Tag Archives: Sergey Brin

News, Politics, Government

Are You Sure You Want To Be An Entrepreneur?

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By Brock Blake, Contributor

Over the past few years, I’ve had fun visiting college campuses to talk about entrepreneurship.  The classroom is usually full of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students that are excited about becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, or Jack Dorsey.  They spend their days reading all of the major tech blogs and know about the most recent VC fundings and billion-dollar acquisitions in Silicon Valley. The life of the founder appears to be so dreamy:  late nights, coding, angel investors, VCs, awesome teams, killer cultures, fast growth, investment bankers, luxurious travel, and then a huge exit.  Of course, they all know that it’ll be ‘hard work.’  Unfortunately, it isn’t all a bed of roses and I’m often the bearer of bad news… ‘Hard work’ is to entrepreneurship what contractions are to giving birth.  Contractions might give you a feel for what you’re about to experience, but there is almost no comparison to the experience of delivering a baby. Don’t get me wrong… (in business) there is nothing more satisfying and enjoyable (for me) than building a successful company.  It’s not a job; it’s a challenge.  It includes the highest of high experiences that create life-long friendships and memories.  However, that’s not the whole picture.  Being an entrepreneur/founder will also ‘chew you up and spit you out’ on a very regular basis.  You’ll experiences challenges, pains, and emotions you never thought you’d experience — including the lowest of lows. I’ve heard Josh James, CEO/Founder of Domo (raised over $125M) & Omniture (sold to Adobe for $1.8B), talk about how he has literally been huddled up on the floor, in the fetal position, crying as he was trying to figure out a solution to a major problem he was facing. Believe me, we’ve all been there. So, in the spirit of trying to portray an accurate reflection of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur/founder/CEO, here are a few of the things you will likely experience: …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Computers

Google comes clean(er) about Glass: What you need to know

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been yakking about Google Glass for more than two years. Yet until this week, we didn’t know even the most basic facts about the platform.

Google spilled some beans in an earnings call this week. The company also published facts about the hardware, software and licensing. And finally, users started receiving actual units, and have been blabbing about them on social media. Glass has already been prohibited in some locales.

Here’s what we’ve learned and what it all means.

Who’s using Google Glass

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238528/Google_Glass_mysteries_revealed_#tk.rss_all

News, Politics, Government

Why The Sudden Rush To Bring Google Glass To Market?

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By Haydn Shaughnessy, Contributor

Only a couple of months back, Google co-founder and augmented reality promoter, Sergey Brin, voiced skepticism about Google Glass, claiming at an impromptu TED talk in February that it was far from the finished article, implying there were doubts it would make the trip to market.

From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2013/04/14/why-sergey-brins-sudden-rush-to-bring-google-glass-to-market/

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Why 2012's Top Charitable Donors Should Give Even More This Year

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By Dan Caplinger, The Motley Fool

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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

Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway

$3.1 billion

Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan

Facebook

$498.8 million

John & Laura Arnold

Centaurus Energy hedge fund

$423.4 million

Paul Allen

Microsoft

$309.1 million

Sergey Brin & Anne Wojcicki

Google

$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/

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

America's 8th Best CEO Will Give You an Investing Edge

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By Brian Stoffel, The Motley Fool

Petroliciouis BMW E28

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Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to dissect balance sheets, income, and cash flow statements. This is the first step in getting your feet wet in the investment world.

But it doesn’t stop there. If we were to base investing decisions solely on what we read in these statements, that would be akin to picking a significant other based solely on their Facebook  profile — to many, it just doesn’t make sense to avoid real-life interaction.

Investigating these “soft” aspects of a company is important for investors. And although we can’t capture all of the intangibles of a company in one article, Glassdoor.com — a website that collects employee sentiment for companies across the world — recently came out with a list that could help: the Top CEOs of 2013.

Over the past few days, I’ve covered CEOs 25 through 9. Today, I’m going to introduce you to the company with the 8th-highest-rated CEO, give you some background on the company, and at the end, I’ll offer up access to a special premium report that covers the biggest name in tech.

Google
You might be wondering how a company as big as Google — there are over 50,000 employees at the Big G — could have a CEO that so many admire and approve of (95%, to be exact). That’d be a fair question, but accomplishing something like this speaks volumes about what CEO Larry Page.

This is actually Page’s second stint as CEO, with the first occurring from 1998 to 2001. Page co-founded Google along with Sergey Brin, and the two have been helping run day-to-day operations throughout the life of the company.

From 2001 until 2011, the duo brought on Eric Schmidt as CEO, as he brought the type of corporate experience in technology necessary to help the company grow. Having learned from Schmidt’s leadership, Page took over again two years ago, and the company has continued its impressive streak of innovation.

From a strictly numbers standpoint, what Google has accomplished as a public company is mind-boggling: 44% revenue growth and 51% earnings growth per year!

GOOG Revenue TTM data by YCharts.

Against heavy competition, innovation rules
What’s even more impressive about Google’s story is that it wasn’t the first-mover in the Internet search business. Yahoo! got there first.

But before Google arrived on the scene, Yahoo! was simply producing search results based on its web directory. That meant that results were both incomplete and somewhat randomized. Google flipped this on its head by creating an iterative algorithm that could produce more complete and accurate results. Since then, the company has grown to capture 83% of the global search market, with Yahoo! coming in second, at 8%. 

More recently, the company has taken on other big names — most notably Apple and its iOS operating system for mobile devices. In an attempt to make Google the default search option of your smartphone, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Insider Selling at Michael Kors Hurts Investors

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By Andrew Marder, The Motley Fool

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Remember that fall that your son’s school football team made it to the state championship game? They worked so hard every day, practicing and running, with you sitting there on the sidelines cheering them on. Then they needed cash to get to the big game and you ponied up a few grand. They were so happy, they put your name on the jerseys.

Then the day came. Tickets to the sold-out game were going for $250 — this was going to be great! But you never found out, because $250 in your pocket was too hard to resist, so you sold your ticket and drank at the bar instead.

If that rings a bell, you might be the eponymous founder of Michael Kors . The man whose name graces the arms of celebrities and the gowns of first ladies has announced that his share of the company is going to fall even further because he could really do with another $185 million right now. After the transaction, he’s down to a mere 2.4% of the company — the company named after him. That’s down from a holding high of 11% before the company IPO in 2011. Investors aren’t happy, and there are good reasons not to be. What does Kors’ move say about the long-term prospects of his brand?

M.
I had to round up, but the letter M is a percentage representation of how much of the Michael Kors brand Kors owns after the sale. He owns the M in “Michael Kors.” I wrote about this a few weeks ago, right after the announcement, but I want to go back and look at the impact that Kors’ selling has had on the stock. Since the filing after close on Feb. 19, the company’s stock has fallen 10%. That’s about $1.3 billion in market cap lopped right off the top. And that’s a loss that goes right to shareholders, and which Michael Kors is largely responsible for.

The problem is perception. It’s entirely possible that nothing bad is happening. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started dropping a whole bunch of shares back in 2010, but the company remained steady. Here’s an important difference, though — the sell-off left the duo with 48% of the voting rights. That means they were still heavily invested in the company, which displayed a strength of conviction in the brand to other shareholders. Kors’ move isn’t the same thing, because he’s down to such a small part of the company that he founded.

The precedent
The other things that have to be running through shareholders’ minds are the countless times it didn’t work out. In the news this week is the case of Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team who’s being accused of dumping shares in an Internet search company as it went under. He saved his own skin and let the rest of the world burn. There’s also …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Health

Google Glass V2 Could Be Binocular, And Even Double As Stealth Hearing Aids

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By Anthony Wing Kosner

Now that the first version of Google Glass is out in the wild (in very limited numbers) it is time to turn our gaze to what’s next. Certainly that’s what Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the lead inventor on the project, is doing. A patent application by Google discovered yesterday by Patent Bolt describes a new version of Glass with binocular Head Mounted Displays (HMDs.) …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Health

Science & Technology

Tech Giants Fund Big Annual Award for Scientists

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By Kevin Spak Forget the Nobel Prize; pretty soon, enterprising medical researchers will really be after the Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize. Some of the biggest names in tech—including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin—have teamed to create the award, which rewards biological breakthroughs with fat, $3 million checks…. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Science

News, Politics, Government

Mark Zuckerberg And Sergey Brin Discuss Collaboration On Life Sciences Award

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By Ryan Mac, Forbes Staff

On a day when Google caused waves by announcing that anyone could apply for its new Project Glass spectacles, Sergey Brin took care of something of a little more personal. As part of an audience seated in an auditorium at the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay medical campus, the Google cofounder and billionaire watched intently as his wife Anne Wojcicki, Yuri Milner, Arthur Levinson and Mark Zuckerberg discussed their new $3 million awards for excellence in life sciences. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

News, Politics, Government

Billionaires Anoint Biogeeks

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By Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff

Hey Nobel Prize in Medicine! You’ve got competition. This morning, a bevy of techoscenti billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin announced the first recipients of their Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, a a $3 million award  “recognizing excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” This year, there are 11 recipients, meaning a total $33 million payout, but in the future five annual awards will be planned, totalling $15 million. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Computers

Google's Page, Brin, and Schmidt to testify in employee antritrust case

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Google’s famed “triumvirate”—Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt—will give oral statements over the coming weeks as part of a private antitrust suit brought against Google and six other technology companies by former employees.

The civil suit, filed last year in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, and several other tech giants in the region conspired to enter into “no-poach” agreements to eliminate competition between them by restricting their hiring of each other’s employees.

Google CEO Larry Page and cofounder Sergey Brin are scheduled to give depositions on the charges on March 22 and March 19, respectively, a court document filed Feb. 15 said. Depositions are oral statements given under oath that are often taken to examine potential witnesses that could be used later in the trial.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt will also give his deposition on Wednesday at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

News, Politics, Government

America's Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under

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By Jacquelyn Smith, Forbes Staff

Larry Page was pursuing a PhD at Stanford University in 1998 when he teamed up with classmate Sergey Brin to create a new search engine, which they nicknamed BackRub. They later decided to call it Google, a play on the word “googol”—which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It signified the enormous volume of information they hoped to eventually make available through their site. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest