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Free!

By on February 27, 2008 in Business, News

WIRED magazine FREE!

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Full article at WIRED, Found via Swiss Miss

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Skinny on the French

By on February 23, 2008 in News, Science / Technology, Shopping


I’m not sure why, but this has always been a topic of interest for me. Never really had serious body image issues, I think it’s just a fascination with their culture…

French people eat until they’re full, Americans eat until the food’s gone
Furthermore, we have found that the heavier a person is — French or American — the more they rely on external cues to tell them to stop eating and the less they rely on whether they felt full,” said senior author Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, now on leave to serve as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion until January 2009.

Via Boing Boing

Along the same lines, close friend of mine also recommended the above book to me French Women Don’t Get Fat.

…you’ll find simple tricks that boil down to eating carefully prepared seasonal food, exercising more and refusing to think of food as something that inspires guilt. It’s both a practical message and far easier said than done in today’s ‘no pain, no gain’ culture.

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Ten Teams Registered to Compete for $30 Million Google Lunar X PRIZE

By on February 22, 2008 in News, Science / Technology, Vision


I am really happy to see that a company is doing something worth while with corporate sponsorship, These numbers are not huge in the world of big business marketing.

ie: NASCAR owners operate on a very slim margin. Most top tier teams require $25million/year in sponsorship money to make ends meet.

It really makes me want to support a company like Google when they can make the decision to support human kind as a whole. Support science, discovery and the human spirit as opposed to putting shoes on some idiot Jocks feet.

Thank you Google!
-Jack

February 21, 2008, Mountain View, CA – The X PRIZE Foundation and Google, Inc. today announced the first ten teams to register for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million in prizes. This international group of teams will compete to land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

ABOUT THE GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE
The $30 million prize purse is segmented into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the Grand Prize, a team must successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. The Grand Prize is $20 million until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15 million until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation. For more information about the Google Lunar X PRIZE, please visit www.googlelunarxprize.org.

Quoted from: Google Lunar XPrize

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Something New Coming

By on February 20, 2008 in News

This is quite a testimonial, has me wondering what is coming!?!

It’s not often that I see software that really changes my world. It’s even rarer that I see software that I know will change the world my sons live in. I can count those times pretty easily. The first time I saw an Apple II in 1977. When Richard Cameron showed me Apple’s Hypercard. Microsoft’s Excel. Aldus’ Pagemaker. And something called Photoshop, all in his West Valley Community College classroom. Later when I saw Marc Andreessen’s Netscape running the WWW. ICQ and Netmeeting which laid the ground for Skype.

Like I said, these things don’t happen often.

Yesterday was one of those days. Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay, researchers at Microsoft, fired up their machines and showed me something that I can’t tell you about until February 27th. I’m sure you’ll read about his work in the New York Times or TechCrunch, among other places. It’s too inspiring to stay a secret for long…

Quoted from scobleizer

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Texas Ban on Sex Toy Sales Is Overturned

By on February 14, 2008 in News

Just in time for Valentines.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A federal appeals court has overturned a statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas, one of the last states — all in the South — to retain such a ban.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Via ANGELA K. BROWN Associated Press

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