Students graduating from college today are feeling the sting of a tough economy: Only 19.7% of those who have sent out a résumé have a job, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges & Employers. Even worse: Less than 60% of undergraduates have bothered to look for employment.

That’s grim news, as any college student (or parent of one) preparing to enter the workforce can attest. But that doesn’t mean students can’t dream—or that there aren’t opportunities out there—as witnessed by the record number of undergraduates who responded to Universum USA’s annual survey on ideal employers.

The research firm solicited feedback from more than 60,000 college students from across the nation on their top five places to work. Universum has given BusinessWeek the first look at its complete findings, which include the overall top 100 employers and breakdowns of the top employers for liberal arts, natural science, IT, engineering, and business majors. New trends emerged, and even a few surprises, including the relative strength of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which beat out rival Goldman Sachs (GS) as the most sought-after financial-services firm for job seekers. (It was also the first time in more than a decade that Goldman hasn’t topped the list in that sector.) Not surprising, however, is the growing interest in the public sector—always seen as a safe haven in tumultuous times. Even better news for job applicants: Many of these employers are still hiring—although competition may be fierce.

Going for Government Jobs

Take No. 27 Lockheed Martin (LMT), which is the second most popular employer among engineering students. The aerospace and defense giant will hire 4,500 to 5,000 recent grads this year alone. Sounds great in this tough economic climate, right? But total online applications are up from 1 million last year to 1.4 million this year. Lockheed’s training programs include not only engineering tracks, but also areas such as finance, human resources, and communications.

The government also looks to be a popular destination for students this year because of the security it provides in a weak job market. Perennial favorites such as the State Dept. (No. 4), NASA (No. 8), the FBI (No. 5), and the Peace Corps (No. 7) are among the top 10 overall employers this year.

Some public-sector newcomers such as the Energy Dept. (No. 22) also appear to be on students’ radar for the first time. Why the jump in popularity? “One thing that has helped is the message from the current Administration,” says George Waldmann, director of the Employment Solutions Div. “Science and innovation is definitely a priority, and I think that has helped us in the marketing of our employment opportunities. [The Energy Dept.] is more visible.”

Investment Banking’s Popularity Falls

Not surprisingly, the industry that took perhaps the biggest hit in terms of student popularity is investment banking. The investment banks included in the top 100 fell an average of almost 20 spots from last year.

But some banks did hold up better than others: JPMorgan (No. 19) surpassed rival Goldman Sachs (No. 21) for the first time in the 14 years Universum has conducted the survey. “[JPMorgan has] a very dedicated CEO who’s been quite visible,” says Universum USA CEO Claudia Tattanelli. “They were probably on campus a little more and also more visible because of the commercial banking, too.”

That helps, but how does Morgan sell students on investment banking with the current unrest in the markets? “It’s challenging and [young people] have an ability to make an impact,” says Sheri Denmark, JPMorgan’s global head of investment banking recruiting.

Still, the place where students really want to work is Google (GOOG)—No. 1 for three years running. However, this year the victory was by a much smaller margin than in years past. “They’ve pulled back a little on recruiting,” says Tattanelli, adding that students are also “looking at a larger number of companies,” out of necessity in today’s tough market. In the past, she notes, students relied more on big brands in choosing ideal employers. Now they’re more concerned with who actually has jobs and will serve as a safe and secure employer.

Stable Employment Would Be Nice

Companies that stress work/life balance continue to be a top characteristic of an ideal employer for the students surveyed—but more so for women than men. Seventy percent of women listed this as a top priority and 60% of the men put this on their list. Furthermore, only 26% of women surveyed mentioned “leadership opportunities” among the most important characteristics of an ideal employer, whereas 41% of men said this was of the utmost importance.

But when it comes right down to it, students want what they’ve always wanted: a good, steady paycheck.

In the section of the Universum survey that asks students to expand on the factors that went into their choice of ideal employers, stability was a constant refrain. “A very prestigious and reliable company,” said one student of Ernst & Young. “A solid organization with a stable history,” said another of the FBI. “A position at NASA would be very stable,” said another about the U.S. space agency.

On the flip side, some expressed their concerns about a lack of security at other employers. One worried about “an uncertain future given the current economic conditions” at JPMorgan, for instance.

And while JPMorgan and other employers on our list admitted to some belt tightening around perks, recruiting and developing young talent still remains a top priority. “We want to have the right dialogues with [interns] from a mentoring and coaching perspective,” says JPMorgan’s Denmark. “What is not important is a cocktail party or serving bagels and lox.” Nor is that what today’s job-hunting undergrads are looking for in an ideal employer.

Click to view a slide show of Universum’s 25 Ideal Employers.

[via BusinessWeek] By Lindsey Gerdes

CNN’s THE MOMENT – stitched with Microsoft’s Photosynth, an impressive tool for stitching together dozens of photos to allow a place or event to be viewed from multiple angles.

The only hard part is it really takes 75 photos or more to get the optimal experience. That’s a lot of work for one photographer. But, with big events, one can also rely on crowdsourcing. Which is what CNN has done with the inaugural, asking viewers to send in their photos of Barack Obama’s swearing in.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment

GOOGLE SATELLITE PHOTOS – GEOEYE-1 captures some amazing images of the inauguration.

[Click each image to Enlarge]

1,474 Megapixel Inauguration Panorama Shot – this is my favorite. A really powerful CANON G10 Bridge Cam, taking a panorama of the inauguration. Try to zoom and and read the musicians sheet music, or check out Yo Yo Mo taking pictures on his iPhone.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

Two years ago, Noah Weiss, a young programmer who spent the summer working here at Fog Creek Software, came to me with a business idea. Noah, who was still in college, had noticed that a lot of smaller tech-related blogs were running classified ads for job listings. He suggested that we do the same thing on my company’s blog, Joel on Software. The site is read by thousands of programmers a month — the ones who are so good at programming they have spare time at work to read the self-absorbed drivel I publish there.

Building an online classified ad system would be easy, Noah argued. (As any programmer would tell you: “It’s one table!”) And Fog Creek already had systems in place for charging credit cards, printing receipts, and accepting purchase orders, so the whole project wouldn’t take much work.

At first, I resisted. I had never run ads of any sort on the site and liked the idea of keeping it commercial-free.

But Noah kept arguing. “These 37signals guys are getting 50 ads a month,” he said, referring to a well-known software company in Chicago. “At $250 each, that’s — ”

Wait, I interrupted. They charge $250 for each ad? I had imagined that the going price to run a job listing would be, oh, I don’t know, $4?

That’s right, Noah said. They charge $250 per ad. “Besides,” he went on, “a job listing is not really an ad — it’s providing a community service.”

By then I had almost stopped listening. Little gears were turning in my head: $250 times 50 ads times 12 months — that revenue would allow me to hire another programmer! So we added classified ads to the site. Noah wrote the first draft of the code in about two weeks, and I spent another two weeks polishing and debugging it. The total time to build the job listing service was roughly a month.

Instead of charging the going rate of $250, we decided to charge $350. Why not? I figured we could establish ourselves as having the premium product simply by charging a premium. In the absence of additional information, consumers often use prices to judge products, and I wanted our site to be the Lexus of job listings. A few months later, 37signals raised its price to $300.

By the time you read this, that little four-week project will have made Fog Creek Software $1 million — nearly all of it profit.

That raised a question: How do you properly compensate an employee for a smash-hit, million-dollar idea? On the one hand, you could argue that you don’t have to — a software business is basically an idea factory. We were already paying Noah for his ideas. That was the nature of his employment agreement with us. Why pay twice?

But I felt we needed to do something else to express our gratitude. Should we buy Noah an Xbox 360? Pay him a cash bonus? Maybe present him with a certificate of merit, nicely laser-printed on heavyweight bond paper? Or a T-shirt that said “I Invented a Million-Dollar Business and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt”? We were stumped.

And what about everybody else at Fog Creek? Those people were doing their jobs, too. Simply because one programmer’s idea translated visibly and directly into a lot of money didn’t mean that the other team members weren’t adding just as much value to the business, albeit in a less direct way. At around the same time Noah came up with the classified ads idea, most of my employees were hard at work developing FogBugz 6.0, a smash hit that just about doubled our monthly sales.

Noah’s case was only the most dramatic example of a question that has long intrigued me: How do you pay employees based on performance when performance is so hard to quantify? The very idea that you can rate knowledge workers on their productivity is highly suspect and always problematic. If you mess up, the consequences are very real.

Psychologists talk about two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is what drives you to do something regardless of whether you will receive a reward. Why do you spend an hour cleaning the inside of your stove? Nobody looks in there. Your intrinsic motivation compels you to do a thorough job. We all have it — in fact, most people start out with the desire to excel at whatever they do. Extrinsic motivation is the drive to do something precisely because you expect to receive compensation, and it’s the weaker of the two.

The interesting thing, according to psychologists, is that extrinsic motivation has a way of displacing intrinsic motivation. The very act of rewarding workers for a job well done tends to make them think they are doing it solely for the reward; if the reward stops, the good work stops. And if the reward is too low, workers might think, Gosh, this is not worth it. They will forget their innate, intrinsic desire to do good work.

And the grumblers have a point: It’s impossible to know whether that bug that David fixed on Tuesday made more or less money for Fog Creek than the code Ted added on Wednesday. We are not a piecework sweatshop sewing doggie coats, where David made five and Ted made seven, so Ted should obviously get 40 percent more money.

In an environment in which judging performance is a subjective exercise, you are bound to make decisions with which employees disagree. Human beings, by their nature, tend to think of themselves as, how can I put this politely, a bit more wonderful than they really are. All of your B performers think they are A performers. The C performers think they are B performers. (A couple of your A performers think they are F performers, because they are crazy perfectionists or just clinically depressed. But they are the exceptions.)

So even if you did magically have the ability to accurately measure how good someone was at a job, the average worker, with his or her above-average opinion of his or her work, would still feel undervalued.

Throughout my career, I have observed that companies with formal systems that tie cash bonuses to performance end up with far more than half of their staff sulking and unhappy. Back when I worked at Microsoft, one of my friends got a lousy review that was neither fair nor correct: His bosses rated him based on the 5 percent of the job they observed (his infrequent interactions with them) instead of the 95 percent of his job where he was exemplary (his frequent interactions with customers). Based on that review, he almost quit in despair. But he held on, and now he is a very senior executive in charge of a product so important that you, personally, will almost certainly use it today.

So, back to Noah, the guy with the million-dollar idea. Though we don’t believe in performance bonuses, we still wanted to recognize his contribution. We decided to give Noah 10,000 shares of stock — conditional on him coming back to work for us full time when he graduated. Because Fog Creek is private and our stock is hard to value, we could say “it’s only fair that you share in the wealth” without assigning an actual dollar amount to it. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but everybody thought it made sense.

Noah seemed pleased, and we hoped the stock would entice him to come back to Fog Creek to take a full-time job. Which…he didn’t. Google made him a better offer. That’s another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.

Oh, well. Thanks for the summer, Noah. We are keeping an empty office here in case you change your mind.

[via Inc Magazine] by Joel Spolsky

President-elect wants to computerize the nation’s health care records in five years. But the plan comes with a hefty price tag, and specialized labor is scarce.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.

Here’s the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.

Sounds good. But it won’t be easy.

In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.

“The hard part of this is that we can’t just drop a computer on every doctor’s desk,” said Dr. David Brailer, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, who served as President Bush’s health information czar from 2004 to 2006. “Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task.”

It also won’t come cheap. Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund have shown that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.

That’s a huge amount of money — since the total cost of the stimulus plan is estimated to cost about $800 billion, the health care initiative would be one of the priciest parts to the plan.

The biggest cost will be paying and training the labor force needed to create the network. Luis Castillo, senior vice president of Siemens Healthcare, a company that designs health care technology, said the laborers will have the extremely difficult task of designing a a system that “thinks like a physician.”

“Doctors cannot spend hours and hours learning a new system,” said Castillo. “It needs to be a ubiquitous, ‘anytime, anywhere’ solution that has easily accessible data in a simple-to-use Web-based application.”

But highly skilled health information technology professionals are as rare as they come, and many IT workers will need to be trained as health technology experts.

Early government estimates showed about 212,000 jobs could be created from this program, but Brailer said there simply aren’t that many Americans who are qualified.

Furthermore, ensuring the privacy of patients’ records in a nationalized computer network will be tricky. There are obvious concerns about hackers and system failures. And new online health record systems, such as Google Health are not currently subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national health privacy law.

“HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the laws never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records,” said Brailer. “Congress can pass one of numerous policy proposals for change, it’s just a question if they have the will to do that.”

The Obama transition operation declined a request to elaborate on Obama’s proposal. The president-elect said Thursday in a speech on the economy thatthe benefits of a modernized national health record system go beyond just cost savings.

“This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests,” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system,” he added.

Still, compared to the $2 trillion a year that the industry spends, the$100 billion experts say it may cost to implement Obama’s planis a drop in the bucket.

“We must reduce waste to become more efficient” said Brailer.

The savings of such a plan could be substantial. Brailer estimates that a fully computerized health record system could save the industry $200 billion to $300 billion a year.

That could ultimately slow the rapid rise of health care premiums, which have cut into Americans’ paychecks. While wages are rising at a rate of around 3% a year, health care costs are growing at about three times that rate.

“Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of health reform that actually will deliver lower costs for hard-working American families,” said Larry McNeely, a health care advocate at U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Long-term savings can’t happen unless we have 21st century health information technology.”

Massachusetts has developed a plan to fully computerize records at its 14,000 physicians’ offices by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. After a pilot program, the state legislature estimates it will cost about $340 million to build the statewide computer system, with a cost of about $2 million per hospital.

“[Obama's] timeframe is very ambitious, but there is a need to be able to track data on patients and talk across providers and health care systems,” said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Secretary of Health and Human Services for Massachusetts. “The program will allow for greater patient safety.”

Some say some of the hard work has begun. The Bush administration laid much of the groundwork for the program, leading to several pilot programs in a handful of states, as well as a standardization of medical records.

“The whole structure has already been developed,” said Stephen Schoenbaum, executive director of The Commonwealth Fund’s commission on a high performance health system. “It’s feasible to at least make a lot of progress on this in the next five years.”

[via CNN Money] by David Goldman

Family Guy = $2 Billion.

It’s not hard to find someone who delights in attacking the show Family Guy. Which isn’t a criticism, per se. Much of the animated sitcom’s purpose seems to be to stoke the opposition, to offend the easily offended. But that’s not the only reason it annoys people. There is a school of thought that says the show is hackish — crudely drawn and derivative of its cartoon forebears. Members of this school would include, most prominently, Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the fathers of South Park, which is probably the only show on television that rivals Family Guy for objectionable content per half hour. South Park has devoted entire episodes to attacking Family Guy, portraying the show’s writers as manatees who push “idea balls” with random jokes down tubes to generate plotlines. Kricfalusi has said, “You can draw Family Guy when you’re 10 years old.”

What does Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane — who earlier this year inked a $100 million — plus contract with Fox, followed by a breakthrough deal involving Google — have to say about that?

“I would say, ‘How many violas do you have?’ ”

MacFarlane is hovering over the soundboard in the control room of the Newman Soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. Various engineers twiddle knobs and adjust levels as he looks out on a gymnasium-size room full of classically trained musicians tuning their instruments. Every piece of music on every episode of Family Guy is recorded live by an orchestra that on this day numbers 56. The only music that ever repeats, even once, are the opening and closing themes, and those too are frequently updated, just because. Now, it is not unprecedented to use a live orchestra in today’s TV world. But it is highly unusual. “All the shows used to do it,” laments Walter Murphy, one of Family Guy‘s two composers. “It’s mostly electronic now — to save money.” The Simpsons, he says, still uses an orchestra, as does Lost. King of the Hill has a small band. And, of course, there’s an orchestra on American Dad, the other show created by MacFarlane, who is now the highest-paid writer-producer in the history of TV.

MacFarlane, despite being 35 and looking like an average dude, possesses the musical inclinations of a septuagenarian drag queen. A significant percentage of Family Guy episodes feature extravagant Broadway-inspired song-and-dance numbers (because, really, why have the cartoon doctor tell his patient he has end-stage AIDS when a barbershop quintet can break the news via song?), and only some of them are sacrilegious or scatological. Among the features of his new contract with Fox is a Family Guy movie he imagines as “an old-style musical with dialogue” in the vein of The Sound of Music, a poster of which hangs above his desk. “We’d really be trying to capture, musically, that feel,” says MacFarlane, whose father moonlighted as a folk singer. “Nothing today feels like it’ll play 50 years from now, like Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart.”

If you’re waiting for the punch line here, there isn’t one. Critics may dismiss MacFarlane’s show for being vulgar, but when he writes a song, it’s going to be lush and jazzy and, at least musically, exactly as you might hear in something by Irving Berlin. It’s all part of a manic attention to detail that not only gives the show its layered humor but also has made MacFarlane a massive multiplatform success.

MacFarlane is more than just an eclectic entertainer. Stripped of its crude facade, Family Guy — indeed, all of MacFarlane Inc. — exposes itself as a quintessentially modern business with lessons that extend far beyond TV land. MacFarlane has divined how to connect with next-generation consumers, not simply through the subject of his jokes but by embracing a flexibility in both format and distribution. He has also stepped outside the siloed definitions of a single industry (Hollywood) and exploited opportunity wherever he could find it (Silicon Valley). And perhaps most instructive, his success is not predicated on his product being all things to all people. He has bred allegiance from his core customers precisely because he’s been willing to turn his back on (and even offend) others — a model of sorts for how to create a mass-market-size niche business in our increasingly atomized culture.

MacFarlane is a fairly unassuming young man. He is partial to long-sleeve T-shirts, fraying jeans, and laceless black Chuck Taylors. Various stories have described him as prematurely graying, but today his hair is convincingly black and lightly gelled, and he’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Beard stubble is a staple. The net effect is the look of a full-grown, thinking man’s frat boy, which also pretty well sums up the target of his comedy (minus, perhaps, the full-grown part).

His show concerns the Griffins of Quahog, Rhode Island, whose patriarch is Peter, voiced by MacFarlane. Like Homer Simpson, he is lovable but bumbling, overweight, and a little slow-witted (a recent plot development is that he’s mentally retarded, but just barely). His wife is Lois, cartoon sexy and much sharper; she adores him despite his flaws. They have three children: Chris, overweight and dim, in so many ways his father’s son; Meg, smart but underappreciated and ever the butt of jokes about her homeliness; and Stewie, the infant pedant with the football-shape head who secretly wishes to murder his mother. Rounding out the clan is Brian the talking dog. He lusts after Lois, drinks martinis, and has been known to snort the occasional line of blow. (MacFarlane also voices both Brian and Stewie.)

Back in the soundstage control room, with the orchestra on the other side of the glass, a bank of flat screens are frozen on an image of Stewie staring out a window, forlorn. MacFarlane tells me that in this future episode, Stewie has been left home alone while the family goes on vacation.

“Let’s try it once with the dialogue,” Murphy says to his musicians. Stewie’s quasi-British voice — inspired by Rex Harrison, MacFarlane says — booms through the control room. “Oh, Mommy! Thank God you’re home! I promise with all my heart that I’ll never say or do anything bad to you for the rest of the evening.” Comedic pause. “By the way, I disabled the V-chip and watched so much porn.”

Out in the orchestra room, trombonists erupt in laughter.

It is a violent collision of high and low — classical musicians accustomed to the Hollywood Bowl recording music for a show heavy on poop jokes — and a perfect lens for examining why this man sipping coffee from a paper cup emblazoned with the Fox logo has such an enormous and perpetual grin.

*****

It would be fair, at this point, to call Family Guy a juggernaut. If you’re looking to get acquainted, it airs Sunday evenings at 9, just after The Simpsons, which it has surpassed as the most-popular animated show on TV. Among males 18 to 34, often cited as the most desirable demographic in advertising, Family Guy is the highest-rated scripted program in all of television (American Dad ranks sixth). It is the second-highest-rated show among males 18 to 49. It is among the most-downloaded shows on iTunes and the most-watched programs on Hulu, and it was the eighth most-pirated show of 2007 on BitTorrent sites.

Next spring, MacFarlane will introduce The Cleveland Show, a spin-off starring the Griffins’ African-American neighbor. The show will be MacFarlane’s third in prime time and the first new product of his megadeal with Fox. (He is also prepping a live-action movie, but no title or dates have been announced.)

A common complaint about MacFarlane’s shows is that they are random and disjointed, with episodes that veer wildly off course for no apparent purpose. A human-size chicken, for example, has been known to show up and battle Peter, apropos of nothing, in elaborate fight scenes that mimic movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and stretch for more than a minute.

The show’s tangents are intentional, but in no way intended to advance plot. MacFarlane admits that sometimes vignettes are inserted into an episode just to fill time, or just because they’re good for a laugh, regardless of plot relevance. As a result, Family Guy is easily digested in bite-size portions — the breakout gags, like the musical numbers, can be watched in isolation, at any time, and still work. This makes MacFarlane’s show especially well suited to the Internet and mobile devices — perfect for viewing during a boring history lecture or on the dreary commute home on the 5:07 to Ronkonkoma.

Easily masticated comedy — plus a fervent audience of college kids in baggy cargo shorts bursting with disposable income and electronics — also made MacFarlane a natural fit for Google. In September, the first of 50 bizarro animated shorts by MacFarlane appeared online. Seth MacFarlane’s “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” distributed by Google via its AdSense network, is a series of Webisodes that MacFarlane describes as edgier versions of New Yorker cartoons come to life. Running from 30 seconds to just over two minutes, the shorts are sponsored by advertisers and noteworthy for a host of reasons. For fans, they are MacFarlane’s first non-TV venture and so exist outside the reach of censors and network suits and introduce a universe of entirely new characters. For the entertainment industry, they mark the first experiments with a bold new method of content distribution (and the entry of the beast Google into its world). This purportedly unsophisticated hack comic now finds himself, in some ways by accident, at the intersection of advertising, television, and the Web — all of which are blurring together.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that while a MacFarlane product like Family Guy may seem slapdash when you’re watching it, the creative process behind it is decidedly sophisticated. “He’s kind of a modern-day cross between George Lucas and Norman Lear,” says his manager, John Jacobs. “He thinks on a big canvas.”

Says Norman Lear himself, a man who was once also the highest-paid creator on TV: “I’m crazy about him and his work. I can’t think of anybody doing a better job right now of mining the foolishness of the human condition.”

*****

A Family Guy episode is more or less a nine-month undertaking, from first script to finished animation. All episodes take shape in the writers room on the third floor of an unremarkable office building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions. It’s pretty much as you’d imagine: a conference table surrounded by rolling chairs and covered in computer monitors, action figures, and the assorted detritus of the comedy writer’s diet: soft-drink cans, candy wrappers, half-finished bags of beef jerky. MacFarlane takes a chair in front of a dry-erase board as his 16 writers stagger in drinking coffee and stabbing at cups of fruit. One of them asks the boss how a concert he’d seen the night before had gone, and when MacFarlane complains about the bathroom lines, the guy suggests he stick to “lesbian shows, like the Indigo Girls.”

The typical episode begins with a single writer producing a script, but then the whole team gets involved, dissecting each scene and line to decide if a) it’s actually funny and b) it can be made funnier. In a loose but laborious process, each gag gets chewed over ad infinitum in this peanut-gallery forum. The goal is to produce an episode overstuffed with jokes — something that gives fans plenty to discuss late at night on bulletin boards. “I think we’re the most joke-per-minute show on television,” asserts executive producer David Goodman.

This late-summer afternoon, the challenge is to fill out a scene in which Stewie and some friends are at nursery school. Ideas are tossed out in various impressions of Stewie’s voice: There’s a molestation joke, some poop jokes, a joke about a rogue chicken because, according to the writer who pitches it, “chickens just wander around the yard at some schools.”

“Is that safe?” MacFarlane asks. “Aren’t chickens aggressive and, like, poke your eyes out?”

Anyone can speak, and jokes are called out with no introduction. MacFarlane sits up front, along with Goodman, reclining in his seat and appearing in no way dictatorial. He’ll chime in, but his input seems no more or less important than anyone else’s. “If the writers in that room don’t laugh — it’s not going on,” says Goodman. “That’s a tough room. If we laugh, it’s probably funny.”

The prevailing meta-joke about Stewie is that, despite being an infant, he is the most intellectual character on the show, even if the only family member who can hear him speak is Brian the dog.

“Stewie could wear a cop hat and go up to a white girl standing with a black kid and say, ‘Are you okay, miss?’ ” one writer suggests.

Awkward, almost embarrassed laughs break out around the table. It’s a joke that could be viewed as offensive, or as fairly pointed social criticism. A digression on race follows, before everyone moves on to another idea, about toddlers as obnoxious art critics picking apart one another’s finger paintings.

There isn’t a comedy writers room in America where the banter doesn’t often veer toward extreme subjects. The difference with this crew is that the extremes are the goal. Watch enough Family Guy and you’ll almost certainly see something that makes you cringe; it might not offend you personally, but you can imagine how someone won’t find it funny. Family Guy savages politicians and celebrities, and is more than willing to tackle all manner of touchy subjects in the name of comedy — race, Islam, Christianity (Jesus is a recurring character, because FCC rules stipulate you cannot use “Jesus Christ” as an exclamation unless the deity himself is present), homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, the physically impaired. A favorite example tossed out by opponents is a sight gag that involved a JFK Pez dispenser in which the candy emerged from a hole in the president’s head. (MacFarlane later admitted that maybe, just maybe, that one crossed the line.)

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that many of his jokes border on offensive, but the notion that the content is actually offensive irks him. Each episode is vetted by a team of Fox censors editing with the FCC in mind. But beyond that, he contends, “There’s an enormous amount of self-policing that goes on and a lot of intelligent conversations about whether a show is worth doing. I would stack the ethics of one of my writers up against the average Washington bureaucrat on censorship any day.” MacFarlane is mystified in particular by the two things that most upset the FCC — two basic elements of human life that, in his view, are far less sensitive than, say, religion. “For the FCC, it’s sexual references,” he says. “But even more than that, shit jokes. Any time we even show somebody on a toilet, we get in trouble.”

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that his jokes border on offensive. But the notion that they are actually offensive irks him.

Which brings us back to the writers room. A source of ongoing consternation is Stewie’s inability to master the commode. MacFarlane assumes the child’s erudite voice and says, speaking in character to his fellow children, “I’d like to make an announcement: It’s the elephant in the room. I made a stool. Now let’s just all go about our business as if nothing happened, and it’ll take care of itself in due time.”

Most everyone in the room laughs. The joke is in.

*****

Seth MacFarlane was basically fated to this life. His middle name, Woodbury, was chosen by his mother as an homage to the town drunk back in Kent, Connecticut. “Some of the foulest jokes I’ve ever heard,” he has said, “came from my mother.” MacFarlane started drawing at 2 and published his first cartoon, “Walter Crouton,” in a local paper at the age of 8. At 18, he left for the Rhode Island School of Design and, after his adviser sent his thesis film, “Life of Larry” (starring a lovable schlub with a tolerant wife and a talking dog), off to Hanna-Barbera, he was hired to work as an animator and writer on shows like Dexter’s Laboratory and Johnny Bravo. In 1996, he created a sequel to “Life of Larry” that aired in prime time on the Cartoon Network. Fox development executives took notice and hired him away to work on interstitials to run between sketches on Mad TV.

A few years later, Fox asked MacFarlane, then 25, to develop an animated pilot, giving him a scant $50,000 to do it. MacFarlane emerged three months later with a nearly completed pilot, for which he had drawn every frame and voiced every character.

Fox bought the show, gave MacFarlane a reported $2-million-per-season contract, and premiered Family Guy in the highest-profile slot possible, following the 1999 Super Bowl. He was the youngest person ever to be given his own primetime network show.

It drew 22 million viewers but then became a sort of network foster child. For the next two years, Fox execs moved the show all over the schedule, trying it in 11 time slots, including in the death zone opposite Friends. Despite the fact that Family Guy tracked well with young men, the show’s ratings were low. Fox canceled it in 2000, revived it briefly the next year, then canceled it again.

But a funny thing happened. The show lived on over at the Cartoon Network, with even edgier versions specially edited by MacFarlane. Regard for the show was so low that Fox essentially gave the Cartoon Network the first 50 episodes for free; Fox simply asked for promotion of the show’s DVD in exchange. (They were having trouble persuading retailers to stock it — another in a list of miscalculations that seems inconceivable in retrospect.) Family Guy‘s audience, ignored at every turn, followed the show to the Cartoon Network, dug in, and swelled, regularly beating both Letterman and Leno in the desirable young-male demographic. When Fox released the first 28 episodes on a series of DVDs in 2003, it sold more than 2.5 million copies. (In 2005, a straight-to-DVD movie called Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story sold about 3.5 million copies, bringing in almost $80 million.)

Twentieth Century Fox TV president Gary Newman (now chairman) summoned MacFarlane to his office in 2004 and did the unthinkable: He asked him to restart production. “I had gone into the meeting not knowing why I was going in there,” MacFarlane recalls. “He said, ‘We’d like to put this back into production,’ and I almost fell out of my chair.”

David Goodman says that when Family Guy was initially canceled, MacFarlane told him Goodman’s job would be safe if it ever returned. “I’d been on 14 canceled TV shows,” Goodman recalls. “They never come back. It’s never happened before — ever.”

Fox brought the show back in a big way, ordering 35 episodes (22 is typical) and handing over the Sunday-at-9 slot, where it boomed. The 100th episode aired in November of 2007, pushing the show into syndication. Though schedules vary, Family Guy airs up to 27 times a week in a single market, with reruns on Fox, TBS, the Cartoon Network, and in 20 major markets on channels owned by Tribune Broadcasting.

“Animation is something that, if it works, it’s more profitable for a studio than any other show,” MacFarlane says. People don’t buy Everybody Loves Raymond T-shirts, but they do buy shirts bearing the devious visage of Stewie, as well as action figures, stickers, posters, and video games. Increasingly, they also buy song clips and ring tones. And Fox, which owns the show, also owns the intellectual property (but kicks a percentage of sales back to MacFarlane). Reports have valued the Family Guy franchise at as much as $1 billion. Though neither Fox nor MacFarlane’s team would confirm that number, a little back-of-the-envelope math indicates that it is overly conservative. At a reported $2 million per episode, Family Guy has garnered at least $400 million up front from syndication. DVD sales have totaled almost another $400 million, while 80 licensees have contributed at least $200 million from sales of various clothing and baubles, actual and digital. Fox’s ad revenue off Family Guy can be estimated at at least $500 million over the years. “Suffice it to say, with it being a studio-owned show, and being on the Fox network, it’s of substantial value,” Newman told me. And none of this figures in revenue from MacFarlane’s other hit product, American Dad.

Team MacFarlane, of course, also recognized the value of what MacFarlane has brought to the network. By the time negotiations on a new contract began more than two years ago, the challenge for both sides was how to put a number on MacFarlane’s worth, considering that he isn’t just a writer-producer but also an animator and actor. MacFarlane’s team felt the need to let his contract expire, “to have him on the open market,” explains one of his representatives. For more than two years, MacFarlane worked on Family Guy in good faith, without a contract. “There were a couple days when I was ‘sick,’ ” MacFarlane says. “At times, that helps bring the negotiations back when they’re stalled.”

When the writers strike broke out last year, he sided with the guild and walked off the set. Fox decided to go forward and edit episodes without MacFarlane’s participation — they did own them, after all. MacFarlane called it a “colossal dick move.” When asked about it now, he says it’s a sore that’s been salved ($100 million has a way of doing that). “They gave us money to go back and edit the shows the way we wanted, and we made nice.”

One Fox-inflicted bruise that has yet to fade involves shots taken at Family Guy by The Simpsons, a show that MacFarlane says he admires greatly. Most famously, in an episode called “Treehouse of Horror,” Homer creates a sea of clones even dumber and more dim-witted than himself. One of these is Family Guy‘s Peter Griffin. MacFarlane decided to return fire. He wrote a joke in which Peter’s perverted friend Quagmire attacks and molests Marge Simpson. Fox, he says, nixed the idea. “They said, ‘We want the feuds to end.’ I thought it was very conspicuous that this came about only when we decided to hit them back.”

What did he do? He left it in anyway, and delivered the edit to Fox, which then edited it out. “It’s still a sore point,” MacFarlane says. “It’s still this wound that has never quite healed that says, ‘We don’t value you quite as much,’ which I can’t imagine is true, but …” The thought trails off and, perhaps realizing that it’s best not to follow this logic, he turns a corner. “To be fair to Fox — for the most part, creatively they have been a very easy company to work with. This was kind of a rare lapse in judgment.”

*****

MacFarlane’s contract hiatus didn’t just buy him leverage with Fox; it was an expansion opportunity. While the studio was noodling on the deal, MacFarlane’s management team went out and signed him up with Google. The resulting “Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is outside the bounds of the Fox relationship. “In a completely perfect world,” Dana Walden, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, has said, “he wouldn’t be able to do that.”

He did. The idea stemmed from conversations between MacFarlane’s lawyer and agent and representatives of Media Rights Capital, an L.A.-based multimedia financier. Loosely tied to the talent agency Endeavor (which reps MacFarlane, naturally), MRC partners with content creators — whether that’s director Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel; or Sacha Baron Cohen on his next film, Bruno; or MacFarlane — giving them funding and a share in ownership, plus creative control.

MacFarlane produced the Cavalcade shorts with a team of six writers. The animation is instantly recognizable as his, as is the humor. The shorts lean heavily on pop culture (say, “Fred and Barney Try to Get Into a Club,” which is fairly self-explanatory); they’re rude (in one, Tara Reid’s grotesque belly flab talks); and of course, they’re crude (a boy is told he is adopted by two parents with nipples that stick out of their chests like javelins; his name, they tell him, is not Michael Sticknipples but rather Albert Horsefeet Turdsneeze — whereupon the boy sneezes a turd that sprouts horse feet and gallops off).

The Cavalcade shorts are also distributed in an innovative way: targeting young males where they lurk by popping up in ad windows on sites such as Maxim.com and Fandango.com (while simultaneously appearing on YouTube). “The idea is not to drive someone to a Web site but to make content available wherever the audience will be,” explains Dan Goodman, president of digital at MRC.

Also unprecedented is the way MacFarlane is being paid. MRC is not Fox; it can’t just write him a nine-figure check. Instead, MacFarlane’s status as an equity partner in the deal entitles him to split the ad revenue with Google and MRC. Because the whole idea is new, it’s hard to draw parallels to current entertainment and marketing models but, essentially, MRC provides the funding and sells the ad partnerships, MacFarlane provides the content, and Google serves as distribution outlet, providing the “broadcast” via its AdSense network. Then all three split the proceeds. It can, and will, be replicated with other content providers. Already, MRC is working with the Disney Channel’s Raven-Symoné on kids-targeted programming. You could easily imagine it with, say, Rachael Ray.

Each Cavalcade short carries a single advertiser. The first 10 were bought by Burger King, and — in yet another unprecedented move — MacFarlane animated the company’s ads for them. It’s an option available to any of the sponsors if they choose to pay extra for it.

For Burger King, the appeal was obvious. “Seth’s fan base intersects squarely with our audience of young men and women,” says Brian Gies, vice president of marketing impact for Burger King. In other words, MacFarlane’s comedy provides a very powerful and friendly connection to a very targeted audience, one that tends to get the munchies. Says Google’s Levy: “We know where to find them, and we’re putting the advertising in an environment they’re comfortable in.”

“The idea is to take the TV experience and provide it on the Web,” says Alex Levy, Google’s director of branded entertainment. “But brought to the people you want to reach, when, where, and how you want to reach them.” For a company that likes to say it’s not in the content business, that’s a remarkable statement. Google, in essence, is trying to use its ad-distribution network to turn content distribution upside down. (Google calls it the Content Network.)

There’s no guarantee the new model is going to stick, of course — advertisers could decide they get as much value by just buying regular Web ads and avoid paying extra. But early returns showed viewers were responding well to the shorts. In its first days, Cavalcade was the most-watched channel on YouTube, and the videos racked up 5.5 million views across the various sites running them. And MacFarlane wins no matter what. Unlike his Family Guy characters, every horny frog and lusty princess and sarcastic talking bear created for Cavalcade is owned by him, and can be deployed for future revenue. And for all this, he has zero financial risk.

*****

A couple of years ago, MacFarlane nearly worked himself to death. He collapsed at his desk and was rushed to the hospital. He was sick, he says, and “didn’t have the time to stop.” So he passed out right there under the Sound of Music poster. He ended up spending, as he tells it, “a lovely afternoon at the emergency room.”

“We’ve been behind schedule on Family Guy since day one,” he explains. “In reality, you can’t do a prime-time animated show in the time allotted, so that always puts a glaze of stress over the whole process.” He takes a breath. “I refuse to let that control my life. I did that in my twenties. Now I insist on a balance.”

MacFarlane has handed off the day-to-day control of both American Dad and The Cleveland Show, and he is increasingly delegating on Family Guy. He reviews all the drawings and obsesses more than a little over the music — there is some stuff he just can’t give up. And what’s easy to forget is that MacFarlane is also the star of Family Guy. Actually, several stars of Family Guy. He voices three of the six main characters, and is in virtually every scene, sometimes playing several parts at once. He’s also the voice of Quagmire, a major secondary player, and hundreds of ancillary characters and one-timers. And, of course, he’s the voice of Stan, the lead on American Dad, and almost certain to guest-star often on The Cleveland Show. This summer, he showed up as a voice actor in Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II and is very soon planning to step in front of the camera in live-action projects. He also intends to direct movies.

One afternoon in August, MacFarlane and two sound engineers are in the tiny control room outside the recording booths in the Family Guy offices. In strolls the actor Gary Cole wearing shorts and sunglasses. For a show that likes to pick on celebrities, Family Guy has little trouble attracting them, especially those whose résumés include the kind of wonderfully awful performances that ultimately get embraced as cult in-jokes: Drew Barrymore, Haley Joel Osment, Gene Simmons, Bob Costas, Phyllis Diller … Michael Clarke Duncan was in earlier this morning. Richard Dreyfuss is due to arrive this evening.

Cole has done the show 23 times. Today, he’s doing Mike Brady, reprising a role he played in The Brady Bunch Movie. In this script, Mr. Brady is verbally abusing Mrs. Brady in one of those trademark pop-culture tangents.

“You know, you can really go as loud as you want,” MacFarlane says in director mode. “We’ve never heard Mike Brady yell before, so this is new territory.” He then assumes the role of Carol Brady.

“Huh, I don’t remember asking for a warm beer,” Cole says, his voice quiet but seething.

MacFarlane, as Carol, flips out: “I didn’t want to quit working — you made me!”

Five minutes later, Cole exits and MacFarlane is off to the next thing, laying down lines in furious fashion, typically in three or four takes, which he then selects from on the fly. His sound engineers tag his favorite takes and move on. He swaps from voicing Stewie to Peter to Quagmire to various odd parts, including a bit as Paul McCartney and another as Vince Vaughn.

Next up: A writer is doing Patrick Swayze, who is not, as you might expect, the butt of a cancer joke, but rather a tight-jeans joke followed by repeated takes of the writer growling, as throaty redneck Swayze, “Roadhouse!” It’s another one of those cult jokes, a little snippet of Dada theater.

“Even a hair more badass,” MacFarlane directs, and over and over they go until that one simple word becomes absurd in its own right. You can already hear it as a ring tone.

[via FastCompany] by Josh Dean

Chris Sacca is one of Google’s Principals for New Business Development. Here he blogs about how to get noticed, if you are interested in working with Google, Inc.

I am on the front line of inbound business proposals. I would gather I see 40-50 per day. The launch of Google Talk has probably added another 15-20 per day.

So, as I sit with trepidation considering how many emails I have flagged for follow-up in my inbox on this Sunday afternoon, I thought I would take a minute to type out some hints that will make it easier on both of us and increase the likelihood that your company and mine will get some business done. These are in random order and I might expand the list as time goes on. As always, your comments are welcome. Anything I missed? (Keep in mind, this is my personal blog and nothing herein is approved by my employer.)

Email Rules – Phones are very yesterday. Voicemail is so broken. Until someone can really make it easy for me to extract a number from a voicemail, file the message away for later, label it, quickly find it again, search over it, forward it, reply at my convenience, etc etc, I am going to stick to email. Email is awesome (especially Gmail). It allows me to ensure that I get back to you. It also helps me bring in all the folks within the company whose input would matter on your topic. So, please, please, please – email. If you insist upon calling, you will hear a message saying that I won’t check your voicemail anyway. So, before you think me rude, I implore you to please send email.

Thesis Statements – Lead with what you want. Please, put it in the first sentence or two. Just tell me how we can work together. You can expand on it later, but please don’t make me go too far. This is particularly tough when I have to forward your message to a lot of other execs who are also looking for a thesis statement.

What problem are you solving? – Hand in hand with the thesis statement is identifying the problem you are solving. Many times I have conversations with folks who can’t answer that question. We are obsessive about solving problems that enhance our end-user experience. We are lucky in that the company doesn’t even ask us to make money with each enhancement. We are instead rewarded for the impact we have on users. So, please tell me what about their experience is broken now, and how we can fix it together. (By the way, we are very humble about this and realize there are myriad ways to improve the experience. Just help us by being specific.) Also, please keep in mind that we try to solve big problems. Huge problems. Problems that affect millions and millions of users everyday. In that light, some of your niche proposals may be cool, but it often comes down to a matter of prioritization for us.

Differentiate – Tell me right away why you guys are different and what comparative advantage you have on the market. Why are you the best to help us? 90% of the time we realize that we would like help in a space, but we need help finding who is best positioned to be our partner. Kick that off right away and accelerate the process.

Follow-up – Following up by repeat email is perfectly fine with me and may often help if I have fallen behind. When doing so, please propose a concrete next step. That said, what doesn’t help is when you go over our heads to other execs. At the end of the day, those random emails to the big guys come right back to me and just leave me a little less excited to collaborate. So, don’t be afraid to ping me by email if need be.

Google is Bottom-up – That last point reminds me that Google buying/partnering decisions are made bottom-up. Meaning, product managers and engineers are your ultimate clients. Sure the deals may be signed by VPs, but they are just endorsing the recommendations and leadership taken by the PMs. Our executive team truly empowers folks here to get done the deals needed in their spaces. You want to partner with Google Talk? Our CEO is not going to drive that. The Product Manager for Google Talk will be your guy. So, my advice is to avoid shooting for a meeting with a bigwig and instead, know your audience. I assure you that your deal will get done faster.

Meetings aren’t always necessary – Often, vendors are in a rush to meet in person. They want to bring a big team in to press the flesh. I went along with this for a long time and soon saw my schedule descend into gridlock. Truth is, meetings can be inefficient. Let’s start with email. Send us a deck. Maybe next we can do  a brief call. There is no need to hold a meeting with me to build a relationship. I swear I have done business over instant messaging networks.

NDAs aren’t a helpful start – As an IP company, NDAs can be frightening. Asking us to sign one before we are really getting into the nitty-gritty of a partnership will likely grind things down. I will ask you to just not share anything with us that is confidential. I think NDAs have just become automatic in the Valley. However, when people stop to consider them and the pitfalls, they realize they can be superfluous in many instances.

Lead with engineering – I would rather have a meeting with technical people in the room than just business people any day. (Note: This is a statement against self-interest as I am only a wannabe geek and am not an engineer by background.) At the root of 99% percent of our partnering decisions is evaluation by an engineer(s). We like to dive into the nuts and bolts of what is currently broken, how we will fix it together, and what that collaboration will look like, all with specificity. A deep technical understanding on both sides is a precursor to starting any conversation about who pays whom, etc. So, thanks in advance for bringing your smart people into the loop with our smart people.

PR is a distraction – As a matter of principle we tend not to do PR with our partners. Truth is, I think PR is just a distraction. I know what it feels like to be a start-up and craving some public awareness. I have definitely been there and can sympathize. However, PR can be  very empty and doesn’t add much concrete value to anyone. Focusing on building something cool that users will really dig is the best path for both of us to succeed. Believe me, when that happens, your company and mine will get all the exposure we could want, and more. So, let’s avoid the PR discussion for now and just concentrate on making cool stuff work. If it rocks, the world will know soon enough.

Threats don’t work – A surprising number of people write to me saying “If you do not act in 5 days I am taking this to Microsoft  . . . ” or “This note will be forwarded to Terry Semel . . . ” I am very inclined to let those proposals go. To me, partnerships are as much about the partner as they are about the technology. I am not psyched about working with people who want to coerce me into action. Microsoft and Yahoo are both awesome companies, with solid engineers. They are both tackling big problems and having a lot of success with many pieces. I think each of us has our strengths, and, in the end, it might just be possible that one of them might make a better partner for you. While I wouldn’t seek your exclusivity upfront, please give me a break on the threats. I would rather you spend that energy on explaining why Google is uniquely positioned to make a great partner for you. Thanks.

Don’t assume we have thought about X already – One of the most entertaining things for me to do is read the blogs and see how much credit folks give us for our alleged next moves in a particular area. They presume we have a big honking master plan document somewhere and have the next few years set forth step by step.  Truth is, we are constantly learning. We tend to launch early and launch often. However, this doesn’t mean we have it all figured out. You have a killer idea for us? Are we missing the big picture? Can you help us? Fire away. For instance, you guys who have been thinking about VoIP for years and years, what would you do if you were Google, and how can you work with us to get that done?

Consider working for us – If all of the above comes instinctively to you and you have got lots of fabulous ideas, experience getting things done/built, and are looking for a fun environment in which you can shape/make decisions affecting millions of Internet users, then I strongly urge you to come work for us. Check out our jobs page and shoot me an email if you find anything interesting.

Bottom line is that I/we want to work with you and your company! Partnerships are an essential part of our strategy and have been the impetus for massive value creation at Google. We humbly admit we can’t begin to accomplish a fraction of what we would like to without teaming with others. That said, as you can imagine, we are beyond busy, so I beg your forgiveness if sometimes I am not able to get back to you on a timely basis. Hopefully keeping all of the above in mind, we will get more done together.  So, send those proposals and let’s do some cool deals! Thanks.

[via WhatIsLeft.org] by Chris Sacca

This bird’s-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters — close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye’s second major partner.

“This is the opposite of a spy satellite,” Brender said in a phone interview. “Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.”

Since around the late 70s, the military has used high-resolution spy satellites capable of reading newspaper headlines in Red Square. But only in recent years the technology became available to the public and businesses while concurrently making dramatic strides in coverage and resolution. For example, when Google Earth launched in 2004, its imagery was low-res and spotty. But by March 2006, a third of the world population could get a bird’s-eye view of their own homes in high resolution.

There’s one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction, Brender explained. However, Google’s partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite’s photos.

“We’re commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments,” Brender said. “Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom — all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology.”

Considered the world’s most-accurate commercial imaging satellite, the GeoEye-1 had been undergoing calibration and inspection since it was launched on September 6 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25-centimeter, company representatives promised. However, Google’s satellite imagery will not likely get more detailed because of the 50-centimeter regulation.

[via Wired Magazine] by Brian X. Chen

Microsoft and Google are competing on a new level: outer space. With the development of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope and Google Sky, the two technology giants find a new platform for dominancy. It’s truely out of this world.

It’s not every day that a demo is so good it brings a tear to my eye. But then how often do you get a view of the universe that’s as inspiring as what Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope provides? “We can scroll in to look at this blob,” says Curtis Wong, who developed WWT (worldwidetelescope.org) with his team at Microsoft Research. Using just his mouse’s wheel, he then whizzes past planets, through stars, galaxies, dwarfs, black holes, and into deep space. The site was an immediate hit this spring; it attracted more than 10 million unique visitors in its first week, according to Microsoft Research honcho Rick Rashid.

Google also has a service that lets you see the stars: Google Sky (google.com/sky). Although on the surface it’s similar to WWT, there are major differences in how these free virtual telescopes have been built, how they work with the Web and on mobile devices, their depth of features — and their ability to make money for the two tech titans. By looking to the heavens, we can learn more about Microsoft and Google and the future of our business galaxy.

How you use these two telescopes immediately points to the fundamental differences between the companies. Microsoft, not surprisingly, has tied WWT to the Windows desktop, and users who want it have to download and install it. Google Sky is browser-based and works anywhere you have an Internet connection, even on mobile phones, a vista where the resource-intensive WWT can’t dare to go. Microsoft’s desktop-based model gives WWT far more feature goodies than Sky. For example, WWT has more than 50 different views from tons of telescopes and Sky has a measly 8.

WWT reveals how Microsoft plans to balance its need to keep Windows relevant with its need to show that it “gets” the Internet. Your hard drive can’t store all the data WWT needs to render the sky, so the astronomical info sits on a series of servers at Microsoft and is downloaded to the WWT as you reach the part of the universe you’re exploring. You can use WWT offline, which is great for taking your laptop to a star party in a field in the middle of nowhere, but you’ll get more from it when connected. That’s the new Microsoft way. Its Live Mesh platform, announced last spring, uses the Internet to deliver data wherever you need it, but it needs the software downloaded to your desktop and mobile devices to do it.

But being tethered to its Windows cash cow limits Microsoft from competing effectively against Google in online advertising. Sky is just one of dozens of Google services — social networking, docs and spreadsheets, maps, and video, to name a few — that can be linked to and embedded in your own Web site. Google collects demographic data from the millions of sites that are running one or more of its services, and that’s the big prize. Google Sky opens up yet another universe of potential customers for it to learn more about and then make smarter contextual advertising offers.

Microsoft’s telescope software? You can’t embed it anywhere, so what’s the advertising opportunity with it? There isn’t one.

That is why Microsoft is going to have a tough time competing with Google’s ever-expanding cosmos. Microsoft’s telescope really did make me cry because it’s a beautiful piece of software. Too bad it isn’t a harbinger of a beautiful business model for the future.

[via Fast Company] by Robert Scoble

Pronounced “cool”, the launch of new search engine Cuil.com is the next in a line of many who have tried to slay the Google beast. Cuil does have some serious competitive advantages, like 120 billion indexed pages (about 3x that of any other search engine). Designed by ex-Googlers Anna Patterson, her husband Tom Costollo, and two engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, the team thinks they finally have Google beat.

With $33 million in VC, can they compete with the search giant?

Here’s the entire article, ironically, on Google News.