simplicity

I recommend searching youtube for their stuff. They have got some good videos.

What started as a college a cappella pastime became a ticket to the big time for 10 Indiana University graduates. Straight No Chaser had actually broken up until a YouTube video became a sensation. Suddenly, a record contract beckoned.

Source – YouTube sensation becomes huge hit

I have been following this story since it broke a few weeks ago. I am highly interested in how this occurred and why this occurred. It is just quite fascinating to me for some reason. I think I have always been gravitated to stories about how people make their millions, what type of businesses they run, what type of lives they live. That would explain my nauseating love for non-fiction, but at the same time I am also intrigued with their downfall and why that downfall occurs.

This is a long read (~5400 words) and I do not recommend it unless you have the time or do not know of what has been occurring. I was hoping to get a lot more of the ‘how’, ‘where’, and ‘why’ but so is the rest of the world.

The juggernaut began to sputter this fall as investors, rattled by the financial crisis and reaching for cash, started taking money out faster than Mr. Madoff could bring fresh cash in the door. He was arrested on Dec. 11 at his Manhattan apartment and charged with securities fraud, turned in the night before by his sons after he told them his entire business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

The case is still viewed more with mystery than clarity, and Mr. Madoff’s version of events can only be drawn from statements attributed to him by federal prosecutors and regulators as he has not commented publicly on the case.

But whatever else Mr. Madoff’s game was, it was certainly this: The first worldwide Ponzi scheme – a fraud that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any similar scheme in history, entirely eclipsing the puny regional ambitions of Charles Ponzi, the Boston swindler who gave his name to the scheme nearly a century ago.

Source – Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders – NYTimes.com

Absolutely fantastic.

Only the Danish could get away with something like this (but how great would it be to see Amazon do commercials like this). Danish ecommerce site Fleggaard recently made the commercial below. I don’t know if it was shown on Danish television (I’m trying to find out), but I wouldn’t be surprised.

It most definitely contains nudity and is NSFW. I think it would be just as good without the exposed breasts, though. If you don’t watch it, the highlight is that dozens of topless Danish women link hands during a skydive to advertise a Siemens washing machine for 4,999.00 DKK, or about 0. It doesn’t seem like such a great price, but I’ll buy one anyway if they deliver to California.

Link:

Source – Quite Simply The Best Commercial Ever Made

Manly Bicycle for sale

Bike for sale

What kind of bike? I don’t know, I’m not a bike scientist. What I am though is a manly guy looking to sell his bike. This bike is made out of metal and kick ass spokes. The back reflector was taken off, but if you think that deters me from riding at night, you’re way wrong. I practiced ninja training in Japan’s mount Fuji for 5 years and the first rule they teach about ninja biking is that back reflectors let the enemy know where you are.

Saw this shared by a friend in Google Reader. A great listing for what I assume is an amazing bike:

This thing is listed as a street bike which is man-code for bike tank.

This has become pretty common place. Towards the end of the year Google releases this list and it’s always interesting to see what’s made it to the top.

Google has just released its annual Zeitgeist report for 2008. The report brings together all the search data that Google collects throughout the year and highlights some of the most interesting things. And this year, for the first time, it includes specific data for 30 different counties, according to the Google Blog post.

So what’s in the report? Well globally, the fastest rising terms the year were as follows:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

Yes, former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin capture our minds, if not our hearts, this year. She managed to beat out the Chinese Olympics, and interestingly enough, the rather specific, “facebook login.” And while Democrat Barack Obama may have won the United States’ Presidency, he too lost to Palin in search race, coming in at number 6.

However, for the U.S. Zeitgeist data, Obama was the number one fastest rising result last year. Along with Palin, he beat Facebook and the iPhone on that list. Though, once again, it was Palin who took him down in Google News and Google Image searches.

This year’s Zeitgeist also lists the top ten most searched for social networks in the world:

1. facebook
2. myspace
3. hi5
4. orkut
5. linkedin
6. nasza klasa
7. netlog
8. mixi
9. meetup
10. odnoklassniki

It should be no real shock that Facebook topped MySpace, as that has been the trend for some time, but how about networks like Friendster not even making the top 10? It fell behind quite a few of the foreign ones.

The economy was also on a lot of people’s minds in 2008. The top searches in that area included:

1. financial crisis
2. depression
3. bailout
4. mortgage crisis
5. wall street
6. oil
7. stock market
8. subprime
9. credit crisis
10. housing crisis

2008 also saw quite a few films come out based on comic books. Zeitgeist has a nice graph breaking the search data for those down. Not surprisingly, Batman, the main character in what is now the second largest grossing domestic film of all-time, The Dark Knight, rose above all others.

In the new “Around the World” section, Zeitgeist shows the differences between nations, but also many similarities. Chief among them seems to be the desire to find information about Facebook, YouTube and the iPhone – all of which also made the U.S.’s list.

And yes, I’ve used the joke in the headline before – a few times. It never gets old.

You can find the previous years’ Zeitgeists here.

Source – Google Zeitgeist 2008: All other search reports Palin comparison

This is a fascinating list. There is a pretty significant separation between first and second and second and third. I’m not really sure what it means, it could be that certain types of game enthusiasts are using eBay far more then any other. I am also surprised to see that the Playstation 3 is not in the top five. When I first took a quick glance at the list I just assumed number three would be the PS3 as opposed to the PSP but that is not the case. But at any rate, this is interesting none-the-less.

Flickr

The Nintendo Wii took the #1 spot in eBay’s 2008 tech toys and gadgets top list, with over 2 million related items sold on the site. The Xbox360 was next at 1.3 million, followed by the Sony PSP and iPod touch.

The full list is below.

1. Nintendo Wii: 2,056,866 related items sold
2. Microsoft Xbox360: 1,297,903 related items sold
3. Sony PSP: 350,591 related items sold
4. iPod Touch: 281,361 related items sold
5. Nintendo Wii Fit: 266,584 related items sold
6. Apple iPhone 3G: 212,837 related items sold
7. BlackBerry Pearl: 207,688 related items sold
8. BlackBerry Curve: 193,788 related items sold
9. Sony Playstation 3: 103,333 related items sold
10. Guitar Hero III: 98,159 related items sold
11. Halo 3: 91,067 related items sold
12. Grand Theft Auto IV: 43,005 related items sold
13. MacBook Air: 12,423 related items sold
14. Guitar Hero Aerosmith: 3,749 related items sold
15. Rock Band 2′s: 1,650 related items sold

Source – Which gadgets were the most sought after on Ebay in 2008?

Shared by Greg
Amazing

MARIO KART (REMI GAILLARD)
by nqtv

(Daily Motion link)

The popular video game comes to real life in this video by Remi Gaillard. -Thanks, Matt!

Source – Mario Kart in Real Life

Very interesting read. I am sure you will find it entertaining:

You see these opening logos every time you go to the movies, but have you ever wondered who is the boy on the moon in the DreamWorks logo? Or which mountain inspired the Paramount logo? Or who was the Columbia Torch Lady?

Source – The Stories Behind Hollywood Studio Logos – Neatorama

Coincidentally I just finished reading: ‘Inventing the Movies: Hollywood’s Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs‘ which had a few sections dedicated to the future theater experience and how the current one is not lucrative enough for the studios. I agree that the current movie-going experience needs to change and that’s mainly driven from the fact that people have good theater systems in the comfort of their own homes and to be honest they surprisingly are suffice enough to give you a great experience. While 3D could be an important step for theaters to start luring in audiences again, I am hesitant to think that anything outside of animation, i.e. non-animated films, for 3D could have a profound draw for audiences. Also, charging a premium on the experience is not something I can see a large number of the population willing to pay. Especially when the economy is tanking and the fact-of-the-matter is the movie-going experience is already expensive as is.

I am looking forward to see how and what theaters will do to stay in business with the availability of digital distribution and home-theaters. Hopefully, we will be surprised.

“Monsters vs. Aliens”

Jeffrey Katzenberg boldly predicted Monday that there will benearly 2,500 screens ready for 3-D in time for the March 27 releaseof DreamWorks Animation’s “Monsters vs. Aliens.”

At the 3-D Entertainment Summit here, DWA’s CEO also forecast thatthere will be 7,500 3-D screens for the summer 2010 release of hiscompany’s “Shrek Goes Fourth.”

Estimates suggest that the number of 3-D-ready digital-cinemascreens now in the domestic market is in the 1,500 range.

But Katzenberg, the ultimate 3-D cheerleader, expressed optimism,once again calling the format an “economic game-changer for movietheaters.”

Source – 3-D vision doesn’t waver

Interesting idea. Although, I still hope and pray that one day someone will be able to conjure up something spectacular that will help us to curb the problem of traffic in general. While it seems unlikely that such an invention will ever be designed/implemented, we can continue doing what we always do and find ways to avoid the issue at hand by finding alternative routes. :p

In 2000, I invented a gadget called RadaR. Fred Wilson told me that I was ahead of my time, and he was right.

RadaR.com was a hardware/internet hybrid that could eliminate boatloads of traffic (and frustration). The idea is this: traffic reports are useless, because they tell you about places where you don’t want to go and because they don’t help you make smart choices. Have you ever once been on the Father Baker Bridge? Me either. I don’t care if it’s closed.

When I go to the airport, I have a choice of three bridges. Which one should I take? If a smart friend was in a helicopter, she could call me and say, “don’t take the Triboro (RFK)! Take the Whitestone…”

They never say that on the radio. “Hey Seth, don’t go that way!”

Well, with GPS and a little spectrum, we could fix this problem in a clever way.

You get a box a little bigger than a pack of Altoids. There are four big red buttons on top and a serial number on the bottom. Type your serial number into radar.com then put in addresses for the four buttons (the airport, work, your grandma’s house and Philadelphia, say). Then, whenever you get in the car, hit the button for where you want to go. The device speaks to you and tells you which route to take.

Here’s the killer part: the way it knows which way to go is that everyone driving along with a RadaR device is consistently uploading two pieces of data: where they’re going and how long it is taking to get there.

Since RadaR central has thousands of cars in every city, it knows which routes are fast and which ones are slow. Crunching some numbers, it realizes that the Whitestone is totally jammed and can send people over the Throgs instead.

I was going to seed the market by giving RadaR devices to taxi drivers, so we’d have plenty of data points from the beginning.

The challenge is that getting this much hardware to so many people is expensive. Not to mention the bandwidth.

You probably already guessed the punchline: Do it with an iPhone.

Have the iPhone use the gps data… upload where I was a minute ago and where I am now. Figure out my speed and route. Use the data to tell other RadaR users which route is best. It’s worth a month if you live in a place with traffic jams. It’s a natural monopoly–once someone figures it out, why wouldn’t everyone want to use the market leader?

I minimize the difficulty of technology implementation (and I’m usually right). So don’t tell me why it’s impossible to do this, just build it and I’ll buy one. If you build it, let me know.

BONUS! Here’s an easier one that you could probably sell as well. I type in a phone number and enter a time. Record a message and press go. I can cue up a bunch of messages that are based on time. I can have groups get the message I record, at the time I want them to get it. I can make announcements… For example, if the sign in at the gym starts at 6 am, I can set my phone and it will call ahead and sign me in. Or you could ping your exec team every morning at 8 on their way into work…

Source – An iphone app that could change the way you get to work