America’s Richest Geeks

Every now and then we hear about another startup that made it big online, but rarely we see or hear of the people behind these ventures in the lime light, usually its just celebrities that gets all the attention.

Well watch out, Geeks are here to rule the world and they are slowly making progress. Out of the top 20 richest persons in America, eight are Geeks from technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and Dell.

In fact out of the top 5 richest people, 2 of them are Geeks, the number one position belonging to Bill Gates from Microsoft and number three to Larry Ellison from Oracle, while Social Networking giant Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, hold the title of the youngest Geek billionaire on the list at number 35.

Here is a list of the top 20 richest geeks in America.

Rank Name Net Worth Age Company
1 Bill Gates $54 B 54 Microsoft
3 Larry Ellison $27 B 66 Oracle
11 Larry Page $15 B 37 Google
11 Sergey Brin $15 B 37 Google
15 Micheal Dell $14 B 45 Dell
16 Steve Ballmer $13.1 B 54 Microsoft
17 Paul Allen $12.7 B 57 Microsoft
18 Jeff Bezos $12.7 B 46 Amazon
35 Mark Zuckerberg $6.9 B 26 Facebook
35 James Goodnight $6.9 B 67 SAS Institute
42 Steve Jobs $6.1 B 55 Apple, Pixar
47 Pierre Omidyar $5.5 B 43 EBay
48 Eric Schmidt $5.45 B 55 Google
85 Ray Dolby $3.6 B 77 Dolby Laboratories
88 Gordon Moore $3.5 B 81 Intel
90 John Sall $3.4 B 62 SAS Institute
136 David Sun $2.6 B 58 Kingston Technology (Computer Memory)
136 John Tu $2.6 B 68 Kingston Technology (Computer Memory)
164 Jack Dangermond $2.2 B 65 ESRI (Mapping Software)
205 Walter Scott $1.9 B 79 Telecom

Nice hey? Who knows, maybe your name could be on that list, so start that startup.

#thenerdies10 turning into mudslinging contest

Contests tend to always turn competitors into sour grapes when it is noticed that an aponent is doing better then yourself in it. This is now again the case of The Nerdies 2010.

This year was the first I ever heard about The Nerdies, its like the Oscars slash Miss America slash Darwin Awards for online personalities as SheBee, creator of The Nerdies explains it. The Nerdies started as a small blog post and then turned into a raging online auction competing geeks from all over the country, betting on each other’s underwear, photographs and even down to body hair.

The main aim of The Nerdies is in the end to raise money for a specific charity.

The male ego is a big thing, and to tamper with it tend to result in some words being thrown around and competitors trying to bruise the egos of fellow competitors. This is now the case of the final round of The Nerdies 2010 male voting.

The male finalists for The Nerdies 2010 are:

  • ChrisM
  • Nick Hunt Davis
  • Owen Swart
  • BlindCripple
  • AndreVR
  • Arcainus
  • Barrie Bramley
  • Vince Hofmann
  • Richard Coote
  • Elan Lohmann

The whole mudslinging started when ChrisM asked how Owen managed to get 80 votes in a matter of minutes, after that there was more speculation about vote rigging and personal attacks started.

SheBee has stepped in to put a damper on the situation and has requested information from PollDaddy, where the polls are being held, about possible rigging or issues in the system.

You can go check out the comments at PollDaddy, and while you are there give your favourite nerd a vote. I tend to find these ridicules very amusing, and cant wait for the SA Blog Awards 2010 where I foresee something similar. Last year the SA Blog Awards had this post which provided for some amusement.

Win a Google Android Phone

Vacation time is over and now its time to get back to business. Some of you may recall that just before the Holidays I was lucky enough to get a HTC Hero powered by the great new mobile OS from Google, Google Android.

I have been using the Hero now over the holidays and has gotten quite familiar with the OS and I’m loving it to bits. The HTC Hero is not the only phone currently available in South Africa running the Google Android OS, there is also the HTC Magic, HTC Tattoo and HTC Dream.

There is also the OpenMoko any geeks dream when it comes to phones. Why you ask? Well just because its open source and you can basically run anything on it the cpu and memory is capable of. The OpenMoko works well with Google Android and now you can win one.

Rafiq from WebAddict(s) is now running a competition where you can walk away with a OpenMoko phone capable of running Google Android. All you have to do to win this Google Android phone is to follow the steps on WebAddict(s).

Local blogger propose online

Christopher Mills the man behind the famous iMod blog has gone and shown local geeks how a real geek should ask for hand in marriage.

Christopher Mills or Chris M as he is know in the local cyber arena wrote a blog post  with the heading Will you marry me and posted it online before asking his girl to go and check his site for some important information he needed.

Well done Chris and congrats, hope you two have a wonderful life together.

You can have a look at how he planned everything here. Nice way of doing it, because they will have this moment forever on his website.

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