Business Insider’s Chart of the Day shows us how Apple’s market cap took a turn for the better after the recently resigned Steve Jobs became CEO of the company. Oddly, Apple’s market cap began its ascent shortly after Jobs began his battle with pancreatic cancer. When Apple acquired Jobs back in 1996, their market cap was sitting at $3 billion; currently, Apple’s market cap is sitting pretty at $347 billion, only $2 billion less than the most valuable public company in the world, Exxon, having surpassed Exxon to become the most valuable public company in the world for a short while a couple of weeks ago. One can only wonder if the imminent release of the iPhone 5 will push Apple past Exxon and give them a permanent hold on the most valuable public company position.

(via Business Insider)

It goes without saying that the world of “print” media is being turned upside-down right now. That being said, print media is only one aspect of visual media, which has been important from the days of crude cave drawings up until now, the days of crude MS Paint drawings. Still, visual media always has been, and always will be important, which is presumably why Business Insider created this lovely little infographic detailing the history of visual communication in all its forms. Click below for the full infographic and obligatory references to Gutenberg, the Bible, the Communist Manifesto and everyone’s favorite book by Ayn Rand.

Like previous operations against PayPal and Sony, Anonymous has announced Operation Facebook, an attempt to disable Facebook on Guy Fawkes Day, of all days. Except, have they? This particular situation really lays bare the process by which a decentralized organization operates. The origin of Operation Facebook traces back to a YouTube announcement in typical Anonymous style, uploaded by the user FacebookOp on July 16th. It is his only video. The video also makes mention of a Twitter account devoted to the project.

The catch? Well, the Twitter account only has one tweet, dating back to July 16th, the day the video was uploaded. To boot, Anonymous, a notoriously talkative bunch, haven’t mentioned anything relating to that particular project despite all the things that have happened in the meantime. And the statement referenced was released on “pirate pad” instead of the iconic, and usual Pastebin. While the story is starting to be picked up by CNN, Business Insider and the Village Voice, I’m having trouble finding any references to the project before it was picked up by large media outlets. The video dates to mid-July, but nearly all coverage of the story is in August. So, is this a real threat or is the coverage of it making it real?

Toward the bottom of Twitter’s about page, they claim that as of September 2010, the service has 175 million users. That sounds like a bunch, right? Well, what Twitter doesn’t tell you is that 175 million number actually represents the number of registered accounts, which technically do not have to be active in order to exist. According to Business Insider, they know someone with “full access to Twitter’s API,” who was then able to get an engineer to write code to produce figures for the “real” (active) number of users on Twitter.

Using data that is currently only one month old, the source found that there are 119 million Twitter accounts following at least one account and there are 85 million accounts with at least one follower. With these numbers, Twitter’s 175 million figure, and a bit of math, one can see that there are 56 million accounts that aren’t following any other accounts and 90 million accounts without any followers. Using another “source” over at Facebook who said that a Facebook user doesn’t end up using the service unless they make ten or more friends, Business Insider attempts to put a definition on what constitutes an “active” account, and provides a few numbers: 56 million Twitter accounts follow at least eight other accounts, while only 38 million accounts are following 16, and only 12 million accounts following 64 accounts.

That a company would use the biggest number available that isn’t totally indicative of their active users isn’t surprising, as it’s a common trend among things such as video game sales data, where companies frequently used “units shipped” rather than “units sold,” and even free-to-play MMOs, where the developers use the same tactic Twitter uses, in that they release the total number of accounts, rather than people who actually log in and play.

(via Business Insider)

You may have noticed an interesting trend recently where you can connect to more and more website by using your Facebook name. At first it was just social media sites, but now all kinds of websites are jumping on the bandwagon and soon, if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his way, everything will. Zuckerberg just gave the keynote speech at the Facebook’s F8 developer conference and Business Insider summed it up in an article entitled, “Facebook Announces Plan To Infiltrate The Entire Web”. Reading the post made it distressingly clear that the headline was not at all hyperbolic.

Because drinking or eating caffeine is too slow, and snorting caffeine is still frowned upon by polite society: a Harvard biomedical engineering professor, David A. Edwards, has just launched “Le Whif“, a line of chocolate and coffee products that you can consume just by breathing them in, nationwide.

Chocolate Le Whif sounds innocuous enough, if too good to be true: Switched writes that while it has the taste of chocolate, it’s a zero-calorie treat. The evil, yet more deeply intriguing, of the two Le Whifs, at least to us, has got to be the Coffee Le Whif. Forget the flavor of coffee: Each hit delivers 100 milligrams of caffeine — as much as a cup of espresso: