Edie G-Lush

Life in America’s prisons is famously tough, but at least it allows one inmate, Jonathan Lee Riches, plenty of time to spend filing lawsuits. In his latest legal complaint, Riches — who happens to be a resident of Williamsburg federal correctional institution in West Virginia — has turned his sights on legendary San Francisco-based venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and is attempting to sue him for $43 million. The complaint, in its entirety, reads: ‘Khosla’s fund invests in prison buildings. I’m suffering from no medical treatment. This is a conspiracy. Bhutto was killed on my birthday. I can’t see outside, this is unconstitutional. I seek $43 million.

Are you a serial investor, but with more money than time? You like the idea of being a business angel but you’re too busy to research companies yourself? Investment clubs or partnerships may be just what you’re looking for. The basic aim of an investment club is — for a fee — to allow members the opportunity to invest in deals that they might not otherwise see. They typically finance companies looking for new capital of between £250,000 and £5 million — too small for most venture-capital and private-equity funds. Unlike ‘business angel’ syndicates, where members do their own due diligence and deal-structuring, investment club management does the hard work and club members simply put up the cash.

Imagine you’re the finance director of a quoted financial services company. You receive an anonymous invitation to a ‘Party of a Lifetime’ in the form of a USB memory stick. Hopeful of some welcome distraction, you plug it into your office computer. But unbeknown to you, the stick has been sent by a criminal gang seeking a way into your company’s IT system. The stick searches your directories, sends private files to the gang, inserts a ‘keylogger program’ which records your keystrokes and passwords, and sets up a way for the gang to attack your network. Farfetched? No, it isn’t. Earlier this year 500 UK finance directors received memory sticks in this way and 47 per cent of them ran the application contained in it.

The heady days of 1999 are back. Once again it’s fashionable to work for an internet start-up, even more so if you’re a part of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ bonanza. (For those who may worry that they’ve missed some kind of software update, Web 2.0 refers to second-generation internet developments based around user-generated content and social networks, such as YouTube and Wikipedia.) Hopeful entrepreneurs are chasing venture capital money with the dream of becoming the next Skype or Google. There are differences, however. Europe — and specifically London — seems to have a more pronounced buzz than in the first boom, yet there’s also a definite recognition that another bubble may be in the making.

Edie Lush endures a ‘Win Investing’ seminar which fails in  its promise to reveal the secrets of stock-market success ‘What percentage of ten trillion pounds do you need to be happy?’ asks the young Australian called Jonathan who is instructing the ‘free’ Win Investing seminar I’m attending. You may have heard Win Investing’s irritating ads on Classic FM, pressing you to attend one of about 18 free sessions a week available in Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. You’re promised that by spending two and a half hours with a tutor like Jonathan, you’ll learn the secrets of trading the £1 trillion UK and £9 trillion US stock markets.

Suppose you have 15 minutes to while away waiting for the train. Why not pull out your mobile phone, punch in your pin number and download a Playboy movie for as little as £5? Not interested? Of course you’re not; you’re a Spectator reader, for heaven’s sake. But there are plenty of people out there who are, and they’re not only bringing in revenue for the niche market of mobile porn, they’re actually driving the development of mobile technology. Three years ago, when third-generation mobile phones were first launched in Britain, the joke was that 3G stood for ‘girls, gambling and games’. That has proved substantially correct, though it could equally well be ‘girls, girls, girls’.

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When I was in the White House...’). He wears a nice suit and a tidy salt-and-pepper beard. He doesn’t even wear Birkenstock sandals, and he looked well at home amid the comforts of the de luxe London hotel when I met him there. But beneath the professorial façade is a combative mind and an inability to keep his mouth shut — neither of which sat well with the US Treasury during his tenure at the World Bank.

Rupert Murdoch is probably the last person in the world who would use an online social networking service, but he may be the first to make serious money out of the concept. MySpace, which he bought for $580 million in 2005, is one such service, and it may or may not be the coolest thing on the internet. It has about 70 million users, but is already being squeezed by an upstart website called Bebo which is attracting a greater share of UK visitors. Nevertheless, Murdoch-watchers see MySpace as the next big weapon in his relentless battle to maintain global media dominance. But what exactly is an online social networking service? It is a website which allows anyone to build a homepage for free.