For a marketing campaign, Cartoon Network placed some lighted figurines of one of the characters on a popular [adult swim] show around some major metropolitan areas. [adult swim] is the block of shows that start at 10:30pm and are targetted to a more mature audience. They feature Futurama and Family Guy among others.

On January 31st Boston was gripped in a panic as some people thought the figurines looked like something menacing. That very night [adult swim] featured a bump apologizing for it. They were serious, it wasn’t a joke. However that didn’t stop the Boston Police from arresting some of the guys that were hired to put the signs up.

Today Cartoon Network’s general manager resigned.

No one is saying what happened in Boston was funny but lets not be extreme. National Lampoon has put this out making fun of the situation:

        24 Vs. Aqua Teen Hunger Force

People who I’ve hung out with at conferences this year will tell you that I am down on mobile companies. Not just because at every conference there are new ones and some that were there previously are already gone.

I met with a mobile company at a conference in September. Their CEO, CTO, EVP Sales, EVP Programming, EVP Customer Support….the titles alone should scare you. The amount of VC money pouring into these ventures with such thin business models conjures up feelings of the late 90s.

All of these new mobile companies are so obsessed with putting content and services around SMS, that they miss the real point and opportunity.

The title of this post is inentionally WRONG. Its not SMS vs. IM. SMS IS IM. Texting on your cell phone is away from computer instant messaging. And the company that figures this out and understands how to drive at both SMS and IM is who I will declare the winner.

No surprise that its happening in Europe with Microsoft and Orange.

The gulf between mobile phone and personal computer narrowed a bit more on Wednesday when Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven Ballmer, announced an “instant messaging” product to be offered by Orange, a European cellphone carrier.

When the service starts in December, Orange subscribers will be able to conduct real-time chats by voice, text or video on their phones or personal computers, using a version of Microsoft’s messaging software.

Someone at AOL needs to wake up because the ICQ guys saw this all coming 6 years ago when they integrated SMS into ICQ.

And to all those new mobile companies: Stop looking at mobile space as a technology play and start looking at the content and marketing opportunity of instant messaging. The platform will emerge as computer desktop + sms.

The Immigration Debate. Why now? I don’t understand this at all. Is the current system broke somehow? If you come into the country illegally you are not able to work legally. Makes sense to me. There is a legal way to get into the country where you can work legally.

UPDATE: I heard a story on NPR about the immigration debate where this woman - supposedly an illegal immigrant - was saying that she loved the USA and wanted to work here. She really loved the USA. This would have resonated with me more if she had said all of this in English instead of Spanish. Needing a translator points to part of the problem IMO.

ICANN - they approve .mobi for mobile phones but not .xxx for adult-content sites. No reason, just whim.

Why people haven’t yet had enough Law & Order

How with so many restaurants on the strip in Las Vegas they can still all charge 4x over what you pay at a comparable restaurant in another city.

UPDATE Forgot to talk about Da Vinci Code here. Its fiction people. Christian Organizations attacking it - better look out - Indiana Jones also borrows from your mythology. Maybe people find it more believeable since it has less plot holes than the modern Christian Bible. Then again, so do Superman comic books.

From Reuters:

Delta pilots vote to authorize a strike

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The pilots’ union of Delta Air Lines Inc. said on Tuesday its members have voted to authorize a strike if the airline is permitted to impose new terms on the pilots.

I’m all for letting people go on strike but not in cases where they have a practical monopoly like Delta does in Cincinnati. This would shut air travel in and out of here completely down and further depress an already practically n-stage local economy. If we had another airline in town where it wasn’t so disruptive that would be one thing. The trade-off of having a strangle-hold/monopoly on a market is a responsibility to serve that market.

Your new commercial talking about freeing up Intel processors really makes me mad. I do way more interesting things with my intel processors than purchasing music from iTunes and transferring it to my ipod. I think their life inside my computers is much more interesting than anything ever done by the average Mac user.

Macs have always been underpowered and the move to intel is, yet again, another bad processor move. Intel is stuck. They can’t put more power to the chips because they can’t keep the temperature under control.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a long-time intel bigot. My home PC is built with all-intel - motherboard, chipset, processor, network card, sound card - the works. Ask my friends who have been on the AMD bandwagon for a while how I always blame any problem they have on their non-intel proc.

But Intel made a bad choice at a fork in the processor road a few years ago with the Pentium 4 footprint. A dual-proc P4 is a little hard to come by because they elected not to lay things out in a way that makes it easy to do so. Intel’s dual-core offering isn’t 100% dual core…its dual processing behind a single bus.

So, alas, I must admit that AMD has become the forerunner. I saw the first sign of this when Intel had to license some 64bit tech from AMD. Now that we are entering the “dual core” age, guess who’s leading?

I’m now running AMD at work (after actually trying a mac), and soon the home PC - a monument to intel, will be replaced with an AMD/nvidia box.

I’m also excited about the new IBM chip, but I don’t see it making it into any computers other than IBM’s unfortunately overpriced server line.