Mike’s ramblings

The idea behind a new treatment of cancer is so simple one might ask why it hasn’t been thought of before. Doctors find out which immune cells in the patient kill the cancer cells and populate them in vitro. In the patient those are usually too few (at some stages of cancer only a few hundred) to be able to cure itself.

After reinjecting billions of those cells the patient magically cures himself. The smart idea behind it is, that only the body’s own systems can reach each and every cell. Cancer can spread throughout the body and build so called metastases which are almost impossible to remove by surgery. By injecting the body’s own cells the treatment is much more gentle than chemo therapy.

There are already several patients who have been cured by this method and have lived cancer-free for the last two years. Of course because the progeny of the cells is very laborious the treatment is also expensive.

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Firefox wanted to get the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours today with the release of Firefox 3.0. It would have been a quite good marketing ploy, but they kind of ruined it for some people because they didn’t communicate at what time they would publish Firefox 3.0. Europeans, Asians and everyone else east of the US just assumed that it would start on their July 17. On the SpreadFirefox forums there are lots of angry voices, even some that say they will download it this weekend instead of today.

Firefox will still get the Guinness World Record, because they’re the first to “try”. If you still want to download Firefox 3 today (like me :D) you can do so starting 10 AM PDT here.

I just stumbled upon this video on YouTube, which contains links, clickable objects, speech bubbles and text as an overlay. It is announced as the first interactive video. Now we know why YouTube rolled out their new player.

It seems that this points in the direction of new advertising opportunities. They probably want to enable sponsors to tag objects like a watch or a car and display advertising when people hover over it. For example if an actor is wearing an IWC watch, they could point to an online shop selling this watch when someone is hovering over it.

There are already several other companies working on this. E.g. Innovid (mentioned here) or Asterpix (mentioned here).