Amazon.com to launch digital music store

Online retailer Amazon.com on Wednesday said it plans to launch a digital music store later this year featuring songs without copy protection restrictions.



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Steve Jobs of Apple

Here is a picture of Steve Jobs (left) with Bill Gates and the Wiki bio of Jobs including four interesting excerpts from the bio:

Steve Jobs was given up for adoption:

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco[1] to American Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian Abdulfattah John Jandali, a graduate student who later became a political science professor.[9] One week after birth, Jobs was put up for adoption by his unmarried mother, who was also in graduate school. He was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.[10] They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. His biological parents later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, whom Jobs did not meet until they were adults. The marriage of his biological parents ended in divorce years later. Jobs dislikes hearing the "adoptive parents" appellation applied to Paul and Clara Jobs and refers to them as his only parents.

Jobs works at Apple for an annual salary of US$1:

[3] and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer." As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary. This approach reduces his personal tax liability because, under current U.S. tax law, salary income is taxed at a significantly higher rate (currently up to 35%) than the capital gains tax (currently a maximum of 15%) applied to profits arising from the sale of stock grants. Obtaining remuneration through stock instead of salary is a common extrinsic rewarding technique which ties management performance to financial benefits. Furthermore, it acts as a tax minimization strategy.

Steve Jobs is now Disney's largest shareholder:

In October 2005, Bob Iger replaced Eisner at Disney, and Iger quickly worked to patch up relations with Jobs and Pixar. On January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. Once the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder with approximately 7% of the company's stock.[30] Jobs' holdings in Disney far exceeds those of Eisner, who holds 1.7%, and Disney family member Roy E. Disney, who holds about 1% of the company's stock and whose criticisms of Eisner included the soured Pixar relationship and accelerated his ousting. Jobs joined the company's board of directors upon completion of the merger.

Steve Jobs is the father of four children:

Jobs married Laurene Powell, nine years his junior, on March 18, 1991 and has had three children with her.[10] He also had a daughter named Lisa Brennan-Jobs with Chris-Ann Brennan, whom he did not marry. Lisa (born May 17, 1978) is a journalist who wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

Robert Iger, CEO of Disney

Here is a picture of Disney's CEO, Robert Iger.

And here is the Wiki bio on Robert Iger and Disney's bio of him.

Iger had been the number two man at Disney until Michael Eisner, then CEO, was forced out of Disneyin March of 2005. A year later is when the Pixar merger occurred. Here is an excerpt from the Wiki bio of Iger:

Pixar merger
On January 24, 2006, in a move that would have been inconceivable a year earlier, Disney announced it would acquire Pixar for US $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction. The merger installed animator John Lasseter as Chief Creative Officer of the Disney/Pixar animation studios and Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering, the division that designs theme park attractions. It also made Steve Jobs Disney's top shareholder with 7% of outstanding shares and gave him a new seat on Disney's board of directors.

Why Disney is going to school.

I just read an article titled, Why Disney is going to school. Disney is getting into the online education biz with various articles that will appeal to moms. On the site I found something I had been looking for: pages devoted online resources for kids titled Your Favorite Sites for "Early learning."

Disney will, of course, have consumer friendly advertising on their site, including ads for Sony (and lite tech articles for moms, who do much of the buying for the family). Another nice link is Disneyplayhouse.com. It's a good site for young kids. However, I haven't checked to see what they have for older children (ages 7 or 8 and above).

Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of Linked In

Earlier today, I listened to a podcast from Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. It was an interview of Reid Hoffman, the CEO and co-founder of the business social networking site, LinkedIn.com.

Then, I read an article, titled, Five Questions for Reid Hoffman, on a blog called GigaOm which began:

"Reid Hoffman is a busy guy. Along with being the full-time CEO of LinkedIn, he’s an active angel investor, and has participated in the financing of over 50 companies. Since his time at PayPal, Hoffman has culled a classy list of angel investments: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Ironport Systems, Last.fm, Nanosolar, Ning, Six Apart, Socialtext, Tagged, Technorati, Tiny Pictures, Wikia, and more."

I also read an interesting July 2006 article by CNNMoney.com titled: The 50 Who Matter Now. Reid Hoffman ranked 22 on their list. Then, I read 2004 interview of Reid that discussed the 4.7 million in VC funding LinkedIn received and how they were using it to grow LinkedIn quickly. And finally, I read the bio on him that Wikipedia provided. It was interesting to me that Reid was born on August 5, 1967...so he turns 40 this year. He's done a lot in his 40 years.

Craigslist's Ongoing Success Story

CEO Jim Buckmaster has an unusual business approach for the successful classified ads site: Keep it simple and don't try to maximize revenue. Jim Buckmaster seems like a man of principle.

In the January 2007 picture in this post, CEO Jim Buckmaster is on the left and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, is on the right.



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The Poverty Business

Some businesses are preying on the poor by charging exorbitant credit interest rates (including those earning less than $30,000 a year). The higher your income, the less you pay in credit interest. The upshot is that the poor find themselves mired in debt.


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Google scary now? Personal Health Records, sponsored by Google, next

Google Scary Now? Personal Health Records, Sponsored by Google, NextI found this article interesting. The healthcare industry is going to be a huge growth industry.



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test to joyful biz

this is a test

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Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Amazon mum on EC2 and S3 spending

Amazon mum on EC2, S3 spending by ZDNet's Larry Dignan -- While Amazon delivered a blow-out quarter it remains quiet about detailing how much it is spending on the fast-growing EC2 and S3 Web services. On the first quarter earnings conference call, Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck tried to pin down Amazon (AMZN) executives on the capital spending issue for 2007, but CEO Jeff Bezos didn't [...]
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I just glanced at his Wikipedia bio. It was interesting to read, among other things, that his mother gave birth to him while she was still a teenager.

Then I read an interesting August 2004 article from Fast Company titled: Inside the mind of Jeff Bezos.

By the way, I noted in an earlier post that Jeff Bezos is also funding a company called Blue Origin to build vehicles for space travel.