How Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Other Successful People Start Their Day

Whether it’s going to the gym, reading the paper, or enjoying a cup of coffee, most of us have things in our morning routine that we rarely skip.

Getting into a good morning routine can help us be more productive throughout the day. The consistency can also be comforting.

With the help of this great infographic from sleepypeople.com, we decided to look at the morning routines of some of the world’s most successful business people and politicians.

U.S. President Barack Obama hits the gym every morning

The President of the United States and arguably the world’s most powerful man, Obama isn’t one to hang around in the mornings.

Sleepypeople.com tells us that the president is up by 6:45 a.m. every morning. Then, he goes to gym to do both weights and cardio.

Once he’s finished pumping iron, Obama will head back to eat breakfast with his wife Michelle, and his two daughters Malia and Sasha, before sending the girls off to school.

After the kids are gone, it’s time to get down to the serious business of running the country.

British Prime Minister David Cameron avoids watching TV in the morning

Earlier this year, a video from the Sun showed that British Prime Minister David Cameron starts his day at 6:00 a.m, and will go through important government business until around 8:00 a.m, when he joins his wife Samantha, and kids Arthur, Nancy, and Florence for a bite of breakfast.

Cameron’s private flat in No.10 Downing Street has a strict no TV rule in the mornings, and in the past the Prime Minister has said that he thinks his children should be “doing something” in the morning before school.

Cameron is also an avid follower of media coverage and will take time to catch up on the news every morning.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wasn’t really a morning person

Another Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, albeit of a slightly different era. According to sleepypeople.com, Churchill woke up at 7:30 a.m. every morning. Pretty normal right? Not when you consider that he didn’t usually actually get out of bed until 11:00 a.m.

What did he spend those three and a half hours doing, you ask? Churchill would eat breakfast and read the newspapers (no smartphones back then), as well as dictating correspondence to his numerous secretaries.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz favors a morning cup of joe

Perhaps unsurprisingly for the man in charge of Starbucks, Howard Schultz’s morning routine involves coffee.

In a 2012 interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Schultz talked about how he gets up at around 4:30 a.m. every morning to walk his three dogs, before coming home and making coffee for himself and his wife by 5:45 a.m.

Schlutz is pretty particular about the kind of coffee he drinks, using a “coarse grind of aged Sumatra” steeped for 3-4 mins in boiling water, according to BusinessWeek. After that, it’s time for work.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave himself a motivational speech every morning

The late Steve Jobs, famous for his all black clothing, turtlenecks, and for turning Apple into the world’s biggest company would do one simple thing every morning to ensure that he got the best out of himself.

After waking up, sleepypeople.com says Jobs would go to the mirror, look at himself and ask: “If today was the last day of my life, would I be happy with what I’m about to do today?”

If Jobs found himself saying no to this question too often, he said he knew that something needed to change.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates likes to train mind and body

Another tech billionaire Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, likes to exercise both mind and body first thing in the morning.

Sleepypeople.com says that Gates spends an hour on the treadmill doing cardio exercise, but watches instructional videos from the Teaching Company while doing so, ensuring that all parts of his health are looked after.

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg often skips bedtime altogether

The 31-year-old Harvard dropout and founder of Facebook is well known for almost always wearing a plain gray T-shirt, saying in a 2014 interview that wearing the same shirt helps allow him “to make as few decisions as possible.”

So presumably, he gets up, goes to his closet and picks his favorite gray T-shirt and goes to work.

According to sleepypeople.com, Zuckerberg often doesn’t sleep very much, and he has been known to stay up until 6 a.m. talking with Facebook employees.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos likes to eat a leisurely breakfast

Unlike lots of the world’s most successful people, Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, is not a morning person.

Bezos places a lot of emphasis on getting a good night’s sleep. In 1999 he told the Wall Street Journal that he feels “so much better all day long if I’ve had eight hours.”

He has also previously spoken of deliberately avoiding early morning meetings so that he can spend his mornings having a leisurely breakfast with his wife Mackenzie and their four children.

According to sleepypeople.com, avoiding super early mornings allows Bezos to get away without using an alarm clock, and get a natural night’s sleep. He also gives himself time to eat a healthy breakfast, rather than cramming down fatty convenience foods.

Foursquare Gets $45M And A New CEO To Build Out Enterprise Business

Foursquare has been a fantastic idea in search of a business plan for as long as it’s been alive. Efforts to monetize the platform via ads in its app (now apps) have not made the grade.

Now, the last of the cool standalone Web 2.0 companies has a new hit revenue stream in its business and enterprise location services and it’s looking to capitalize on that with some restructuring and new funding.

Foursquare has raised $45 million in equity financing. The Series E round is led by Union Square Ventures, with Morgan Stanley and previous investors including DFJ Growth, A16z and Spark Capital participating.

In addition, co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley is moving to an executive chairman position and Jeff Glueck has been appointed the company’s new CEO. Glueck had been serving as COO and overseeing the enterprise businesses that have become the majority revenue stream for Foursquare.

Chief Revenue Officer Steven Rosenblatt has been appointed Foursquare’s president and, Crowley says, Glueck’s ‘co-pilot’. Rosenblatt had previously been at Quattro and at Apple as a director of iAd.

Other moves include Kinjil Mathur to CMO and Jonathan Crowley to VP of Product. Rory Parness (VP Finance), Meghan Lapides (VP HR), and Brian Chase (General Counsel) also join the executive team.

During a chat today with Crowley, Glueck and Rosenblatt, Crowley said that “[Foursquare] has become much more than just the two mobile apps.”

He pointed to deals that Foursquare has signed with companies like Apple, Twitter and Pinterest to use its location data. These, Crowley says, have contributed to Foursquare’s biggest revenue year.

Freshly minted CEO Glueck says that the “maturing” revenue lines are growing at ‘triple digit rates’. More specifically, its media businesses like Pinpoint — digital targeting with location info for businesses and ads — are 170 percent over 2014 revenue. Combined, the enterprise side of Foursquare, which includes its Places API customers and its newer Place Insights business, has seen 160 percent growth, says Glueck, though no hard revenue numbers are forthcoming.

Glueck stressed the importance and uniqueness of Place Insights: “It’s the world’s largest opt-in foot traffic panel, with no check-ins required.”

Place Insights has grown out of Foursquare’s new location system — called Pilgrim — which is able to place users at locations with confidence even if they don’t check in. This allows Foursquare to provide serendipitous recommendations to users of its consumer apps, but it also provides a wealth of foot traffic information that can be offered to the enterprise.

Place Insights allows enterprise customers to access aggregate anonymous trends — which can tell them where they should locate their next physical business, where to move inventory and invest in growth and more.

For a practical example, see Foursquare’s recent data ‘win’ with its accurate prediction of iPhone retail sales based on historical sales traffic data recorded by Foursquare.

Glueck says that the Pinpoint and enterprise revenue lines now make up the majority — over 50% — of Foursquare’s revenue. That’s up from 40% last year.

Glueck is also careful to note that the financing round was oversubscribed. In advance of this round, TechCrunch reported that Foursquare was raisingand that it would be at a lower valuation. We’ve heard that this latest round of financing cut the company’s valuation roughly in half. Foursquare declined to speak to valuation, but its previous round in 2013 put it at a reported $650 million valuation.

In response to a question about what portion of the funding will go to developing the enterprise product, Glueck said “we will continue to launch innovations with our consumer brands. This is our foundation of the map of the world and our living breathing members that discover [it].

In a blog post today, Crowley said:

“I will be stepping up into the role of Executive Chairman. This new role will allow me to focus full-time on vision and innovation, long-term strategy and creating new consumer products. If this sounds more like my job from 2010 than my job from 2015… well, that’s the point. It frees up my time from operational and management duties and lets me get back to the “let’s just make something awesome that people love’ spirit that got us here. There are a lot of things I still want to build at Foursquare. And there are a lot of things that should exist in the world that only Foursquare can build—for both consumers and app developers. My new job is to make sure those things get built as projects, and that the best of them get pushed into the real world as products.”

This is essentially a move back to a purely product role for Crowley, with the majority of the responsibility for revenue falling to Glueck and Rosenblatt.

“This will allow us to meet the demand out there from our customers and potential customers. We want to accelerate growth of business as leading location intelligence company,” says Rosenblatt.

Foursquare says it is hiring 30 new positions, mostly in enterprise media sales and engineering.

“Making sure that everything we ship is something that we’re really proud of — making sure that the whimsy and magic of everything we built in 2010 is still in the product,” is how Crowley characterized his new role to me. “It’s Foursquare’s duty to build these new products — we can build things that no one can because of the technology that we have and it’s my responsibility to make sure that we build those.”

Where To

The location confidence business that Foursquare has built up, both in support of other platforms’ location efforts and in the vein of an enterprise intelligence suite, provide it a unique opportunity. Those of us who have followed the company for some time have been waiting for it to utilize these differentiators efficiently — mostly to avoid it going away or for it to end up as a fire sale of data to something like Microsoft or Yahoo.

If Foursquare is able to take this latest lease on life to make a booming business out of its Pilgrim data, then the consumer ‘cloud’ of users that get enough benefit out of it to continue contributing to that pool will finally be able to rest easier.

Of course, there is another path, one which has been a danger for years. Under its new leadership, Foursquare could build a solid enterprise business that is just ripe enough for a company in need of its location intelligence — say Salesforce — to pluck for a choice sum when its runway runs out of asphalt and into the weeds.

Now it has $45 million more to figure it out. The clock is ticking.

Yahoo Opens Largest Machine Learning Dataset to Researchers

Tech giant Yahoo is doing everything it can to gain an edge in the machine learning market, including releasing what it said is the “largest-ever machine learning data set.” The coveted info is going to the academic research community. 
Yahoo’s said its goal is to advance the field of large-scale machine learning and recommender systems. The company also wants to help bring more equality between the academic and industrial research communities. 
"Many academic researchers and data scientists don't have access to truly large-scale datasets because it is traditionally a privilege reserved for large companies," said Suju Rajan, director of research at Yahoo Labs (pictured), in a statement. "We are releasing this dataset for independent researchers because we value open and collaborative relationships with our academic colleagues, and are always looking to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning and recommender systems."
20 Million Users Involved
What exactly is Yahoo handling over? A collection based on a sample of anonymized user interactions on Yahoo properties, including the Yahoo News Feed dataset, the Yahoo home page, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Real Estate and Yahoo Movies.
All told, the dataset contains 13.5 TB of uncompressed information connected to how users relate to and interact with these Yahoo properties. The dataset covers 110 billion events and includes the interactions of about 20 million users from February 2015 to May 2015.
Categorized information, including age range, general geographic data and gender, is included in the dataset for a subset of anonymized users. The title, key-phrases of news articles, and summaries are also included in the data dump. User interaction data is timestamped and even shows what device was used to browse the sites.
"Academic researchers everywhere will finally have access to realistic scale data to study how to automatically discover which news articles are of interest to which users, and will be able to compare their methods using this as a shared test case," said Tom Mitchell, machine learning department chair, Carnegie Mellon University, in a statement. "Here at CMU we'll certainly be using it for our research."
Yahoo’s Big Move
We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his thoughts on Yahoo’s big machine learning move. In a way, this qualifies as a self-promotional event on Yahoo's part that positions the company as a player in the rapidly growing area of machine learning, he told us. The company's ongoing business troubles sometime mask its history of developing innovative, often market-leading technologies, and this effort could and should help counteract that misperception, he said. 
“In essence, by making this huge dataset charting anonymized user interactions with Yahoo properties available to academic researchers, the company is helping to advance machine learning efforts among users who seldom, if ever, have access to such a profusion of data,” King said.
In the vast majority of instances, companies collecting datasets of this sort retain them for their own private uses, King noted. As a result, data scientists at universities and associated research labs are forced to make due with much smaller data samples. 
“Yahoo's effort should help to advance machine learning, particularly at the university level. Its effects on business organizations is hard to parse though. Over time, many of the innovations that universities develop do find their way into the commercial market,” King said. “Given the size and richness of the dataset Yahoo is releasing, it could very well support and inspire research that will eventually benefit businesses.”

Saved By The Bell Star Goes To Jail Over Fight

The actor who played Screech in the 1990s TV show was given four months in jail for the altercation in Wisconsin.

The website of Ozaukee County Jail, which is near Diamond's home in Port Washington, said Diamond was booked in on Friday.

The 38-year-old was convicted in May last year of two misdemeanour charges relating to the fight in the town on Christmas Day 2014.

He was found guilty of carrying a concealed weapon and disorderly conduct but was cleared of a felony charge.

Diamond told the trial he took out a knife at the bar to try and ward off people, including a woman who punched his girlfriend.

Witnesses said Diamond's girlfriend, Amanda Schutz, pushed one woman at the bar and grabbed another woman's hand, starting the fight.

Schutz was convicted of disorderly conduct in May and the judge fined her $500.

Diamond had been due to start his time in jail last summer, but a judge put the sentence on hold for an appeal. He withdrew his appeal last month.

Although famous during his time on the show, he made headlines again in 2013 when he entered the house in the UK programme Celebrity Big Brother.

He lasted 16 days inside before Geordie Shore's Charlotte Crosby was declared the eventual winner.

Tsai Ing-wen elected Taiwan's first female president

ents Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which leads the camp that wants independence from China.

Although she has not made her stance clear, opponents say Taiwan's relations with China will deteriorate as she does not recognise the "one China" policy.

China sees the island as a breakaway province - which it has threatened to take back by force if necessary.

Ms Tsai had a commanding lead in the vote count when Eric Chu of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) admitted defeat.

Mr Chu congratulated Tsai Ing-wen and announced he was quitting as KMT head. Taiwan's Premier Mao Chi-kuo also resigned.

The election came just months after a historic meeting between the leaders of Taiwan and China. 

However, the flagging economy as well as Taiwan's relationship with China both played a role in the voters' choice, correspondents say.

The KMT has been in power for most of the past 70 years and has overseen improved relations with Beijing - Ms Tsai's victory means this is only the second-ever victory for the DPP. 

The first was by pro-independence advocate Chen Shui-bian - during his time as president between 2000 and 2008 tensions escalated with

The election result marks a turning point in Taiwan's democracy and relationship with China. 

The DPP win means the island is moving towards a political system in which voters prefer to transfer power from one party to another, ending decades of mostly KMT rule.

That could make relations with China uncertain, because unlike the KMT, the DPP favours Taiwan's independence and does not recognise the Republic of China (Taiwan's official name) and the People's Republic of China as part of "one China".

The KMT was the Communists' bitter enemy during the civil war. It fled to Taiwan after losing the civil war and its charter and leaders still favour eventual unification. It remains China's best hope - and perhaps only hope - of peacefully reunifying with Taiwan

Beijing has been closely watching the elections to gauge Taiwanese people's sentiments and what those sentiments will mean for its goal of reunifying with the last inhabited territory - following Hong Kong and Macau - that it feels was unfairly snatched from it by Japan as a colony in 1895, and then ruled separately by the KMT after the civil war.

---

Ms Tsai, a former scholar, has said she wants to "maintain [the] status quo" with China.

She became chairwoman of the DPP in 2008, after it saw a string of corruption scandals. 

She lost a presidential bid in 2012 but has subsequently led the party to regional election victories. She has won increased support from the public partly because of widespread dissatisfaction over the KMT and President Ma Ying-jeou's handling of the economy and widening wealth gap.

Saturday's polls come after a historic meeting between President Ma and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Singapore in November for talks that were seen as largely symbolic - the first in more than 60 years.

Eric Chu, 54, is the mayor of New Taipei City and stepped up to become chairman of the party in October. 

The KMT is at risk of losing its majority in the legislature for the first time in history. 

The former accounting professor was seen as popular with young people in the party, but had been unable to change public opinion that is increasingly unhappy with the party's friendly stance towards China and the island's economic travails.

In 2014, hundreds of students occupied the parliament in the largest show of anti-Chinese sentiment on the island for years. Labelled the Sunflower Movement, protesters demanded more transparency in trade pacts negotiated with China.

Apple iPhone 7 to kill off the headphone jack?

The headphone jack dates back to the late 19th century. 

Republican debate turns inside out

It would be easy to sum up Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate as a battle within a battle: Two outsiders duked it out for the top spot, while the GOP establishment continued its struggle to coalesce around a single candidate and to be heard. Those outsiders — businessman Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — did spend much of the two-and-a-half-hour gabfest attacking each other. Meanwhile, the party faithful, represented by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, tried to jump into the fray.

But to paint it in those broad terms is like critiquing the actors without ever naming the movie. Trump may have successfully defined himself as the anti-establishment front-runner, but in doing so, he has made it harder to understand just what an establishment Republican is.

Campaigning on an ever-escalating series of emotional one-liners — calling for border walls and Muslim bans — the real estate baron and reality TV star has been condemned for being short on details and policy proposals.

Yet while saying so little, Trump seems to stand for so much. The man who brags about his business acumen has himself become a brand. And not just any brand but the kind of wildly successful product whose name becomes synonymous with its category, the way Kleenex can mean facial tissue or Coke stands in for any soda. Trump is Trump’s style of politics, his collection of beliefs, the feeling voters get, negative or positive, when his name is raised.

Cruz also tosses a sort of branded hat into the political ring. He, too, styles himself as an outsider — perhaps surprisingly, considering he is a U.S. senator, a former high-priced attorney and a graduate of some of America’s most elite schools. And he is considered a master debater who, while in college, humiliated his opponents, a cunning litigator who has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Issues with issues

Yet for all these two candidates supposedly bring to a presidential campaign, almost all they brought to the stage in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday were narrow, ad hominem attacks. Trump, by his own admission feeling the heat of a surging Cruz, has made the senator’s birth status practically the sole point of attack. Cruz was born in Canada — which, Trump contends, makes Cruz ineligible to be president.

In response, Cruz has accused Trump of harboring “New York values,” meant to imply the Queens-born billionaire has liberal politics, suspect morals and elitist pretentions.

Trump stood by his birther attack, giving Cruz the opening to quote Trump from just last year, when he said Cruz’s citizenship was not an issue. And Cruz’s New York rhetoric handed Trump one of the night’s most authentic moments, when the candidate from the Big Apple sang the praises of the city’s response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

And that issue-free back and forth made up almost the entirety of the Cruz-Trump clash. In fact, when Trump tried to explain one of his objections to Chinese trade policy, moderator Neil Cavuto of debate host the Fox Business Network interrupted, saying, “You’ve lost me.”

For the so-called establishment candidates onstage, issues were almost all they had. But were they really the issues of the establishment?

Yes, there was a wonky exchange between Rubio and Cruz, with the senator from Florida insisting the value-added tax proposal offered by the senator from Texas would hurt seniors — causing Cruz to fight back with the kind of arcane detail that must have had his advisers begging for Cavuto to interrupt again.

Tax policy aside, the rest of the issue talk Thursday saw a group of Republicans playing on a field plowed, seeded and hash-marked by Donald Trump.

Not Trump

Rubio used to believe in some form of comprehensive immigration legislation, but now he accuses Cruz of being too soft on undocumented migrants. Kasich wanted to modify Trump’s proposed ban on allowing Muslims to enter the U.S. by focusing only on Syrians, while Christie wants the ban to apply to Middle Eastern refugees and their families. Even Bush, who was perhaps the most directly critical, calling Trump’s stance “unhinged,” has proposed accepting only Christian refugees into the country.

There was little talk of trade policy or global finance, more typical concerns for establishment Republicans, and discussions of U.S. military posture were almost exclusively limited to the country’s undeclared war on the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The harsh words everyone onstage had for Obama tended toward the hyperbolic adjectives most associated with Trump and far surpassed any criticisms the establishment candidates had for the front-runner.

That is not in itself strange; this is the opposition party, after all. But in the headlong rush rightward on the issues and the light touch most used on Trump the man, you see a Republican establishment caught in not only an ideological bind but an electoral one as well. For while every pundit will tell you that the establishment is desperate to knock Trump out of the race, the Republican Party is desperate to keep his supporters.

Most GOP successes of the last 20 years have relied on motivating turnout among a committed base of religious conservatives and rock-ribbed pro-business Republicans, but Trump appears to draw his support from a different group. Perhaps angry, as Trump describes himself, and feeling abandoned by elected government at almost every level, the people who gave Trump early momentum and now seem to be pushing his national poll numbers to record heights, are citizens who rarely feel motivated to vote. This election cycle, many might be voting for the first time — if they get to vote for Trump, that is.

If, however, the GOP establishment — or any Republican candidate — is seen to be too actively aiming to take Trump out, then it risks taking his supporters out of electoral process too. And that, for a party already facing demographic challenges as the country grows younger and more ethnically diverse, is a paralyzing prospect.

So the reason no establishment candidate has emerged as a Trump killer is that no one wants to be identified with Trump’s demise.

That makes for a field of timid also-rans — cautiously jockeying for position, drafting behind the energetic front-runner — and a looming marketing disaster. 

In the marketplace of products, one of the worst things to be is a not brand. A not brand is one known primarily for its not being the brand that dominates the category. By definition, it is not a leader, and by necessity, its identity is defined by the brand it wants to overtake.

And this is what has become of the Republican establishment. Its candidates are careful not to stray too far from the positions that seem to stir the hearts of Trump supporters, and their communications teams have yet to craft any attack ads hitting the wealthy, thrice-married, Democrat-supporting, business-bankrupting Republican front-runner. Those candidates have instead chosen to play at the borders of Trump’s spreading territory, looking for fine details and modulations of tone to differentiate themselves. None are a thing in and of themselves anymore; they are simply and increasingly self-identified as not Trump.