My Fuji Xerox printer has been on the fritz over the last couple of weeks. I needed to print a letter so I went to the Office Works in the local town to print it. I saved the letter onto a memory stick to make it easy.

OfficeWorks wanted to charge me $5.50 to download the letter from the memory stick to one of their PC's! And then charge me for the printing on top of that! What a total rip off!

Instead I went to an internet cafe a couple of blocks away and got the two page letter printed for fifty cents...

Back to the printer - this is another rip off. I have had the Xerox laser printer for a couple of years. It cost originally about $600 which was a pretty competitive price at the time. So now it appears that the ink cartridges need to be replaced. And boy are they expensive! About $170 per cartridge. And there are four cartridges...

The moral of the story seems to be that it is substantially cheaper to buy a new printer when the first cartridge gives up the ghost. This is why we have landfill overflowing with e-pollution in this country....

I just came across a really interesting observation.

Someone has compared the amount of name frequency in Google searches and the amount of money spent in candidate marketing in the US Presidential campaign.

The answers are quite astonishing. The whole article and a graph are here.

What it indicates is first that Ron Paul and Hilary Clinton are pretty much tied at #1 in search. Not surprising is that Ron Paul has spent almost nothing and Clinton has spent a huge amount already.

Obama has a much lower level of brand interest, it appears.

And on the Republican side, Mitt Romney has outspent them all.

Check out the article.

OK so I finally broke down and joined Facebook. And for the last few days have been creating my page, and 'poking' people and generally trying to get my head around it.

Basically it appears to be no different from MySpace - it is blogging basics but with the ability to have a neural network of known friends that appear on your homepage.

Amazing that it can be that simple.... and that powerful

Phil was at Costco in Culver City yesterday. Shopping for a big screen TV. "We got a 52" already but I think I'll take that out, and put it into the bedroom and install a 60" on the wall." Plasma probably. That's several K. But Costco have a $499 deal for a 32"LCD on the website.

Big screens prices are plummeting and the demand is explosive. Phil isn't alone. American consumers want the big screens. Price drops get them drooling. There's big growth building here. And some previously no names; Olevia  and Sceptre; could be big winners.

But after you get the screen what next? HDTV. Internet hookups. All coming as the hardware mandates more content.

It's no surprise we like video. It's the future. So good news. Today we announce a heavyweight contender launching into the video arena. We know it remakes content on the web. Why? Chris Gilbey founded it with a very fine technology thinker, Silvia Pfeiffer.

The company went public today in Sydney and Santa Monica. Read the release. Remember the name.


Sydney, Australia/Santa Monica,Ca

Australian start up video search, socialization and advertising company, Vquence, commences business today at the heart of the Internet hotspot, video, promising to remake the web experience.

“The Internet is now driven by video. The video quotient of any business or consumer communication: the VQ:is becoming the key factor of success” said co-founder and CEO, Chris Gilbey,

“Vquence helps solve revenue problems for content owners. We make finding videos easy for consumers. We hasten content distribution.”

Vquence provides a one stop shop for content owners to monetize video to consumers under one seamless umbrella. Vquence has a patent pending for an instantaneous approach to clickable video.

“Vquence’s technology and business model turn today’s video assets and costs into online reach and revenue. Consumers, publishers and content owners are united by Vquence” Gilbey noted.

The basis of Vquence is a technology leading video search engine. Users easily discover relevant video content. An authoring toolset then permits easy creation of a playlist of thin sliced videos (or ‘vquence’). The vquence is presented through a specialised video player. This playlist will play in any Web page. Users can cut and paste the code for their vquence into a blog or web page. Dynamic insertion by Vquence places ads into the vquence, based on relevance.

“Vquence boosts social networks.” Gilbey said, adding “Consumers find and aggregate video, then share it widely. They get paid. Content creators and publishers are rewarded from embedded ads in the vquences their communities share.

Initial seed funding to establish Vquence came from Information City Australia Limited, a Melbourne innovation incubator.

“This changes the market dynamic. Consumers become legitimate distributors of the video asset rather than pirates. In contrast, old school DRM brakes distribution” Gilbey said, continuing:

“Vquence gives consumers the ability to opt in or out of ads. Advertisers are getting smarter and making their messages more personal. Passive consumers no longer exist. It’s a community driven outlook now – with the emergence of almost a hive mind. The wisdom of crowds is a powerful market force.”

Vquence was formed in July 2006 by Gilbey and Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, a former CSIRO research scientist. Gilbey is a long time entrepreneur in the content and technology arenas, a former CEO of Lake Technology who consulted to Dolby Laboratories for two years on a global basis.

Dr Pfeiffer is a leading authority on Digital Media Analysis. During a seven year stint at CSIRO she led the team that developed Annodex, an open source platform for video distribution, and her continuing research over the last decade has deepened industry’s understanding of how to apply algorithms to analyse and mediate video content.

“Vquence takes the World Wide Web immeasurably closer towards a Web of Videos, where people build communities around video content published anywhere on the Web. But, uniquely, Vquence guarantees the original content owner will not lose an audience or their content.” Dr Pfeiffer noted.

“Video is the centre of the internet’s next big leap forward. Vquence will be one of the key accelerators.” Pfeiffer said.

The Vquence R&D team is internationally spread and headquartered in Sydney. The company expects to announce a slate of initial customers that includes media and content companies in both the US and Australia.

“Vquence lets consumers click through video and go beyond. Previously, all you could do was click to a video. Vquence is transformational. Vquence gives media publishers the powerful tools of comprehensive, easy search of all their video assets, and then super-distribution.” Dr Pfeiffer concluded.

About Vquence. Vquence is a video search, socialization, and advertising company that has a comprehensive model of monetizing video for content owners to consumers. Demonstrations of the technology are being conducted under NDA. The Vquence website has more information on the company. www.vquence.com. The company has offices in Sydney Australia and Santa Monica Ca.

McDonald's taps into "you" craze.

The move by the world's biggest restaurant chain to feature customers on its packaging is the latest proof of the importance marketers are placing on so-called user-generated content like the homemade videos and blogs that rule the Internet on sites such as social network MySpace and Google Inc.'s video-file sharing site YouTube.

"People are really interested in reality," McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon said in an interview, pointing to the rise in popularity of reality television shows. "It's about real people connecting with our brand."

"They've really tried to be on the cutting edge of change and the cutting edge is viewed as user-generated content," said Mark DiMassimo, chief executive of New York-based ...   more »