Mobile Ad Revenue

The Epicenter blog at Wired is running a story titled Mobile Ad Revenue to Exceed $2.7B in 2008. Now I don’t know about you, but for technology that only in the past 5 years became a possible medium for advertising I find this to be HUGE number. This means that people are using their mobile devices quite a bit and one can only assume that will increase.

It seems quite obvious that mobile usage will incrase, compared to a desktop a mobile is closer to a person, and far more likely to be used since it provides several functions. One can phone some one, check for places to eat at, find your location, compare prices, send a message, etc etc etc with a mobile and you are likely to do that at least a couple times a day.

I think this is what Google’s next revenue stream will be, ever since they have started to launch their mapping service, mobile version, their buisness directory, and their mobile phone platform Andriod. It makes a lot of sense that the next big thing in advertising will be the mobile web. Just imagine ten years from now you are on the street hungry, trying to find a good sushi palce to eat at. You can whip out your handy dandy mobile device, use google’s mapping service to list all the sushi places near you and Google can list advertisements for some of them, such as listing their new special. Then you will use Google’s search to find reviews for some of them where Google displays ads with every search. Then you finally use Gmail to send a quick message to all of your friends to meet you there in a little while, again where Google can display ads.

Think about it. Remember, 10 years ago something like the iPhone was unimaginable, so try to guess what could be sold 10 years from now.

Sub-prime madness

How does a very tiny segment of the mortgage industry cause a total meltdown ? You tell me. Ever since last August when the subprime mortgage sector in the United States of America collapsed on itself, it some how took down the rest of the country with it. This is just mindboggling to me. That is like saying that a broken headrest can some how cause an entire 747 to go down.

After spending some time thinking about this, it is clear like many how many others have written that it was a symphony of errors. Ranging from the people taking the loans that they could not afford, to the SEC who watched this whole thing happen, to the construction industry who caused a housing bubble to begin with, to the banks who bought risky loans and repackaged them as grade AAA securities, to investors who never checked in on what they were investing it, to the credit rating agencies who made it seem like the risky loans were so good, etc, etc, etc.

However clearly the biggest point here is where the small mortgage companies sold those risky loans to banks. That started a chain reaction where millions of people became exposed to such a tiny segment of the market. All fueled by capitalism and greed. I have been reading about the housing bubble and how it was very likely to burst any time since 2005. How was it no obvious that eventually that the price of houses would have to go down (even a little) which would cause all of these subprime loans to fall on themselves? It would become impossible then for people to pay back their loans once they became unfordable and it would be impossible for banks or other investors to recoup their loss by selling the property. Of course this just set of a spiral where more people defaulted on their loans because they couldn’t pay them back, meaning there was another house on the market, meaning the price of housing went down, meaning some one else couldn’t pay back their loan, etc etc etc.

The entire system was build upon the idea of constant growth, which everyone knows is impossible. Do this date, I have never heard of an economic cycle that continued to go up. Eventually it would have to slow down to a standstill, or even go back down a bit. This entire system was of course fueled by greed. This caused everyone involved to loose something, and became a full scale problem all because some bank was stupid enough to invest in risky loans. Obviously since they are risky one should not invest their money in it, however they did. Then everyone with pension funds to investments anywhere felt the pain.

That’s not the end of it though, because of murky investment reports and less regulation in the American banking sector no one really knew how much of everyone’s money was invested in something so plainly stupid. Who invests millions of dollars in high risk loans ? It’s called sub-prime for a reason stupid.

Writing Productivity Tools

Just mentioned yesterday on how Q10 helped me write better and now lifehack.org has a whole list of software and stuff to help you write better with Q10 on top. Check out the list for your self.

Notable inclusions on the list are:

 q10: A cool, minimalist full-screen text editor that includes a spellchecker and a couple other nice features. (Win Only; Alternatives: DarkRoom, also Win-only; DarkRoom, Mac-only but not free; Writer, online app)

Zotero: Firefox extension that allows you to capture bibliographic information from web pages, organize citations and documents, and create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice. Essential for anyone who does research on the web.

Zotero is a fantastic extension for Firefox if you do any research at all. Keeping track of your citations and creating them is a great pain and Zotero tuns that into no problem at all.

Becoming a Writer Seriously: Tom Colvin is a working writer who gives tips and advice on writing, including great in-depth reviews of software and otehr tools for writers.

Freelance Switch: Essential reading for freelancers of any sort, including writers.

How Not to Write: News, tips, and amusements for writers when they’re not writing.

Plus these great  ones on the list there are many more. Check it out and see if you can get anything to help you out!

Adobe AIR on Linux

Several blogs and news sites are reporting that Adobe has finally released an alpha of it’s AIR platform on to linux. It is available as an alpha download at their website. AIR is adobe’s vision for bridging the divide between web apps and desktop apps. Currently there are several AIR apps displayed at Adobe’s website.

The AIR platform allows developers to write web apps as they normally do, such has good integration with web services and by using JavaScript, but the AIR platform then adds desktop features such as drag and drop and package management. On linux, arstechnica reports that AIR programs could be uninstalled via the package manger.
Although AIR on Linux does not increase the amount of users significantly it shows Adobe’s commitment to the open source community. With features readily available available, it is possible that is will cause a growth in applications available for linux, since designers can create them once and have them run everywhere. Example applications such as the Google Analytics Reporting Suite are feature filled and bringing them to the linux desktop only increases the chance that people may move to linux, since it will be easy to use the same applications.

Q10: How a simple text editor can help you write better.

I have recently discovered Q10, a minimalist, yet feature filled fullscreen text editor for Windows. By having a screen full of text, it removes all distractions from the screen and forces you to look at what is important. The software boasts several features such as an alarm, customizations, statistics, notes, a spell check version, small size and a portable version for USB sticks.

Although it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office, it does allow some one to just sit down and write. Which I think is very important. By being presented with just the text and nothing else the user is forced to write something down and since it is full screen it prevents the annoying distractions of email, IM, facebook, youtube, etc. By using this you are more likely to write but also write better.

Clearly it isn’t designed to write an entire book but for a short essay where you want to get your ideas down first or for that blog post it is perfect.

Check it out and see if it makes a difference for you.

iOptOut

Michael Geist, Law Professor at the University of Ottowa responded to the frustrations of Canada’s do-not-call list and created iOptOut. He explains in his blog post, “Regular readers of my work will know that I have been frustrated by Canada’s do-not-call list, which contains far too many exceptions and has taken an embarrassingly long time to become operational.”

Under Canadian Law, all organizations must remove you from their call lists if you request to do so. However, the Canadian government has been very slow to create such a list. iOptOut allows a person to list their phone number, check off which organizations they do not wish to hear from again and iOptOut sends emails to the organizations asking that the phone numbers be taken off their lists.

I think this is a fantastic website to address the short comings of the Canadian government and finally allows people to get off those damn telemarketing lists.

Asa Dotzler’s interview with Michael Calore

Michael Calore at the Compiler blog has interviewed Asa Dotzler from Mozilla. In this interview Asa addresses the bloat problem and feature creep in Firefox.

Firefox initially was supposed to be a lean clean version of the Mozilla Application suite (Now Seamonkey) which the Mozilla Foundation thought to be too bloated and cumbersome to maintain. Thus a small standards compliant browser was born. As you all know, Firefox grew, and now controls approx 15% of the browser market. Firefox has a dazzling array of features, themes and extensions and the upcoming Firefox 3 (set to ship in June) only adds to this list.

Asa states in the interview that Firefox was initially a simple browser with an address bar rendering content. Nothing else. Then features were added if they were deemed essential and if they would be used by the majority (it not all) of users. Since those humble beginnings Firefox has become a behemoth of a browser, packing loads of features and taking lots of system resources.

Everyone at least once has experienced frustration with the vast amount of resources Firefox can consume. Since Firefox 2 shipped, thousands if not millions of users have complained about the poor memory management of Firefox. Memory leaks had become a huge problem for Firefox. Google’s Gmail would cause Firefox to become sluggish if the browser kept it open for too long.

However, with numerous improvements to Firefox 3’s memory management, one may think this is a problem of the past. Read the interview on how Asa describes on how Mozilla has dealt with such problems.

First Post!

A first blog post. Why start a blog ? What could be the motivation for writing something that most likely no one else will read ?

In my case it is to give me something to do when bored, combining my interest in technology with a skill that needs refining during a time where I don’t do anything. Keep watching this blog for more!