Internet Business Daily

I have seen 4 separate cases this weekend of my friends on facebook “liking” something that was clearly not intended. The links that are “liked” always have very catchy titles such as the image below. I clicked on the link and it took me to a page which just said “click here to continue.” I was smart enough not to click that link but I’m sure it would have installed malware on my computer. The image below is what the phishing attempt looked like (definition: phishing):

Five minutes later another friend of mine posted something to my wall saying something along the lines of “OH MY GOD I cannot believe how much MONEY I made in just 1 month.” The link sent me to an affiliate marketing play, one that is very obvious to an affiliate marketer. It was a page meant to look like a news website that promoted a “make money” offer.

I told all of my friends to change their passwords and delete the links. If you see any of these shady links on your profile page or see things you “like” that you don’t remember clicking, delete the link and change your password immediately. Be careful online!

For Christmas, one of the gifts I received was Apple’s new magic mouse, which you can buy here. I absolutely love this thing. The Magic Mouse is the total revamp of Apple’s previous Mighty Mouse. Apple has take multi touch technology and placed it in this mouse. The entire top of the mouse is one big touch pad that can accept multiple gestures.

There is one glaring problem with the new Magic Mouse, which is the fact that Apple decided to not build any extended functionality into the multi touch surface. The only thing it allows you to do is flick up and down, which represents scrolling and two finger swipe right and left which cycles forward and backward in your browser. With such a powerful piece of hardware, I wonder why they made the software so limited.

Alas, all is not lost. Some awesome developers came up with Magic Prefs. Magic Prefs allows all the functionality that the Magic Mouse was built for. Pinch to zoom, three finger click for expose, and much more is now available if you install Magic Prefs (shown below). With this software, the Magic Mouse has become the best mouse on the market. It has become the standard for all other mouse makers to be compared to, just like the iPhone did to the mobile phone market. If you don’t already have the Magic Mouse, I definitely suggest getting it.

I saw this video on Digg and just had to post it. It explains in simple terms one of the most interesting (and still not understood) properties of quantum physics. There’s no way I’ll be able to explain it, so just check it out:

The coolest part is definitely the fact that the way quantum physics behaves changes depending on if someone is measuring it (looking at it).

This robot (by Robotex) is a series of smaller pieces connected by powerful magnets. When the pieces are broken apart, they sense each other, seek out the other pieces and reassemble automatically. This is very cool and very scary, kind of like the big dog robot I wrote about a couple weeks ago. It is amazing how far we have come with robotics. This stuff is very interesting to me, so much so that I am adding a new category to my blog, “robotics.”

Cloud Computing Basics
Google’s newest service it is offering is access to its “cloud.” Cloud is short for cloud computing, or distributed computing. Basically, how the cloud works, is by making lots of everyday home computers act like one giant supercomputer through the use of software, also called virtualization. This software, named MapReduce, is one of the main reasons why Google is so far ahead of its competitors. Instead of having to buy and maintain an expensive server that can support millions of users, cloud computing allows for lots of low cost machines to accomplish the same task. Whenever a machine breaks, it can be replaced without disturbing the cloud.

Cloud as a Service
Now that Google is offering its cloud as a service, everyone will be able to tap into the same machines that power such products as Gmail, Google Search, and Google Docs. There are both positives and negatives associated with this. Firstly, we will be giving Google even more information about ourselves and our websites. Like they need any more competitive data. Second, there will be limits on the amount of processing power each developer can use. To being, Google will offer 500mb and up to 5 million pageviews as part of its web app engine. Another negative is that there will most likely be little customization possibility.

On the positive side, developers will have the peace of mind to know their apps and websites are running on the most stable servers in the world. There will be virtually zero down time, and speed will be off the charts.

What Does This Mean?
Google is far from the first company to have this type of offering. Amazon already has a very similar and successful cloud service called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). From a business aspect however, this is still a very smart move by CEO Eric Schmidt. Google already has the “biggest” cloud on earth, and a transition from the desktop windows system to a fully online computer network is imminent. The money will be in which computer network all the information sits on. If I am Google, and I am hosting all of your information and applications, I can charge you to use it. Although Google says its purpose is to index, sort, and make easy to find all the information in the world, they want to be the gatekeepers and charge for access. Whether the charge is direct, or through the viewing of ads, Google still profits.

This is definitely one of the coolest/weirdest things I’ve ever seen. Does anyone remember that video of the dog-like robot running in circles attached to a crane? It jumped and did flips and looked incredible in the process. Now the people who brought you that robot (Boston Dynamics) have released it into the wild. In this video, the next generation of the “Big Dog” robot is demonstrated and the advancements are unbelievable.

Check out the video at 0:35 for an insight into the future of robotics. The “dog” was able to instantly respond to someone who tried to kick it over and recovered flawlessly. Later in the video (1:20), the robot slips on ice and its life-like reaction put chills in me. The sound this machine makes is pretty annoying though. Check it out:

**UPDATE: Looks like Google deleted this movie from their archives…sorry everyone!

This has got to be one of the greatest geek movies of all time. It is the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and their relative companies. This is a much watch for any techy or computer geek, so here ya go!

Google’s Domination Continues
I was very excited today to see that the company I work for had been selected to join Google’s New Video Distribution and Sponsorship Pilot. This is the second step in a process that will make Google the king of all Internet video the way they dominate contextual advertising. The first thing I noticed was the new option in my adsense account. Here is what it looks like:

This was what I saw on the Adsense setup screen. Upon clicking this, I was taken to a page where a list of channels could be selected. These channels include clips from music, entertainment, finance, lifestyle, and sports categories.

How It Works
How it works is very interesting. Basically a publisher (like me) comes along and decides they want to try this program out. The first thing I do is select a channel that I feel would best integrate into my site. Since my blog is about Internet Business, I would probably choose something like the Wall Street Journal channel. I then grab the ad code just like their contextual ads and place it anywhere on my site. A (brand-new) Google video play is embedded into my page and that’s all from my end!

Now that the video player is embedded into my page, all someone needs to do is start watching. The video player only starts buffering when someone clicks play, but it shuffles through frames to entice the clicks. When someone clicks play is where the fun begins. The videos (yes multiple videos) load up in a play list and start playing. When one video finishes, an ad is automatically put in between that video and the next to be played. The easiest way to describe this is like a television channel. The videos continue to play until you leave the page or press pause, with ads between each video.

What About Revenue?
Of course no one (atleast no one wanting to make money) would put Google’s video player on their site without the promise of big bucks, and Google fully understands this. They have devised a rather brilliant system to pay the three parties involved with these videos. The publisher gets paid each time someone views an ad, even if they don’t view the entire ad. This means they will have to click play on a video and watch the entire thing, then when the ad loads up the publisher gets paid. As for the content provider (video creator), they get paid for each time their video is viewed. And last but not least, Google takes their nice little cut at the end. So it looks like everyone is happy.

This Is Only A Test
This pilot will only be running for 1 month and ends March 8th, so it’s ending pretty soon. I was late to find out about it but will try to implement the video player into one of my companies sites before the end date. I will report back to everyone on how the player is doing in terms of revenue.

I would like to take a moment to thank one of the best features of WordPress: Akismet. Without Akismet I would have to go through every single spam comment that comes my way, which is a whole lot. I get hundreds of these comment spams per day and it would take me hours to go through them all. Akismet checks the content of the messages against a database of known spammers and automatically filters them out of your comments inbox in WordPress. To give you an idea of how much spam I actually get, here is a screen shot of an Akismet message from within WordPress.

3,825 spam messages caught without me having to even look at it if I didn’t want to! I do scan them over before deleting just to make sure it did not filter a real comment, which has only actually happened twice. Since the time I first had Akismet, only about 5 or so spam messages have slipped through. I am very impressed with their service and would like to thank them.

UPDATE: download Akismet here.

Here’s a video of a pretty cool 3D desktop made for Linux called Beryl. This is just a short video of the features that Beryl has. In my opinion some of the cool effects accomplished by Beryl will just waste processing power/time, but damn it looks cool! I have yet to try it out so maybe it adds some functionality beyond just looking really nice. Check it out: