My jaw dropped a few times during Seth McFarlane’s MC of the Oscars. But I fact checked most of his snarks, and while he should have stayed away from many of the digs, they are based on incidents that actually happened.
In the last month, people have brought to my attention tech industry “can you believe he/she said that?”, and true to form, I chuckle, then fact check them.
Here are a few:
Deepak Chopra talking about his new Dream Weaver glasses at an SAP event said ““I got the idea for these during my first LSD experience at the age of 17” (fact check – that would have been 1963. LSD was not banned in CA till 1966 and later around world. He also told Conan it was during medical school.)
On Valentine’s Day, on the regular SAP sponsored column at Forbes, a writer talked about “fornicating fowl” (fact check – the ponds near us are filled with recently hatched ducklings)
On Jim Cramer, Bill McDermott made several interesting statements (see video). (Fact check – many of the statements are “forward looking”. The 49ers will not move to their new stadium till 2014. To my knowledge SAP does not have sentiment analysis tech today to offer to Budweiser. In fact, the salesforce marketing cloud showed its young Clydesdale commercial made it the most mentioned brand during the Super Bowl. EU 2 bn cloud revenues by 2015? Be really nice. Best of breeds are losing? Maybe he is talking about the future of Ariba and Success Factors?)
Moral of the story – I will chuckle at most anything. But when you are not looking I am likely to ask Google and Siri and Snopes to check them out:)
