Category: Tech news

On every earnings call, someone always asks for specific sales numbers. And companies always duck those questions. But not today. When someone asked how the Apple TV is doing since its relaunch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave a very specific answer. “In a short amount of time, we’ve already sold a quarter million.” He quickly made it a bit more clear: “over 250,000.”

Jobs is clearly happy with how the new Apple TV is doing so far. “It’s a great product and its $99 price point is very enticing,” Jobs says. He notes that the Apple has completely moved the product over to the streaming model. You can either stream from the iTunes store, from a computer in your house, and soon from your iPhone or iPad with AirPlay.

As we’ve noted previously, this new Apple TV strategy does seem to make sense for now. It simplifies things at a killer price point. At the same time, Apple needs to get and give access to more TV show rentals. That’s a huge weak spot for the service right now.

Microsoft has just announced that Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Software Architect is stepping down from this position. The full letter CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees is pasted below.

Ozzie assumed the chief software architect’s role in June 2006. In his role, Ozzie was responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Prior to this role, Ozzie was chief technical officer from April 2005 to June 2006. He assumed that position in April 2005 after Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a next-generation collaboration software company he formed in 1997.

In the note, Ballmer writes that Ozzie will remain at Microsoft until he retires (it’s unclear when that will be). Ballmer notes that Ozzie’s role as CSA role was unique and he will not be filling the position at this time.

Ozzie has been Microsoft’s cloud evangelist of sorts over the pas few years.

From: Steveb
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2010
To: Microsoft – All Employees
Subject: Ray Ozzie Transition

This past March marked a significant milestone for the company when, in a speech at the University of Washington, I sent a message to the world that we’re ‘all in’ when it comes to the cloud. In that speech I noted that Ray’s Internet Services Disruption memo nearly five years ago, and his work since, stimulated thinking across the company and helped catalyze our drive to the cloud.

As a company, we’ve accomplished much in the past five years as we look at the cloud and services. Windows Live now serves as a natural web-based services complement to both Windows and Office. SharePoint and Exchange have now decidedly embraced the cloud. And by conceiving, incubating and shepherding Windows Azure, Ray helped ensure we have a tremendously rich platform foundation that will enable app-level innovation across the company and by customers for years to come.

With our progress in services and the cloud now full speed ahead in all aspects of our business, Ray and I are announcing today Ray’s intention to step down from his role as chief software architect. He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization – bringing the great innovations and great innovators he’s assembled into the groups driving our business. Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments. We have tremendous opportunities in the entertainment space overall, and I’m excited about what we can accomplish. Beyond that, Ray has no plans at this time. While he’ll continue to report to me during the transition, the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure. We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market.

While Ray will be onboard for a while, I’d like to thank him today for his contributions to Microsoft, both as a leader and as a long-time Microsoft ISV. As an early ISV, Ray contributed significantly to the early success of Windows. Since being at Microsoft, both through inspiration and impact he’s been instrumental in our transition toward a software world now centered on services. He’s always been a ‘maker’ and a partner, and we look forward to our continuing collaboration as his future unfolds. Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud, and positioned us well for future success.

Please join me in thanking Ray and wishing him well.

Steve

TLDR.it is a web application that summarizes long winded articles and even longer winded RSS feeds into small, medium and long versions for those of us with truncated attention spans. “When I’m reading a story on CNN or NY Times, I want to know more than the high points but don’t want to read 6 pages of text,” says creator Jeremy McAnally. Word.

In fact, this post used to be really really excruciatingly long, with pie charts and graphs and quotes from analysts along the lines of “We estimate the size of the ‘too long didn’t read’ market at $6 million by 2013 …” but then we got distracted and just fed it into the TL;DR summarization machine for your quick ADD-addled enjoyment.

Built in around 48 hours, TLDR.it is currently in “project mode,” though McAnally does hint that he has a few ideas for monetization or just selling the service outright. My colleague Robin Wauters and I actually can’t wait until McAnally builds a feature that does exactly the opposite, turns a tweet into an essay.

Watch out tech journalism!

Thanks: HN

You don’t need to look any further than Apple’s stock price over the past several months to know that they’re on a roll. A year ago, the stock price was at about $190 a share. Today, it closed at $317.93 a share — an all-time high. In fact, they’ve hit several all-time highs this month alone. Their market cap is quickly approach $300 billion. And now the company has just announced their Q4 earnings. And once again — boom. But a boom with a couple caveats.

Just as with last quarter, Apple easily beat the earnings estimates. The company posted $20.34 billion in revenue and $4.31 billion in profit — both new records for Apple. EPS was $4.64 (Wall Street consensus had been $4.06 and Apple’s guidance had been $3.44). A year ago, Apple posted revenue of $12.21 billion with a profit of $2.53 billion ($2.77 EPS). All that said, gross margin did drop a bit, to 36.9 percent down from 41.8 percent a year ago.

The key product numbers: 3.89 million Macs during the quarter, 14.1 million iPhones, 9.05 million iPods, and 4.19 million iPads. Aside from iPods, each of those is a new record for the company. The number of iPhones sold is probably the most amazing stat there. As CEO Steve Jobs very specifically notes in the PR, Apple sold 2 million more iPhones last quarter than RIM sold BlackBerry devices. He also notes that “we still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year” — *cough* Wednesday *cough*

Given how quickly the iPad sold out of the gate (3.27 million in the first quarter it was available), the 4.19 million may seem a little low. But that also means Apple sold more iPads than Macs for the first time — and again, it only took two quarters of existence to do that.

More:

• Steve Jobs: Apple Has Already Sold Over 250,000 New Apple TVs
• Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”
• Steve Jobs: “The iPad Is Clearly Going To Affect Notebook Computers”
• Apple And Google: The Activation Pissing Match Continues

The earnings call will be starting at 2 PM PT. We’ll take notes live below (paraphrased):

Peter Oppenheimer, CFO:

• We’re extremely pleased to announced the conclusion of a great year for Apple. New all-time records for Mac, iPhone, iPad. Highest quarterly revenue and earnings ever.
• 3.9 million Macs — new record by over 400,000. 27 percent year over year growth.
• Double digit growth in both portable and desktop. iMac and MacBook very strong.
• 3 -4 weeks of Mac channel inventory.
• 9.1 million iPods vs. 10.2 million a year ago. But we just announced new ones.
• Over 70 percent market share still
• iPod is still the top-selling MP3 player in most of the countries we track.
• iTunes revenue over 1 billion dollars this quarter. iTunes 10 is out there now.
• 14.1 million iPhones versus 7.1 million a year ago. Huge growth.
• 166 carriers in 89 countries for iPhone now.
• Asia, Europe, and Japan are very strong. And we’re in China now too.
• Fortune 500 companies continue to get on board
• 3.3 million iPhones in channel inventory now. Have a sizable backlog now, but that wasn’t the case earlier
• Almost 4.2 million iPads sold — now in 26 countries.
• Good enterprise adoption rate
• 65% of Fortune 100 are deploying or trying out iPad
• Revenue from iPad (and accessories) was $2.8 billion.
• We have 3 to 4 weeks of channel inventory now.
• Expanding to Walmart, Target, Verizon, and AT&T stores now.
• iOS sales 125 million last month cumulative
• In November iOS 4.2 is coming — AirPrint coming
• 200,000 registered iOS developers now.
• 65,000 games and entertainment titles — over 30,000 apps just for iPad
• We’re pleased with iAds so far.
• Apple retail stores 3.57 billion revenue — new record
• Opened 24 stores last quarter — 16 outside the U.S. Our four China stores are the highest trafficked in the world
• 317 stores worldwide now. 84 outside of the U.S.
• 74.5 million people in stores last quarter
• 40 to 50 more stores in FY2011 we think. We’ll be replacing some stores in the U.S. too.
• Cash now $51 billion. Increase in $5.2 billion this last quarter.
• full year sales 40 million iPhones.
• 7.5 million iPads sold so far.
• This year, Apple generated 5 times the revenue and 10 times profit we did 5 years earlier.
• for Q1 2011: we expect revenue of about $23 billion and we expect earnings per share of about $4.80

Steve Jobs, CEO:

• I don’t usually participate in these calls. But I just couldn’t help dropping by for our first 20 billion quarter.
• iPhone sales have been huge — well ahead of expectations
• Handily beat what RIM sold this past quarter. “I don’t see them catching us in the foreseeable future“
• They’re in a tough space now. It’s going to be a challenge for them. They’re the third platfrom after
• What about Google? Last week Schmidt reiterated 200,000 devices — they have 90,000 apps.
• We activate 270,000 iOS devices a day for the last 30 days — nearing 300,000 now in a few of those days. 300,000 apps now.
• they aren’t reporting how many Android phones shipped each quarter. “We await to see if Android or iPhone was the winner
• “We find this a bit disingenuous” – re: open versus close.
• When you hear open you think Windows — but Android is very fragmented.
• HTC and Motorola install proprietary OS versions
• “Twitter client TwitterDeck (TweetDeck — I assume)” – multiple hardware and software iterations provide a daunting challenge.
• iPhone has two versions of the software to test again (current and past)
• There will be at least four stores on Android. This confuses customers and makes it hard on developers.
• “This is going to be a mess for both users and developers”
• Even if Google were right and the issue is closed versus open — “open systems don’t always win“
• Google flirted with this with the Nexus One phone.
• But this is a smokescreen. “Fragmented versus Integrated” — Android is becoming more fragmented by the day.
• We think Apple and not the users should be the sys admin.
• “We believe integrated with trump fragmented every time.“
• We are confident it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach.
• Now as for the upcoming tablets from competitors — there are a handful of them
• Almost all use 7 inch screen — iPad nearly 10 inch screen.
• Users have to sand down their fingers if they want to use these.
• 7-inch tablets are “tweeners” too big for a smartphone, too small for a tablet.
• not enough apps. poor pricing, etc.
• these tablets are going to be DOA — Dead on Arrival. Orphan products. “Sounds like lots of fun ahead“

Q&A

Q: How are constraints on iPad now?

Tim Cook, COO: We’re in good shape now. We have new partners and inventory for the upcoming holiday quarter.

Q: What are the headwinds on gross margins?

PO: We did say we thought there would be some — but we did better than we thought. iPhone sales were huge.

Q: Steve, talk about the iPad opportunity. What do you think of this business a year or two years down the road?

SJ: “The iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers.” I think the iPad proves it’s not a question of “if” but a question of “when”. Things will continue to change over the next few years. It’s surprising how much interest there is in business. “It’s being grabbed out of our hands.” From board rooms to nurses and doctors and hospitals. “The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we have a tiger by the tail here.” This is a new model of computing that we already have people trained on thanks to the iPhone.

Q: Will this be the second biggest business (behind iPhone)?

SJ: I can’t predict. We’re already shipping more of them than Macs though.

Q: Any updates on Flash?

SJ: Flash memory? We love flash memory (laughs).

Q: How is iPad supply/demand.

TC: It has been extraordinary, I can’t predict when we’ll be able to meet demand. iPhone 4 took iPhone demand to a whole new level too.

Q: You are the tablet market right now. Can Apple sustain share growth for tablets?

SJ: I have a hard time envisioning what competitors strategies are. They can’t match us in price. Flash hasn’t presented any problem at all. Most of the video on the web is now in HTML5. We’re out to win this one. And we’re not done yet.

Q: Are smartphones a zero-sum game?

SJ: Most phones in the world are still non-smartphones. Those will convert to smartphones. There will be room for a number of companies to be successful. Right now it’s a battle for developers. And the mindshare of customers. “Right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.”

Q: Why are margins going down?

PO: It’s a higher than expected mix of new iPods and more iPad sales — pricing is very aggressive.

Q: How is your hobby doing? Apple TV.

SJ: We don’t talk about unannounced products, but I’m happy to talk about Apple TV. We have gone to a streaming model — it’s complete streaming. Soon to be streamed from your iPhone and iPad too with AirPlay. I can report in a short amount of time we’ve already sold a quarter million. Over 250,000. It’s a great product and its 99 price point is very enticing.

Q: What about the market share play for the iPhone?

SJ: Our goal is to make the best product — not to be the biggest. Nokia is the biggest. They’re good at that. We don’t want to be them, we want to be like us and make the best products. In our part of the market, Android is our biggest competitor. They out-shipped us in the June quarter while we were gearing up for iPhone 4. The numbers are out yet for last quarter, but we’ll see how we did. “We don’t know how to make a great smartphone for $50.”

Q: What about the tablet competition?

SJ: The reason we wouldn’t make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we wouldn’t want to hit a certain price point, we just think it’s too small for the software.

Q: With over $50 billion in cash now, what about returning money to shareholders?

SJ: We believe there are one or more strategic opportunities that may come along. And with the cash we have, we can do something. The money isn’t burning a hole in our pockets, we’ve been smart with it. We’d like to continue to keep our powder dry. There are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.

Q: What about other carriers for the iPhone? A lot of pressure there?

TC: The pressure is really only on the supply. Everyone we’re doing business with wants more supply. That’s the pressure I feel.

Q: Why do you think you have an advantage on the price point with the iPad?

SJ: Part of it is that we engineered so much of it ourselves. We did the A4 chip. And we learned a lot from the iPod and iPhones. Others have to buy things on the market with middlemen, who take a cut. We’re efficient. This is a product we’ve been training for for the past decade.

That’s a wrap.

[photo: flickr/jasonr611]

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner is now greenlighting social games. His personal investment company, Tornante, is backing an LA startup, Diversion, which is about to launch a new social game on Facebook called FameTown. According to an SEC filing, the amount of the seed round was $300,000.

FameTown is modeled after Zynga’s FarmVille or Mafia Wars, except that you try to become a Hollywood player and produce movies instead of building a farm. The game, which will launch in beta as a Facebook app on November 1, starts out as star map of Hollywood, with a studio area, a nightlife area, a shopping area, and your profile (see screenshots below). You earn “favors” (the currency of the game) by producing movies and you spend energy in the nightlife area, which includes bars, hotels, and the “Underbelly.” Your friends in the game can help promote your movie with buzz or sell their friends’ secrets to the paparazzi.

You can use the favors that you earn to buy skills such as a French accent or comedic timing, movie props, or hire staff such as a personal assistant or an agent. Each time you release a movie, it gets a certain number of stars depending on how much effort and resources you put into it. You start out on the D list, and try to claw your way up to the A-List.

Eisner was introduced to the company by Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who is an adviser. “I kept on going back to it,” Eisner tells me. One opportunity he sees is in tying the game to promotions for real movies. For instance, one of the movies players will be able to produce will be Burlesque, an upcoming Sony Pictures film starring Cher and Christina Aguilera. “You can imagine the confluence of the social networks, the real world, the PR world, the bit-part world, and the promotion world,” says Eisner. The game could also be expanded beyond movies to TV, fashion, and other parts of the entertainment world.

I’m not talking about the privacy of Twitter’s millions of users- who they follow, what they retweet and the inner-sanctum of their DMs. I’m talking about the privacy of Evan Williams– one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the Web 2.0 era, yet one who doesn’t have Gawker photographers come to his house, doesn’t have snarky movies made about him and doesn’t have many hit pieces written about him either.

The closest Williams came to scandal and privacy invasion was when TechCrunch published some of his hacked emails, and much of the world just sympathized with Williams rather than piling on. Williams can be as quiet, shy and awkward as any Valley wunderkind, but somehow he’s never called snobby or aloof. He’s generally regarded as the nice guy in Silicon Valley.

The backlash against popular, iconic founders seems inevitable in the age of blogging and social media and it doesn’t take a degree in sociology to figure out that a lot of that has to do with jealousy– whether its over Kevin Rose’s charisma or Mark Zuckerberg’s billions. So how has Williams eluded this? He’s managed to keep himself from becoming iconic despite co-founding, funding and running one of the most iconic social media sites in the world.

In the early days of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was the front man. Even when Williams took over as CEO, he took pains to give credit to his co-founders when he did a high-profile appearance like Oprah, or brought a co-founder with him, like he did at the Commonwealth Club last week. It was co-founder Biz Stone who took the enviable turn on Stephen Colbert’s show, and while we were kidding about now-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s turn as male model, co-founder Biz Stone is actually starring in a vodka ad– twice. He’s having a drink with himself bearing the titles “Twitter Pioneer” and “Nerd of the Year.” That’s akin to poking nerds who haven’t been successful with a stick. Mark my words: Haters are gonna hate. It’s exactly the kind of moonwalking that Williams has assiduously avoided.

Even when Williams ousted Dorsey and became CEO, he quickly tapped his friend and Feedburner co-founder Dick Costolo to be COO and anyone shocked and outraged that Costolo was promoted a year later, doesn’t know Williams. The biggest knock I’ve heard made on him by people close to the company is that he surrounds himself with friends, as opposed to (necessarily) the right people for the job. (A claim Costolo addresses in this video interview.) The flipside of that is that Williams isn’t a loner, and by the same token, he isn’t an attention hog.

The best I’ve heard anyone explain this ability to avoid the spotlight was Williams back when Twitter was starting and he encouraged Dorsey to be the CEO. He said he just wasn’t happy being “the guy”– never mind that Twitter was spun out of Wiliams’ previous company using exclusively Williams’ money. Still, given the trappings of ego endemic to human nature, it’s surprising he never got seduced by the spotlight.

It’s no doubt been strategic too. Williams has been in the Valley long enough to see the dangers and limited upside of too much hype. To wit: Twitter has a habit of not over-hyping itself– witness its $1 billion valuation which seems downright paltry compared to Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Of course, to people outside of our frothy Web economy, another word for “paltry” could be “reasonably valued”– this is a company that takes pains not to hype itself despite a revolving door of celebrities and a Twitter segment on nearly every news and entertainment show. Arguably just the brand “Twitter” is worth $1 billion. And since Williams was the first investor in the company, the company’s muted valuation has kept his net-worth muted, leaving him off lists of the youngest billionaires that Zuckerberg can’t seem to avoid.

Up-and-coming CEOs should take note: You can keep your privacy in the world by keeping your product, not your personality, the star.

Ahhhhhhhhhahhhaha!

The inmates are now running the asylum.

All anyone is talking about today is the series of articles that the Wall Street Journal has written about a “Privacy Breach” at Facebook. Front page above the fold stuff, all the fruit of a “Wall Street Journal investigation.”

We’ll put aside the fact that no mention was made of the Wall Street Journal’s sister company and Facebook competitor MySpace.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that most people in tech, let alone the general population, have no idea what the article is even about. But even the top paragraph summary, when read carefully, is a snoozer:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Yes, that’s what this is all about. Sometimes identifying information about you – your name and maybe your friends’ names – is theoretically being passed on from Facebook to apps and then to advertising networks. Along the way it’s being stored by various companies that are in the business of gathering data about people to resell to others, chiefly Rapleaf.

The way this is being done is via referrer URLs (99% of the general population just got lost on what those are), which can contain profile IDs. Which can then be used to look up users. And whatever information that user has in his or her public profile can then be scraped and added to a database.

And then…well, nothing. It’s in a database. And theoretically can be used to target ads to you.

The only real concern is that all that data can also be tied to you doing something with a third party app. So in addition to your profile information, the database also gets to know that you like Farmville.

Is this a real problem? No.

Are lots of people freaking out because they have no idea what referrer IDs are but trust the WSJ to tell them when they need to be concerned? Yes.

Will a bunch of Attorneys General with aspirations for the Senate launch an investigation on this? Probably.

Is it a web-wide “problem,” not just a Facebook problem? Yes.

Would we mock one of our own writers on Yammer if they said they wanted to write this story? A lot.

Would you scream at us for posting it? I hope so.

If you do stuff online, people are tracking it and putting it into a database and trying to sell you stuff based on that. There’s not much you can do about it except not be online. And it’s not all that bad, really, to get ads for diapers when you’re having a baby, or ads for cars when you are looking to buy a car. Life will go on.

Professional social network LinkedIn has made a few improvements to profiles today, adding the ability for members to customize their profiles with additional information.

So now, you can add new sections to the current ones on your profile (current job, past jobs, recommendations and education). Users can add published work to their profile with a link to the content; and list language proficiency, special skills (i.e. C++, Java); certifications of licenses and security clearances (i.e. CPA, SFP); and patents that they have been awarded.

I’m sure some of this information has already been added manually by many of LinkedIn’s users, but it is useful that these are now broken out to their own individual sections. Additional certifications or skills, for example, are sure to be used by many professional who want to highlight special licenses or skillsets.

While the feature addition isn’t monumental, it does show that LinkedIn is encouraging users to add more relevant professional data to their profiles. Data is a big part of the social network’s strategy going forward. For example, LinkedIn recently updated company profiles with additional data visualizations such as the most popular schools attended by employees, the segmentation of an employee base by skillset and more. And the company is using some of this data to provide career visualizations for college students and young professionals.

In what is definitely a contender for strangest news of the day, The Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld has just debuted his own Groupon clone called “Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals.“ He built the clone through Seattle TechStars company Deal Co-Op which successfully pitched him on the “anyone can do daily deals” aspect of their service.

Says Feld:

“During one of our weekly mentoring meetings, they told me they could turn anyone with good business contacts and an online audience into their own Groupon. They asked me if I knew anyone that fit the bill, and I told them I did… me!”

Feld’s first deal is selling a $50 credit for $25 dollars on Boulder’s “social shopping” gear site Giant Nerd and it looks likes he’s got more offers coming soon. The Foundry Group was most recently in the news for the launch of a brand new, second $225 million venture fund. No word on Feld will be receiving any profits from the “Amazing Deals” clone or how long his enthusiasm for the ubiquitous model will last.

While Feld does also have an iPhone app extension of his brand, there’s really not very much further you can go from VCs turning themselves into Groupons.

What’s next? Ron Conway gets his own social network? Guess we’ll just have to stick with the @RonConwayFacts Twitter account for now.

Cacoo, the browser-based diagramming and design application launched in November 2009, came out of beta today. The Flash tool allows users to create, share and publish wireframes, sitemaps, network diagrams, flow charts, UMLs, etc.

What makes Cacoo stand out is that it lets multiple users in different locations create and edit designs collaboratively and in real-time. Changes to designs shared online, i.e. on a blog or wiki, are reflected in the embedded item automatically and in real-time, which means uploading them again isn’t necessary (more on Cacoo’s main features in our previous coverage).

Next to shedding the beta label, Cacoo maker Nulab has introduced a freemium model, under which the free plan will continue with some restrictions. Users paying $4.95 monthly (or $49 per year) will be able to create unlimited sheets for their designs, export them in more formats (SVG), share diagrams and folders with an unlimited number of people, and more.

Apart from adding a number of fresh features (for example, free and paid users can now share folders and all diagrams in the folder with others), Cacoo is no longer available in English and Japanese only. The users themselves translated the interface into French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Polish, with 15 more languages coming soon. And there is now an API (which supports OAuth and an API Key), too.

Cacoo currently boasts over 60,000 users worldwide. Similar design tools include Creately, Balsamiq Mockups, or Gliffy.

More screenshots (click to enlarge):

In a Tweet just sent from Google Mobile Ads account, the company said that its mobile ad network, AdMob, has hit a new milestone today. AdMob has served a whopping 300 billion mobile ads since 2007. The network added another 100 billion ads since May, when it posted its 200 billionth ad milestone.

To give you a perspective of how fast the AdMob is growing in terms of ads served; it took nine months to get to 200 billion ads from 100 billion in August of 2009, and only 5 months to get to 300 billion. Clearly, growth is accelerating for the network.

Google announced its $750 million acquisition of AdMob last year, but the closing of the deal was drawn out due to concerns from the FTC over anti-trust issues. Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire AdMob, Google finally closed the deal at the end of May, a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal.

While AdMob used to publish monthly statistics and data surrounding its mobile ad network, the company stopped discontinued the reports in May for “a few months.” In terms of how many monthly requests the network is seeing; we know that in May received 10 million mobile ad requests. I’m sure that number is higher now.

This morning, we were alerted to a site at the URL demoslam.com. Imagine our surprise when it turned out to be some sort of Google project. Or at least, that’s how it appears.

Currently, the site is just one giant Flash file that plays over and over again. It shows some weird Wall-E-like figures sitting in the rain while a figure in a green cap mows some lawn that doesn’t exist. Very weird. The page reads: “Google Demo Slam: Technology is awesome. Learning about it isn’t. Until now.”

Below that, it says “Welcome to Demo Slam. Where a little creativity takes tech demos from mundane to mind-blowing. All thanks to people like you. So come watch, choose your favorites and most importantly, show the world what you can do. This Wednesday the Slamming Preseason begins.”

Hovering over the people in the stands makes them hold up signs that say “Men in wigs rock!” and “Support overweight rabbits!” Again, weird.

Based off of all of this, it sounds like Google is hosting some sort of competition to see what people on the Internet can come up with using their various products and technologies. My guess would have been that this will be an HTML5 project, similar to their HTML5Rocks site or more recently their Arcade Fire experience, but the fact that this entire teaser is in Flash seems to go against that idea. We should know more soon.

Online video platform Brightcove took another step towards an eventual IPO today by hiring a new chief financial officer. Christopher Menard is the new CFO. Previously, he was the CFO at Phase Forward, a clinical trials enterprise software company bought by Oracle last April for $685 million. Before the Oracle acquisition, Phase Forward was a public company.

In the announcement of Menard’s new role, Brightcove stresses that he “played an integral role in the execution and integration of six acquisitions, successful execution of the IPO and secondary stock offering, and implementation of global financial systems.” Menard also teaches a course on M&A at Boston College’s business school. Just the kind of guy you want before you file for an IPO. Either that, or an M&A exit.

Over the past year, Brightcove has been beefing up its executive team, adding a new president and COO (David Mendels), a new board member (former Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson), a new senior VP of sales in North America (Paul Goetz), and a new VP in charge of its growing Asia-Pacific business (Dennis Rose).

Today, Newsweek released its environmental rankings of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in America, and internationally as measured by revenue, market capitalization, and number of employees.

The U.S. list included forty-nine tech sector companies. Their rankings were based on criteria including: “[the companies’] actual environmental footprint, management of that footprint (including policies and strategies) and reputation among environmental experts,” according to Newsweek’s methodology statement.

Within the U.S. tech sector, the top ten most environmentally responsible companies were:

1 Dell
2 Hewlett-Packard
3 International Business Machines (IBM)
4 Intel
5 Sprint Nextel
6 Adobe Systems
7 Applied Materials
8 Yahoo!
9 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
10 Cisco Systems

On the U.S. list, Google ranked 14th in tech and 36th overall, while Apple ranked 20th in tech and 65th overall. Since they scored points for their reputations and environmental policies, Yahoo made a surprisingly strong showing— it had a lower score than companies like Google, Microsoft and Motorola which, according to the researchers, did a better job controlling the size of their actual environmental footprint, and managing their impact on the environment.

The publicly traded company with the lowest rated reputation for environmental responsibility in the U.S. tech sector was Ingram Micro. The company with the weakest environmental policies on the list was NCR. And Corning did the worst job managing its environmental impact of all the companies listed.

The U.S. company with the best reputation for environmental responsibility among experts surveyed was IBM. Dell had the strongest rated environmental policies. Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel best controlled its footprint and managed its impact to the enviornment.

Newsweek’s Global Green Rankings measured the environmental qualities of “the biggest publicly traded companies in developed and emerging world markets,” naming IBM strongest overall and in the tech sector. The tech sector top ten, globally, included:

1 International Business Machines (IBM)
2 Hewlett-Packard
3 Deutsche Telekom
4 Toshiba
5 Vodafone
6 Nokia
7 Nippon Telegraph & Telephone
8 Microsoft
9 France Telecom
10 China Mobile

Only 14 tech companies made the Global Green Rankings this year.

Think of Casio’s latest Pathfinder watch as a rugged, multitasking, tougher-than-a-titanium sledgehammer, time keeping device. Really, it’s the chronometer equivalent of Bear Grylls.

Except that it doesn’t order you around and sleep in a hotel when it’s feeling cold. No this badass is an all-in-one tool armed with a digital compass, altimeter, barometer and thermometer. Oh yes, it keeps pinpoint accurate time, too.

Because of its multi-band Atomic timekeeping, the Pathfinder PAW5000-1 stays in constant sync with Atomic clocks around the globe. Going one better, the watch has what Casio calls Tough Movement. Okay, that sounds like some marketing bullshit but it does automatically check and correct the accuracy of the minute hand position at the 55th minute every hour. Its real toughness is in the ruggedness of its construction, much like Casio’s G-Shock watches.

Solar powered (no battery replacements ever and charged for five months without any light exposure), the dual analog, digital face watch is tough in another way: learning how to use its legions of functions. It comes with a thick 114-page manual whose tiny type requires sharp eyesight and plenty of patience as you figure out which combination of the six buttons along the watch’s perimeter you need to push —and it what order—to do all that is promises.

It’s a bit intimidating on first glance but once you get the hang of it, this Pathfinder goes the distance. Push the dedicated compass button and the sweep second hand together with the LCD face points you north and how many degrees off true north you are headed. A touch of the altimeter button displays in meters your current altitude. Press another button in altimeter mode and the watch will measure the duration of your ascent and descent

Of course, the Pathfinder handles all the other expected time functions such as stopwatch, countdown timer, alarm, and time check in any of the 29 world time zones. And if your hike in the woods continues in the dark, the face can be illuminated by a flashlight strength LED lamp either manually or set to a light sensitive, automatic mode that switches on with the turn of your wrist except in bright lighting where it stays dormant.

Although the half-inch thick PAW5000-1 is packed with ruggedness, its power belies a 2.9-ounce weight. With all of its functions, features, and just general toughness, we’re kind of surprised this watch hasn’t been given its own show yet.

WIRED Solar-powered, lightweight yet rugged. Includes an altimeter, barometer, thermometer, compass. Atomic timekeeping is da bomb.

TIRED Air temperature readings are skewed by your body heat when watch is on your wrist (where else would it be?). 118-page manual takes some time in figuring out how everything works.