Bill Gates

LibraryCity’s proposal for a national digital library endowment has just made The Baltimore Sun—complete with a personal appeal to Bill Gates to talk up the idea. Books and billionaires does have a ring to it, doesn’t it? If TeleRead community members can help get the word out on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere and otherwise show [...]

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While we were recovering from Thanksgiving feasting (ie. stuck in standing traffic), Jeff Bezos was unveiling Amazon's latest innovation on 60 Minutes-the Amazon Drone, or octocopter. Then, in short order, the internet exploded with stories on the subject, proclaiming Bezos' latest announcement as the biggest news in ecommerce or the biggest laughingstock. 

For centuries, biographers have relied on letters to bring historical figures to life, whether Gandhi or Catherine the Great. But as people switch from writing on paper to documenting their lives electronically, biographers are encountering new benefits - and new challenges.

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is based on dozens of interviews. But one of the book's juiciest episodes comes from a string of emails from 2003. That's when Apple launched the iTunes music store. Right away, the company's rivals at Microsoft understood this could be a game changer.

Need an imagination? There’s an app for that. Or soon will be. Among the wackier wheezes worked up lately to improve on plain old Mark One printed text is a patent application filed by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and a bunch of other Washington State dreamers to autoconvert text to video. The application covers: “A system [...]

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Some older TeleReaders may remember Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine, in which Jerry demonstrated that there was no PC problem that you couldn’t have fixed in a jiffy, provided you had a five-figure domestic IT budget and speed-dial numbers for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the U.S. President. There are moments–just moments–when [...]

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country. With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.