Groupon’s 2-for-1 CEO deal: Groupon, decidedly the most non-tech company pretending to be a tech company fired Andrew Mason, founder & CEO, and replaced him with not one but two CEOs — Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, who are taking over as co-CEOs. Not to poop on their parade, but weren’t these two gentlemen supposed to prevent the current state of chaos at the company as board members? Something stinks, and it is not kielbasa. In what seems to be a perfect exit interview, Mason had some choice things to say:

“I think in the first phase of our company, we were a glorified mailing list. We had a completely unintelligent email that we sent out once a day and we had a human sales force that was going around and procuring the deals.”

As for Mason, he is looking for a fat farm to lose what he adorably calls “Groupon 40.” I am going to miss his nonsensical utterances.

Everybody hates (or loves) Marissa Mayer & loves(or hates) Sheryl Sandberg: Well, at least everyone in media has something to say about two of the brightest and more powerful women in Silicon Valley, Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. They were both making headlines this week for what seems to be all the wrong (or right) reasons.

Mayer wants her remote-working Yahoos to come back to the office, and while some claimed that this was the worst decision possible for the company (and its working parents), others argue that maybe we could all use more separation between work and life. Even we couldn’t decide with Mayer’s idea that the best ideas come from “hallway and cafeteria collaboration,” the fact remains — people are talking about Yahoo again.

Hoping to recreate a Betty Friedian-like social movement empowering women in the workplace, Sheryl Sandberg’s individualized take on feminism outlined in her new book, Lean In, may not strike the cord she had hoped. In fact, prominent entrepreneurial women have denounced the cause as unrealistic, while others insist that men must also become passionate change agents  in order for the business world to become more balanced.

By the way, those two news items sparked a lively thread on our internal messaging system.

Technology’s worst dressed guy is emasculated by phones: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is not exactly Bernard Arnault (CEO of LVMH, if you must ask), feels that smartphones are “emasculating.” He was speaking at the TED conference and his comments resulted in a flurry of commentary around gender issues.

The general body language of your average smartphone user aside, his comments indicate that Glass could evolve to include cellular phone service, but the truth is that health concerns might hinder adoption by the masses. One thing that might help make Google Glass cool? Its rumored partnership with hipster darling Warby Parker. But those are minor issues, as author Mark Hurst rightfully argues. The real issue is how we as human beings will interact with people with Google glasses and how that will change our daily experiences, he said.

“Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it. And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.” [Mark Hurst]

Does that future scare you? Then you should read Joel Hladeck’s amusing letter from the future that talks about why Google glasses kinda went the way of AltaVista.

Getty Images

Oscars & Hard times at CGI Corral: Darlings of the big screen and red carpet took home their golden statues at the Oscars last Sunday, but not all is well for the behind-the-scenes crew. The visual effects industry is facing hard times due to foreign outsourcing and subsidies, with large and small studios alike facing layoffs and closures. You may have caught Bill Westenhofer attempting to broach the subject after winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi before being ushered off the stage to the theme of Jaws, which now seems oddly appropriate given that thousands of jobs are dead in the water.

Talking about Oscars, congrats to PopSugar for launching PopSugar Live. Their live red carpet show from the Oscars got about a million views, putting them in the cable television territory. Who needs cable (TV) when you have broadband?

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Fashion and tech in one place! What could go wrong: Conde Nast rolled out the red carpet for geeks during this years’ New York Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week by hosting a first-of-its-kind fashion and tech hackathon to create new ideas around how to use technology in the industry. We do admit that does sound kinda crazy and, well, Conde Nast isn’t who we turn to for innovation tips. But then again, the fashion industry is so far behind that they need to start somewhere. We would also recommend watching out for a whole new breed of fashion media upstarts that are frankly more fun and engaging than perusing dowdy Conde Nast.

Beyond Fashion Week, a handful of forward-thinking companies are already capitalizing on the use of technology in fashion, and creating a brand new way to shop, and find the perfect fit online

It is now the Internet of things:

“We are beginning to learn what it is like to use the Internet to communicate with things that are not humans.” — Vint Cerf at TED2013 (via Twitter)

We at GigaOM have been on it for a while, writing about the topic for a few years now. But now we are taking the show on the road and are hosting a series of meetups like the most recent one in San Francisco and the next one in Boulder, Colorado. Our belief: Ideally, the internet of things should fade into the background; what matters is what it allows people to do.

And what here are some stories from this week you might have missed.

1. Battle of the campuses: Google told Vanity Fair that it would soon be breaking ground on a new 1.1-million square foot campus, and it’s quite the contrast from Apple’s upcoming futuristic spaceship-like HQ coming in 2016. Richie King at Quartz explored what these vastly opposing architectural footprints say about the personality of each company.
2. Jimmy Iovine needs to make up his mind: He can’t undermine music curation without undermining Music by Beats, the company he owns and will disown soon.
3. Microsoft wants to be cool: And it will never be cool, according to a former Apple guy and a former Microsoft guy.
4. Tim Cook & Apple versus Wall Street: The New Yorker’s John Cassidy rightfully argued that we shouldn’t pity the hedgies.
5. The problem with Facebook data: Well, there is a lot to dislike about Facebook’s “Like” argued Alan Wolk.

Read this and other in-depth articles on GigaOM’s Flipboard channel

Kickstarter is slowly and surely becoming a major force in the film business, something I noted in my post earlier this year. The Inocente win comes close on the heels of Kickstarter-backed films taking center stage at the Sundance Film Festival. According to Kickstarter, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And in 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects in 2012.

When I interviewed Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen last year, I asked him if Kickstarter could perhaps upend the institutional control of the creative industries. Here is what he said:

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history….any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way.

Looks like fox is in the henhouse.

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On its website, it notes:

In the past 3 years, Kickstarter inspired filmmakers to launch 20,000+ projects, accounting for over $100 million of the $450 million pledged to date. 19 KS-funded films — 10% of the slate — were official Sundance 2012 selections, with 4 award winners!

Since its early days, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And the total number of successfully funded projects is 8,680. In 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects.

Most of the attention accorded to Kickstarter is because of gizmos and gadgets like the Ouya gaming platform or the Pebble Watch. But since its very beginning it has provided crowd funding for creative projects – music albums, documentaries and feature films. When I interviewed Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen last year, I asked him if Kickstarter could perhaps upend the institutional control of the creative industries. Here is what he said:

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history.

…any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way. People are watching films that were made on Kickstarter and playing games that were made on Kickstarter. I think the big media companies are going to continue to have things that they’re going to keep making for the mass audiences, but we hope we’re eating away at the bad stuff.

Three Kickstarter funded films — Kings Point, Buzkashi Boys and Inocente — became the fourth, fifth and sixth films to be nominated for Oscars. Add the good stuff at Sundance, and Kickstarter’s young CEO might be getting his dream of eating at the bad stuff come true.

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Screen grab credit: TheDigiTour

I’m probably not the only one who was ready to fall asleep halfway through the show during last night’s Oscars telecast, but then it happened: Anne Hathaway and James Franco joked slightly awkwardly about this being “the year of the movie musical,” only to wake up the audience with an awesome auto-tune mash-up, featuring Harry Potter pals Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Woody from the Toy Story franchise, Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker and Twilight’s Edward, Jacob and Bella.

Check out this YouTube clip in case you missed it:

The video wasn’t just a tribute to the YouTube auto-tune mash-up phenomenon, though; it was actually produced by none other than the Gregory Brothers, best known for Auto-Tune the News and their Songify This videos.

Asked about the collaboration, Evan Gregory told me via email:

“The producers of the broadcast reached out to us and asked us to do a piece. Then we collaborated with them over a period of several weeks to pull it together.”

Many Auto-Tune fans immediately went online to thank the Gregorys for their Oscars contribution.

Others, who had missed the clip, wondered when it would be added to the Gregory Brothers YouTube channel. Unfortunately, due to rights issues, the answer seems to be never. Said Evan Gregory:

“We won’t be posting the clip to our YouTube channel, but it will live for a limited time online at the Academy’s site.”

This means that Auto-Tune the News aficionados will have to scour YouTube for fan uploads (just like we did for the embed above), which may or may not get taken down in the days to come, or patiently wait until the clip finally gets uploaded to the Oscars website.

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First things first: The ceremony broadcast is exclusive to ABC, so if you want to watch the entire show and you don’t have a TV, you might have to wait for illicit clips to be uploaded to YouTube. However, if you do have a TV but don’t have cable, a digital antenna for your television will solve that problem.

There will be plenty of material available online, however, especially if you’re more interested in gowns than acceptance speeches. Livestream.com and the AP are partnering for their own live streaming coverage of the red carpet, and plenty of other organizations will be on the carpet as well as backstage, including MTV and PopSugar.

And Oscar.com will also be live streaming — according to a spokesperson, “Oscar.com will be live streaming content from the awards throughout the evening — from the Red Carpet through the ceremony — which will be in addition to the content airing on television.  So fans can actually log on to Oscar.com at any point during the night and see content from the awards show.”

However, for the premium experience, Oscar fans can subscribe to the Oscar All-Access web experience; for $4.99, they can access multiple live camera feeds on the red carpet and in the Kodak theater during the show, along with other extra content. In addition, the Oscar Backstage app for iOS devices features all the same content as the All-Access package — except for the “360 cam” — and costs $0.99.

I’m still not sure that monetizing the two-screen experience is a good idea, but while the Oscar.com spokesperson says that “both the Backstage app and Oscar All Access are designed to be a companion to the TV broadcast and offer insider access to enhance the experience as opposed to replacing it,” it’s still possible that someone not watching the broadcast would still be able to follow the action on stage.

And hey, if you want to get truly low fi, just follow the #oscars hashtag on Twitter. Not only will you be able to get up-to-the-second updates on who just won what, but live commentary on the night’s best and worst moments as well.

Any other options? Let us know in the comments!

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It is a very sad scene! If only he’d known about this thing called the Internet! This year, while films up for consideration have changed, the ways you might watch online are the same as last year. Oscars.org, Facebook and Livestream.com will all host the broadcast of the announcement on their respective channels beginning at 8:30 AM ET/5:30 AM PT. UPDATE: It is also available at Oscar.com. The Livestream.com version is embedded below.

If you want to hit snooze on your alarm, though, set it for eight minutes or less. 5:30 AM PT is when a Road to the Oscars special hosted by Chris Harrison and David Karger starts, and the actual announcement of the nominees, read by Academy President Tom Sherak and Mo’Nique, begins at 5:38 AM.

So get excited to tune in and see if the Academy does the right thing! Whatever you think the right thing is, of course.

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Sutton doesn’t mention whether his yells went unnoticed by His Steveness, but he posted a fantastic snapshot of the event to his blog — take a look and see if you can spot El Jobso for yourself (it’s not immediately easy to find him in the crowd, but once you see him, he’s hard to miss!)

Image courtesy of Wayne Sutton

The Theme Begins (Prequel to The Oscar Theme)

Now why would the normally shy and retiring Steve Jobs be at the Academy Awards Oscar ceremony? Well, he is the largest individual shareholder in the Walt Disney Company, to whom he sold Pixar Animation Studios in 2006. Pixar is the legendary computer animation studio responsible for the box office hits Toy Story and Finding Nemo (to name only two of many others) and its latest CG offering, Up, was nominated for an impressive five Academy Awards (and was the first Pixar film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture).

On the night, Up received two of those Oscars; Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. Steve didn’t take to the stage to receive the awards, but I’m sure he was grinning from ear to ear like a proud father at his child’s first music recital.

The Oscar Theme

If you’re interested in the mechanics of modern movie making, you’ll find this fascinating; Macworld UK reports that a staggering nine out of ten of the Oscar-nominated Documentaries (across both the Short and Feature Documentary categories) were edited on Macs using Final Cut Pro.

If you’re not a movie maker, you might not know that Final Cut Pro is Apple’s pro-level film editing software. Speaking from personal experience of many hours spent in many darkened editing suites all around the world, there are (broadly speaking) three dominant software editing tools; Avid, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. (There are others, of course, but they’re far less commonly used in the film and TV industry.)

Avid has traditionally been the editing platform of choice and still reigns supreme, though mostly because it has been around since the Stone Age and many long-established editing facilities using Avid suites have long-term service contracts tying them to that platform. But Final Cut Pro (and the Final Cut Studio suite of film making tools) has been gaining ground in recent years, due in part to its relative affordability and Apple’s amazingly progressive efforts to develop and promote new HD codecs and standards, such as the ProRes family. (For more on this, you can watch a video on Apple’s Final Cut product pages.)

That almost all the Award-nominated Short and Feature Documentaries were edited using Final Cut (and, therefore, made on Macs) speaks volumes about filmmakers’ faith in, and trust for, Apple’s technologies.

The Oscar Theme Part 2: The Theme Continues

The impressive numbers continue. I almost missed this one, but last week The Awl’s Abe Sauer penned Why Apple Deserves and Oscar Too, which started with this remarkable tidbit;

In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners. This high appearance rate does not include the heap of mass-market films from 2009 that did not own a weekend but also featured Apple product placement.

Sauer has done his homework. He goes on to list a fair number of those movies (you can read the list for yourself here) and, if you’ve got the time to spare, (7 minutes and 25 seconds, to be precise) there’s even a Ken Burns-tastic video slideshow of screenshots from movies and TV shows through the years featuring Apple products. Sauer adds;

…Brandcameo shows that Apple has appeared in 102 of the 302 weekly number one U.S. box office films from 2001 to 2009—more than 33% of them. Apple’s number is actually higher when period and fantasy/scifi films, in which Apple could not appear, are removed (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars prequels 3:10 to Yuma, etc.).

Right then, don’t let it be said that Apple’s brand managers aren’t doing good work.

The Oscar Theme Part 3: Oscar’s Revenge

During the ad break (presumably while Oscar winners were busy phoning their Moms with the good news) the first ever iPad television commercial was broadcast. The ad itself is a bit “meh,” to be honest; it didn’t light the world on fire and teach us anything we didn’t already know. But that’s OK, because what really matters, I suppose, is that a very large audience not normally exposed to tech/gadget news saw the iPad for the first time. You can watch the ad on Apple’s website here.

I’m still wondering what Apple was up to in that diner back in August last year. At this rate, I think we’ll have to wait for next year’s Oscars to find out.

While we’re still waiting to hear from ABC.com about how its video coverage performed, Livestream.com’s hosting of the AP’s red carpet concluded with George Clooney saying farewell to over 100,000 viewers.

Oscar chatter on Twitter was also huge according to our friends at Trendrr, with “Oscar” mentions peaking at nearly 70,000.

Meanwhile, the other big drama of the night — the big face-off between Cablevision and ABC, which was resolved 15 minutes after the ceremony began — created two big spikes in Twitter traffic, with the two terms tracking pretty cleanly together.

And The Hurt Locker‘s underdog triumph meant that positive Twitter sentiment about Avatar plunged, which is best interpreted as fans mourning James Cameron’s defeat.

While the lack of live-streaming for the actual ceremony was frustrating for both Cablevision customers and cord-cutters nationwide, the social media surrounding the ceremony seems to have done its job and driven audiences to ABC. Though the fact that the highest-grossing film of all time (before inflation) was up for seven awards probably didn’t hurt, either.

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The video, purported to be a featurette about one of Waltz’s “most important early roles,” is actually an homage to a strange little viral that’s been floating around for the last two weeks, in which Russian baritone Eduard Khil sings a song known to the Russians as I am very glad, because I’m finally going home and known to the Internet as Trolololololo.

Waltz is an incredible talent and watching him take this project way too seriously is delightful. This video is a bit annoying, though, because of its failure to capture important details. Why isn’t Waltz bugging out his eyes as much as possible? Why is the lighting so much darker and undersaturated than the original? Why does he need to be humping things at all? Isn’t the original video (below) weird enough?

I’ll admit this, however: I could just be bitter because I was looking forward to another installment in the I’m F—ing Matt Damon series. Yes, I know those were two years ago. But true love never dies.

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