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Jorge Mendes illustration

Business / Fuppes22.09.2014

Jorge Mendes: the most powerful man in football?

The 20-year ascent of Mendes from Porto nightclub owner and friend of footballers to the beaming broker of the game’s most lucrative transfers has tracked the sport’s pay-TV-fuelled inflation itself, and Portugal’s status as a habitual exporter of players. Mendes built his name and the operation of his company, Gestifute, on attaining a remarkable dominance over the deals done by Portugal’s top three clubs, and he took several of these players on multi-million pound moves to England and Spain. There he has extended his influence, particularly after his client, José Mourinho, made the journey himself from Porto after 2004, to sign as the manager at Chelsea, then Internazionale and Real Madrid, now Chelsea again.

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Business / Music30.08.2014

Nostalgia pays in Nashville as rocketing record sales make it the capital of vinyl

"This is the mother, the metal mother," says Jay Millar, examining a brilliant silver disc on the machine floor of United Record Pressing in downtown Nashville. "And the mother is where it all starts."

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Business / Internet / Science14.08.2014

A Chinese Internet Giant Starts to Dream

Dig into the history of Baidu, however, and you’ll find it has Valley roots of its own. CEO Robin Li cofounded the company in 2000 with biotech salesman Eric Xu, after a stint as an engineer at the Sunnyvale-­based search engine Infoseek. Li was armed with a patent for a way to rank sites in search listings by the number of incoming links—filed in 1997, a year before Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page patented their similar PageRank algorithm. As China’s Internet population grew, so did Baidu, enough to attract a $5 million investment in 2004 from Google itself—which later tried to buy Baidu for $1.6 billion in an attempt to head off the Chinese company’s IPO, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Instead, Baidu went public in August 2005, and shares rocketed 354 percent the first day. Much as Google had done in the United States, Baidu quickly solidified its hold on China’s search market and used the profits to expand into a range of other online services.

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Basketball / Business / Sports10.08.2014

District judge: the NCAA cannot stop colleges from paying football and basketball player

The National College Athletic Association has violated antitrust laws and must allow colleges to offer student athletes a limited share of revenue, a U.S. judge ruled on Friday in a lawsuit that seeks to redefine traditional notions of sports amateurism. More than 20 current and former athletes sued, saying that players should share in the profits of college athletics, a highly lucrative business in which universities reap billions of dollars from men’s football and basketball.

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Business / Internet08.08.2014

The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup

He admits that if the right offer comes along, the kind of offer that only three or four companies in the world could come up with, he would have to jump. But what is that? Five billion? Seven? Ten? It’s hard to know, because in Silicon Valley today, money has lost all meaning and value. It is an abstract construct that can be exchanged for homes and Teslas and handmade selvedge denim jeans flown in from Japan, but nobody really has any idea what constitutes “a lot” anymore. At some point however, he would be obligated to all those who’ve stuck with him and to all those who have given him money.

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Business / Internet / Technology / Wikipedia08.08.2014

List of mergers and acquisitions by Google

Google is a computer software and a web search engine company that has been acquiring, on average, more than one company per week since 2010. The table below is an incomplete list of acquisitions, with each acquisition listed being for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified.

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Business / Interviews / Science / Technology18.07.2014

Laboratory-grown beef: meat without the murder, but would you eat it?

Growing meat in labs could cut hunger, tackle climate change and end animal slaughter, but creator Professor Mark Post says the biggest beef will be convincing consumers.

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Business / Conspiracy Theories / Internet / Technology17.07.2014

A detailed exposé on how the market is rigged from a data-centric approach

We received trade execution reports from an active trader who wanted to know why his large orders almost never completely filled, even when the amount of stock advertised exceeded the number of shares wanted. For example, if 25,000 shares were at the best offer, and he sent in a limit order at the best offer price for 20,000 shares, the trade would, more likely than not, come back partially filled. In some cases, more than half of the amount of stock advertised (quoted) would disappear immediately before his order arrived at the exchange. This was the case, even in deeply liquid stocks such as Ford Motor Co (symbol F, market cap: $70 Billion, NYSE DMM is Barclays). The trader sent us his trade execution reports, and we matched up his trades with our detailed consolidated quote and trade data to discover that the mechanism described in Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" was alive and well on Wall Street.

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Business / Internet / Science / Technology / Zahlen26.06.2014

2014 Internet Trends

Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley analyst and current Kleiner Perkins investor, has built a personal franchise around her annual Internet trends report. She delivered her latest at the Code Conference this morning. Meeker and her team have a knack for pulling together data that speaks to both the specificity of what’s happening right now and how it fits into the larger context of the past and present. This time around, Kleiner Perkins built a site for the reports, which date back to 2001, available here.

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Business / Internet / Technology26.06.2014

The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality

... the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough proto­type in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. In June 2012, John Carmack—the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming—brought that early proto­type to the E3 videogame show, reintro­ducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. A year later, Oculus brought an HD proto­type to E3 and blew minds all over again. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March. And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago.

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Business / Music26.06.2014

The Couple Behind Odd Future’s Unlikely Empire

While Odd Future are the face of hip-hop’s DIY audacity and Frank Ocean is R&B’s most compelling ascendant superstar, their managers (and guardian angels) are making the most of the music industry’s slow implosion.

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Business / Interviews / Movies / Society24.06.2014

Playboy Interview – Gary Oldman

"I look at the world, I look at our leadership and I look at every aspect of our culture and wonder what will make it better. I have no idea. Any night of the week you only need to turn on one of these news channels and watch for half an hour. Read the newspaper. Go online. Our world has gone to hell. I listen to the radio and hear about these lawsuits and about people like this high school volleyball coach who took it upon herself to get two students to go undercover to do a marijuana bust. You’re a fucking volleyball coach! This is not 21 Jump Street."

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Arts / Berlin / Business23.06.2014

Pixel perfect: The story of Eboy

As professionals, the "eBoys" seem to have found the holy grail of graphic design. Their work is instantly recognizable and consistently relevant. It’s paid off, too; the group’s client list reads like a primer in 21st-century consumerism: Coca-Cola, the New York Times, Paul Smith, MTV. When I met them for the first time in Berlin last fall, they were working on a campaign for Xbox. In the world of digital design, their mark has been indelible. "eBoy are the originals," says Jürgen Siebert, CEO of FontShop, a Berlin-based typography company that the eBoy founders collaborated with in the early 1990s. "Of course there are some more pixel wizards, and there had been before eBoy. But eBoy developed that discipline to perfection."

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Business / Politics / Science / Society14.06.2014

Neuro-enhancement in the military: far-fetched or an inevitable future?

Different forms of neurostimulation in humans have now been shown to boost our ability to learn and perform motor actions, to pay attention to events in the environment, to recall information in memory, and to exercise self-control. At the same time, evidence is mounting for more complex effects on cognition. For instance, stimulation of the human prefrontal cortex can enhance or inhibit our tendency to lie, improve ourability to lie successfully, and can encourage us to comply with social norms that carry a punishment for disobedience.

Exhibition of the ashes of Chilean student loan papers burned by artist Francisco Tapia

Arts / Business25.05.2014

Chile students’ debts go up in smoke

For a whole year, a Chilean artist using the name Fried Potatoes (Papas Fritas) planned his revenge. Saying he was collecting material for an art project, the 31-year-old visual artist sneaked into a vault at a notorious private, run-for-profit university and quietly removed tuition contracts. Fried Potatoes – whose real name is Francisco Tapia – then burned the documents, rendering it nearly impossible for the Universidad del Mar to call in its debt – which he claimed was worth as much as $500m (£297m). "It's over. You are all free of debt," he said in a five-minute video released earlier this month. Speaking to former students, he added: "You don't have to pay a penny."

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Business / Internet / Technology08.05.2014

The Untold Story Of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback

One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them. As at most startups, in Google’s first year there were no management layers between the CEO, Page, and the engineers. But as the company grew, it added a layer of managers, people who could meet with Page and the rest of Google’s senior executives and give the engineers prioritized orders and deadlines. Page, now 28, hated it. Since Google hired only the most talented engineers, he thought that extra layer of supervision was not just unnecessary but also an impediment. He also suspected that Google’s project managers were steering engineers away from working on projects that were personally important to him. For example, Page had outlined a plan to scan all the world’s books and make them searchable online, but somehow no one was working on it. Page blamed the project managers.

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Business / Internet15.04.2014

Google confirms it’s going through your emails to figure out what ads to show you

Google Inc updated its terms of service on Monday, informing users that their incoming and outgoing emails are automatically analyzed by software to create targeted ads. Google’s updated terms of service added a paragraph stating that “our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

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Berlin / Business / Sex25.03.2014

Sex gegen Bezahlung – Ich bin Stricher

Die anderen Gäste in der Bar sitzen meist alleine und unterhalten sich nicht miteinander. Aber wenn die Tür sich öffnet, blicken sie gemeinsam Richtung Eingang. Auf der Suche nach Frischfleisch. Dabei sind es nicht die Schönen und die Reichen, die hier einen Stricher mit nach Hause nehmen. Es sind vielmehr die Dickeren und die Älteren, die im sexdurchdrungenen Berlin sonst keine Sexpartner mehr finden.

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Business / Society08.03.2014

The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary

Arunachalam Muruganantham's invention came at great personal cost - he nearly lost his family, his money and his place in society. But he kept his sense of humor. "It all started with my wife," he says. In 1998 he was newly married and his world revolved around his wife, Shanthi, and his widowed mother. One day he saw Shanthi was hiding something from him. He was shocked to discover what it was - rags, "nasty cloths" which she used during menstruation. "I will be honest," says Muruganantham. "I would not even use it to clean my scooter." When he asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads, she pointed out that if she bought them for the women in the family, she wouldn't be able to afford to buy milk or run the household. Wanting to impress his young wife, Muruganantham went into town to buy her a sanitary pad. It was handed to him hurriedly, as if it were contraband. He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price. He decided he could make them cheaper himself.

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Business / Internet23.02.2014

“I Don’t Want to Create a Paper Trail”: Inside the Secret Apple-Google Pact

Documents filed in conjunction with the litigation, first reported last month by PandoDaily's Mark Ames, offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of interactions among the likes of Apple's Steve Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell. In early 2005, the documents show, Campbell brokered an anti-recruitment pact between Jobs and Schmidt, confirming to Jobs in an email that "Schmidt got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple." On the day of that email, Apple's head of human resources ordered her staff to "please add Google to your 'hands off' list." Likewise, Google's recruiting director was asked to create a formal "Do Not Cold Call List" of companies with which it had "special agreements" not to compete for employees. A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than "verbally," he wrote in an email, "since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

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Business / Celebrities / Music / Strange06.02.2014

Mamoru Samuragochi – Sinn für falsche Töne

Vielleicht ist der Fall von Mamoru Samuragochi so zu erklären, des angeblich gehörlosen Komponisten, der als "japanischer Beethoven" berühmt wurde und der am Mittwoch einräumen musste, dass er gar nicht selbst komponiert hat. Am Donnerstag hieß es dann, er sei wahrscheinlich nicht einmal taub. Bis dahin war der 50-jährige Samuragochi in Japan ein Star. Von seiner "Hiroshima-Sinfonie", mit der er die Opfer des Atombombenangriffs von 1945 ehren wollte, hat er mehr als 100 000 CDs verkauft; berühmt geworden war Samuragochi mit Filmmusik, auch Videospiele wie Resident Evil hat er mit klassischer Musik vertont. Das Wunder des tauben Komponisten brach mit einer dürren Pressemitteilung seines Anwalts zusammen. Samuragochi gebe bekannt, dass er seine Musik nicht selbst geschrieben habe. Seit fast 20 Jahren habe er einen namenlosen Ghost-Komponisten dafür bezahlt, "weil mein Gehör immer schlechter wurde". Dieser habe bei etwa der Hälfte seiner Werke mitkomponiert, ließ er erklären. Selber habe er jedoch "die Ideen" geliefert. Zunächst ließ Samuragochis Anwalt auch noch verlauten, der Ghost-Komponist wolle unerkannt bleiben. Seine "persönlichen Umstände" ließen es nicht zu, dass er sich äußere. Doch am Donnerstag zerstörte der Mann im Schatten in einer gut einstündigen Pressekonferenz dann endgültig den Mythos von "Japans Beethoven": Er habe entgegen Samuragochis Angaben in den vergangenen 18 Jahren alle Stücke allein geschrieben, erzählte der Teilzeit-Musiklehrer Takashi Niigaki, auch die hochgelobte Hiroshima-Sinfonie. Und mehr noch: "Vom ersten Tag an bis heute hatte ich nie das Gefühl, dass er taub ist."

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Business / Documentary / Drugs / Music / Videos24.01.2014

Kidd Life

Hard-hitting and darkly comic music documentary-turned-social commentary following Nicholas Kidd, a young, ordinary guy who shoots to fame overnight when his mock-rap YouTube video goes viral. As he is invited onto talk shows, to awards ceremonies, and even to partake in a charity poetry reading, Kidd illustrates the absurdity of his fame and how disturbingly surreal it is that the joke has got so out of hand. But slowly the tables turn and, lured by sex, drugs and wild partying, we watch Kidd get swept up in the world he started out mocking.

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Business / Crimes / Politics23.01.2014

Highlights of Offshore Leaks so far

The month of April, 2013, marked the beginning of one of the biggest financial leaks in history. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists had just released the first stories from a global collaborative project into the world of offshore money. The Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group, claims that a large part of the world’s wealth is tied up in the secret area of offshore. For over two years, journalists from more than 50 countries have worked together to shed light on this issue.

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Business / Celebrities / Music17.01.2014

Imagine Making $2000 A Day From Something You Did 30 Years Ago…

Songwriting for "Every Breath You Take" is credited 100% to Sting (credit by his birth name, Gordon Sumner). Sting took all the credit despite the fact that both fellow Police members Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers contributed to the song (drums and guitar riff, respectively). Andy Summers came up with the song's guitar riff after a particularly bitter argument with Sting. Sting eventually conceded and told Andy "go and make it your own". When Andy came back with an early formation of the now-famous guitar lick, the band knew they had a hit on their hands. Unfortunately, Andy Summers never pushed for his share of the song's credit. As the song's sole composer, Sting earns the vast majority of royalties when the song is played on the radio, sampled or included in something like a commercial or a movie. This fact alone should have been enough to make Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland furious in the early to mid 80s. But at some point they probably stopped losing sleep over their loss. Then came Puff Daddy. Unfortunately for Diddy, no one from Bad Boy Records (Diddy's label) thought to secure Sting's permission to sample the 1983 pop song for the updated 1997 remix. Had Diddy asked permission first, he likely would have been required to hand over 25% of I'll Be Missing You's publishing royalties to Sting. By forgetting to ask permission before the song was released, Sting was able to demand and receive 100% of the remix's publishing royalties.