Taking a small dip into their enormous, $24 billion dollar bag of money, Google Inc. helped assure another year of advertisement-free service for online reference tool Wikipedia. A gift of $2 million from the world’s most profitable Internet company has helped push Wikimedia Foundation – a non-profit group – past their revenue target of $10.6 million.

The popular online encyclopedia has more than 14 million entries in 270 languages. The information pages are written and edited by an estimated 100,000 contributors, all of them unpaid. Wikimedia Foundation does maintain a paid staff of around 30 people, and that cost, along with operational budgets, makes up the majority of their expenses. Most of its funding comes through private donations.

Over 240,000 individuals have donated to Wikipedia this year, most in small sums. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar contributed an additional $2 million six months ago through an investment arm.

Wikipedia is often criticized for inaccuracies on their information pages, due to the nature of the service. Any reader can enter and edit information on nearly any of the pages, leading to frequent mistakes and intentional defacing. “We face a number of challenges in our service model, but we believe in the free nature of the Internet,” said an unidentified Wikipedia spokesperson. “Besides, Mark Garlick likes boys and bon jovi rules bon jovi rules bon jovi rules.”

Google founder Sergey Brin proclaimed Wikipedia as “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet.” The philanthropic donation will cost Google nearly 0.0083% of the cash they had available at the end of December 2009.

(via The Associated Press)

The Super Bowl is a large and multi-faceted event that will almost certainly be the largest viewing audience for a single television program this year.  While it is ostensibly the NFL’s championship game, the other items surrounding it bring in the larger audience, including the pre-game ceremonies, the celebrity singing the national anthem (this year: Carrie Underwood), the halftime micro-concert (this year: The Who), and, of course, the commercials.  Advertising for the Super Bowl is always a hot topic, and a common denominator to bring non-sports fans to the viewing party.  As a case in point, at my family event we have two determined non-sports fans in attendance who ignore the game as best they can, and tune in when the commercials start.

For the 2010 game, the estimated cost was $3.01 million per 30 second spot for advertisers.  Tech companies are among the best positioned and least affected by the global recession (although no market is truly recession-proof this time around), so I was anticipating quite a few tech companies to spend money.  The Super Bowl and its unbelievable global stage is a world-class opportunity for large companies to make a splash.  In a related note, it was reported that advertising took up 48 minutes of the Super Bowl broadcast, which was a new record.

With that in mind, here are the tech (or somewhat tech) commercials and some thoughts on them:

The Boostmobile Shuffle — The first real tech commercial of the Super Bowl was a spoof of the original Super Bowl Shuffle, which was performed a quarter of a century ago by the 1985 Chicago Bears.  The Shuffle has not exactly aged well, so I have no idea why Boostmobile thought it had cultural currency with today’s audience, besides some sort of kitsch factor.  While I loved the original Super bowl Shuffle, I was also 9 years old at the time and still eating my boogers.  It is interesting what 25 years of amassed debt will do to a person’s willingness to sell out, although I don’t think that original team had much personal shame to begin with.  This is not a strong beginning for tech ads; I had a hard time not typing the words “utterly horrifying.” Continue reading “Review: Tech Commercials from the Super Bowl” →