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Bill Gates Gives $258m to World Battle Against Malaria

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates last night gave $258m (£145m) to the fight against malaria, branding the rich world’s efforts in tackling the disease “a disgrace”.

The grant is equivalent to more than three-quarters of global spending on research into the disease last year, according to a report published simultaneously by the Malaria Research and Development Alliance. Malaria causes an estimated 500m bouts of illness a year, kills an African child every 30 seconds, and costs an estimated $12bn a year in lost income.

But the MRDA report stated that global spending on malaria research last year totalled just $323m, about a tenth of the funding that would be needed to match its 3% share of the global disease burden.

Mr Gates said that the world had failed to fight the “all-out war” on the disease. “For too long malaria has been a forgotten epidemic,” he said. “It’s a disgrace that the world has allowed malaria deaths to double in the last 20 years, when so much more could have been done to stop the disease.

“Millions of children have died from malaria because they were not protected by an insecticide-treated bed net or did not receive effective treatment. If we can expand malaria control programmes and invest what is needed in research and development we can stop this tragedy.”

Trials of a vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline and the Gates-supported Malaria Vaccine Initiative have been encouraging. Results from Mozambique last year suggested vaccinated children between the ages of one and four were 30% less likely to need treatment for serious malaria and nearly 60% less likely to suffer potentially fatal episodes. Now plans are under way to widen the trials.

The new funds donated by Gates include a further $107m to the MVI. Its director, Melinda Moree, said: “We are advancing this vaccine through final testing in the hope it will be available to save lives as soon as possible.” The vaccine may go to drug safety regulators in 2010 and be available for use the following year.

A further $100m is being given to the Medicines for Malaria Venture, a Geneva-based non-profit organisation, to accelerate research on cheap and effective low-cost anti-malarial drugs. The remaining $50.7m goes to a consortium of research bodies led by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to improve insecticides, bed nets and other protective materials.

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Bill Gates Gets 4 Million Emails a Day

The next time you’re sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, told a conference in Singapore that being the world’s best-known software billionaire has its down side: “Bill receives 4m pieces of email per day, most of it spam.”

The upside of the Microsoft founder’s bulging inbox is that it appears to have focused his mind on the problem.

Spam is regarded as perhaps the biggest threat to the internet, with some experts putting it as high as 80% of the world’s online traffic.

The company is working on a number of solutions, including software that replies automatically to email messages from users not known to that computer, and the idea of “postage” on emails. Microsoft is also working with internet firms AOL, Yahoo and EarthLink to verify the identity of the sender of an email message.

A North Carolina man who raked in $24m (£13m) from peddling junk products and pornography under a false name this month became the first felony conviction under under a United States anti-spam law, and faces up to nine years in prison.

Unlike ordinary people though, Mr Gates doesn’t get a sore finger from deleting unwanted missives. The company has a team of people dedicated to ensuring he only gets mail that he wants to read.

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Bill Gates – A story of Success

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in a family having rich business, political and community service background. His great-grandfather was a state legislator and a mayor, his grandfather was vice president of national bank and his father was a lawyer.

Bill strongly believes in hard work. He believes that if you are intelligent and know how to apply your intelligence, you can achieve anything. From childhood Bill was ambitious, intelligent and competitive. These qualities helped him to attain top position in the profession he chose. In school, he had an excellent record in mathematics and science. Still he was getting very bored in school and his parents knew it, so they always tried to feed him with more information to keep him busy. Bill’s parents came to know their son’s intelligence and decided to enroll him in a private school, known for its intense academic environment. It was a very important decision in Bill Gate’s life where he was first introduced to a computer. Bill Gates and his friends were very much interested in computer and formed “Programmers Group” in late 1968. Being in this group, they found a new way to apply their computer skill in university of Washington. In the next year, they got their first opportunity in Information Sciences Inc. in which they were selected as programmers. ISI (Information Sciences Inc.) agreed to give them royalties whenever it made money from any of the group’s program. As a result of the business deal signed with Information Sciences Inc., the group also became a legal business.

Bill Gates and his close friend Allen started new company of their own, Traf-O-Data. They developed a small computer to measure traffic flow. From this project they earned around $20,000. The era of Traf-O-Data came to an end when Gates left the college. In 1973, he left home for Harvard University. He didn’t know what to do, so he enrolled his name for pre-law. He took the standard freshman courses with the exception of signing up for one of Harvard’s toughest mathematics courses. He did well over there, but he couldn’t find it interesting too. He spent many long nights in front of the school’s computer and the next day asleep in class. After leaving school, he almost lost himself from the world of computers. Gates and his friend Paul Allen remained in close contact even though they were away from school. They would often discuss new ideas for future projects and the possibility of starting a business one fine day. At the end of Bill’s first year, Allen came close to him so that they could follow some of their ideas. That summer they got job in Honeywell. Allen kept on pushing Bill for opening a new software company.

Within a year, Bill Gates dropped out from Harvard. Then he formed Microsoft. Microsoft’s vision is “A computer on every desk and Microsoft software on every computer”. Bill is a visionary person and works very hard to achieve his vision. His belief in high intelligence and hard work has put him where he is today. He does not believe in mere luck or God’s grace, but just hard work and competitiveness. Bill’s Microsoft is good competition for other software companies and he will continue to stomp out the competition until he dies. He likes to play the game of Risk and the game of world domination. His beliefs are so powerful, which have helped him increase his wealth and his monopoly in the industry.
Bill Gates is not a greedy person. In fact, he is quite giving person when it comes to computers, internet and any kind of funding. Some years back, he visited Chicago’s Einstein Elementary School and announced grants benefiting Chicago’s schools and museums where he donated a total of $110,000, a bunch of computers, and provided internet connectivity to number of schools. Secondly, Bill Gates donated 38 million dollars for the building of a computer institute at Stanford University. Gates plans to give away 95% of all his earnings when he is old and gray.

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Gates Warns That Penalties Would Cripple Microsoft

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates yesterday warned that the tougher settlement demanded by nine US states in the long-running antitrust case would be crippling for the firm, setting it back 10 years and costing thousands of jobs.

In his first courtroom appearance in the four-year trial Mr Gates said the added sanctions would leave a fragmented, less profitable soft ware industry. He also said the billions of dollars spent on research and development by Microsoft would be sharply cut back if the company was forced to share its technology.

The appearance of Mr Gates, who is likely to be on the stand for two days, was viewed as a high-risk strategy. In his only previous appearance via a videotaped interview in 1998, he is thought to have damaged the case with an evasive, curmudgeonly performance.

In cross examination in the Washington DC federal courthouse yesterday, he was more focused, giving answers that were short and to the point. A repeat of the earlier combative testimony could have played into the hands of the nine US states pursuing tougher penalties against Microsoft.

The harsher settlement would require Microsoft to divulge some of the blueprints and technical information about how its products work. One proposal is for a version of Windows that could be customised by computer makers and rival software firms.

Mr Gates told judge Colleen Kottar-Kotelly that “by reducing Windows to some kind of core operating system [the nine states] would turn the clock back on Windows development by about 10 years and effectively freeze it there. I know that Microsoft could not have developed Windows 95, one of the most successful software programmes in history, if the requirement had been in effect in the early 1990s.”

In a written 156-page statement he said Microsoft could not technically meet the demands for a modular version of Windows. “There is no clear dividing line between where a particular block of middleware ends and the rest of the operating system begins.”

The penalties he said would amount to a “massive transfer of Microsoft’s intellectual property rights” to rivals. He also disputed the claim that his company planned to dominate internet services by designing software that is incompatible with that of rivals.

Microsoft has already been found guilty of abusing its monopoly and has agreed a more lenient settlement with another nine states and the justice department.

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Gates Foundation Announces $500M Grant for AIDS Research and Care

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is advancing its ongoing support of AIDS-related research by announcing a $500 million grant to a global fund that provides AIDS assistance in poor and undeveloped countries. The grant will be given over a five-year period to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

In announcing the gift, Bill Gates said, “The Global Fund is one of the most important health initiatives in the world today. The fund has an excellent track record, and we need to do everything we can to support its continued success, which will save millions of lives.” The announcement was made just before the International AIDS Conference, which is scheduled for this weekend in Toronto. The conference will be attended by nearly 25,000 scientists, policymakers, and AIDS research advocates.

The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000, and during its first four years of operation over $150 million was given to support AIDS research. Last month Gates announced another $287 million gift to speed the development of an AIDS vaccine. The grant announced Wednesday goes far and above all previous donations and grants by the founder of Microsoft.

The foundation has an endowment of approximately $29.2 billion, supporting grantees in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It also supports work in more than 100 countries, with about 70% of donations going toward global efforts and the remainder dedicated to improving lives in the United States through programs including the United Negro College Fund, Save the Children, the national Council of Culture & Arts, and the United Way.

Tags: $500M, Aids, Announces, Care, Foundation, Gates, Grant, Research

Friday, March 5th, 2010 Grants No Comments