Tech firms delight and disappoint on Super Bowl Sunday

If you believe the viewing figures a third of the US turned out to watch last night's Super Bowl competition. But in Silicon Valley a sizeable minority of viewers were just there for the adverts.

Super Bowl adverts are very odd things. It's the most expensive advertising space in the world, with companies typically paying millions for a 30 second spot on the most watched sporting event of the year.

Technology firms typically spend a lot on Super Bowl ads, for not entirely understandable reasons. Sure, it's a big audience but what was Salesforce.com thinking with this year's lamentably bad advert for Chatter. Are there that many Green Bay fans specifying software systems?

Points to Best Buy for taking the piss out of Justin Beiber (and the mobile phone industry) but it was still not a great advert.

Worst ad of the night goes to GroupOn, who managed to be both tasteless and sneaky with this advert based in Tibet. Thousands have died in the formerly independent country and millions more are having their cultural heritage destroyed but GroupOn tried to make a joke about it. The company's follow-up that it was collecting money for the country was too little, too late.

Certainly the best tech ad of the night goes to Motorola - and that's not something you can say every day. Motorola stuck one in the eye of Apple with its 1984 satire, it's just a pity the Xoom is so expensive.

But the best ad of the night wasn't a tech ad, but one from Volkswagen. I don't have a VW, a child, or a Darth Vader costume, but this ad made me want all three.