(CNN) – On Sunday, Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees passed away from cancer, adding to a series of untimely deaths of fading music icons over the last few months.

The Bee Gees enjoyed their heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s with disco hits such as “Saturday Night Fever,” “Staying Alive,” and “How Deep is Your Love.”  While the group’s popularity declined over the following decades, Robin Gibb’s death will breathe new life into the group’s record sales in the United States, if history is any indication.

Soundscan, which provides data on U.S. record sales, won’t have data on Bee Gees sales until next week.  But Gibb’s passing follows the death last week of another 1970s legend, ‘Queen of Disco’ Donna Summer.
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(CNN) – Which platform is better to advertise on, Google or Facebook?

On Tuesday, General Motors announced it will stop paid advertising on Facebook. "This happens as a regular course of business and it's not unusual for us to move things around various media outlets," the company said in a statement. But coming the week Facebook has its initial public offering, the announcement is raising more than a few eyebrows and begs the question:

Is Facebook really worth $100 billion?

WordStream, a U.S.-based search engine marketing company, released a study Tuesday comparing the advertising influence of display ads on Google versus ads on Facebook. The results: While Facebook is good, Google is better.
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(CNN) – Dust off your old comic books: a collector has sold a near-mint copy of the first issue of the Batman comic book for a whopping $850,000.

The seller reaped a stunning return on investment, after paying $315,000 for the No. 1 issue two years ago, according to the auctioneer.  The comic book was priced a mere 10 cents when it was published in 1940.

The sale to an investor partnership was arranged privately by Dallas-based collectibles auction house, Heritage Auctions.  The identities of the buyer and sellers have not been revealed.

Playing on nostalgia, vintage comic book sales have been on the rise in recent years.  A rare comic book collection reaped Heritage Auctions over $8.9 million in February, breaking the company’s own world record of $6.03 million from May 2011.  According to Heritage, comic auctions grossed no more than $2.2 million when the company began auctioning comics over a decade ago.
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(CNN) – As the “Queen of Burlesque,” Dita von Teese has seduced audiences worldwide with high-class striptease – but some may know her best as the ex-Mrs. Marilyn Manson.  Now von Teese is expanding into entrepreneurship with her new fragrance.

The burlesque dancer launched her perfume in “Dita von Teese” in the UK on May 1 after launching in Berlin in October.

Von Teese says her perfume will not be for everyone – although she said her marketing people wouldn’t allow her to put an 18-and-over age restriction on the product.  “I want you to think this is the perfume for a seductress, for the wicked city woman. This is not for the girl next door,” she told CNN’s Richard Quest.
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(CNN) Every three years city officials here in Vancouver comb the street corners, counting each and every person who doesn't have a home.

In 2011 they tracked down 2,623 people sleeping rough.

Housing is at a premium in Vancouver. Prices are the highest in Canada and affordable homes are in demand. This is North America's most expensive city, according to the Economist. The pressure for housing is a large part of the homelessness equation.
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(CNN) – Former Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan – rebounding from his “Appetite for Destruction” that cost him his pancreas (and nearly his life) – now has an appetite for investment.

McKagan has launched a financial management firm for musicians, educating fellow rockers on how to manage their own wealth.

“You have no experience of money and if you suddenly get a million or two million dollars or more, you’re just in foreign territory,” McKagan told CNN’s Richard Quest. “If you’re a millionaire, there comes a point when you are too embarrassed to ask: What is a mortgage, what’s a bond, what’s a stock?”
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(CNN) – Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos plans to dive 14,000 feet below the surface and raise the F-1 engines that fired Neil Armstrong to the moon in July 1969.

Just days earlier, producer and director James Cameron lived out his own real-life adventure, plunging solo to the deepest point known in the world’s ocean – 35,800 feet under the surface.

Not to be outdone, British businessman Richard Branson has announced plans for his own deep dive. “The Puerto Rico Trench is the deepest place in the Atlantic and is deeper than Mount Everest is high,” Branson says on the website.

“It should prove to be quite an adventure.”

A bevy of wealthy entrepreneurs are setting off for extremes, be it the depth of the ocean or the widths of space.
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(CNN) – Amid a rough political battle of the U.S. Republican presidential candidates, being caught in the middle is not something companies usually want.

But Ohio Art, producer of the child’s toy Etch A Sketch, is not complaining after a political firestorm in the U.S. caused the company’s share value to more than double in less than three days.
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(CNN) – Earlier this week, voters in Switzerland went to the polls and said "no" to an additional two weeks vacation a year.

In a national referendum, 66.5% opposed the chance to put Switzerland in line with its neighbor Germany, where employees enjoy six-week paid vacation every year.

The Swiss apparently considered previous warnings of the government and business representatives who claimed that an additional fortnight of paid holidays increase labor costs and put their economy at risk.
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Hong Kong (CNN) - China’s state-owned cigarette monopoly, the China National Tobacco Corporation, may have a larger annual net profit than HSBC and Walmart, according to a report released this week by the Industrial Bank Co Ltd.

A rare glimpse into the tobacco-giant’s finances revealed a net income of 117.7 billion yuan (US$18.7 billion) in 2010 on sales of 770.4 billion yuan.

According to Bloomberg, HSBC reported $16.8 billion of profit for its most recent fiscal year while Wal-Mart reported a net income of $15.7 billion. The 2011 figures of China National Tobacco Corp. were not given.
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