Happy New Year 2009
Yet another year flew by, and a great one to come ... stay tuned and keep an eye on my Take Me To Your Leader! blog with tons on new emerging technology, marketing trends, and special focus on social media to come this year.
Obama vs McCain in the Digital Space
Check out this amazing top level analysis at Take Me To Your Leader, comparing Obama's and McCain's digital efforts, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhone, Blogs, and Mobile.... Obama clearly dominates the digital spectrum.
Take Me To Your Leader!
You may have noticed the lack of activity on my blog lately, mostly because of work, but also because I'm because recently launched another blog: Take Me To Your Leader! which focuses on trend watching in consumer behaviors, digital marketing, technology, and social media. I will continue to maintain my blog for the same type of content you're used to reading here, and write more frequently on my new blog about trends, innovation, and points of view...
Some of the recent topics you might like include a full thread on Microsoft's new ad campaign (first Seinfeld ad, Microsoft explains why it's so lame, Seinfeld gets the boot, I'm a PC), or talks about invasion to privacy through deep packet inspection, interesting AIR applications, or the best youtube ads ever.
Hope you like it, and as always, feedback is always welcome.
Delicious 2.0
Popular social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, now delicious.com launched a brand new revived interface. 
Next Generation 911 Targa 4 and 4S revealed
Porsche Cars North America has just released details about the new 911 Targa 4 and 4S, completing the update of the full line of 911 models. Like their 911 brethren, the Targa 4 and the sportier 4S will receive horsepower bumps to 345hp and 385hp respectively, thanks in part to a new direct injected fuel system that also promises increased fuel efficiency.
2009 Porsche 911 Targa 4S
The Targa 4 and 4S will also receive Porsche's new 7-speed double-clutch gearbox, Porsche-Doppelkupplung. As indicated by the "4" in its moniker, the Targa 4 and 4S will only be available with the Porsche Traction Management, which replaces the viscous multiple-plate clutch all-wheel drive system of the previous 911 models. According to Porsche, this package results in a more pronounced driving characteristic.
Inside the cabin, the new 911 will receive the new Porsche Communication Management 3.0, which features a touchscreen for simplified operation of the audio system as well as the optional hard-disk-drive navigation system. Also available are the new options of XM satellite radio with XM NavTraffic capability, Bluetooth connectivity, iPod port, USB port and auxiliary jack.
Unique to the 911 Targa is its 16.58-square-foot, specially tinted glass roof made up of two segments--a sliding roof at the front and a tailgate at the rear. The roof slides beneath the tailgate within 7 seconds, offering almost 5 square feet of open space above the passenger cabin when opened completely.
The 2009 911 Targa 4 and Targa 4S will be available in the United States in October at $89,500 and $100,100 respectively. [The Car Tech blog]
MySpace supports OpenID
OpenID allows a user to create a single identity profile that can be used across the Web at participating sites. This negates the need to fill out the same information on multiple sites, and then need to remember those login details for each individual account.
OpenID has already been embraced by nearly 8,000 sites, including Yahoo (the largest supporter in terms of users), Plaxo, Wetpaint, Technorati, and LiveJournal. But MySpace is the second largest site to join the network to date, and will nearly double the amount of OpenID accounts to a half-billion.
Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace's OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere. [brought by betanews]
Any good CFers in LA?
Do I have a job for you, must work FT on site. Leave a comment.
Amazon AWS s3 ec2 / Google App Engine / Media Temple / Mosso CloudFS Comparison
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Scalability |
Upgrade ECU or Deploy new instances |
Pay extras |
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OS |
Any |
Python - Universal |
Linux |
Linux / Windows |
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Other uses / extensibility |
Complete flexibility Requires additional deployments |
Requires Python and GQL |
Easy to install additional applications |
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Resources |
$0.10 - Small Instance (Default): 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform |
Free for 500Mb of data and 5MM views/month |
100 GBs of premium storage 1 TB of short-path bandwidth 100 unique sites / alternate domains 64MB Ruby/Mongrel container 1,000 GPUs 100 databases 1,000 email addresses |
$50 Gb of SAN storage 500 Gb 10,000 compute cycles |
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Pricing |
Storage $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used Data Transfer $0.100 per GB - all data transfer in $0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out Requests $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, POST, or LIST requests $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests* * No charge for delete requests Computing $0.10 per CPU hour SimpleDB $1.50/Gb/month |
$0.10-0.12 per cpu cycle $0.15-0.18 in BigTable Gb/month $0.09-0.13 transfer Gb/month |
Base: $20/month $2.56 per additional transfer GB $0.10 per additional GPU |
Base: $100/month $0.25 per transfer GB $0.50 per storage GB $0.01 per CPU cycle MS-SQL $5/100Mb/month |
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Practical Rating (1-10) |
7 |
5 |
8 |
9 |
Google protocol buffers: Open-source Data Exchange Language
Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases.
"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."
Protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML, according to Google.
Google has prepared a download page that contains protocol buffer compilers for Java, C++ and Python.
iPhone 3G is official and will be available July 11th
- [via engadget]
- It's a teensy bit thicker.
- A SIM ejector comes in the box, at last.
- There's no dock included, just a USB power adapter.
- On AT&T unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, on top of voice plans starting at $39.99 a month. Unlimited 3G data for business users will be $45 a month, on top of voice.
- Apple's new MobileMe service will be coming with the iPhone 2.0 software, bringing push email and contacts for all.
