Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson was an American singer and dancer. Dubbed the "King of Pop", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest entertainers of all time, he was known for his unorthodox lifestyle, residing in a private amusement park he called Neverland Ranch, becoming the focus of tabloid scrutiny. Jackson's contributions to music and fashion, along with his publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades; the eighth child of the Jackson family, Michael made his professional debut in 1964 with his elder brothers Jackie, Tito and Marlon as a member of the Jackson 5. He began his solo career in 1971 while at Motown Records, in the early 1980s, became a dominant figure in popular music, his music videos, including those for "Beat It", "Billie Jean", "Thriller" from his 1982 album Thriller, are credited with breaking racial barriers and transforming the medium into an art form and promotional tool.
Their popularity helped bring the television channel MTV to fame. Bad was the first album to produce five US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles, he continued to innovate throughout the 1990s with videos such as "Black or White" and forged a reputation as a touring artist. Through stage and video performances, Jackson popularized complicated dance techniques such as the robot and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name, his sound and style have influenced artists of various genres. Jackson is one of the best-selling music artist of all time, with estimated sales of over 350 million records worldwide, his other albums, including Off the Wall, HIStory rank among the world's best-selling. He won hundreds of awards, has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, is the only pop or rock artist to have been inducted into the Dance Hall of Fame, his other achievements include Guinness world records, 15 Grammy Awards, 26 American Music Awards, 13 number-one US singles. Jackson was the first artist to have a top ten single in the Billboard Hot 100 in five different decades.
In the late 1980s, Jackson became a figure of controversy due to his changing appearance and behavior. In 1993, he was accused of sexually abusing the child of a family friend; the case led to an investigation and was settled out of court for $25 million in 1994. In 2005, he was tried and acquitted of further child sexual abuse allegations and several other charges. In 2009, while preparing for a series of comeback concerts, This Is It, Jackson died from an overdose of propofol and benzodiazepine given to him by his personal physician, Conrad Murray. Jackson's fans around the world expressed their grief, his public memorial service was broadcast live. In 2019, the documentary Leaving Neverland detailed renewed allegations of child sexual abuse and led to an international backlash against Jackson. Michael Joseph Jackson was born in Gary, near Chicago, on August 29, 1958, he was the eighth of ten children in the Jackson family, a working-class African-American family living in a two-bedroom house on Jackson Street.
His mother, Katherine Esther Jackson, played clarinet and piano, had aspired to be a country-and-western performer, worked part-time at Sears. His father, Joseph Walter "Joe" Jackson, a former boxer, was a crane operator at U. S. Steel and played guitar with a local rhythm and blues band, the Falcons, to supplement the family's income, his father's great-grandfather, July "Jack" Gale, was a Native American medicine man and US Army scout. Michael grew up with five brothers. A sixth brother, Marlon's twin Brandon, died shortly after birth. Joe acknowledged that he whipped Michael, he recalled that Joe sat in a chair with a belt in his hand as he and his siblings rehearsed, ready to physically punish any mistakes. Katherine Jackson stated that although whipping is considered abuse in more modern times, it was a common way to discipline children when Michael was growing up. Jackie, Tito and Marlon have said that their father was not abusive and that the whippings, which were harder on Michael because he was younger, kept them disciplined and out of trouble.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993, Jackson said that his youth had been lonely and isolating. In 1964, Michael and Marlon joined the Jackson Brothers—a band formed by their father which included Jackie and Jermaine—as backup musicians playing congas and tambourine. In 1965, Michael began sharing lead vocals with Jermaine, the group's name was changed to the Jackson 5; the following year, the group won a talent show. From 1966 to 1968 they toured the Midwest; the Jackson 5 performed at clubs and cocktail lounges, where striptease shows were featured, at local auditoriums a
Facebook
Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company. It is based in California, it was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon and Google; the founders limited the website's membership to Harvard students and subsequently Columbia and Yale students. Membership was expanded to the remaining Ivy League schools, MIT, higher education institutions in the Boston area. Facebook added support for students at various other universities, to high school students. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in this requirement, depending on local laws; the name comes from the face book directories given to American university students. Facebook held its initial public offering in February 2012, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
It began selling stock to the public three months later. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements; the Facebook service can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers and smartphones. After registering, users can create a customized profile revealing information about themselves. Users can post text and multimedia of their own devising and share it with other users as "friends". Users can use various embedded apps, receive notifications of their friends' activities. Users may join common-interest groups. Facebook had more than 2.3 billion monthly active users as of December 2018. It receives prominent media coverage, including many controversies such as user privacy and psychological effects; the company has faced intense pressure over censorship and over content that some users find objectionable. Facebook offers other services, it independently developed Facebook Messenger. Zuckerberg built; the site was comparable to Hot or Not and used "photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the "hotter" person".
Facemash attracted 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours. The site was sent to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days by Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy; the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final exam, he uploaded all art images to a website, each of, accompanied by a comments section shared the site with his classmates. A "face book" is a student directory featuring personal information. In 2003, Harvard had only a paper version along with private online directories. Zuckerberg told the Crimson, "Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard.... I think. I can do it better than they can, I can do it in a week." In January 2004, Zuckerberg coded a new website, known as "TheFacebook", inspired by a Crimson editorial about Facemash, stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is available... the benefits are many."
Zuckerberg met with Harvard student Eduardo Saverin, each of them agreed to invest $1,000 in the site. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook" located at thefacebook.com. Six days after the site launched, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com. They claimed; the three complained to the Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation. They sued Zuckerberg, settling in 2008 for 1.2 million shares. Membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. Within a month, more than half the undergraduates had registered. Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help manage the growth of the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Columbia and Yale. and to all Ivy League colleges, Boston University, New York University, MIT, Washington and successively most universities in the United States and Canada.
In mid-2004, Napster co-founder and entrepreneur Sean Parker—an informal advisor to Zuckerberg—became company president. In June 2004, the company moved to California, it received its first investment that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2005, the company dropped "the" from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for US$200,000. The domain had belonged to AboutFace Corporation. In May 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, Jim Breyer added $1 million of his own money. A high-school version of the site launched in September 2005. Eligibility expanded to include employees including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address. By late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 pages. Organization pages began rolling out in May 2009. On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced th
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred on 26 December 1991 granting self-governing independence to the Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was a result of the declaration number 142-Н of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union; the declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States, although five of the signatories ratified it much or did not do so at all. On the previous day, 25 December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the USSR, declared his office extinct and handed over its powers—including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes—to Russian President Boris Yeltsin; that evening at 7:32 p.m. the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag. From August to December all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had either seceded from the union or at the least denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR.
The week before formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol formally establishing the CIS and declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist. Both the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR marked the end of the Cold War. Several of the former Soviet republics have retained close links with the Russian Federation and formed multilateral organizations such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, Eurasian Economic Community, the Union State, the Eurasian Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union to enhance economic and security cooperation. On the other hand, the Baltic states have joined the European Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on March 11, 1985, three hours after predecessor Konstantin Chernenko's death at age 73. Gorbachev, aged 54, was the youngest member of the Politburo, his initial goal as general secretary was to revive the Soviet economy, he realized that doing so would require reforming underlying political and social structures.
The reforms began with personnel changes of senior Brezhnev-era officials who would impede political and economic change. On April 23, 1985, Gorbachev brought two protégés, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, into the Politburo as full members, he kept the "power" ministries happy by promoting KGB Head Viktor Chebrikov from candidate to full member and appointing Minister of Defence Marshal Sergei Sokolov as a Politburo candidate. This liberalization, fostered nationalist movements and ethnic disputes within the Soviet Union, it led indirectly to the revolutions of 1989, in which Soviet-imposed socialist regimes of the Warsaw Pact were toppled peacefully, which in turn increased pressure on Gorbachev to introduce greater democracy and autonomy for the Soviet Union's constituent republics. Under Gorbachev's leadership, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1989 introduced limited competitive elections to a new central legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies. In May 1985, Gorbachev delivered a speech in Leningrad advocating reforms and an anti-alcohol campaign to tackle widespread alcoholism.
Prices of vodka and beer were raised, intended to discourage drinking by increasing the cost of liquor. A rationing program was introduced, where citizens were assigned punch cards detailing how much liquor they could buy in a certain time frame. Unlike most forms of rationing, adopted as a strategy to conserve scarce goods, this was done to restrict sales with the overt goal of curtailing drunkenness. Gorbachev's plan included billboards promoting sobriety, increased penalties for public drunkenness, censorship of drinking scenes from old movies; this mirrored Tsar Nicholas II's program during the First World War, intended to eradicate drunkenness in order to bolster the war effort. However, that earlier effort was intended to preserve grain for only the most essential purposes, which did not appear to be a goal in Gorbachev's program. Gorbachev soon faced the same adverse economic reaction to his prohibition; the disincentivization of alcohol consumption was a serious blow to the state budget according to Alexander Yakovlev, who noted annual collections of alcohol taxes decreased by 100 billion rubles.
Alcohol sales migrated to the black market and moonshining became more prevalent as some made "bathtub vodka" with homegrown potatoes. Poorer, less educated Soviets resorted to drinking unhealthy substitutes such as nail-polish remover, rubbing alcohol, or men's cologne, resulting in an additional burden on Russia's healthcare sector due to the increased poisoning cases; the underlying purpose of these reforms was to prop up the existing command economy, in contrast to reforms, which tended toward market socialism. On July 1, 1985, Gorbachev promoted Eduard Shevardnadze, First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, to full member of the Politburo, the following day appointed him minister of foreign affairs, replacing longtime Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; the latter, disparaged as "Mr Nyet" in the West, had served for 28 years as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Gromyko was relegated to the ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, as he was considered an "old thinker".
On July 1, Gorbachev sidelined his main rival by removing Grigory Romanov from the Politburo and he brought Boris Yeltsin and Lev Zaikov into the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat. In the fall of 1985, Gorbachev continued to bring more energetic men into government. On September 27, 55-year-ol
China
China the People's Republic of China, is a country in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering 9,600,000 square kilometers, it is the third- or fourth-largest country by total area. Governed by the Communist Party of China, the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since China has expanded, re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin established the first Chinese empire; the succeeding Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC until 220 AD, saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements.
The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty and Northern Song completed the Four Great Inventions. Tang culture spread in Asia, as the new Silk Route brought traders to as far as Mesopotamia and Horn of Africa. Dynastic rule ended in 1912 with the Xinhai Revolution; the Chinese Civil War resulted in a division of territory in 1949, when the Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China, a unitary one-party sovereign state on Mainland China, while the Kuomintang-led government retreated to the island of Taiwan. The political status of Taiwan remains disputed. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China's economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing with annual growth rates above 6 percent. According to the World Bank, China's GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $12.24 trillion by 2017. Since 2010, China has been the world's second-largest economy by nominal GDP and since 2014, the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity.
China is the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget; the PRC is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as it replaced the ROC in 1971, as well as an active global partner of ASEAN Plus mechanism. China is a leading member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, WTO, APEC, BRICS, the BCIM, the G20. In recent times, scholars have argued that it will soon be a world superpower, rivaling the United States; the word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century. It is not a word used by the Chinese themselves, it has been traced through Portuguese and Persian back to the Sanskrit word Cīna, used in ancient India."China" appears in Richard Eden's 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa's usage was derived from Persian Chīn, in turn derived from Sanskrit Cīna.
Cīna was first used including the Mahābhārata and the Laws of Manu. In 1655, Martino Martini suggested that the word China is derived from the name of the Qin dynasty. Although this derivation is still given in various sources, it is complicated by the fact that the Sanskrit word appears in pre-Qin literature; the word may have referred to a state such as Yelang. The meaning transferred to China as a whole; the origin of the Sanskrit word is still a matter of debate, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The official name of the modern state is the "People's Republic of China"; the shorter form is "China" Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Western Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne. It was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing, it was used as a cultural concept to distinguish the Huaxia people from perceived "barbarians". The name Zhongguo is translated as "Middle Kingdom" in English.
Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominids inhabited China between 2.24 million and 250,000 years ago. The hominid fossils of Peking Man, a Homo erectus who used fire, were discovered in a cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing; the fossilized teeth of Homo sapiens have been discovered in Fuyan Cave in Hunan. Chinese proto-writing existed in Jiahu around 7000 BCE, Damaidi around 6000 BCE, Dadiwan from 5800–5400 BCE, Banpo dating from the 5th millennium BCE; some scholars have suggested. According to Chinese tradition, the first dynasty was the Xia, which emerged around 2100 BCE; the dynasty was considered mythical by historians until scientific excavations found early Bronze Age sites at Erlitou, Henan in 1959. It remains unclear whether these sites are the remains of the Xia dynasty or of another culture from the same period; the succeeding Shang dynasty is the earliest to be confirmed by contemporary records. The Shang ruled the plain of the Yellow River in eastern China from the 17th to the 11th century BCE.
Their oracle bone script
Twitter
Twitter is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled for all languages except Chinese and Korean. Registered users can post and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service or its mobile-device application software. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and launched in July of that year; the service gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet"; as of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.
Since 2015 Twitter has been a hotbed of debates and news covering politics of the United States. During the 2016 U. S. presidential election, Twitter was the largest source of breaking news on the day, with 40 million election-related tweets sent by 10:00 p.m. that day. It was a source of information on Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination and the 2018 United States midterm elections. Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group; the original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was in use, it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter.
The developers considered "10958" as a short code, but changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 p.m. Pacific Standard Time: "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:...we came across the word'twitter', it was just perfect. The definition was'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and'chirps from birds', and that's what the product was. The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets — including Odeo.com and Twitter.com — from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in a 2013 interview: With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility, it is that, in part, but the insight we came to was Twitter was more of an information network than it is a social network. The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters.
Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, the bloggers in attendance touted it." Reaction at the conference was positive. Blogger Scott Beale said. Social software researcher danah boyd said. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less, and we just did!"The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network as president of revenue. The company experienced rapid initial growth, it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.
This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications; as of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, about 140 million tweets posted daily; as noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site
Amazon (company)
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington that focuses in e-commerce, cloud computing, artificial intelligence. Amazon is the largest e-commerce marketplace and cloud computing platform in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, started as an online bookstore but diversified to sell video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, video games, apparel, food and jewelry. The company owns a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, a film and television studio, Amazon Studios, produces consumer electronics lines including Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Echo devices, is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services through its AWS subsidiary. Amazon has separate retail websites for some countries and offers international shipping of some of its products to certain other countries. 100 million people subscribe to Amazon Prime.
Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world and the second largest employer in the United States. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion, which vastly increased Amazon's presence as a brick-and-mortar retailer. The acquisition was interpreted by some as a direct attempt to challenge Walmart's traditional retail stores. In 1994, Jeff Bezos incorporated Amazon. In May 1997, the organization went public; the company began selling music and videos in 1998, at which time it began operations internationally by acquiring online sellers of books in United Kingdom and Germany. The following year, the organization sold video games, consumer electronics, home-improvement items, software and toys in addition to other items. In 2002, the corporation started Amazon Web Services, which provided data on Web site popularity, Internet traffic patterns and other statistics for marketers and developers.
In 2006, the organization grew its AWS portfolio when Elastic Compute Cloud, which rents computer processing power as well as Simple Storage Service, that rents data storage via the Internet, were made available. That same year, the company started Fulfillment by Amazon which managed the inventory of individuals and small companies selling their belongings through the company internet site. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems to automate its inventory-management business, purchasing Whole Foods Market supermarket chain five years in 2017; as of March 2019, the board of directors is: Jeff Bezos, President, CEO, Chairman Tom Alberg, Managing partner, Madrona Venture Group Rosalind Brewer, Group President, COO, Starbucks Jamie Gorelick, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, Dorr Daniel P. Huttenlocher and Vice Provost, Cornell University Judy McGrath, former CEO, MTV Networks Indra Nooyi, former CEO, PepsiCo Jon Rubinstein, former Chairman, CEO, Inc. Thomas O. Ryder, former Chairman, CEO, Reader's Digest Association Patty Stonesifer, CEO, Martha's Table Wendell P. Weeks, President, CEO, Corning Inc.
In 2000, U. S. toy retailer Toys "R" Us entered into a 10-year agreement with Amazon, valued at $50 million per year plus a cut of sales, under which Toys "R" Us would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products on the service, the chain's website would redirect to Amazon's Toys & Games category. In 2004, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon, claiming that because of a perceived lack of variety in Toys "R" Us stock, Amazon had knowingly allowed third-party sellers to offer items on the service in categories that Toys "R" Us had been granted exclusivity. In 2006, a court ruled in favor of Toys "R" Us, giving it the right to unwind its agreement with Amazon and establish its own independent e-commerce website; the company was awarded $51 million in damages. In 2001, Amazon entered into a similar agreement with Borders Group, under which Amazon would co-manage Borders.com as a co-branded service, Borders pulled out of the arrangement in 2007, with plans to launch its own online store. On October 18, 2011, Amazon.com announced a partnership with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to many popular comics, including Superman, Green Lantern, The Sandman, Watchmen.
The partnership has caused well-known bookstores like Barnes & Noble to remove these titles from their shelves. In November 2013, Amazon announced a partnership with the United States Postal Service to begin delivering orders on Sundays; the service, included in Amazon's standard shipping rates, initiated in metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and New York because of the high-volume and inability to deliver in a timely way, with plans to expand into Dallas, New Orleans and Phoenix by 2014. In June 2017, Nike confirmed a "pilot" partnership with Amazon to sell goods directly on the platform; as of October 11, 2017, AmazonFresh sells a range of Booths branded products for home delivery in selected areas. In September 2017, Amazon ventured with one of its sellers JV Appario Retail owned by Patni Group which has recorded a total income of US$ 104.44 million in financial year 2017–18. In November 2018, Amazon reached an agreement with Apple Inc. to sell selected products through the service, via the company and selected Apple Authorized Resellers.
As a result of this partnership, only Apple Authorized Resellers may sell Apple products on Amazon effective January 4, 2019. Amazon.com's product lines available at its website include several media, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, gourmet food, groceries and perso
Burger King
Burger King is an American global chain of hamburger fast food restaurants. Headquartered in the unincorporated area of Miami-Dade County, the company was founded in 1953 as Insta-Burger King, a Jacksonville, Florida–based restaurant chain. After Insta-Burger King ran into financial difficulties in 1954, its two Miami-based franchisees David Edgerton and James McLamore purchased the company and renamed it "Burger King". Over the next half-century, the company would change hands four times, with its third set of owners, a partnership of TPG Capital, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, taking it public in 2002. In late 2010, 3G Capital of Brazil acquired a majority stake in the company, in a deal valued at US$3.26 billion. The new owners promptly initiated a restructuring of the company to reverse its fortunes. 3G, along with partner Berkshire Hathaway merged the company with the Canadian-based doughnut chain Tim Hortons, under the auspices of a new Canadian-based parent company named Restaurant Brands International.
The 1970s were the "Golden Age" of the company's advertising, but beginning in the early-1980s, Burger King advertising began losing focus. A series of less successful advertising campaigns created by a procession of advertising agencies continued for the next two decades. In 2003, Burger King hired the Miami-based advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which reorganized its advertising with a series of new campaigns centered on a redesigned Burger King character nicknamed "The King", accompanied by a new online presence. While successful, some of CP+B's commercials were derided for perceived sexism or cultural insensitivity. Burger King's new owner, 3G Capital terminated the relationship with CP+B in 2011 and moved its advertising to McGarryBowen, to begin a new product-oriented campaign with expanded demographic targeting. Burger King's menu has expanded from a basic offering of burgers, French fries and milkshakes to a larger and more diverse set of products. In 1957, the "Whopper" became the first major addition to the menu, it has become Burger King's signature product since.
Conversely, BK has introduced many products. Some of these failures in the United States have seen success in foreign markets, where BK has tailored its menu for regional tastes. From 2002 to 2010, Burger King aggressively targeted the 18–34 male demographic with larger products that carried correspondingly large amounts of unhealthy fats and trans-fats; this tactic would damage the company's financial underpinnings, cast a negative pall on its earnings. Beginning in 2011, the company began to move away from its previous male-oriented menu and introduce new menu items, product reformulations and packaging, as part of its current owner 3G Capital's restructuring plans of the company; as of December 31, 2018, Burger King reported. Of these, nearly half are located in the United States, 99.7% are owned and operated, with its new owners moving to an entirely franchised model in 2013. BK has used several variations of franchising to expand its operations; the manner in which the company licenses its franchisees varies depending on the region, with some regional franchises, known as master franchises, responsible for selling franchise sub-licenses on the company's behalf.
Burger King's relationship with its franchises has not always been harmonious. Occasional spats between the two have caused numerous issues, in several instances, the company's and its licensees' relations have degenerated into precedent-setting court cases. Burger King's Australian franchise Hungry Jack's is the only franchise to operate under a different name, due to a trademark dispute and a series of legal cases between the two; the predecessor to Burger King was founded in 1953 in Florida, as Insta-Burger King. After visiting the McDonald brothers' original store location in San Bernardino, the founders and owners, who had purchased the rights to two pieces of equipment called "Insta-machines", opened their first restaurants, their production model was based on one of the machines they had acquired, an oven called the "Insta-Broiler". This strategy proved to be so successful that they required all of their franchises to use the device. After the company faltered in 1959, it was purchased by its Miami, franchisees, James McLamore and David R. Edgerton.
They initiated a corporate restructuring of the chain. They ran the company as an independent entity for eight years, before selling it to the Pillsbury Company in 1967. Pillsbury's management tried several times to restructure Burger King during the late 1970s and the early 1980s; the most prominent change came in 1978 when Burger King hired McDonald's executive Donald N. Smith to help revamp the company. In a plan called "Operation Phoenix", Smith restructured corporate business practices at all levels of the company. Changes included updated franchise agreements, a broader menu and new standardized restaurant designs. Smith left Burger King for PepsiCo in 1980 shortly before a system-wide decline in sales. Pillsbury's Executive Vice President of Restaurant Operations Norman E. Brinker was tasked with turning the brand around, strengthening its position against its main rival McDonald's. One of his initiatives was a new advertising campaign featuring a series of attack ads against its major competitors.
This campaign started a competitive period between Burger King, McDonald's, top burger chains known as the Burger wars. Brinker left Burger King i
