Bono, who’s also recognized for his messianic mission to save the world from ourselves, owns 1.5 percent of the shares in Facebook via an investment firm he works through. Whenever Facebook shares start trading on the stock exchange, those stocks are expected to be worth a little less than $1 billion. He’ll surpass Sir Paul McCartney to become the richest rockstar in the world (I hesitate to say “richest musician” because there are other genres than rock ‘n roll out there).

Despite the Dr. Evil levels of wealth that the great sunglassed one will find himself, don’t be surprised if Bono uses his new riches for his many humanitarian projects. NME expects that some of this money will go toward several of Bono’s charity projects. That’s probably a safe bet, so let’s hope that the money finds its way to some good causes for people who need a hand.

Personally, I think Bono should just buy a Laputa-like floating island and go start over with this whole human race thing.

Sarah Lacy wrote earlier this morning that Elevation disclosed the move in "a recent letter to its limited partners."  Also, "This is on top of Elevation’s $90 million, 2.5 million share purchase back in November."

That’s an important detail, since there’s no reason to believe Elevation Partners would throw good money after bad.  Indeed, it makes sense to conclude that the original investment’s done better than predicted, and that whatever info Facebook’s supplied its shareholders with makes the future look even brighter.

Then it’s also necessary to note that Elevation’s move doesn’t represent any sort of hostile maneuver.  Lacy explained, "Facebook controls who buys its shares on the secondary market, and Elevation has tight ties with the company.  Elevation founders Roger McNamee and Bono were personal investors in Facebook, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s brother-in-law is Mark Bodnick, another Elevation partner."

We’ll try to avoid cliches about a "beautiful day," but this arrangement really does look like a win for all involved.

The slight catch for some people might be that Elevation Partners doesn’t have a great track record in terms of picking winners, with its investment in Palm earning the organization more than a few scornful headlines.

As CNET points out, Bono is on the board of Elevation Partners, which is an investor in iLike — and Valleywag’s Megan McCarthy notes that the connections are even more intertwined than just that if you look closer — but nevertheless, I think it’s a great idea.

The song is a preview of a tune called Waves of Sorrow, and it’s a nice long clip of Bono talking about the inspiration for the song and then kind of singing along and talking about it as he sings it. I admit that I’m a U2 fan (although the Bono “saviour of the world” act gets a little thin at times), but in any case I think it’s a pretty interesting use of Facebook.

After just three days of being up on Facebook’s iLike page and available to be added to users’ iLike widgets (and displayed in their feeds, of course) the song has more than 1.3 million fans, and there are over 9,000 wall posts. Will Bono be reading each one? Somehow I doubt it. In other iLike news, Billboard reports that the company has signed a deal for exclusive content with Keith Urban.C

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Launched in late 2003, AOL’s RED was MySpace when MySpace wasn’t cool, an online nest for teens, offering celebrity gossip, style advice, music, news, sports, and blogs. According to a January 2007 comScore report, RED attracts about two million unique visitors.

Antonio Borreill, an attorney for New York law firm Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, who represents the Cincinnati Reds, first filed opposition to RED in December of last year, updating the complaint last week.

The official protest appears to be inspired by AOL’s application for trademark of the term "Red," published in an October 3, 2006 edition of the Official Gazette.

The timing of the application explains why the Cincinnati Reds didn’t seem to have a problem with it before, and why the club didn’t go after the much-publicized (Red), U2 front man Bono’s campaign to raise awareness and money for AIDS in Africa.

Well, the PR nightmare of going after a charitable organization was probably reason enough not to oppose. But AOL’s trademark audacity was, apparently, the last straw.

The next obvious question is "can you trademark a color, or color word?" The answer is: sometimes.

While trademarking the color itself seems iffy and situation-dependent, as illustrated a Color Matters, RegisteringATradmark.com notes UPS has the market cornered on Brown.

There are other things to consider, like whether there is sufficient prior use, potential confusion between companies offering similar services, and genericization concerns.

Though colors sometimes are trademarked, it seems doubtful the Cincinnati ball club could make a case for confusion. However, they have been using the name "Reds" for upwards of a century now.      

Representatives of the Cincinnati Reds could not be reached for comment.

Back when Bono was the young and defiant face of U2, minus the sunglasses and stubble of today, it was easy to look at him and think the band would change the world. As the band ascended on the global stage, it has been Bono who has been most visible in trying to enable those changes.

Besides the meetings with global leaders, and the establishment of the ONE campaign to make poverty history, Bono has spoken extensively with the media about the efforts he supports. Now he has offered his name to the Yahoo Answers audience, and asked them a question:

“What can we do to make poverty history?”

Yahoo Answers has featured other notable people in its Ask the Planet promotion. Before Bono’s question appeared today, eminent physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking asked “How can the human race survive the next hundred years?”

That question has drawn 15,895 answers to date. Suggestions like colonizing other planets, a theory espoused by Dr. Hawking himself, found their way to Yahoo Answers.

While there probably is not a single answer that by itself offers the solution to the problem, parts of various answers may be helpful in constructing an overarching approach to surviving the next century. That may also hold true for Bono’s question on poverty.

Yahoo Answers does for modern web users what Usenet did long before Tim Berners-Lee conceived of the World Wide Web. It provides a forum, in a rich graphical format, for people to post questions and sift through answers to find the best response.

Like Usenet, posting a question does not always attract the best answers it can. That’s part of public participation; everyone has a different take on a subject, and some are more useful than others.

For a little while, Yahoo Answers may have a little impact on the way its users think about social issues. That has to be a good thing.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Product Red was a project co-founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver. Various companies, including Gap, Armani, and Converse, have joined the effort. The branding and fundraising plan is expected to have impressive results, but only time will tell-it was just formed in January of this year.

The mobile phone, produced through Bono’s partnership with the world’s number two handset maker, will only be available in the United Kingdom. It could still be an effective fundraiser, though. 10 pounds (about 19 American dollars) will be contributed for the sale of each phone, in comparison to the model’s retail price of 149 pounds ($280). But more interestingly, 5 percent of each phone owner’s monthly bill will be donated. Individuals can join the effort without losing their service or phone number by swapping their existing handset’s Sim card into a red phone.

Ron Garriques, president of Motorola Mobile Devices, said, “I would be very disappointed if this did not generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the global fight to fight AIDS.”

Bono, well known for his humanitarian efforts, has been quoted as saying, “We must join together to stop the scourge of AIDS and poverty.” Now, by purchasing a little red phone, consumers in the United Kingdom can work towards that goal.

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Bono, a founding member of the ONE Campaign, called Viewpoint “our Paul Revere in cyberspace,” due to the company’s provision of online advertising support through its Unicast advertising group as well as interactive creative services through Viewpoint’s creative services team.

The premise of ONE derives from Bono’s one-by-one approach to fighting AIDS and poverty, enlisting people one-by-one, fighting the cases one-by-one, and showing the steps people can take one-by-one.

In the months leading up to the G8 Summit last July, Viewpoint joined with ONE.ORG to enlist one and a half million Americans through an online public awareness campaign. Viewpoint, through its Unicast advertising group, delivered approximately 30 million online ads per day thanks to the generous ad space donations its received from its publishing partners including Time Warner’s AOL, 24/7 Real Media, Microsoft’s MSN, Google, MSNBC, The New York Times’ About.com, Gamespot.com, Accuweather.com, Right Media, ValueClick and Viacom’s CBS.com, CBS News and UPN.

“It is a testament to Bono’s phenomenal work to fight global aids and poverty that this campaign has been so successful so far,” said Patrick Vogt, CEO of Viewpoint. “The ONE Campaign has effectively employed the power of the web to galvanize people one by one toward this very worthy cause, and Viewpoint’s digital marketing technology is the perfect vehicle for reaching hundreds of millions of people across the web. Together with our publishing partners we can accomplish a great deal toward making these campaigns successful.”

Time normally picks a “Person of the Year” every year and there have certainly been some intriguing people to get that title, which used to be called “Man of the Year.” This year, the magazine split the honors between Bono, leader singer of U2, and Bill and Melinda Gates. While no one doubts Bono’s limitless energy in helping to feed the world’s poor and bring about peace in the world, the Gateses have the closest thing to an unlimited bankroll for any human alive. And they wield that money with the efficiency and passion, intelligence and conviction.

In the tech world, Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates are often maligned. Many suggest they have engaged in questionable business practices, they’re pricing is too high and they essentially have a monopoly on a lot of software. Bill Gates is also the wealthiest man on the planet, with an estimated wealth of somewhere over $50 billion dollars.

Time quoted Gates in a Fortune article from 2002, “”Well, when you have the resources that could make a very big impact, you can’t just say to yourself, ‘O.K., when I’m 60, I’ll get around to that. Stand by.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation runs a $29 billion grant for various charities. They watch where every penny goes. They approach this charity with the same eye for detail Gates built his empire on. Earlier in the year, the Foundation funded the “Great Challenges.” The word went out for scientists and their teams around the world to send in feasible projects that can make a difference. The most promising projects that fit the criteria were funded. These were mostly about public health issues.

The Gateses are still young and full of passion for their cause. They watch their charity like hawks because they want to make sure the money is spent right and efficiently. They’ve worked a lot with the singer Bono. Time quoted him also about Gates, “”He’s changing the world twice,” says Bono of Bill. “And the second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more.”

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Former stylist for U2, Lola Cashman was ordered to return Bono’s “iconic” Stetson cowboy hat he had worn in music videos like “Desire” and on the cover of 1988′s “Rattle and Hum” live album, and other items like a green sweatshirt, a pair of pants, a pair of earrings, and 200 photos of the band.

Cashman, author of Inside the Zoo With U2: My Life With the World’s Biggest Band) an unpopular missive among the band that was the subject), claims the hat was a gift from Bono she had received after a 1987 Joshua Tree concert in Arizona.

Cashman regaled the court with a tale of Bono running around backstage in nothing but his skivvies and cowboy hat. She said he gave her the hat and the earrings that night.

“Bono was running around offstage in his underpants with his hat on,” she told the court. “To me it symbolized all I had achieved in my work, working on this amazing tour.”

Bono was incensed by the charges that he had done any such thing and sued the woman, who had put up the items for auction at Christie’s in 2002.

Bono said the hat was an icon of the band and that giving the hat away “would be like the Edge giving away his guitar. It just wouldn’t happen.”

Justice Matthew Deery found Bono’s story more believable.

“The weight of evidence is entirely against the defendant’s version of events,” Deery ruled. “Bearing in mind all the evidence, it is highly unlikely that the items were given in this way.”

In addition to the clothing items, the judge ruled that Cashman unhand 200 photos he said violated her confidentiality agreement.

He then scolded her by stating that crazy stories about rock stars’ zany backstage shenanigans, including whoppers about them being trousers down in front of young females, were the worst type of malicious slander. That could never happen, he asserted, and she should be ashamed of herself. **

*The last bit about Donald Duck is a lie and should not be believed by anyone, especially those who actually do fight to fully clothe the ill-tempered bird, God help them.

**All claims in the final paragraph are untrue. But they are funny.