Jesus saves, Moses lends, Muhammad invests – Islamic finance accounts for 1 trillion in banking

“The interesting thing about Islam,” says Professor Constant Mews, “is that it was a much more commercial culture from the outset than Christianity.” And from around the middle of the eighth century to the middle of the 13th, while European Christians were struggling through the Dark Ages, the Islamic world enjoyed a golden age. Arab …

How Linkedin gets 20x more money per user than Facebook

Forbes has LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner on the cover—but the professional social network’s business model is the real hero of the story. Here are some of the amazing statistics Forbes’ George Anders reports: LinkedIn users spend an average of 18 minutes a month on the site. Facebook users spend 6.4 hours a month. But LinkedIn gets $1.30 in revenue …

Microsoft invests half billion in the Nook, making it more valuable than Barnes and Noble

Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have teamed up to compete against Apple and Amazon in the eBooks business. The new partnership sees Microsoft investing $300 million in a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary. The $300 million investment in the Nook subsidiary of Barnes & Noble gives Microsoft about 17.6 percent ownership of this business unit. …

Talk is cheap…so make a Long Bet (for charity) to prove your prediction

Pronouncements about the future come easy. Even when made with an air of authority, they’re usually just cheap talk, rarely revisited. Only the tiny fraction that have proven correct tend to be remembered, when their authors want to take credit. But what if there were some cash at stake? The Long Bets Foundation, a new …

Best Buy to close 50 stores in the U.S. and 11 in the U.K.

Selling consumer electronics isn’t as easy as it used to be for Best Buy. The big-box retailer is closing 50 stores and compensating employees based on customer service after its fiscal fourth-quarter sales fell short of expectations. The company today reported a fiscal fourth-quarter net loss of $1.7 billion, on revenue of $16.63 billion, up …

The new movie studios – $2.6 billion built from internet ads and online streaming

As 2012 rolls in…it appears the geeks have finally won. Multiple “internet-built studios” have announced they are committing big money to making movies and TV shows: Netflix – the big dog spends $2 billion annually and will spend $100 million this year on original content. Hulu – proving that ad revenues are a bankable business …

Artificial insemination and too-fat-to-fly – the real Thanksgiving turkey

Something scary is happening in the turkey world. Our scientists and farmers have created a Frankenstein-like beast called the broad breasted white. This creature is created in a lab, through artificial insemination, and then grows fat so fast that it often cannot walk. It usually needs antibiotics to survive to be butchered. Needless to say, …