Koo’s Corner

First and foremost I will be traveling a lot the next 3 days so I may be MIA. I hope to take some video content at Mirror Lake for Bucknuts which I will post here as well.

So below are two videos. One of me enjoying borrowing a handheld video camera for my trip. As you can see I decided to give it a test run hazing FTR. The other is a NSFW (not safe for work) video of our managing editor getting knocked unconscious by MMA fighter/announcer and YB blogger Frank Shamrock. The version without the brief profanity is found here, but really it makes the whole video so why not?

Startling FTR

My boy Dewey going hard for the yard (NSFW, but safe for awesomeness)

So I am on the verge of Ecstasy. For a variety of reasons, the past 5 nights have been the worst stretch of getting sleep in my life. No crazy vices going on here, but just random freak flareups of items that I take I had to handle. From Friday night until this moment, I have not had a night of sleep more then 4 hours. That’s really not good and I can feel it right now (typos beware?)

But before I hibernate for god knows how long, here as always are some cool updates.

First off I am going to do an interview sometime soon with good longtime friend Andrew Greenstein who is CEO and Founder of Bojam

So what’s cool about Bojam and what will we talk about? Well I caught up with him today and was extremely blown away with the company right now and can tell Andrew will do a great job telling us himself. Below is their TechCrunch 50 demo at their company launch, and if you don’t know Tech Crunch or the event, its kind of a big deal.

Speaking of TechCrunch, they are now covering porn 2.0. The following link is border line work safe and discusses how companies are now following Itunes lead when it comes to video distribution.

So here is some great news. It looks like I will get to also do an interview at the Tesla store in Menlo Park and am crossing my fingers I get to go out for a ride in one. Not sure when this will happen, but I think its on thanks to the great people over there. Also I need to correct my earlier post which had some minor very small inaccuracies that I need to correct. The Tesla people are coo like that.  I can’t wait until this happens!

Also wanted to plug the big day its been for Yardbarker. First Donovon McNabb wrote another really arituclate well thought out blog on his dissapointment of how the season has gone. The fact of the matter is that he’s right, but that he is also being very hard on himself. The Eagles have had a tough schedule and have not caught any breaks. Unfortunately for my team, Mcnabb rolls into town this weekend looking to get back on the right track. Yikes…..Let’s keep this one respectable.

Yardbarker on Sportscenter!

We’re also real pleased with some recent big announcements that WigetBox and Yardbarker are working together to make these awesome sports, athlete, and team specific widgets based on Yardbarker content. Take a look. I am adding mine real soon (PESTRO?)… Also some big announcements as we grow and diversify our network.

Finally I wanted to again plug the guys at Pantless Knight. You have to check out their Search Engine Rap Battle. Below is Google and MSN. There are 3 of these. They are all good.

I score it as MSN 0-2 (figures and makes it realistic although he was good)

Yahoo 1-1

Google the rap king. Voting on their site goes for 2 week. Their latest project looks really cool as well as I just glanced it.

Below are some random things on my mind tonight.

- Yesterday I commented on Tesla Motor’s big announcement to produce cars in California over New Mexico. Today another big rumor is floating around that Tesla has reached a deal to sell batteries to Mercedez in their efforts to sell electic cars by 2010. With other big name auto companies believed interested in similar deals, one wonders if Tesla’s future may one day be mainly as a battery maker and secondarily a car manufacturer.

Tesla Battery Below

- Yahoo email freaking blows compared to Gmail. Most of the emails in my inbox are spam and a good 25% of non spam emails end up in the spam folder.

Emails I have had to dig out of my spam folder include 2 job offers, a reply email from a friend, a response from an Ohio State professor about a speaking engagement, and notification that I won an African lottery ….kidding.

Gmail on the other hand is pretty much balls on accurate. Yahoo is a crap shoot, and I am thinking of phasing out the account.

- I gave into the temptation to join Twitter tonight. I’ll recap my thoughts in it in a couple of weeks. Feel free to “follow” me at http://twitter.com/bkoo

- Finally wanted to give a look at how sweet Yardbarker is. There are a lot of cool fuctions and things we are doing, but what continues to amaze me is how easy it is for fans to interact with athletes. Below are some schreenshots of some exchanges between me and Chiefs WR Dwayne Bowe and Angels Pitcher John Lackey

Awhile back I wrote a blog ranking the 12 months of the year of how exciting they are to me as a sports fan. While June clocks in midway through the list, the second half of June followed by July and August are some of the most difficult times of the year to endure.

I got some cool Bucknuts stories in the pipeline but wanted to bring attention to some rather cool things going on in the sports world currently.

- As a casual golf fan, watching the US Open this weekend was a tremendous investment of my time. Battling a bum knee, Tiger had an epic Round 3 (see below, u ever see Golf fans go this nuts before outside of Billy Madison)

Rocco Mediate played a solid final round forcing Tiger to hit the shot below to force a 18 hole playoff. If he misses this putt Mediate would be your US Open Champion.

It only got better from there as Rocco actually had a 1 stroke lead on the last hole of the playoff. Tiger birdied the hole forcing a sudden death playoff where he eventually won his 14th major.

The 91 holes of golf which included the 18 hole playoff and 1 hole sudden death playoff took its toll on Tiger who’s knee injury is now forcing him to miss the rest of the 2008 season with major surgery required on his left knee. While golf can be somewhat slow, non physical, and for rich guys wearing collared shirts, this past tournament was an epic showcase of golf and Tiger woods at their best.

- The Celtics Lakers series had some good games but didn’t live up to all the hype. I invested on the Celtics to win in 6 games and was rewarded nicely. Yardbarker blogger Rajon Rondo did a tremendous job blogging a whopping 14x during the finals. Rondo won over a lot of fans with his insight into his finals experience which was capped with a stellar effort in game 6. Rondo lit up the box score with 21 points, 8 assists, 7 boards, and 6 steals in just 32 minutes.

Life has been hectic of late and will not calm down until next week. However, I hope to jam in 3-4 solid posts before the weekend. This one will focus on sports with hopefully some commentary on tech, entertainment, and commercials soon to follow.

- Rajon Rondo had a stellar weekend putting up 18 assists, grabbing 6 boards, while only having 2 turnovers. Even more impressive, Rondo blogged about the finals on Yardbarker 4x in the 24 hours before and after the game. Its great to see Rondo interacting with fans and sharing his thoughts and state of mind during such a compelling time of the year for him.

For those of you who don’t know my current employer, check out Yardbarker.com.

Those curious to see Rondo’s blog you can check it out here.

- The other interesting news of the weekend, was Big Brown losing in the Belmont. Big Brown actually finished last as his jockey eased off of him 2/3 into the race, fearing the horse was injured. Turns out no injury can be found. So what’s the deal?

Nobody really knows, any maybe nobody will ever know what really happened. However let me put forth this conspiracy theory (its a doozie, but I never concoct theories).

Below you will find the odds for the Belmont. Casino Drive, the horse Vegas picked second most likely to win, scratched as many suspected he would. With Casino Drive out, 8 of 9 the horses left were pretty heavy underdogs with only one horse having better than 20-1 odds. You can see where this is going.

Is it possible that someone got to jockey Ken Desormeaux, and explained him that if he could hold Big Brown back, that a mighty fortune could be made on one of the other horses. In fact the odds above are somewhat stingy as other betters cashed in on eventual winner Da’Tara at 40-1.

I haven’t heard this idea thrown around and am not saying it happened, but if there EVER was an opportunity to pull this, it would have been Saturday. The scenario of one front runner and a field of heavy underdogs may never be replicated to this degree again.

- The Euro Cup has started and has fairly entertaining thus far. Its nice to watch soccer at work or late at night. ESPN and ESPN 2 are televising a decent amount of games so tune in to watch the second most enjoyable soccer tournament.

- Finally, I wanted to chime in to keep your eye on the UFC this week. I am not an avid fan of MMA, but have slowly getting more into it as my friends are hooked like worse then Barkley on casinos.

This week UFC president is set to make a “mind blowing” annoucement. Lots of speculation that the company has been bought or at least reached a major network deal. It will be interesting to see as MMA continues to cross over to the mainstream while boxing wilts away to an afterthought on the national scene.

The outlook is bleak for boxing. I can’t think of anyone young who prefers it to MMA or even cares what so ever. If that doesn’t change, we may see boxing fizzle down to a third tier sport.

Typically, this is the time I start most of my blogs (10-11pm), but tonight is a little different. Tomorrow I don’t have work, hence I am not fretting being tired after writing this blog and taking care of some other pressing items.

Why do not I have work? Because next week I start my new job at Yardbarker.com and last Friday was my last day at SugarCRM. With one week of freedom sandwiched in between, I am tentatively calling this next week Summer of Ben (Seinfeld reference)

Video of Baron Davis on Yardbarker talking about his Yardbarker blog

Anyways wanted to share some interesting tidbits on my new gig.

It was two weeks back, I was faced with the question PC or Mac for my new computer. Although my desktop at home is Mac and my phone is an Iphone, my work computer has always been a PC.

Hmmmm. Could I fully adopt Macs, despite years of doing all work functions on the PC? I wrestled with this decision for about 2 seconds before I replied back requesting a Mac. I am sure there will be a couple of bumps in the road, but for now I must say I am ecstatic that today I became the new user of a Macbook.

In other news, today I was discussing various blogging platforms in a informal meeting when I was told wordpress.com hosted blogs do not allow advertisements on them. This was news to me, and unfortunately my blog is hosted by wordpress.com.

Recently someone inquired about selling ads on my blog, something I was looking to do very soon. The Wordpress.com/Automatic policy is known, but is not exactly advertised during the sign up process.

While a majority of wordpress users may not want to place advertisements on their blogs, the option to do so would enable the minority of bloggers the ability to make some extra cash. Wordpress is such a great tool with such a large community, there has to be hundreds of thousands of users who find themselves locked out of using advertising tools despite an interest to do so.

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider have both indicated that this issue maybe revisited and I sincerely hope they see the light. Blogs and new media in general are steadily gaining traction in the mainstream as viable media outlets. Not having advertising enabled, will cost Automatic/Wordpress.com a large contingent of users who hope to augment their income with advertising revenue. I know I might be going out on a limb here, but I am pretty sure bloggers are people too…. and people typically like money.

I hope there is movement soon on this front, as every day I go without advertisements is another day that I am postponing retirement. One can wish.