Koo’s Corner

I saw or heard about a lot of interesting April Fools jokes. ESPN pulled a good once on its viewers with a fake breaking news story that Davidson was still in the NCAA tourney and that the last 20 seconds of the Elite 8 game would have to be replayed. Peter Fuitak at collegefootballnews.com had me slightly convinced that Hershel Walker was coming back to college football.

A pretty bold risque prank call was documented on a message board I frequent.

“dad, i just got a call from this girl named Stephanie that i met on spring break… we met at a bar, got drunk and did the spring break business… she called me yesterday stating she is pregnant but she does not know if its mine or not because she has a boyfriend back home”

However what really suprised me was the tech industry and in particular Silicon Valley’s participation in the April Fool’s festivities.

Below are some highlights.

- Google led the way with a couple interesting pranks, the most ridiculous below.

Funny but its better if you know someone dumb enough to believe it

Google followed this shaninigan with a fake micro site claiming Gmail users could now back date emails.

-Google owned Youtube continued the Internet phenomena that is Rick Rolling. Rick Rolling has two different forms. 1) When a publication or website puts up a link promising something interesting but rather redirecting you to the video below. 2) Blasting the song “Never Let You Down” to protest formal gatherings (Scientology meetups have been rick rolled several times.

All the links on Youtube’s homepage today directed them to the video below, with many other sites joining in on the fun. In fact the music video below has now tallied 8 million views/ Rick Rolls with duplicate videos talling multi millions of views.

- Technology publication ZD Net ran a fictitious story that ICANN was going to shutdown the internet for an hour for research purposes.

- San Francisco based Wikipedia made fictitious entries for their “On This Day” and “Today’s Featured Article section”

- InfoWorld published a pair of great fake stories. 1) Google buys facebook 2) Yahoo and Microsoft agree to merge. Both articles laid on the sarcasm pretty thick.

In just under a month I will be attending an event in whichOracle, MySQL, and Sun Microsystems are set to have a presence.

Today all three companies made noise with Sun acquiring open source database software maker MYSQL for $1 billion and Oracle acquiring BEA systems for $8.5 billion.

2 interesting moves. I am sure the blogosphere will chime in with opinions a plenty. MYSQL was seen as the next logical candidate out of the handful of open source companies to go public. Sun Mircosystems has been one of the most open source friendly larger entities so it seems like a good fit. Its great to see Sun investing heavily in open source and embracing the idea that the LAMP stack is enterprise ready.

MacWorld

Steve Jobs made a slew of announcements yesterday at his keynote at Macworld. A ultra thin laptop, some new ipod and iphone features, and a variety of other less sexy product announcements.

To me the biggest announcement was Apple’s addition of movie rentals to their Itunes store and the revamping of Apple TV. Earlier I discussed Netflix’s forray into the digital living room with their partnership to LG and how it will affect Vudu. In that blog I predicted that Apple would make a move into this growing market.

“While their are a handful of other companies making waves in this space, something tells me Apple will dive head first into this space and steal a lot of their thunder. AppleTV has been a disappointment thus far, but you can