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Tired of April Fools Gags? Wait, There’s More.

April 2, 2009
by Don Clark
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Don Clark

Jokes dreamed up by tech companies for April Fool’s Day may not be spectacularly funny. But one can’t help but notice the level of effort put in, which sometimes seems to rival the intensity of their product-development efforts.

Qualcomm (QCOM), for example, has a very slick video on YouTube that initially seems to be a typical piece of corporate B-roll hyping the latest development out of their labs. Then it turns out they are discussing putting cellular base stations on pigeons to form a flying wireless network, which prompts the need to develop a beast called the wolf-pigeon to defend the network, which inspires the creation of a shark-falcon to control the wolf-pigeons, and so on.

Amazon.com (AMZN), reacting to the gaseous conversations about a trend known as cloud computing, contends in a Web posting that it has a new high-level offering in the field–on a blimp. It’s called “the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE for short. Using the latest in airship technology, we’ve created a cloud that can come to you,” the company writes.

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