Results of a three month internal investigation by the Apple board has resulted in the revelation that stock option grants made between 1997 and 2002 on 15 dates preceded the approval of the grants. Previous reports had identified accounting issues with grants dating back to 2002.

This latest revelation indicates that Steve Jobs knew of the problem, but claims he did not know of the accounting ramifications. Typically, a CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for the financials especially since the enactment of the Sorbanes Oxley legislation.

In other words, its questionable if Steve Jobs can claim no fault for not knowing what he was responsible for signing off on as the CEO. It could be that the admonition of Jobs could have been taken out of context. It could reflect financials from one time period, say before Sorbanes Oxley, and not those after, or vice versa.

Technorati Tags: Apple CFO Resignation, Is Jobs Safe

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Former Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who resigned from HP on September 22, 2006, was charged by California officials today. Four others were also charged including Kevin Hunsaker, the former HP director of ethics and the HP executive responsible for running the probe. In addition, Ronald DeLia of Security Outsourcing Solutions and two additional private detectives were also named.

So far Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd has not been named despite Dunn’s testimony in front of congress that Mark Hurd was responsible for the executive management of the operation and recent disclosures that Mark Hurd may have had knowledge about the investigation for many months.

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I’ve been using VOIP for about a month now at home. I used it at work in the office for several years and just considered it like any other phone system or PBX system. It was virtually the same, just a lot cheaper. I’ve done a number of business cases on the market and benefit and applications of VOIP, however these were always business cases with minimal hands on usage. Think analysis paralysis, you spend so much time thinking about it in the office sometimes and never any time actually doing it.

I setup a VOIP cordless phone in my home about a month ago and established a free skype account and the results are pretty amazing. Its easy to use, it sounds as good if not better than my cell phone, it doesn’t receive telemarketer phone calls like my home phone and IT’S FREE!

Did I mention that IT IS FREE!

It makes me consider why I need my cell phone. For about six years now, I’ve been using my cell phone as my primary phone for all of my calls business and personal. I probably get about 80% business calls and 20% personal.

Now, however I find myself asking why not use the VOIP phone for all the calls taken at my home office. I could reduce my minute package through my cellular provider and save $50 a month or more. Plus, I’m seeing a number of offers where VOIP phones on WiFi can be used in hotspots on college campuses and Starbucks and things. Its not a cellular replacement yet, but its getting closer.

If WiMax rolls out, look out cellular carriers, your days might be numbered and my bill might be getting even smaller!

Technorati Tags: VOIP, voip replacing cell phones

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I’ve been using VOIP for about a month now at home. I used it at work in the office for several years and just considered it like any other phone system or PBX system. It was virtually the same, just a lot cheaper. I’ve done a number of business cases on the market and benefit and applications of VOIP, however these were always business cases with minimal hands on usage. Think analysis paralysis, you spend so much time thinking about it in the office sometimes and never any time actually doing it.

I setup a VOIP cordless phone in my home about a month ago and established a free skype account and the results are pretty amazing. Its easy to use, it sounds as good if not better than my cell phone, it doesn’t receive telemarketer phone calls like my home phone and IT’S FREE!

Did I mention that IT IS FREE!

It makes me consider why I need my cell phone. For about six years now, I’ve been using my cell phone as my primary phone for all of my calls business and personal. I probably get about 80% business calls and 20% personal.

Now, however I find myself asking why not use the VOIP phone for all the calls taken at my home office. I could reduce my minute package through my cellular provider and save $50 a month or more. Plus, I’m seeing a number of offers where VOIP phones on WiFi can be used in hotspots on college campuses and Starbucks and things. Its not a cellular replacement yet, but its getting closer.

If WiMax rolls out, look out cellular carriers, your days might be numbered and my bill might be getting even smaller!

Technorati Tags: VOIP, voip replacing cell phones

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The internet bubble really started to swell back in the days when companies started to realize that they could monetize impressions.  A thousand page views and later impressions would generate a metric that advertisers could value and they would pay for that value.  This was an extrapolation similar to sending a person out to the interestate to count the number of cars that drive by a billboard ad, and then valuing the advertising signal that might be achieved for that location.

Internet advertisers rapidly found many different ways to push ads around the internet from pop ups to banner ads to drop downs and hover text.  Then Google launched Paid Per Click contextual advertising.  A google bot would read the content on a page and match the context of that content to an advertisers ad and put that ad via a little script box on the same page.  So if a person is reading an article about a Dell PC or a Vlassic Dill Pickle they will see an ad for a Dell PC or a Vlassic Dill Pickle respectively, and the two will not generally cross.  This means that if you are reading about a Dell, dude, you won’t get a pickle ad, and if you are reading about pickles, you won’t get a Dell ad.  (Now lemons might be a different issue . . .)

Podcasts are growing rapidly in cyberspace and this adds a dimension to the content.  Now content is not flat on a screen, but dynamic in a voice or a sound.  Many advertisers are working to drop sound adverts at the beginning, middle or end of these broadcasts like the banner ads of the past.  Many different firms are hoping to make this easy to do for the creative types.  One company, TalkShoe is even offering up a different version of the banner dropping model in a Podcast.  They are offering a model where people would be Paid To Talk. 

Under the Paid To Talk model a person would create a TalkCast (similar to a Podcast without the potential that Apple might litigate over the trademark for the word Pod, even though it might not be long before Apple tries to litigate over the trademark for the word Talk).  A TalkCast is basically like an internet talk shoe where a person records a conversation with someone else and Narrowcasts the show on the internet.  TalkCast then pays for every person that listens to the show.

Its probably not to futuristic for some advertising company to figure out a way to monetize thinking.  Before long we’ll have a business model where people are Paid to Think or Paid to Ponder, or Paid to Savor the Thought.  An entire industry could popl up around the concept of Lucrative Meditations.

DISCLAIMER: This article does not include any endorsements and the author has not been paid for any writing, links, images or backlinks.  Advertisement inquiries are welcome.  Please direct such inquiries to hotline@softduit.com Please include the name of the Blog in question and your contact information.

Technorati Tags: Paid to Talk, Lucrative Meditations, Paid to Think, TalkCast, Paid to Ponder, Paid to Savor the Thought

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Last year was the year of thin phones.  Its the ‘thin phone stupid’ mantra that made a number of non-Motorola cell phone manufacturers see red.  Samsung of course lept to the challenge and thinned down their phones to best Motorola on the size of their phones, but could not quite keep up with the buzz and cool factor.

Samsung may have put their skinny phones on a binge diet to best Motorola with a slightly thinner phone, but like a super model preparing to hit the cat walks in Spain a little extra in the right places made the difference for Motorola.

Sony Ericsson saw red just like the others in the cell phone industry.  However, they appear to have completely ignored the fight for a skinnier phone and instead opted for functionality with coolness in a thicker form factor.  They are delivering in the area that the Sony brand has the most notoriety and that is in functionality.  Its one thing to hold a cool looking phone, but its a entirely different thing to ‘use’ a phone that does amazing and cool things.

Sony seems to be working on a dynamic color scheme where they use a hot lava red color offset with either white or black and it seems to be working.  The accent that seems to help the most however is the MP3 player functionality combined in video phones and camera phones.

A phone with 4gb of memory to use with an MP3 player, camera or video phone is pretty cool. Nobody goes out to buy a Harley Davidson and thinks to themselves, “I want the smallest bike I can get!” They want the most audacious, loudest, high performance but overwhelmingly cool bike they can be seen and heard on as they cruise in town or on the highway or where ever.

A slim Motorola phone will slip into a tight pair of jeans nicely and maybe fool the judges at a super model weigh in giving those extra few ounces of weight to tip the scales, but when a person has a cool phone they want to be seen and heard and noticed. I suspect the disappearing act like trend of cell phones is going to swing the pendulum in the other direction for a few years towards the audacious and noticeable and highly funtional. Small and slim isn’t a tech trend that will disappear, but will probably take a vacation for a season or two until a new stylized form factor of small and slim can re-invent it as the new cool again someday.

Technorati Tags: slim cell phones, cell phone fashion trend, color phones, Motorola, sony ericsson

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I don’t know if the Marketing team from Microsoft will sign up for marketing lessons from the cast of Jackass 2 any time soon, however, they do seem to have learned a thing or two about product packaging from a prank video.

Don’t get me wrong Microsoft made the prank video themselves about themselves, but they did get the message to themselves, so no one can acuse Microsoft of not talking to themselves effectively.  Talking to yourself instead of your customers is not normally the first goal of product packaging, but it seems to work for Microsoft on Zune.

CBS has a nice little video spot taking the black and brown versions of the Zune out of this infamous packaging and putting the device through some of its lite paces.

So will the packaging make the difference here? 

Will it help Zune be a Zuccess? 

It may not, but at least it won’t hurt things.

Technorati Tags: microsoft Zune, product packaging, If microsoft had made the ipod video, prank video, Jackass 2, Zuccess

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PayPerPost.com has secured $3m in venture funding for a blog advertising business model generating a significant amount of controversy on the internet.

TechCrunch covered the news in their article Controversial PayPerPost Raises $3 million and then interviewed the VC firms and founder of PayPerPost on TalkCrunch.

TechCrunch and TalkCrunch have written and talked quite a bit about their perceived problems with the PayPerPost business model.  Their arguments seem to focus on the perspective that bloggers should write as if they are journalists and that journalists should not take endorsements for the topics of their writing.  They also claim that start up companies that can not generate interest about their services or products should not pay for advertising to generate buzz.  The thesis of the argument being that if the company is so un-interesting that it can not generate natural buzz then it should not advertise and generate un-natural buzz.

TechCrunch seems to miss the point on several items.  I’ll cover just a couple:

First, many freelance journalists write articles for widely circulate magazines newspapers and online sites for money today. 

1. Does it go on the front page of the WSJ? No. 
2. Do these articles make it into hundreds of thousands of publications everyday?  Yes.

Second, TechCrunch seems to have a bias against smaller companies that are trying to create a successful marketing drive.

Third, TechCrunch seems to believe that a person can not write an honest review about a product service or anything else if there is money involved.  Yet, there is a huge market out there for survey companies that provide money to a person in exchange for their time to complete the survey, typically a nominal amount of a few dollars.  I filled out a survey for Yahoo the other day and they sent me a check for $15.  Did Yahoo waste their money?  Did I complete the survey and give Yahoo glowing endorsements in the survey?  Definitely not.  I was paid for my time and gave them an honest answer.

From the VC investors perspective, they main question is, Does the System work?  They feel that the answer is yes.  The answer has been found when advertisers come back and buying more ads and spending more.  The cpm’s and cpc’s on PayPerPost ads are actually at very good levels.

TechCrunch makes the argument that PPP is offering links to advertisers sites at an average rate of about $10 per link, when the true internet value of a link from a website is closer to $100 - $200.

So my readers are you aware that when you see a hyperlink anywhere on the net that the value of that hyperlink could be worth one hundred dollars?  How many hundred dollar bills do you see on this page right now? 
(Note that I have two hyperlinks to TechCrucnh and Talk Crunch above and they are not paying me $200.  However, I do also have a link to PayPerPost in this particular article and PPP is paying me $10.) 

Similarly, I have several google ads that run on my blog and other websites.  The links from google and other advertisers do not pay me anything for the individual link being present.

As a reader of a blog, would it be better to read a blog that had zero blocks of Google ads on it allowing the reader to focus on the headlines and the content of the actual site?

These are all interesting questions and its an intriguing argument that occurs in this podcast.  Its really one of those arguments that could be fought out by anyone against advertising arguing with anyone that finds advertising of value in the marketplace.

Noticeably absent from the argument was any talk of the work that goes on behind the scenes in many A-list blogs to target specific keywords to attract the highest converting affilliate ads and Google Advertising.

TechCrunch states in the PodCast that nobody argues about the efficiency and bargain of the PayPerPost business model.

So it would seem that the two sides in the podcast agreed to continue disagree(trash each other), it remains to be seen how this will play out on the rest of the internet.

If you are interested in the levels of idealism of any of the members of this podcast from either side, you should definitely list en to the last 3 minutes. 

The gold in this podcast is at the end!

Technorati Tags: PayPerPost, TechCrunch, TalkCrunch, Product Buzz, Paid Surveys, Internet Advertising, Internet marketing

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I’m just getting back in from the Podcast and Portable Media Expo in Ontario. I’ve got a good bit to catch up on and I’m going to be dedicating a several articles to some of the great things I learned at the show.

This blog and several of the other blogs I write for are going to experience some improvements and added features as a result of some of the things I learned during the trip. Stay Posted and we’ll get things moving in here soon!

Technorati Tags: Maven Mapper’s Information, Maven Mappers, Podcast expo 2006

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