Above is a map of the acquisitions and investments Google has made since 2001. Some of the companies you may have never heard of before, or since. (Note: Both images in this article can be clicked to enlarge)

One company of note on the list is AOL. In 2005, as AOL was on a steady free fall of subscriber losses for their Internet access services, Google invested $1 billion. AOL has had one investment after another to stay alive, and is currently owned by Time Warner. The AOL investment appears to have been a total loss.

On March 12, 2009 Tim Armstrong, who quit as Google Senior Vice President, was named Chairman and CEO of AOL, LLC. On May 28, 2009, Time Warner decided to cease operations with AOL, and to spin it off as an independent company once Google’s shares cease at the end of the fiscal year.

AOL took Google’s money, and ran with it as it has with so many other investments over the years to stay alive. Google now has nothing to show for their $1 billion investment. At the time, it seems, the AOL investment may have just been an anti-Microsoft move, and not a smart business move. Google has learned from this bad experience, at least we think so.

As for Microsoft, they’ve invested in Apple, before the big iPod boom, and Facebook, just as their growth exploded.

Just last night I saw in Apple iPhone ad that boasted the App store has an App for everything, and 75,000 iPhone Apps to choose from. Technology moves along so fast that it outpaced that commercial. Apple just announce the other day there are 85,000 Apps available now. Today it could be 95,000.

In the spirit of Apps for everything I present this very appropriate parody commercial. The only thing missing was a tutorial on how to disable the GPS tracking chip in the iPhone.

In response to Microsoft’s announcement of their free Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software, Symantec Norton posted a commercial on YouTube dubbed You Get What You Pay For.

Norton’s point is that free software is limited for all sorts of reasons, like it won’t scan email, or web pages for phishing, or email, and you don’t get free support, but almost none of that is true. In fact, none of it is true. The free support might be true in some cases, but most often it is provided by other users of the software, and the support is often better than that obtained directly from Norton. Even Norton’s software is so bloated, and slows PCs down so much, that years ago I switched to McAfee, and have never been happier.

Probably realizing their commercial can’t hold water, Norton took the ad down within days.

Bionic Eye is an App developed for the iPhone 3GS by Dutch startup Layar. The app allows you to visualize nearby points of interest. The POI database is currently at 100,000, but the next version, coming soon, promises more POI, and faster loading.

Bionic Eye does not require any network connection, but it will work on the iPhone and iPod Touch with some functionality limited for older firmware.

The versions available are listed below by country:

Bionic Eye USA
Bionic Eye UK
Bionic Eye France
Bionic Eye Tokyo

Dan Ross took an old singing Big Mouth Billy Bass fish, implanted an MBED chip, and added an SD card with .wav files to allow the fish to speak. That was kind of boring, so he came up with a different idea.

Dan’s new idea was to hook the fish up to an Ethernet cable, pull in Tweets from Twitter, and say the tweets out loud. Currently the fish is offline.