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.

This year will be forever remembered as the year that we lost the most creative mind that Silicon Valley has ever seen, as well as one where a few rough Tech IPOs scared away potential future investors. We also said goodbye to some CEOs and tech founders, and Facebook stayed in the social networking driver’s seat.

Lets get into the year that was in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs

What can we say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said? The founder and most memorable leader of Apple resigned as CEO in August, making way for the Tim Cook era. In his resignation letter, Jobs didn’t give an actual reason for leaving Apple, but suggested that Apple move on with its succession plan:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Many assumed that the reason for Jobs stepping down was his failing health, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case when he passed away on October 6th. As a Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs brought Apple back to life, which launched the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 this year, showing that hard work and determination can indeed pay off. Even after his death, Jobs continued to make headlines, with his biography shattering records and topping charts.

Read all about Apple’s entire 2011 in our rewind.

IPOs

2011 was a big year for going public in the tech space. With much of the year being filled with rumblings about whether Facebook would go public or not, four other companies took the huge step of going for the IPO.

Here’s a timeline of big-name 2011 IPO filings:

• January: LinkedIn found a way to make money, so the time came to go public.
• February: Pandora went from nearly being toast, to becoming to the toast of tech.
• June: Groupon took the world by storm with its group buying model, but is the sizzle gone?
• July: Zynga relies heavily on Facebook for its revenue and game players, but that didn’t stop them from going for the IPO hailmary.

Unfortunately, most of these public offerings ended up tanking, but that shouldn’t stop companies from taking the leap next year.

Facebook and Yelp are the two companies to watch out for in IPO land next year.

Silicon Shuffles

A few major notable founders and CEOs left or were booted from their positions in 2011. Some of them included companies that were synonymous with “Web 2.0″, which was the beginning of the social web.

In March, Kevin Rose decided to resign from the company he started in 2004, Digg. After a short stint as CEO of the company in 2010, Rose decided to give the big goodbye to Digg this year. In many ways, Kevin Rose was a symbol of how cool it was to be an Internet entrepreneur, serving as a way more social and popular version of Mark Zuckerberg. His resignation came after an unsuccessful attempt to revive Digg’s community with a new version that everyone ended up hating. Don’t worry about Rose, he got funding for his new startup, Milk.

In September, Carol Bartz was fired as CEO of Yahoo!, over the phone no less. With Yahoo! seemingly having no leadership or direction, the rest of the year was filled with speculation on when Yahoo! would sell, and who it would sell to. Some of the names thrown around? Google, Microsoft, Aol, and Alibaba. No sale yet, and don’t hold your breath in 2012.

HP, which Steve Jobs had noted was “being dismembered, destroyed” fired its CEO this year, Leo Apotheker. However, Apotheker’s tenure didn’t even last a year and was replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

But it wasn’t all about high profile departures, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey came back to the company in March to split time as an adviser as well as CEO of his Valley startup Square, putting 8 hour days in at both companies.

Facebook gets competition, remains king of social

The existence of a Google social network had been rumored for years, but this year we finally got to see what the company had come up with. In a huge direction change for the company, Google has decided to go all-in with social by launching Google+. In doing that, it shut down previous social failure Google Buzz.

Even though Google+ shows strong growth, Facebook remained the king of social in 2011. The company told us that they had 800 million users, but what was more impressive, it had 500 million users on the site at once.

Facebook didn’t stand pat amidst numerous privacy issues and launched numerous new features this year including Timeline. But what made Facebook the real king of Silicon Valley in 2011? The fact that it could bank 1 billion dollars in net revenue this year. Growth in users is one thing, features are another, but bringing in that type of bank puts it light-years ahead of Valley darlings like Twitter.

These are the stories that in one way or another narrated the entire year of innovation in 2011 on the left coast. What were your most memorable moments in Silicon Valley this year? Share them in the comments!

Spindler was ousted in 1996 to make way for Gil Amelio, who of course only lasted one year before Steve Jobs returned. He’s credited with ruining the Newton project, and his employees decided to poke some fun at his decision to license Mac OS 7 in 1995, which was reversed by Jobs.

Enjoy “I think we’re a clone now”, sung to the tune of (you guessed it) “I think we’re alone now”, an internal video created by Apple employees on its main campus in Cupertino:

This is more entertaining than Apple’s 80s music album.

Twitter showed us its plans to become the social network for global communication. The company has decided to focus on scaling back its look and feature set, and wants to hone in on simplicity.

This is a huge turning point for Twitter, as it is now clear that the service is a fierce competitor to Facebook. Facebook is adding more features that could complicate things for the users it already has, while Twitter is focusing on making it simpler to use for “everyone”.

I asked Twitter CEO Dick Costolo today if the integration with iOS 5 and its partnership with Apple had anything to do with the decision to scale things back design wise.

Costolo responded:

Apple is a mentor company to us, and it’s really hard to edit down a product to make it simpler while you’re innovating and adding functionality.

That’s true. And things that are hard tend to pay off the most.

Recently, many of my friends have said that Facebook is becoming too difficult to navigate, and there’s just way too much going on. The News Feed has been amped up, the Ticker is obnoxious to most, and with the introduction of Timeline, many users aren’t going to know how to use Facebook at all anymore.

In steps Twitter.

When talking about its new direction today, Jack Dorsey spoke about powerful messages being sent in 140 characters or less. He mentioned Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” as an example. What Dorsey is really saying, is that to get everyone in the world using a service, let alone get their attention, you have to keep things short and sweet, and I think he’s right.

This new direction shows a clear path for Twitter to become the defacto service for real-time communication. We know that Steve Jobs had hopes of killing off carriers while at the helm of Apple, and with Twitter integrated, its namespace could easily overtake phone numbers with such a powerful telephony partner.

Regardless of the rumblings that engineers have grown tired of refactoring the service instead of adding new features, Twitter has a real shot at taking out a few methods of communication. The only way to get there is accessibility via simple design and a clear proposition to new users. Basically, Mom has to be able to understand it.

Facebook’s growth took off as soon as everyone’s Mother, Uncle, and Aunt hit up existing users with friend requests. But with Twitter’s focus on simplicity, it makes more sense for everyone to get on the service that lets you communicate the fastest and with the least amount of hand-holding.

Twitter is simple, and wants to remain simple. Its website and apps now reflect that simplicity for the first time since it launched in 2006. During today’s press event, Dorsey mentioned that the world has 7 billion people, and while it’s a bit crazy to set your sights on getting even half of the global population on Twitter, it takes crazier people to even attempt to hit those goals. Call me nuts, but if Twitter stays simple, it has a shot of becoming the preferred way to communicate. Forget SMS, forget Email, forget Facebook.

Just keep it simple, stupid.

The Palmpilot was probably the first commercially available gadget that let you transfer vCards over thin air. It used Infrared, and later Bluetooth, to transfer information from device to device. Most people who owned a Palm device tried it at least once, for the cool factor, but the process was awkward and slow so it never really took off.

Since then however there have been many declarations of ‘the death of the business card!’. I’m pretty sure even this blog wrote similar posts in the past. Every 6 months another company launches that seems to promise to ‘revolutionize’ the business card business. Still, most people I know still carry around lots of paper and I don’t see that changing very soon.

Why?

There are a couple of good reasons for that too. Let me sum it up for you real quick so the next time someone tells you that one day we won’t need paper anymore and that it is cool to have a shotcode on your businesscard or some other seemingly futuristic idea you can explain to them how that isn’t going to happen.

First of all most business card revolutionaries aren’t revolutionary enough. Simply converting the business card to a digital format isn’t going to cut it. The reason why that is is because there is more to it than just exchanging information. That is the basic error most people make. Or at least it is about more than exchanging the information printed on the card!

The whole ‘exchanging business cards’ process is a cultural phenomena that contains a few subtle meta layers of information that you can’t just digitize. Sure, a digitally exchanged business card can contain a date and GPS coordinates. That’s cool, but not cool enough.

Imagine being in an airport; you sit down somewhere, drop your wallet, the guy next to you picks it up and hands it to you, you look at each other and you realize its Bill Gates. Hot damn! You thank him, he asks you where you are going, you start talking, pitch your company and at a certain point he says “That sounds awesome, give me your card so I can have my people contact your people”.

Now you have two options: you can reach into your jacket pocket (0,2 seconds), grab a card (0,05 seconds) and hand it over, with the text on the card facing him (0,25 seconds). This whole process shouldn’t take more than a second, it won’t distract you from the conversation and it won’t require any action from Bill except sticking out his hand, an action which Bill is familiar with.

Then the magic happens; Bill looks at the card. He examines the quality of the paper between his thumb and index finger. He glances over the beautifully designed company logo and then reads your title, or the lack of one, and without effort or even being conscious about it he will form an opinion on you and make a mental note which will make him remember your name. Then he takes out his pen and quickly scribbles 2 words at the back of your card.

What happens next? Nothing. Bill Gates doesn’t give you his card. That is not his style and that is not how things work when you meet Bill. People introduce themselves to Bill, Bill doesn’t have to introduce himself to people. People give Bill business cards, Bill doesn’t hand out cards. If there will ever be a meeting again between you and Bill the initiative will come from Bill.

The other option?

Well, there really isn’t one. You can reach for your iPhone, Android (seriously, in front of Bill?) or Windows Phone and launch any of the current Business card replacement apps and ask Bill to do the same. But seriously, are you going to waste precious minutes trying to convince Bill to install an app so you can exchange business cards? No way in hell. Bill doesn’t exchange anything! You’ve got 30 seconds to make a lasting impression and you won’t do it by staring at your phone trying to find the LinkedIn app and then asking Bill to dictate you his email address.

This is all so obvious I’m surprised I still have to explain it to people. As long as the digital business card exchange format isn’t a lot richer, unless you can do it without looking at your phone, unless you can do it one way and unless you are pretty sure it is compatible with almost everybody in the world, this isn’t going to work out. Paper business cards are here to stay.

Tips for digital enhancements

Of course, there are exceptions and easy ways to enhance the whole information exchange process. A few tips:

- My personal business card contains just my name and email address, nothing more. If a contact is worth following up on all you basically need is those two pieces of information. In fact, you can also learn the company name and website from looking at the email address so that makes it 4 pieces of information with just 2 information sets. And the less information on the card the bigger the chance that people will take the trouble to follow up.

- Keep your card readable and easy to scan. A lot of people use scanners or phone cameras and Apps with character recognition to input data. Using weird fonts and combined horizontal and vertical text placement doesn’t make it easier to read.

- Shotcodes are cute but hardly anyone can read them. Use for innovativeness (not a word but you know what I mean) but not for usefulness, yet.

Apps that are useful

Then there are a few apps that are cool and useful. Lets look at three of them:

I often use Business Card reader to quickly scan business cards as soon as I get them. Sometimes I’ll scan the card while we are talking and then hand it back after I scanned it so they can re-use it.

Be careful not to appear unthankful or uninterested and make sure to mention you have all their data copied to your phone now.

The other service I regularly use is Cardcloud. I don’t often bring my paper business cards to meetings (because I’m like Bill Gates, right?) and love how their app focusses on sharing your card instead of the whole information exchange dance. If the other person has Cardcloud too you can beam the card to the other person, and Cardcloud scans

your location for other people using the app, but I mainly use it as an easy way to share my contact details, if I want to. And that makes all the difference.

I will be talking to 20 people at an event and they will likely all give me their card. They don’t ask me if I want one, they just give it to me. Maybe with 1 or 2 of those I will feel like also sharing my data with them. In those cases I will ask for their card or email address and enter it directly into the Cardcloud app. Then I can choose if I email them my personal card or my business card.

Then there is CardFlick. It is trying to recreate the experience of seeing a beautifully designed card. It might be too early to tell if the app will turn into something that will replace or enhance your paper card as I found the process of sharing the cards inconvenient and the choice of designs limited.

Still, at least they are trying to add some feeling and beauty to the scene and for that I’m thankful.

Conclusion

The focus for many ‘business card killers’ is too much on replacing paper business cards with a digital equivalent. The opportunity lies much more with enhancing analog meetings; annotating, adding notes, recording locations and adding other meta layers could be useful. But there really isn’t a need to kill anything, especially as it is performing so well.

There is still a future for paper business cards but I do see digital information exchange apps becoming more popular and growing alongside paper.

But complete replace paper? Well, don’t hold your breath…

Steve Jobs’ Business Card:

Mark Zuckerberg Business Card:

Larry Page Business Card:

Bill Gates Business Card:

Jerry Yang Business Card:

Steve Wozniak Business Card: