Archive for the 'PPP' Category

The Internet and television has been gearing up for convergence for a long time. Some people thought it was going to happen a long time ago. Only recently have we seen IPTV start to take off. These IPTV shows, with the exception of DLTV, are usually pre-recorded and not intended to be watched live. ACCSelect.com is one company that seeks to change that. If you want to watch ACC Sports, there aren’t too many choices other than going to the school and watching it as it happens. But now you can get, for example, Georgia Tech Sports on ACCSelect.com. There is certainly a market for college sports other than Football. The market may not be big enough for cable companies to carry them, but that’s the beauty of the Internet. The delivery mechanism cuts out the middle-man and allows niche programming to be sold and delivered directly from the producers to the viewers. This is an exciting step in the right direction. Let’s hope that more live content like this becomes available. Finally there is an alternative to the Lowest Common Denominator!

We’re not moving any time soon, I hope. But we sure do seem to have a lot more stuff than our apartment can hold. We have an extra storage closet on our balcony, and the thing is filled up to the ceiling with boxes of books, computer equipment, holiday decorations, and all sorts of things we just don’t want to get rid of, but really can’t use very often. When the time comes I’m glad that I found the Self Storage Directory – Moving.bz to help me find the best deals. I almost never pay full price for anything if I can avoid it. Moving.bz lets you compare prices and get quotes from different storage companies in your area. They also have links to deals on moving supplies and moving companies for when you decide to take your things out of storage and just get a bigger place instead.

I have worked on some websites and tried to make those pages show up close to the top spot on Google before. This can be very difficult to achieve because the exact algorithms that Google uses are not public knowledge. It is sometimes baffling why a less relevant site comes up above yours. SEO in Austin, help Texas is the specialty of Apogee Search. They are the largest Search Engine Optimization firm in Austin and the fastest growing in all of Texas. It is amazing to me that search engine placement has become so important to companies that they are willing to pay others to help them rise to the top.

Blog advertising website PayPerPost.com received $3 Million in venture capital according to a story by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. PayPerPost has polarized the blogging community. Many bloggers see nothing wrong with making a little extra cash on their blogs. After all, many bloggers have to pay for hosting and the proceeds from most forms of advertising is abysmal at best. PayPerPost users can make a few hundred dollars each month if they advertise as much as possible. Some people are just looking to cover their hosting and bandwidth costs.

I think PayPerPost is an excellent idea whose time has come. Small and new companies can get their name out there fast for just a few thousand dollars, and bloggers get the maximum benefit possible. It promoted blogging just as much as it promotes advertisers products. Some people think it’s deceptive, but that’s only if the bloggers make it so. I think most bloggers know which opportunities they will take based on whether they believe in the products being shown. I enjoy showcasing new exciting technologies on this blog, and I don’t mind making a little bit of money while doing it. If I had found out about these people on my own I would probably blog about them anyway, so I’m just getting paid to do what I would have done for free otherwise. Click the second link at the beginning of this post to read about the company and listen to an interview with PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy.

PayPerPost.com showed off a great example of Guerilla Marketing on The Today Show a couple of weeks ago. The Today Show is filmed in front of a big window facing the street where people congregate to watch the show and hold up signs on live TV. These guys gave out signs with their logo on it and markers so people could write on the signs and hold them up. They also gave out a bunch of t-shirts for everyone outside the window to wear. Check it out!

FineTooth is the fastest and easiest solution for converting paper documents into easily searchable digital information. With their Contract Management Software you have instant access to information no matter where and how the hard-copies are stored. The really interesting part is that their software can read through narrative contracts and automatically index bullet-points, milestones, and dates. This is in the same field of computational linguistics that I’m interested in. It’s amazing that their software can understand these complex documents well enough to pull out this information. We’re getting closer and closer to a robot that can interact with you like C-3PO can. This is exciting stuff!

There is a new blog for those who want to advertise on blogs or wish to have advertising added to their blogs. It is by a company mentioned in a previous post called PayPerPost.com. They allow blogs with lighter traffic to make money the way the big blogs do while getting the word out on some brand new things from smaller companies. Check it out if you are interested.

Jason Calacanis, also known as the Web 2.0 Copycat, is complaining again about an idea that he probably wished he had come up with himself. After copying digg.com and paying digg’s top submitters to start the clone site for Netscape, he is now taking jabs at PayPerPost.com, a company allowing blog advertising revenue to be earned by smaller blogs so that smaller companies can get their products out there. I don’t know why he hates the idea so much, but it seems to be quite popular with advertisers as well as bloggers. I say more power to you PayPerPost.com! Maybe Mr. Calacanis is just upset that he hasn’t figured out a way to rip it off yet.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve needed to lug a computer monitor out from its usual location and sit it on the floor, plug it into the wall and a headless computer. I have a 700MHz Pentium 3 in the living room hooked up to the television working as a media hub. I also have a slower machine working as a print/scanner server and web server. Every so often something goes screwy and I can’t log into one of them over the network. I have thought time and time again that what I really need is a way to hook these boxes up to my laptop and use the keyboard, touchpad, and LCD screen to control and get feedback from the headless systems. I have thought about this but never realized that this was really possible. Well, as it turns out, it is possible!

Epiphan Systems, Inc. must have run into a lot of people with the same wish I had. Maybe they had wished they could use something similar internally, I don’t know. Whatever the reason and however they came up with the idea, here it is! The KVM2USB hooks up to a laptop’s USB port. It has three connectors on the other side: VGA, PS/2 Mouse, and PS/2 Keyboard. Now you can service any machine that is usually not controlled with a keyboard and standard display without a bulky monitor and separate keyboard and mouse. Normally you wouldn’t be able to carry all of the things you need by yourself in one trip, but now you can. Maybe some day they will have an official version that works on laptops running Linux, but you can get a binary only driver that will allow it. Take a look at the KVM2USB Technical Specifications.

This really has the potential to become the tool of choice for the system repair technician.

I just love trivia games. My brain is like a sponge soaking up useless little bits of information. I have enjoyed watching Jeopardy ever since I can remember. I always look forward to playing Trivial Pursuit at parties. I love watching documentaries and increasing my knowledge. Learning is fun, even if most public school curricula don’t teach children that. Now I’ve found a fun resource for unusual trivia. The Aviva Trivia Blog includes such varied information as 10 Things I Didn’t Know About Jukeboxes, Weird Jobs, and Useless Facts About Shaving.

I will be checking this site regularly to see what other weird trivia they come up with. Take a look and let me know what you think! Do you have any weird trivia that most people don’t know about? Let’s see what you’ve got in the comments.