Monday Signal

Happy Monday, folks. Today is all about poker. Over the weekend, the buzz was hearsay about Steve Jobs’ distaste for Google and its ‘don’t be evil’ mantra, as well as for Adobe and its Flash technology (this is all second hand reporting from Wired and other sources, repeating what Jobs reputedly said at a Friday town hall for Apple employees. The story became instantly reported “news” all over the blogosphere.)

Whether or not the sources got their quotes right, what’s really interesting is the Texas Hold’em playing out across the computing, media, and Internet industries. Apple, Google, Adobe, and others (including Microsoft) are playing their hands as each market card is revealed. New standards are tested (HTML5), old standards are questioned (Flash), new devices are introduced (Droid, iPad), and old alliances are shattered (Google, Apple – it was less than a year ago that Schmidt was on Jobs’ board, recall?).

I love it. Our industry has never been more fascinating.   

Meanwhile, other interesting headlines:

IPad Can’t Play Flash Video, but It May Not Matter (NYT) See above and my prior Signals from last week…

Google news Jeff Jarvis talks with Eric Schmidt at Davos and reports his findings, including that Google is toying with making AdSense splits “transparent.”

Who is the MVP of the Marketing Bowl: Social Media or Super Bowl Ads? (Forrester) A research note that details how social marketing is finding its footing in large platform plays – IE, don’t spend that money on a SuperBowl ad if you’re not going to amplify it through social media, or, honestly, vice versa: the SuperBowl ad should be a platform for the social media program, not the other way around.

Tesla Files For $100 Million IPO (BI) IPOs filings are starting to appear left and right, but this one caught my attention because it’s Elon Musk (of various Web startup fame) and it’s electric cars/motors.

The Birth of the Virtual Assistant Siri’s CEO quotes a guy name Battelle to show how his new product fulfills the future of search. Clearly the guy’s been drinking over the weekend.

Microsoft to Test Ad Exchange Business (AllThingsD)