The crafty little advertising move comes at a time when Chrome needs a boost to take on the Web browser competition. Currently Chrome has 8.5 percent of global users, according to NetMarketShare, compared to 59 percent for Internet Explorer, 23 percent for Mozilla Firefox and 5.4 percent for Apple’s Safari. Yesterday, the new social browser RockMelt launched, and while the only people using it so far are avid followers of tech blogs, the company will obviously need to figure out a way to use some of its $10 million in funding and its investors’ experience building browsers to gain market share. (Interestingly, NetMarketShare says mobile browsing is only 2.8 percent of the market. Room to grow.)

Google’s in-flight Wi-Fi will be on domestic AirTran, Delta and Virgin America flights (which use Aircell’s Gogo service) from Nov. 20 to Jan. 2 (which is sadly 23 days shorter than last year’s promotion).

Image courtesy NASA.

Evidently that’s as true today as it was 12 years ago, because Apple (AAPL) has won a bundle of AdWeek’s “Best of the Decade” awards. The advertising trade mag named Apple “Brand of the Decade,” its “Get a Mac” ads ”Campaign of the Decade,” its iPod “Product of the Decade,” its iPod silhouettes ads “Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade” and CEO Steve Jobs “Marketer of the Decade.”

“Though the brand almost petered out in the ’90s, last year consumers told Interbrand that Apple was the thing they couldn’t live without and the one they found most inspiring,” AdWeek explains. “Why? Perhaps it’s Apple’s vaguely antiauthoritarian stance (epitomized in its iconic ’1984′ ad). A true-in-practice focus on relentlessly improving its products also helps. But maybe it comes down to this: Most brands are run by committee, but this one is the embodiment of a living, breathing person. Steve Jobs is Apple in the way that Richard Branson is Virgin. Of course it helps when you’re a brilliant marketer who happens to be the CEO.”

Apple, it’s worth noting, also came close to winning “Digital Company of the Decade,” but was bested by Google (GOOG), which was named “Media Company of the Decade” as well.

Last June, a Vornado executive told Reuters that the store would shut down in the first quarter of 2009. The decision to close the store appears related to real estate and the value connected to the location. That executive was quoted as saying that Virgin pays only $54 per square-foot when the market rent in the area is about $700 a square foot.

So, while the store, which does an estimated $55 million in annual volume, is profitable to the tune of $6 million, according to sources, the space would be even more profitable for its owner with a higher rent tenant. Vornado bought the 180,000 square foot retail component of the Bertelsmann building, which houses the Times Square store, in 2006, and will lease the space to Century 21, according to reports.

The closure leaves the Virgin chain with five stores, and one of them, the Union Square store in New York, will now be the city’s premiere record store, with an estimated $40 million annual volume. But the status of that store is also at question as the Related Cos. and Vornado leased the ground floor of the store to Nordstrom Rack for the holiday season, only to have the deal fall through.”

I get that the decision appears to be “related to real estate,” but it’s really about the health–or lack thereof–of bricks-and-mortar music retail. If the No. 1 store in the country can’t make it, and if New York City’s “premiere record store” rented out a floor during the peak sales season, then why is anyone bothering to sell CDs in stores, period?

Plenty of retail executives seem to be asking themselves the same question, and are responding by cutting the small space they’ve devoted to CDs even further. The exceptions: Special promotions for exclusive albums, like Wal-Mart’s (WMT) successful push for the new AC/DC album last year, and Best Buy’s (BBY) unsuccessful gambit with Guns N’ Roses.

[Image Credit: Troshy]