Month: November 2010

Manga is very popular in many Asian countries. Similar to the comics that originated in Rome, they feature hand drawn scenes that follow a storyline. Manga is growing increasingly popular, and in 2007, Japanese publishing company made $3.6 billion in manga sales. There is also a growing number of English speakers who read manga. However, publishers translating manga into English cannot keep up with demand, and consumers are going elsewhere.

Many of them are going to a site called www.mangafox.com, a site that currently stores 6754 different series. The creators of mangafox.com saw that there was excess demand for translated manga, and rounded up teams of volunteer translators to create scanned translations, or scanlations. As Mangafox’s popularity grew, so too did the amount of revenue they generated. Right now, their revenue is approximately $22.7 million per year, and with only a cost of $40 000 to $81500 to run the site, Mangafox is making a substantial amount of money. From almost nothing, they created a site that generates over 40 million page views per day. The creators of Mangafox saw the internet as an innovative way to let people read manga. Instead of storing millions of paper copies, all the manga is stored on huge servers free for everyone to read.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, is a prime example of an entrepreneur. He essentially created a new product and a new market to house that product. Gate’s innovation can be considered one of the defining moments in history of technological advancements. With his new operating system for the PC, he became the world’s youngest billionaire (not anymore), and eventually the richest man in the world. However, as he became wealthier, his focus turned from maximizing profits to maximizing the amount of social good he brought to this world. The most recent example of this turnaround is The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledge of $500 million to a help people living in squalor to create a banks accounts, particularly savings accounts.

Gates recognized the problem that poor people could not create savings accounts due to the fact that it costs money to maintain savings accounts, which is more than people who are living off $2-3 a day can afford. That is why he is funding various projects, such as mobile banking. Mobile banking is virtually negating all costs that are incurred with traditional banking. His goal is to raise the living standards of those most in need, and using technology to create easy to access bank accounts is currently his modus operandi to see his goal reach fruition.