As an important part of Americans' daily life, Los Angeles has never lacked all kinds of parties, nor is it short of the "party creatures" that attend one or two hundred parties every year.

Simon Westeros’ 23rd birthday party, in all of these parties, is both special and not special.

In the mansion halfway up the mountain, there was a carefully prepared birthday party on the evening of February 22. Some people expanded their connections, some gained the capital to brag, and Simon himself also received gifts that could be demolished throughout the weekend, which was a joy to the host and host.

After the birthday party, the public relations of Hollywood awards season also entered the final sprint stage.

Due to the Gulf War, the 61st Academy Awards ceremony this year was scheduled for March 25 later.

Daenerys Entertainment's main award-winning work "Dancing with Wolves" this year has been released on November 2 last year. After winning a number of important awards at the Golden Globe Awards in January, the recent union awards and film critics association awards have also won all the best.

Among the Oscar nomination list that has been announced, "Dancing with the Wolf" has also become the most nominated film for the 61st Academy Awards with a total of 12 nominations.

However, the most eye-catching thing is the box office of this film.

From November 2 to February 21, before Simon's birthday, it was released for 16 weeks. "Dancing with the Wolves" at the beginning, with no potential box office dark horse. With the film's reputation and the continuous stimulation of popularity in the awards season, it has unknowingly accumulated a North American box office of US$113 million, becoming the third North American box office work produced by Daenerys Entertainment at the end of last year.

Looking back on the entire 1990 year, among the movies produced by Daenerys Entertainment, there are seven films in North America with box office of over 100 million, "The Pretty Beauty", "The Love of Man and the Ghost", "Sleeping with the Enemy", "Teen Ninja Turtles", "Dancing with the Wolves", "The Red Pink League" and "The House of the Imperials".

All seven films squeezed into the top ten of the North American box office list in 1990. Among them, "Home Imperials", "The Love of Man and the Ghost", "The Pretty" and "Teenager of Ninja Turtles" released by Daenerys Entertainment, have firmly dominated the top four of the annual box office list.

With the strong box office momentum of "Dancing with Wolves", the total box office of this film in North America is almost destined to squeeze out Paramount's film "Hunting Red October", which is temporarily ranked fifth, making Daenerys Entertainment's films completely occupy the top five in the box office list in 1990.

In addition, as of December 31, 1990, the total cumulative local box office of these seven films in North America's box office exceeded 100 million US dollars, which is equivalent to 17% of the total box office of North America of US$5.26 billion in 1991.

More than a dozen other films related to Daenerys Entertainment, including "Children in the Cornfield 2", "The Ghost Chasing Soul 3", "The Hand Shaking the Cradle", "Ten Days of Danger", etc., have also reached US$350 million in North America's total box office, accounting for 6% of the North American box office share in 1991.

Combined with the two phases, Daenerys Entertainment produced videos throughout the year last year accounted for 23% of the total box office share of North America.

Moreover, this does not count the box office part of films such as "Home Imperial" in 1991, so it is not rigorous.

According to this calculation method, the 1990 box office part of the film "Flying Over Innocence", "Batman: The Moment of War" and "Driving for Miss Daisy" that were last year at the end of the previous year should also be included.

Once this is the case, the box office ratio controlled by Daenerys Entertainment will easily exceed 30%.

With the official completion of equity transfer between Daenerys Entertainment and MCA shareholders at the end of February, in 1991, as long as the videos produced by Daenerys Entertainment can continue to maintain the box office momentum of the previous two years, the company can definitely control more than 40% of the North American box office share.

This possibility is actually very great.

Because, when other film studios were still releasing the box office in 1991, Daenerys Entertainment's first box office dark horse this year had already appeared.

"Anti-Withful Stars", which started on February 8, was released on February 28, and the cumulative box office in North America has quickly reached US$49.69 million in three weeks. Moreover, the box office of this film in the third week was only 16% lower than the second week, and the long-term trend is very obvious.

The cumulative box office of "The Counter-Witness Stars" has reached nearly $50 million in three weeks. Coupled with such an obvious long-term trend, it is almost certain that the box office of "Anti-Witness Stars" in North America exceeded 100 million.

It was also on February 28, as multinational forces officially stopped their attacks on Iraqi troops, the 42-day Gulf War officially ended.

This war has allowed many countries to see the major trend of modern warfare's transformation from mechanization to informatization. In future wars, human sea tactics are destined to be difficult to play. The Soviet Union played an almost negligible role in this important regional war, which further indicates that the red empire is getting closer and closer to the collapse.

On March 1, the day after the Gulf War ended, North American stocks rose sharply across the board, with the highest gains of the Dow Jones and S&P 500 on the same day.

The protracted war that many people originally thought was concluded so quickly. The United States, which collected a large amount of military expenditure from European and Middle Eastern countries before the war, undoubtedly became the biggest winner of the war.

Not only has the war destroyed the US stock market rebounded in the past month, but the direct war income obtained from military expenditures from various countries reached US$19 billion, which has greatly alleviated the increasing fiscal deficit in the United States.

The Bush administration has made great achievements and benefits through this war, and domestic support ratings have been rising steadily.

Simon knew that the recovery of North American stock markets did not mean the recovery of the US economy, and the federal economic downturn would continue throughout 1991, which also laid the groundwork for the Bush administration's defeat in the new presidential election in 1992.

The expansion of the Westeros system was not affected by the sluggish economy in the United States at all.

For American Online, as of the end of February, all free trial periods for Internet access users in January have ended one after another.

Among the 810,000 free trial users who were connected in January, the number of final converted to official users exceeded 430,000, with a positive conversion rate of 53%, far exceeding the initial 20% to 30% expectations of US Online.

Throughout February, the number of users who made free trial appointments in the United States fell sharply to 1.6 million compared with 2.3 million in January, but the number of users who successfully completed the access to the trial increased to 970,000, basically achieving the goal of accessing one million users per month.

The number of users queuing up for free trials exceeded 2 million.

The major telecom operators in the United States, except for AT-T, which is still huge after being split, such as Seven Bell, have basically the number of users within the tens of millions.

With such a clear explosion in the Internet industry, major operators dare not take any more underestimation.

In addition to three regional telecom operators including Bell Atlantic, which signed an exclusive agreement with the United States Online, other telecom giants, including AT-T, have begun to quickly deploy the Internet industry in the past two months, or simply acquired the World Wide Web Access Service Company authorized by Igrit in their own operating areas, or obtained authorization from Igrit to establish its own Internet access service department.

Because of the industry trend brought about by the outbreak of the Internet industry, Simon's advantage of buying Bell Atlantic in advance became increasingly obvious.

If the Westeros system had not mastered the strongest Bell Atlantic among the three regional operators, driven by the huge interests of the Internet industry, even if there is a constraint on exclusive contracts, if the three regional operator giants put pressure on American Online at the same time, American Online would definitely have to make a big compromise.

Now, Bell Atlantic is firmly on the side of AOL, and the other two companies happen to be distributed on the east and west coasts of the United States, making it difficult to unite, so AOL can continue to maintain its advantage in the exclusive agreement.

In comparison, most Internet service providers in other regions have to accept the "recruitment" of operator giants, and basically quickly became the fate of being acquired. Otherwise, they would have to be squeezed out by operator giants who want to dominate ISP business and cut off line network resources.

With the outbreak of the Internet industry, Egret's high monopoly on the World Wide Web technology has gradually attracted the attention of major manufacturers.

Of course, I'm just paying attention for the time being.

Because Igrit maintains a very open and authorized attitude, and Igrit's loss in January was more than US$50 million, and its business prospects were far inferior to ISP business, Igrit's monopoly on graphical interface browsers and various services of Igrit's portal did not attract other telecom companies to covet them.

That's right, with a desperate expansion attitude, Egret was only the first month of 1991. Although its revenue exceeded US$15 million, its overall loss exceeded US$50 million.

In order to increase the popularity of the portal business in the general public as soon as possible, Igret invested $20 million in marketing expenses in the past month.

The various information sectors of the portal website have tapped a large number of news talents and columnists from traditional paper media platforms to build Igret's content team, and the investment is also huge. In addition, email services, social network services, online game investment and Igret's own increasing technology R&D and basic equipment expenses ultimately resulted in the company's "creative move" of a loss of $50 million in just one month.

Of course, this kind of money-burning speed is actually just a small scene in Simon's opinion. There are no Internet companies that burn billions of dollars a year. The funds Igrit burned out now are definitely much greater than those of Simon's memories of burning money in the red ocean market of the Internet industry.

As the entire new technology field begins to pay attention to the Internet industry, Igrit, which has accumulated a large number of technical patents and software products in the early stage, has rapidly increased the demand for IE browser software, World Wide Web tool software and portal advertising, Igrit's revenue data growth in 1991 will also accelerate.

As long as the current performance growth rate can be maintained, Igret's annual loss in 1991 is expected to be controlled within US$500 million, which is far from exceeding Simon's limit.

Under the rapid growth trend of users for two consecutive months, facing the continuous IPO news released by the United States Online, various investment banks on Wall Street valued this new technology company more than $1 billion, and analysts at Morgan Stanley even gave a valuation of $2 billion.

It can be imagined that after completing all the 3-month free trial plan, the IPO valuation of AOL will definitely increase again.

In addition to the general direction, Westeros continues to make arrangements in some seemingly small new technology industries.

After showing Simon her business plan, C girl Claire soon set up a card camera company with the senior engineer who left Kodak.

At the same time, Claire also contacted a graphics processing software company that had just been established for more than a year.

The developer of the software is Thomas Noel. Noel first used Apple computers to develop a graphic editing software for processing black and white images in 1987, named Display. After two years of continuous research and development and improvement, the name of this software has also been changed to Photoshop and has begun to be used in the fields of scanners and digital typesetting.

After Simon received the news, he directly instructed James Rebel to buy out the software.

However, the Noel Brothers did not agree to sell the software, but also hoped to cooperate with Westeros.

After several negotiations between the two parties, Westeros invested US$800,000 to acquire 50% of the shares of the company established by Noel Brothers. At the same time, Noel Brothers will continue to master the research and development of Photoshop software.

Simon did not want the professional image processing software in his memory to become a presence like Meitu Xiuxiu, so he instructed the Noel brothers to develop two software at the same time. One continues to deepen the professional-level functions of Photoshop, which will be sold through the Igrit online software store in the future. The other is a simplified and free version of Photoshop, which is specially provided to Claire's card camera company as supporting software.

San Francisco.

Inside the mountain mansion in Woodside.

It was March 5th, and Simon came to Silicon Valley again yesterday to attend the monthly meetings of several companies in Igrit.

The female assistant did not squeeze herself out last night. Simon got up early and ran in the Woodside Mountains as usual.

At eight o'clock, when he returned to the villa, Jennifer had already prepared breakfast.

The two sat down in the restaurant, Jennifer ate breakfast and talked about his work casually: "I think if Egret continues to develop like this, he will sooner or later encounter antitrust obstacles. If you want to build a hardware ecosystem, you have to directly contact the interests of traditional technology giants such as Intel and IBM."

Simon aimed at the newspaper at hand, picked up the tableware and smiled, "Think about my personnel layout for Igret."

Jennifer turned his head slightly and thought for a moment, and soon caught something, saying, "Bats is in charge of the software business, Bezos is in charge of the network business. And, next, Ferguson may be in charge of e-commerce. Well, you made up your mind from the beginning to split Egret?"

"If we can not split, of course it would be better not to split," Simon nodded and said, "However, this possibility is very low. Major North American operators have now begun to enter the ISP business, which means that the expansion of the Internet industry will be further accelerated. Igrit is just because it is still losing a large scale, and many people cannot see the commercial potential contained in it. In addition, this company involves a completely emerging technology industry and will not invade the interests of traditional giants, so we do not encounter too much obstacles. However, when the industry expands to a sufficient output value scale, we cannot expect this state to continue."

Split Igrit was indeed a thought that Simon had from the beginning, because Igrit's involvement in the field contained too much industrial value.

Moreover, Simon did this mainly because of the development of Igrit himself. He did not want Igrit to suffer from serious large-scale company disease because he mastered too many resources. The Internet era has just begun, and he will face too many challenges in the future. If he does not intend to make progress and keep his complacency, even if he masters more resources, he will only encounter the fate of being eliminated in the future.

The two were chatting when Simon's private cell phone suddenly rang.

I answered casually, and before I could speak, a series of small screams came from the opposite side: "Ahhhh..."

This is Janet's voice.

Simon showed a helpless expression and came again.

Just as he was about to comfort him, Janet continued excitedly on the other side of the phone: "Dear, there is, there is, I'm pregnant, come back soon."

Simon was stunned for a moment, confirming that he heard it correctly, and subconsciously stood up.

Jennifer looked over in confusion.

Simon stood across the dining table and chatted with Janet for a while in a gentle tone. Xu Nuo immediately rushed back to Los Angeles, and then hung up the phone.

Jennifer also understood when she heard Simon and Janet’s conversation.

Knowing that Simon was a bit miserable by Janet for her child's affairs during this period, Janet finally got her wish before her 31st birthday. Although she couldn't help but feel a little savory, the female assistant put down the tableware and said, "Since that's the case, let's go back now."
Chapter completed!