Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google - could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

Earlier this week we broke the news when the official Microsoft PR Twitter account added their third tweet. Unfortunately we missed the chance to break the news that the account was now fully staffed and their first two tweets went out to the world - another reporter got that story.

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned - for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

This morning we noted that DEMO was now offering some amount of money in advertising to the two winners at their startup-infomercial. As I noted in an update on that article, I am no longer sure if the total amount is $1 or $2 million.

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes - anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 - Demo: 1 - Startup: 0“.

Last month I discussed presenting at the DEMO and TC50 conferences later this year. In the comments, Techcrunch50 founder Jason Calacanis noted that one of the big differences between the two startup-infomercial conferences is that his Techcrunch50 offers $50,000 to the winner.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties - another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

As an entrepreneur, it’s always interesting to read about lessons other startups have learned as they move on their journeys. Paperless invoicing startup BillFlo has just hit their one-year anniversary and have put together a list of some of the lessons they have learned.

The lessons include:

• Customers don’t tell you what they want
• Remember your company values
• Startups are a fu**ing roller coaster
• Biases are dangerous

It seems nearly every entrepreneur I speak with has one learning in common — that is startups are roller coasters. If you’ve posted your learnings, leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the post.

I’ve been a happy Yahoo Mail user forever and to the best of my memory, I don’t ever remember the service being down. As of 7pm Eastern this evening, Yahoo Mail has not been functioning. The few times that I’ve received an error, a simple browser refresh fixes the issue - but not this time. The error message remains even when switching over to the very old “classic” version of Yahoo Mail.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm - it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

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Featured Jobs:

• Technical Director at Your Majesty
• Project Manager at Modea
• Technical Services Analyst - New York at Google
• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc
• Creative Director at ABC News
• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc
• Traffic/Production Manager at JWT INSIDE
• Front-end Web Developer at GOOD

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