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Part 2 of the above interview about the possible Maryland Computer Tech Tax.

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Finally had a chance to watch all the clips of this move called "10 mph". It's an awesome film that is inspiring and reassuring for those doing what they love and a reminder to those of us who aren't! Take a look at the opener clip below and you decide where you want to be.

Today at 12noon Ill be on News channel 8 talking about HD DVD &
circuit city 90 day return deal, ATT new Centro phone & panasonic
rugged laptop. You can watch online here:
Http://www.cn8.tv

Have you heard the new lottery announcement by ridiculously rich Kleiner Perkins. He's the Venture Capital firm behind Google, Amazon and Intuit. Well he's setting aside $100 million in venture capital to invest in companies creating applications and services for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. As you may have heard Apple recently announced their SDK (software development kit). This kit will enable other companies to develop programs and software to run on the iPhone and iPod touch devices. While this will certainly garner major attention, who is following up to ensure his 'gold rush' announcement will follow thru all the way to $100,000,000? We will contact them directly and post an audio or video interview once we hear back.

So subscribe to this blog and stay tuned for more details on this.

In the meantime we will try and locate more details and post to this blog so we can make sure you have an equal opportunity to develop applications for the iPhone and not miss out on this opportunity.

Got an idea to take over the world or maybe a simple idea for a biz program or a hip hop application-- think big and think iPhone demographic - now go make it happen and get you share of the loot$.  

So what? The Blu-ray format has won! What did they win exactly? Their players had less technical features than the recent HD-DVD quitters and while wasting months and months of potential customer adoption time fighting HD-DVD they forgot the real battle may come from online movie downloads and from el-cheapo dvd upconverter players that make your existing dvd library look pretty darn good on HDTV sets. Ohh and by the way if your tv is 37 inches or less at the end of the day (except for real videophiles) it all pretty much looks the same to the average eye - so keep your money for now. For those of you who have already been burned invested in HD-DVD players or HD-DVD movies Toshiba has announced that they will not except returns! They said "They [customers] understood that there were two competing formats and understood that one of them would probably prevail ... so they made the decision to go with HD DVD.'' Ouch, thank you mam can I have another!

My recommendation is to hold off buying a Blu-ray player right now anyway because they are upgrading their units to include better features later this year. If you already have HD-DVD movies you might decide to buy the LG hybrid player to play Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. But then again why? With Slingbox, Apple TV, Netflix and if companies like Morgan Freeman's Clickstar can get some real momentum the whole idea  of buying a player to watch movies may be obsolete - just buy from our computers and easily watch them on our tv sets. Honestly,I wish the battle would have kept going throughout 2008, so it would have given more time for internet players to swoop in.

Just got of the air with celebrity talk show genius Roland Martin. If you haven't heard him on air in Chicago you probably have seem him on CNN. He is one of their most solid and energizing political contributors. We discussed the internet and the role it's playing in the election. Bottom line: the internet ha leveled the playing field for sure in the 2008 election. Look, big money campaigns that can buy big media days are over (like analog tv-that's a story for another day). If you were to choose the nominees based solely on the internet popularity of each candidate the results would be: Democrat = Barack Obama and Republicans = Ron Paul with a strong lead and the most money raised online than any other Republican candidate.

These are truly interesting times, I mean nowadays watching a primary with live tickers and play-by-play instant-live blogging updates - watching politics is like watching ESPN. I mean people are at bars with net-connected computers watching 50 inch screens and blogging! Will this translate into newer audiences, will this type of activity translate into new votes?

Your thoughts? Will the online momentum die out, does it have the power to bring out new non-voters to the booths - hit us up with a comment below!

PS-some of the websites I shared on Rolands show today are:

www.techpresident.com,   www.politico.com,   www.opensecrets.org 

Could the youth change the 2008 election and for once be recognized as a voting population that can make a difference in today's political process? It seems that some candidates are going the "tried and true" route of reaching to the obvious age groups and demographics. But this race has forever changed how elections will proceed in the future. With YouTube, Facebook and sites with college focused blogs on Politico.com. We might actually see a new group of voters at the poll booths. That brings up the next point. Below is a video from will.i.am front man of Black Eyed Peas & Jesse Dylan (son of Bob Dylan) they spent $30,000, pulled together 40 artists, musicians, atheletes and in 48 hours had a fully video produced and on the web inspired by the New Hampshire Obama speech. It has received close to 2 million views online. With 18-29 year olds saying the "web is their #1 source for campaign news" and 25% of Americans using the web for campaign news regularly (doubled since 2004 according to Pew Research) you can't deny that now may be the time for youth to really understand the issues and get out to vote. MTV tried with Rock the Vote and P Diddy is back with more than "Vote or Die" but it may be the silent, organic web that may be the ultimate influencer this go 'round!

One thing is for sure regardless of who you are voting for you can't argue the power and energy you feel from the video below (at least that's my opinion). You view and post a comment on your feedback.

Who asked for the transition? Consumers, Gov't, Industry? You guessed it! Well now the tv ads are running and consumers are more confused than ever. In some cases being convinced to buy HDTV set when all they really may need is a converter box or an SDTV (Standard Definition TV). No, we want people to consume, consume, consume. Well part of me wants to tell you to not wait, go ahead and request your  2 subsidized vouchers so you have them BUT there's a catch you have to use them within 3 months of acquiring them. And yes many, many people will need them not all people are using cable or satellite tv. 22.5 million coupons are expected to be available and the last day to make a request will be March unless something changes. Bottom line: if your tv uses rabbit ear antennas to watch tv you will need a converter box for your tv to work. But many consumers have no idea that this change is coming, and members of Congress are voicing concern over the lack of cooperation between federal agencies and the entertainment industry. The political clash comes as broadcasters, retailers, cable operators and regulators argue over how to educate consumers about the change.

So,what do you think about this transition, are you for or against it, post a comment below?

For more info logon to: www.dtvanswers.com or call 1-888-DTV-2009

Have you seen the ads yet? See the NAB ad here: http://www.dtvanswers.com/dtv_30spots.html

 

At least that's what researchers from Northwestern's Relationships Lab are saying in this article from the New York Times about how online matchmaking, not dating, sites work.

Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.

“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”

Also of interest in the article, EHarmony.com is allegedly responsible for 2% of the marriages in America last year, at least according the survey EHarmony.com comissioned. It seems that the main problem with online dating is that 1) people pick and choose potential dates on faulty criteria and 2) people project too many expectations onto others based off of intangible information (as Lux Nightmare, editor of Boinkology.com noted in this Digital Cafe segment).

 Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love from the NYT

This isn't an exaggeration - part of the problem of using a computer for me since the availability of broadband has been the constant distractions: IM, email, the Internet party.

Dark room is a free, lightweight text editor that looks like my web page from 1998. Sure, you could just fullscreen Microsoft Office, but there's something about the green on black text and lack of features that just makes it appealing. It also makes you feel like you're typing in the Matrix.

 

Spurred by outrage over the censorship of a video featuring Tom Cruise, an Internet group named "Anonymous" has declared war on Scientology. So far this has allegedly involved Denial of Service attacks on their servers, as well as other means of disruption detailed at Project Chanology. Operation Clambake, leading web source of information critical of the Church of Scientology, does not condone these actions. What do you think? Are these Internet vigilantes doing more harm than good? Or is the information being brought to light in wake of these publicized events justifying the actions?

 

There Can Be Only One - from Wired 

This chain of events was partially spurred on by Blogging Media Uber-conglomerate Gawker refusing to remove this video of Tom Cruise

Looking to make a small edit to a personal web page but don't know where to start? Haven't looked at HTML in a few years? Want to teach yourself how to build a web page from scratch? W3Schools has free tutorials covering topics like:

• XHTML
  
• CSS
• Flash
• Javascript
  

Ever felt curious, but never got around to experimenting with Linux? Now you really don't have any excuses. Wubi  makes it a snap to dual boot Linux on a Windows machine. The Wubi installer acts like any normal Windows program, so you can uninstall it from the Add/Remove section under the Control Panel if you decide that you don't want to have Linux on your computer anymore. No need to mess around with partitions! Setup is a snap, it took me a click or two to get the installation process moving, and a little bit of a wait while Wubi downloaded the necessary installation files for Ubuntu, the most widely adopted flavor of Linux out there right now. Unfortunately, wireless support for Ubuntu right out of the box is not quite there yet, there were a few solutions that I easily found that required going into the Terminal and putzing about.

Otherwise, Ubuntu might make the ideal operating system for a grandparent or someone with limited computer needs: email/web surfing/word processing. It's not nearly as susceptible to viruses as Windows and unlike a designer Apple product, it's free! It even comes with the open source Open Office, which is pretty compatible with Microsoft Office. I haven't tested it, but Ubuntu should run fine as soon as you install it on a desktop system, and its relatively low system requirements means that it should work fine on older computers.

Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you. 

Did you watch the 60 minutes piece (12-30-07) about technology and it's role in our lives? Essentially, the piece was dead on point - simplicity is king! Technology has become more complicated in our lives NOT easier. Engineers nowadays seem to push beyond the limits of features of what many called featuritis. Just because you can do more doesn't mean you should. But that's exactly what they do - pile on the features and then the marketing professionals say "great, now we have 7 more things to put in our brochure versus our competition". Meanwhile the consumer has no idea what these " proposed" features really mean. Trust me I still receive calls on my daily XM radio show looking for help on the most basic issues. One thing that has helped to make things more comforting is the book by MIT professor John Maeda entitled "The Laws of Simplicity". I had an opportunity to meet with John and hear him present his ideas. I hope more companies hire him and his peers to help us have more productive and intuitive technology.

So here's my question to you! Is technology getting easier or are you becoming more of a prisoner of it?