Flushing $9.5 Billion.

"I bet it would take longer to literally flush $9.5 billion in cash down a toilet than it took for Google to do so figuratively on the Motorola acquisition." - DaringFireball

My toilet is ready to flush again after 30 seconds.  That gives 2,880 flushes a day.

I'd say 20 bills at a time is the max before my toilet would start to get clogged (and that's being generous...and I'm not going to test this number.)

Going with the smallest bill, flushing single dollars, that's only $57,600 a day.  You're flushing for 166,666 days or 456 years.

Google is rich, so say they're flushing $100 bills.  That's $5,760,000 a day.  Flushing for 1,666 days or 4.5 years.


The days between buying and selling really was 617.  Huh, according to Wikipedia, the US no longer makes bills bigger than $100.  So, no, with a standard toilet, and readily available US currency, you could not flush it fast enough.

Apple's Big Number problem.

To please Wall Street and Analysts, Apple has to keep the numbers growing.  Which they did, but not enough.

From here (embedded below), about 57% of Apple's revenue is from the iPhone.
~57% of their $57.6 Billion in revenues last quarter is $32.8 Billion.
~20% is iPad, for $11.5 Billion.
~12% is Mac, for $6.9 Billion.

In the most recent quarter, Microsoft had revenue of $24.5 Billion. And a recent quarter had Google at $14.9 Billion.

So to really grow more, Apple really has to invent a product or product category the size of a Microsoft or a Google.

Easier said than done...but they might :)  Or they can just keep printing money...

Apple revenue PERCENTAGE by product line, since 2005. pic.twitter.com/V1WYoBFE23
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) January 27, 2014

You2GIF

A cool app that will never see the light of day.

It let you use your iPhone or iPad to make a GIF from a YouTube video.  (With a hard limit of 7 seconds at most.)  

Browse to the video you want, then hold the button to record as it plays.  The options for setting the speed/looping work exactly like our camera app Giffish, so you can see all but the YouTube recording part in that app.

A nice cool icon too.

And of course we made a couple GIFs to show off how it worked...browse to your video & tap the Record button.

Then hold the red button to record.

We thought it would fall into the same Fair Use area that YouTube itself fits.  But Apple said that YouTube would say "No" so it was rejected.  Sorry Internets!

Interested?  Maybe I'll sell the source code or something so you could put it on your own devices... 

michael@burford.net