One Sec Tech

SOURCE:  Los Angeles Times

There is a whole new tribe of charitable givers out there, and they are not who you think they are.

They are a new breed of philanthropists coming together on an online site launched this month, an EBay-like portal that auctions people’s skills — juggling, hula-hooping, pie-baking — and connections to raise money for their favorite charities. In its first weeks, allthis.com has drawn do-gooders from across California and a few other states. They are professionals, young people and stay-at-home moms. And although they might not all have the means to write a check to a charity, they can teach you how to roast a perfect chicken or get you a dinner with the prince of Bali.

The offers are as varied as the causes: Learn to speak Punjabi for as little as $200 to help the mentally ill, lunch with Google super-lawyer David Drummond for $10,000 to promote jazz, have your bathroom painted for $25 to aid a volunteer center.

Whoever has placed the highest bid when the timed auction closes wins the prize.

The companies range from makers of San Diego wedding centerpieces and brides maid dresses to companies who pick up wrecked cars and even Houston truck accident lawyers.

Money collected from bidders is sent directly to the charities, said Paul Weinstein, one of three Internet start-up entrepreneurs who came up with the site idea a year ago. Five percent goes to allthis.com, and if an offer is not fulfilled, he said, all the money is returned to the bidder.

“Everybody has something to give,” said Weinstein, who lives in the Bay Area. “Now you can take whatever you do, whatever you’re good at, and turn it into cash for your favorite charity.”

The idea has inspired nonprofits from San Diego to San Francisco to find out the hidden talents of staff members and volunteers. Most are looking for any way they can to boost revenue in a tough economy with growing needs and diminishing grants. Starting next week, charities that raise at least $500 will be awarded another $500 from the site.

So far, almost 400 auctions have been listed, including some from celebrities including Ben Stiller (who will record a greeting on your voicemail to help rebuild Haiti — starting bid, $200) and Rihanna (who will give you one of her concert corsets to help children in need — starting bid, $150).

It seemed obvious to Salnik, a research and development director for a solar company, what he could offer to help cancer research. He did not spend three years on match.com hunting for a mate for nothing.

So for $200, the Moscow native says, he will show you how to conquer online dating — how to read profiles, hide imperfections and learn women’s tricks. In essence, he will help you score love.

“Or at least someone you can tolerate for an hour or a day,” Salnik said.

South of Los Angeles, Sue Carter, executive director of the Volunteer Center of San Diego, wasted no time mobilizing her troops to make their pitches.

One staffer knew karate. She could teach a women’s self-defense class. Another person had connections in Bali. She could set up dinner at the Peliatan Palace with the prince. (As for getting to Indonesia, that would be up to the winning bidder.) Soon, a belly dancer, a hypnotist, a comedian and a professional football player were on board offering their talents.

As of Friday, seven popular auctions promised to deliver almost $1,000 to the center.

That beat the $1.23 and a few minutes of effort it cost to place each bid online, Carter said. “We thought this was a great twist to get more people to participate.”

Weinstein and his partners have big ambitions. They say they hope the site one day becomes as recognized as EBay and as successful as Bill Gates’ charities. Equipped with a team of about 12 staffers based in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, they want the idea to spread beyond California, to go nationwide, with nonprofits getting out the word to volunteers.

Out in Wilmington, N.C., the buzz reached Kathleen O’Neil last week. The 38-year-old marketing consultant was encouraged by a friend not just to donate by bidding but to market her consulting skills on the site.

Surfing through the hodgepodge of listings, O’Neil soon found herself lured in by an auction: A Bay Area artist offered to paint a portrait of any pet, for a starting bid of $75. The money would go to the artist’s local humane society.

O’Neil won the auction, among the first to close on the site, and in six to eight weeks she will have a painting of her 2-year-old, black-and-white whippet, Oliver.

“This was money I planned to spend anyway,” she said. “And now I know it went to a good place.”

__________________________________

MY TAKE:  What a great idea!  The next time you spend a bunch of money on San Diego CA wedding chair covers or pay to have your damaged cars towed away, or visit a prom dress store for something your daughter or your niece will likely wear just once, you can at least know that the money spent will be used, if only partially, to aid someone or some organization in need.   That goes for you, too Mr. NJ DUI lawyer and you Texas personal injury attorney out there. And ditto for you, Mr. Monmouth County traffic tickets lawyer.  You know you have the money to spend, why not spend it in a way that will show you care about your community and the world at large. 

OTHER RESOURCES: 

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SOURC: CNN

Travel + Leisure gives you seven ways to sleep better in your next hotel room.

Go where there are empty rooms

During the economic downturn, certain destinations have had lower occupancy rates, particularly those with high room counts: Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, Hawaii and Orlando, Florida. “Hotels that can’t sell expensive suites bump people up so they can resell the standard rooms, which are in higher demand,” explains Nicole Hockin, a spokesperson for Hotels.com. Likewise, look to resorts in the off- and shoulder seasons, when fewer suites are booked.

Book the right way

A luxury travel agent who’s affiliated with a network such as Virtuoso or Ensemble Travel can sometimes get you bumped up to the next room category.

Go standby

Hyatt recently partnered with E-standby to allow guests booking on Hyatt.com to pay a small fee — as little as $30 — for the chance at a space-available upgrade. Hilton Worldwide has a similar program.

Be card savvy

At many hotels, booking with a Centurion or Platinum card from American Express (Travel + Leisure’s parent company) can get you a better room, in some cases automatically. Charging everyday purchases on a hotel-affiliated credit card can help you earn upgrades, too — regardless of whether you’re actually staying at the hotel.

Use your connections

Look beyond AAA and AARP memberships to affiliations you might not expect. Lexus and Saks First cardholders are sometimes eligible for upgrades at Fairmont hotels. If you bank with Merrill Lynch, UBS or HSBC, you can often book an upgraded Ritz-Carlton package though the banks’ member benefits programs. Occasionally, hotels partner with airlines in ways that benefit you, too. Business- and first-class passengers on Singapore Airlines flights, for example, get automatic upgrades at Raffles hotels.

Check in later

The later you check in after noon (when most hotels require guests to check out), the better your chances for securing an upgrade, especially if you’re staying only one night. “Later in the day, rooms aren’t likely to be sold anyway,” says travel guru John E. DiScala, founder of JohnnyJet.com. Plus, it’s more likely that housekeeping has turned over rooms.

Be loyal

Many hotel chains give priority to their loyalty program members based on how often they stay at their hotels. Make sure you use your loyalty member number every time you book, particularly at large chains such as Starwood, Omni, and Loews. (See Great Hotel Loyalty Programs for more on loyalty programs.)

__________________________________

MY TAKE:  I’m all for upgrades.  Working for a Riverside CA personal injury law firm outside Los Angeles, I don’t get a lot of perks and I work long hours.  But when I’m travelling and away from my colleges, who are mostly  Los Angeles personal injury attorneys, I want luxury and I want to relax.  I love the ideas offered here and I’m going to try them next time I travel. 

One thing I’d like to see less of at hotels is the maids leaving their Rolling tool cart or whatever they are called outside in the hallways.  It seems to me that they should put them in the rooms, not leave the service carts out in the halls.  I often have found them to be distracting and would like to see fewer of them in hotel hallways.

 

OTHER RESOURCES:

Licensed to operate
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Playstation repair  providers can help you fix a broken iPod, LCD screen or battery. Whether your iPod is on the fritz, your iPod battery is not charging fully or you dropped it and now have a cracked LCD screen, it can be fixed.  Ditto for iPhone repair options.  Before you buy a new one, see if you can fix the one you’ve got.

Source:  New York Times

Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures — and saw vast potential.

Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. His site immediately crumbled under the resulting wave of visitors.

Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it.

“It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?”

Mr. Huh has since found that the appetite for oddball Internet humor is insatiable.

Traffic to the Cheezburger blog has ballooned over the last three years, encouraging Mr. Huh to expand his unlikely Web empire to include 53 sites, all fueled by submissions from readers. In May, what is now known as the Cheezburger Network attracted a record 16 million unique visitors, according to the Web analytics firm Quantcast.

A more recent success for the company is a site called Fail Blog, which chronicles disastrous mishaps and general stupidity in photos and video. The network’s smaller sites include Daily Squee, with pictures of cute animals, and There I Fixed It, for photos of bad repair jobs.

Mr. Huh said his company, which makes most of its money from Web advertising, has been profitable since Day 1.

“Then again, it was just me and Emily in the beginning,” he said referring to his wife, who also works at the company. Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment.

As the company has grown, so have the opportunities to make money, said Todd Sawicki, the company’s chief revenue officer.

“Only 1 percent of what gets submitted goes on the Web site,” he said. “The rest we can turn into T-shirts, books and other content that the audience loves.”

This year alone, Mr. Sawicki said, the company will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales.

The company has published five books based on its blogs, one of which, a collection of the cats-with-misspelled-captions images known as Lolcats, hovered on the New York Times list of miscellaneous paperback best sellers for 13 weeks. Three more books are in production, along with a line of greeting cards and desktop calendars.

One secret to the company’s success is the way it taps into the Internet zeitgeist. It seeks clues to what is funny right now by monitoring the Web for themes bubbling up on community forums, blogs and video sites. Then it spins off new sites devoted to the latest online humor fads.

“Cheezburger figures out what’s starting to get popular and then harvests the humor from the chaff,” said Kenyatta Cheese, one of the creators of a popular Web video series called “Know Your Meme” that documents viral online phenomena, known as memes. “Things like Lolcats and Fail are easy to make, easy to spread and hit on an emotional level that crosses a lot of traditional boundaries.”

Most of the material the company posts is created by readers, who can Photoshop a funny caption onto an image or remix a popular video in minutes and submit it to one of the Cheezburger sites for consideration. The company says that each day it receives more than 18,000 submissions from readers.

Joe Olk, 28, is one of two dozen staff members who spend their days deliberating over exactly what makes something laugh-out-loud worthy.

Skimming through images on a computer monitor in the company’s spacious office in downtown Seattle, Mr. Olk paused over one photograph of a neon sign advertising services described as “Internet Massage.” “Now that is just weird,” he says with a snicker. “But also funny.” And with a click, it is posted online.

Employees do not check to see whether the person submitting content actually owns it before they put it on a company site, but they will remove it if they receive a complaint after the fact. The company says that before it puts an image into a book or calendar, it does seek permission from its creator, who might receive a free book or T-shirt.

Submissions that are funny but don’t fit into any of the current blog themes can inspire new blogs. For example, after noticing an influx of photos featuring comically bad knock-off toys and other products, the company decided there were enough to warrant a new site, which is slated to be introduced in the next week or two.

The tricky part, said Kiki Kane, 36, who oversees new site development for the network, is gauging whether an Internet trend has legs. She aims to introduce a new blog every week.

“We’re constantly monitoring the Web for new memes,” she said. “Those bits of cultural shorthand, inside jokes that you get right away just by seeing a visual image.”

Not every new site is a hit. One called Pandaganda, which collected images of pandas looking comically evil and sinister, fizzled after a few weeks, so Mr. Huh pulled the plug. “We kill about 20 percent of all the sites we start,” he said.

The idea of quickly tailoring a blog network to satisfy the fickle tastes of a Web-savvy audience, generating new sites to capitalize on a viral sensation and dropping the ones that don’t catch on, is what convinced Geoff Entress, a noted angel investor in the Seattle area, to help Mr. Huh purchase the original company.

“Being flexible and able to change as the environment changes is a huge asset to a consumer Web site,” said Mr. Entress, who has backed more than 35 local start-ups, including an online community for booklovers called Shelfari that was eventually bought by Amazon.

“The risk wasn’t that people wouldn’t like the product,” he said. “We already had the numbers showing they did. The risk was whether or not we could prove this was more than a fad.”

If the wacky cats are a fad, they are one that has had surprising staying power, as shown by a recent Cheezburger happy-hour event at Safeco Field before a Seattle Mariners game.

More than 1,000 fans turned up to listen to cat-themed songs blasted over the loudspeakers, snack on miniature cheeseburgers, slurp from plastic cups of beer and pose for pictures with Mr. Huh.

Tess Mattos, a 41-year-old knitting instructor who traveled up from Portland, Ore., for the event, said she had been a fan of the network’s flagship site for three years.

“It’s just a good, simple break from real life,” she said, adjusting the pair of sequined cat ears she was wearing. “It’s clever, but not mean-spirited.”

“People think we’re weird,” she quipped. “But have you seen the fans of ‘Twilight?’ ”

______________________________________

 

 

My Take:  Look, I’ve seen people blog on and on about everything from the ads on poll pads at the Lakers/Celtics playoff games to how to hire and fire an MD home cleaning company.  Why wouldn’t funny cat photos garner attention?  In this day and age, I think we need more laughter and nothing is funnier than cats doing silly things in photos, and what cats do them as pets.

 

 

 

 

 

Other Resources:  

 

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Baby Talk
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Cited: Fortune Magazine

Continued from “How Steve Jobs Transformed American Business Part 1“

Jobs had come up with an idea for strategy of building company-owned retail stores and it was derailed at the time as it risky cash during. He was convinced people would convert to Apple if he could speak to them directly and not just the faithful Macintosh users that included artists and students, but everybody. Today, company-owned retail stores are integral to Apple’s success.

For those paying attention after Jobs’ return, the CEO was telegraphing Apple’s trajectory. “I would rather compete with Sony (SNE) than compete in another product category with Microsoft,” he told Time in early 2002. “We’re the only company that owns the whole widget — the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can’t do.”

“He did this with a nervous board,” says Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive who went on to become chairman of Intuit (INTU) and an Apple board member. “He knew that this is what customers wanted.” What’s striking looking back is how little there was to sell in the original Apple stores. Jobs knew how he’d fill them.

Jobs made it his business to know everything about Apple. “He’s involved in details you wouldn’t think a CEO would be involved in,” says Ken Segall, a former Chiat/Day creative director who has worked with Apple on and off for years. Jobs commissioned the iconic “Think different” campaign, says Segall, well before any of Apple’s new products were introduced — or even described to the ad team. “He’d say, ‘The third word in the fourth paragraph isn’t right. You might want to think about that one.’ “

The rare pairing of micromanagement with big-picture vision is a Jobs hallmark. Early in his return to Apple, he recognized that gorgeous design was a differentiator for Apple in a computer industry gripped by the successful blandness of Dell, Microsoft, and Intel (INTC, Fortune 500).

“I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, ‘Give me the next iPod,’ ” writes Tim Brown, CEO of product-design consultant Ideo, in his new book “Change by Design.” “But it’s probably close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond — under their breath — ‘Give me the next Steve Jobs.’”

Jobs also has a knack for pouncing at the right moment. The music industry had failed repeatedly to develop its own digital-music sales site before Apple came along with iTunes, which was by then prepared to become a store for buying music.

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Jobs cleverly made his pact with the record labels when iTunes worked only on Macs, which in 2002 had a personal-computing market share in the low single digits. Apple’s humble position — before iTunes became compatible with Windows, expanding its potential market share to nearly all PCs — was a virtue. This made iTunes an experiment rather than a destructive paradigm shift.

“I don’t understand how Apple could ruin the record business in one year on Mac,” said Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music, according to “Appetite for Self-Destruction,” a new book about the record industry’s ills by Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper. “Why shouldn’t we try this?” Writes Knopper: “By the time Steve Jobs came around, he was the last resort. He was merely smart enough to know it. He played tough, but not any tougher than any lawyer for a major label who had negotiated an artist contract in recent decades.”

A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message. He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic.

Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say — and don’t say. Harvard professor David Yoffie estimated that in the months between announcing and selling the first iPhone in 2007, Apple received $400 million in free advertising by not making any public statements, thereby whipping the media into a frenzy.

Jobs himself is careful to avoid overexposure, preferring to speak only when he has products to promote. He didn’t disclose his 2004 cancer surgery until after it occurred, and then only in an employee e-mail that was strategically released to news outlets. Similarly, he told the world of his recent leave in another employee missive, with no additional comment from him or anyone else at Apple.

Nobody in Jobs’ sphere speaks without the permission of the company’s media relations team, which reports directly to Jobs. Apple declined to make Jobs available for an interview for this article. It did bless the participation of some people in Apple’s orbit to speak about him, while nixing requests for others. The secrecy has rankled corporate governance experts, who insist the health of such an indispensable CEO warrants greater disclosure.

Jobs was initially mum as well about a stock options backdating scandal that embroiled the company’s former finance chief and general counsel. In an eventual SEC filing, Apple said Jobs was aware that the company had adjusted option grant dates so that the grants were more profitable for employees. Jobs apologized for the backdating, calling the episode “completely out of character for Apple.”

Jobs manages the money, the message, the deals, the design, and more. Consider the case fairly made that the long-ago enfant terrible of the computer industry has built up impressive business chops and that his company is peerless. But if nothing else, his recent illness is a reminder that Steve Jobs is mortal. When he’s gone, how long will his company thrive without him?

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Apple’s future.

This past September, when Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to the public eye, he thanked precisely one Apple executive by name: Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer.

At an event to introduce a new line of iPods, Jobs first informed a crowd of journalists, analysts, and Apple developers that he now possessed the liver of a “twentysomething liver donor who had died in a car crash.” Then he thanked Cook and the rest of the management team for “ably” running Apple in his absence. Cook, in turn, led a standing ovation for Jobs, his arms raised over his head from the front row of a San Francisco auditorium.

With Jobs back at work, the conversation has been postponed as to whether Cook, or anyone else, is prepared to fill Jobs’ shoes. “At Apple the hierarchy is determined by who Steve calls,” says a former Apple executive. “There’s a lot of value in ‘Steve said.’”

Larry Ellison, a CEO known to dislike the topic of succession, says of his friend, “He’s irreplaceable. He’s built a fabulous brand. He’s got a wealth of products. Whenever he leaves, I hope he retires in good health and he’s sailing off in his yacht in the Mediterranean. But they’re going to miss him terribly, because it’s a consumer products company. The product cycle is so fast.”

There are signs that Jobs has inculcated the troops enough to last awhile without him. “The organization has been thoroughly trained to think like Steve,” says someone with contacts among the Apple executive team. “That’s why the six months went so smoothly. People could envision, ‘This is what Steve would do.’”

Jobs, in fact, inspires far beyond Apple. Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently told The New Yorker that Jobs is their hero. When Jeff Bezos released Amazon.com’s smooth, shiny Kindle 2, the Jobs envy was obvious. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape, says he often evokes Jobs in his advice to entrepreneurs. He says, “The threshold for the release of the first product should be, ‘What would Steve Jobs do?’”

Steve Jobs will probably let us know when he’s done good and ready given his habit of secrecy, surprise and his braids. He is already created $150 billion in shareholder wealth, transformed movies, telecom, music and computer industry as well as influencing everything to do with retailer design. What else is there for him to do?

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My Take: Well, for 54-year-old man who is about to turn 55, I think he has done a hell of lot. If I was able to ask him a question it would be, Do you think your life has been worthwhile? Then I would probably ask him to lend me some money.

The article is right however, many artists and designers use Apple or Macintosh computers to do their work especially in the movie and fashion industry. You will find that many designers create their T shirt designs on a Mac. Designers all over world create designs for limited edition T shirts, shoes, pants and more on a Mac just as animation producers and movie editors do.

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Cited: Fortune magazine

Who does this describe?

A youthful company founder who gets booted from his company in the 1980s then comes back in the 1990s only to survive two brushes with death in the next decade, a securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries. Oh, he is also a billionaire many times over and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.

If you answered Steve Jobs, you would be correct. This is the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his impact on everything he touches in a nutshell.

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 as if his signature “one more thing” line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant — and yes, profitable — as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) in 1976.

Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he’s 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he’s Fortune’s CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue). In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.

Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm’s Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.

In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.

He is the rare businessman with legitimate worldwide celebrity. (His quirks and predilections are such common knowledge that they were knowingly parodied on an episode of “The Simpsons.”) He pals around with U2’s Bono.

Consumers who have never picked up an annual report or even a business magazine gush about his design taste, his elegant retail stores, and his outside-the-box approach to advertising. (”Think different,” indeed.)

It’s often noted that he’s a showman, a born salesman, a magician who creates a famed reality-distortion field, a tyrannical perfectionist. It’s totally accurate, of course, and the descriptions contribute to his legend.

Yet for all his hanging out with copywriters and industrial designers and musicians — and despite his anti-corporate attire — make no mistake: Jobs is all about business. He may not pay attention to customer research, but he works slavishly to make products customers will buy.

He’s a visionary, but he’s grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple’s various operational and market metrics. He isn’t motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500). Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned — proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.

The financial results have been nothing short of astounding — for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple’s groundbreaking “digital lifestyle” strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google (GOOG, Fortune 500).

Its market share in personal computers was plummeting back then, and the cash drain was so severe that bankruptcy was a possibility. Now Apple has $34 billion in cash and marketable securities, surpassing the total market cap of rival Dell (DELL, Fortune 500). Macintoshes make up 9% of the PC market in the U.S. today, but that share is increasingly beside the point.

With 275 retail stores in nine countries, a 73% share of the U.S. MP3 player market, and the undisputed leadership position in innovation when it comes to mobile phones, Apple and its CEO are no one’s idea of underdogs anymore.

In 2006 Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) paid $7.5 billion to acquire Pixar, the computer animation film studio Jobs had nurtured and controlled. Jobs, in turn, became a Disney director and the blue-chip company’s largest shareholder. His net worth, solely based on his stakes in Apple and Disney, is about $5 billion. Other executives have had stellar decades but none can compare with Steve’s.

With Jobs back at the helm of his company, plenty of challenges lie ahead. Will the Goliath role suit him nearly as well as playing David clearly has? How will he respond to the competition he has awakened, particularly in smartphones, even as the personal computer fades in relative importance? Has he fashioned an organization that can succeed him? Can he possibly be as dominant in the decade to come as the one that is ending?

The “decade” of Steve actually began in 1997, when he returned to Apple after having been ousted a dozen years earlier. That was a year of triage, of a humbling investment from Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), of paring Apple’s product line to a bare minimum of four computers.

By the following year Steve’s regime had kicked into gear. Jobs completed the hiring of a new management team, which included several executives from his previous company, Next. Those top players would form the nucleus of the Jobs brain trust for nearly 10 years.

Then came the first Macintosh after Jobs’ return, the iMac, a breakthrough all-in-one computer and monitor that heralded Apple’s return to health. The success of the pricey iMac, coupled with drastic cost cutting, allowed Jobs to build a cash cushion. By repairing Apple’s balance sheet, he prepared the company for big investments to come, a shrewd business move if ever there was one.

Jobs laid the foundation for Apple’s leap from stable to stratospheric when things looked darkest. In 2000, Apple missed its financial targets in a September earnings announcement, sending its stock price plummeting in subsequent months to the equivalent of $7 in today’s prices. Yet Jobs by this time had set in motion the key elements of Apple’s rejuvenation.

Over the course of 2001, as global markets fell and the world headed into recession, Apple launched the iTunes music software (in January), the Mac OS X operating system (March), the first Apple retail stores (May), and the first iPod (November), a 5GB model that Apple bragged would hold 1,000 songs.

The market didn’t catch on quickly to the significance of those events. iTunes was just music-playing software embedded into Macs and lacked an online store that sold music. The new operating system, though impressive, powered a niche product. The iPod was a snazzy MP3 player in an established market.

As the company’s stock languished, takeover rumors appeared from time to time. What was never reported was that Jobs seriously contemplated taking the company private with the help of newly formed buyout group Silver Lake Partners. An Apple buyout would have been the deal of the century, but according to people familiar with the talks, Jobs ultimately shut them down. That was actually the second serious proposal to buy Apple.

Financing was lined up to take over the country on the assumption that jobs would run it in 1997 by jobs friend Ellison later became an Apple board member. Recently, also stated that jobs didn’t like the idea of being “second guessed” if it looked as if he was just going to come back because the money. “He explained to me that with the moral high ground, he thought he could make decisions more easily and more gracefully,” said Ellison.

How Steve Jobs Transformed American Business Part 2

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My Take: This man has an envious life! Everybody wants to be Steve Jobs. I would just like his business ability and money. That would make me very happy. But, he is also very lucky man where his health is concerned. At least he had the financial ability to cover his medical expenses.

He runs a company that has Hollywood by coattails. Most editors and video nuts used a Mac or Apple computer to do most of their work. I understand that a West Hollywood DVD replication can meet made faster on the iMac than any PC. However, I do think they are comparable when it comes to a Los Angeles CD duplication. The Apple Computer is the best computer for animation, graphics and movies.

What does this mean for Steve Jobs; he has got a better mousetrap. It is known to all business professionals that if you want to succeed you have to build a better mousetrap and he has done it.

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