Last week we told you about a neat single-serving site called SteveTold.Us that gave you some great quotes from Apple’s Steve Jobs upon every refresh.

Since its launch, the site has nabbed nearly 3M pageviews, and the group behind it has launched two more sites today: toldusyodadid.com and markpushes.us. Obviously, these new sites feature Yoda and Mark Zuckerberg.

As with anything that gets hot instantly, there’s always an interesting backstory on how it came to be. Today, we got a little bit of background on how SteveTold.Us came to be. Since last week, the team tells us that its gotten a lot of people requesting features and signing up for its new initiative called Changemakrs.

The team consists of four people: Matthias Wagner, Sacha Tueni, Chloë Bregman, and BC Broussard. Here’s their story:

TNW: Can you tell us more about the team behind the project SteveTold.Us?

Chloë Bregman: We are a team of 4 entrepreneurs in San Francisco, CA who co-founded and work on the startup Zerobird together. (blog.zerobirdapp.com) We have a team culture of hacking and creating things outside of Zerobird to amuse and inspire each other.

TNW: What inspired you folks to create the site?

Chloë Bregman: There are many people who inspire us everyday to do what we do: Steve Jobs for his vision, Facebook for their hacker culture and all of our friends who run startups. The choice of Steve Jobs wasn’t completely random. In Silicon Valley the iPhone, macbook airs and macbook pros are ubiquitous. We use apple products all day. When our team rented an RV truck to drive across america together in March to South by South West a large tech conference in Austin Texas, we listened to Steve Job’s audio biography on the way.

TNW: How did its launch go, and when did you decide to push it live?

Chloë Bregman: On Friday May 18th, the day of the Facebook IPO there was nothing that was inspiring to us in our Facebook news feeds. The only thing our friends and tech bloggers were sharing and writing about was the Facebook IPO and the Facebook Hackathon. Our co-founder Matthias quickly built stevetold.us to amuse and inspire us. We all quickly shared it with all of our friends. We had no idea how big the site would get. It was just another hack to inspire the team.

He shared the site at 3:30pm. At 5:45 pm you wrote an article on it for The Next Web. (http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/05/19/your-moment-of-apple-zen-remember-the-things-that-steve-told-us/) Over the course of the next 48 hours over 2 million people visited the site. People from around the world have been sending in feature requests, sharing the site, getting excited as they find the easter eggs such as clicking on the turntable to play Steve Job’s favorite song (tech term = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)) and have been returning to the site day after day.

TNW: What’s next for the team now that the first site was a massive success?

Chloë Bregman: The worldwide enthusiasm for stevetold.us inspired us to make this bigger. We realized we aren’t the only people who like to be inspired and feel connected to those who inspire us. On Monday, we started Changemakrs.com to build a place where people can be inspired and inspire others. People are visiting stevetold.us and signing up to be part of changemakrs which only inspires us more.

So there you have it. From a simple idea born out of inspiration has become a focus for a new type of company and site. Sure, Yoda is a fictional character, but his quotes in various Star Wars movies have inspired millions.

I’m personally interested in social good and seeing how people are inspired by technology, thoughts, and quotes. It seems like this team is on to something massive. Keep an eye on them.

If you’re interested in the upcoming Ashton Kutcher movie version of Steve Jobs’ life, it is set to begin filming in June. The first place that filming will start is the original “Apple Garage”, as well as in the actual house in Los Altos where Jobs grew up.

The movie also has its own website: www.thejobsmovie.com.

Here is the film’s synopsis according to the site (which sports the tagline “Get inspired.”:

“JOBS” is the incredibly powerful and true story of the visionary who set out to change the world, and did.

The film chronicles Steve Jobs’ (ASHTON KUTCHER) transformation of character from the enthusiasm and self-discovery of his youth, to the personal demons that clouded his vision, and finally to the ultimate triumphs of his later life. Steve changed the way we see the world today through his relentless drive, passion, persistence, and the force of his will, and it is through these qualities that we draw inspiration from his life.

Dark, honest, and uncompromising, “JOBS” plunges into the depths of Steve Jobs’ character, uncovering his motivations, his gifts, his flaws, his failures, and his successes. An immensely private tale spanning four decades, “JOBS” is an intensely character-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is a personal tale.

An rousing narrative of Steve Jobs’ days, “JOBS” pulls no punches and does not speculate, only telling the candid account as seen through his eyes, emotions, and ingenuity. The life of Steve Jobs.

The movie is set to be a dark depiction of the “30 most defining years of Steve Jobs’ life”, seen through the eyes of his friends and colleagues. I personally like the name of the movie, jOBS, but the lowercase treatment of the J will certainly bring out some eyerolls.

There is another movie in the works, based on Walter Isaacson’s popular biography. We reported yesterday that Sony has brought on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as an advisor for the Aaron Sorkin written flick.

This cool site called SteveTold.Us depicts a very relaxed Steve Jobs with an overlay of his best quotes. Simply refresh the page and you’ll find some new words of wisdom:

There’s nothing more to the site than that, but as usual, the words of Steve Jobs still resonate like they always did. Give the site a go and get yourself some knowledge like this gem:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

➤ SteveTold.Us

When it comes to technology and products that excite me personally, I have what I call the “mom test”. Put simply, if my mom can’t figure something out it’s not worth spending a lot of time checking out or using. My mom is pretty tech savvy as most of you learned from reading “Facts you didn’t know about The Next Web team” this morning.

One of the areas in technology that excites me the most is the “cloud“. Up until the past year or so, it’s been a buzz phrase that you read on every tech blog. So and so for such and such “in the cloud”. If someone were to ask you what the cloud is, you could quote this Wikipedia article on cloud computing:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

Cloud computing provides computation, software applications, data access, data management and storage resources without requiring cloud users to know the location and other details of the computing infrastructure.

For consumers this means that all of your stuff is stored somewhere that you don’t have to worry about and you can access your stuff no matter where you are or what device you’re using. It can be a pretty confusing concept for non-geeks.

Companies like Box (previously Box.net) and Dropbox have been around since 2005 and has provided amazing resources to people who work remotely, have a few computers, or just want a safe place to store their important data. Google is getting into the act with the long-rumored GDrive, and Microsoft has SkyDrive. For people like my mom, it’s not something that has been especially consumer friendly…until now.

In typical Apple fashion, the company has taken a difficult-to-explain technology like the cloud and turned it into a consumer-friendly product that even my mom can understand. It has recently aired its first TV commercial for iCloud, its data storage solution for iDevice users. It’s absolutely brilliant. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look:

The service was actually not a new concept Apple decided to work on, it was previously called MobileMe and flopped. Horribly. When the company announced the new direction it was heading in with iCloud, Steve Jobs explained the service in one sentence:

iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes all of it to your other devices.

Yes, the commercial that you saw above is exactly what Steve Jobs described last June. But as we know, seeing is truly believing. The best part about the commercial is that there isn’t one word spoken throughout its 31 seconds. With one product and one brilliant marketing concept, Apple has solved a problem that has been plaguing new computer users for years. Just as Jobs explained last June:

We’ve been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system. When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system. On iOS, you don’t have to think about it. But how do you move those documents around? Now you can.

Apple makes things that you don’t have to think about. Not only is iCloud a beautiful implementation of the power of the cloud, it’s something that even my mom can understand.

Thank you, Apple.

A calendar app might not be the most news-worthy app when you think about all of the cool things, but when it’s one that was built as a tribute to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it definitely gets some attention.

It got Apple’s attention too, when it was submitted for review by its developers Nushka Labs. However, Apple rejected the “Steve Jobs Tribute Calendar”, more than likely due to lack of ownership of the photos included in the app.

Part of the note sent to the developers read:

…However, We have decided to honor his life in other ways and we are not accepting these types of apps.

Here’s what the app looks like:

Instead of going away quietly, the team at Nushka Labs has released the app on Cydia, which is the app store for jailbroken phones.

Here’s what the team had to say about it today:

We are really happy (& proud) to announce that ‘Tribute Calendar’ is launched with Cydia Store. We have kept our promise to release the App free (as well Ad Free), it will remain Free for lifetime.

While placing the app on the Cydia store might seem like an act of defiance, I’m sure Mr. Jobs would appreciate the app and the team for not giving up after it got rejected during the review process.

➤ Steve Jobs Tribute Calendar (Cydia)

During an interview with The Telegraph, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates disclosed that he had written a letter to Steve Jobs as he was dying.

Apparently the letter meant quite a bit to Jobs, as he kept it by his bedside in the final days of his life. According to Gates, the letter wasn’t to make peace, as the two had gotten along quite well:

There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.

After Jobs passed away, his wife Laurene called Gates:

She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.

While Gates didn’t share exactly what was in the letter, he did touch on some of the things he wrote to Jobs about:

I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.

Bill Gates has become quite the humantiarian since leaving his post at Microsoft, giving 48% of his net-worth to charity through the Gates Foundation.

It’s sad to think about what type of dent Steve Jobs could have made in the way health is managed in third-world countries after his days at Apple. I’m sure that the accomplishments Bill Gates has made would have fueled him to do the same in his older age.

Steve Jobs has left an impression on all of us since he stepped down as CEO at Apple, and then passed away last year. So much so, that MacRumors is reporting that Virgin America has given a name to one of its jets that is inspired by Jobs.

With the tail number N845VA, this Airbus A320 first took flight last October, and has a famous quote from Steve Jobs on the side of the jet.

It says:

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

This of course was a quote from the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. Towards the end of the speech, Jobs said:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Here is the plane in all of its glory, it handles a multitude of Virgin America’s most popular routes, including SFO to JFK:

In an interview with the BBC during CES, former Apple CEO John Sculley discussed his relationship with Steve Jobs, as well as the perception that he was ousted from Apple due to poor performance.

Sculley was asked about his ousting, but wanted to set the record straight as to the company’s health at the time of his removal by Apple’s board in 1993:

When I left Apple it had $2bn of cash.

It was the most profitable computer company in the world – not just personal computers – and Apple was the number one selling computer. So the myth that I fired Steve wasn’t true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn’t true either.

A lot of things happened after I left before Steve came back.

The $2bn in cash that Apple had at the time is a far cry from Apple’s war chest in 2012. In fact, 19 years after that point Apple has $80bn more. Jobs returned to apple in 1997.

While Sculley told the BBC that he hasn’t read the Steve Jobs biography penned by Walter Isaacson, he has talked to many people who have, and doesn’t seem to think he was treated unfairly in it.

What’s John Sculley up to now? He’s an active investor and advisor in healthcare related startups.

Parts of the Internet are enraged about Google’s newest search feature, “Search plus your world“, which I’d like to say is a god-awful name for a product. Regardless of this weak product naming convention, Google is guilty of one thing, and it’s not an anti-trust issue. The company failed to properly launch a product that has massive implications because it’s confusing as all hell.

It would be nearly impossible to argue the fact that Google employs many smart people, but when it comes to managing communication with its massive community of users, it tends falls short. I really thought things had changed with the launch of Google+, because that team has done a sparkling job releasing new features and explaining them along the way.

But take a look at part of Google’s statement on Monday, when it announced the radical changes to search:

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

Whether you consider me to be a smart person or not, that last sentence is about the most confusing thing I’ve ever read from a big company. Let’s read it again:

You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

Is it just me, or is Google really bad at explaining things? Whether Facebook and Twitter results were shown alongside Google+ in this new release, it’s still a clumsy product announcement.

When you’re bad at explaining things, you’re forced to go on the defensive. After the fact. For example, Google’s Matt Cutts took to his own blog with a post called “Sharing a search story“. In it, he describes his wonderment and delight of finding photos of himself when searching for a social game that he has played at tech conferences. After explaining his experience, he says:

I suspect as more people take Search plus Your World out for a test drive, they’ll quickly experience similar magical “Aha!” moments like I did.

Why wasn’t this “story” a part of the Search plus your world product announcement? This is just poor execution in my opinion. Steve Jobs was fantastic at showing you a problem and then of course providing the answer with Apple products. It’s as if you wanted to shake his hand for making your life better as soon as he unveiled something, simply because he told you why you needed it beforehand.

Similarly, Facebook did a really good job explaining its Timeline product during the f8 conference, and whether you like the product or not, what it is was completely obvious by the time everyone hand their hands on it.

I’m not sure why Google can’t do this with its products, especially one as important as search. Whether I like the product or not, I can turn it off and so can you. Unfortunately, I can’t turn off the fact that Google releases products like it’s never talked to another human being in its existence.

If these changes to search do cause issues for Google, business, legal, or both, perhaps it will learn that doing something radical to something that we use everyday and then going on the defensive later gets you nowhere in the hearts and minds of loyal users.

“Search plus your world” denotes that my world involves nothing but Google products. This is not the case, thus making the product name hollow for me from the get-go. Having said that, I still don’t think this will get Google into hot water legally, it just makes them look bad.

Toy company “in icons” is set to sell a Steve Jobs action figure that is so accurately detailed, your jaw might drop. The figure will cost you $99.99, and is set to ship at the end of February.

It’s unlikely that this doll action figure will see the light of day, since it’s not an authorized product. I’m sure that the Jobs family will have something to say about its release, but man this thing is impressive.

Here’s all of the features and add-ons that will come with the Steve Jobs 12″ collectible figure. That’s sixth-scale if you’re wondering:

-One realistic head sculpt & Two pairs of glasses
-One highly articulated body & Three pairs of hands
-One black turtleneck & One pair of blue jeans
-One black leather belt & One chair (wood + metal)
-One pair of black socks & sneaker
-Two apples (One with a bite.)
-One piece of “ONE MORE THING” hard backdrop

Take a look at this thing:

The more I look at it, the more I can’t believe how spot-on its features are. I doubt that Apple or the Jobs family will ever release an official product like this, but there’s no doubt that Apple collectors and Steve Jobs admirers are going to salivate over this doll. Check out the box that it comes in, even that is gorgeous.

I’m actually thinking of picking one up, as the site promises to give your money back if it sells out. I assume that if it gets blocked from shipping via a cease and desist from the Jobs family, you’ll also get a refund. It might be worth the risk, though.

UPDATE: Apple has threatened the manufacturer of the doll with legal action.