Google Japan is giving away a 4GB iPod nano (with a Google logo) away! Well, you don’t just get it, you will have to compete with hundreds. Not sure if you need to be living in Japan, but I am sure that you will need to know Japanese to answer their questions.
Interested? Give it a try.
related: Want an Video iPod? - they are addicted to giving away iPods

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br

This is some startling news: According to Doug Kass at TheStreet.com, Apple is preparing for a situation where CEO Steve Jobs will have to step down, temporarily, to deal with a stock options backdating scandal. If that does happen, the Apple board member who would likely take the reins of the company until his return: None other than Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The idea of this sort of thing happening is so mind-boggling that I refuse to believe it to be true, but if it did happen, the possibilities are endless

Online branding magazine Brandchannel.com asked 3,625 branding professionals and students to vote on “Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?”.
Here are the top 5 global brands, based purely on impact of the brand:

Google
Apple
YouTube
Wikipedia
Starbucks

The list order changes a little, when you look just at North America:

Apple
YouTube
Google
Starbucks
Wikipedia

Curious about Europe?

Ikea
Skype
Nokia
Zara
Adidas

There is a reason that smaller agile companies and entrepreneurs will always have a place on the web. Big corporations just don’t get it sometimes.
Take for example Apple’s iPhone launch. Both Cingular and Apple where in the perfect position to dominate the free market for the product. After all, they are the source and in the end, it all comes from them

Apple introduced the iPhone today (you can read more about that at Apple Watch, and get my very long op-ed on it at InsideMicrosoft), and joining Steve Jobs onstage for about a minute was none other than Google CEO and Apple board member, Eric Schmidt. Schmidt was there to announce that Google Maps and Google search would be built into the iPhone

…but I want an iPhone!

It’s a new year and a new law suit for Google. This time, the world’s largest search engine is joined by Apple and Napster as they face allegations of patent infringement from online movie distributor Intertainer Inc.
Intertainer, claiming it has suffered irreparable harm, asked the court for cash compensation and an order to prevent the companies from using its technology.

Intertainer’s patent was issued in August 2005 and covers a “digital entertainment service platform”

If you’re looking to locate your business in California’s Silicon Valley and are feeling the pain of real estate prices, we know who you should blame.
Apple, Google and Yahoo are collectively buying-up large parcels of land in the Valley and driving up commercial real estate values in the process

Congratulations to Kevin Henney who wins an iPod Shuffle for spotting our secret RSS-only message last Thursday.
Thanks to all of you who subscribed to the Marketing Pilgrim feed. We hope you’ll keep your subscription due to the great content, but just in case you were about to hit the “unsubscribe” button, you’ll be pleased to know we’ll be running another contest in the New Year.

Pilgrim Partners: Backup Important Data for Free! - Get 2GB of free online backups, no catch, no trial period.

If you’ve not already subscribed to our RSS feed, now would be a good time, as the deadline for drawing is this Friday. We’ve not yet posted the secret message - available only to RSS subscribers - that will see one lucky winner receive an iPod or possibly a Zune.
Full details of the contest can be found here.
Here’s that feed again - http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketing-pilgrim
The hidden message could come at any time before Friday!
P.S

Categories are a really interesting feature of Objective-C, especially for those of us who came from C++. Not only do categories allow you to extend other classes for which you may be lacking the source, but they also give you a really simple way of hiding interfaces from your clients without all the baggage of a pImpl pattern

If you’ve not already subscribed to our RSS feed, now would be a good time. We’ve not yet posted the secret message - available only to RSS subscribers - that will see one lucky winner receive an iPod or possibly a Zune.
Full details of the contest can be found here.
Here’s that feed again - http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketing-pilgrim

The first time I ever saw the mysterious inscription Woz was while reading the legendary Red Book that came with my Apple ][. I soon found out that Woz was Steve Wozniak, who had designed the Apple ][ and co-founded Apple Computer. The more I learned about Woz and his inventions, the more amazed I was: how he enabled the Apple ][ to use a cheap cassette recorder to load and save data; his incredible design for color output that two professional engineers told me "couldn't possibly work"; his unique disk controller that somehow managed to use software for timing and eliminated the need for all but 5 chips.
Woz is a Silicon Valley legend of the highest order, so we at Google were thrilled to welcome him here last Thursday to talk about his new book, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It