Emad Fanous

Kind of macabre but someone sent me a link to MyDeathSpace.com. It catalogs people who have died or are murderers that are listed in MySpace.com.

The first listing I saw when I went to he site was for murderer #4, a boy who had killed his mother. (Yes they link to the news stories when they have them).

Clicking on the myspace profile link shows this alleged murderer’s profile (assuming it is not a fake). In it, he writes:

Heroes: my mom i love her to death she is the greatest she has always been there and ill always bethere for her all my friends think she is the coolest i love you mommy

Is this thing for real or is it a joke??? Hmmmmm.

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Screenshots of Google Earth as an in-car navigation system.

Google, Volkswagen and nVidia are jointly developing an an in-car navigation map system and 3D display that displays a photo-quality view of the driver’s route, rather than the basic graphics displayed by current navigation systems.

It took them long enough. My bet is that all major players are looking at doing something similar.

Additionally, I have been in discussions where we have talked about placing advertisers in those navigation systems. If you have a navigation system, aren’t there such things as “find the nearest McDonalds/Denny’s?” From an advertiser’s perspective, how much better do those leads get than having someone diving in their car towards your business, looking for your product? From the advertising engine’s perspective, how do you keep the data up to date and charge if you are doing a pay-per-lead model when he current technology uses data on a DVD rather than download from elsewhere? Of course, that has never stopped some of these companies with sufficient capital from coming up with a solution. In fact, there are already navigation systems available with “realtime” traffic conditions…

Google’s products claims the product will do the following:

The navigation system is equipped with a vehicle-centric touchscreen interface to Google Earth with state-of-the-art graphics, accurate 3D maps and real-time traffic updates and routing. Current information on restaurants, dealerships, gas stations and other points of interest can be overlaid directly onto the user’s 3D map.

Of course the navigation system manufacturers can always do a subscription model with no advertising at all where the consumer foots the entire bill…or even a hybrid model where they lower the cost to consumers and make money by taking flat rates from chains that have sufficient coverage within a geography (most systems only hold enough data for their locale…that’s why they use DVDs rather than building it into a “box.” I wonder how much of the data (meaning points of interest/business locations and map information/pictures will be on the DVD/box versus downloaded in realtime/near-realtime.

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After mapping the Earth and the moon, Google has mapped Mars, this time providing elevation, infrared, and other info.

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AOL has made AIM available to developers.

This includes AIM Presence which, like Yahoo’s Messenger provides a tool to display if you are online/offline (see below), AIM Plugins (build your own plugin to do various things…like GAIM’s plugins), and AIM Custom Client to write your own client (like the many currently available).

No real blockbuster new functionality here but makes it easier from a developer’s perspective to use standardized interfaces without the worry of consistently updating software to match new protocols/interfaces. From a business perspective, perhaps opening AIM up could mean losing subscribers to various competitors, both new and old. With others utilizing open standards and Yahoo and MSN talking about interoperability, AOL needs to take some action…especially after having seen how competing products that have better UI and provides an API can eat into their properties.

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• Michael pointed out MSN is testing a new homepage and Reprise Media notes that Yahoo is testing a new homepage as well
• In case you don’t know, Zillow provides property valuations and information whereas Trulia scrapes realestate sites to provide realestate listings…so why do people keep comparing them as long as they are very different services???
• Find out how to bypass websites and phone systems and get directly to a human by going to the gethuman database
• A lot of people may already know most of these but The Ethical Hacker Network provided some discovery techniques to find secret hidden pages and information about sites using Google…be careful coding your site!
• Someone (sorry, don’t remember who), pointed me towards wufoo that uses AJAX to provide a way to add and host forms in a nice interface…the only thing is I was unable to get it to work on Firfox for Mac, nor on Windows IE!!!
• Sean pointed out Open Source Mac which lists a low of open source projects available for Mac OSX
• If you’re in to local happenings and business analyses, check out Peter Krasilovsky’s Blog. Peter’s got good stuff there.

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Want to find out what a search engine probably sees in your swf file?

Then try the swf decompiler which will output the HTML of an swf file.

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Sounds like the Google Cube might not be what is being announced at CES.

Instead it will likely be announcing Video and Pack (and MSN is not too pleased).

The Google Video deal sounds like a an apple itunes competitor (with CBS and others already signed up)…although it is unclear if it will be a rental or a download like itunes.

Google Pack will be a downloadable package/software bundle that includes Google and third party software…a potential list exists here.

Sources tell us that Google pack will feature a Google-tweaked version of Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, antivirus software from Symantec, AdAware, Trillian, and Google’s own offerings, including Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Earth, Google Talk, and all of the toolbar action you can shake a stick at. Oh, and I left out one other item: the RealPlayer.

Bundling is nothing new for Google. I’ve seen their software bundled many places. I just find it interesting that they would offer this bundle on their site (how do they intend to promote or distribute?) and provide competing services such as Trillian software (which, as far as I know, does not connect to Jabber-based services like Google Talk).

Meanwhile, Yahoo is announcing Yahoo Go:

Yahoo! Go allows you to access the information and content that is important to you on whatever device you choose.

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So I’ve been using Clipmarks for a little while.

It installs a toolbar into Firefox (also available for IE) that allows you to either highlight what you want as you would with your mouse or mouseover boxes (usually defined by tables) to select areas to save.

Once you highlight what you want, you save it into your account, give it a title, add some tags, organize it into folders, and choose to keep it private or public.

It is different from the social bookmarking tools out there in that you are clipping/tagging/organizing section of a page rather than entire pages. That means, you can select an item from sale on a store’s search page without worrying the contents will change (it actually copies the contents, HTML and all…but without the styles). I’ve found the concept/tool interesting but I wonder if anyone will care about copyright issues should they be the one being added into clipmarks.

You can also search through the clipmark tags (either the public ones or your own). You can choose to follow a user if you see that they are consistently providing you with good content. Additionally, you can comment on the stories.

This is a nice tool that adds structure to the unstructured web by allowing you to tag, title, & organize page subcontents including paragraphs/sentences, pictures, and most anything else that appears on a page. It also could serve (once it gains enough users) as a Digg crossed with a Technorati: you can track/trend tags and each clip for a story can act as a “digg” or vote for popularity.

The cost of utilizing a toolbar for your product: potentially fewer downloads and, therefore, fewer adopters. The benefit of it: once installed, most people leave it there so using it and coming back is inevitable. Of course if you build a great product, you can counteract the cost of using the toolbar.

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Pablo sent over this link:

moving window: make sure javascript is turned on, your window is not maximized, and click on the link. Warning…didn’t work for me on Firefox/OSX but worked on Firebird/OSX as well as IE/Windows.

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found here:

CosmoPOD.com offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE’s Kiosk framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor. Read on for the interview.

…and, BTW, this link was found at digg. Check it out…it lets users submit stories and other users decide to “publish” it by giving it a vote ( you “digg it” ).

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