“When we think about commercials that offend us, we think of those that glorify antisocial behavior — like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women. Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously. Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact — and this is part of the reason we ran them — they have the opposite effect.”
- Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, addressing the controversy over the deal-a-day site’s controversial Super Bowl ads that were meant to parody public service announcements, but seemed to trivialize the charitable causes the company was instead trying to promote. (Groupon Blog)
“That Sun campus is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to San Quentin. It’s pretty isolated.”
- Silicon Valley historian and Stanford consulting professor Steve Blank, commenting on Facebook’s announcement that it will relocate to the 57-acre, nine-building campus in Menlo Park, Calif., formerly owned by Sun Microsystems. The campus reportedly can house about 3,600 employees; Facebook currently employs about 1,400. The social networking giant also purchased a 22-acre adjacent parcel of land and says it expects to continue a 50 percent annual growth rate in its workforce. (San Jose Mercury News)
“HP is finally making a run for the next-generation OS that will be used across all platforms, including the PC. Microsoft can’t be happy about this.”
- Analyst Maribel Lopez, commenting on HP’s release of the much-anticipated Touchpad tablet, based on Palm’s webOS. (Enterprise Mobile Today)
“Although Apple’s CEO scoffed at a stylus being used on the iPhone during his 2007 keynote, the fact remains that Apple continues to this day to bankroll expensive engineers to the task of developing exotic pens, styluses, displays and digital ink engines. I’d follow the facts more than the myth that Apple will never introduce a stylus or digital pen.”
- Patently Apple’s Jack Purcher, blogging on the implication of recent Apple patent filings. (Datamation)
“People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the 1980s had a phone — and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years — and in the French Revolution the crowd in the streets spoke to one another with that strange, today largely unknown instrument known as the human voice. People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.
- Author Malcolm Gladwell, writing in an article titled: Does Egypt Need Twitter? (The New Yorker)
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David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
