Marketing Pilgrim

In the past, Apple has been pretty secretive about the health issues of its leader, Steve Jobs.

Today, Apple decided to make an internal memo public on their site. In this day and age of making sure you control your online message, it’s the best policy. Of course, this won’t stop the wild speculation. Here’s the announcement at the Apple site.

As for us here at Marketing Pilgrim, rather than speculate, we’re just going to give our best wishes and our prayers for things to go well for Mr. Jobs, whatever the health concerns may be.

Ahh, Facebook. You’ve just helped Sony Pictures win a bunch of Golden Globes for their sensational betrayal portrayal of the start of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The lasting impression of the movie comes from a line by Zuck’s then girlfriend, Erica Albright (hat tip to TechCrunch)

You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.

Memories. Good times.

The “Can’t do anything wrong these days” company is Groupon. With the talk of a $15 billion IPO in the offing and the fact that they have been handed the crown of the “Next Big Thing” (or “Greatest Indicator of a new Bubble” depending on who you listen to) the video below from CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason can give some insight into what many feel is happening with Groupon deals more often than we know.

The background is that a ‘Groupon’ went pretty poorly in Japan and Groupon is trying to silence the storm in Japan and get everyone back to ‘Groupon normal’. Right now it’s not. Here’s Mason’s apology.

For quite some time Google has been getting heat from just about every angle concerning the supposed favoritism it shows Google’s own properties in their search results.

Individual companies have complained, government agencies have threatened (with the help of complaining companies) and those who just feel life is unjust have whined that Google doesn’t play fair. I like to remind people that Google is a company, not a government and they owe the world nothing. Yup, that’s nothing as in nada, zip, zero etc etc.

They do, however, provide work for a lot more than their 20,000 plus employees and one might argue that if they had not helped to develop the online space to the point it is at today that our overall economic condition might be a lot worse even than it currently is. But I digress.

Search engines have historically been the best way to find information on the internet. But what if we didn’t need search engines anymore? What if, all we had to do was verbally tell the computer what we needed and it gave us the best response? All without visiting a web page, navigating through ads or waiting for our browsers to load.

Well, computer scientists at IBM have almost made the above scenario a reality. With their new natural language processing (NLP) super computer named “Watson”, they are breaking new ground that could potentially create a radical shift in information retrieval (IR).

Now, many of you already know that I am fascinated with NLP. In fact one of the first web applications I ever created is highly dependent on NLP. I really think NLP could play a very significant role in the future of IR.

If you were going to make a Super Bowl commercial on behalf of the United States of America, how would you do it? That’s the question Harper’s Magazine asked a group of ad execs and it got me thinking about the right way and the wrong ways to advertise any product.

For example. Super Bowl commercials tend to be funny and over the top, but is that anyway to sell patriotism? An ad that pits Victoria’s Secret models against Obama in a cherry pie eating contest will certainly garner attention and it’s pretty likely that everyone will still be talking about it a day later. But is buzz all you need to call a commercial a success? What if the reason people are talking is because they were offended by the ad. Certainly there would be a large segment of the population who felt it was inappropriate. Does it matter? Is bad buzz as welcome as good buzz?