Elon Musk Competing Wit...

Last week Mark Zuckerberg took his little Harvard project public in the largest tech IPO ever and quickly followed it up by marrying his Harvard sweetheart . However, the honeymoon was cut short as the Facebook stock has yet to impress. Meanwhile, the tech world’s equivalent of Tony Stark, announced via Twitter yesterday that the Tesla cars were approved for sale to the public after passing the necessary federal crash tests. That announcement was followed up this morning with SpaceX becoming the first privately owned company to launch a rocket destined to dock with the International Space Station. So then the question becomes whether or not launching a rocket combined with a major milestone in a separate company outshines taking Facebook public. In my book, rockets and fast cars win every time. Musk’s car company is on a tear lately. Tesla announced in early May that it was on-track to deliver the Model S to customers next month, a full month prior to the original July rollout (June 22nd according to today’s press release ). Then, a few days later, Tesla revealed that it will begin repaying the $465 million by the end of the year which would make the auto company the first startup to begin repayment. Falcon flew perfectly!! Dragon in orbit, comm locked and solar arrays active!! Feels like a giant weight just came off my back :) — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 22, 2012 Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much nicer than HAL9000 :) #DragonLaunch — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 22, 2012 SpaceX, one of Musk’s other ventures, had an impressive milestone of its own today, becoming the first privately-owned space company to launch a rocket headed for the ISS. History will no doubt forget that this event happened a few days late. The rocket was supposed to launch on Sunday, May 19th but the launch was aborted with a half a second left on the countdown clock. The rocket’s automated systems flagged abnormal pressure in one of the engines and automatically killed the launch, which would have likely caused a catastrophe.

Gap launches digital an...

Gap launched a digital and social marketing campaign May 10, said Rachel Tipograph, global director of digital and social media at the Gap. The "Be Your Own T" campaign accompanies the launch of a new t-shirt collection and includes several digital experiences, including a Facebook initiative.

Social Networking Prope...

With the launch of its Mobile Metrix 2.0, comScore shared some data regarding mobile media usage across apps and mobile browsing. Among the key findings is that more than 80 percent of time spent with mobile media happens via apps.

Thinkfuse Exits Beta: G...

It’s the problem every manager or CEO faces: how do you stay aware of what everyone is doing? Thinkfuse, which debuted at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York , is out of beta with a product that makes it easy to get a single status report on what everyone is working on across a company or team. The Seattle-based company, which was formed by former Googlers and ex-Microsofties, was inspired by Snippets — an internal tool that Google uses. Every week, Googlers would post a simple status update explaining what they had worked on and what they planned to finish by the next week. All of those updates would go into a report for managers and they would also be searchable for everyone else. Thinkfuse is trying to make this available for everyone. A manager or CEO can sign up with Thinkfuse and then ask their employees to file reports every week by e-mail. It’s elegant because it doesn’t require too much behavior change. There’s no entirely new system to learn and it slides right into e-mail. “It helps make a habit of just pausing for 15 minutes a week and thinking about what’s actually important, what you’ve accomplished and how that lines up against company goals,” said Thinkfuse’s chief executive, Aydin Ghajar. Once all those reports are filed, they’re searchable and they can be organized by team, location or role. Ghajar says that other social apps for the enterprise, like Yammer, get treated too much like Facebook. “People post everything from random thoughts to company photos,” Ghajar said. “That makes it difficult to find business critical information.” He says Yammer and Jive end up being more complementary than competitive to what Thinkfuse offers. Another company in the space, Asana, can show what workers are doing at any given time, but it requires them to adopt a totally new system and drastically change their behavior. The closest competitor might be 15five , which debuted at the Launch conference earlier this year. Since launching last year, they’ve enrolled about 450 companies in the beta. This is clearly going to be a freemium product, but pricing isn’t out yet. Ghajar says he’s thinking managers might pay $10 or $20 a month for premium analytics and features. Thinkfuse has raised about a half-million from angel investors including Ali and Hadi Partovi, SV Angel and Scott Banister. It was also a TechStars company. And just for good fun, remember TPS reports? Yeah, Thinkfuse is like the opposite of that:

Apple’s Mothra Quarter ...

Two quarters ago, Apple unleashed Godzilla. It was a quarter so spectacular that the only appropriate way to describe it was in pure expletive form . $46 billion in revenue. $13 billion in profit. 37 million iPhones sold. 15 million iPads sold. A gross margin of 44 percent. These weren’t just good numbers, they were obscene. That’s what made yesterday’s earnings release insane: Apple almost managed to match those numbers last quarter. While pound-for-pound, Apple’s Q1 is the clear winner, I actually think Apple’s Q2 was more impressive. It was Apple’s Mothra. In Q1, Apple was coming off a quarter than some considered “disappointing”. It was their first “ miss ” in forever. I put those terms in quotes because that’s where they belong. Those who actually knew what they were talking about with regard to Apple, knew that Q4 2011 was a fluke that happened for a few reasons — namely the launch of a new iPhone in Q1 rather than Q4 (in terms of Apple’s fiscal calendar, which is different from the ones human beings use). So it wasn’t hard to predict that Q1 was going to be big. Hell, Apple itself even hinted at it . Of course, no one knew the quarter would end up being that good , but plenty of us were thinking big. But last quarter was more complicated. First of all, it was the quarter after the holiday quarter, which typically sees a good sized drop as buying slows. Second, because of an oddity in Apple’s fiscal calendar, Apple’s Q1 was actually a week longer than their quarters typically are. That means a week less of sales in Q2 compared to Q1. Third, the iPhone 4S was no longer brand new, so the pent-up demand was probably going to dissipate. Fourth, a new iPad was expected, but it wasn’t expected to be on sale until the end of the quarter, creating a sales void leading up to the launch. Fifth, there were no new Macs released in the quarter. All of this seemed to be setting Apple up for a fairly significant drop quarter-to-quarter. Nope. Instead, what happened was that iPhone sales remained insane. 35 million for the quarter. While the phone grew its command of the smartphone market in the U.S. percentage-wise, the absolute sales numbers were down (again post-holiday and post-launch). But it was a different story in China. Because the phone was introduced in Q2 in that country, sales went through the roof. And it nearly offset the drop-off in the post-holiday and post-launch U.S. market. Since the iPhone is Apple’s most important product revenue (and profit)-wise, this bolstered the overall numbers — especially with regard to profit (more on that in a bit). Much was made yesterday about the iPad’s “miss” in terms of sales. Because Apple “only” sold 11.8 million of them, plenty of folks were disappointed. Those folks are idiots. The new iPad only went on sale in the last two weeks of the quarter. But everyone knew it was coming. As a result, buying of the old iPad slowed in anticipation. This isn’t rocket science. Further, Apple had trouble meeting demand for the new iPad in those two weeks on the books. If they can get the inventory up to speed, it will be this quarter which will be the big one for iPad. You release a new product, people buy more of them when they’re available. That’s generally how it works. But again, this iPad dip did little to slow Apple’s quarter because of the iPhone sales. And more broadly, Apple’s overall business in China is booming. As Kim-Mai pointed out yesterday,