So many missed opportunities

News recently emerged that Google tried to purchase the company Groupon for an estimated 6 billion dollars. Groupon is a site that offers special deals for local restaraunts and businesses to consumers that sign up to their email list. For a company that is only 2 years old 6 billion dollars is a huge offer. They however declined under speculation that they would soon be working towards an IPO. While I am impressed by Groupon's success, it has made me look back and analyze some of the opportunities I've missed out on. About a year and a half ago I was working for my cousin's publishing company in Chicago. He asked me to design a website for a company that would have essentially been a competitor to Groupon. He had a little bit different business model that would have likely allowed him to achieve some pretty good success. If he could have even achieved half the success Groupon achieved, that could have meant billions. I began creating a mock-up for the site, only to find my cousin's interested dwindled. I was just enjoying being in Chicago and had plenty of other work to keep me busy, so I pretty much dropped the idea. Now in retrospect, I wish I would have pushed it on him more. He has lots of resources, and it would have taken very little for him to launch the start-up. I have had similar start-up opportunities in the past that I've always given up on for one reason or another. Seeing all these missed opportunities is really beginning to motivate me to do more with my ideas. Now if only I could meet some angel investors.

arrrgh there's a lot of pirates still out there

When I first became interested in computers, one of the first things I did was begin downloading music through Napster. From there as I began to dig deeper into the inner workings of computers, I began to download pirated software. For those that don't know the modern use of the word pirating refers to the use of any media or technology without paying for the rights to it. For a long time I would stay up every night finding countless movies, music, and software to download. Sometimes I would never even use the media I downloaded, I would simply download it for the fun of it. I would amass all this media and software onto hard drives just so I would have it "in case I ever wanted to use it." I would use my family's computers like zombies in order to take advantage of their bandwidth when it wasn't being used. I was downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of data every week. While some of the data was never touched, I did use a lot of it, and through it I learned a great deal about computers. Eventually anti-piracy laws were passed. I began to read stories of people being sued for millions of dollars just for downloading a few songs without paying for them. This eventually began to scare me. One day I began using Apple's Itunes software for my music and movies. I loved the ease of use and the convergence Apple had achieved across devices. From there on out, I began buying all my music through Itunes. I also began buying and renting the majority of my movies through Itunes. As I started college and began working more with enterprise computing environments, I lost touch with the pirating community. To the point that most of my accounts on torrent websites are now inactive. While I knew pirating was still very popular in some areas, I had somewhat assumed that it had declined in recent years. A recent article on Slashdot showed me I was very wrong. Antivirus company Avast recently revealed that a single license of it's software is being used by 774,651 users worldwide in over 200 countries after going viral on file-sharing sites. This shows how very popular pirating still is.

Who needs books anymore?

With the launch of the Google bookstore, it appears as if we are truly headed towards the end of the traditional book. One of the most popular Christmas items this year is the e-reader. There are several that have become extremely popular including the Sony Nook, Amazon Kindle, and Apple Ipad. While some devices such as the Ipad offer much more than just your simple E-reader experience, the Nook and Kindle are currently aiming to be just another way to read a book, magazine, or newspaper. To begin with I thought all this new technology was very exciting and interesting. I went out and bought an Ipad shortly after their release. I spent the next several weeks coveting the shiny new device and playing with it often. Then it all came to an abrupt end, and less than two months after buying it, I sold the device to someone at church. I was hoping the whole digital publication thing would just be a fad, but the more I see the more I realize, it is the future. Now that Google has entered the competition, it is officially the next big thing. Looking back now I can see one of the original starting places may have been one of the least expected, the education environment. Two years ago I began having classes offer e-versions of the textbooks. Now nearly half my classes offer the option to purchase the e-books instead of the more expensive traditional texts. While for classes that require little use of the text and casual reading of the news may be convenient on a tablet or e-reader, I find it very difficult to really dig into something more serious without the printed version. For instance when configuring our most reason DDN (Data Direct Networks) storage device, I had to print and read the entire 300 page manual. I just couldn't focus when trying to read through the PDF on my PC. While it's obvious e-editions aren't going away, I think there will always be a certain place for printed media.

Is netflix killing the internet?

As more and more people and devices have begun taking advantage of Neflix's streaming media capabilities, a very important problem has arisen. Who will pay for the bandwidth. Streaming terabytes and terabytes of media constantly, requires quite a bit of bandwidth. Recently a company called Level 3 which is a streaming-content provider signed a contract to become the exclusive provider for Netflix's online content. Shortly after this contract was signed, Comcast (the largest cable internet provider in the nation) demanded that Level 3 pay more money for the use of their network. While normally I wouldn't care that much that two corporate tech giants are arguing over money, this is somewhat concerning to me. The issue is that someone is going to have to pay for the bandwidth, and I don't want it to be me. I use Netflix regularly, and at the end of the day, it's very likely that consumers will be the ones to pay. Where this turns into an internet wide issue, is if Level 3 doesn't pay Comcast, Comcast is threatening to block Netflix content to its users. If this were to go through, it could possibly mark the end of the "free internet" as we know it.

Star Wars in real life?

We may finally get to see some of the amazing technology seen in the Star Wars movies. While I'm not a Star Wars junkie (like Jason), this is some pretty interesting technology. Apparently Japan has put in a bid for the 2022 World Cup that's based off providing holographic video feeds to stadiums in other countries. The way it would work (as I understand it) is the Japanese would use over 200 high-definition cameras to film every match. The cameras would allow for complete coverage of the entire field, including every angle of every player. The camera feeds would then be fused together using technology that doesn't yet exist, to create holographic images of each player that would then be cast onto fields in other countries. This would allow people in the US to go to a stadium and watch a holographic version of a match that is taking place in Japan. This technology sounds really cool, and I would definitely like to see it in action. Unfortunately, the technology doesn't yet exist. I'm not sure I could agree with FIFA if they gave the World Cup to Japan based solely off their promise of a nonexistent technology.