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Posts tagged with "steve jobs"

The Story Behind The “Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt” Video→

The Story Behind The “Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt” Video

Michael Markman has published an interesting blog post detailing the backstory behind the rare Apple video featuring Steve Jobs as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I called Chris in L.A. to outline what we were thinking. War movie. Stock footage from the D-day landings. Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel hanging on the wall. Mac marketing team in cameo roles. And the topper: Steve as FDR. He said he’d start looking for a director (or maybe he had one in mind).

Glenn, Mike, and I marched into Steve’s office to give him the pitch. Pretty much the way I outlined it in the previous paragraph. Steve’s eyes were sparkling through it all. By the time I got to, “and you as FDR,” I had made the sale. In the binary universe of Steve Jobs, something is either a zero or a one. This was a one. Instantly. Definitively.

The “1944″ video was aimed at rallying Apple’s sales troops and the Mac division against IBM, which was taking the majority of PC market shares back at the time. Check out the full story here, and the video on YouTube.

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Rare Video Of Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt Surfaces→

Rare Video Of Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt Surfaces

Network World (via MacRumors) managed to obtain a copy of an old internal inspirational video for Apple employees titled “1944”, starring Steve Jobs as U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Serving as an in-house alternate version of Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial, “1944” was allegedly aimed at rallying Apple’s sales troops against IBM.

Set as a World War II tale of good vs. IBM, it is a broadcast-quality production (said to have cost $50,000) that was designed to fire up Apple’s international sales force at a 1984 meeting in Hawaii. A copy of “1944” was provided to me by one-time Apple employee Craig Elliott, now CEO of Pertino Networks, a cloud-computing startup located two blocks from Apple in Cupertino.

Make sure to check out the full video, backstory, and transcript of the entire video at Network World.

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Ken Segall Remembers Noah Wyle and Steve Jobs’ “Moment Of Truth”→

Ken Segall Remembers Noah Wyle and Steve Jobs’ “Moment Of Truth”

Ken Segall has posted a fun anecdote about Steve Jobs and actor Noah Wyle from 1999, when the two orchestrated a fake keynote opening address at Macworld.

Steve’s response surprised me. “No, that’s just it. I never said anything. This never happened — it’s all made up.”

So there you have it. It was all a lie. Granted, Steve wasn’t exactly under oath when he offered this testimony, but he did deny it emphatically. Maybe one day we’ll get a rebuttal from an eyewitness to the event.

Make sure to check out his post for the full story. Here’s a video of the “performance” on stage at Macworld 1999.

Ken Segall is also working on “Insanely Apple”, a book about Steve Jobs and the importance of Simplicity in his career, and inside Apple as a company. Segall worked alongside Steve Jobs and the Chiat\Day agency for a number of ad campaigns, including the original iMac’s one. We’ll have a review of Insanely Simple when it becomes available on April 26th. [image via]

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Steve Jobs to be Honored by The Recording Academy with a Trustees Award

The Recording Academy has announced its 2012 Special Merit Awards recipients; Steve Jobs, Dave Bartholomew, and Rudy Van Gelder are expected to be formally awarded a Trustees Award on February 11th, 2012, during a special invitation-only ceremony. The Trustees Award is awarded by the Recording Academy’s National Trustees to those who have made significant contributions (other than performances) to the recording industry.

Steve Jobs transformed the music industry when he unveiled the first iPod in 2001. The iTunes Store was unveiled almost two years later in April, 2003, ushering in a world of digital music that could be immediately downloaded and synced to Apple’s portable MP3 players. In 2010, Apple announced that they had surprased 10 billion songs downloaded from the iTunes Store. Steve Jobs was known for his love of Bob Dylan, and Apple recently succeeded on adding The Beatles to iTunes. Steve Jobs was also nominated by NBC News’ Brian Williams to be 2011’s Person of the Year.

“This year’s honorees offer a variety of brilliance, contributions and lasting impressions on our culture,” said Neil Portnow, President/CEO of The Recording Academy. “It is an honor to recognize such a diverse group of individuals whose talents and achievements have had an indelible impact on our industry.”

The Recording Academy also announced recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award category which includes Allman Brothers Band, Antonio Carlos Jobin, Diana Ross, George Jones, Gil Scott-Heron, Glen Campbell, and the Memphis Horns.

Formally, the 54th annual GRAMMY awards will be televised by CBS at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 12th.

[Grammy.com & Mercury News]

 

 

Small Demons and the Indexing of Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography captures some of the mystique and intrigue of a visionary who was set apart by not only his personality, but his exquisite tastes and passion for excellence. His personal likes — minimal and beautifully designed products — pertained to brands like Mercedes and Braun. His love of Bob Dylan eventually saw the sale of a $199 box set in the iTunes Store. Of course he was a film critic, making business deals during his time at Pixar while providing colorful commentary on the works of Disney.

The book is full of references related to his personal life and Apple’s, from the places he traveled through the development of the iPod and more. All of this documentation — newspaper entries, advertisements, and even the things Steve Jobs interacted with — is being preserved and shared online in a visual browser.

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Steve Jobs Nominated for Time “Person of the Year”

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams nominated Apple’s late co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs to be Time’s “Person of the Year” 2011, CNET reports. Other nominees in this year’s selection include U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, Mohamed Bouazizi (a Tunisian fruit vendor who kicked off the Arab Spring) and the “angry people”. Alongside Williams, “Saturday Night Live” writer Seth Meyers and actor Jesse Eisenberg presented the nominations this year.

One guy, who changed our world, and I said to Seth Meyers as we walked across Sixth Avenue, ‘Just look with me on this one block walk at how he changed the world around us. Look at how he changed the world.’ Not only did he change the world, but he gave us that spirit again that something was possible that you could look at a piece of plastic or glass and move your finger– that’s outlandish. You could make things bigger or smaller like that. ‘Oh the places you’ll go’ and oh the way you will change forever the music and television industries. So may he rest in peace, Steve Jobs, and the spirit he represents, are my nominee for Person of the Year,” said Williams during his nomination speech.

Steve Jobs would be the first person to receive the award posthumously. Time’s Person of the Year will be revealed next month, and previous winners include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (2010), Barack Obama (2008) and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (1999). As Wikipedia describes the award, Person of the Year “features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that for better or for worse, …has done the most to influence the events of the year.”

[Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com]

Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” In Amazon’s Best Books of 2011→

Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” In Amazon’s Best Books of 2011

In a press release published this morning, Amazon has announced the 100 Best Books of 2011, which include Editors’ Picks for the Top 100 Books of the Year and “Top 10 lists in more than two dozen categories”. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is in the Top 10 editors’ picks ranking at #8:

Few in history have transformed their time like Steve Jobs has. In this timely book, Isaacson paints a vivid, compelling portrait that pulls no punches – the end result is satisfying, complete, and gives insight into a man who managed to turn his contradictions into potent strengths.

Last week, “Steve Jobs” was reported to have sold 379,000 copies in the first week of US availability, and 37,000 copies in the UK in first five days of sales. Those numbers didn’t include digital sales for the book, which is available on Apple’s iBookstore as well as Amazon’s Kindle Store. After its release on October 24th, “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson quickly became a bestseller on Amazon, suggesting the bio would be one of the most successful books this holiday season.

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Steve Jobs Biography Sells 379,000 Copies In First Week In The US→

Steve Jobs Biography Sells 379,000 Copies In First Week In The US

The Bookseller reports Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” has sold 379,000 copies in the first week of US availability:

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs sold 379,000 copies in the US in its first week on bookshop shelves, BookScan US data has revealed.

Walter Isaacson’s 656-page biography scored the biggest week of sales for any book in the US since November last year, when Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth (Amulet) and George W Bush’s Decision Points (Crown) both sold more than 430,000 copies at US booksellers in the seven days to 13th November.

The Guardian adds some UK data, reporting that Steve Jobs bio sold 37,000 copies in five days, based on Nielsen BookScan figures, which include physical sales from Amazon but don’t track digital versions of the book, available both on Amazon’s Kindle Store and iBooks.

Walter Isaacson’s critically acclaimed biography, published 19 days after Jobs’s death, sold more than 37,000 copies – more than any other fiction or nonfiction paperback or hardback in its first five days on sale, according to Nielsen Bookscan, the official industry measurement system for retail sales.

It’d be interesting to know the exact figures of digital sales, considering many people opted to download the ebook from Apple’s iBookstore or Amazon’s Kindle Store – where it went on sale soon after midnight on October 24th – rather than wait for a physical copy to ship. “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson is already a best-seller on Amazon and is prominently featured on the iBookstore homepage, gaining interest of Apple fans and people curious to know more about the life and experiences of Apple’s late co-founder, who passed away on October 5th, 2011. [via]

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A celebration of Steve’s life.→

A celebration of Steve’s life.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Watch the special event, filmed live at the Apple campus in Cupertino, California.

On October 19th, Apple celebrated the life of Steve Jobs in Cupertino as retail stores closed, giving employees around the world the opportunity to partake in the event. Now, everyone can share in the celebration as well. Apple has published a recording of the event that you can watch online.

Airing earlier this evening, CBS News have made available their interview with Walter Isaacson, publishing a written transcript and additional online-only content which you can find on 60 Minutes.

At midnight tonight, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs will be available for download in the iBookstore. You can preorder the book for $16.99 to have it downloaded on your iPhone and iPad when available.

 

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