DTV - Digital Television Is Here Today!

Today, is the first day of full-power digital television in the US and the end of most analog TV broadcasts.

The move to DTV has been a long process, which began in the 1990s. But, it's here now!

What this means for you:

• If you are on cable or dish it means nothing.
• However, if you receive your broadcast TV via traditional antenna and tuner and didn't either upgrade your TV to one with a built-in digital tuner or purchase a digital converter box most of your TV stations will be gone.
• If you were prepared for DTV, you may need to rescan your channels because some stations may have changed channels upon going to full-power.

A few little known pieces of info for those of you that were not prepared:

About a hundred TV stations around the country serving nearly 70 percent of all households are providing "analog nightlight" services. The "nightlight" program is a voluntary program in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes. More than half the stations broadcasting the "analog nightlight" service will remain on air for 30 days. And the rest will be on for at least two weeks. In total, these stations will reach 69 percent of TV households.

And only high-power broadcasters are required to switch to digital, a few low-power analog stations and rural relay stations known as "translators" will still be available in some areas. (Yes, Virginia, the DTV transition still isn't over)

So, for some of you there is more time to make the switch to DTV and enjoy what I've enjoyed for over a year now -- crisp, sharp picture and digital surround sound via broadcast DTV (provided you have a HDTV set).

For more DTV info check out DTV.gov.

Facebook's New Path to Profitability

Facebook anounced that it is introducing a payment system and a site-wide currency of credits for the purchase of virtual-goods on the site from Facebook and third-party applications.

This anouncement come on the heals of last weeks investment of $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a private Russian internet investment group.

The payment systems is new means of monitizing Facebook, which is something that has aluded socail networks thus far. Users undoutably with feel more comfortable giving Facebook their credit card information for purchases, rather than the hundreds of application creators using the system as a platform.

With this Facebook will undoubtably will encourage commerce and capture a percentage of every transaction on the Website by serving as the payment provider.

Read More:

• Facebook brings in payment system
• Facebook gets $200m from Russian group

Bing - Microsoft's New Search Engine Has Launched

Bing Preview has launched, but so far I don't see it measuring up to Microsoft's hype or being the ultimate search engine. But, I'll give it the old college try for a while.

Get Ready to Catch a Wave!

Google engineers demonstrated for developers Thursday at Google I/O conference something new and frankly amazing, Google Wave. This new product, which is slated to launch later this year, is a revolutionary Web communication and collaboration tool. 

In my humble opinion from viewing the demo of Google Wave we may be watching 'the beginning of the end' for email as we know it.

Some of the same team that gave us Google Maps (Jens and Lars Rasmussen with Stephanie Hannon) has taken email back to the drawing board to give us a new protocol for communication on the Internet.

So, what is Google Wave and why is it revolutionary?

• It simultaneously enables real-time communication and asynchronous communication in the same user interface -- acting like email when the parties you're communicating with are off-line and acting like instant messaging when they are on-line in the same conversation (Wave).
  
  
• It could ultimately merge all your communication interfaces email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management into one browser based client.
  
  
• It enables real-time multi-user editing of documents / communication with tracking and time-line playback. Key strokes from every participant of a Wave are updated live from all users and visible to all users live.
  
  
• It features drag-and-drop file-sharing to the browser. For example, you can select and drag photos from your desktop right into the Wave in the browser and it automatically uploads and makes the photos available to all participants of the Wave.
  
  
• It features real-time natural language spellchecking! It first automatically changes commonly misspelled words as you type. Then it examines the context of words in the sentence structure to also make changes automatically or suggest alternate spellings.
  
  
• It features real-time language translation of about 40 languages. For example, the demo shows a English user and a French user typing and reading in their native languages while the Wave Robot translates word for word in real-time fixing the sentence structure along the way.
  
  
• It features embeddability into Web pages, blogs, etc. For example, the Blogy extension to Wave enables the posting of a blog featuring live editing and live responses via comments on the blog or by just typing in the Wave client.
  
  
• It features embeddability of maps, videos, gadgets, robots, etc. These are only limited by developers' imaginations.
  
  
  • Gadgets are applications that run inside a Wave such as most current iGoogle and OpenSocial gadgets, games, polls, etc. 
    
    
  • Robots are extensions that add automation to a Wave and allow exchange of data with third parties such as Stocky for stock prices and Tweety, which displays and posts tweets between Twitter and Wave. 

Google Wave will be a free service offered by Google at Wave.Google.com. 

But, don't forget that I mentioned earlier that Google's intention is to make this a new protocol. To that end Google Wave will be open source. Any developer will be able to sign up and download the code to not only develop Gadgets and Robots, but setup entire Wave servers. The architecture will then support inter-server Waves with the same real-time capabilities and additional security features which keep local server Waves and wavelets (private comments in a Wave) on the local server.

Also, notice the user side of Wave is in the browser (the demo used Crome, Safari, and Firefox). So, the user doesn't have to install any new software and doesn't store any data on the local system. This is cloud computing communication were everything is stored on the server and the user is just interacting with the server through the browser.

These two, open source and in-browser, translate into FREE communication software for every organization on the Internet, which could replace every email server and every email client. (Look out Microsoft.)

So, if you have an hour and twenty minutes to spare, watch the amazing demo for yourself (posted below). If you don't, just look at the screenshot and image the possibilities.

Screenshot of the Google Wave user interface.

See the Google Wave demo below.

To read more about Google Wave check out Google Wave or Google Wave: A Complete Guide by Ben Parr for some great, detailed explinations.

The 'Search Wars' are Back!

Well the 'Search Wars' are back! This month we witnessed the introduction of WolframAlpha, which is kind of a search engine. But it just spits facts and answers to math questions out at you. It's great for things like entering your birthdate and finding out how many days you've been alive, what famous events happened that day, or what famous persons were born the same day as you. 

But, it's not a search engine that helps you find answers to things like what's the best digital camera or where's the closest zoo to your home. But can any of today's mainline search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Live.com, Ask.com) answer these questions effectively? Yes, they all attempt to, but they just don't quite make it.

Enter Bing! Bing is Microsoft's yet to be launched attempt to answer life's little questions. Check out the Bing promotional video. 

Microsoft claims that they decided to "start over" when creating this new search engine. I don't know yet if that claim is true, but from just watching the promo video I see a lot of borrowed features from search engines, Web directories, shopping aggregaters, etc. all combined into a nice new package.

I personally can't wait to try it out and determine for myself if Microsoft's hype is just the regular hype or if there is something to Bing that could actually the take search share away from Google.

I'll be watching for Bing to launch. 

The Simpsons Business Principles

Darrell Zahorsky of About.com: Small Business has come up with 5 business lessons from the Simpsons. And theStreet.com has produced a short video highlighting these principles.

1. Avoid Apu-like Hours – put systems in place, hire people, and outsource
2. “D’Oh” Yourself – Stand out from the crowd
3. Protect your “Flaming Homer” – Protect your money winners
4. Spread the Ned – Word of mouth marketing
5. Don’t Krusty a promotion – Obey the law when using promotions

Drudge Report Bigger Referrer than Google to U.K. News Sites

The DrudgeReport.com is biggest single referrer of United States web traffic to United Kingdom news sites, according to an article published in the August 2007 edition of the journal Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism.

The report sites the Drudge Report as referring 25% of the U.S. web traffic to U.K. news sites with Google and Google news coming in a distant second and third by referring less than 15% combined.

This is an illustration of the power of the manually-aggregated news portals, which publish links to stories in other online publications, and an illustration of how much influence one person can have online. Matt Drudge, as the editor of the Drudge Report, can direct up to 150 million page impressions a month and with his website, which is more popular than many of the publications from which he aggregates content. Drudge is able to do this becasue he found and develop a nice at the right time.

The primary purpose of the new reaserch was to examine the globalization of British news sites. The research showed that "Americans made up an average of 36% of the total audience with up to another 39% of readers from countries other than the US." If you do those numbers, you will discover that only 25% of British news site readers are from the U.K.

Read a pre-published copy of the report here.