InterBrand does this study every year.

Apple Inc.’s brand value jumped 28 percent to $98.3 billion, Google Inc. (GOOG) is now in second place at $93.3 billion, and Coca-Cola Co. has slipped from the top seat after 13 years to third place at $79.2 billion.

The annual study, closely watched by the industry, determines a brand’s value by examining its financial performance, role in influencing consumer buying and ability to secure earnings. The Top 10 is rounded out in descending order by IBM, Microsoft, GE, McDonald’s, Samsung, Intel and Toyota.

Pretty interesting.

Speaking of China, this looks like fun to me. Definitely adding to my bucket list.

A single change made by China’s State Council will bring huge opportunities to the video game industry.

For the past 13 years, the sale of video game consoles was banned in China. China’s State Council has now decided that video game consoles can be sold across the entire country so long as the foreign companies establish sales and production operations in Shanghai’s new free trade zone.

The only caveat here is that PS4 and Xbox One may not see the benefits of the new market for a few years. The new policies will roll out over the course of the following three years. It’s still a savvy move on China’s part. Console manufacturers and game developers would love to leverage China’s population of 1.4 billion people as new customers, and China would love to get its new trade zone brimming with successful, modern businesses.

At the same time, Apple shifted their China iPhone release policy.

The iPhone 5 sold around five million units through the opening weekend, while the 5S and 5C sold around nine million units combined during its opening weekend, with the 5S significantly outselling the 5C. Did the addition of a new, somewhat gaudy gold color and an easily-bypassed fingerprint scanner really make four million sales worth of a difference? Perhaps, but the 5S (and 5C) was the first time Apple began selling iPhones in China on release day, rather than after a long delay.

Editorial aside, the point is worth noting that China is opening up their markets and Apple was quick to take advantage of that fact. This is a huge change to the tech sector and, I think, just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a famous story about Elvis Costello appearing on Saturday Night Live, back in 1977, when the show was still pretty brand new. Because SNL is live, timing is critical. Costello was supposed to sing Less Than Zero and the show’s timing was based on that fact. But in the middle of the song, he suddenly stopped and switched into the song he originally wanted to play, Radio Radio. Pissed Lorne Michaels off and he was banned from the show. This is an old, well known story. If you are interested, follow the link above and you can watch the video.

Here’s the part of the story I did not know. In 1999, Lorne and Elvis had made up and Elvis was invited back on the show as a surprise guest. Here’s how that went.

One of the founders of Apple and the man who brought video gaming to the masses, together onstage for the first time (at least as far back as they can remember).

They covered a lot during an hourlong conversation before a packed room at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on Friday afternoon, from Steve Jobs and data encryption to the early days of Silicon Valley and the future of robots and computing as machines get smarter and smarter. But the sense you got from both of these valley pioneers is that, for the most part, they had a lot of fun building the future and the idea of having fun still figures into their decisions.

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs and Woz’s roles in building Breakout for Atari. But this is the first time Woz and Bushnell have told that story together.

Both Bushnell and Woz said they never really saw the negative, blustery Jobs that people talk about, though they heard about it. Woz did tell an amusing story about developing the game “Breakout” for Atari on Jobs’ suggestion. He jumped at the chance to create a single-player version of Atari’s popular “Pong” for Bushnell. “Then he said you have to do it in four days,” Woz recalled.

Bushnell laughed at the comment. “I didn’t tell Jobs four days,” he said.

Woz said he was pretty sure that Jobs was trying to buy into a farm in Oregon and needed the money to do so in four days, so he set Wozniak on that insane schedule (a deadline Woz hit, by the way).

Cool stuff.

Semil:

I was lucky enough to watch enough baseball to know there was one player who was simply better than everyone else. He wasn’t perfect, but he was about as close as they come to perfection.

For Yankee fans, baseball fans and fans of class. And if you haven’t seen the video of Rivera’s last appearance at Yankee Stadium, watch it here. But have a tissue handy.

The Globe and Mail:

This investigative report reveals that shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

Mr. Lazaridis opposed the launch plan for the BlackBerry 10 phones and argued strongly in favour of emphasizing keyboard devices. But Mr. Heins and his executives did not take the advice and launched the touchscreen Z10, with disastrous results.

Fascinating article about the demise of a once great brand.

John Gruber talks about future plans for Vesper with incredibly refreshing honesty. Devs and product marketing managers, this is worth a read (and worth emulating). So great.

C’mon, how wicked is this?

This living history of the web is a lot of fun. When you get to the site, click and drag in the timeline or click on the left or right side of each page to move forward or backward in time. OK, you won’t actually move through time, but you get the idea. As you move closer to current day and things start to get a bit crowded, you can click in the lower left corner to expand the timeline.

Lovely.

National Geographic:

Today photography has become a global cacophony of freeze-frames. Millions of pictures are uploaded every minute. Correspondingly, everyone is a subject, and knows it—any day now we will be adding the unguarded moment to the endangered species list. It’s on this hyper-egalitarian, quasi-Orwellian, all-too-camera-ready “terra infirma” that National Geographic’s photographers continue to stand out.

To my mind, no contemporary magazine has brought us more powerful images so consistently for so long. This 125th anniversary issue is one that should be bought in hard cover and kept as a family heirloom.

Thought this was fascinating. Since July 1, 2010, Professor Staffan Normark has been the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and one hell of a cold-caller. He’s the one who calls folks to tell them they’ve won a Nobel Prize.

Sometimes the subjects of his research have an inkling that it could be their time; but when their phone rings, they try not to let themselves believe it. Serge Haroche (physics, 2012) was out walking with his wife when he saw a Swedish code appear on his mobile. “I realised it was real and it’s, you know, really overwhelming,” he says. “I was lucky—I was in the street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately.”

Pretty cool job.

Delta will distribute Microsoft Surface 2 tablets to its pilots and not Nokia’s “Sirius” tablet as originally planned. The move comes in the wake of a deal to distribute Nokia Lumia 820 smart phones to nearly 19,000 flight attendants.

Note to self: Never fly Delta.

This is very smart.

In a bid to make the ballpark experience more engaging for fans, Major League Baseball plans to roll out Apple’s new iBeacons technology to deliver targeted information and offers based on a fan’s location within the park, according to a new report.

Plan on seeing this in place in time for the beginning of next season. Brilliant!

This is an interesting take on the iPhone sales data.

If this single product were its own company in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, IPhone Inc. would outsell 474 of those companies—ranking between Wells Fargo (WFC) ($90.5 billion) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC) ($84.9 billion). The iPhone’s $88.4 billion in annualized revenue tops 21 of the 30 component companies in the Dow Jones industrial average—it would be the ninth-biggest stock in the Dow 30.

I’ve been an Apple fan since the Apple II days, have watched the company go through the wringer, teeter on the edge, bear a lot of trash talk. To watch this success unfold is incredibly gratifying to me. And, I’m sure, to the rest of the community.

I think this long time underdog status is part of the reason Apple fans are so enthusiastic about new product rollouts. Samsung can easily see the quality of the product, but I think they can’t see the beating heart underneath it all.

Slow release ultra capacitor technology, assuming it successfully makes its way to market, should be a real boon for small devices. Filling an ultra capacitor with power is like filling a glass of water. Happens in seconds, not hours.

But using capacitors to provide a steady flow of energy is something new. Still, like other capacitors, the new ones can be recharged quickly. The remote control can recharge in five minutes and run for many hours, maybe even days, depending on how often it is used to change channels, Mr. Sund said. And unlike the lithium-ion batteries used in phones, laptops and, now cars, capacitors do not lose storage space with age.

Doesn’t seem to be any barriers for remote controls and cameras. Key is, can they make this technology small enough to squeeze into an iPhone, yet still have it carry enough power to be useful.

Grantland:

Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it.

If you remember the game, you remember that feeling of landing on Myst Island for the first time, staggeringly bereft of information in a way that felt like some kind of reverse epiphany, left with no option but to start exploring.

People who had never gamed before in their lives bought new computers so they could play Myst.

I remember playing Myst and being dumbfounded, confused, exhilarated, frustrated and fascinated all at the same time.

BBC News:

In the early hours of the 26th of September in 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

But duty officer Stanislav Petrov – whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches – decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.

His decision may have saved the world.

Chilling story and terrifying to think what might have happened.

Steve Ballmer took the stage last night for his final annual employees meeting.

He departed to the strains of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the song played at Microsoft’s first employee meeting in 1983, followed by “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the finale of “Dirty Dancing,” getting a standing ovation from the 13,000 or so Microsoft full-time employees in attendance.

“We have unbelievable potential in front of us, we have an unbelievable destiny,” said a visibly moved Ballmer, reusing a quote from the 1983 meeting. “Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future,” he continued. “We’re going to think big, we’re going to bet big.”

That’s just so Ballmer. I find his popularity mystifying. Watching the end of an era.

In this issue, Philip Michaels takes a humorous look at bad songs from otherwise great artists; Michael T. Rose looks at raising children in the modern day of TV; Marcus Mendes wonders why people aren’t as fanatic about what guitars people play as they are about what gadget you use; Chris Domico surveys friends and family to see what they do for backups; and Matt Dusenbury gives us a guide to coffee shop co-working.

Voting for the Sound on Sound Awards is open.

Oh, sweet justice!

People buying Galaxy Note 3s are finding out that they’re “region locked.” If you buy one in Europe, it won’t work outside of Europe. If you buy one in North America, it won’t work outside of North America. Even if the phone is unlocked and you use a SIM from a local carrier, the Galaxy Note 3 won’t work.

Nice job, assholes.

Have a new 3rd generation Apple TV and an iOS device that supports Bluetooth Low Energy? Then you have everything you need to do “tap to setup”. Follow the instruction in this Apple support document.

In a nutshell, you touch your iOS device to your Apple TV and a login screen will appear on your device. Login to your Apple ID, follow the instructions, and your Wi-Fi network and password, iTunes Store account, and Language and region format preferences will be transferred to your Apple TV.

This is cool. I bet the next Samsung phone will do this, too!

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (that is the name of the band) won this year’s Polaris Prize, given to the best full-length Canadian album for the album Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!. The album is brilliant, one of my absolute favorites, and you can listen to it in the embed below.

But what makes the linked article so worth reading is the band’s response to the folks who gave them the prize. Take a look.