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How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World

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There are good chances you already came across the term “cloud computing” once or twice, even if you don’t completely grasp the meaning of the term. If that is the case, check out this article on Business Week titled How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World. It gives some good examples of how cloud computing is starting to shape the way companies do business, and individuals interact with IT. Here is a small quote:

The term “cloud computing” encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.

A pit-stop on the Wikipedia article for cloud computing can help also. This is probably one of the most important shifts that we will see on the coming years, so make sure to understand it.

20 Weird USB Gadgets

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Over at TechCult there is a list with 20 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Stick In Your USB Socket. You think you saw them all? A USB Ghost Radar? A Barbie USB Driver?

Man, these people are either cretive geniuses, or they have nothing better to do. Probably the second option…. Anyway head to the full article and check out the 20 items. I am considering buy a couple of them. the laser guided rocket launcher would rock on if I was still working inside an office.

iPhone to Change Mobile Gaming?

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The iPhone for sure shook the mobile industry, but now people are claiming that it will also affect the mobile gaming one. Time just published an article on that line titled Can the iPhone Rule Gaming?.

The numbers they present are pretty interesting. Here is a quote:

The cell-phone gaming market is ripe for the picking. While millions of people play games on the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP every day, fewer than 10% of cell-phone users in the U.S. do the same on their phones, according to Nielsen Mobile. What’s more, the average cell-phone gamer spends just $8 a year on new games, versus an estimated $45 a year for users of the PSP and $65 yearly for DS players.

I certainly can see the average money spent by mobile gamers on the rise with the introduction of the iPhone, but I don’t see it threatening the market of Nintendo DS. Nokia has tried in the past with N-Gage, and we all know how it went…

Hardcore mobile gamers don’t buy the iPhone (they are supposedly younger and don’t go around locking themselves in a 2 year phone contract), and hardcore iPhone users only play gamers occasionally while on the run.

In the future when mobile phones converge with personal computers more heavily we might see phones becoming game platforms, but I don’t think this will happen over the next year.

A Tribute to the Box Art of Video Cards

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It might be a geek thing, but since I was a teen and started playing with computers I have always admired the box of video cards. They always had some beautiful graphic art. Dragons, knights and other creatures that inspired my fantasies about the games I would play.

Thinking about that I decided to create a collection with pictures of video card boxes. Enjoy.


























AdAge Claims Online Advertising is Overhyped

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And I don’t agree with it.

Their first argument is this one:

The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is “old” media — a commercial message to be placed next to editorial or entertainment content. And we know by now that measured-media growth has pretty much ground to a halt as marketers continue to increase their dollars in unmeasured disciplines such as web development, public relations and database marketing at the expense of paid advertising.

Well, I think there is a huge different between an ad that appears on a paper newspaper and ones that appear on the online website of that same newspaper. For one thing, the results of the latter are much more measurable. You can track how many times the ad got displayed. How many people clicked on the ad. How many people ended up purchasing a product after that click. Heck, you could even know the country, browser and operating system of the people that saw the ad.

When hard economic times come, companies will want to spend their money in places where they can track the results more efficiently.

The the article questions:

Sure, dollars are shifting within those media budgets, with some moving out of traditional media into interactive. But most of the top 100 advertisers that wield the big budgets are still primarily TV and print spenders. The question is: Should the fact Procter & Gamble spends only 1.5% of its marketing budget on display ads be viewed as a warning signal by online ad sellers, or as an opportunity

The author of the article apparently thinks that this is a warning signal, he goes: “For all its glory, the internet still has not proven itself capable of being a primary branding medium.”

Well I think he is wrong, I think that the fact that the advertisers still spend 90% of their money on television is definitely an opportunity for online advertising. Why? Because eventually everything is going to migrate to the web. That is, everything is going to travel on IP. Your television, your telephone conversations, and even the bits that your fridge will send to the local supermarket when you run out of beer cans.

Sure it might still take some years for that to realize, but it is a matter of when and not a matter of if.

As a result, I think that online advertising will keep growing strong, and perhaps new forms of advertising will emerge, but they will certainly be based on web technologies.

Anyway you can read the full article here and take your own conclusions.

Best Online Flash Games: Ragdoll Cannon

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I was browsing through my RSS feeds today and came across a cool little game called Ragdoll Cannon. The concept is pretty simple: you have a cannon that shoots dolls, and on each level you must make the dolls touch a “here” stone.

Simple but addicting, now I must finish all the levels! Check it out, it is Friday after all…