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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.

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

The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up containing one of the following recent actions:

• A comment
• A like
• Recent signup
• Recent upload

Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.

Currently there's only one other toy available. If you're looking for something less flashy than VimeoLand, we recommend Pulse.

Making Your Own Vimeo Toy

We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured on Vimeo. While this isn't a problem for us, we'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.

What we think would be really interesting to see is for Vimeo and developers to take things to the next level. By this we mean seeing a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up as a Vimeo Toy. The current offerings are still a little too random for our tastes. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is next.

This book has a lot of business lessons in it for budding startup entrepreneurs, so for that reason alone I recommend it to our readers. For example when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in the 90's, one of the first things he did was cut down the number of products Apple had - from around 40, to just 4. The book describes how Jobs went about simplifying Apple's brand and focusing in on the key products that consumers wanted. This is something a lot of startups and media companies would do well to emulate.

Also compelling are the stories behind the phenomenal success of the candy-colored iMacs, the iPod, the Apple Store, and other Apple products of this era. I'd read much of this before in media articles and the like, but Kahney does a great job of bringing all those stories together in one book, while adding new quotes and commentary from key Apple staff members. For example on the Apple Store:

"We said, we want our stores to create an ownership experience for the customer," explained (Apple's Ron) Johnson. The store should be about the lifetime of the product, not the moment of the transaction.

Leander Kahney obviously knows his stuff when it comes to Apple. He is a news editor for Wired.com and the main author of the Cult of Mac blog. He previously wrote two other Apple books, The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. I may have browsed through one or both of those books before, but Inside Steve's Brain is a more memorable look at the person behind much of Apple's success today. I highly recommend it, even if you're not an Apple user.

On that note, here's my story about my Mac conversion...

I didn't become a passionate Machead until the last couple of years. I had used Apple products in the 80's and 90's (my primary computer in my Uni years in the early 90's was a Macintosh). But I have always been a bit wary about Apple's hip factor and the cult-like behavior of its more rabid fans. And yes, I am one of those people who finds 'The Mac Guy' in the current TV ads just a little too smug (I feel a bit sorry for Windows Guy, who is actually far more like the typical nerds that I know and love). However I've came around to being a Mac Guy. I currently use a Macbook as my main computer, and I am going to buy an iMac next; I have a couple of iPods, I use iTunes, I visit Apple Stores whenever I'm in America, and of course I am a huge fan and fervent user of the iPhone. I will probably even buy an Apple TV in the near future - and then the Digital Lifestyle will be almost exclusively Apple for me!

It's hard to ignore Apple products when they are so beautifully designed, simple to use, ground-breaking (e.g. iPhone), highly functional, and (yes) hip! If you want to know the reasons behind all that, this book provides excellent insights.

Are you an Apple user? If so what's your story?

Windows Mobile is the second most popular mobile operating system worldwide. Flash, meanwhile, is arguably the most popular rich media platform on the web reaching almost 99% of Internet users, according to Adobe.

For Microsoft, even though they're still banking on Silverlight, licensing Flash Lite now is a smart move. It gives their mobile OS a tangible advantage over the surging iPhone, and as as Larry Dignan points out, it gives them an opportunity to learn how to roll out a rich media platform on the mobile. Flash Lite now means access to a ton of already made rich media content, video, and applications that users of some rival platforms don't have access to.

Even though Silverlight has signed some high profile partnerships to deliver web video, including with Major League Baseball and NBC for the Beijing Olympics, it is still largely not used by developers. Further, a mobile version of Silverlight won't ship for a few months. If Microsoft can expand the reach of Silverlight on the web via more partnerships like the ones it has been signing, then it can worry about pushing Silverlight to mobile platforms. We agree with Dignan at ZDNet: in a couple of years, this partnership will probably be irrelevant, but in the short term, it's a great move for both companies.

We all knew iTunes Movie Rentals were coming, all that was left for Jobs to announce were the details.

The iTunes Movie Rental store launches today in the US (later this year for the rest of the world), with rentals costing $3.99 for new releases, and $2.99 for library titles. Renters have 30 days to begin watching a movie, and then 24 hours to finish watching it once they do. Every major studio is on board, and Apple's rental store launches with over 100 titles (1000 promised by the end of February), with new releases appearing 30 days following DVD release (which perhaps indicates some hesitation on the part of studios to embrace a new format -- no surprise there).

At first glance, Netflix would appear to have a leg up on Apple. Unlimited streaming for a little as $8.99 per month is probably a better deal for most consumers than $4 per movie strapped to a 24 hour viewing window. But where Apple's system shines is in its convergence with other devices. Whereas Netflix can only stream to Windows PCs, Apple can stream or download rented movies to both the Mac and PC, as well as to any current generation iPod, the iPhone, and the Apple TV.

Jobs said in his keynote that many companies have tried to figure out how to stream movies from the PC to the TV -- Apple tried, Microsoft tried, TiVo tried, VuDu tried. All of them failed, according to Jobs. In fact, even though Jobs touted the 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies sold so far via iTunes as miles ahead of competitors, he still said they missed their sales goals. That is one of the reasons, according to Jobs, that Apple embraced the idea of rentals, and one of the reasons they revamped the Apple TV so that it could rent and stream video directly from iTunes.

Image via TechCrunch.

Jobs demonstrated the ability to browse iTunes and rent movies with a single button click directly through the Apple TV. The device can also download and stream podcasts through iTunes, sync with computer content (as before), connect to YouTube, and grab photos from Flickr and .Mac.

The Apple TV updates will be pushed to current owners as a free software update. To entice new buyers, Apple lowered the price of the device by $70.

MacBook Air

The other major announcement we all knew was coming: the Macbook Air. Speculation that Apple would release an ultrathin notebook has been flying all weekend, and Apple delivered today with one that redefines the meaning of "thin." Clocking in at just 0.16" (at its thinnest end, 0.76" at the thickest), the 3 lbs. Macbook Air sports a 13.3" LED backlit screen, 1.6-1.8 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 80 GB HD (64 GB SSD option), 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR, a reported battery life of 5 hours, and no optical drive.

Drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd, the Macbook Air also has a multitouch track pad that allows for a lot of new gestures -- like rotating photos by pivoting your thumb and forefinger.

While Jobs was clearly tickled by just how thin the Air is (he introduced it by sliding it out of an envelope and then showed a TV commercial playing off that quality), he was also clearly proud of the steps that Apple has made to make the production of the machine more environmentally friendly. It is the first Apple product with a fully mercury and lead free display, BFR-free circuitry, and due to its form factor, it can ship with 56% less packaging.

Image via TechCrunch.

All that's remaining is to find out of the MacBook Air can help my vertical leap... (sneaker joke... anyone?).

iPhone/iPod Apps and Time Capsule

Jobs made two other major, albeit less buzzworthy, announcements at Macworld. After briefly mentioning his excitement over the iPhone SDK coming next month, he announced a handful of new apps for the device. These include an improved mapping application (with location finder), webclips (like bookmarks for your phone's home screen), and multi-SMS. The new apps are all available as a free software update for iPhone users.

The iPod Touch also got some love with the announcement of five new applications: Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. Inexplicably, while the iPhone gets a free update, the iPod apps (which already exist on the iPhone) will cost users $19.99. That prompted engadget's Ryan Block to chide Apple for being, "SO weak." Agreed.

The first new product Apple announced at Macworld 08 was a wireless external hard drive. Time Capsule, as it is called, comes in 500GB and 1TB flavors and syncs wirelessly with OS X Leopard via its 802.11n base station to back up your files. The device will ship in February.