“New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ ”

$783,529 spent on Zuckerberg’s “comprehensive security program” in 2011, which included the procurement, installation, and maintenance of security measures for his personal residence, annual costs of security personnel, and the use of private aircraft.

And many more interesting (and mostly irrelevant) facts.

“People look at my profile and say, ‘You can have all the options,’ ” he said. “But really, everyone does.”

So true. While money may make some things more accessible, people in general share the same opportunities.

This isn’t a prediction that everything will be fine, but it is a caution that the pessimism about Greek prospects once the turmoil is past may be overdone.

But then again – who knows?

16 photos – worth the quick watch.

ICANN has received approximately USD $350 million in fees for applications for new gTLDs.

ICANN will announce the new gTLD applications on Tuesday May 8th. Will be interesting to see who’s been applying for what.

All the relevant info regarding the IPO in one place.

The Financial Times is preparing to kill off its iPad and iPhone app for good, signalling its final conversion from executable-app to web-app publishing.

We ask that you clear out and personal belongings and leave your company-issued laptop at the fifth floor help desk and leave the premises immediately. We will also be sending you a bill for any damage to the rug near your desk.

This kind of “journalism” and integrity would make TechCrunch something it once was – too bad AOL doesn’t allow for that.

A Creative Commons licensed data journalism handbook, to be read freely online.

Steve Wozniak on Lumia 900 and WP:

I’m kind of shocked. Every screen is much more beautiful than the same apps on Android and iPhone.

Love it how they start giving him business advice such as “you should have lunch there so when they get hungry they don’t have to leave”.

Wonder how business oriented Finnish kids are in similar cases?

Microsoft launches paid additions for their Skydrive service. 7 Gb for free and cheap increases up to 100 Gb.

There are some usability issues on the Mac compared to Dropbox, but I feel like Skydrive could have a shot at at least increasing the quota on Dropbox, but also increasing competition.

What happened to Spain was a housing bubble — fueled, to an important degree, by lending from German banks — that burst, taking the economy down with it. Now the country has 23.6 percent unemployment, 50.5 percent among the young.

[...]

I’m really starting to think that we’re heading for a crackup of the whole system.

Make no mistake, the incumbents have each others’ back. But the Internet users have the insurgents’ back. So when the Internet users care enough, the insurgents will win. That’s what happened with PIPA/SOPA. It will be interesting to see if it will happen again with CISPA.

The line between an incumbent and an insurgent is an unclear one. Facebook is clearly an incumbent already.

Good post from Fred Wilson.

And I think it is also worth remembering, because very few people at that time saw it from that perspective, that if you take the relative size of the Icelandic economy and the British economy, and you transfer over to the British economy the sum that the British government was asking the Icelandic taxpayers to be responsible for due to the failure of this private bank, would have been equal, given the relative size of the British economy, to asking the British taxpayer to be responsible for an 800 billion pound-bill from a failed British bank in Spain and Italy and Greece.

This is probably the single most best article on Business Insider ever. It’s a great interview with the Iceland’s president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson.

He explains his learnings of the financial crisis Iceland lived through.

The interview further made me believe that EU is taking the wrong approach to the problems in Greece and other troubled countries. The difference of course is that the pay cut Iceland’s population took was through the weakened currency exchange.

The markets forced this on Iceland where as EU is trying to negotiate with individual countries.

Iceland is in many ways doing better than they were before the crisis. I’m sure there are lots of scars in the economy still, but if you compare their situation to where the troubled EU countries are – I’m quite certain a better solution would have been a quicker fix than making the tax payers pay for the costs through bail out funds.

This is great news:

David Martin MEP said that the controversial treaty was likely to be rejected by the Parliament in July, and that new measures to deter music, film and software piracy were likely to take two years before they came into force.

This is just stupid.

“Notwithstanding whatever use it claims to make of ‘open source educational content,’ Defendant distributes ‘replacement textbooks’ that are created from, based upon, and overwhelmingly similar to Plaintiffs’ textbooks,” the complaint reads.

I’d argue most educational books that of similar subjects are overwhelmingly similar. The whole legal case is a great validation that there is definitely something here for the startup.

This is some seriously cool video from the launch of a space rocket. The cameras are attached to the boosters of the rockets. In just 450 seconds, they ride to almost 30 miles and come flying down to earth.

This is one nuisance that could seriously make SMS useless.

Spread over 250 million text message-enabled phones, the problem is not as commonplace as e-mail spam. But it is a growing menace, with the potential for significant damage.

I do believe though that legislation and tougher penalties could help here though.