• Thirteen years ago, Microsoft gave Apple a big loan. Since then, Steve Jobs has become a bit of a graybeard but he’s also turned Apple into a company that’s now bigger than Microsoft. Literally. It just happened yesterday. How? Check out our AOL News article. It explains everything. Essentially, Apple’s market capitalization is based on their future potential. Microsoft’s is based on their continuing huge profits. source

• dumb Zappos.com’s sister site,
  6pm.com, accidentally caps the
  price on all their items at $49.95.
  The gaffe lasted for six hours.
• smart Rather than ignore the sales,
  the company has decided to
  honor them – at a cost of $1.6
  million. Great PR. source

• $29 billion in revenue per year
  for the combined airline

• 370 number of destinations the combined airline will cover; it’ll have 10 hubs
• 90,000 number of employees the airline will have after the merger source

• $1.8 billion sale of Volvo cars from Ford to China’s Geely source

• Canon is sure an arrogant company. They think, for some reason, that they’re worthy of their own top-level domain, unlike every other company out there. We think this is really stupid, because, well, their top-level domain opens up the possibility of a .cocacola or a .southoftheborder, which means that what’s a fairly simple domain structure becomes unspeakably complex.

• bad standardThe reason why top-level domains work well as-is, mostly, is because they create an open environment. By getting their own top-level domain, Canon creates a walled garden separate from the rest of the Web.
• Is it really easier? Canon seems convinced that it’s easier to type in my.canon (or whatever) than it is to type in canon.com. People have been typing canon.com for 15 years; changing it makes it harder. It’s branding gone amok.
• showing restraint To us, this idea suggests a need to figure out just when the best time would be to pull out the generalized top level domains. Because it appears Canon’s taking a road down a slippery slope with this move.

.canon domains we’d like to see

• » pachelbels.canon: One of the most well-known pieces of music is Pachelbel’s Canon, and that’s been around way longer than Canon has.
  
• » isthis.furry.buffyfanfic.canon: The main definition of “canon” refers to whether something is part of a story’s universe. And you could probably have fun with it, too.
  
• » potato.canon: Some jokers will probably come up with clever uses of the TLD, although if they’re like this, they’ll totally be wrong, because “cannon” has two N’s.
• » myprintersucks.itsmadeby.canon: If Canon really wanted to be bold with this idea, they’d let people buy dissenting domains that criticize both the brand and its products.
  

• 34 fatalities reportedly caused by Toyota accelerator issues source

• four number of hamsters Cepia, Inc. sold last Christmas, when they were a super-hot toy
• 40+ number of hamsters the company will sell starting this summer; way to milk a fad, guys source

• five the number of copies of a newly released DVD you can buy from Wal-Mart; Target also does this
• 40% the percentage of DVDs that kiosk company Redbox buys from Wal-Mart or Target; hmm source

• harman 1 A guy named Harman Bajwa, who had reserved the vanity URL of facebook.com/harman, had it taken away “for violating Facebook’s policies” – the policy where the URL has to have something to do with your name. Wait a second …
• harman 2 It appears that the real reason Harman’s vanity URL was taken away was because Facebook’s sales staff did a deal with one Harman International, and swiped the name from the guy under false pretenses. Pretty lame. source

• We believe the offer represents good value for Cadbury shareholders and are pleased with the commitment that Kraft Foods has made to our heritage, values and people throughout the world.
• Cadbury Chairman Roger Carr • On the $19.5 billion buyout offer that Kraft showed the company today. For months, Cadbury rejected Kraft’s advances. No longer. While Cadbury is open to other offers – get your #(&^ together, Hershey – they seem quite happy with the offer that the world’s second-largest food company has put forth. If they combined, they would become the largest. source