Tough economic times and startups have at least one thing in common - you need character and determination to survive. Character is what it takes to win, to believe and to persuade others. It's a mix of passion, determination, sleepless hours, hard work. Character is about crossing the finish line, about achieving dreams and goals.

While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people.

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Reading them, you will be inspired to strive for perfection, to innovate, to cross the finish line, to fight hard for your idea and for your business.

1. Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney

There's probably no one in the tech industry who doesn't know or admire Steve Jobs. Tireless innovator and one of the fathers of computer technology, Steve has had a hand in many modern marvels. His first famous 'child' was Macintosh, and the latest is iPhone. Steve also revolutionized the music industry by taking music online, and helped push computer animation by funding Pixar.

How has he done it? By being relentless, passionate and focused. Steve in the early days was reputed to be impossible to work with. Yet, he is widely admired and recognized as a great leader. The bottom line is that Steve gets the job done.

Kahney's book, which Richard recently reviewed here, is a compact edition that gives insight into Steve's character. You will learn how Steve utilizes creativity, focus, and at times the stick, to drive Apple's team to build amazing products.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is one of the best modern Japanese writers. His books are creative and unique, his writing is an inspiration. Murakami, not only a gifted writer, is also a remarkable character. In this book he describes his journey as a runner. At age 30 he quit smoking and started running.

Training tirelessly he readied himself for his first marathon. He flew to Athens and, retracing the original route, ran to the town of Marathon.

Since then, Murakami has competed in at least one marathon and triathlon a year. He trains with the same discipline with which he iterates to perfect his writing. This short book reveals simple yet powerful truths. Reading these pages, Murakami emerges as an incredible force of focus and will.

To learn more, read our companion post: What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami.

3. It's Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong is one of the most impressive athletes in modern sport. The stamina and character needed to win the Tour De France are impressive, but Lance's most impressive race was not on the bike. Shortly after winning his first world championship at age 25 Lance confronted testicular cancer. He fought it for a year and won. This book focuses on this fight and connects the dots in his life.

Written in a simple yet profound way, the book inspires on every page. Armstrong reveals that cancer made him a different, better person. It reshaped his character from boyish, feisty, more physical rider to a wiser, patient and more tactical cyclist. Ultimately he argues that if it wasn't for cancer he could never have become great.

The book relates an inspiring journey, the crux of which is: never quit and never back down.

4. The Maverick and His Machine, by Kevin Maney

Today IBM might not be the most inspirational company around, but its story is full of innovation and character. IBM owes its status to the pair of Thomas J. Watson, Snr and Jnr, two different men passionate about business and computing. The book is a biography of IBM from its inception as CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Company to the defining player in modern computing.

Watson Snr's style was a mix of carrot and stick. He demanded a lot from employees and focused on corporate culture. He planted roots of growth and scale that were leveraged by his son, Thomas J. Watson Jnr, who succeeded his father as CEO. Watson Jnr took the company to the next level, pushing it into the mainframe business.

The father and son blend in a single narrative and what emerges is IBM's character of strength, passion, focus and success. Even though the skills that created IBM differ from those needed to build a successful startup, the book is a great read for every enterprenuer.

5. The Pixar Touch, by David Pierce

All five books on our list are full of strong characters, but the Pixar team had to endure plenty to realise their computer animation dream. For two decades the team had to work odd tangential jobs to stay alive. Remarkably the group stayed together and survived thanks to Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar for $5M from Lucas Digital and (reluctantly) kept the company going through the years until its triumphant launch of Toy Story and the later multi-billion dollar exit to Disney.

What help the Pixar team win was an obsession to make computer animation happen. Even while Disney and Lucas Digital were dismissing the promise of making movies using computer graphics, the team stuck together. They continued to build and enhance their software and algorithms, ultimately leading to a set of solutions that enabled hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The Pixar story is an inspirational lesson on how enterpreneurs can succeed in business and life.

And now tell us about people and books that have inspired you and helped build your character.

Top image: Daniel Y. Go

Almost exactly one year ago, Facebook and Microsoft were in the headlines when the Redmond, Washington-based software giant outlasted Google in a bidding war to garner a $240 million stake in Facebook. It was that investment that pegged Facebook's valuation at a whopping $15 billion.

In July of this year—following a generous amount of speculation on how the two companies would collaborate—Microsoft revealed plans for an integrated search and advertising deal that would incorporate Microsoft Live Search and advertising into the Facebook platform by fall. Today, we're seeing the first step in that integration with the release of Microsoft Live Search on Facebook.

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Microsoft promises that adding Live Search functionality and advertising to the Facebook platform will improve the user experience by delivering "great search results while receiving highly relevant ads that are personalized by either my Facebook profile or search query."

Facebook claims the addition provides more relevant information to its users:

"For example, your friend may invite you to an event at a new restaurant. Without leaving Facebook, you can check out the details of the restaurant on the web. Or, say you see photos in your News Feed about a friend's recent trip to Dubai. Inspired, you can search the web for more information about travel without having to leave Facebook. Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query."

Will users find this functionality beneficial? It's hard to say. But one thing's for sure: the functionality provides yet another way to enrich the Facebook experience while keeping those users well-ensconced in the Facebook chrome.

And that's sure to be beneficial to Facebook.

Google just announced the company's latest attempt to monetize YouTube - "click to buy" links that will appear below music videos. Music rights holders can also use YouTube's song-detection technology to, get this, put a link to buy a song under a video that uses that song without permission. That's crazy.

Eventually Google says it hopes to roll out e-commerce to support all kinds of industries, from music to movies to print to TV. TV, or course, knows how to sell advertisements; so even though TV is full of ads you still know you're there to watch video - not to go shopping. Such may not be the case with YouTube much longer, but maybe we all knew this day was coming - when YouTube was turned into the mall.

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Fortunately, as you can see in the image below of an officially sanctioned video, the buttons are relatively small and unobtrusive. We are very curious to see how often people will actually click on them.

Exactly one year ago tomorrow, Google announced that YouTube videos would be offered inside of Adsense, something we thought was going to mean huge profits for the company. Apparently it hasn't, or else we'd have all heard about it in a press release.

Below: Overplayed, male-fetishized, wannabe-lesbian, mall-rat video with "click to buy" links at bottom.

Figuring out how to monetize YouTube is widely believed to be one of the biggest challenges Google faces, though in fact the $1.6 billion Google paid for YouTube was an all-stock deal and the hype of the buy alone raised Google's total stock value more than an additional $1.6 billion.

None the less, it's a huge property that the company obviously wants to monetize. We're not excited about seeing e-commerce links strewn all over YouTube, but if there's one bit of good news here it's that music sales will happen through both iTunes and the DRM-free Amazon.com. That way when you watch a cute video with someone lipsyncing, you can pay 99 cents and get that song yourself. Or, when you watch some pop-tart belt out the latest hit - you can buy that song for yourself. Instead of watching the video again or listening to it stream for free on MySpace Music.

Remember the "pre-cog" cop-things in Minority Report, able to figure out who was going to commit a crime before they committed it? If that's ever going to happen it looks like it's going to have to be something super-natural - because at least these days, technology is a long way from able to predict who's going to commit a crime.

A new 350 page report released today, written by heavyweights like former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, National Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest and sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, argues that large scale data mining of consumer and other records is of "limited effectiveness" in finding suspects preparing to commit acts of terrorism.

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The report was published by the National Research Council and was titled All Counterterrorism Programs That Collect and Mine Data Should Be Evaluated for Effectiveness, Privacy Impacts; Congress Should Consider New Privacy Safeguards. CNet's Declan McCullagh says the report offers a retort to the aims of the office of Total Information Awareness, whose duties were dispersed throughout the Federal government after extensive controversy several years ago.

The report notes that while credit agencies have been able to use data mining to find fraudulent financial activities, the tactic is of limited effectiveness in finding would-be terrorists for two reasons. First, because so little about the psychology and behavior of terrorists is known and second, because the resulting data is so rife with false positives that it's of very low quality.

The report argued that it was much more effective to use data mining to track known terrorists or to find people exhibiting very specific behavior. It warned against using such tactics as tracking emotional or psychological states as those are things the authors believe individuals should not be called to account for. Apparently that doesn't go without saying anymore.

Much of the report's summary, and clearly its title, focused on the privacy implications of these false positives in particular and of this kind of data mining in general. Presumably the report was written in a different era, before it became appropriate to try out for the Vice Presidency of this country with words like "Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and [Barack Obama] he's worried that someone won't read them their rights." (Palin acceptance speech) Evidently we live in a post-rights world now.

Thus what's most significant in today's report is the finding that pre-emptive data mining just doesn't work. Surely the ineffectiveness of pre-emptive actions is significant, isn't it? The report warned against using anti-terrorism data mining as an opportunity to find other actionable information.

The report offers a series of recommendations that include close monitoring of any such programs, possibly even including subjecting data-mining activities to regular data-mining based assessments of thier effectiveness. The report said that "legislation to clarify private-sector rights, responsibilities, and liability in turning over data to the government" was an area "ripe for congressional activity." At a time when neither party running for the US Presidency is willing to mention anything like this, such recommendations might seem either refreshing or insane.

When Google launched its sanitized version of Wikipedia, called Knol, earlier this year - the topics highlighted were all pretty mundane. Medical conditions, backpacking, etc. Today the company put Knols to good use and used the site to launch the first in a series of debates about topics of widespread general interest.

The aftermath of the US financial bailout bill is the first topic discussed.

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Economists from the conservative Cato Institute and the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have posted differing opinions as Knols. Now readers can post comments and in theory, recommend changes to the text. (Good luck with that.) This is just the first of several debates Knols will host in the handful of weeks leading up to the US Presidential election. It's a smart move by Google, both politically and economically.

Why the Knols Debates Are Politically Smart

Google is a company that finds itself taking political stands some times. Last week the company took an official stance against a California bill that would ban gay marriage. On the other hand, earlier this year it colluded with Chinese government censors by removing images of Tienanmen Square from its search results, arguing that engagement is the best way to foster change in a repressive regime and legal compliance is required in order to comply. "We have to do business with them in order to encourage change on human rights" is a convenient argument that's been made since at least the days of the South African boycott over apartheid. In some circumstances it might also hold some water as an arguement.

For Google to host a long-form point-counterpoint debate about key issues, using simple software that allows readers to participate through comments, is good for Google and good for the public. Google needs to come across as impartial at every opportunity. Otherwise it's omniscience will become all the more unpalatable.

Most topics do have more than 2 important perspectives from which they should be addressed and we hope that the best comments from readers will be effectively highlighted, as well. Just as a two party political system hampers the intellectual honesty of our engagement with vital public issues, it would be a real loss if the Knols debates were similarly focused on a crude bipartisan analysis of complex topics.

It's a Good Business Move by Google

Speaking of impartiality, there has been a fair amount of evidence since day one that Knol is doing unusually well in Google search results. Who can be surprised? Some people wouldn't object if a relevant Knol was automatically placed at the very top of any search result page that it could be.

The problem with that is that Wikipedia pages are often in that position today due to extensive inbound links. Knol truly is aimed to be a Wikipedia killer and Google would no doubt profit handsomely by making its own content pages the go-to sites for matters of public concern.

What better topics to do that with than hugely popular controversies leading up to the Presidential election? These Knols will probably be read by millions of people and in the process of becoming more educated, they will also be exposed to Google's Knols site.

Last night we wrote about how Google Search and analytics have changed the phenomenon of political debate forever. This giant knowledge conglomerate publishing its own debates as content is likely to be a much more subtle influence on politics, but it could be an important one, none the less.

Social networking provider Ning yesterday announced that it now hosts half a million social networks on its platform. Ning launched in February 2007 and has seen rapid growth and mainstream adoption ever since. According to Ning's co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini, Ning users now create a new social network every 30 seconds. As Dan Farber reports, 65 percent of these social networks are currently active and 3 percent of Ning's users are paying $19.95 a month for Ning's premium service.

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Ning's premium service allows users to use Ning on their own domain and run their own ads (or decide not to run ads at all).

Some of Ning's most popular networks include Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, a network for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network. While Ning has a number of competitors, including KickApps and Crowdvine, Ning clearly leads the pack in terms of its user-base.

Ning is also very popular among academics and teachers, who often use it to set up networks and blogs for their classes instead of relying on more commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace or having to use cumbersome class management software.

Hulu made its name by providing time-shifted access to one of the web's largest libraries of television shows. For tonight's second presidential debate in the U.S., Hulu will also introduce live streaming. The feed will be provided by NBC and Hulu will make a recording of the debate available after the broadcast. It is not clear if Hulu will expand these live offerings to other events, though with the infrastructure in place, we will probably see Hulu stream other political and sporting events in the future.

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After this second debate, Hulu will also live-stream the third debate, which will be produced by FOX News. Hulu is jointly owned by NBC Universal and News Corp., which gives Hulu access to both NBC's and Fox's coverage of the debates and also explains why Hulu did not cover the first presidential and the vice-presidential debate.

There seems to be a trend among online video sites towards live streaming. Joost, which just debuted its web-based offerings, is also planning to add live streams to its service in the near future. The U.S. presidential election in particular seems to be a catalyst for live streaming. All the major U.S. networks will carry the debate live on their own web sites, and bothCurrent.tv and MySpace will provide live streams.

Hulu also announced its first premiere of a feature film, a documentary about Crawford, Texas, the site of President George W. Bush's ranch.

MySpace and Facebook, as it turns out. Despite the land grab by numerous startups looking to become the number one social network for mobile devices, it's becoming apparent that mobile social networking isn't necessarily going to be the new frontier that everyone thought it would be. Instead, as consumers surf the "real internet" on their mobile devices, they're also interacting with "real" social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Could it be that consumers don't want new and separate social networks just for the mobile phone?

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According to new data released on Monday from ABI Research, nearly half of social networking users (46%) have visited a social network on a mobile device. Out of those users, 70% have visited MySpace and 67% have visited Facebook. No other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, even reached 15% adoption. Based on these numbers, ABI Research concludes that consumers do not want new social networks for mobile phones - they just want to interact with the social networks where they're already members.

This is further supported by data about what consumers do when mobile social networking. Checking for both comments and messages from their friends register above 50% for mobile social network users and 45% of users post status updates. In other words, they're doing the same sort of things on their phone as they would do if at their computer. The phone is just an extension of their online social networking life, not a separate and different platform for new types of interactions.

The survey, which was conducted 2Q, 2008, interviewed 500 users of online social networks. Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only. A mobile social network, for example, would be phone-only. Yikes. That number is low.

So Where Does This Leave Mobile Social Networks?

At first glance, we have to admit, these numbers don't look promising for mobile social networks. Although it's possible that some of these social networks will stick around thanks to strong and supportive niche audiences, it doesn't look like any today are poised for mainstream success.

Then again, it could just be too soon to tell. Given how long it takes for mainstream users to discover any new technology, it may be just a matter of time before mobile social networking really takes off. With the recent explosion of new touchscreen smart phones (iPhone, Android, , HTC Dream, Instinct, LG Dare, etc.) designed with web surfing in mind, mobile social networking could still be right around the corner.

When it comes to presentations, typical slideshows have gotten a bad reputation for being dull and dry. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Thanks to Web 2.0 tools and applications, you can bring pizzazz to your presentations like never before. Whether you're looking for an "un-slideshow" altogether or just looking to add a little kick to the boring charts and graphs in your PowerPoint, you can find something here that fits your needs as we introduce you to Slideshows 2.0.

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There are tons of slideshow apps designed for sharing your photos on social networks and blogs. For example, Slide, Rock You, FilmLoop, and Flickr's new slideshow tool come to mind. While those are great for casual use, they're designed for blogs and profiles, not the boardroom. However, there are plenty of apps out there that let you get creative even when you're presenting for your business colleagues.

1) Jazz Up Your PowerPoint

Just because you're stuck using PowerPoint, that doesn't mean your slideshow has to be boring. Get a professional template, read Slide:ology, then choose one or more of the following plugins to add something unique: LiveWeb to surf the net from within the PowerPoint, the Office Labs pptPlex addin which makes PowerPoints deem-zoomable, the Cooliris plugin which makes slideshows 3D just like their browser plugin does, or Freepath, which lets you mashup your slideshows with other web content.

2) SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online presentation app built on Adobe's Flex platform. Like any presentation app, SlideRocket offers powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, transitions, image and video manipulations and animations, and charting and table creation. You can even import your PowerPoint slides to get started. However, SlideRocket also offers some unique features like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player. (You can read our full review here).

3) Web Slides

If instead of bullet points, you're discussing web content, the application called WebSlides from Diigo, makers of the social bookmarking application (also called Diigo), can help. With WebSlides, you can turn your bookmarks or feeds into interactive web content. The application works with their bookmarking tool to automatically allow the creation of slideshows from a list of your bookmarks. The RSS option may be less useful as it only allows the import of one RSS feed, not an entire OPML file.

4) Agglom

After downloading a browser plugin, you can click on the new Agglom button at any time to save all the URLs from each tab in your browser as a set of links. These links can be shared with others via one URL provided to you by the service. One of the options for viewing the links is to view them as a slideshow. Those you share the URL with can view the slideshow with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.You can set the resulting slideshow to public or private or even password protect it. However, for use in presentations, you could simply play the slideshow of web content. (Read our full review here.)

5) Flowgram

If you want to narrate a tour through web content instead, the new application called Flowgramlets you create a rich, multimedia tour of your content. However, Flowgram isn't limited to web content alone. You can actually mix together web pages, RSS feeds, photos, audio, custom pages, and Office documents including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDFs. The resulting Flowgram runs as a sure-to-please Flash-based application that's ready for embedding on the company's intranet site later on as further proof of your media mastery. In a way, Flowgram is a lot like the oddly-named MyJugaad.in, which allows for slideshows of web pages, videos, and images sourced from Delicious, digg, Google News, Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, etc. or from a list provided by you or from your RSS feed(s).

6) Animoto

Ready to ditch slideshows altogether? Animoto blends images and music together using motion graphics, effects and transitions to create videos of your imagery using their patent-pending "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence" software,which analyzes the pictures and music that you input and decides on the proper effects and transitions to match both. The end result is better for sharing your photos and not as good for professional presentations, but we can still imagine a few good business uses for this technology. For example, the Animoto video could be used to kick off another presentation or speech. (Read our full review here).

Now Share Them!

Thanks to online slideshow web apps like  and Zoho Show and Google Docs, slideshows can be created, edited, and viewed online. For sharing with others, though, the popular "YouTube for presentations" web site, SlideShare, is a great choice. Here, you can upload your slideshows for everyone to see, download, or embed, depending on how you set the permissions.

If done well, slideshows don't have to be boring - they can both entertain and inform. And it's a lot easier to get your message across when everyone isn't sleeping through your presentation, isn't it?

Today, the old real estate adage 'location, location, location' could just as easily be