Google's CEO went to Abu Dhabi this week and preached. He sermonized about Google's exceptional virtue — its indifference to profit and supreme trustworthiness. His speech should have been shocking. Except that delusional self-righteousness is now routine at Google. More »

A interview with the Andrey Ternovskiy, the 17-year-old Russian founder of Chatroulette who has abandoned high school to travel the world and meet with technology investors.

The 10-year plan would reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

Because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks, the changes approved by the Texas School Board will have a broad influence.

This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix.

About five months ago we announced that Netflix would sponsor a sequel to the Netflix Prize. We've given a lot thought to how to sponsor a contest that discovers more about the predictability of Netflix members' movie watching behavior while always ensuring we protect Netflix members' privacy.

In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members' privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel. With both the FTC and the plaintiffs' lawyers, we've had very productive discussions centered on our commitment to protecting our members' privacy.

We have reached an understanding with the FTC and have settled the lawsuit with plaintiffs. The resolution to both matters involves certain parameters for how we use Netflix data in any future research programs.

In light of all this, we have decided to not pursue the Netflix Prize sequel that we announced on August 6, 2009.

We will continue to explore ways to collaborate with the research community and improve our recommendations system so we can constantly improve the movie recommendations we make for you. So stay tuned.

The iPad officially became available for pre-order earlier today and while plenty of you are still debating about whether or not to pre-order, it appears as if the device might already sold 51,000 units in just two hours via pre-order. Wow.

If you’ve ever doubted how insane dedicated Apple fans are, the background on how these figures were determined will assuage any doubts. A group of particularly prudent Apple fans from the APPL Sanity Board at Investor Village decided to put together a spreadsheet of order numbers, times that orders were placed and contents of those order. As someone who has been known to obsess over Apple details myself (tracking a freightliner from China to the US with 27″ iMacs on-board in order to better guestimate delivery time), my hat is off to these folks!

Using this information, they were able to come up with a baseline for the number of items being sold through the Apple Online Store.

Fortune’s Phillip Elmer-DeWitt reports:

“51,000 orders in two hours,” announced Victor Castroll shortly after noon. He’s an analyst with Valcent Financial Group and an AAPL Sanity member who, with the blogger-analyst who calls himself deagol, has been monitoring the spreadsheet.

This matches other estimates from blogger Andrew Erlichson who wrote:

“We just bought two iPads, about 30 minutes apart. Our order IDs are 10,000 apart. Assuming those order IDs are sequential, and they appear to be, then Apple is selling 20,000 iPads per hour.”

Now as with anything unofficial, there are caveats — major ones — assuming that the order number system has been identified and “cracked” so to speak, this would really be more accurate for all orders placed through the Apple Store, not just iPad orders.

Additionally, these figures wouldn’t account for orders with multiple iPads (you can only pre-order two at a time). This also doesn’t include any reservations to pick up an iPad at a local store (no payment information is required for that and you aren’t given an order number).

Still, it’s safe to say that the majority of orders placed through the Apple Online Store are for the iPad.

I’ve reached out to Victor Castroll for a more recent update and will update the post if I’m able to get any more information.

Update: Victor Castroll from the Valcent Financial Group and AAPL Sanity got back to us with some numbers that account for approximately the first 6 hours of sales. Here’s what he tells us:

“We’re at 90k in 6 hours. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include multiple orders but we have some dirty data from regular Apple business which now is about 4k orders out of the 88k orders. So, we estimate Apple has already sold about 90k today, not including in-store reserves.

“$54 million in revenue in a quarter of a day is a great opening. Looks like contrary to much speculation about who would actually want one of these, like the iPhone, people are voting with their wallets. Considering these are just pre-orders for a product still three weeks out, iPad is home run.”

Indeed, 90,000 pre-orders in just one day is extremely impressive!

Tags: apple, ipad, ipad preorder, trending

For the past two years, thousands of taxi drivers overcharged passengers a total of more than $8 million by switching the meter to double the rate.

28.8 million people used the Facebook iPhone app in the last month.

That's about a third of the 75+ million iPhone and iPod touch devices that have been shipped so far -- a huge percentage of phones. Most super-successful iPhone apps only have a fraction of Facebook's users.

That also represents about 7% of Facebook's roughly 400 million users.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• STAT OF THE DAY: Apple Owns Mobile Web Consumption
• STAT OF THE DAY: iPhone App Store Has More Books Than Games
• STAT OF THE DAY: Forget Email, Facebook Is Where People Share Content

Public Anger continues to spread following the incident which saw governor of Hubei province Li Hongzhong [de] snatch a recording device out of the hands reporter Liu Jie in between sessions at the ongoing Lianghui.

Taking their cue from a speech from Prime Minister Wen Jiabao leading up to the Lunar New Year about people's need for greater dignity and another last week calling for greater public supervision of the government, journalists, academics and others from the country have launched a petition demanding Li Hongzhong's resignation.

This follows growing, since rejected, demand since the incident for an apology from Li, perhaps most notably in a March 8 editorial (now harmonious) from Caijing magazine, ‘Would Governor Li please apologize?”. Sophie Beach at China Digital Times has a thorough roundup of the various facets to the story so far.

“This ‘Two Sessions’ recorder is stealing-, grabbing- and governor-proof, perfect for you female reporters…”

The petition was launched Saturday morning with a number of prominent names and over 200 signatories in total by the latest tally; the number keeps growing on a Google Buzz thread, where an English translation of the petition has appeared, reading in part:

In their many weighty opinions on this matter, those from both the news and academic worlds speak now with the same voice, having found, in the shared shame this incident has brought upon them, the resolve to unite in condemning the terrific impact the Li Hongzhong incident has had. Regardless of your medium, be that newspaper, magazine, television, radio or microblog, or be you journalist from north or south, please do not hesitate in your resolve to continue reporting this story as it develops, as this is a battle for all of our rights.

We look to news workers to raise your arms and voice your concerns, at the same time that we welcome citizens to second the points made within this petition. Our tolerance has run its length and extends no further. People need to be reminded that journalists still exist in this world, as well as to be reminded what being a journalist means; more importantly, people need to know that their civil rights still belong to them and them alone. Having witnessed senior official Li's rage, the time has now come for him to see and hear the fury of the news media profession and how far that fury has now spread.

Beijing-based writer, blogger, publisher and Twitter fiend Mo Zhixu offers a bit more perspective on the backlash against Li:

12:38 AM Mar 12th 我觉得吧，省长抢笔事件在推特上也不要太追究了，说到底这事情跟新闻自由也没多大关系，不过是地方大员藐视了一哈中央媒体权威，如果两会自由采访，抢笔事件才与自由言论有关吧

12:39 AM Mar 12th 没日人民报的证件，连被抢的资格都没有，所以，这事件提升到新闻自由的高度，我看也不靠谱

1:04 AM Mar 12th 我并没有说不应该关注抢笔事件，我只是强调，这事情跟新闻自由关系不大。通过掩盖当下媒体的权力属性，将这个事件包装成新闻自由事件，在我看来是不成立的

Yesterday, Foursquare turned one. You read that right: The mobile social network that made its splash at SXSW 2009 and has tremendous buzz is just 366 days old.

Despite that short amount of time, Foursquare has more than half a million users, 1.4 million venues and 15.5 million checkins, and it’s still growing. Experian Hitwise decided to use this milestone to analyze Foursquare’s growth.

As you might imagine, not only have Foursquare’s mobile apps seen growth, but so has Foursquare.com. What did strike us as surprising is that the site’s number-one referrer is Facebook, which accounted for a whopping 33% of upstream visits last week. That’s even bigger than Google (22%) and Twitter (8%) combined. It’s yet another indicator of how much traffic the world’s largest social network can drive.

Searches for Foursquare have also been sharply rising, accounting for around 0.00032% of all U.S. searches. Its most recent peak was February 20, about the time Please Rob Me was gaining the press’ attention.

With more than 15.5 million checkins and nearly 300,000 yesterday (many due to SXSW), Foursquare seems to have a bright future. However, competition from Gowalla, Yelp and Facebook in the local space could give the startup a run for its money this year.

Tags: foursquare, Mobile 2.0

MassTLC's Board of Trustees voted this week to officially support the Startup Visa Act of 2010, authored by Senator John Kerry and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana (photo credit StartUpVisa.com). This bill would modify the EB-5 visa program to create a new "EB-6" visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs seeking to start companies here in the United States. This idea originated among venture capitalists in California and Colorado and is supported by venture capitalists from several local firms including: Flybridge Venture Partners, Spark Capital, .406 Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, SoftBank Capital, and Venrock.

Here's the simple but vitally important premise of the bill: It seeks to keep foreign-born entrepreneurs here in the United States. The bill does this by creating a new visa category for those building startups, so long as the individual has raised $100K from a sponsoring US venture capitalist or angel investor and has raised a total of $250K in equity capital. Entrepreneurs can become permanent residents after two years if their business has created at least five full time jobs in the US and has raised an additional $1mm in investment or achieved $1mm of revenue. See http://www.startupvisa.com/ for more information.

Here's why that's important to our country and state now more than ever.

First, throughout our history we've relied on foreign-born entrepreneurs to help spur economic growth. Nationwide, about a quarter of our technology companies have been founded by immigrants. Here in Massachusetts, some of our most notable tech giants were created by brilliant, visionary immigrants like An Wang of Wang Laboratories, Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks, and Ash Dahod, who recently sold Starent Networks to Cisco for nearly three billion dollars.

Second, now more than ever, our foreign-born students can return to their home countries to find opportunity. A recent study found that 52 percent of the Chinese students attending U.S. colleges and universities believed they would find greater opportunities if they returned home after graduation.

With some 445K students currently enrolled at Massachusetts colleges and universities, we naturally have one of the nation's largest pools of foreign-born students, a disproportionate talent asset that, in turn, can create tremendous innovation and wealth in our Commonwealth. We need to retain every one of those students who is willing to strike out on his or her own to start a company and create new jobs and wealth in our Commonwealth.

We believe this tradition of great foreign-born entrepreneurs starting companies and hiring here must be maintained and nurtured if we are to succeed in an increasingly competitive world. As connectivity and talent have become globally available commodities, the barriers that foreign-born entrepreneurs face when starting businesses outside the United States have all but disappeared. To maintain our leadership position, we need the best entrepreneurs -- domestic and foreign-born -- to stay here and build tomorrow's leading technology companies in the Commonwealth.

This is a time of unprecedented technological innovation, as evidenced by the explosion of ubiquitous connectivity; the growth of so-called "big data" storage and analysis; and the transformation of computing from desktops to mobile devices. Such waves of innovation spawn waves of new startups, some of which will create and lead new markets and industries. Massachusetts has a strong legacy, and is today broadly recognized, as a global powerhouse in information technology. According to a recently released study by the UMass Donohue Institute, the IT sector is the second largest employer in the state (178,000 workers), trailing only the health care sector.

MassTLC supports initiatives that contribute to innovation and growth of companies at all stages in the technology sector, from start-up to global enterprise. We believe that a rich and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem is essential to our economic growth and are working to remove barriers that inhibit company formation and growth in the Commonwealth.

As a community we must continue to initiate and embrace ideas like the Start-Up Visa Act that will position Massachusetts as a leader in the next wave of innovation.

See letter to Senate from Sen. Kerry and Lugar
See letter of support from 150+ VCs
See letter of support from MassTLC

On Friday, Netflix announced on its corporate blog that it has settled a lawsuit related to its Netflix Prize, a $1 million contest that challenged machine learning experts to use Netflix's data to produce better recommendations than the movie giant could serve up themselves.

The lawsuit called attention to academic research that suggests that Netflix indirectly exposed the movie preferences of its users by publishing anonymized customer data. In the suit, plaintiff Paul Navarro and others sought an injunction preventing Netflix from going through the so-called "Netflix Prize II," a follow-up challenge that Netflix promised would offer up even more personal data such as genders and zipcodes.

"Netflix is not going to pursue a sequel to the Netflix Prize," says spokesman Steve Swasey. "We looked at this, we heard some dissension and so we've settled it, resolved the issues and are moving on."

Netflix's decision to forestall the so-called "Netflix Prize II" was part of the settlement agreement, says Scott Kamber, the plaintiff's attorney. Also part of the settlement and per industry norms, Netflix is not admitting any wrongdoing.

According to the company's blog post, Netflix has also settled an until now-unknown negotiation with the Federal Trade Commission.

The financial terms--if any--remain undisclosed, but Kamber has been involved in multi-million dollar privacy suits before, including the $10 million Facebook Beacon settlement.

The movie rental company captured the world's attention when it announced the Netflix Prize in October 2006, offering a reward to anyone who could improve upon Netflix's personalized movie recommendations by a 10% margin. That mandate wasn't achieved for close to three years and, at one point, was generally thought to be impossible.

Several competing teams ended up joining forces and the contest quickly became so close that nobody knew which of two amalgamated teams would end up on top. It was a mashup of three competing teams, dubbed "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos," that ended up taking home the check from Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings last September.

The Netflix Prize's great draw--and ultimate flaw-- was capturing the world's imagination and some of its greatest minds. Like the folkloric John Henry and the steam engine, the contest drew machine learning experts from leading academic and private research firms and the attention of publications like The New York Times and Forbes.

James Bennett, then vice president of recommendations at Netflix, issued the initial proclamation at a highly specialized industry conference in Spain. In the end, 50,000 contestants wound up participating.

"We thought that it would generated some big interest among a couple hundred machine learning experts," says Swasey. "It became a news-making machine."

The surprise popularity of the contest, however, came with the unintended consequence of also gaining attention from privacy researchers like Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, who showed that a second set of information such as comments on the popular Internet Movie Database could help third parties triangulate the identity of the "anonymous" Netflix customers.

Kamber, who brought the suit, says that it was in part the massive attention to the Netflix prize that brought clients to him and compelled some of them to seek an injunction against the announced follow-up. He argues that his clients don't want to prevent the kind of technological and academic innovation that Netflix was trying to encourage, but rather just want to make sure Netflix's customers' privacy is protected.

"My clients specifically expressed an interest in making sure that those opportunities were not foreclosed," says Kamber. "The resolution allows Netfix to potentially tap into that community in the future, but do so in a way that makes customers confident that their information is going to be safeguard."

Interestingly, privacy expert Larry Ponemon says that Netflix could have likely avoided the matter altogether by using a technique called "data masking" that would have randomized its data set while still keeping the data relevant to developers.

A spokesperson for Dataguise, a data masking company, says that it would have cost the company around $50,000 for a license.

Thousands of taxi drivers overcharged riders more than $8 million by switching the meter to double the rate, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government.

In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation.

Sponsor

History of Google in China

Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.

In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results.

At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.

Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government.

In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result.

There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at.

In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time.

Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes.

Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January.

Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works."

The Great Firewall

There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo.

The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs.

So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites.

Self-Discipline

The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed "self-discipline."

Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government.

Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China."

Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet

Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have.

The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks.

Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government.

Next Moves from Beijing and Google

Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down.

The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu.

The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked.

The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn - but the service stays online.

Discuss

MySpace has taken a bold step and put a large quantity of bulk user data up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.

Sponsor

The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split.

Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc.

MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven't gotten terribly excited about it yet.

Related: See today's coverage of the cancelation of the Netflix Challenge due to privacy concerns.

Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering up their user data more than once. We covered InfoChimps' offering of bulk Twitter data in depth this Fall, but the marketplace quietly removed that data after Twitter asked them to "wait" for a second time.

In February we profiled Pete Warden (The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul), a developer who planned on putting a huge pile of Facebook user data online for academic analysis. As we wrote in that article:

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public.

Days later Facebook contacted Warden days later and asked him to hold off on release of that data as well. Last week Warden posted open source code for harvesting the same type of bulk user data from Google Profiles, so the game's not up yet, not by a long shot.

Why is this kind of big data interesting? This rational may be less applicable in the case of MySpace given its focus on music, or it may be more applicable given the allegedly poorer user demographics on the site compared to Facebook, but here's how I explained my interest in big social network data analysis in general, as part of a discussion about an excellent special report on big data in the Economist this month.

I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we're working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we've got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I'm hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we'll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

What will we see come out of MySpace's bulk data? What could we see come from Facebook and Twitter data if only they would let people get their hands on it? Time will tell.

Discuss

We generally have a disconnect between the person, business, or agency that we want to be and the reality of who or what we are today.  This disconnect is a great thing, an opportunity for growth an opportunity for improvement.  However, when not understood, it is also a major pain point, something that leads your customers, your citizens, to lack faith in your words and actions.

As you begin to make use of collaborative solutions, like social media, it is critical that you recognize the importance of being genuine.  This is hard, especially for businesses and agencies that enable multiple people to take part in conversations on your behalf.  So, as you review the strategies and tactics you have in place, take some time to clearly define:

• Who are we today?  For businesses, how do we fit in the marketplace?    For people, what are your real strengths and weaknesses?
• How do we want to be perceived?  Nearly every person, every company, every politician, every agency, wants to be perceived as an expert, a guru, a thought leader.  The reality is that most are none of those things.

How you bridge the perception gap, both in person and across collaborative channels like Twitter, Facebook, your web site, will tell people who you are.  Be genuine, bridge those gaps by making efforts to become who or what you represent.  If you fake it people will know.  Listen, learn, and engage.  Take the time to be genuine.

John

Filed under: Social Strategies Tagged: Social Strategies

At Friday’s close, these were the five highest market cap U.S. companies:

• Exxon (XOM), $315.38 billion.
• Microsoft (MSFT): $256.71 billion.
• Apple (AAPL): $205.48 billion.
• Wal-Mart (WMT): $205.09 billion.
• Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA): $202.20 billion.

The biggest oil company. The largest retailer. The leading software company. A conglomerate run by the world’s most respected investor.

And Apple.

Here’s a weekend exercise for you: Looking out five years, which of these would you most want to own?