Ajax Girl

When Apple started running the anti-Vista commercial (above) mocking Microsoft for spending $300 million on Vista’s own ad campaign instead of on fixing its problems, I called it hypocritical:

Apple’s advertising budget is also pretty massive. I mean, I see more Apple commercials on TV than ads for Barack Obama. Apple is on track to spend more than $3.5 billion on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for its fiscal year that ended September 30. How much of that was spent on advertising? I don’t know, but 10 percent doesn’t seem unreasonable.

It turns out that I underestimated Apple’s advertising budget. Lindsay Blakely at Bnet (a former Business 2.0 reporter) found the actual numbers in a subsequent SEC filing. In its 2008 fiscal year that just ended last September, Apple spent a whopping $486 million on advertising. (In fiscal year 2007, it spent $467 million, and in fiscal year 2006 it spent $338 million).

Half a billion dollars on marketing. No wonder I think Apple products are so great.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TmHrcbNO4xE/

Tomorrow, YouTube will be showcasing its first live stream as it broadcasts its YouTube Live celebration, which will bring together a host of celebrities, musicians, and notable YouTubers for a massive event in San Francisco. The show will be streamed on YouTube beginning at 5 PM PST, and will include performances from Katy Perry, will.i.am, Joe Satriani, the Chocolate Rain guy (Tay Zonday), and a number of other musicians. I’m personally looking forward to a special appearance from the Mythbusters team.

YouTube hasn’t yet made any announcements regarding a livestreaming service for regular users (which would pit it directly against services like Ustream) but it won’t be surprising if we hear from them tomorrow about the company’s upcoming plans. We first heard about possible streaming functionality back in January, and later confirmed that it would be coming some time this year.

YouTube’s Chris Di Cesare says that the event may be the first of a series of annual live-streamed get-togethers celebrating the year in viral videos. We’ll have another post tomorrow with some of the highlights.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/tmm0e5em8Iw/

A 17 year old named Eric Calisto is about to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with disappointment. He’s asking Google to use a logo that he created on their site on December 2, his birthday, and he’s urging people to call, email and fax Google with their support.

Not going to happen.

But he may make a few dollars on those ads.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9lkBF6iVhHA/

In partnership with the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, we are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a 20% discount Thank You LeWeb

Without our sponsors TechCrunch would not be possible. Accordingly, we want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

RackSpace a provider of managed hosting solutions

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TechCrunch also is happy to announce two new sponsorship opportunities. First, CrunchGear is publishing a Holiday Gear Guide, which is the perfect way for your company to reach people as they research their purchases this holiday season. Second, we are now offering a full banner (468×60) on TechCrunch’s RSS feed, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please e-mail Dan Kimerling

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Source: TechCrunch
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Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).

Meezoog, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at Meezoog.com that attempts to determine how strong the connections are between users by analyzing their relationships on other sites across the web (it also asks you to manually input your relationship with each friend, but this isn’t required). The site presents a number of “paths” connecting you with each friend in a manner similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that helps users determine the degree of “social trust” they have with each user. At this point it’s too early to tell how well the system works, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Besides its social network, Meezoog also plans to offer Facebook and OpenSocial applications that allow users to estimate the nature of their connections with their friends, even if they aren’t on Meezoog’s network. This cross-network analysis is probably the company’s best shot at success - while Meezoog may be able to establish its standalone social network in some regional areas, it will have a very hard time directly competing with established networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Other companies have tried to do similar social connection strength mapping, including Linking Universe.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/X6y8u1yZc-o/

The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

Where does it go from here?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/WBLLB91-QLU/

If you were intrigued by BitGravity’s Multiview product that allows viewers to choose from six different camera angles as they watch an event, check out episode 177 of Diggnation today at 3 pm PST.

The regular “director’s cut” will be shown at at Diggnation.com. The customized version will be available here on the Revision3 website.

We’ve got a few screenshots of today’s show (actually, we’ve seen the show, but we can’t post it here, you’ll have to watch at 3 PM).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ndS71AhXea8/

When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows employees to sell shares to outside investors.

But in a letter dated October 13, 2008 (embedded below), Facebook’s lawyers argue that rule should not apply to Facebook because most of the shareholders are employees. The SEC granted the exemption.

So Facebook can keep issuing both restricted stock and options to new employees without fear of triggering the (costly) reporting requirements. As long as most of those shares stay inside Facebook, the company should be all right. But if enough employees take advantage of its program allowing them to sell shares to outsiders, and the number of outside investors grows beyond a handful or a few dozen, the SEC might want to revisit this decision.

Facebook Letter to SEC - Get more Legal Forms

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/CbtBjiHf2TE/

I’ve recently recognized a nasty coding habit I seem to be developing. It’s been developing for a few months now, and while I kick myself every time I discover myself doing it, the habit itself is remarkably hard to kick.

I’ve been working on enhancing our internal Queen Bee application, this time making it so we can more easily track the performance of our Job and Gig boards. The change itself is pretty straightforward, but I found that when it came time to build the actual UI, I got stuck.

I kept chasing my tail. I’d look at the existing reporting UI that we have for our other products, and then I’d start thinking what needed to change to adapt it for the Jobs/Gigs reports. That would then lead me to think about potential refactorings in the code needed to support the (hypothetical) UI changes. Thinking about the code refactorings would lead me back to the UI, where I would think some more about the visual impact of the code refactorings, and so I would go, loop after loop, ad nauseam.

It’s ironic that, even after nearly 4 years of drinking the Getting Real message almost every day, I’d get stuck in such a trap, because the solution really is to just stop pretending and make something. In my case, I had to sit down and just mock up the page, throw together some HTML with fake data in it, and see what it looked like. And it turned out that I didn’t need to change the existing UI or code much at all—the new stuff was actually independent enough that it stood almost completely on its own. Oh, the bitter, bitter irony! I had wasted almost two days worrying about a non-issue.

So, if you ever catch yourself playing mind games with your code, just stop and make something. Pretending is poison. Stop drinking it!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1416-stop-pretending

Pizza pie charts from The Economist’s “Get a World View” campaign. Philly pizzerias distributed the boxes which display pie charts with statistics related to world food distribution, emphasizing those used in pizza production (e.g. global wheat consumption, world cheese imports, arable crop land, etc.).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1415-pizza-pie-charts-from-the-economists-get