Power Pal

I've been trying to get up-to-speed on the mobile industry these days and had a thought on search and implications for marketers. All this may be obvious, but I figure I'd jot it down while I'm thinking about it. I was looking into all the new location based gaming companies starting up these days. In looking over what companies like Foursquare , Gowalla , and Booyah are doing, it seems like it introduces new opportunities for how search and targeted advertising will work. Each of these games is producing a rich amount of content regarding where, when, and how consumers behave in the real world. This is incredibly valuable if you're a retailer or service provider. Apply some analytics to this data set and you could form completely new segmentation strategies based on behaviors rather than demographics. For example, make offers to those people that may actually respond to them based on their previous behaviors (e.g. they don't always frequent the same locat...

Read a good article in Business Week titled " Apple vs. Google " about how the two companies are on a collision course for each other. The recent acquisitions of AdMob (by Google for $750M) and Quattro Wireless (by Apple for $275M) and the uncanny similarities between the iPhone and the Nexus One highlight how similar the two firms strategies may be. They both want to dominate the mobile industry. According to the analysts, mobile is the next key battleground for digital riches: The key battleground in the near term is mobile computing. Analysts who once tingled when talking about the Internet are getting that same old feeling over mobile's potential. Morgan Stanley's ( MS ) Mary Meeker predicts that within five years more users will tap into the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs. Desktop Internet use led to the rise of Google, eBay ( EBAY ), and Yahoo, but the mobile winners are still emerging. "Now is the time to get going," says Doug Clinton...

I know very little about it.  But if I ever do need to, I thought this was a good post on VentureBeat - " The top 12 trends of the video game industry ".

There are a few articles and blog posts I read recently that highlight some exciting emerging technologies for the future of electronic displays, networking, and interfaces.  One I saw a few months back was Microsoft's 2019 vision video  (scroll down for the long version).  It's a 5 min video that runs through not only advances in physical devices and materials, but also associated networking and interfaces.  Another one was Nokia's Morph concept.  It's their take on the impact that nanotechnology can have on devices. It looks pretty science fiction-like when you watch the videos, but it's closer to reality than you would think.  The obvious one that's already a reality in the Microsoft video is the Surface technology.  I just came across the flexible OLED display technology that Sony is working on.  Awesome to see a working prototype.  Another one is a company called Plastic Logic  who have built display technologies where transistors are placed on plastic ...

I just read this posting in VentureBeat about the FCC's $7.2 billion investment in broadband infrastructure coming from the stimulus package.  The investment is focused on developing the rural and underserved areas of the US.  What I found most interesting was how far behind the US is in terms of broadband penetration around the world.  We are 20th!  Here's the excerpt: To understand the vital nature of these hearings, it’s important to first understand how widespread the lack of broadband access is in the U.S. It might come as a surprise, but the U.S. is at at No. 20 in the world for per- capita  broadband penetration. A study by  Point Topic says that only 26.4% of people in the country have regular broadband access. To give you some context,  another report issued by the  Brookings  Institute and MIT  determined that for every percent increase in per- capita  penetration, 300,000 more jobs are created. This is an opportunity that can’t go overlooked right now. Incidentally,...

I've heard the term cloud computing thrown around a lot and never quite knew what it was.  I quickly Google'd it.  I may be simplifying things, but it basically sounds like software (or hardware)-as-a-service.  Amazon's Web Services ( AWS ) is likely the leader in this category.  It seems like a natural evolution in computing - just a further packaging and abstraction of computing power.  I think what's important about it, though, is that from a strategic perspective, IT will become less and less of a differentiator among companies.  In the long-run, if everyone can quickly integrate and bring applications from a salesforce.com or AWS online in their business quickly, IT in and of itself will become more commoditized as an input in the value chain.  Or maybe it will kick-off another round of IT innovation that could serve as a differentiator.

As a Cal lifetime alum, I get a free subscription to Forefront, a quarterly publication the College of Engineering puts out. The Fall issues cover was titled " Green Future ". There were a few really cool ideas in there that researchers in the engineering department are pushing forward. There were two that I wanted to comment on. The first was a project to recapture waste heat by creating nano-scale devices that convert heat to elecricity. The premise is to use the " Seebeck Effect " (thermoelectric effect) in cheap organic materials to produce electricity from all of the wasted heat that's created in burning fossil fuels. Apparently, for every 1 watt of power, you waste 1.5 watts of energy in waste heat. That's a ridiculous amount of waste. The world's power output is somewhere in the 10 trillion watt range, so that means there's 15 trillion watts being wasted. If you could recapture even a small fraction of that with these types of thermoelectric ...

Read an article in Forbes about how Jack Goeken is working on a company to popularize the LED lightbulb. The company Borealis Lighting (by PolyBrite International) currently have LED bulbs priced at $10 - $14 that will deliver six times the light per unit of electricity that an incandescent does. A 60-watt incandescent send out 13 lumens per watt, a comparable fluorescent 50, the LED 85. I can't wait until these are cheaper and hit the stores.

Technology is really amazing. We saw the opera Don Giovanni this past Friday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts . It was broadcast in high definition live from the San Francisco Opera . The opera was simulcasted (via satellite) free to four different venues for a combined audience of 10,000 people. The other venues were in Davis, Santa Rosa, and San Jose. I never would have imagined such a use for technology, but it was really impressive. The opera house's next big experiment is coming in September where they'll be simulcasting the opera Samson and Delilah in AT&T Park (again for free!). The ballpark has the highest quality outdoor high definition scoreboard in North America. Should be cool.

I came across these two new technologies from Microsoft and Google today. Microsoft Surface - It's a 30-inch tabletop display that allows several people to work simultaneously using just their hands without a mouse or keyboard. You can grab data with your hands and move information around between objects using gestures and touch. I've seen various versions of this in development. The new iPhone has some of these features as well where you can modify photos using touch. Apparently this is going to reach the market in Winter 2007. Pretty cool. Google Street View Maps - Google added an additional feature to their maps application where you can get a "street view" of a location that you've mapped. It's essentially a 360 degree view from street level that you can rotate and walk along. I think Microsoft Live Maps had something like this where you could virtually drive around a city, but this is much cleaner, much faster, and far better executed than Micros...