Business Diary: Book of Jobs is a hit in China

That Steve Jobs biography you might have heard of has been called a must-read for Apple fans and wannabe tech gurus alike, but at one Chinese company the book is literally required reading. Xiaochuan Wang, an earnest computer programming prodigy who is now chief technology officer at Sohu, a Nasdaq-listed search engine, has bought 500 copies. "For my colleagues," he says. "I hope they can learn from it." Diary detects just a hint of menace, and thinks Sohu might have a little Steve Jobs in the making here.

Gupta looks to get the gods on side

Rajat Gupta, the ex-Goldman Sachs director and sometime telephone contact of insider dealer Raj Rajaratnam, surrendered to the FBI on Diwali because he believed it was auspicious, apparently. "He believes he is innocent and the gods will protect him if humans fail," a friend told The Wall Street Journal. Then again, Mr Rajaratnam was told by an ola-leaf reader that he'd be acquitted...

Prepare to go hopping mad

Leapfrog's LeapPad has been marketed as the iPad for kids and has already been populating the lists of this year's top 10 Christmas toys. There'll be tears before bedtime in many British homes when parents realise how difficult the thing is to connect to a Mac, and anything but basic queries to the UK helpdesk have to be referred to the US. And if Leapfrog doesn't get it sorted by Christmas, you can expect tears in the boardroom before too long, too.

Blacks provokes Met discon-tent

Julia Reynolds, the new chief executive of Blacks Leisure, said the outdoor retail group had sold a "disproportionate amount of tents" to the hordes of anti-capitalist protesters camping close to its store by St Paul's Cathedral in London. However, she admitted: "The police [subsequently] popped in and said could we refrain from selling tents, so we agreed to do that."