Apple's new SpaceShip headquarters in Cupertino

The most realistic and detailed images yet of Apple’s new spaceship headquarters have just been published on Wired.

At this point, there’s a good chance you’ve seen pictures of Apple’s proposed new headquarters — a 2.8-million-square-foot spaceship parked in a verdant man-made forest in the northeast corner of Cupertino. Since the first dozen or so renderings trickled out in 2011, however, we haven’t gotten a much better sense of what all the new campus will entail or what it will be like to work there. Until now. Apple may be known for its secrecy, but buried in Cupertino’s municipal archive is a wealth of detail on the project — including more than 20 previously unseen renderings of the new campus.

The latest images of the 2.8 million square-foot campus show an expansive cafeteria, an underground parking garage, and a subterranean auditorium where forthcoming Apple products will be unveiled to the media. The office will sit on a 176-acre plot of land, most of which will be dedicated to indigenous flora and fauna to act as a barrier between the floor-to-ceiling glass walls and the outside world. It's planned to have a separate facilities outside of the main campus for Research & Development. 

The Mothership

Apple Campus 2, which was approved by city officials last month, will sit on a 176-acre plot in the South Bay city of 60,000 — a site that was once home to HP and Compaq. If you’re an Apple employee who drives to work, you’ll enter the campus at a freshly constructed security point at North Wolfe Road, on the west edge of the site. The lucky ones will quickly be diverted into a discrete, futuristic tunnel, where a subterranean service road will give them access to a two-level, 2,000-space parking garage underneath the mothership itself. Otherwise, you’ll have to wind your way to the south edge of the campus to the above-ground parking garage — a pair of emory board-shaped structures, clad with solar panels and foliage. If you take advantage of Apple’s shuttle buses from elsewhere in the Bay Area, you’ll be dropped off at the “Corporate Transit Center” on the eastern edge of the site. From there a walkway, flanked by two Apple Store-white staircases, will lead into the mothership itself.

You can have a look inside the new Apple campus, and make sure to check out Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s presentation after the approval of the campus, and/or Steve Jobs’ initial presentation to the city of Cupertino.

Twitter milestone - 2 billion tweets in one month

I understand Twitter. Twitter is not chat or IM. Twitter is not a replacement for email. And Twitter is not the end of SMS.

For the month of May 2010, Twitter officially had 2 billion tweets per month. According to Pingdom ...

Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

Ezra Gottheil said “... that’s promising for Twitter”, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “Fads tend to accelerate upward and come crashing down. It looks like people are finding real uses for Twitter… I don’t have the data, but I think there’s been a shift in usage.”

The percentage of Twitter accounts currently tweeting with any regularity is approximately 17%. That’s a really low number. But Gottheil perhaps describes this as: “You can have a lot of people trying Twitter and lose most of them but still increase both the number of users and the level of use.” 

Pingdoms describes the 2 billion tweets as ... “Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost 6 billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace. Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.”

Twitter is still innovating - a partner ad platform and usability enhancements - my prediction (June 2010) is that Twitter will be acquired and morphed into a new Social Media platform in the next 2 years. But now it continues to grow at a fast pace.

Twitter is has gained critical mass and is going to disappear anytime soon. According to Twitterholic, Britney Spears, Ashton Kucher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga and Barack Obama make up the top 5 most followed people in the world using twitter. These 5 people have more than 20 million people following them. Maybe Twitter will morph into something else in a few years. But this is the internet – that’s practically a given. In the meantime, I am happy to tweet every whimsical thought I have.