Blogoscoped corralled Ruth Kedar of KedarDesigns into recounting the story of how she came up with the Google logo back in 1999. It’s a charming story, but not one that should have taken 619 words to explain. Here’s a version for the ADD among us.

Was teaching design at Stanford in 1999. This particular logo was selected because it was playful, deceptively simple. Subtle as to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless.

The colors evoke child play, but stray from the color wheel to hint to serendipity and the irreverence and boldness of the “I’m feeling lucky” link. The texture and shading lift it from the page, giving it both weight and lightness. Solid but ethereal.

The chosen typeface is an old-style serif typeface. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past; historical ties seemed appropriate.

“Google’s Search Party,” Ken Auletta’s 6,264-word opus on the search engine’s grudging embrace of D.C. lobbying, has proved tough to condense. Until I reread it again this weekend, and realized it can be boiled down to the final observation made by CEO Eric Schmidt:

What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.

Control fate, or tempt it? Google, improbably, is managing to do both.

In its February issue, Wired promises “The Untold Story” of the iPhone. But as typical for the magazine, they instead deliver a rehash of things you mostly already know, spread over 3,336 lavish words. Here, instead, are 378 words, in bullet points, containing the truly juicy tidbits Wired writer Fred Vogelstein was able to turn up. My favorite? That when Steve Jobs gets really mad, he doesn’t scream. He stares.

• In the fall of 2006, in Apple’s boardroom, the prototype flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly. Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.” The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums.

• For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
• Just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show wireless boss Stan Sigman. Sigman, uncharacteristically effusive, called the iPhone “the best device I have ever seen.”
• About 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T’s rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier’s volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.
• In February 2005, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
• At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down.
• Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
• Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2.
• Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone’s transmitter.
• Even the iPhone’s hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.
• By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.

Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast’s Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]

Source:Valleywag

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After warning me that he was coming to the CES Press Room and to “stay out of his face,” blog blowhard Jason Calacanis stormed over to me to “introduce” himself and slam my boss and brag about how much money he has. Money can’t buy you a snappy comeback, however.

When Calacanis was almost out the door, I yelled across the room, “Google’s better!” — than Mahalo (there’s your link, now quit your bitching), that is, the “human-powered” search engine that’s currently keeping Calacanis off the street. Having no response, he slunk out the door to peels of laughter.

Source:Valleywag

Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That’s all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing folder — not, mind you, for actually ripping the files off a CD. We ridiculed the Washington Post for making this mistake, and were prepared to laugh derisively when it ran a correction. But a Wired blogger argues, at length — 745 agonizing words — that the RIAA still thinks CD ripping is illegal. Here are the 100 most essential words.

The RIAA does not recognize that you have a legal right to rip your CDs into MP3s. The RIAA will not say that ripping MP3s for personal use is legal. That’s why the Sony executive said ripping a song was the same as stealing one. To sum up, the RIAA does believe a majority of American music buyers are thieving criminals, but it’s not going to sue anyone over ripping MP3s because a) it’s not really a big deal b) there’s no way to find out and/or c) it would be terrible publicity to sue someone for using an iPod.

Helicopters. Hot metal print. Faked photos. Police scanners and running engines. Even if you’re not a journalism wonk, outgoing Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger’s recap of his years in the golden age of newspaper reporting is an engaging read, all 2,963 words of it. If you just want the dirt, I’ve pullquoted Steiger’s dead-bird story, plus the time he asked for a helicopter to do some reporting — can we get one of those, boss?

I remember walking past a photographer’s open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He’d perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans’ cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame.

In 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence of gasoline hoarding. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.

Why is Steiger leaving the Journal now? Because he’s 63 years old. “Retirement,” a more insidery Journal reporter tells me. “He was set to go a long time before the Murdoch thing.”

I don’t expect anyone other than Jeff Jarvis to read Gawker’s 1,047-word memorandum to employees in its entirety. I’ve cored out the important part — the numbers with dollar signs — below.

From now on, you will be paid a set monthly fee. You will be expected to contribute a set number of posts in exchange. On top of that, you will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month, even if the story is months or years old. Each site will be assigned a pageview rate. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus.

This chart should make it clearer. If your site has a PV rate of $5:
$2,000 = 400,000 views:
$5,000 = 1m views:
$7,000 = 1.4m views

Based on this example, if your base pay is $2,000 per month then you would need to get upwards of 400,000 pageviews to begin earning bonus. A total of 500,000 views would earn $500 bonus (or $2,500 total pay). Four sites are already using the new bonus system (Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer). One guest editor on Wonkette landed a huge exclusive and walked away with an extra $3k in his paycheck.

The libertarians are coming! But don’t let a Republican explain it to you. Instead, crazy fun local lefties the San Francisco Bay Guardian report on the Ron Paul phenomenon. I’ve culled some easily-absorbed bullet points from the lengthy article.

• It’s rare to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows and beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets.

• Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire [remember, this is the Bay Guardian] got his campaign rolling.
• Paul’s libertarian platform is attracting support from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.
• One unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. “My gut tells me Ron Paul is different.” “Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom.” “He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election.”
• Paul’s Dec. 16 fundraising push raised more than $6 million in a 24-hour period, breaking the record for funds raised in one day held by the John Kerry 2004 campaign.
• Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. The average size of each donation is around $100.
• There is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articulating the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas.
• Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation.
• He sees the USA Patriot Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.
• He is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.
• There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives. “We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when Dean had already been crowned winner by the media,”

(Photo by Anarchyware)

Source:Valleywag

Yahoo has installed Brandon Holley, the former editor of Jane, a women’s magazine, as executive producer of Yahoo Lifestyles. This doesn’t bode well for her career. When Scott Moore was put in charge of Yahoo’s media operations, he said Yahoo would start focusing on mass instead of niche content — news, finance, sports, and maybe entertainment. “Lifestyles is the same — lots of subcategories don’t meet the bar.”

Holley’s now in charge of those very same niches — food, health, astrology, and technology — Moore has suggested he plans to drop or scale back. Maybe having a girlfriend in HR was actually a good idea.

Source:Valleywag

The New York Times spent an epic 3,800 words on a truth known to everyone in Silicon Valley: Google is competing with Microsoft in email and productivity apps. Steve Lohr got lots of time with Google CEO Eric Schmidt — but attributes his failure to get any good quotes from Schmidt to Schmidt’s caginess. Here’s a version that skips the useless talking points from Microsoft and Google and just gets down to the scant few numbers Lohr managed to assemble. Bottom line: Microsoft doesn’t have much to worry about. Yet. Lohr doesn’t note this stat: 73 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD have noever even heard of Google Apps.

Eric Schmidt career competing against Microsoft. Google offering word processing applications and spreadsheets. Epic business battle. Cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future tethered to its desktop PC software. In order to succeed, Google needs to win corporations. About 2,000 companies are signing up for Google Apps every day. Companies with more than 50 users, charge of $50 a year per user. A few large companies, notably General Electric and Procter & Gamble, are at least trying out Google Apps. About 160 employees of BankFirst Financial Services, a small bank in Macon, Miss., have been using Gmail for about two months. BankFirst isn’t using Google’s online word processing, presentation and spreadsheets, a package known as Google Docs. According to Compete.com, a research firm, Google Docs is gaining popularity. It had 1.6 million users in November, seven times as many as a year earlier. Office may continue to be an outstanding product, but Microsoft may not be able to charge as much for it.

(Illustration by Tim Bower)

In a shareholders’ conference call yesterday, Pay By Touch CFO Robert Sigler told investors the company plans to raise $150 million in 2008. This after Pay By Touch management has already burned through over $300 million since its founding and cost some 250 jobs just this fall. Tell you what, I hope Sigler and returning COO Eula Adams find their investors. Beause whoever they are, maybe I can find something to sell them, too. (Photo of the Brooklyn Bridge by absolutwade)

Source:Valleywag

AOL CEO Randy Falco is a lot like Santa Claus, really. Why, he’s downright jolly when laying people off, and he has an uncanny ability to fly whenever and whereever he wants. So who better to pen a year-end missive to rally the elves? Here’s that letter, conveniently downsized to just 100 words.

It’s over a year since I came to AOL. When I arrived it needed work. More than I expected. Pageviews were in decline. Products were behind and underinvested. Advertising needed investment. I needed to rebuild AOL. Let me highlight progress. We upgraded products. We’ve refreshed programming. Everything was trending downward on AOL Search; changes have turned these trends around. Internationally, there’s upside for AOL. Our ad network reaches 9 in 10 Web users in the U.S. We invested $800 million on advertising. Cutting costs and laying off people is about resource allocation and being smart. I feel really good. I’m making progress. Happy holiday.