Mike’s ramblings

As Mashable and Techcrunch report, YouTube had a page up which showed a new embeddable player with ads around it. They have since pulled the page and you are redirected to your account page (or the start page if you’re not a registered user). It seems as if this was not meant to be public just yet. Hopefully we’ll see this come soon, it might be a big chance to make some additional revenue for many people.

I’ve written about this technique at the end of August and Mashable now brought my attention to the first product that popped up , which lets you easily use the feature. (There was a demo before, but you could not save the images.) Rsizr is a flash online image utility like every other, but this feature makes it truly stand out. What lacks for me though, is that you can only make the picture smaller and not size it up. Hopefully they integrate this feature in the near future. (Before it will be integrated into Photoshop?)

The worthy iTunes competitor we’ve all been waiting for just launched. Amazon introduced their DRM-free music store, which they announced a few months ago, today with 2 million songs priced from 89 cents to $1. Most of the songs are cheaper than they are on iTunes, but obviously the newly opened store can’t keep up with the diversion of the offerings the iTunes Music Store has right now. I found the address, which is quite obscure at the moment, over at GigaOM. Techcrunch is reporting too.

As Techcrunch notes, costs for solar cells are steadily coming down so maybe after all it won’t be that long until we see the solar roadway? The good thing with this announcement is that its not about a new invention that was just made, but rather about its soon start of its mass production. Colorado State University has developed cells that only cost $1 per watt to manufacture and will be available to the the customer at $2 per watt, which is roughly half of todays prices. The new cells are made from cadmium telluride rather than silicon and there is less waste in their production.

The production of the panels, which have a efficiency of about 11-13%, will begin at the end of next year. The factory will initially produce panels with a capacity of 200 megawatts.

Because of the information in the leaked Media Defender email conversations, ThePirateBay is suing several companies in Sweden. Media Defender is a company hired by the entertainment industry that is supposed to fight legally against P2P sites and users. As the emails suggest, Media Defender was also ordered by its employers to hire hackers that attack, namely DDOS several sites including ThePirateBay.

AutoBlogGreen has a story about a nice idea developed by Scott Brusaw and his wife. The idea itself is pretty simple and tries to solve several problems at once. We all know solar energy is good, but there is also the problem, that it uses a lot more space than its ungreen counterparts like coal plants et cetera. If we would put solar cells into our roads under a translucent layer, the deserts would remain a free habitat for wildlife. The potential space to use in America is huge. There are 65′000 square kilometers of roadways and parking lots that could be used as space for solar cells. Of course this makes only sense if we manage to produce cheap solar cells, and even better organic cheap solar cells. That these cells only come at an efficiency of about 4% is no problem, if we consider the huge amount of space that could be covered with them.

Another interesting possibility of this type of road would be the possibility to include LEDs to show all kinds of signs, including warnings from accidents. The problems to solve are, as mentioned above, the production of cheap solar cells and to find a material that is translucent and hard-wearing. It would probably also make sense if the parts would be reusable, because roads get rebuilt quite often.

Commsday reports that they have heard from a source that Google is building its own transoceanic fiber-optic link between the US and Australia (via Guam and Hawaii) and should be finished with it as soon as 2009. The reports say, that construction for the Unity called project started a few months ago. Although this is still speculative, it has naturally evoked everyone to write about it. There are many different theories developing. True to their nature, Valleywag thinks that it is, together with Google’s wireless bids and phone business, all just a tactic to get what they need at a cheaper rate by scaring their adversaries. Techcrunch knows, that Google may have met with Telstra and Asia Netcomm last week in Sydney to discuss the plans. GigaOm’s article is, as always, very insightful and gives a lot of background information. Mashable, Engadget and others are reporting too.

I stumbled over the site reCAPTCHA today, which offers free CAPTCHAs for everyone. This in itself is not extraordinary, but the CAPTCHA offered by the site is quite special. It presents the user with words that could not be matched by OCR software. The source is the Internet Archive, which archives thousands of books and makes them available to the public for free. Solving (and offering) the CAPTCHA is therefore a kind of a noble cause and way more useful than just annoying the user with a colored, hard to read sequence of numbers and letters.

On the technical side it works as follows: The word that could not be read is taken as a picture from the book that is being digitized and is shown together with a random word from reCAPTCHAs database that is presented similarly so the user cannot distinguish between them. If the user matches the word from the database reCAPTCHA assumes that the user typed in the correct answer to the other word too and it is placed in the book.

I’ve found a great video on the 5min Life Videopedia, which by the way is a great place to waste your time, about Michael Schumacher’s driving style. The best Formula 1 driver of all times has a unique technique and showed everyone just how fast he was in every race when he was driving besides Barrichello, who drove the same car, but was always seconds slower.
The interesting part of the video is, when they really analyze Schumacher’s driving style scientifically and you can see the difference.

As Mashable (and just about everyone else) reports, Apple has sold 1 million iPhones in the 74 days since its launch on June 29th. This is a lot faster than the iPod sold in its beginnings. As Steve Jobs notes, “it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod”. If the sales keep this speed, Apple will “only” sell another 6.5 million , for a total of 7.5 million until the end of 2008. 2.5 million short of its predictions of 10 million sold units. It is almost certain though, that Apple will sell a lot more iPhones with the new $399 price tag the device got just a few days ago.
Apple will obviously also enter the international market and if we can believe French site MacBidouille, the launch date for Germany will be November 12th. The supposed “leaked advertisement” also states that the device will be 3G capable and will therefore be able to access the internet at 3.6Mbit/s. This advertisement, which looks like a typical T-Mobile ad but most likely is a fake, also states that we Europeans will get a 16GB version, like the new iPod touch Apple released. All of this sweetness would come at a much higher price point though.
That Apple inked a deal with InterDigital about licensing 2G and 3G technology also hardens the speculations that they will soon release a 3G iPhone.

I think with international sales about to start, the nice price cut the iPhone got and the holiday season coming up, Apple can be quite confident about selling 10 million units of its wonder product, which turned the whole industry upside down and is covered by the mainstream media just as much as by the geeky blogging crowd, until 2008.