In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

New King of Technology - Apple Overtakes Microsoft - NYTimes.com

The Center for American Progress has an immediate opening for a Microsoft Windows Systems Administrator with strong network management skills. The Systems Administrator will maintain core Microsoft system software and applications on our internal network and in co-location points. The administrator will work primarily with Windows-based systems but should also have a working knowledge of integrating those systems with Macintosh and Linux servers and workstations. This person must have an understanding of advanced network concepts, routing, firewall security policy, and virtual private networking.

I'm hiring a MS Admin in Washington, DC. Pass this along...

Microsoft Windows Systems Administrator Wanted

YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth. Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world’s greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google’s massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.

The problem lies with the bean-counters. According to a report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose roughly $470 million in 2009. No matter Google’s $116 billion market cap: a half-billion dollar loss on a single property, even one as large as YouTube, is a bitter pill to swallow. Even Eric Schmidt, talking to the New York Times about the YouTube acquisition, was quick to say that, going forward, Google would “be more careful with potential large expense streams, which are of uncertain return.”

Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely.

It's no wonder why the twitter guys have no interest in selling out to anyone. Streaming around 140 characters at a time has a very different operating cost overhead than streaming around videos of cats doing stupid things. Given the necessity to share ad revenue with content owners, there isn't much room for a profit even with extremely high-end CPM rates. Youtube economics. FAIL.

YouTube Is Doomed

"There's no question about it," Bush said. "Wall Street got drunk, that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras. It got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments."

With Bush at the country's helm, why wouldn't they?

The Hill's Blog Briefing Room » Bush on Economy: 'Wall Street Got Drunk'

Memestreamer Cyan got $7 million in funding for Zivity!

The site allows both amateur and professional models and photographers to show their stuff. Users vote on those that they like, which channel real dollars to the talent. The more votes, the more money. The basic site is free, but users must pay to vote. About 40% of gross revenue is given directly to the talent. With a recent redesign, the site is focused much more on social networking - users and talent have profile pages and can add each other as friends. They’ve even added a news feed feature that shows who is adding who as friends, and which models users have voted for.

Go Cyan!

Zivity Takes $7 Million In Venture Financing

Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.

The deal announced Wednesday after several weeks of negotiation values Palo Alto-based Facebook at $15 billion

These deals keep having more and more insane valuations. I think Decius and I should start practice claiming that MemeStreams is worth four billion while keeping a straight face..

Microsoft buys Facebook stake for $240M - Yahoo! News

"The idea behind capping our investment at $1 million is tied to making sure we avoided investments from traditional adult media sources," Banister explained. "It's all part of a plan to methodically decide how much money we want to take and on what terms. Investors that would want to alter the amount we pay out to models would be changing the focus of the site, and we want to avoid that."

An interview with Cyan about Zivity is on one of Wired's blogs.

Epicenter - Zivity's CEO, CSO Discuss Funding An Adult Startup

Amazing. This is a short slideshow about Shenzhen, which includes photos of the biggest electronics components market in the world.

Made in China

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.

And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.

Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent

Search engine leader Google is buying privately held DoubleClick, a top digital marketing services firm, for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies said Friday afternoon.

Google (Charts) is buying DoubleClick from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought DoubleClick in 2005 for $1.1 billion in a deal that took the company private.

All your ad are belong to Google.

Google scoops up DoubleClick for $3.1 billion - Apr. 13, 2007