Although its really hard for me to wrap my head around it, TechCrunch is reporting that Google has released a white paper stating that as of September the company was processing 20,000 terabytes of data per day. I guess that's what the company has been hiding in all those new data centers it has been quietly acquiring lately.
Read the full story at TechCrunch.
Amazon is currently running a contest and where you can win the chance to buy stuff from them at a very steep discount. The odds you will win are probably zero, but the chance to buy cool swag at a crazy steep discount is worth the 2 minutes it takes to fill out a contest entry - especially if you already have an amazon account.
Here's how it works: 1) go to amazon and vote on your favorite product for each of the six product smack downs the company is offering, 2) come back the day the winners are announced, 3) if you pick the product that wins (hint, you can click to see the current leaders) then you are entered into the drawing to be one of the lucky bastards who can pick up the gear on the cheap and flip have it for yourself.
The product showdowns are as follows:
Thurs Nov 22: Nintendo Wii ($79) v. Xbox 360 (arcade) ($219) v. Playstation 3 (40gb) ($319)
Fri Nov 23: Panasonic L1 SLR ($499) v. Panasonic SD-1 Camcorder ($299) v. Panasonic FX-30 ($74)
Sat Nov 24: Jakks Cyclops ($14) v. Leapfrog Clickstart ($17) v. Razor E100 ($29)
Sun Nov 25: Toshiba HDDVD ($149) v. Samsung Blu-Ray ($149) v. Tivo HD ($89)
Mon Nov 26: HP Laptop ($299) v. Magellan GPS ($99) v. 1 ct diamond earrings ($499)
Tues Nov 27: Samsung 46" HD TV ($719) v. KitchenAid Mixer ($69) v. Roomba 4110 ($69)
There is also a link to the promotion's website on the Amazon.com main page.
Which promotion would all of you out there most like to win?
The title says it all. According to the Associated Press, a Chinese couple has tried to name their child the ubiquitous "@" symbol. Apparently there are at least 60 million people in China who have names comprised of "unfamiliar characters."
According to the article:
The father "said 'the whole world uses it to write e-mails and translated into Chinese it means 'love him,'"' Li Yuming, the vice director of the State Language Commission, said at a news conference.
I guess "۞" and "©" were already taken...
Image by: vlauria
After the MySpace founders cashed out with more money than the GDP of a small nation, a slew of Web2.0-ish start-ups graced our lives with social network rip offs or vaporware. A more recent challenger is Spock which crosses a social network with a search engine. Boring you say? Well things get more interesting if you hear some background on the service.
Here are some things you should know about Spock a) you don't need to sign up for the service, you may already be there without knowing it, b) the company created a mad libs type application where people could fill in the name of a random person and related nouns, verbs and adjectives, c) the company populated its initial profiles with much of the data received from this application.
You can probably guess where this is going. If I'm filling out a mad libs type form with, say the name of my best friend. I will probably be immature and include a description that is probably completely untrue. For example, if someone were to say "John Cramer" is a cross dressing trapeze artist from Prague in the application. A user searching for "John Cramer" on Spock may well find those terms associated with his profile. The company also has a spider that roams the internet and looks for text associated with the various names.
As Wired recently said, if Spock becomes popular - you may have no choice but to sign on so you can police your reputation.
I can't attest to the accuracy of the results. I searched for my name and those of a few friends and (luckily) didn't have a profile.
If you feel the need to try out Spock, you can find a review here. It was the first few matche I found via Google and happens to say some relatively positive things about the site. I think I share the observations of Web Strategist when it wrote that it seems like Spock is something that Google could create relatively quickly and dwarf the site in no time.
