Mr. Cook (Photo: News.au)

Apple CEO Tim Cook is preparing for his upcoming Congress appearance about corporate tax code by promising a “dramatic simplification” of the ancient laws. [Washington Post]

It’s been a year since Facebook's IPO. So let's celebrate it with a ~one year later~ reflection piece. [WSJ]

Remember when you’re complaining about your long work week, it’s way worse for Foxconn employees. [NYT]

It sounds like the Facebook designers behind News Feed's redesign were having the chillest of times on the project. They brought in lamps to create a "nice living room" and stared at posters on the wall to keep them motivated. [Taxi]

Ugh, we have some disturbing news: A website that bills itself as “Kickstarter for gigs” has launched in London. [BBC]

(Photo: Screencap)

It's helped celebs like Zach Braff and Kristen Bell pull together the cash for their passion projects, but it looks like the Kickstarter gravy train has finally dumped a famous person right on her ass. Childhood sassiness role model and erstwhile teen witch Melissa Joan Hart's project has, sadly, failed abysmally.

Ms. Hart wanted to raise $2 million for Darci's Walk of Shame, about a school teacher who has sex with a waiter while in Thailand for her sister's wedding (really). She appealed to her fans: "By playing Darci, I will get the chance to once again be in a fun and hilarious Rom-Com much like Drive Me Crazy...only all grown up and having a roll in the hay with the hot actors in the film!"

Guess no one bit, though, because the numbers were so bad that Ms. Hart pulled the plug on the project. She scraped up only $51,605 from 315 backers.

In perhaps the most humiliating stroke for the showbiz vet, concerned backers are currently doling out advice in the comments section of the Kickstarter. For example, from before Ms. Hart canceled the fundraiser:

"It might even be a good idea already to shut this down, do some more planning using what you've learned from this experience, and come back stronger in a couple months. I honestly believe it will look better if you stop this with the intention of coming back with a stronger pitch than if you let it run to the end and it doesn't succeed."

Ouch. If we were Kristen Bell, we'd watch out for covert-ops sloths come to enact Ms. Hart's revenge.

(Screencap: Kickstarter)

Whether you really related to it as a tween or couldn't get over the fact that you find Zach Braff annoying as hell, Garden State, the 2004 indie about feeling lost and listless in your 20s, is one of those films from the early aughts that is hard to forget (for better or worse). Its writer and director, Scrubs star and Reddit fav Zach Braff, hasn't made another film since then, primarily, he claims, due to financing issues.

Now, Mr. Braff has taken to Kickstarter to ask for your money so he can make a followup film to Garden State. It's also about a lost and listeless guy, but this one's in his 30s, so it's different. Plus, he has kids, so like, separate life stages and everything. "It's not a sequel in story, but a continuation of the tone," Mr. Braff clarifies on his Kickstarter page.

White guy angst memorialized in a film proposed by a popular Redditor, who was also smart enough to include a cosplay plot element? Throw in a cameo from Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and the money should flow right in.

This painting of Ron Conway was a gift from Steve Jobs' wife. (Photo: Twitter/b_c_g)

Yesterday, Y Combinator (Silicon Valley's ur-accelerator) hosted its biannual Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

As cofounder Paul Graham announced last fall, YC downsized both the number of startups and the size of the investment in this current class. And fears that the accelerator bubble is about to pop were not lost on the 47 startups who presented, nor the 500 or so investors in attendance.

Where the buzziest startups once commanded valuations of up to $20 million, "now the higher end is closer to $10 million, and the financial terms of the investment deals have shifted slightly for the benefit of investors," reports the Wall Street Journal. (Perhaps to loosen checkbooks, they started serving booze earlier in the day this year.)

Indeed, like their more established brethren, the hottest trend among YC's early stage companies seemed to be (wait for it) generating revenue! The Journal says Demo Day offered "further proof that the social-networking craze has died down and more founders are tackling 'boring' problems that generate cash."

Guess bored founders will have to get their kicks from checking their bank balance--and still existing in a few years.

Where the pitch decks of yore could be counted on for bubblicious slides on market size, the ones presented yesterday also highlighted money-making metrics:

"Don Dodge, a startup investor and well-known 'developer advocate' for Google, said today’s startups are more focused than ever on revenue—as evidenced by the large revenue-growth charts most of them showed off during the presentations to investors. In prior years, founders focused more on the number of people using their service, he said."

So what did all this emphasis on practicality amount to? Copying proven business models instead of pie-in-the selfie-sky ones, according to CNET.

Does that mean we're done with, "Instagram for ___" startups?: At Y Combinator Day, echoes of Kickstarter cnet.co/16XEfEx via @cnet

— Paul Sloan (@PaulSloan) March 27, 2013

This batch wasn't entirely lacking innovative ideas, however. There was "everything from a “Kayak for insurance” to a service that promises to help people divorce amicably."

But PandoDaily's representative failed to notice an appreciable difference:

"While Y-Combinator made changes over the past year, there wasn’t a whole lot different about the companies this time around. Less money did not, YC partner Jessica Livingston claims, result in greater fiscal austerity. 'It’s not like they were really irresponsible to begin with,' she says. More squishy was the outward impression each company emitted: some attendees told me there was a greater sense of founder modesty."

As revolutions go, disrupting egoes ain't half bad.

AdAge, MediaBistro, Motley Fool, Business Insider and dozens of others all weighed in on Coke’s study, which “finds online buzz has no measurable impact on short-term sales”--driving thousands of tweets, likes and comments between them. (By “weighing in,” I mean they repeated the same few facts derived from the same presentation originally reported by AdAge in its “Buzzkill: Coca-Cola Finds No Sales Lift from Online Chatter” story.)

The chatter about this story was so immediate, so loud and extreme that Coke rushed to walk back the claims--reassuring the blogosphere about its devotion to social media. Coke’s senior vice president of integrated marketing communications and capabilities, Wendy Clark, was compelled to post on the company’s website promising that "with social playing a crucial role at the heart of [Coke's] activations," the company is committed to continuing to invest in social campaigns.

It's an ironic microcosm of the real impact of online buzz. You can't say for sure why or how it works, but clearly when there is enough noise in the right circles, it drives real people to do real things.

However, the idea that advertising or chatter on social media is going to drive short-term sales of soda is stupid (and that's all Coke's study ascertained). I'm not even sure that social media buzz can lift sales in the long term. Not with a brand so well known.

Perhaps social media isn’t working for Coke because they’re not doing a very good job at it. Perhaps their ads are targeted poorly. Perhaps their 61 million Facebook fans aren’t generating much value because Facebook has surreptitiously walled off up to 85 percent of those fans and charges exorbitant rates for reaching and communicating with them. Maybe nobody wants to tweet (or listen to tweets) about 100-year-old sugar water. Who knows?

None of the potential reasons say much about social media buzz as a whole. (This is why data scientists warn about generalizing from a single example.)

But one thing is well established: social media is incredibly effective at taking something totally unknown and making it known, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

I've seen this with my own clients and with myself. A blog mention by Tim Ferriss and your book sales skyrocket. A mention on 20/20, not so much. Look at the musician Alex Day, whom I advise, he’s never been mentioned in an offline media source in his life. And last week, based solely on the buzz of social media, he charted higher than Justin Timberlake.

One needs only to glance at Kickstarter, where projects go from $0 in sales to commitments from fans in the millions of dollars. How do people find out about these projects? It isn’t from the New York Times, at least not at first. Users hear about it from friends who post about their donations, from blogs, and from email and then they spend real money in real time. So we know social buzz is responsible for at least $119 million last year--and that’s on one site. Another company turned $200,000 in Facebook ads into $10 million in revenue. The list goes on and on.

So many marketers and gurus have naturally begun to extoll the limitless benefits of online media and highlighted the decline and influence of other media. But to focus exclusively on that is short-sighted. What they should really be focused on is how to get more from both.

Because in my experience, online and offline media drive each other. Eighty-nine percent of journalists admit to using blogs as sources. Meanwhile, every old media outlet on the planet accuses blogs and social media of profiting unfairly off their work.

Right now, social media is cheap. Its impact is more difficult to track, which has made it easy for charlatans to exaggerate its benefits. On the other hand, other forms of advertising like television, print and outdoor have premiums built into them--premiums left over from when they were the only game in town.

The perfect example of this is Forbes. It's a 100-year-old media brand … but its business model is exactly the same as Huffington Post. Essentially anyone can publish there (leading to a lot of embarrassing articles and crap). Yet, its advertising rates are comparatively quite high. In fact, they claim that they do not have "remnant inventory” (though anyone who has ever read a Forbes article knows how many bogus pageviews the site generates).

If Coke or anyone is buying there--purchasing new media advertising inventory at old media rates--of course it’s going to be ineffective. Old tactics are growing less efficient, but their prices remain high. New tactics are developing, but their value and proper cost is still ambiguous and can fluctuate.

Because of rapid technological disruption and advancement, knowing what works is even harder. At this intersection of old and new, there is all sorts of confusion. What is this worth? What is that worth?

Coke’s study says social media doesn’t work. Facebook and Datalogix have an equally persuasive study that says it does. In fact, they say that Facebook ads work just like television ads, subtly influencing you whether you know it or not. And 50 years ago Ogilvy was trying to figure out if television ads worked at all compared to print. Nobody knows anything.

And that’s my point: don't expect the debate to be settled--ever. Because it never was in the first place.

Marketing is a mercurial business. It's based on gut and "creativity." If it wasn’t, the Don Drapers of the world wouldn’t get to keep their cool offices and expense accounts.

Marketing has always been hard to track–the idea that advertising and PR and “brand awareness” drive sales is, at its core, based more on common sense than it is on data.

And at the end of it, the only thing we can say, whether we’re talking about classified ads or Facebook messages, billboards or online display ads, is this: certainly spending all these billions doesn’t hurt.

That’s all we really know. The rest is opinion.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

(Photo: Kickstarter)

Angelina "Trash Bags" Pivarnick, the Jersey Shore cast member who left the show in the first season after only three episodes, wants a second chance at the spotlight. On Monday, Ms. Pivarnick launched a Kickstarter page called "The Comeback," which aims to raise $8,000 to help her get her own reality show called--yes--The Comeback.

The money will be used to fund a pilot, which Ms. Pivarnick will shop around until a network is so desperate for content they bite. The show's description makes it seem like it will provide a platform for Ms. Pivarnick to finally redeem herself after viewers and cast members alike reacted negatively to her persona on Jersey Shore:

As you may have seen on MTV's The Jersey Shore, Angelina was cornered by the rest of the cast due to her larger than life and 'tell it like it is' personality, but if you were to meet her in real life you would surely get a different impression. Angelina has a fun and outgoing personality that will shine on her new series as you see her go through the trials and tribulations of trying to be the best Angelina that she can be!

Ms. Pivarnick left the show after fellow cast members mocked her, then spent months shopping stories to outlets like Life and Style about how Jersey Shore ruined her life. Now she wants another go at stardom, and needs your money to help her do it. Your reward for contributing? Another Jersey Shore spinoff show. The choice is yours.

Last year, Kickstarter sent 19 films to Park City, four of which picked up awards. This year, 17 Kickstarter-backed films made it to Sundance and took home 5 awards. More importantly, you might actually get a chance to see some, since four films already inked deals. 

Blood Brother won the U. S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary & U.S. Documentary Audience Award, both Inequality For All and American Promise picked up the U. S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking, This is Martin Bonner won Audience Award: Best of NEXT, and The Square won Audience Award: World Cinema: Documentary.

In terms of distribution deals, Newlyweeds sold to Phase 4, Inequality For All sold to Radius, I Used to Be Darker sold to Monteray Media, and 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film sold to Participant Media.

Those weren't the only notches in the Kickstarter team's hipster belts this week. David Gallagher, deputy tech editor at The New York Times, announced on Twitter that he will soon be joining as director of communications. "We're thrilled that David's decided to join the team," said Justin Kazmark, who has been handling PR for the company for awhile. Any other journos interested in defecting, the company is hiring. Here's a handy reference guide for Silicon Alley negotiations.

Katie Couric in Warby Parker. (Photo: Facebook.com)

Rose-Colored Glasses Warby Parker just released its annual report for 2012, and it's a pretty fun slideshow to click through. The glasses empire now has 113 full-time employes and 42 part-time employees. Of those bespectacled folks, 108 have company-sponsored gym memberships. In other Warby Parker health news, 2,507 pounds of salad were eaten in the office this year. Although there are not too many exact sales figures in the package (besides the fact that 296 monocles were sold this year) a diagram on the last page shows that sales from the first quarter of the year to the last one have nearly tripled. Warby Parker says it gave out 250,000 pairs of glasses this year, some of which went to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

G Train Still Lost Forever If you take the Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains, you already know what time your train is coming based on the large signs that tell you. In December, the MTA released an iOS app to tell you the subway times. But now the MTA is providing a web app, as well as a native iPhone app, so that you can know what time your train is coming before you get to the station. The web app is located at onthego.mta.info and has real-time updating data for all of your arrival times. Most importantly, the MTA has decided to release the data behind the app to developers. Let's hope someone whips up something cooler than this thing.

Fund This Office Kickstarter will soon be moving to into its new Greenpoint offices in the former home of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. Renovations to the space began in the summer, and renderings of the new office were released yesterday and then swiftly taken down. The gorgeous plans show that the former factory will contain a lot of rooms, including a theater, an art gallery, a lounge, a library, a green roof and a cafeteria. Oh yeah, and offices too--have to do work at some point.

Thinkers Posthumously Fill in the Rap Deets Rap Genius is speeding right along on its quest to become the Talmud of the Internet. John Wesley, back from the grave, now has an account to comment on the teachings of the bible. And none other than Samuel Johnson is reading between the lines on some of Shakespeare's juiciest bits. Now if we could only get Heidegger to fill us in on some 2 Chainz lyrics, we'd be all set.

Whistle While You Cowork An article published yesterday on FastCompany has some interesting stats on coworking. The piece says that "50% of all coworkers access their work space around the clock" and that "71% report a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space." Secret Clubhouse, the coworking space originally established by The Barbarian Group cofounder Rick Webb, gets highlighted in the article as well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the space served as a functional workplace for employees from all over the city.

LinkedIn for the Klout Enthusiast A new jobs site launched today that takes your personal connections into account when matching you up with jobs. CareerSonar is a site that matches the employment history of your friends with every job available online and shows you which jobs you could be connected to. In the "it's who you know" world, this might make the most sense for looking for a job online.

Girl Put Your Records On(line) Accessing your medical records online is an impossibility right now, but the NYC-based New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and Health 2.0 are trying to fix that. Yesterday, the two organizations launched the Patient Portal for New Yorkers Design Challenge. They are looking for designers and developers to create a prototype for a website for patients to access their medical records online. This seems like something important!

Jerseylicious Accelerator Wants You TechLaunch, New Jersey’s premier Technology Accelerator, is now accepting applications for its 2013 class. The program is slated to begin in May and will culminate in mid-September with a Demo Day at Montclair State University. The teams that make it past the selection process will join the class and will each receive up to $25,000 of seed capital.

Be an Average Boyfriend The Netflix for fancy flowers, H.Bloom, has recently announced the launch of a special Valentine's Day service its calling "H.Bloom Hero." It allows men to become "heroes" by scheduling flowers to be delivered to their loved ones on Valentine's Day. Not sure if that makes a guy a hero or just a subpar boyfriend, but we're all just taking what we can get at this point, right?

Better Gets Better Betterment, the personal investing startup that helps users manage stocks-and-bonds portfolios from an online dashboard, hit a milestone last week, topping $100 million in assets under management. That was cause to celebrate and also for a minor redesign. "We have a dashboard screen on the wall that shows our assets under management and how they grow each day,” said CEO Jon Stein in an email. “We've finally had to adjust the font because the number wouldn't fit anymore."

Hipster Becomes the Man AOL is switching things up a bit and poaching one of its mobile employees for its venture fun. Doug Ludlow, the former CEO of the AOL-acquired photosharing startup Hipster, is leaving AOL's mobile side to become the first innovation partner at AOL Ventures. The title is extremely unclear, but it's understood that Ludlow will be spending a bit more time back in New York and getting out of AOL Ventures' Palo Alto headquarters.

Because Tweetdeck Popups Suck Rapportive, the add-on that replaces Gmail's ads with information about your contacts, has just launched an early version of Twitter integration to its service. The update lets you follow, reply and retweet your contacts from within Gmail.  You can request early access to the feature here.

Kickstarter's cofounders

Kickstarted The crowdfunding king released its annual highlights for 2012 this week. And the startups is going about as gangbusters as well, an oversubscribed, blockbuster Kickstarter campaign. In 2012, 2,241,475 people pledged almost $320 million and successfully funded a little over 18,000 projects. That works out to about $606 per minute. Monetization is so much easier when it's baked into your platform, isn't it?

Indie No More Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo also released data for 2012. Campaigns raised 20 percent more in last year than they did in 2011 and successful campaigns took an average of 11 days preparing for their launch.

On the tech side, 64 percent of core campaigns incorporated video in their campaigns. The lesson, though, is keep those videos short: campaigns with videos under five minutes were 25 percent more likely to reach their fundraising goal. The average length was three minutes and 27 seconds. "This Is Forty" could learn a few lessons from these fundseekers.

Closing the Gap Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott launched a new software development competition for programs to help middle school students excel in math. The Gap App Challenge invites developers to submit applications, games or other programs that focus on middle school math and can be used by students, teachers or parents. Submissions will be accepted through April 10, 2013, and will be reviewed by two panels: one comprised of public school principals and teachers, and the second comprised of Department of Education officials and experts in technology, media and design. The criteria include idea originality, potential impact and feasibility. No Angry Birds need apply.

More Girls Are Coding Girls Who Code, the do-gooding non-profit that encourages and trains teenage girls to pursue careers in technology and engineering, announced they’re growing their team. Founder Reshma Saujani sent around an update about new corporate, academic and foundation partners and expanding programming to reach hundreds of girls through the first ever Girls Who Code clubs. Good luck not humming Beyonce for the rest of the day.

Digital Libraries, Dour News A new report released today by the Center for an Urban Future shows that New York City’s public libraries are serving a record number of people even as more New Yorkers are turning to e-books and other digital resources. But while the report finds that libraries have become an increasingly critical, it also notes that the libraries are open fewer hours than most other large urban library systems--too many branches across the five boroughs are in bad shape and the libraries face growing threats in today’s digital age. A mixed bag of news for bookworms everywhere.

Haute Hackture Apparently, you can now hack your way to Fashion Week. The Hearts Corporation has partnered with AngelHack Events to bring you the inaugural Hearst Fashion Hackathon. Prizes include access to exclusive VIP Fashion Week shows and events, use of your hack in NYFW events, thousands in cash prizes, and mentorship from Hearst Corporation to help take your app to the next level. Le geek c'est chic, we guess.

Escape to South Beach Time Warner Cable is currently running a sweepstakes where five people will win a trip for two to Miami in late February to enjoy the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Presented by FOOD & WINE, the festival is surely a nice way to escape the winter doldrums, if you are so lucky.  All a person needs to do is enter is fill out the free form found on Time Warner Cable’s facebook page by the January 21 deadline date. It's a nice try, but we'd still rather you try to come up with a more reasonable service window than: sit around your house all day.

This nerd would go to CES and ENJOY it. Nerd. (Photo: IMDB)

CES is so uncool that it has magically transformed into cool. Cool? [TechCrunch]

Over 2 million people pledged close to $320 million for Kickstarter projects in 2012. [Kickstarter]

Apple is reportedly working on a less expensive iPhone to help reassert its dominance in the smartphone market. [Wall Street Journal]

The average salaries of Silicon Valley will launch you into a fit of despair. You're welcome. [How to Write a Business Plan]

There's a mystery complex in Western China and even the CIA analyst who spotted it on Google Earth can't figure out what it is. [Wired]