11 Facts About The World's Changing Appetite For Luxury Watches

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Report : Why Americans Use Social Media

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Social media users love luxury cars, really love Audi, according to Amplicate

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25 Super Rich People Who Use Their Money To Help The World

Facebook power users 'have gone to Google+ and Twitter'

Sean Parker, managing partner of Founders Fund, speaks

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Burberry leads the way in digital media marketing

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Luxury brand executives meet in NYC to learn about China opportunities

Facebook May Help Online Luxury-Goods Sales Grow 20% Annually

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Millionaires Pile Into Facebook, Drop Twitter

Millionaires are liking Facebook

 But no longer following Twitter

A new study shows that 46% of online users with investible assets of $1 million or more are members of Facebook, up from 26% a year ago. The survey, by Spectrem Group, showed that millionaire’s use of Twitter has declined, from 5% to 3%.

Coming Soon: Special Facebook Editions Of News Sites

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When Apple's iPad launched, news outlets rushed to create special versions of themselves for the hot gadget.

Now, the same thing may be about to happen with Facebook.

According to Forbes, about 15 news outlets are in discussions to create special "app" versions of their sites that would appear entirely within Facebook. The special editions could launch by September.

The deal would give publishers like CNN, The Washington Post, and The Daily more direct access to Facebook's 750 million users, and would help Facebook keep users at the site longer, instead of clicking away to these publishers' Web sites whenever users shared an interesting link or news story.

The move especially makes sense if Facebook is building its own HTML5-based mobile platform, which would give Facebook developers a way to sell and distribute "apps" through Facebook on any mobile phone, rather than having to go through the Apple App Store, Android Market, and other gadget-specific stores.

A lot of publishers hated Apple's plan to take 30% of their subscription revenue, and while Apple eventually backed down, it makes sense for publishers to get on board with multiple platforms to make sure there's plenty of competition.

Google may be working on a similar news platform, according to the report, although it's not clear how it would differ from Google News.

 

Via BisinessInsider

Luxury News / Golden Choice by Lux Creative International

The Companies That Have Minted The Most Billionaires

Commodities trading firm Glencore released its much anticipated 1,600 page prospectus in early May.

In it, the firm revealed the identity of its biggest shareholders including five individuals who are now worth, based on the listing price, at least one billion apiece.

My colleague Chris Helman wrote an informative post on these new individuals, which got me wondering about what other companies had produced as many or more 10-figure fortunes.

Using Forbes’ comprehensive wealth database, I came up with the following list. A few caveats: the list is based on folks who ranked among the 2011 billionaires. Excluded are heirs to company founders who largely inherited their stakes thanks to good genes. Among those family firms that have indeed spawned multiple billionaires are (nyse: WMT) Wal-Mart (7), Brazil’s Itau Unibanco Holdings (7), Cargill (7), Turkey’s Koc (6),and S.C. Johnson (5).

Leading the pack of non-family firms is online search giant (nasdaq: GOOG) Google, with 7 billionaires. Among them are the cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, their top hired executive Eric Schmidt and Stanford U.

professor David Cheriton (full list below). Not counted is legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, who has a stake in Google, but was already a billionaire when the company went public in 2004.

Close on its heels is California neighbor and rival, social networking site Facebook.

Valued at $50 billion thanks to a Goldman Sachs investment announced in January, it has already pushed 6 into billionaire ranks including Mark Zuckerberg, two of his former Harvard buddies and the firm’s first president.

It could easily pass Google in terms of number of billionaires when it goes public, likely in 2012.

TNK-BP, the joint venture between a leading Russian oil firm and BP, ties Facebook with six billionaires, despite frequent dramas. Most recently, the Russian partners behind TNK quashed BP’s deal with state-controlled Rosneft, which would have given the company access to Russia’s offshore Arctic oilfields; they argued that BP had no right to negotiate a new deal in Russia without them. But TNK’s original investors have all extracted fortunes, both prior to the 2003 joint venture and since.

Indian outsourcing firm (nasdaq: INFY) Infosys, founded in 1981, counts five of its founders among the world’s super rich. For now, it is tied with Glencore.

But there is a good chance that when the commodities firm starts trading later this week, it may well move up these ranks.

Here is a complete list of the top five companies and their respective billionaires.

GOOGLE (7 billionaires)

Sergey Brin, $19.8 billion

Larry Page, $19.8 billion

Eric Schmidt, $7 billion

Andreas von Bechtolsheim, $2.3 billion

Michael Moritz, $1.8 billion

David Cheriton, $1.8 billion

Kavitark Ram Shriram, $1.6 billion

Facebook, (6 billionaires)

Mark Zuckerberg, $13.5 billion

Dustin Moskovitz, $2.7 billion

Eduardo Saverin, $1.6 billion

Sean Parker, $1.6 billion

Peter Thiel, $1.5 billion

Yuri Milner, $1 billion

TNK-BP (6 billionaires)

Viktor Vekselberg, $13 billion

Leonard Blavatnik, $10.1 billion

Mikhail Fridman, $15.1 billion

German Khan, $9.6 billion

Alexei Kuzmichev, $7.5 billion

Pyotr Aven, $4.5 billion

Glencore, (5 billionaires)

Ivan Glasenberg, $9.5 billion

Daniel Francisco Mate Badenes, $3.6 billion

Aristotelis Mistakidis, $3.6 billion

Tor Peterson: $3.2 billion

Alex Beard: $2.8 billion

Infosys (5 billionaires)

N.R. Narayana Murthy, $2 billion

Nandan Nilekani, $1.8 billion

Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, $1.6 billion

K. Dinesh 1.2 billion

S.D. Shibulal, $1.1 billion

*We valued the net worths of the Glencore billionaires using the recently released prospectus. For all other billionaires we took their net worths from the 2011 Billionaires list, which were calculated in February.

Luxury Info / Golden Choice by Lux Creative International Via Forbes