ever did,” as Bill told me recently. And it was a true collaboration. I’d estimate that 45 percent of the code was Bill’s, 30 percent Monte’s, and 25 percent mine, excluding my development tools.
In Microsoft’s first year of operation, its primary business model involved selling something like this…
Source: Wikipedia.
…to be fed into this:
Source: Wikipedia.
That’s right — the first Microsoft software came on a roll of paper tape and made a bunch of red lights blink on and off. For the first few months of its existence, it wasn’t even Microsoft yet, but “Micro-Soft,” hyphenated to better highlight the fact that it was software for microcomputers. Once MITS accepted Gates and Allen’s BASIC, the new company quickly secured its first license from NCR. However, revenue was pretty minuscule in Microsoft’s first year, and the three-man operation (Ric Weiland had joined the company after its formation in Albuquerque) banked only about $16,000.
Over the next few years, Microsoft would port BASIC to other popular machines as they entered the market, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
It’s fun to look at old pictures of Bill Gates from back when he was a boy wonder. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Zack O’Malley Greenburg, Forbes Staff
FORBES released its annual Billionaires issue earlier this month, and the list features plenty of new faces (Tory Burch, Renzo Rosso) alongside the usual suspects (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett). …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Many successful entrepreneurs, business owners and world leaders have something in common. When asked how they achieved their success, they point to a role model they knew personally or were familiar with during their formative and most inspired years. The role model lived a life that seemed appealing to them. That’s how many young entrepreneurs look at people like Bill Gates today, whether or not they’re fans of Microsoft. After all, Bill Gates dropped out of college and is now the world’s second richest man. That’s some serious inspiration for you — not because of the money but because of the opportunities brought about by wealth. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
