Steve Jobs, as you’ve probably heard by now, is taking another medical leave of absence. The last time he took one in January, 2009 it was for six months and it turned out to be for a liver transplant, likely related to his earlier bout with pancreatic cancer. This time the leave is indefinite and Apple is not going into any further details about his condition.

One thing Wall Street hates is uncertainty. Just look at what happened to Apple’s stock between June, 2008 (when a very thin Steve Jobs appeared at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, sparking speculation about his health), through his subsequent leave of absence, to June, 2009 (when the Wall Street Journal reported that he had undergone a liver transplant). During that period of uncertainty, the stock was down 23 percent, after dipping even lower (see chart). Will Apple’s stock take another hit this time around?

Whenever a company lays off 500 people, as MySpace did earlier this week when it gave half its employees walking papers, it generates quite a bit of anger and bitterness. The latest tip in our inbox from a dispirited former employee goes into a details about do-nothing managers who still have their jobs while all their underlings are now unemployed.

I won’t repeat the character assassinations here, but the former MySpacer did include something else I will share: The kiss-off letter from CEO Mike Jones. “He didn’t even take the time to personally sign the letters. It’s just a xerox copy,” laments the former employee. You can read the termination letter below. It is pretty standard, thanking those being laid off for their “dedication and commitment to MySpace” especially through its recent relaunch.

This is the part, though that must really rankle:

It was only last August that Chartbeat passed one million concurrent users tracked across all the sites that use the realtime analytics dashboard. It took 16 months from launch to get there. Now, a mere five months later, Chartbeat has broken through the 2-million user milepost.

Chartbeat is like Google Analytics, but in realtime. It lest you see exactly how many visitors are on any page on your Website at any given time, where they came from, and how your realtime traffic compares to the norm. So you can see spikes right when they are occurring. I use it religiously to track how posts are doing on TechCrunch every day. And more and more sites are getting religion, it seems, or traffic is growing for the already-converted. The 2-million user number is concurrent users across all sites that use Chartbeat, and that is an average number at any one instant.

Success in online video is relative to how much time, effort, and money you put into it. Andrew Baron of Rocketboom offers an (albeit self-serving) chart in a post updating the State of the Union for his startup and online video in general. I like this chart because it tries to compare the total capital poured into four different online video ventures and the total cumulative videos put out and consumed by viewers.

Next New Networks is by far the largest, with an estimated 1 billion cumulative video views, but it’s also raised $27 million in venture capital (weren’t they supposed to be bought by YouTube by now?). Revision3 and Rocketboom come in at the next tier with 312 million and 290 million cumulative video views, respectively. A decent accomplishment by both, but it took Revision3 about $10 million in capital to get there whereas Rocketboom got there with only $1.5 million. And then there’s MyDamnChannel, with 105 million cumulative views and $7.5 million in capital invested. Not very capital efficient at all, assuming revenues are tied to video views, which is usually the case. But in order to better visualize the ratio of cumulative views to total invested capital, I created the my own chart based on Baron’s original one.

Mobile QR platform ShareSquare launches their beta today with the announcement that they’ve already got 150K out of a 500K seed round under their belt, from angels Paige Craig, John Frankel of ff Assett Management, Jeff Miller and Roy Rodenstein of Hacker angels.

In the same space as Likify and Mofuse, ShareSquare is a QR Code creation platform specifically for music and entertainment brands. With ShareSquare’s CMS, artists and promoters can deck out branded merchandise like posters, promos, flyers and even bumper stickers with QR codes corresponding to a custom HTML5 web app (see a mockup one for Justin Bieber, to the left).

Around here at AOL/TechCrunch, they tend to keep us out of the loop on corporate strategy because they know we’ll post any old memo we find. So imagine my surprise to find a box with AOL snow globes and first quarter stretch targets sent to my office in New York City (which is not at AOL’s headquarters, by the way, but the same office I’ve always had because, well, they don’t really want me in their building—despite being an AOL employee, I can’t even get an AOL ID to enter unannounced). This box has been sitting around since the holidays, and inside is a little motivational package with five AOL Winter Luge 2011 snow globes and bookmarks/postcards (see photo above).

On the back of the postcards are the company’s goals for the first quarter dubbed “Q1 Winter Luge.” Some of these have been reported before, like doubling homepage traffic, which in and of itself would be huge. But there are others too, including growing ad sales revenue by 20 percent, doubling engagement on the local Patch sites, organizing around “towns” (we are in Tech Town!), recruiting top talent, and expanding the Project Devil ads, which replace clutter on the page with one big ad incorporating different interactive elements like video or maps.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong today announced three new content partnerships which effectively will hand over coverage for sports, health and real estate. The partners are Sporting News, Everyday Health, and Move.com for real estate. These will replace AOL’s own properties Fanhouse and AOL Health, whereas AOL Real Estate will remain. (Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch).

Armstrong suggested on a conference call that these are not areas that are core to AOL. “The reason we did these deals is because we believe the partners we are working with will be better at doing their core business than we are.” AOL isn’t getting completely out of sports, health, and real estate content. Especially when it comes to local (through Patch) or video, AOL will continue to create videos and articles covering these topics, some of which will appear on the partner sites and some of which will appear in AOL properties.

When a good idea comes along, often what you see are multiple startups pop up who were all working on it independently but launch around the same time. Look at Foursquare and Gowalla in geo-location apps or Instagram, PicPlz, and Path in geo-photo apps. Right now, a lot of the action seems to be in group messaging, with Groupme, Beluga, and Fast Society all vying for mobile group supremacy. Groupme, which came out of one of our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathons, recently raised $10.6 million (sending all those text messages is expensive); Beluga was started by a few ex-Googlers, and Fast Society is still bootstrapping but blew people away at Chris Sacca’s Tahoe conference.

I recently caught up with Fast Society CEO and co-founder Matthew Rosenberg in New York City to understand why everyone is going gaga over group messaging. After all, it’s nothing new—one of the original use cases for Twitter was as a group messaging platform. In the video above, Rosenberg explains what he is trying to do with Fast Society. It is targeted specifically at 13 to 30 year-olds, young people going out in groups. Fast Society’s tagline is “Built to Party.”

Social news has many flavors. Twitter and Facebook function as social news feeds with your friends pushing out stories they find interesting. But what about news about your friends or other people you care about? Two Harvard sophomores, Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon, have cobbled together Newsle to do just that. Newsle imports your friends and contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn and shows you any news or blog posts that mention them. It also lets you follow famous people in different categories (actors, musicians, politicians, business people) to get all the news about them.

Newsle recently launched in private beta. The first 1,000 readers to sign up with the beta key “techcrunch” will get in.

Back in the day, and by that I mean six months ago, a ‘Pivot’ was simply known as ‘a change in strategic directions’. Call it what you may today, Peer39 made one of these eighteen months ago, and hasn’t looked back.

Their team deduced that display advertising was not going to go away, but that at the same time, privacy concerns will raise the levels of scrutiny over traditional cookie-based targeting. They saw it as an opportunity for the company and its semantic URL analysis technology.

Let’s begin with a whooper… Peer39 is processing 18,000 URLS per second. This means that their systems get hit 18,000 times per second with requests for semantic targeting information for URLs which Peer39 then has to go out and classify, then determine levels of brand safety for. All this has to happen in under three milliseconds per URL to allow the data to be monetized through ad networks and exchanges which require minimal latency.