The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 7 hours and 19 minutes long and was read by Mike Chamberlain.

Think of it as the long-awaited "Facebook Story". Ben Mezrich, the author of the fabulous "Bringing Down the House," has done an exhaustive job of researching Facebook's genesis, and has created a work that is enough of a dramatization to make it almost a novel. To be sure, Mark Zuckerberg, the youthful founder of Facebook, did NOT sign off on this. And I cannot say I am surprised.

The story begins with Zuckerberg, and his friend, Eduardo Saverin, trying to meet girls at Harvard, where they are both undergrads. Mark gets an idea to create a website that archives photos of all the girls at Harvard and pairs random pictures for users of the site to choose which is hotter. While the site is in it's experimental phase, some of his computer science friends pass the site around and it goes viral in a short time and nearly gets him kicked out of school for hacking school databases and stealing the picture files that he used. His notoriety alerts some other students who were working on a social networking site of their own, and they approach him to help with it. He agrees, but then leaves them high and dry to create his own site, which goes on to become Facebook.

This is morality tale about friendship and how money changes everything. You will find yourself taking sides in this book, and perhaps even changing sides by the end of it. The Facebook relationship status "It's Complicated" is a fitting description of what happened between Mark and Eduardo. I think Mark was a lousy friend, and Eduardo was a lousy business partner. It's your call to decide which you think is worse.

The reader sounded so much like my favorite, Scott Brick, that it bumped this fun, interesting story into 4 star territory.

The Google Story, by David A. Vise

This audio book was 10 hours and 26 minutes long, produced in Windows Media format, and was narrated by Stephen Hoye.

This is the story of how two Stanford University PhD students created the word's most popular and successful search engine, Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford, and started to purchase all the cheap computers they could in an attempt to download the entire internet in their quest to create better search results.

This story covers their rise from students to startups to billionaires. There are details of their misadventures as a company with the motto: "Don't be evil". They have been criticized for mining personal data to improve their delivery of advertising as well as gathering information that could be abused by over reaching government authorities. Most troubling, in my estimation, was one of the founders' musings about the day when we might have the internet available to our brains on a microchip, making all the world's knowledge accessible at will.

A must read for anyone who wants to be hip to the world's most ubiquitous company. I give it 4 stars.

Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe and Kirby Heyborne

This audiobook came from Overdrive Audio via the Alachua County Library's website. It is in Windows Media Audio format, and it was 9 hours and 45 minutes long.

If you are interested in keeping your business alive and growing in the 21st Century, this thought-provoking book will help you come out of the economic Dark Ages.

Before hiring experts, look to the crowd. In today's global community, you can find out what will work and what will not by accessing niche groups who will not only tell you what they like, but help you build it as well. Collaborative effort is not just for your research team, and your team may not even be on your payroll. Enormously important projects with global scope and billions at stake are created by virtual communities of passionate enthusiasts in partnership with professionals. The Linux operating system, Wikipedia, and a host of smaller enterprises are examples of the amazing power of crowds. These crowds can now be assembled into working units on very technical projects by using the Internet, and even small companies do it.

If you already have a can-do attitude, this will take it up to another level and change your paradigm. I give this book 4 stars.

Power Play, by Joseph Finder

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audiobooks, through the website of the Alachua County Public Library. It was read by Dennis Boutsikaris, and was 8 hours and 30 minutes long, including an author interview.

Jake Landry is a lower level executive at an aircraft manufacturer. The company has recently gotten a new CEO, a woman, to clean up some sloppy business practices. Jake gets the call to come on one of those off-site team-building retreats where executives get to bond under rugged circumstances. He is the low man there, and he is not particularly ambitious. But he has a past that had to be expunged from his record when he turned 18.

As the opening night meeting is getting underway at the remote wilderness lodge, the entire executive team is captured by paramilitary types who are posing as errant hunters. Their goal is to force them to ransom themselves with a huge bank transfer, and they are willing to kill some of their hostages to make that point.

This story has excellent characters and a fast moving story that gets to the point without rushing things. It's a four star story.

Violation, by Darian North

This book was written in 1999, was 10 hours and 16 minutes long, and was narrated by Ed Sala.

A cautionary tale about chat rooms and the power of clever people to manipulate others in the online world. However, this story fails to get inside your head in a holistic way. It attempts to jumpstart that process periodically by trying to shock you, but it keeps sliding back into the same droning story about people who just aren't real enough.

A woman who was raped and suffered a brain injury 14 years earlier is now raising a son in another part of the country with the son she conceived on the night she was raped. She has been hiding this from her son, who knows his mom is lying to him about his father.

Their landlord is a retired LAPD detective who is idolized by the boy, and he tries to help the woman find her son after the kid runs away with the help of a man the boy met online. However, the woman and the landlord discover this separately, so mom thinks the ex-cop is the culprit. It's a cross country chase, which would have been a better story if the characters were better written. I give it 2 stars.

Double Tap, by Steve Martini

I am a longtime fan of Steve Martini, so when I found I could get his latest novel in audiobook format for FREE, I was quite excited. This recording is 13 hours and 45 minutes long, and is read by George Guidall.

Martini's legal thrillers are the best I have ever read, leaving Grisham in the dust, with lots of outstanding courtroom drama. Make a point of picking up The Judge, The Jury, The Arraignment, or any of his other titles that seem lawyer-oriented. Feel free to avoid Critical Mass. Recurring characters include Paul Madriani, a smart lawyer with a daughter named Sara whose wife has died of cancer, and Harry Hinds, a curmudgeonly legal sidekick who provides most of the comic relief in Martini's books.

In Double Tap, a woman software executive is killed in her home, assassination style. The weapon and silencer are found, separately, outside her beach home in a somewhat botched attempt to dispose of them. The weapon belonged to a previously employed private security detail member with whom she had been fooling around. The dismissed security man, Eliliano Luiz, is a former Army special forces member, and he is now in jail as the chief suspect.

Madriani cannot believe that this man would have left such an obvious trail of breadcrumbs back to himself, and starts looking for other reasons why someone would want this woman dead. As it turns out, she has connections with the Pentagon and had a falling out with them over a security program that she has been providing for Homeland Security.

This is a well-written story with a twist. It's also very well researched and somewhat alarming. I look forward to more just like it,and it gets 4 stars.