Earlier today I shared a link on ParisLime (my Tumblr link/misc blog) of David Pogue's review of the new BlackBerry Storm. I shared it mainly because his title was brilliant: "BlackBerry Storm Downgraded to a Depression." But now I see the title has been changed to the infinitely lamer "No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?"Hard to know exactly why the change, but I'd be willing to bet it was one of three things: 1) The New York Times didn't like Pogue's snarky title 2) NYT didn't think the title was clear enough or 3) NYT didn't like "Depression"...
Lingerie connoisseurs will be happy to know that CBS has launched a multi-media, multi-platform Victoria’s Secret assault on all senses. That’s right: no longer will you have to search through the Internet’s wastelands to get your Victoria’s Secret fix; it’s all there on the official website and on your mobile. Social Features The new website will feature behind the scenes videos, interviews with models, photo galleries, model bios, and other original content. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show will be broadcast on December 3, and if you’re the chatting type, check out www.cbs.com/socialviewing during the show, as you’ll be able...
Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs is well known for his abrasive style posts where no-one is immune from his sarcastic wit that can cut to the bone at times. All the time he was working at Forbes and writing under his FSJ persona the world was treated to some great writing. Now though with him working for Newsweek things seem to have changed and not for the better. Case in point was a post he wrote yesterday about the ouster of Jerry Yang that was a great reminder of why his Fake Steve Jobs blog became as famous as...
LATE BREAKING: Dan Lyons, the writer/ journalist formerly know as The Real Dan Lyons formerly know as The Fake Steve Jobs is quitting blogging after having a post yanked this week by his employer Newsweek. Jordan Golson from the Industry Standard reports that Dan told him “that he is hanging up his personal blog as RealDanLyons.com after his Newsweek bosses made him yank his post where Lyons (rightly) called Yahoo’s PR staff ‘lying sacks of shit’ Lyons slammed the company after Yahoo flacks told him just weeks ago that the Google/Yahoo search deal was a “sure thing” and that...
Here’s the latest action: IBM buys Transitive Technologies: Transitive came up with a way to translate code from one hardware platform to another on the fly. Companies such as Apple used it to transition to new operating systems without breaking compatibility with old software. Now IBM has purchased Transitive for an undisclosed price and it will continue to support past customers including Sun, HP and Apple. HP’s expected Q4 results lift stock market: HP said its fourth fiscal quarter results will be surprisingly strong, with revenue up 16 percent to 19 percent from a year ago. The results were helped...
My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to...
In theory, pro journalists can climb to the top of their fields without sacrificing their built-in urge to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In practice, even the loosest cannons find themselves battened to the hatch, or whatever the right sailing metaphor is. One of my role models, former Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons, seems to have been forced by his new employer to undo his own writing. Here's what happened. Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the...
Why is Newsweek's Dan Lyons shocked, shocked that Yahoo's PR team lied to him about how long CEO Jerry Yang would stay in the job? Lyons interviewed Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock less than a month before Monday's announcement that Yang would step down, and Bostock loudly declared Yang was here to stay. One would think no one would be more cynical about the world of tech PR than the man who savaged Apple's spinmeister when he impersonated CEO Steve Jobs in a satirical blog. Lyons is no longer writing as Fake Steve Jobs, but as the real Dan Lyons, he...
["Edges 6". Part of The Edges Series. Click on image to enlarge etc.] I've spent a lot of time in the last few days thinking about Dell Computers, a tech hardware company from Round Rock, Texas. Here are some notes: 1. When I developed The Blue Monster idea for Microsoft, a wee voice told me there was a business model in there somewhere. Some kind of post-advertising, Purpose-Idea, social-object, marketing-disruption kind of thing. Something that would scale, something one could turn into a little cottage industry, creating TONS of value for the fraction of the cost of the traditional...
This morning in NYC international pranksters The Yes Men recruited volunteers through the website Because We Want It to distribute thousands of copies of a fake version of the New York Times dated July 4, 2009 with the headline “Iraq War Ends”. Gawaker describes how the prank came together and here’s the reaction from the New York Times. There is also an online version of the fake paper, including a PDF. UPDATE: Noneck has a few copies of the fake NYT that he is selling on eBay. via Urban Prankster This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For...
Tony Fadell, the head of Apple's iPod division, is exiting Steve Jobs's reality distortion field. While Fake Steve Jobs likes to take credit for inventing the frigging iPod, its real mastermind is Tony Fadell, who took his plans for an MP3 player to Apple in 2001 as a consultant. His replacement: Former IBM chip expert Mark Papermaster, whose erstwhile employer is suing Apple to prevent him from taking a job there. That Papermaster is replacing Fadell makes its lawsuit even stranger; it is seeking to enforce a noncompete clause in his contract, but a job overseeing MP3 players and cell...
There's a "Steven P Jobs" on Facebook. But it's not Apple's CEO. How can I tell? The biographical details, which anyone can get from Wikipedia, are all correct. But the "About Me" section is a dead giveaway. It reads, "Have a passion for really great products!" The exclamation point kills it for me. Add to that: He's not even in Facebook's Apple network. His wife, Laurene Powell-Jobs, and his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs both have Facebook profiles, and they aren't on his friends list. Sadly, 75 Apple employees, drawn to any electronic hint of their cult leader, are. I'm left wishing...
