Tag Archives: Google

Very Cool Technology

Wanna get the Internet to folks in remote parts of the world?

Rather than relying on cell towers, phone lines, or fiber optics, Google plans to beam 3G-speed Internet to the world’s most inaccessible corners using helium balloons. The experiment is called “Project Loon.”

FLATOW: And where – would those – those are under-covered places around the world. Where are the prime places for that?

CASSIDY: There’s lots of places. In the Southern Hemisphere alone, two-thirds of the countries, the cost of Internet access is higher than the average monthly income for people in those countries. Even in China and India, there’s over a billion people that don’t have good Internet coverage. So I think there’s lots of places around the world where there’s sort of remote and rural areas that don’t have coverage, or it’s unaffordable.

Go world!

Google 2012 Flu Trend: Here It Comes

A phenomenon of technology, specifically the internet and the searching of it, is that we can report on those searches.  In specific, Google does a great job of this reporting..

As it turns out, the fact that people go to the internet before they go to their doctor turns out to be a very reliable source of disease outbreak.  Feeling a little achy with a slightly elevated fever?  Google it and see what you can do.

And by doing so, you allow Google to track you search and tally it.  The result is Google Flu Trends.  And based on history and current trajectory, the United States is on the precipice of the season’s influenza outbreak:

In fact, we just now entering the worst month of the flu season.  In addition to counting the number of searches, Google is able to track location.  And form that data we can see that the flu is hitting the rust belt the hardest right now with Nevada following suit:

The bad news?  The flu is coming.  The good news?  We know it.

Google

If you haven’t yet, go on over to Google.com

Cool Google draw today.

Markets In Everything: Domain Names

It seems that where anything is bought and sold, certain rules are true:

A new index launched on Wednesday shows for the first time that even domain names can offer a window into the economy, just as stocks do.

The first-ever domain pricing index, which was created by economist Dr. Thies Lindenthal, joins the ranks of similar economic indicators that track everything from consumer products and homes to truck loads.

Domain prices rapidly gained in value from 2006 through 2007 before peaking in September of that year prior to the recession. Not surprisingly, so did the Nasdaq.

Shortly after, when valuations across the board started to fall, both tumbled. The biggest drop was in the heart of the recession between September 2007 and January 2009, with the IDNX and Nasdaq sliding about 31% and 50%, respectively.

Both started to gradually rebound in the first half of 2009 and now sit at their highest valuation since the IDNX began tracking domains in 2005.

While the two are neatly aligned, the IDNX always seems to stay ahead of the Nasdaq and remains stable when compared with Google (GOOG), showing it is less volatile in the face of severe economic headwinds.

How To Break A Monopoly

We hate monopolies.

People fear ’em and the government works to find and destroy ’em.

They’re bad and they’re evil; scourges  on civilization.

I mostly agree.  I think monopolies would be able to take advantage of markets and prices and demand and supply to benefit themselves without being subject to normal natural checks and balances.

With that said, I do not, do NOT, believe that a monopoly can exits in an open market without the aid of government.

That is government regulation creates and sustains monopolies, not free markets.

Thought experiment:  Think of one single naturally occurring monopoly in the real world.

Continue reading

The World’s Most Valuable Brand

There is an organization that measures such things.  And, in fact, they place a dollar value to those brands as well.  Anyway, the latest list is out and the winner is:

Apple

In a study released Monday by Millward Brown, a market-research arm of London advertising giant WPP, Apple AAPL +0.50%  was listed as the world’s most valuable brand, with an estimated value of more than $153 billion.

And how do they determine this list?

…calculations are based on an analysis of financial data combined with “consumer measures of brand equity.”

They use how well consumers feel they are served by the corporation.

In so far as companies are “greedy” and “capitalists”, they can’t succeed unless they build and sell something that people want.  And the most successful of those corporations are exactly those corporations that do the best job at making the best products.

The Power of Innovation

135 years ago.

The first telephone conversation:

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” With these words, spoken by inventor Alexander Graham Bell into his experimental telephone on March 10, 1876, an industry was born. For down the hall, Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, distinctly heard Bell utter the first spoken sentence ever transmitted via electricity. That achievement was the culmination of an invention process Bell had begun at least four years earlier.

By 1892 AT&T completed a network between New York and Chicago.  The downside?

The circuit could handle only one call at a time. The price was $9 for the first five minutes.

How far have we come?

Continue reading

Corporations: Too Big to Stop

All we here from Obama and the Left these days is that corporations are evil.  They are too big to fail.  They are only craven beasts intent on profit.  They must be stopped.  And failing that, they must be limited.

Continue reading