People and Numbers

What if gas prices go to $2.50 / Liter ($9.46 / US Gallon)?

I was looking through my Linkedin profile today and noticed that Will Price is at widgetbox.com. I checked out the site and it is pretty interesting and the team looks smart. I had the opportunity of presenting www.terapeak.com and AERS Inc. businesses to Will a couple of years ago although we actually didn’t need to raise money. They ended up investing in Infopia, which is a great company that we work with as well.

I also noticed that Michael Dearingis listed as a independent board member. We have a few eBay contracts that have his signature on it from when he was still with eBay. It sometimes feels like a small world after all….

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. Privacy - Does not exist!

Too many businesses have a vested multi-billion dollar interest in knowing each and every consumer. What they want, is to know you better than you know yourself, and to sell! sell! sell! to you….

So what I have decided to do is reverse privacy and just let the information go. This means keeping facebook, linkedin, zoominfo, flicker, and many other accounts online up to date and full of juicy info.

I’ll let you know if there are any adverse reactions!  

Take a look at this site http://stamen.com/ . They do some pretty cool work!

When I read this I thought, does anyone else get the shivers? Is this like the titanic where everyone says… “this ship is unsinkable”, and then… bad thngs happen! As an economist you look at the connections between all the variables. I am curious to know how big this house of cards is…

So in the last month I have been getting to the GYM at least 3 times a week. Today I did hot yoga! It is awesome. I was surprisingly flexible. (Little tip, I did Gymnastics for a few years when I was 8 or 9). In addition I have made a pretty significantly change in my diet. NO MORE refined sugars. No sugar drinks, just water or milk. I also cut my servings in half, and eat a lot more fibre. All together I feel great. And surprisingly enough I have not really had a problem resisting the fun foods in my old diet. I have been sleeping a lot better as well.

The Hot Yoga was pretty intense. The time went by pretty quickly. You move between poses quickly, and it really pushes your physical stamina. I have good things to say about the activity.

I have been trying to load video onto my Blackberry… with little success. Why would I try to do this…. Um… Because you can and I want to. So I tried using third party encoders making sure it fit the BB list of playable media types. It didn’t work. Well I don’t like failing, so I jumped back on the horse, so to speak, and loaded the BB desktop software. Apparently they have a Media converter in the application developed by Roxio. So I loaded that. And in about 5 minutes I was letting the software re-encode Star Wars III. It took about 30 minutes but it works and looks great. So if you are trying to encode a movie for playback on a Blackberry 8830, use the desktop application because apparently RIM wraps the format for the phone. In any event, I am happy to say I figured it out.

The idea is awesome. I don’t really care if it only works for 1 person. I would be surprised if someone at nintendo doesn’t set an initiative to build a game using this technology ASAP. It should be as simple as Mario. Just Mario 3D.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw&feature=bz303

I think facebook is great but you have to question some of the recent decisions that have been made. We have seen the budding social network experiencing some growth pains. Apparently facebook has ruined Christmas . It has not affected my Christmas which will include a nice trip to visit my wife’s family in Mexico!

Facebook needs to remember that people DO value their privacy. I have been using my Blackberry phone facebook APP which is really awesome and I like it. It gives me something to do while my wife is shopping… it is really easy to write on friends walls and get updates. Great App.

Is there such a thing as a privacy respecting advertising advertising targeting engine? People really like the amazon suggestion system. What makes that system so good? I would love to hear some people write back. What do you think ?

I recently attended the web 2.0 summit in San Francisco and it was very interesting. Their were a great many small start-ups present. Given our business is 4 years old and profitable I put myself more in the group of new companies than start-up.

 My observations include the following;

1. The re-occurring topics for this conference were the open web (open information) and connecting the edge with the mainstream.
2. Google folks were surprisingly sparse
3. Microsoft-* were present in numbers although they seemed a bit disassociated from what was happening
4. Many of the people had no real revenue model but expected that advertising would pay the bills
5. Their were about 75 women present in a crowd of at least 1000 and probably a lot more

Recently I was reading Wired on-line and they had an article about Google Open Social. It seems logical that for every custom application their should be a counterpart in the open space.

Zuckerberger (Nickname) is a smart guy (No argument there) and the value of his Internet property will increase as long as users and time spent on facebook increase. All the smart people working on this will figure out a way for it to make a lot of money.