Bidding for an Australian's copy of Google's comic-book press release on its new Chrome browser closed after 17 bids at AU $454.99, or approximately $363. If all proceeds weren't being donated to charity, we'd have a truly disturbing waste of money on our hands here, especially considering the Chrome presser isn't even the best "Google" comic available on the auction site.
Click to viewDespite the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced no new products at the company's glorified press conference yesterday, the crowd's cheers were as blustery as they ever are at Apple events. But Newsweek's Dan Lyons, who must have bored enough by what was being said on stage to be paying so much more attention to the darkened audience, says he knows the reason why: Much of the crowd was clapping so loud because they were paid to.
In an interview after yesterday's iPod refresh announcement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that he could "stand to gain 10 or 15 pounds," but told CNBC's Jim Goldman "I'm doing fine, really." Jobs said he blamed what Goldman calls "the rampant speculation and rumors on the blogosphere about the issue," on "hedge funds with a big short position in Apple." Jobs is wrong.
The tenth anniversary festivities for search engine-turned-advertising company Google are in full swing, but don't expect the founders to invite all their old friends to the party in Greece. Tech blogger Om Malik hasn't heard from the original team in over a decade. It's another sign that the Valley has gone Hollywood. I'm reminded of a friend I met at a downtown L.A. hotel last year who complained that uncannily beautiful actor Adrian Grenier hadn't called since he'd achieved a little notoriety on HBO's Entourage. Imagine how you could treat old friends with a $140 billion market capitalization. [GigaOm] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)
Click to viewAs part of Electronic Arts's efforts to promote Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, the video game publisher gave away $35,340 in free gas at a station in a north London neighborhood. The game, set in Venezuela, uses gasoline as a form of currency. However, the scene that developed looked more like Baghdad shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with a line forty cars long and actors in camouflage fatigues trying to placate angry commuters trying to get out of their driveways. In the end, the company ended the giveaway with a little over half the free fuel doled out.
Cartoonist Scott McCloud's 1993 graphic non-fiction book, Understanding Comics, was a breakthrough piece of work. It explained the complex insides of comics writing and illustration in a way that was engaging and understandable to outsiders and fans, not writers and illustrators. By contrast, McCloud's marketing collateral for Google's Chrome browser is a crippled, half-assed effort.It's not that the work is too technical in scope. Understanding Comics went pretty deep on the elements and jargon of comics style. But this time around, many of McCloud's panels will be indecipherable except to Web engineers — the very opposite of what made Understanding Comics a hit. I doubt McCloud ran his work, whose words are attributed to "The Google Chrome Team," past a proofreader outside of Google. "Given what's known about mass browser exploits ..." mumbles a cross-armed product manager on the second page. My MSM editorial training kicked into gear: What are "mass browser exploits?" (I Googled the phrase. Zero results.) What about them am I supposed to already know as "given" so I can understand why they matter to Chrome? Any editor at O'Reilly would have thrown the line back for rewrite. By page three, McCloud has lost the entire non-webapp-coding world. "The Gears guys were saying that one of the problems with browsers is they're inherently single-threaded." The majority of misfortunates who try to read this comic on Tuesday will have no idea who the Gears guys are. They'll puzzle at the statement browsers inherently frimble frotz foobar. The rest of the 38-page book reads like the middle of a Neal Stephenson novel. Did you know that taking screenshots and creating a cryptographic hash is an imprecise way to compare layouts? It's true.
Have you heard about Google's "Big Tent," the $100 luxury newsroom Google has set up for bloggers at the Democratic National Convention? If not, here's another story on the Internet where reporters go, Oh man, Google is totes on the pulse, giving all the intrepid young blogger kids at the Democratic National Convention this week a safe place to get massaged for free by ladies and plug in their 'iPones" — read the label — while they change the world together!
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced that the site had reached a nice, round 100 million active users by way of a status update on his profile. Though he may have been scooped by Dave Morin, a senior manager in Facebook's platform group — on Twitter. Which should make for an awkward meeting. Marketing at least used the right tools to trumpet Facebook's reach, but they might also expect a grumpy young master soon, too. Why?
Ploddingly methodical reporters at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa pored over Google Maps and found the company's camera-equipped trucks photographed more than 100 private roads in Sonoma County, snapping photos of "Private Road" and "No Trespassing" signs as they barged on past, shooting through secluded living-room windows hundreds of feet beyond property barriers.My favorite shot is the guard dog on private Simone Road in Sonoma. Google spokesliar Larry Yu swore up and down that Google trains its drivers not to do this, they give them specific routes to follow, they hire local drivers who know the area, blah blah blah —- all of which Yu retracted after a reporter talked to a driver who refuted the whole story.
We know that Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis likes to feed his pinup bulldogs Taurus and Fondue burgers from In-n-Out and Pinkberry froyo (to keep their coats glossy and brains brand-aware, we're assuming). Little did we know that he's also eating his own dog food. In a monstrous essay sent via telegraph email titled PR Strategies for Startups, he offers his tips on garnering free publicity by gaming the press. A lot of it is stuff you probably can't get away with unless you're already wealthy, have cute dogs, and are named Jason Calacanis.But in the section, "How to bond with a journalist," he suggests that "you can cut to the front of the line by spending just 30 minutes researching the journalist you're pitching." We're not sure what's creepier: (A) that Calacanis emailed the piece directly to me and very special contributor Paul Boutin, nagging us to post it, or (B) that his suggestions describe the duties of the minion he employs to monitor us.
Lily Lin, BitTorrent's PR rep, wants to know who Valleywag's source is about the company's layoffs yesterday. Lily, you have this all wrong. You tell us things you're not supposed to. The company's statement, the parsing of which we welcome in the comments:
A Yahoo tipster who sat through a webcast of the company's annual meeting lets us know that Brad Williams, Yahoo's vice president of corporate communications, was actually caught on video sleeping during the shareholder powwow. Hey, look, all those open letters from CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock don't write themselves, and now that barbarian shareholder Carl Icahn has been mostly placated with a board seat bribe, let the man catch a few winks, kay? Anyone who sends us a copy of the footage wins some kind of prize — such as not having to report to Williams or communications chief Jill Nash ever again. Full account of the continuing reorg and napping spokesmonkey after the jump.
We didn't even have to condense the latest statement Waggener Edstrom uberflack Frank Shaw sent on Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock's comments at today's shareholder meeting about Microsoft's botched negotiations to buy Yahoo: "Yahoo is attempting to rewrite history yet again with statements that are not supported by the facts.” The three-word version: "So's your mom."
I'm sure I'll be hearing this one at parties for months: 19 percent of American marketers say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story, according to a survey by PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee. 1 in 12 say they've sent a gift to an editor or producer to place a news story. 1 in 10 say they have an "unspoken agreement" to trade coverage for ad buys. Take a few seconds to pump your fist and shout I knew it! Now spot the hole in this story: Marketing people don't meet with editors. Marketers meet with the sharks from ad sales, who'll tell them whatever opens their checkbooks. 1 in 5 American marketers has totally been had. (Photo by yomanimus)
It's Gaelic for "trainwreck." The launchpad implosion of Cuil on Monday is a lesson for startup founders. Cuil had a solid hook: A search engine with more pages than Google, built at a fraction of the cost. But by Tuesday, Cuil was The Little Search Engine that Couldn't. What did they do wrong? I can't believe I'm saying this, but the company would have done better with a more traditional product launch — the kind that usually bores me stiff. Here's what they missed:
Now we get it: Publicists at Google knew that Cuil was going to launch today, with coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. How did they know? Because reporters called them for comment last week, seeking a response to Cuil's claim that it has the largest index of any search engine. That's why last Friday, Google's flacks hastily typed up a blog post announcing that Google had reached the 1-trillion-URL mark, slapped the names of a couple of software engineers on it, and made sure the national media were aware of this awesome story. Normally, a milestone event like this — 1 trillion URLs!!! — would be announced on a Monday, not a Friday. As a former search engine builder myself, here's what I think: Cuil is a much better pop-culture media story than it is a search engine right now. But Google's image-wranglers are aware their company is now the Goliath to everyone else's David in journalists' simplified minds. It may be folklore, but that kind of story only has one ending.
"You think I'm an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong," Apple CEO Steve Jobs told New York Times writer Joe Nocera, in the course of Nocera's reporting on Apple's cult of secrecy. The top subject, of course, is Jobs's health. Jobs insisted on speaking to Nocera off the record, so we cannot know what, exactly, has gone wrong with Jobs's body of late. We do know this much, however, thanks to Nocera: Top Apple flack Katie Cotton, who has long put Jobs's interests above those of Apple shareholders', flat-out lied when she attributed Jobs's gaunt appearance to "a common bug."Apple's secretive ways have paid off for it in turning every product release into a marketing event. But by applying that same Kremlin-like opaqueness to its corporate affairs, Apple has gone astray. "By claiming Mr. Jobs had a bug, Apple wasn't just going dark on its shareholders," Nocera writes. "It was deceiving them." It's one thing for Jobs to lie about Apple's unreleased gadgets — for example, when he publicly dismissed the notion of producing an iPod that played video in 2004, even as Apple was secretly working on one. That kind of maneuver can be put down to competitive misdirection. But to extend it to the health of a public company's CEO? Unseemly. As unseemly, really, as the Apple apologists among us who join Apple PR in repeating the mantra that Jobs's health is a "private matter". Wishing doesn't make it so. With Jobs personally accounting for a quarter of Apple's market cap, it's everyone's concern. Apple's fans have a choice: They can join Jobs himself in insulting award-winning reporters like Nocera, and dismissing the whole affair. Or they can face reality: Steve Jobs let his personal flack lie for him — and they bought it. That must really bug them.
If you can stand it, it's worth watching a particular excerpt from CNBC's interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg twice. First watch the version CNBC put on the air, embedded above. In that clip, Zuckerberg answers a question sounding sure of himself, speaking in clear, declarative sentences, and smoothly using his talking points, not just rattling them off. Compare it to the clip below of Zuckerberg answering the same question in an unedited version of the interview CNBC reporter Julia Boorstin embedded on her blog. The difference shows CNBC editors' talents — and just how far Zuckerberg has to go before it's safe to put a microphone near him. It all goes downhill after Zuckerberg begins to answer a straightforward softball from Boorstin — "What is the new site design and what does it mean for the user experience?" — by saying, "So for those of you who don't know, I, we just announced, um and launched, started rolling a new site design."
