Would You Pay An Extra $100 For An All-You-Can-Listen-To iPod. financial times is reporting that apple is shopping the idea to record labels.

Kluster: Crowdsourcing platform. jody tried to pitch me this business idea a while back.

Chris Anderson and Michael Arrington: Back-to-Back on Charlie Rose. the end piece of the anderson interview on the competitive advantage of the usa is an interesting one.

You’re Now Free to Book Really Expensive Flights Online. you can now charter whole planes online with Virgin.

Lessons to learn from a do-it-yourself curry house - (37signals). The UK version of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares is really quite good (though Gordon somehow manages to take his shirt off during the show more often than not).

Deutsche Telekom bringing T-Mobile to Canada in 2009? | The Boy Genius Report. tmobile has been killing me on roaming charges but i’ve always been overly impressed with their customer service.

What if Telus had bought Fido? “it may be a key reason why Canada is the cellphone backwater that it is.” via josh.

20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time :: Blender.com. some great ones.

Steve Jobs speaks out - FORTUNE. page 10 on “overcoming roadblocks” is really interesting.

Macworld | Apple now No. 2 music retailer in the U.S.. dang.

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.. it’s worth pointing out that this is the website for the most successful company in modern history.

Could Bear Stearns Do Better? - New York Times. JPMorgan is buying it for $2/share. my head almost spun off when i read that. it was at $160 last year and $35 on friday.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Buys Danger. they make the sidekick cell phones. interesting.

The Associated Press: Yahoo Formally Rejects Microsoft Offer. nothing like a formal rejection. and what happens when you put two flatlined companies together?

monkey boy’s three-legged race

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a great blog. It usually has some really funny stuff. On the weekend it posted the best commentary on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal I’ve seen. The article is well worth reading but here’s some of the choice quotes:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

But here’s the really dark part of all this. [Ballmer] knows it won’t work. He has to know this. He’s not stupid. [...] He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.

Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They’ll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.

Scariest to me is that in all the articles I’ve seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he’ll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don’t doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they’re thinking about.

Microsoft challenges Google with audacious $44.6bn bid for rival Yahoo | guardian.co.uk. now that’s insane.

Amazon to buy Audible for $300 million | Reuters. 25% of audible’s business comes from apple itunes.

Goldman Sachs set to cut 1,500 jobs. say what? they made $11 billion last year.

British Brewer Is Sold for $15.4 Billion - New York Times. ok, there’s been so much consolidation in the beer market in the last few years that you can’t even keep the company names straight. My bet, in a couple of years they’ll all collapse into one company which will be called OmniBeer.

French Bank Says Rogue Trader Lost $7 Billion - New York Times. “This month Risk Magazine, a British publication, named SocGen “equity derivatives house of the year,” praising its ability to manage its risks.” This guy puts Nick Leeson to shame