Here’s my new business plan: I will get Google, Samsung, HTC and Motorola to fund my Android blog. I know it seems like a glaring conflict of interest, but is it really? I mean, really? Okay, it really is a conflict of interest. It really, really is. It’s disgusting, actually. But you know what? It sure beats trying to make money by selling ads. These days the cool kids in the Valley hackery have moved beyond mere “journalism” and instead are all about finding ways to “monetize influence.” That seems to be the strategy for Sarah Lacy’s new blog, PandoDaily, a publication funded by the very same VCs whose startups she aims to “cover.” From now on, if you’re a startup company, you won’t need to go hire PR people to go pitch those nasty hacks — because your investors will just get you covered by that sexy blog that they also happen to own. And if some other nasty publication starts writing critical things about you, well, your VCs have a pal in their pocket who can bash away on your behalf. This all makes perfect sense.

Seriously, if anyone reading this knows Andy Rubin, call me up. Half million each is nothing for Google, Samsung, HTC and Motorola, and a very small price to pay to have an influential friend in the press. Look at it like a kind of insurance. Or a protection racket, as I believe it is called in some quarters. Pay up, and you get “most favored nation” status on our blog. Nothing icky about that, am I right? Next up: The Windows Phone blog, funded by Microsoft and its hardware partners. After that? Every vertical you can possibly imagine, funded by the main companies in those verticals. Potential investors, please get in touch. My email address is posted here.

BTW, if you think this is not what every investor in PanderDaily (and CrunchFund, for that matter) was thinking when they wrote their checks, I have some very nice real estate in Florida that I’d like to talk to you about. Or, better yet, a new blog. Huge returns, guaranteed! Because everyone knows blogs are huge money makers. Why else would all the hot VCs in the Valley be investing in one?

Much is being made of the fact that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has called upon the FTC to investigate Google for tying its Google+ social network to its search results.

Some of the more excitable members of the hackery seem to have leapt to the conclusion that if EPIC writes a letter then inevitably an FTC investigation will follow. From the hysterical tone of some articles, you’d think the government has already filed a lawsuit, and that Google had already been found guilty.

But one letter from EPIC does not an antitrust case make. For one thing, EPIC’s director, Marc Rotenberg, has long had an erection for Google — he hates Google even more than MG Siegler, and that’s saying something.

What you also might not know is that Rotenberg has a long history of bitching about tech companies invading privacy, and that one of his most curious crusades was against Caler ID. Rotenberg’s argument was that before Caller ID, you were the one who controlled whether to give out your number, but with Caller ID the phone companies had taken that control away from you.

EPIC’s Web site has a page devoted to Caller ID. Here is an article from the LA Times from 1990 where Rotenberg discusses the scourge that is Caller ID. And here’s one from the New York Times in 1995.

Funny thing is, I learned about this from Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s communications guy, in 2010 when Rotenberg was going after Facebook for pushing its members to share more info about themselves. Schrage was trying to make a point about Rotenberg being the kind of guy who freaks out over new technology.

Now, of course, Rotenberg is going after Google, and (kind of) carrying water for Facebook. My sense is Schrage and his team might have a higher opinion of Rotenberg now than they did last year.

Seriously, this is outrageous. I ordered a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and it just arrived today. Here’s a photo of the box next to the box for the iPhone 4S that I got a couple months ago. Can you tell which one is which? I know I can’t. (I’ll just tell you. It’s the one on the right.)

Things only get worse when you open them up. Look at this shit. Samsung, have you no shame? How do these people keep getting away with this crap?

It’s a theory anyway, laid out in an article I just did about Google’s “Search plus Your World” on The Daily Beast.

Check out the video below or view it on flickr. It’s from CES in Las Vegas. A guy from Samsung is showing off a window display that turns a glass window into a computer display. With the touch of a finger you can flip the “blinds” open and shut, change the color of the blinds, pull up marketing reports, play video and so on. It’s pretty amazing stuff, and may be related to a breakthrough that Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology announced last October which involves “single crystalline Gallium Nitride on amorphous glass substrates.” Samsung has been tinkering with this idea for a while and showed off something sort of similar back in 2008 and showed more transparent display stuff in November 2010.

Now — view the video on flickr, and then look down in the comments. Do you know what Apple nuts are bitching about? The weather widget in the Samsung window display bears a striking resemblance to the weather widget on a Mac. “Shameless!” someone huffs and puffs. The video got picked up on Twitter by Radar Design, and then picked up by John Gruber on Daring Fireball under the headline, “Another Amazing Samsung Design Coincidence.”

I’m starting to wonder if Gruber is just trying to wind people up. Because, um, it’s a weather widget, and they all kind of look like this, and while I’m sure that Apple’s little weather widget is just the most amazingly perfect weather widget out there, and no doubt Jony Ive and his team spent months and months trying to decide on just the right shade of blue for the background of the widget and agonizing over which typeface would be the ideal one for a weather widget — is this what we’ve sunk to? Seriously? What has to happen to someone’s brain that they can look at a video of a magical transparent touch screen window display and all they notice is the weather widget?

This is like someone showing off a fully functioning time machine and having Gruber sniff that, well, that start button looks an awful lot like the power button an an iMac.

Business Insider: “Samsung is Already the Big Winner at CES.”

Business Insider: “Wow, Samsung Beat Apple to a Voice-Controlled TV.”

TechCrunch: “Why Samsung is the new Apple.”

Funny, because supposedly Apple was going to “win” CES without even attending.

That’s a friend, who is on his way to CES, describing the show. Sounds about the same as my experience, which is why I stopped going a few years ago. It’s too crowded, you can’t get anywhere, you spend all your time schlepping around, wandering through halls gazing up at flat-panel TVs or standing in endless cab lines. The executive briefings you get are useless — 15 minutes in the back of a booth with some guy running through a canned script that he’s already run through a hundred times with other filthy hacks who got there ahead of you. Then come the dinners hosted by some big company where you have to sit next to a marketing guy who has been trained in the skill of talking and talking without saying anything. As for the nightlife: I don’t gamble, don’t drink, and have seen enough naked ladies that the novelty has worn off. So, thanks but no thanks.

Someone on Google+ responded to my post, “Enough with the Samsung bashing,” by saying that I have no idea what goes on inside Samsung and therefore I should not assume that they’re not a bunch of thieving cloners.

A few thoughts on this.

You’re right, I have no idea what goes on inside Samsung. Neither do the people who say Samsung does nothing but copy Apple. We can only go by what we see in the market. Yes, there are Samsung products that look a lot like some Apple products. Who knows? Maybe there really has been a concerted effort inside Samsung to copy Apple. Maybe these guys have had direct orders from the top down to just blatantly rip off Apple at every turn.

But if that’s the case how do we account for the fact that Samsung’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S II, the first real hit they’ve had, looks nothing at all like an iPhone? How do you argue that Samsung does nothing but copy Apple when this huge glaring exception is staring you in the face? The GSII is the phone that Samsung pushes in advertisements. It’s the phone that put Samsung on the map in the U.S., and it is the phone that helped make Samsung the top seller of smartphones. And as I pointed out in my post, it looks nothing at all like an iPhone. The Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note have even less in common with the iPhone. The differences are numerous and range from huge to trivial. They charge via microUSB rather than the proprietary Apple connector. They run on 4G LTE networks.

Nobody buys a GSII, or Galaxy Nexus or Galaxy Note, because they saw the device in a store and thought it was an iPhone. For one thing, they have the word “SAMSUNG” stamped in big capital letters on them.

Nobody is getting tricked into buying a GSII. Nobody gets confused and walks out thinking they bought an iPhone and then gets home and is shocked to find out they bought a Samsung GSII.

Nobody buys a GSII or Nexus or Note because they really wanted an iPhone but thought that “this is just like an iPhone, only cheaper.” (For one thing, they’re not cheaper. And last I knew, in the U.S. you could get an iPhone 3GS for zero dollars with a contract. If you really want an iPhone, there’s nothing stopping you.)

Believe it or not, millions of people are buying these new Samsung high-end phones because they believe these phones are better (for them) than the iPhone.

A lot of those people looked at both phones, put them side by side, and decided they wanted the Samsung — not because of the ways in which it is like an iPhone, but because of the ways in which it is not like the iPhone.

Think about it. If you want a phone that’s just like an iPhone, you would get an iPhone.

Also: many millions of people do get the iPhone, and will continue to. It’s a fantastic device. I’ve had every version since the 3G.

But it’s not for everyone. Some people — a lot of people — want something else. Different strokes for different folks.

Maybe the people who buy the GSII or Galaxy Nexus want the bigger screen. Maybe they want 4G LTE. Maybe, believe it or not, they like Android.

I know this may be hard to believe, but every day 700,000 Android devices are activated and I think it’s safe to say that most of those 700,000 people made a conscious decision to buy the device they wanted and understood the trade-offs they were making when they went with Android versus Apple.

And the tradeoffs are significant. For one thing, there’s no iTunes. In fact managing media on the GSII is a very different (and more pain-in-the-ass) experience than on an iPhone. This is not a subtle difference. Media management is a huge part of the iPhone experience and one of the device’s biggest advantages.

When you buy a Samsung you do so knowing that you are giving up iTunes, and if, like me, you have all your music and movies stored in iTunes, you know that buying the Samsung means you’re going to have to work a little harder to get stuff on and off your phone.

Beyond that there is the app experience. There are more apps on iOS, and you might argue that the iOS App Store is better run and easier to use than the Android Marketplace. They’re certainly very different creatures. Even apps that run on both iOS and Android often look and feel very different on the two platforms.

Despite all these differences, millions of people are choosing Samsung and other Android phones over the iPhone. Not because they’re uninformed. Not because they’re being tricked or getting confused.

Keep in mind, this is a huge market opportunity. It’s not a zero sum game. Apple is going to have a great business, no matter how well Samsung and the other guys do. There’s room for everyone. I had lunch recently with a guy who works in the mobile space and I asked him who he thinks is going to win — Apple, Android or Windows Mobile. His answer: “All of them.” That sounds about right.

Lenovo is showing off a 55-inch TV that runs Ice Cream Sandwich. Somehow they managed to time travel into the future, get hold of Apple’s TVs, copy it, and travel back in time to put out their clone. Look at the music icon in the bottom row. Looks exactly like the iTunes logo. They even forgot to completely erase the word APPLE across the top — they left APP. How brazen and stupid can these people be? Apple lawyers are already preparing a complaint.

Samsung Electronics did about $140 billion in revenue in 2011. They’re the biggest tech company in the world by revenue. They make everything from cameras to telecom gear to TVs. They are also the second-biggest semiconductor company in the world and even make the microprocessors for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Samsung has 160,000 employees, and 40,000 of them work in R&D. There are Samsung design centers in seven cities around the world. And, just recently, Samsung leapfrogged Apple to become the biggest seller of smartphones in the world.

So I wonder sometimes if people at Samsung resent the way Apple and its cadre of increasingly nasty fanboy bloggers keep deriding Samsung as some kind of backwater knock-off shop, a cheap Asian cloner that, as Apple put it in a lawsuit, “slavishly copied” Apple to make its products. To hear Apple and its fans tell it, Samsung is the high-tech equivalent of those factories in China that crank out fake Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton bags to be sold on Canal Street in New York.

The latest example is on Daring Fireball, a blog penned by John Gruber, a hardcore Apple fanboy. Responding to news that Samsung just turned in a barnburner fourth quarter, Gruber wrote:

So Jony Ive leads the design team at the two most-profitable phone makers. Impressive.

This is typical snarky Gruber stuff. But it’s so arrogant and patronizing that when I read it was brought up short. Because I realized, this guy isn’t joking. Gruber and people like him really believe that Samsung just sits around making copies of Apple products. In their view, Apple is the fountain from which all creativity flows, and Samsung just follows behind, stealing their ideas.

Thing is, over the summer I had a chance to use a Samsung Galaxy S II. That phone could not have been a copy of the iPhone 4S because it came out nearly a half a year before the 4S. But maybe the GSII was a clone of the iPhone 4? Sure enough, they are remarkably similar devices, except for a few tiny details — like the fact that the GSII has a much bigger screen, a faster processor, more RAM, a better camera, an NFC chip, FM radio, a removable battery, a MicroSD slot and support for MHL. Oh, and it’s thinner and weighs less. The screen technologies are different. The cases are different. The GSII is plastic, with no stainless steel wrapper, no glass back panel, no metal volume buttons and no metal toggle switch for muting.

Otherwise, okay, total knockoff.

Even after the iPhone 4S shipped, most of the differences remained in place. Apple caught up in the camera department. But the GSII is still thinner and lighter, with a bigger screen, faster processor and more RAM. If the GSII is a Jony Ive product, you have to wonder why he’s saving his best work for the employer that doesn’t pay him.

The differences become wider (literally) with two newer devices from Samsung — the Galaxy Nexus, which is even bigger than the GSII, and the ridiculously ginormous 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, which is about to arrive in the U.S. Apple purists no doubt find the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note appalling. But a lot of people love them. De gustibus non disputandum est, as they say. These devices certainly can’t be called knockoffs — Apple doesn’t make anything like them. If anything, with these new phones, Samsung is pushing the envelope on form factor and taking more risk than Apple.

You might be shocked to learn that Samsung actually employs its own designers. Back in the early 1990s Samsung recognized the importance of industrial design and started hiring hundreds of designers and building design centers around the world — Seoul, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Milan and Shanghai. Here’s a BusinessWeek article from 2004 describing Samsung’s efforts. Samsung also reached out to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to set up an in-house university for Samsung designers. Samsung sent young designers around the world (Florence, Milan, Egypt, India, Paris, Frankfurt) to tour museums and study architecture. They sent people to work in fashion houses, cosmetics companies and furniture makers in Europe.

These articles are worth a read, if only to see that Samsung has been building toward this for a long time. In fact for the past few years has been winning a lot of awards for design — sometimes even more than Apple.

Sure, Apple fans make a pretty good case that some Samsung products look a lot like Apple products. But when Apple scored a victory in Germany against the Galaxy Tab, Samsung quickly made a minor change that a judge indicated would be sufficient to get out from under Apple’s complaint. Samsung, meanwhile, alleges that Apple has stepped on its patents. The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung are going to take a long time to play out, and it’s foolish to try to predict the outcome.

Apple has been making essentially the same phone, with the same 3.5-inch screen size, since 2007. It’s a great phone. But Samsung is making dozens of phones and experimenting with different form factors. They must find it rich to have Apple, with its one design, accusing Samsung of lacking fresh ideas. Samsung must also love it when Apple, which can’t manufacture its own chips, or any components for that matter, has the chutzpah to slag off the engineering prowess of the company it relies upon for microprocessors. Samsung’s flagship devices — GSII, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note — bear no resemblance to Apple’s iPhone. No one would ever confuse one for the other. Inside the case they’re even more different. Dismissing Samsung as a bunch of thieving cloners is ridiculous and stupid, and only proves one thing: Steve is gone, but the reality distortion field lives on.