How to market a mystery? That was the challenge faced by Nathan Newman and his team at Time Over Distance (t/d), a UK social media PR company, earlier this year. Their task? To spread the word that Steve Wozniak, inventer of the Apple computer, had a new project, PineApple, which would launch on Apple’s 40th anniversary, April 1.

I worked as part of the team, drumming up interest in North America via social media. But it ain’t easy when you can’t actually tell people what it is you’re talking about. What’s PineApple? How did we spread the word? What roadblocks did we encounter on the way? What lessons can you learn from our experience? We had to market the mystery itself.

Here’s how it went down.
Everything was timed around the Business Rocks conference in Manchester, April 21-23 of this year. That was the actual client, and the actual…

SAN FRANCISCO– Following Friday’s unveiling of the much un-anticipated PineApple, a bemused tech press is left scratching its head over Steve Wozniak’s next big idea.

Wozniak, who co-founded tech giant Apple in a garage along with his pal Steve Jobs, is going head-to-head with his old company with his new startup, dubbed PineApple.

Apple was named after Newton’s apple, which disrupted his thought process and led to his development of the theory of gravity.

PineApple is a fruit of a different color, its spiky exterior giving no hint of the sweetness within.

Why PineApple?
Wozniak replied, I thought, why can’t a pineapple make history too? We need more variety in our tech diet.”

The tech legend has long supported social causes, and there is much speculation on what, specifically, the new startup will do: is it computers? gadgets? a nonprofit of some kind?

Wozniak took several years off to return to school and qualify as a schoolteacher, so no…