Google and YouTube - smart choice after all

Google is one of the key players of the Internet and for very good reason. They are one of the few companies actually making money off the Internet ... not with it, but because of it.

They saw an opportunity to excel in a field that was virtually untapped. Advertising has always been big business, although television and print were pretty much cornered by a huge list of advertising companies across the globe. They saw the huge potential to make money by completely dominating the Internet market for advertising. And that's why their stock is hovering the $500 mark.

Most analysts saw a plateau on Internet advertising that Google could not overcome. They've already cornered the market, how much more money could they make? Taking a pretty huge chunk out of the market for print-advertising where else could they go? Video.

Many of you are thinking that they tried that with their purchase of YouTube for the cool 1.6 million dollars. Many of you probably thought that the whole idea of YouTube being worth that much money was downright ridiculous. How could ads in YouTube videos pay off for Google especially to recoup the amount it paid for it?

Think outside the box. YouTube was an experiment. Acutally, Google Videos was an experiment that went wrong. So they purchased YouTube to understand it's inner workings and closely track its usage. What for you ask? The key is television. Yes, television. Television is the one advertising market that Google has yet to dominate. With newspaper and television advertising you pretty much have to have a newspaper or television. Too much effort to acquire every newspaper and television station around the world.

Google is using YouTube to envision a global network of television channels. Yes, television channels. Google is set to explode with their technology and expertise with content delivery over the Internet. We all know how well iTunes has succeeded with music, and their soon to be fame with videos and television.

Now picture Google serving ads in television shows. Not the same commercial everybody within a geographic region would see with an NBC or CBS station affiliate. Commercials garnered to your Internet and viewing habits.

Google has long been known for tracking searching and surfing habits of users. Just imagine Google's ability to target commercials directly related to your tastes during a tv show or even a live sporting event.

In the future Google will become a vast television agency serving up live and pre-programmed television channels with advertising that caters to every single user. Every television show served will be indexed and cross-referenced with your surfing habits and geographical location.

Viewing a station while at home in Denver in the winter? You'll get ads for the local ski resorts.
Viewing a station while in a hotel on the east coast? You'll get ads for local establishments within walking distance from the hotel. The degree of marketing accuracy is astonishing.

Throw into the mix Google's new Android phone and how they will target individuals with phone commercials. Commercials will come on your phone while driving past a gas station, or shopping mall.

Google has the technology to track what you like, where you are, and whenever they like.

That to me is an impressive stock buy. Especially at today's share price of $537 USD.

Flickr feature - sets & collections within your groups

I've been a frequent user to Flickr but only recently splurged for the Pro account to increase my photostream. It's great to be able to use Flickr as an offsite backup for my digital photos but now I am starting to get into the more advanced features of the service.

I've got plenty of photos of family and family events and I would like to share them with specific family members - hence the Flickr "group" feature. Create a Flickr group, specify who can join, and voila! Family members can now view and upload their own photos.

But I've quickly come to the realization that a group is not useful unless it has the same collection and set functionality as your regular photostream. I'd like to create a family group for all my relatives to view - and within it create sets of different family events. I'd also like to organize all my family events by year in a collection.

Anyone at Flickr listening?

Use Flickr as a backup for your digital photos

I've come across several friends and family who have come to me in dire need of some backup help. For whatever reason their hard drives had conked out - some either giving errors during use, or not being able to load Windows at all. In most cases the hard drives were somewhat recoverable . In a day and age where digital picture taking is the norm and 50+ pictures per event is not uncommon, one has to realize that digital files are more susceptible to becoming nothing than are film negatives. I quickly came to that conclusion when the drive where I store my photos on ... along with 200gb of other data went on the blitz. Fortunately that hard drive was part of a mirrored hard drive RAID array and the other drive was holding an exact copy of that data for me.

I quickly realized that those photos from as far back as 1999 were irreplaceable - even if they were taken with a digital brick of a camera called a Kodak DC210 with it's whopping 1megapixel capacity. It was then I started to find an acceptable solution for backing up my precious data.

Websites that offer offsite storage solutions were either too-expensive or at the risk of disappearing tomorrow. External USB hard drives are good but those drives too are prone to errors (as with any hard drive) especially if you get one based on a laptop (2.5 inch) hard drive (I find laptop hard drives do not last as long as 3.5 inch desktop drives).

My final solution? The $24.95 a year Flickr Pro account at www.flickr.com. Those personal photos don't have to be made public to the world ... they can be marked as private if you choose to. Plus, you can give access to view those photos to other family members. Quite handy indeed.

Norton Ghost in a backup device

I've always been a fan about external USB hard drive enclosures. Originally I used my ADS full-height enclosure for a DVD writer. USB was great for my Windows pc and Firewire was used for my Mac. I was able to move it among all my Windows-based PCs and the occasional use on my Mac. It was so simple and easy that I was able to swap out the original DVD writer for a dual layer DVD writer in no time. Instant usefulness.

Then enclosures became popular with desktop hard drives. It was great to use it as a central repository for files - important backups or just temporary storage. No need to map network hard drives to backup important files and try to remember where you put them a couple of weeks later.

Then I started using them to backup my important files while I wiped out my machines in order to reinstall Windows. This was a frequent practice for me because I often found a fresh install of Windows XP always performed faster and smoother especially with all the spyware, viruses, and trojans that went around. So beneficial, it was commonly becoming a 3-month cycle for me.

With the frequent re-installs of Windows I then found a benefit for Symantec's Norton Ghost. It was software that allowed me to create a complete image backup of my system and store it on a hard drive in a single file (not always). I would create my clean Windows XP install with all service packs and create the backup image. Then, I could initiate the clean process 3 months later. So convenient that it took my 5+ hr reinstall period for Windows XP (with service packs) to less then 30 minutes.

Then I came across an article on PC Magazine that mentioned a product called Maxtor OneTouch. The article immediately had me believe that this whole Norton Ghost process of imaging a system was captured in an external hardware product - complete with hard drive and automatic software! To me it sounded like the hardware would allow me to immediately create a ghost image of my system - and with the size of hard drives nowadays (a 1 terabyte drive can be had for about $200 CDN) - you could probably keep several different stages of backups on the hard drive.

I have yet to see this product in the familiar retail channels (ie. Future Shop, Best Buy, Costco, Sams Club) to try it out. So until then, your guess is as good as mine to whether it works the way i think it might.

Todays desktop - Curacao from above

Available from Interfacelift.com

Something about the colourful buildings and peaceful sea gives you a nice mental break.

Car makers listen up! Heated windshields

Listen up North American car makers, I've got a simple and practical idea!

Build a defrost system that sits in the front windshield under the windshield wipers. Take the technology that goes into rear-window defrost systems, and apply it to the front. A simple metal contact that sits underneath the wiper blade ... no more ice buildup! How many times have you stopped on the side of the road because the wipers froze up?

My HVAC system in my 2004 Jeep Liberty just doesn't seem to be very effective when defrosting the front windshield.

Functional winter mudguards

Here's an idea for an automotive company, or perhaps even a parts supplier like Magna :

Build mudguards that are smooth on both sides - including the side that faces the tire! This way, during the snow-filled winter months here in Canada, snow has a hard time sticking to it.

If you've ever driven in snow, you'll notice that occasionally during heavy sticky snowfalls you might notice some degradation in turning, or braking ability, or even strange noises.

When your tires travel across the snow some of it is picked up in the rotation of the tire. Most cars have a slippery smooth surface on the underbody of the wheel well. The snow will travel along this path until it hits the mudguard.

Being the rough-edged, bumpy, and cavernous moulded plastic it is, the snow will undoubtedly stay there gradually building up like a rolling snowball.

My idea? Round it out to continue the flow of the smooth-surfaced wheel well ... that way the snow has nowhere to stick and continues on back to the road.

Granted in an industry where every penny is pinched (which reminds me of a story an automotive engineer told me when I asked why all car underbody parts weren't painted ... to save a few extra dollars) I can see how this "might" be a valid excuse, but if today's generic household product can be packaged in virtually indestructible plastic packaging, I don't see why it would cost THAT much more.