The Super Bowl is the one time of the year when people actually watch the commercials rather than fast forward through them…or they just watch it on YouTube immediately after the game. Either way, companies bring their advertising dollars and “A game” to the field to try to score with the largest national audience in history.

So who really brought their “A-game” and who wasted their money? Continue on to see M/C/C’s staff picks and thoughts on this year’s commercial at the big game.

Twitter clients have been growing in popularity are users of the social medium look for more ways to aggregate all of the tool’s feature sets, such as real-time search, conversation monitoring and actual dialogue participating. Desktop and mobile applications TweetDeck and Seesmic http://twitter.com/seesmic have risen to the top, but at the end of January the latter launched a new product with the potential overtake TweetDeck’s market share and finally shove Twitter into mass-market popularity – which would mean a greater opportunity to get your company’s message into a significantly larger and more targeted number of eyeballs at very little cost. Eyeballs being the operative term here.

Seesmic Look is exactly what the name describes: a revolutionary Adobe Air platform (optimized for Windows 7) that enables a user to see what people are saying about a certain topic in a visually stimulating way and in real-time. Essentially, it’s a way to “watch” the conversation.

This month one of M/C/C’s clients finally uncapped some huge news they’ve been excited to share for a while. Encryption technology provider Revere Security publicly announced the addition of security legend Whitfield Diffie to its executive team as Chief Cryptographer. The man who WIRED Magazine once dubbed the “Prophet of Privacy” has been actively advising the company behind-the-scenes over the last year and worked with Chief Scientist Eric Smith to co-develop it’s bread and butter – the Hummingbird algorithm. An unprecedented virtual rotor cipher, Hummingbird has the ability to revolutionize security options for wireless devices and embedded systems where space, power and battery life are limited. Diffie is most notably remembered for the invention of public-key cryptography which today remains as the underlying technology for secure Internet commerce.

Last month, Revere Security garnered headlines by joining the Automatic Identity and Mobility (AIM) association – a move that puts the company in a strong position to contribute to the standards process for auto-ID encryption. In fact, Revere Security’s ground-breaking technology inspired AIM’s RFID Connections newsletter producer Bert Moore to sit down with Chief Technology Officer Daniel W. Engels, PhD., for the popular podcast series “Hear and Know.” The old friends discussed the state of RFID security, where it’s headed and… promiscuous tags? To find out what that means, you’ll have to give it a listen.

Pioneering certain technology areas may be a company’s mission, but only through partnering with other pioneers can it succeed and move forward. Skype started in 2003 and it seems businesses, especially in North America, are oblivious to its existence. As communication technology develops, the software offers effective and cost-efficient solutions to problems the industry encounters.

The beauty of Skype’s software is that it works through your existing Internet connection and allows communication with any Internet-connected computer also running Skype. And the best part? The download and computer-to-computer calls are free. Now if you want to call landlines and mobile devices through Skype, there’s a fee administered as-you-go or through a monthly subscription, but with Skype, the majority of users rely on the free communication.

The software became popular as a “share the love” network in Europe. With people moving and living abroad, it helped families and friends keep in touch by chatting, talking for free and later video-calling. Today, it accounts for 8 percent of global international calling minutes. In Q3 2009, free Skype-to-Skype calls accumulated 27.7 billion minutes, with one-third of these being video calls. So how do you get started?

Normally, when the world is buzzing with anticipation for your next product, life is good. You’ve built up enough confidence in your brand that consumers and the media can blindly put their faith in your company and expect great things. It can be a fantastic situation to be in, but, as Apple is learning, it also can be a curse.