While watching this ad for Galaxy Nexus…

“Calling all pretty faces, all visionaries, all the pass-it-alongers, all meeters and greeters, all wandering navigators, and mad scientists. All high-defers, all late-night poets and daylight dreamers. The possibilities are calling.“

… I realized that there’s a famous ad which uses a similar enumeration. It’s Apple’s “Crazy Ones” commercial from 1997. Here’s the unaired version narrated by Steve Jobs (you can also watch the version that aired on TV):

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.“

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Inkling, the San Francisco startup that develops interactive iPad versions of college textbooks, made its first big step in courting the mainstream consumer a few weeks ago when it debuted its version of The Professional Chef, the official textbook of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef school.

Turns out, it’s working out pretty well.

This week, Inkling’s Pro Chef title became the third highest-grossing iPad app on Apple’s App Store, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis said at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference in San Francisco Thursday. That’s compared to all iPad apps worldwide. It also became the top-grossing iPad app in the App Store’s “lifestyle” category.

As we wrote in the piece about the Pro Chef launch last month, the cookbook represented a bit of an inflection point for Inkling, which had up until then produced more strictly academic titles. Inkling thought that Pro Chef would have a wider appeal, MacInnis told me in a brief interview, but its current performance has certainly surpassed its expectations. This means that there will likely be more crowd-pleasing titles with crossover appeal in the future — and that’s good news for students, as well as the rest of us.

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The word on the street is that Sprint is betting the farm on an exclusive for the iPhone 5. It will commit almost $ 20 billion to Apple for 30.5 million iPhones and it won’t even start to make money till 2014. Crazy? Yes and no!

Apple has to love this deal–it basically ensures a nice revenue stream for them, even if the world goes into recession and demand for mobile phones stalls. Second, it takes away some of the Android momentum at one carrier where Android has done well. (I know T-Mobile wants an iPhone too, and too bad they are not getting it.) Now for Sprint, I agree there are risks, but they are calculated risks. The exclusivity of iPhone 5 to Sprint is what reduces the risk around this arrangement.

For starters, globally, the average revenue per user for iPhone is about 1.5 to 2 times the average ARPU for all other phones. The numbers are better in the U.S. On an average, in the U.S., average revenue per user for iPhone is about $ 90 a month, according to Chetan Sharma, principal at Chetan Sharma Consulting. That works out to about $ 1,080 a year.

Now if  Sprint manages to match Verizon’s performance (it added 2.2 million iPhones during the first two months of the launch of the iPhone 4) during the first six months and another million iPhone users in the next six months, it can attract about 3 million iPhone customers to its roster. I am presuming these will be new customers who would switch to Sprint because of the “exclusive” availability of the device on the Sprint network, or they are fed up with AT&T or Verizon.

That works out to about $ 3.2 billion in revenues. And given that analysts estimate Sprint to clock in revenues of around $ 34 billion in 2012, what we are talking about a nice 10 percent bump in revenues for the company. The presence of the new iPhone would also reduce the churn on Sprint’s network and thus would provide the much-needed stability to their revenue stream.

So as I said –crazy yes, but not completely loco!

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One of the unending qualities of the human being is the obsession with making lists. We care passionately about the rank our sports teams achieve, even if it means nothing. We chatter about magazine power lists as if they have an impact on reality.

The writer Nick Hornby even elevated the top 10 list to an almost religious level in his book High Fidelity, which essentially chronicles a middle-aged man’s internal struggle between his drive to make lists and his desire to make love.

Now British startup Top10.com hopes it can harness our nerdiest tendencies for fun and profit with a list-making service that has just gone live.

“We think when people are trying to discover and find new products, they want to see what other people have recommended,” said co-founder Tom Leathes when I spoke to him earlier. “Top tens are already ingrained in popular culture, so we’re starting with lists of things people are passionate about.”

The site has a simple premise: Users organize things into lists, which are then made public and shared with other users. Here, for example, is my list of top 10 pizza toppings and my top 10 technology blogs.

If enough users create lists that are similar to each other, the site can aggregated the rankings and provide a top 10 across all users. In the future, it plans to add filters so that users can see (for example) what their friends’ top songs are right now, or what other people in their city think are the best restaurants. It’s effectively taking the model used by review sites and loading it up with a heavy dose of human psychology.

Overall, it’s simple and intuitive, and pretty fun — for a while at least. The way you construct lists on the fly, adding images and text, reminds me a bit of Nextstop, a travel website that was bought by Facebook last year.

Fun is only part of it, though. Leathes doesn’t shy away from what his real objective is: to profit from recommending products to people.

“We want it to be about social recommendations,” he explained. “People love to talk about music, films, restaurants and so on. The challenging thing is that we want to monetize it in a way that’s seamless — so that it’s an end-to-end thing where you can recommend something, discover something and then go and buy it.”

The founding team — including Leathes and his co-founders Harry Jones and Alex Buttle — already have a good track record, building and selling three startups in the last few years. Their last, a broadband comparison site (also called Top10; they clearly kept the name as part of the deal), hit more than $ 10 million in revenues before it was sold to larger rival uSwitch earlier this year.

But while they have lots of experience as a team building web services, Top10 is their first foray into the social arena. So can it work?

Leathes admitted to me that the team deliberately reached out to investors with a good track record in the social web so that they could get help where they needed it. Those include Accel, Founder Collective and Bill Gross’s IdeaLab, who collectively saw fit to give the company a $ 3.5 million Series A round.

So can they do it? The site certainly has a neat gimmick to draw people in, but until we see how many people sign up, it’s too early to say.

The real problem may be that Top10′s success lies outside of its control.

The social recommendations business is turning into a very crowded market. You have companies in all sorts of areas: generalists like Hunch and specialists such as GetGlue. And then there are trendy new startups like Berlin’s Amen, which has a different spin on list-making — you simply praise what you love or hate — but does it for much the same reason.

As if that wasn’t enough, beyond all of these startups there is also another little site that’s proven very successful at mining sentiment data for advertisers and retailers. You may have heard of it.

In fact, Facebook’s ability to gather data from its gazillion users and push new features out en masse could prove the biggest threat to any company trying to claw some market share in this space. Numbers released today by e-commerce site The Find suggest the “Like” button — which reports suggest is set to expand in scope this week — is a powerful tool for making retailers more successful.

If the numbers are true, then the danger for all these social recommendation sites must be straightforward: Facebook could flip the switch and take out huge segment of the social recommendation business with a single, well-targeted strike.

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Steve Ballmer starting a presentation.
Video Rating: 4 / 5