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With an estimated fortune of $62 billion, Warren Buffett is the richest man in the entire world. In 1962, when he began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway, a share cost $7.50. Today, Buffett, 78, is Berkshire’s chairman and CEO, and one share of the company’s class A stock worth close to $119,000. He credits his astonishing success to several key strategies, which he has shared with writer Alice Schroeder. She spend hundreds of hours interviewing the Sage of Omaha for the new authorized biography The Snowball. Here are some of Buffett’s money-making secrets — and how they could work for you.

3. Never Suck Your Thumb: Gather in advance any information you need to make a decision, and ask a friend or relative to make sure that you stick to a deadline. Buffett prides himself on swiftly making up his mind and acting on it. He calls any unnecessary sitting and thinking “thumb sucking.” When people offer him a business or an investment, he says, “I won’t talk unless they bring me a price.” He gives them an answer on the spot.

4. Spell Out The Deal Before You Start: Your bargaining leverage is always greatest before you begin a job — that’s when you have something to offer that the other party wants. Buffett learned this lesson the hard way as a kid, when his grandfather Ernest hired him and a friend to dig out the family grocery store after a blizzard. The boys spent five hours shoveling until they could barely straighten their frozen hands. Afterward, his grandfather gave the pair less than 90 cents to split. Buffett was horrified that he performed such backbreaking work only to earn pennies an hour. Always nail down the specifics of a deal in advance — even with your friends and relatives.

5. Watch Small Expenses: Buffett invests in businesses run by managers who obsess over the tiniest costs. He one acquired a company whose owner counted the sheets in rolls of 500-sheet toilet paper to see if he was being cheated (he was). He also admired a friend who painted only on the side of his office building that faced the road. Exercising vigilance over every expense can make your profits — and your paycheck — go much further.

6. Limit What You Borrow: Living on credit cards and loans won’t make you rich. Buffett has never borrowed a significant amount — not to invest, not for a mortgage. He has gotten many heart-rendering letters from people who thought their borrowing was manageable but became overwhelmed by debt. His advice: Negotiate with creditors to pay what you can. Then, when you’re debt-free, work on saving some money that you can use to invest.

7. Be Persistent: With tenacity and ingenuity, you can win against a more established competitor. Buffett acquired the Nebraska Furniture Mart in 1983 because he liked the way its founder, Rose Blumkin, did business. A Russian immigrant, she built the mart from a pawnshop into the largest furniture store in North America. Her strategy was to undersell the big shots, and she was a merciless negotiator. To Buffett, Rose embodied the unwavering courage that makes a winner out of an underdog.

8. Know When To Quit: Once, when Buffett was a teen, he went to the racetrack. He bet on a race and lost. To recoup his funds, he bet on another race. He lost again, leaving him with close to nothing. He felt sick — he had squandered nearly a week’s earnings. Buffett never repeated that mistake. Know when to walk away from a loss, and don’t let anxiety fool you into trying again.

9. Assess The Risk: In 1995, the employer of Buffett’s son, Howie, was accused by the FBI of price-fixing. Buffett advised Howie to imagine the worst-and-bast-case scenarios if he stayed with the company. His son quickly realized that the risks of staying far outweighed any potential gains, and he quit the next day. Asking yourself “and then what?” can help you see all of the possible consequences when you’re struggling to make a decision — and can guide you to the smartest choice.

Very interesting considerations on mobile phone browsing by Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO. http://tinyurl.com/5g4ogq

They say that twitter has refused 500M$ for being acquired by Fb. Everybody knows that Fb and overall the founder are in love with twitter but i’m wondering, what we’ll be the competitive advantage by this acquisition? Should i underline that until today both company are unable to do (enough) money?

That’s not what you’d expect. I would have guessed difficulty in raising funds would be linear, but it isn’t.

The primary reason is that there are two typical investors: angels and VCs. Angels are just wealthy people who typically sums of between $10 and $100k, with $50k probably being a good average.

VCs are institutional investors who raise funds often totaling in the hundreds of millions, and are paid in such a way that they are incentivized to deploy the entire amount into investments. So, VCs like to make bigger investments because then they can make fewer. That means less due diligence, fewer board meetings, etc.

Not many VCs make it their business to invest amounts of money that small. It happens, but it’s often just something they do to lock up right of first refusal on future rounds. A lot of companies would much rather raise $500k than $5m, so they’ll do it if they like you enough, but it’s relatively uncommon.

Raising $500k from angels means convincing somewhere between 5 and 20 different people, all with their own habits and goals, to invest in you at the same valuation and terms. That happens too actually, even outside of the few syndicates that exist, but again, it’s hard to pull off.

Full Article

A Danish farm nestled just a bike ride away from Aarhus—a small city founded 1,000 years ago by Vikings—is a long way from traffic-clogged Silicon Valley and its high-energy engineers and entrepreneurs. Yet it was here that work began on the engine that powers the new Chrome Web browser from Google (GOOG), a product that aims to change the very nature of Internet browsing and the way we use computers.

Traditional browsers such as Internet Explorer from Microsoft (MSFT) and Firefox from Mozilla are designed primarily to display Web pages accessed from remote servers. But thanks to the Java language from Sun Microsystems (JAVA), there are now a growing number of full-fledged software applications available via the Net—and browsers are increasingly assuming responsibility for running them.

When Google dreamed up Chrome, its aim was to create a browser capable of running those applications dramatically faster than any previous alternative (BusinessWeek.com, 9/3/08). If the product succeeds as planned, it could upend the traditional computing model—typified by Microsoft Windows and Office—where software loads and runs locally on a PC, replacing it instead with an approach known as “cloud computing,” where programs run over the Internet.

That’s where the Danish farmhouse comes in. Its occupant, Lars Bak, is one of the world’s foremost experts in JavaScript engines—programs that run Java code on a variety of local computers. A slim, 45-year-old Danish computer scientist with close-cropped hair, Bak has spent the last two decades working on so-called “virtual machines” that, like the JavaScript engine in Chrome, execute one program inside another. He holds 18 U.S. patents in the field and spent seven years at Sun, where he developed a high-performance virtual machine that is still used by Sun, Apple (AAPL), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Bak had moved back to Denmark in 2000 so that his two daughters, now 13 and 15, could be educated in his native country. Two years later he left Sun to start a new company with a pair of students from Aarhus University, called OOVM, that was bought in 2004 by Switzerland’s Esmertec (ESMN.F). After a two-year stint as chief architect and engineering manager for Esmertec, which specializes in Java software for mobile phones, Bak was ready for a break.

Two weeks later, he got a call from Google asking him to work on Chrome. Bak says he was intrigued by the project because “the goal was to raise the bar for the whole industry.” But he and his family didn’t want to leave the 1860 farmhouse on eight acres of land near Aarhus where they live. Google agreed to hire him anyway—and Bak set up shop in an old stable on the property and began hiring local talent.

The engineering team soon outgrew the stable and moved to office space at Aarhus University. There, Bak and a dozen other engineers worked in stealth mode to build a new JavaScript engine for Chrome, code-named V8, that was based on open-source software and designed from the ground up for speedy performance.

“Lars’ experience in this area made him the ideal person to work on this ambitious, significant project,” says Nelson Mattos, Google’s vice-president of engineering for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “V8 is the key to Chrome’s remarkable speed, and because it’s open source, it’s also a contribution to browser technology in general.”

Experts agree that the speed of the engine that Bak and his team designed is one of Chrome’s key differentiators. In the short term, according to tech consultancy Gartner (IT), the new browser’s success will be measured by whether it delivers a superior user experience for JavaScript-intensive applications, such as Google’s Gmail. But the ultimate test is whether Chrome’s appeal will extend beyond early adopters to mainstream enterprise customers—a chasm that other challengers such as Firefox and Apple’s Safari haven’t yet crossed in dominant numbers.

One thing is for sure. Chrome is expected to achieve what Bak set out to do: raise the bar for the whole industry. Press reports have estimated Chrome to be as much as 56 times faster than Internet Explorer at running Java programs. Bak is cagey about Chrome’s performance compared with rivals because it depends on which benchmarks are used. Plus, competing browsers are also evolving rapidly; indeed, some reports already claim that a new JavaScript engine in Firefox outperforms V8. “Competitors will catch up,” says Sheri McLeish, an analyst at technology consultancy Forrester Research (FORR). “Whenever there are new entrants it ups the ante.”

As for Bak, he is still at work in Denmark, continuing to tinker with Chrome’s engine to make it better. The office at Aarhus University doesn’t offer any of the perks that Google is famous for, such as free haircuts and gourmet meals. But living in the Danish countryside and commuting on his bike to a job with one of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies is all the reward he needs, Bak says. That, and potentially changing the whole way people use computers and the Internet.

Busienss Week original article