Thursday, September 25, 2008
Ng: Using technology to enjoy
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
I AM quite fascinated to hear that Sandisk, a leading memory storage supplier, has been able to convince some record companies to release music in micro-SD format and convince some leading electronics resellers to sell it.
They call it slot Music and it means that you can buy high quality, DRM free mp3 music in microSD form.
This is another way technology is being used to enable new formats to distribute something we always enjoy—but why micro-SD? Why not USB thumb drives? Well, apparently, there seems to be a compelling reason—there are probably over a billion cellphones that will be sold this year, and many of them (including mp3 players now having micro-SD slots).
So, the story is that you buy one and just insert it to your mobile phone, and you could be hearing music in no time! And with a micro-SD with a gigabyte of storage space, that could easily enable you to buy hundreds of songs for a few dollars! (though, of course, most of these are already pre-selected).
I’M A PC. Remember the Jerry Seinfeld ads that Microsoft tried to run a few weeks ago? They cancelled it. It’s a waste. I’m sure they spent millions to produce them, with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld heading the cast. But I guess the message was too obscure, or difficult to understand.
Anyhow, I guess with YouTube now, you can experiment and you can also use it as a publicity vehicle. Sometimes, companies produce an ad costing millions, and then instead of spending millions to put it into the networks, they try to create word of mouth by saying the ad was banned or cancelled.
But since it was produced, we put it on YouTube, where the ads get hundreds of thousands or millions of page views, and the company did not even have to spend any money for it!
Anyhow, the new ad keeps commenting on just one phrase—”I’m a PC.” I guess you know where the phrase comes from.
It came from the hugely successful Apple ads called “ I’m a PC and I’m a Mac,” which tends to show that most exciting people use the Apple, while boring people use Windows. These ads try to create an anti-theme of that stereotype, and that there are many different kinds of people who use PC doing incredibly different things. After all, over a billion people use Windows, and it is time to show that they are not all 40 something nerds who are not creative or exciting.
If you want to see the ads (there are three as of this writing), check it out on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrmF-mPLybw
RICHEST. In the latest report of Forbes on America’s richest people, we tried to dissect who were those on the list that earn money from technology. Bill Gates is the richest again (Warren Buffett topped the list in March, but Berkshire stocks which invests in insurance and financials was dropped from the list the last few months due to the financial contagion).The list includes Bill Gates (Microsoft, rank 1, $57 billion), Larry Ellison (Oracle, rank 3, $27 billion), Michael Dell (Dell, rank 11, $17.3 billion), Paul Allen (Microsoft, rank 12, $16 billion), Sergey Brin (Google, rank 13, $15.9 billion), Larry Page (Google, rank 14, $15.8 billion), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft, rank 15, $15 billion), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, rank 33, $8.7 billion), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp., rank 47, $6.8 billion), Pierre Omidyar (eBay, rank 54, $6.3 billion), Eric Schmidt (Google, rank 59, $5.9 billion) and Steve Jobs (Apple, rank 61, $5.7 billion).
It is exciting to note that of the 12 richest in tech, Microsoft and Google have three each. Anyhow, I’m sure it would be exciting to see again in a few months how things will turn out.
(www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (September 25, 2008 issue)
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