What People Want:

A look back at 2005 wouldn't be complete without some lists. Ok i know its a little early to call the year and i will be blogging extensively from home during my work break, but here are some of the most popular searches this year on Google. Some are quite interesting looks into pop culture and people's behavior.

Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005
1. Myspace
2. Ares
3. Baidu
4. wikipedia
5. orkut
6. iTunes
7. Sky News
8. World of Warcraft
9. Green Day
10. Leonardo da Vinci

The Force vs. Darkside










Good to know the Force is still winning(the search war).

Google News - Top Searches in 2005
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter
*Nice to see that despite all the happenings of 2005, Janet's wardrobe malfunction was still the more popular than Katrina or the 360.

Shredder










Snowboarding, a newer phenomenon than the other two, shows a distinctly seasonal pattern – after all, it’s most effective when there’s snow. But regardless of geography or season, each adrenaline pumper has its own partisans and plenty of search interest. Surfing is still the best and we know it.

Natural Disasters


Year End Blow-out

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The City that never sleeps takes a hike

A modern strike allows for some modern solutions. When talks began to sour, Craigslist filled with hundreds of posters looking for rideshares to and from work on Tuesday. City websites offered New York's netizens .pdf files of traffic routes and restrictions. And untold thousands became telecommuters overnight. But for those who needed to show up to work, the remedies were decidedly old-fashioned: walk, bike, or, if they had enough people to fill a car, sit in miles of gridlock. I give it to New Yorkers for some ingenious solutions. What i would really like to know is if this will change behavior. London has started controlling traffic by excising a tax on cars not carpooling and entering the city. Simliar studies have produced astounding results. NY is a chaotic system at best, but the transit strike demonstrates the role that public transporation plays in daily lives. Where is our solution Bruce Mau?
Carpool is here

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Static to Life

Displax developed by Edigma, combines rear projection holographic screens with finger tracking to bring interactive storefront displays to retailers and various commercial applications. Displays are about to be taken to a whole new level with interactvity. I can't help but remember the Back To The Future (part 2) where Marty sees a preview for Jaws, and Jaws comes down and tries to eat him in a holographic manner. Very cool. Words cant do this justice. Check out their site to see it in action. I feel that Star Trek is upon us.
Window shopper

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Be Jaws

Jacques Cousteau's grandson Fabien co-designed a shark-shaped submarine to study Great Whites. Covered in a skin-like material, the sub is propelled by a silent motorized tail fin. Cousteau calls the sub Troy, in reference to the mythical Trojan horse statue, in which Greek soldiers were spirited into the fortress kingdom of Troy. The idea for the sub, though, came from a slightly more prosaic source. Troy was inspired by Tintin, a Belgian comic book character. On the cover of the book Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (published in English as Red Rackham's Treasure), Tintin and his dog are pictured in a metal, shark-shaped submarine. I love Tintin and have so many books. Interesting to know Fabien reads tintin to. Incredible where inspiration can come from.
See the Shark Sub Swim Swiftly

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The E-Life

Remember, before e-tickets, when checking in for a flight required waiting in a giant queue? Well, it looks like e-ticket style check-ins may be coming to hotels. The Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center will allow guests to swipe their credit cards at kiosks, press a few buttons, and retrieve their receipt and room key. The whole process should take less than 2 minutes. You can also order room service through your 32-inch flat screen TV. Or listen to 500 songs on the provided iPod. So basically you can avoid human interaction for your entire trip. The hotel will also have a 24-hour Starbucks and work station with a Kinko's and FedEx shipping inside. If that's not enough, the hotel has a computerized valet service where a guest can request and pay for the car online. Byebye people hello, easy street....Right? What happens if you get a smoking room, or its trashed...hmm might have to work out the kinks here
Im esleep

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Lojack Got Jacked Up

Auto-txt allows police to track the vehicle and use remote wireless technology to disable the vehicle or to keep it from restarting once the engine is turned off. While most car-tracking systems are activated by the driver’s key or key ring, Auto-txt is unique because it both requires keys and a cell phone to identify the owner. Because it requires two different identifiers, Auto-txt could also save money on insurance premiums for drivers. RDM received ₤4.75 million (about $8.3 million) in venture funding to develop and roll out Auto-txt. Catapult Venture Managers invested in the first round as part of its Advantage Enterprise and Innovation Fund. The system is the first to receive a Category 5 accreditation from the Thatcham motor insurance industry research center. The accreditation is a new insurance industry standard supported by the police. For now, Auto-txt is only available in the U.K. and is limited to cell phones with Bluetooth.
have you seen my bicycle?

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Flash Jacket

Pinky Tuscadero wore pink, Leather Tuscadero wore Leather. Where does that leave the wearer of this jacket? StrideLite have shed new light on the bike riders safety jacket by inventing the illuminated safety jacket . The jacket is made up of 24 micro thin Electroluminescent lamps that are as flexible as they are bright. The lights are good for 300 hours before you need to change the batteries ( 2 AAA ) and are incased in a totally waterproof shell. The jacket itself is made from a totally breathable technically advanced fabric and can be fit for your particular needs ( ie walking, riding running ). The jacket can live longer than Joan Collins' mother with it's 20,000 hour total life span ( 6 hrs p/d -365 dys- 9 years ). Who knows? In nine years the new model may have wings .
stridelite

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Musical Signatures

Ever wonder if you took your whole itunes libary and turned it into a signature? Me neither. But someone did. iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature. SM selects a small number of your "favorite" tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature. Oh and my signature is waaaay cooler than that. Just ask meghan.
Herbie Hancock

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addiction: Samorost

Samorost 2 is a free, Flash-based Myst-style puzzle-game with gorgeous, lush Terry Gilliam cut and paste-style graphics. Watching this is almost as much fun as playing it. Looks really freaking cool. Though im still sorta trying to figure out what im doing. To me this seems like a throwback to the Maniac Mansion and the text based games of yeasteryear. LOVED THEM. I tend to think its a missing piece of the videogame world. Too much emphasis on graphics and whatnot. Great stories still translate. These things remind me of Lemmings too. This is truly a labor of love. Check it out.
Samorost

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Space Spiders

Robotic "spiders" could help build large-scale structures in space. They would inch their way across large nets of fabric in space performing small tasks or lining up to create an antenna or some other structure. The concept, known as a Furoshiki satellite, could revolutionise satellite-based applications by providing cost effective large antennas in space that can be launched on small rockets. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency is planning to test a Furoshiki spacecraft in January 2006. Once in space, the mother satellite will deploy three 'daughters'. These will pull out a net into a triangle, leaving the mother satellite at the centre. Two palm-sized robots will then 'crawl' along the net into prearranged positions. This is the first small step towards satellites that collect solar energy using large arrays of solar panels and then beam the energy down to Earth. Such satellites could revolutionise the Earth’s energy supply systems by providing large amounts of clean solar energy. "A solar power satellite would need very large structures for its solar panels and antenna. Small experiments like this can help us mature the technology needed to build them," says Leopold Summerer from ESA's Advanced Concepts Team.
flyin spiders

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Good Morning Sunshine

One thing that sometimes wakes you up at night and prevents you from sleeping is the mosquito or blowfly when flying around your room. You can't and don't want to fall asleep again until you've caught it. These produces adrenalin and requires movements. The alarm clock blowfly works like a "blowfly" that at the desire time it escapes from a cage in your room. It starts moving and producing sound around you - to turn it off you should catch it and put it back in the cage. Hmm this might get me out of bed. Hiding the clock under my bed doesn't work anymore, since i can practically touch all the walls in my room.
buzzzzzzz

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The Madness

CBS is offering March Madness Online for free. HALLELUJAH!!!! So many years of being forced to watch crappy Southwest Fla versus Iona games. NCAA March Madness on Demand, will be a streaming webcast. CBS had been offering the games online as part of a subscription, but this year the NCAA Tournament will be available for free at NCAAsports.com. he webcasts will be free through the regional semifinals, and there will be web blackouts for games aired in local television markets. Press conferences and highlights are also part of the package. CBS doesnt think this will take away from television ratings, or erode subscribers to the Direct TV package because viewers tend to watch something online if they are already in front of a computer - but they watch television if they are home. This applies not only to office workers, but college students as well. It is less a money-earner than a technology and marketing test, an opportunity to see if free content can attract enough viewers to pull in advertising revenue.
Pregame

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Mind the Gap

Ok im starting to get disturbed. Europe gets all the freakin sweet phones. Now they get HBO on demand from 3G. Um wait isnt that show from the USA? Vodaphone is announcing a global Mobile TV service, which will offer series like Sex and the City, Six Feet Under or Curb Your Enthusiasm on its Vodafone Live! service. Bastards. And to rub it in, they’ll also get Eurosport, Twentieth Century Fox Television, The UEFA Champions League, Discovery, MTV, Chilli TV and Fashion TV in countries like New Zealand or UK. All this will work on any 3G-enabled phone in eight of Vodafone’s operating countries: Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and the UK; three associate networks—Belgium, France and Switzerland; and one partner network, Austria.

On another note BskyB digital satellite customers are starting to download hundreds of films as well as highlights from major sporting events onto their PCs—all for no extra cost. Stunning, really. Called skybybroadband, the service promises a good mix of films, including Hollywood blockbusters and classic movie titles, as long as they’re available on its Sky Movies channels. All you need is a PC running Windows XP and a broadband connection.

Wow at what point is this really going to start hurting America? Our loss of PhD's and scientists is disturbing enough but where is the tipping point where our technological lateness starts to hurt us? I realize a country the size of Britain is much more adapt to create networks like this. All we get is Snake II or Madden, while Europe has on demand for their phone and is watching Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Broadband goes Airborne
Curb Your Fish & Chips Breath

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The next firefighter

The i-garment project aims to develop smart garments for for the Portuguese Civil Protection. The suits will be equipped with sensors to monitor position, vital signals (temperature and heart beat) of the firefighters. The information will be sent via a wireless link to Civil Protection Officers in the HQ, processed and returned to the field officers equipped with PDAs and/or TabletPCs. Tightly integrated with the fire-fighting garment, sensors, telecommunication, localisation, alert and processing hardware collect the status and position of the fire-fighter and transmit it wirelessly and in real time to a data collecting computer installed in local Operational Field Vehicles (OFV). The system will allow the data to be transmitted from the local OFV to the main servers via satellite transmission, making the data available from virtually anywhere there might be a fire situation, without the need for further communication infrastructure. Why haven't we seen something like this sooner is my only question...
Science Prjoect

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Get stuff for getting a new phone

RipMobile, is a mobile device recycling programs that fund charities via the recycling process, converting old cell phones into financial support for groups like CARE who then use the funds to help victims of the Tsunami crises in East Asia. It says much of the funds are donated to charity, but boy is this a smart plan or what. Kids get mp3 certificates, circuit city stuff, or swag from karmaloop just for donating an old phone. Hell it doesnt even have to be yours. Fantastic idea that capitalizes on the high turnover rate of cell phones among teens. Its also nice to see another corporation which embraces recycling. Hey its not selling out, its looking out for the environment and making a buck.
Rest In Earpiece

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Up Close and Personal

How would you like to have your very own concert from one of your favorite rock bands? Better Than Ezra is offering a weekend of music/ the full BTE experience with a stay at the hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. Its a fascinating concept in which you pay for hotel and both shows. Obviously you must be a die-hard fan to want this, but BTE is offering much beyond the typical musical artist-fan relationship. The hotel is across the street from the venue and BTE claims the hotel knows them. BTE has always done a great job aligning themselves with the city of New Orleans and being more than just a band. They even offer a show for students only. I remember seeing Outkast at UNC and watching so many non-students come in. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it was for the students. It loses its certain cache when others crash the party. It posed the thought in my head, now that we are in the MP3 age, do bands have to do more to rise above the clutter. Are their any bands out their who provide this type of intimate/rewarding experience for their fans?
Ezraites

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Skype takes over the world

Could this be the information rush 2.0? Its beginning to feel like it these days, with talks of Google shares topping $400 a pop. PSFK is reporting that The NY Times is reporting that Skype has announced that it will introduce video technology into its software to allow Skype internet telephony users to make video calls. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal predicts Skype is about to go mainstream. Skype already got bought by ebay, but i feel that everyday brings us closer to the video phone jetson world. Either way hot stock tip of the day, buy Skype.
WSJ(sub needed)
NYTIMES

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