Homo Viator

I am not sure if the facebook users among you want to hear this, but the company has launched the most privacy invading advertising model ever.

Yesterday it began selling "ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about." From an advertiser's point of view this is not short of an industry revolution. Nothing is more convincing than having a friend of yours recommend a product to you. In the case of facebook it is 50 million friends. 200.000 friends are added everyday.

Many users will dislike this kind of privacy invasion, but I could not care less. I am a modern day consumer. I want to get the product that best meets my taste and expectations and I want to use as little time as possible to find that product. I basically want to maximize product satisfaction in the most efficient way possible. This is why I dig i-Tunes and Amazon recommendations and warmly welcome Facebook's new advertising model. Read this New York Times article if you want to find out more about that model.

Don't be fooled by the design of his site. Scoble has one of the world's most read blogs. He lives in Silicon Valley and blogs from home. When company executives launch new products or raise new funds they stop by at his house, just to have a chat with him. Thus he really gives you the inside scoops on media and technology developments. Below a little graph he did that depicts social media distribution.

If you cant see it properly by clicking on the image above, try clicking on the link here.

Apple and New York just fit. Nowhere is Apple as established as in the Big Apple itself. People were cuing for the new Operating System Leopard.

From the inward stats, I see that 43% of you readers still use the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Wow, you guys must have a slow internet experience. That statistic should lie between 0,1% and 0,5%,max. Do yourself a favor and download firefox.

What an incredible way to shop. I cant wait to furnish my apartment the IKEA way. Check it out and play around with it.

Three sites that you should keep on your radar: Joost, Pownce and Wixi. Unfortunately the latter two are currently beta versions, by invitation only, but it should not take too long until they open to everyone. I blogged about Joost some months back and the site has developed slower than I thought. It still has some technical problems, but I am sure that the Skype founders will do to TV what they previously did to Telecommunications: Shake things up considerably! Wixi is amazing as well, HD quality movies, easily shared by everyone. Even though Wixi currently just has a few members, I could find lots of movies to watch instantly.

This phone is one little mean machine. Just bought it and am stunned. These kind of products make you look at the world and wonder like a child: How can human beings built such incredible things? It has a 5 mega pixel Carl Zeiss camera and GPS. Little me, in constant direct contact with a satellite that is looking over my shoulder. Since working at Siemens Mobile and writing my dissertation on it, I have been waiting for mobile convergence. It seems to have arrived. And even though I always thought that I would not really seek convergence, I must admit that it comes in quite handy. Although I am a great believer in the Apple stock, I am not sure how the stock will perform after the first version i-phone will come out. I will skip the first version and am sure that many people will. How can a phone successfully compete against the N95 with just a 2 mega pixel camera and no GPS?

In ancient times, people searched for a few answers to relatively few questions. Thanks to Google we find millions of answers to trillions of questions, all instantaneously. Even though we still do not really communicate with Goggle in a question/ answer format, search optimization will lead to exactly that in the near future. With SpaceTime you can get your Google answers in 3D and you do not need Vista to run it. Tune in and space out!

Let me be a brand ambassador once more and present you the latest Apple ad. I just wonder when their new operating system Leopard will finally hit the stores. On its website Apple had been announcing it for Spring 2007 for more than a year. Now it changed the launch date to October 2007. Apple is traditionally very secretive about its developments, which is why competitors have such difficulty copying it's innovations in time. Hopefully Apple will pair Leopard with new hardware. It is said that Apple will bring out the world's first computer with flash card memory, which will be replacing hard drives. This would mean that computers could be switched on as fast as a digital camera, with 20 hour battery life and laptops would be much much lighter. Once the Leopard awakes, I'll be running to switch. I am so tired of my PC. It slows me down!