Here's a link to an article about Wikipedia's quiet desire to make more money:
http://news.smh.com.au/wikipedia-questions-paths-to-more-money/20080321-20sl.html
And here's a key passage in that article:
Another subject getting carefully parsed is the foundation's relationship with Elevation Partners, the venture firm co-founded by Roger McNamee and U2's Bono. Elevation owns stakes in Forbes magazine and Palm Inc., among other companies.
McNamee has donated at least $300,000 to the Foundation, according to Danny Wool, a former Wikimedia employee who processed the transactions. More recently, the foundation said, McNamee introduced the group to people who made separate $500,000 gifts. Their identities have not been disclosed.
Officially, Gardner and McNamee say he is a merely a fan of Wikimedia's free-information project, separate from Elevation's profit-making interests. "He has been clear _ when he talks to me, he's talking as a private individual," Gardner said.
Yet the relationship runs deeper than that would suggest.
Another Elevation partner, Marc Bodnick, has met with Wales multiple times and went to a 2007 Wikimedia board meeting in the Netherlands. (Wales described that as a "get to know you session" and said Elevation, among many other venture firms, quickly learned that the foundation was not interested in changing its core, nonprofit mission.)
Bodnick and Bono had also been with Wales in 2006 in Mexico City, where U2 was touring. On a hotel rooftop, Bono suggested that Wikipedia use its volunteer-written articles as a starting point, then augment that with professionals who would polish and publish the content, according to two people who were present. Bono compared it to Bob Dylan going electric _ a jarring move that people came to love.
McNamee and Bodnick declined to comment.
Although Wales says no business with Elevation is planned, that hasn't quelled that element ever-present in Wikipedia: questions.
In the recent interview, Devouard, the board chair, said she believed Elevation was interested in being more than just friends, though she wasn't sure just what the firm hoped to get out of the nonprofit project.
"It is easy to see which interest WE have in getting their interest," she wrote to Wales that day on an internal board mailing list, in an exchange obtained by The Associated Press. "The contrary is not obvious at all: Can you explain to me why EP (Elevation Partners) are interested in us?"
And here's a highlighted passage from an article by Steve Knopper about megaconglomerate Wal-Mart's attempts to get record companies to lower the wholesale prices of compact discs in this week's print issue of ROLLING STONE:
"All of this [including the fact that Apple's iTunes is now the Number Two music retailer] is bad news for the struggling record biz, which is now facing its biggest outlet cutting prices and shelf space, and its second biggest client selling digital downloads for a low-profit 99 cents apiece. "That's the real underlying problem of the industry. The kids have stopped buying records," says Russ Solomon, founder of the now-defunct Tower Records [note: Tower is still active as an online entity and still has some overseas stores--I happened to shop in two Tower Records in Dublin, Ireland last September] and owner of the Sacramento store R5 Records and Video. "Just reducing [CD prices] to $10 doesn't solve that problem."
Two quick footnotes:
1. Bono and Dave "Edge" Evans are involved in the ownership of the distinguished old Clarence Hotel in Dublin (somewhere I also stayed last fall, since at least Bono was funding a business that paid Irish taxes, unlike his songwriting). Now, there are plans afoot to demolish the hotel in its current form and knock down a few adjoining buildings to essentially build a "new" Clarence that will undoubtedly make more money--and contain a few doors and selected furnishings from the demolished "old" Clarence.
2. Russ Solomon may not have been around for the entire run of Tower Records as a brick-and-mortar concern. But Tower should take some deserved punches for not foreseeing the partial shift of recorded music to the mp3 format and also shoving a middle-finger into the faces of CD consumers young and old by selling a lot of product at a close-to-list price of $18.98 for a single CD (bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble do it too, but their rationale seems to be that customers are sufficiently upscale to pay premium prices for recorded music).
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