The Art of the Riff Sunday, Oct 4 2009

The Raconteurs

Consolers of the Lonely

Third Man/Warner Bros.

BY MELISSA MAERZ

WHAT SEPARATES THE BLUES GREATS

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from the legends? A good story. And Jack White knows how to tell one. (Did you hear the one about the guitarist who mar¬ried his sister?) It’s no coincidence that his side band is called the Raconteurs: “When you call yourself a musician,” newest films the White Stripes leader said when he teamed up with singer-songwriter Brendan Benson, bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Pat¬rick Keeler in 2005, “you join that family of storytellers.”

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DO YOU KNOW PIERRE? Sunday, Oct 4 2009

BRILLIANT ASKS, leaning close to me and nodding toward Pierre Omidyar, who is standing a few yards away. We’re at a dinner party hosted by Google at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to kick off this year’s TED Conference. Sharks patrol the waters behind us, eels lurk, and the whole room has an aquatic glow.  Submit Ticket

Brilliant waves Omidyar over, and the eBay founder -thin, serious, dressed like a grad student – scoots past Al Gore, who is locked in conversation with Cameron Diaz. Brilliant gives Omidyar a half-hug, and the two chat about Omidyar’s three kids and his upcoming trip to India. “Pierre is one of the finest, most decent people in the world,” Brilliant says after Omidyar moves on.

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What else can you do with $1 billion? Sunday, Oct 4 2009

From the beginning, it was clear that renewable en¬ergy would be a centerpiece of DotOrg’s efforts. Long before Brilliant arrived, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were big believers in the urgent need to replace fossil fu¬els. They have championed plug-in hybrid vehicles and installed i.6 megawatts of solar panels at the Googleplex in Mountain View – one of the largest installations on any corporate campus in America. Filed under: JoomlaJunkie Google’s push for clean power is not entirely unselfish: Cheap, renewable power would reduce the company’s energy bills and free it from worry about blackouts.

But DotOrg’s clean-power initiative is even more am¬bitious – it’s nothing less than an energy moonshot. The stated goal is to fund research into breakthrough tech nologies that, within the next decade or so, could pro¬duce what the group calls “RE<C” – renewable energy cheaper than coal.

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IN THE FAST LANE WITH GOOGLE Sunday, Oct 4 2009

1.            Brilliant in the back seat of a plug-in hybrid car funded by Google; in the front are company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Promoting clean energy is one of Brilliant’s top priorities.

2.            Presenting a $15,000 check to Joseph Tackie, a small businessman in Ghana. “Business is a better engine for creating jobs than aid,” Brilliant says.  Computers · Electronics

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He’s someone in whose presence you feel better Sunday, Oct 4 2009

Among those whom Brilliant met was John Doerr, the powerful venture capitalist who sits on the board at Google. The company was in the midst of a search for someone to head DotOrg, but it was having trouble find’ ing a leader who not only had expertise in the nonprofit world but who would also be at home in the freewheel¬ing Google culture. “Lots of people from the traditional philanthropic world were interested in this job,” Doerr says. Legal MP3 downloads “They weren’t a good fit. But Larry broke the mold. He has not only done great work in the world, but he also knows how to move and inspire people.”

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