CrankyRants.com

Inc.com has posted their latest list of Top 30 Coolest Young Entrepreneurs in America. Their criteria? Gotta be rich and cool and under 30.

Bummer.

It’s bad enough trying to start your day in the tech industry as it is. But to settle into your morning newspaper site with a warm cup of Diet Mt. Dew, only to find out that you have failed on possibly 2 of the 3 items required to check off your “Coolest Young Entrepreneurs in America” checklist before the sun has even risen? Depressing .

Hell, the mere proximity to any form of diet product and usage at anytime, day or night, of an exclamation referring to the process or state of being “bummed” are reasons enough to make it a clean-failure-sweep on that particular list.

Makes the morning task list just that much more unbearable. Still have my fingers crossed for their next installment, “Top 30-Something Losers With Projects That May Someday Earn Back Their Domain Reg Fee” list.

Microsoft Corp. is set to officially release the “Surface”, a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. Kind of like Minority Report, but with a reduced chance of the photos merging to reveal personal visions of yourself murdering anyone.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn’t currently marketing the device to the family crowd, but will instead focus on the corporate workplace where the demand for push and slide photo-technology is, most likely, staggeringly high.

Dust off your video scripts… CBS has a few hundred million bucks burning a whole in their pinstriped pockets… and they’re on the prowl.

CBS Corp has announced that they are interested in spotting the next big phenomenon in user-generated programming over the Internet, not buying market leader YouTube, Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said on Thursday.

“It is obviously phenomenally successful,” Moonves said of YouTube. “I doubt we would buy it at this point. Maybe we would look for the next YouTube, the next great idea that’s not spread across the world.”

So think you’ve got the next big MyTubeSpaceBook and thinking about retirement? Give them a call. Just remember to remove those downloadable episodes of Survivor before taking them on the tour of your site. Never know what might set those corporate types off.

When working IT or development for a company, it’s common knowledge that all bad ideas, outlandish promises, and general bull slush come from the marketing department. Combine that with the Heathen Church of Telemarketing, and the entire lot can be cast into the same fiery statement. Marketing is evil. And now it’s been documented.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group that has conducted research on pop-up ad programs and the technology supporting them, said Wednesday that 55 percent of the ads, particularly those coming from smaller companies, used no intermediaries at all. No one else to blame but themselves. In the past, a majority of marketing companies have hidden behind the claim… “We didn’t know they were using pop-ups? We thought they were just giving away information about our products while handing out warm fluffy blankets to orphans!”

Not anymore. Researchers studied the patterns by loading two computers with adware and installing a packet logger to track the Web addresses accessed. Guess where they pointed. No surprise I guess, since most infected laptops come from the sales and marketing staff anyway. They wade through pop-up-sewage daily. So the next time your own computer becomes infested with adware or pop-ups… slap someone from sales. They probably had something to do with it one way or another.

Media companies Gannett Co., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co. on Tuesday announced an agreement relating to their stakes in several high-profile websites, none of which belong to me.

Like most small businessmen, I would certainly entertain the prospect of selling a small stake in my vast web empire if the right buyers came along. Clearly the business world has more regard for profitable, high-traffic sites than they do my small, half-finished projects that earn a few dollars a month. Unjust and unfair are two words that come to mind. What has happened to the corporate sense of adventure?

As part of the deal to boost their stake in the sites, McLean and Tribune will each pay roughly $142 million to help expand their ownership in the sites. I can only surmise that the sole reason these firms have so far been unwilling to throw that kind of green at my sites… is that they simply have not truly spent enough time with them. Or any time. Or really even know about them.

Because of this I have drawn the conclusion that more CEO’s need to spend time on any of the various entrepreneur forums that exist to help promote small business. If Gannett’s CEO Craig Dubow would simply sign up for an account, (username DuBowDuBowDoo I’m guessing) and browse around a bit… he might find plenty of upstart companies that could just as easily become successful for a fraction of the millions that they have spent on one or two sites. Plus… you know… he could get some cheap advertising because TheBusinessForum.net I believe uses member-sponsored ads. It’s win-win!

Until then, small-site owners are doomed to live a 142-Million-Dollar-Free life. No one paying for private flights to exotic resort meetings or offering stock trades in an attempt to outbid competitors for the ownership rights to… a celebrity fan forum… or a ringtone download site. The consumers are the real losers in this story. The short-sided, “all eggs in two or three baskets” mentality of the corporate world will prevent honest consumers like you and me from having more than 600 choices in free online flash arcade options. When there could be thousands!

And that is very… very sad.