Samsung ended up going all out this year for their Super Bowl ad, taking up a full two minutes of airtime, costing them around $16 million after it was all said and done. Actors Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, as well as NBA all-star LeBron James made appearances in the commercial, and discussed some ideas on what Samsung’s “next big thing” could be. BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) aired their first-ever Super Bowl ad, spending a few million dollars on an ad showing off the new BlackBerry Z10, which according to the ad, will light you on fire, so be careful.

Best Buy ended up airing their own Super Bowl ad as well, and it features SNL alum and Parks & Recreation star Amy Poehler, who is pretty much the most adorable and funniest woman in show business right now, so we have to give it up for Best Buy for pulling off such a cute and witty ad.

We knew GoDaddy would make an appearance at the Super Bowl, as they do every year, but this time they aired two ads, one featuring the typical sexy theme that you know and love, and then there was an ad that actually wasn’t that bad. The company advertised their .co domain names, and the ad rings true of anyone with an original idea these days.

As far as the automotive commercials, it was a hit or miss mostly. Audi’s “Prom” ad was probably our favorite one out of the bunch, with Dodge’s “Paul Harvey” commercial at a close second. Other car ads included VW’s semi-racist Jamaican ad, Hyundai’s adorable “Team” ad featuring kids with super powers, Kia’s “Hotbots” ad, Mercedes-Benz with their celebrity-filled commercial (as well as one featuring Kate Upton), Lincoln’s Jimmy Fallon ad and “Phoenix” teaser, and an awkward Toyota ad featuring Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco.

Movie trailers were also hot stuff during Super Bowl commercial breaks. The Iron Man 3 trailer caught our eye the most, with Star Trek: Into Darkness also showing off a quick teaser for us. World War Z also made a quick appearance, and we also saw an extended teaser for Johnny Depp’s upcoming movie, The Lone Ranger.

Now we want to hear what you think. We know not every ad this year was amazing, and some were iffy at best. What was your favorite commercial from the Super Bowl? Which tech company blew it out of the park? Which one could’ve been better? What suggestions would you make to the creators of the ads? Sound off in the comments below!

The privately-held Scottsdale, Arizona-based company said that Irving will also join the company’s board of directors on top of his CEO role. He is replacing Scott Wagner, who served as interim CEO since the summer, after Warren Adelman stepped down after only eight months on the job. Adelman replaced GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons in December 2011.

Irving spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he appeared in many hats, but his most notable and most recent role at the Redmond-based company was corporate vice president of the Windows Live platform. He also spent time at Yahoo as the company’s chief product officer, where he developed and rolled out a unified product vision and strategy, which grew Yahoo to nearly one billion active PC and mobile users.

Irving currently serves on the board of GolfLogix, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based mobile web company, and in the past, he has served as a professor at Pepperdine University located outside of Los Angeles. He is also a graduate of San Diego State University and received an MBA degree from Pepperdine University.

Image via Flickr

GoDaddy’s interim CEO Scott Wagner has sent a message out to a set of webpages affected by the drop, including TechCrunch, which noted that, “once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions for our customers and GoDaddy.com.” In addition, a site outage investigation report was released today with a bit more info:

“Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.

We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.”

- Wagner

This type of attack – or issue – is enough to make some of the more gigantic hosted webpages think about their future with the business. Because of a downtime like this, massive amounts of otherwise earned cash will have been lost. A company whose main task is to keep webpages hosted successfully on the web at all hours of the day has this one key element that will act as bad PR for them – what GoDaddy must hope now is that this incident fades away quickly.

In other news, it turns out that AntiSec may not have stolen all of those Apple UDIDs from the FBI like the group originally claimed, and the LG Escape was leaked shortly before being confirmed by the company. Toys R Us has a new tablet on offer, and it’s aimed directly at your children, while TTP is looking to give Google Glass a run for its money with some new specs of its own. Speaking of Google Glass, the headsets made an appearance at Fashion Week, with designer Diane von Furstenberg sending her models onto the runway while wearing them.

The FBI has rolled out a $1 billion facial tracking initiative, and it seems that GoDaddy’s network of hosted websites has been taken down by a lone hacker associated with Anonymous. Google says that 180 “fiberhoods” qualify for Google Fiber service after a lengthy preliminary sign-up period, and a new Samsung Galaxy Note II leak suggests that the new phablet will be launching at Verizon. The founder of The Pirate Bay has been deported to Cambodia, while Samsung’s hopes for a 13-megapixel camera in the Galaxy Note II were dashed when LG bought up most of the stock from suppliers.

Sony is launching the first installment in its new Wonderbook series in November, and today is the day that the Steam Big Picture Beta comes to televisions everywhere. Bethesda’s Pete Hines doesn’t see the need for a new generation of consoles just yet, some scientists are now thinking that Mars was too hot to support life in the past, and Nielsen has discovered that the number of teenagers who own a smartphone is on the rise, climbing faster than any other age group.

Finally tonight, we have a few original articles for you to check out. Chris Davies examines the LTE situation with the incoming iPhone 5, while Chris Burns makes the distinction between tablets and laptops when it comes to work and play. Finally tonight, we have a hands-on with the upcoming LG Intuition, so if you want a phablet-like device that isn’t the Galaxy Note II, you might want to take a look at that. Enjoy the rest of your evening, everyone!

Of course, this is causing a headache for more than just the folks at GoDaddy, as many business owners are seeing their sites go down as a result of the attack as well. Since the attack makes a number GoDaddy’s DNS servers inaccessible, many site owners who were using GoDaddy’s DNS service were affected by this breach. Customers are also saying that the company’s email and phone services are down as well.

GoDaddy itself has had to deal with a number of angry customers this afternoon, and at the time of this writing, the hosting service is still down for many. GoDaddy seems to be making progress, with one of its most recent tweets claiming that service has returned for some customers. With tens of millions of sites down, however, GoDaddy has its work cut out for it.

What’s interesting is that AnonymousOwn3r did this whole thing by himself. He hasn’t really given a reason for his attack on GoDaddy, saying in a tweet that the breach was meant to test GoDaddy’s “cyber security,” among other reasons that he can’t talk about now. A lot of GoDaddy customers are understandably calling him out on Twitter, so let’s just hope that the company can get everything back to normal soon. Stay tuned, as we’ll have more details for you as this story develops.

The first response GoDaddy felt came the week before Christmas when they saw 70,00 domain names moved away from its services. Since most users turned to services such as NameCheap, GoDaddy competitors were feeling the benefits of GoDaddy’s mistakes. This mass exodus wasn’t the only backlash GoDaddy felt. Although GoDaddy retracted its support, MLG recently dropped all domains from GoDaddy.

NameCheap has been doing quite well since the wave of GoDaddy criticism hit. Not only did they gain users after the initial mass exodus, they also acquired MLG as a customer. MLG announced the transition from GoDaddy to NameCheap in an official statement quoted below.

MLG would like to officially announce that we have removed our entire network, which encompasses over 100 domains, from GoDaddy.com in response to their support of SOPA. Moving forward, we will be using Namecheap for all of our hosting needs.

MLG is firmly against both the specifics of SOPA and the philosophy behind the bill. We urge all of you to read up on the issue and draw your own conclusions.

Many of those domain registrations that GoDaddy lost went to competitors like Namecheap. The transfer didn’t go smoothly, and Namecheap has accused GoDaddy of withholding some of the needed details to make a smooth transfer to the new registrar. Namecheap said that GoDaddy was returning incomplete Whois information thereby delaying the transfer process.

GoDaddy claims that the limiting of Whois information is a standard practice to prevent Whois abuse. GoDaddy also says that had Namecheap contacted it the limit on the Whois data would have been lifted. Since the mass exodus of domains kicked off, GoDaddy has retracted its support for the SOPA act. Namecheap later noted that its queries had been unblocked.

[via CNET]