Category Archives: Money
Lytro’s Light Field Camera
Wow! What a cool idea for a camera! Take a picture and don’t worry about focusing – you can focus later on an spot on the photo. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself! Go ahead . . . I’ll wait . . .
Isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever seen? From what I’ve read, Lytro is planning on building their own camera with this technology embedded. However, I’m hoping that they license the technology to other camera manufacturers, too.
Supercomputer vs. Jeopardy Players
Some of you may remember that in 1996 and 1997, we saw a chess match between then-champion Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue, an IBM computer created to beat the best chess players. It lost in 1996, won in 1997, and was then dismantled.
IBM is at it again. They’ve created a supercomputer system named Watson that will play Jeopardy with two of Jeopardy’s best players between February 14th and 16th of this year. One million dollars is on the line. All goes to charity if Watson wins; half to charity and half to the player if one of the other two players wins. Either way, artificial intelligence will be in the spotlight once more.
Mark your calendars!
E-Rate Changes for 2011
Changes to the E-Rate program will go into effect as of January 3, 2011 and will be implemented in the July 2011-June 2012 year. The changes fall into 3 conceptual categories (from Federal Register):
- Providing more flexibility to select and make available the most cost-effective broadband and other communications services;
- Ability to lease dark or lit fiber from the most cost-effective provider;
- Schools can now allow their communities to use E-rate-funded services outside of school hours;
- Supports eligible services to the residential portion of schools that serve students with special circumstances;
- Indexing the funding cap to inflation;
- Seeking proposals for a limited pilot to establish best practices to support off-campus wireless for portable learning devices outside of regular school/library operating hours.
- Simplifying and streamlining the E-rate application process;
- Reduce administrative burden on applicants;
- Remove technology plan requirement for priority one services;
- Facilitate disposal and recycling of obsolete equipment that received E-rate support.
- Improving safeguards against waste, fraud, and abuse.
- Codify requirement that competitive bidding processes be fair and open.
- Includes eligible services list for funding year 2011.
Much of this supports the priorities of the National Broadband Plan.
Circuit Boards as Art
It truly amazes me what artists can use. In this case, Theo Kamecke creates furniture using the unique designs found on circuit boards.
Click on the image to see a much better rendering of this piece — it’s truly incredible and beautiful.
More Old Spice News
Two more things on the Old Spice Twitter advertising campaign.
I forgot that one of the spin-offs was from Brigham Young University’s Harold B Lee Library — and it’s great!
However, a second issue came up during the campaign. Many critics were assuming that, although it was clever, Old Spice’s revenues would not rise because of this social media effort. Well . . .
According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent.
It sounds like the company definitely benefited financially. This gives those of us in non-profits hope.
E-Glasses
Raise your hand if you like wearing bifocals! Trifocals? Help may be on the way . . .
Later this year, you may be hearing about “e-glasses,” which adapt to where you’re looking with the click of a button. One click, close reading; another click, distance; a third click, mid-distance. From CNET:
The lenses are made with a type of liquid crystal, sandwiched between traditional plastic lenses, that reacts according to the electrical charge passing through it. The frames run on rechargeable batteries. Pressing the button sends a low-wattage jolt through the liquid crystal, which expands or contracts to change the shape of the lenses, thereby changing the focal range.
Google’s PacMan
Remember the day Google put PacMan on the searching home page? It was May 21, 2010 — PacMan’s 30th birthday. You could actually play the game — it was great! It was such a hit that they’ve kept it available for everyone.
RescueTime, a blog which deals with attention data, did a calculation to determine how much time was lost due to Google’s PacMan. Here are the results:
- 4,819,352 hours were spent playing or watching Google’s PacMan; time spent searching Google was above this
- $120,483,800
But wasn’t it worth it?
Internet Trends – Morgan Stanley
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has been an analyst since at least 1995, covering both Netscape’s and Google’s initial public offerings (IPO). In April 2010, Meeker presented “Internet Trends,” a look at the future of the Internet through the eyes of Morgan Stanley. If you are into statistics and graphs — this is for you!
Some specifics from the presentation:
- The major point of the presentation is the “mobile will be bigger than desktop Internet in five years.” Then they go on to explain how they came to that conclusion . . . in detail.
- They propose that mobile Internet will pass desktop Internet usage sometime in 2013
- The advancement of mobile is due to the convergence of 5 trends:
- 3G – 3G penetration is expected to be 74% in North America as of 2014
- Social networking – globally, there are 859,000,000 unique users, growing 32% per year; 471,000,000 are on Facebook
- Video – as you might expect, video is driving the increase in mobile traffic; by 2014, video is predicted to be 69% of all global mobile traffic
- VoIP – if Skype were a carrier, they would be the largest carrier in the world
- Impressive mobile devices – specifically, the iPhone, iTouch, and the iTunes store. In addition, as of February 2010, the iPhone operating system (OS) had 44% of the smartphone OS market and Android had 42%.
- On worldwide networks, data is the predominant type of traffic — up to 90% on NTT docomo, the predominant mobile phone company in Japan, and up to 70% on Vodafone, the largest mobile telecommunications company.
- Mobile users are more willing to pay for instant access to services; 30% of desktop users vs 76% of mobile users. Why? Mobile commerce includes:
- Easy-to-use, secure payment systems available, e.g., iTunes
- Most content carry prices of under $5
- Much content is in proprietary system, thereby decreasing possibility of uploading pirated content
- Well-known store fronts, e.g., iTunes
- Personalization
This is a great read, but it takes times to understand the statistics.
Saving on Printing Costs
In an earlier post, I mentioned that the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay had changed their default font and, as a result, saved on ink costs. Since then, I found that Printer.com, a Dutch company that compares printers and their costs, did a study encompassing more fonts. In their results, they found that Century Gothic is the most economical font, followed closely by Ecofont, Times Roman, Calibri, and Verdana.
In the comments, however, I saw a very practical idea — print in draft when you can. That probably saves more money than using any of the fonts above.
Recharging Batteries – via USB
USBCell is currently selling rechargeable AAA batteries. The interesting thing is that they use your USB port to re-charge.
The cost almost $20 each. Re-chargeable 9-volt and cell phone batteries are in the works. Not sure if this is helpful or not, but it’s certainly different!
