After racking up a $40 late fee on a VHS copy of Apollo 13, Reed Hastings was inspired to start Netflix.
business
A Chinese Billionaire is selling canned …
A Chinese Billionaire is selling canned air in China to highlight the country’s pollution problems. The air is collected and compressed in soda cans from “revolutionary regions” around the country.
The first pizzeria in the US opened in 1 …
The first pizzeria in the US opened in 1905 and still runs till this day, it even offered $0.05 Pizza’s for its 100th Birthday.
The oldest continuously operating busine …
The oldest continuously operating business in the USA is a 400 year old farm.
McDonald’s in 2008 saved $278,850,000 b …
McDonald’s in 2008 saved $278,850,000 by removing one of the two slices of cheese from the McDouble/Double cheeseburger.
Japan’s travel agency has begun offerin …
Japan’s travel agency has begun offering holidays for stuffed toys. For between $20 and $55 you can send you favorite stuffed animal on a fabulous vacation! Travelogues are uploaded to Facebook, where the owners can follow what activities their stuffed animals are up to.
Coca-Cola cancelled a Canadian promotion …
Coca-Cola cancelled a Canadian promotion that paired randomly generated English and French words inside bottle caps after a woman got one that said “You Retard.”
You can be denied a loan because you’re …
You can be denied a loan because you’re unpopular on Facebook. A San Francisco-based start-up LendUp checks the Facebook and Twitter profiles of potential borrowers to see how many friends they have and how often they interact; the company views an active social media life as an indicator of stability.
The web app now pulls data for people on …
The web app now pulls data for people on social media sites. It crunches all of the information, highlights topics where people are most influential, and generates a score for everyone between 1 and 100. The higher the score, the more influential a person is. Marketers use these scores to target their ads to industry leaders, whether it is a mom who has pull in her town’s PTA, or a CEO running a big-name company.
You can rent old men in Japan for only 1 …
You can rent old men in Japan for only 1,000 yen (US$10) an hour, for example, going to art galleries, having lunch and talking about your love life, test driving cars with you, renting weepy DVDs, looking at new apartments together, complimenting you, and even running errands for you.