Pegatron lands Acer notebook orders for 2011

Even the rumor of a CDMA phone in 2010 is going to piss people off. Q4 isn’t that far away, and with all the fervor over iPhone 4 sales this week — and all those freshly-minted 2-year AT&T contracts — that there’s even a remote chance for a Verizon CDMA iPhone on the heels of launch will spark that good, old fashioned spirit of entitlement all over again. Get ready to let yourselves feel all wonky and let down by the man, people.

Still, this is a bit of old news. Apple’s put an awful lot of weight behind GSM and to go to Verizon with essentially a custom phone seems oddly uncharacteristic of their behavior in the market.

There’s that, plus DigiTimes’ loose relationship with accuracy, too.

Pegatron will also start shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 to Apple in the fourth quarter and is currently using its plants in Shanghai, China to produce the products, the sources noted.

The Legendary Tales of Old Uncle Scrubby

“… It’s also brought to you by this book. ‘Success’. If you want to have any success, you should read it. … Looks like a good one.”

There’s just nothing that’s not funny about Uncle Scrubby.

Wonderfully clever little tool here, this Google Search Story Creator. What’s a search story? It’s the story of your business as told through Google’s search results. Simply enter search terms that are representative of your business or brand online and Google will craft a clever little commercial for you.

Whether it was a lifelong talent, a desire to be your own boss, or a great idea at 2 a.m. that kick-started your business, there’s a Search Story about your journey just waiting to be told. And with just five minutes, a keyboard and a mouse, you can create a video of your own!

They do a handy bit of lobbying in the email announcing the Search Story Creator:

In 2009, Google generated $54B in economic activity in the United States – one business at a time. See how Google helped small businesses in your state at www.google.com/economicimpact.

In looking at the Oregon economic impact, I see that “Google generated $512 million of economic activity for 29,000 Oregon businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009.” Even better, the map linked me to this profile, highlighting Clive Coffee in Portland through a Google Doc whitepaper. This is a terrific use of absolutely free tools to get your stories out there into the broader web. From a data-enabled Google Map to a PDF in Google Docs, this company has done more to integrate small business communication tools for the masses for free than any other I can think of. If you’re not taking advantage of all the ways you can tell your story in this space, find someone who can help you do it.

It serves as a funny reminder, if you stand back a bit, that so much of the story of our existence on the web is inextricably linked to Google’s presentation of that story. Yes, it’s a wide open web. But if your place in the wide open web doesn’t exist in the Google sphere, you’re not really taking part in the discussion, are you?

Think about that. In the meantime, here’s my search story. Took me about three minutes.

Mark Zuckerberg – From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings

Speaking up for the first time since f8 on the privacy mess.

Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Wow. Tough to say you really care about user privacy when you’re handing really private data over to advertisers. As an advertiser? I don’t even want this kind of information.

The Journal found that Facebook went farther than most in sharing identifiable data, by sending the username of the person clicking the ad as well as the username of the profile they were viewing at the time. This news could hardly come at a worse time for Facebook, a company that currently faces a privacy backlash potent enough to make the cover of Time Magazine this month.

The game of deliciously hard choices – Resort to Cannibalism

Why yes, it is a Flash game in which you try to beat your raft-mate and eat him before he eats you. Thank you for asking.

D.C. Douglas PSA For Tea Party And FreedomWorks Critics

Takes stones to be divisive and funny with such a marvelously patronizing tone. NSFW. Thanks Amy Lambert for the tip.

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Jack Dorsey on turning ideas into reality

Commit your ideas to paper before you worry about committing them to code. Get your idea out of your head so you can see it from a different perspective. And just as importantly, share it with others.

5 Lessons TV Should Learn After Losing Heroes | Wired.com

I loved the show. I loved all of it. But this certainly rang true for me. The part that got so frustrating was watching the team try and try to write Sylar’s character in a compelling way, and go completely off the rails every other week. There was just no thread.

“If you end up creating bad guys cooler than your good guys, let them ride. Don’t make them into heroes. Zachary Quinto’s Sylar is an excellent example of this formula gone wrong. If you start off a show with your primary madman chopping off the heads of cheerleaders, it’s exceedingly hard to flip him into a savior of mankind, even if he is the show’s most magnetic personality.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010: “”

Absolutely stunning images from Sean Stiegemeier of Iceland volcano action. Watch on Vimeo for HD goodness.

Clock calculates wasted time at meetings

Pretty much sums up how I feel about meetings in general. Nice visual reminder, this.

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

Sometimes, what a person says is magnified 1,000 times by who says it. This is one of those times. Danah is a smart person. This is worth reading.

What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting.

At it’s core this is a question of the changing tide of our cultural evolution. Jarvis once again nails it here:

* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.

Yes, there is great, deep value in history. We’ve been through this transition before. We are innately social creatures. But that hard-wiring is difficult to scale cleanly. Moving from tribes of connections to villages to cities to distributed networks causes strain on the system. It’s true, we’re probably moving away from some of our plainer collective sense of privacy, but that doesn’t mean we individually walk away from our right to chose how we make that journey.

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com

This is fantastic. Note — two of the most important privacy options in Facebook are not actually available on the Facebook User Profile Privacy Settings page. How would someone just *know* that?

And, say what you will about Facebook transparency, there’s just no excuse for a privacy statement to be longer than the Constitution (minus amendments).

Global ad industry grapples with new spending trends
| Reuters

This is a message from the immediate future for small to medium-sized businesses, too. Big companies are recognizing the power of their own sites and the agility they have in creating content they control, and they’re spending money accordingly. The same can be true for smaller players.

“Technology is enabling companies to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways directly with their customers, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer ways for users to multiply the effect of corporate messages.

Chuck Richard, lead analyst at information advisory and research firm Outsell, says companies now spend more than half their online marketing budgets on their own sites. ‘It’s been 50 percent or more for the last three years,’ he says.”