“exploit the country’s “wind corridor” from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
Transmission lines would be built to transport the power to places in the U.S. where the demand is. The natural gas, now used to fuel power plants, would instead be used as a transportation fuel, which burns cleaner than gasoline and is domestic.”
The commercial is affective in raising awareness in this great concept. While Pickens has had some somewhat dirty/contreversial political past, the plan is legimate and has been embraced whole heartedly by enviromtental groups thus far.
Unlike its competitor, Myspace, Facebook has earned a great reputation for performance, scalability, and uptime. Today, it seems the system is temporarily down causing many of my coworkers to comment on the rarity of such a platform crash for Facebook. I am sure, it will be back up soon but wanted to point out that even the most revered/untouchable IT infrastructure and back end systems aren’t immune to an occasional hiccup.
Although I usually refrain from blogging much on the weekends, there was a significant amount of news involving what I consider the three most influential Silicon Valley companies. Below is a recap
Yahoo- Yahoo rejected a radically new proposal from Microsoft. Yahoo was given 24 hours to accept the deal, which was not for the entire company but rather just the search component of Yahoo. The offer also asked for the current Board of Directors and executive team to be replaced by new teams led by investor Carl Ichan.
The real news is in Yahoo’s rejection. Yahoo implied that a could deal be reached for the entire company. While this does sound like foreplay for a potential merger, the rejection also included some jabs at Microsoft.
“adding that the requirement to replace the board and executive team is absurd and irresponsible given the complexity of the deal.” per tech crunch.
2008 has had a lot of interesting squareoffs with Obama vs Clinton, Microsoft vs Yahoo, Rodriguez vs West Virgina and Favre vs the Packers now looming. At this point with all the ill will between the two companies, I think this has become a pissing match that Microsoft has the will and resources to win. Its a war of attrition between two tech giants and its sad to see them looking so feeble in full view of the public. I think in the end, investor pressure from Icahn and other key investors will broker a deal sometime in the next month or so.
Apple- Apple, known for their execution of product launches, ran into a snag releasing the new 3G iphone. Unlike last year, new Iphones, needs to be activated within the store. Phones were unable to be activated with issues with the Itunes server causing the first several waves of Apple fanboys to come away empty handed. Just imagine you waiting in line for 1-3 days only to come away empty handed. Luckily though, the product is going over well and Apple is continued to meet demand through the weekend at most locations. Below is a video of a line for the phone in Mission Viejo.
Google- Last year, a popular rumor was that Google would release their own mobile phone. Speculation died down as Google announced their Android mobile phone operating system. However there is now a new wave of speculation around the tech blogosphere that Google may indeed looking to release a mobile phone within the next year. While reports are conflicting, its something to keep an eye out as Google has yet to to take their superior web know how and engenierring excellence and apply it to a hardware device.
The Monday after a long weekend is always somewhat more depressing than your average Monday. Hopefully this will start you off on the right foot. At least you’re not distraught as Mr. Peter Givens below.
With the sport’s world in a somewhat of a dead time in between now and the fall, some of my fellow Bucknuts community members started a topic on favorite youtube videos.
Below is a great interview with Yardbarker CEO and my boss, Pete Vlastelica. A lot of my job entails explaining our company and the value of joining our vertical advertising network. I think I am doing a pretty good job, but nobody does it better than Pete. Check out the video below to get a better feel for the cool things we are doing at Yardbarker.
Below is a video of Arnold Schwartzenegger announcing that California has secured Tesla Motor’s new production facility to mass produce electric vehicles. New Mexico was earlier announced as the destination for the facility, but the Governator (big fan and owner of a Tesla) worked hard to come up with an incentive package to get Tesla to reconsider.
Have to say that I am glad Tesla made the decision, as the company’s HQ, funding, and biggest fans are in the Bay Area. This move reinforces California as the epicenter of emerging green technologies and as the state most pro active against Global Warming.
Busy Day, but thought I would post another Hulu clip. From a classic and all time favorite. Yes, that’s Sean Penn..Great movie, great clip, and great start for Cameron Crowe
I am a big fan of Hulu and blogged about it a couple months ago. At a high level, Hulu is a higher resolution Youtube with advertising except all the videos are legal and come from big name media companies so there is no user generated content.You can watch entire movies and television shows with a sparse amount advertising and even have the option to embed them into blogs. The problem is that WordPress.com users like me have had mild success getting these great videos from Hulu.com onto our blogs. Luckily for me 30 minutes of persistence has paid off. I am sure I’ll post a lot of stuff from Hulu to make it look like I blog a lot, but for now here is a scene from Garden State (good 20’s angst movie).Scene below is fist meeting between main characters Andrew and Sam. Props to VodPod for making this happen, although I had to jump through some extra hoops.
