Bill Gates is no longer the richest man

Bill Gates who has been the richest man in the world for consecutive 13 years is now ranked the third in the world with the estimated worth of $58 billion. This is due to the stock holdings are hit by Yahoo bid on 1st February - Microsoft shares fell by 15% the day the announcement was made.

The richest man is now Warren Buffet (American investor) with estimated worth of 62 billion.Buffet has controlling stake in Berkshire Hathaway. He also invested in insurance (GEICO, General Re), jewelry (Borsheim's), utilities (MidAmerican Energy Holdings) and food (Dairy Queen, See's Candies), and non-controlling stakes in Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo. Recently, the company disclosed he owns a significant stake in Kraft Foods.

Carlos Slim Helú (Mexican telecom tycoon - America Movil) is the second richest man with estimated net worth of $60 billion.

Source: MSNBC News

Popular Social Networking Websites Around The World

So.....only Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian and Filipino are using Friendster??



Anyone who can read French, can you please enlighten me what is the meaning of those numbers for the bar graphs? I suppose those are million hits per month??

Source: Le Monde.fr

Controversial ads of Ubuntu

Last time, I blogged about the gaining market share of Mac. Linux world is desperate to do something, so Ubuntu comes up with these unbelievable ads:






Sadly enough, I think the result will probably make Ubuntu famous but not more users.

Mac is gaining market share

Apple is just doing better and better with the return of Steve Jobs. While Mac is gaining momentum, Windows XP still remains as the king with 76% market share. Windows Vista is breaking the 10% mark for a very understandable reason - people is forced to use Windows Vista when buying new PCs.

Related readings are this and this.

The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year

An article by PC World - you can read it at here.

.Net overtakes Java

To me, with the release of WCF and WF, it is just a matter of time for .Net overtaking Java - .Net is getting easier to use and more features, while Java is getting more and more complicated. The result of the survey over here shows .Net is gaining market share. I think even if Sun changes its ID on NASDAQ from SUNW to JAVA won't help much because it cannot change the fact that the .Net is more productive by now - that is why .Net is winning.

Where does those names came from

Can't remember the source of information, but an iteresting reading nonetheless.

Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server -- thus, the name Apache

Apple Computers - favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.

CISCO - its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.

Google - the name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders, Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation (by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi).

Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.

Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (acronym for: One Real *** Called Larry Ellison)

Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone !

SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects"

SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say 'dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root 'xer' means dry.

Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos

Google in 2007

A summary of Google's performance in 2007 can be found at here. iGoogle grows at an incredible 268% rate - not too sure what leads to the success. Overall, Google is still very popular with the web search and image search. Dropping popular in video search is understandable because of YouTube acquisition. As for other products, I never use most of them although I knew their existence. Frankly, out of so many products Google has released, there are still many of them I never know, not to mention never use. Look at this post, how many of you know and use all of them?

The Greatest Minds Inventing Things No One Wanted

Check this out.

Business world is tough, either those big corporations push forward or they fail. We, as consumers, often become the victims of purchasing something not as useful as we originally thought.

As for the Windows Vista entry, I think the most annoying factor of the OS is UAC. I turned it off the second day after I used Windows Vista after seeing enough of 'Are you sure...' questions. Microsoft should make UAC turned off by default.

The end of advertising as we know it

IBM Institute for Business Value has released an interesting finding on the shifting trend of advertising - from traditional one-to-many advertising model to one-to-one targeted model. I believe the traditional model is getting less effective especially on the global internet - firstly, I seldom pay attention to the irrelevant banner ads on a web page, let alone click on the ad to find out more information. Pop-up ads are even more obtrusive, that is why we need pop-up blocker. If I am not mistaken, the new advertising model was started by GoTo.com which is more like an advertisement search engine. Sadly, GoTo.com pursued a wrong business decision by dropped out GoTo.com website and renamed the company called Overture which later acquired by Yahoo. Google refined what was done by GoTo.com and called it AdWord. Later, Google also introduced AdSense, which is more sophisticated. Currently, Google is working on the advertising strategy on YouTube. Hmmm…what sort of innovation Google will bring to us this time?

101 Dumbest Moments in Business

An interesting list from Fortune magazine. Some are quite funny. Never thought big corporations can be good joke makers too.