The Museum of Me: Powerful Advertising from Intel

May 31, 2011 by

A hat-tip to Leo Laporte (@leolaporte on twitter) for pointing this out to me.  Intel just released this awesome bit of advertising.  I’m somewhat fascinated by advertising.  Some of it is droll and uninspired.  Then, you get something like the “Museum of Me” from Intel.  Wow.

Basically, they jack into your facebook profile, use some of your photos, likes, and friends and put together a simulated “Museum of Me”.  Then, using that data, they roll you through it in a video set to some music.  It’s pretty cool.  A downright reinvention of immersion advertising.  Why advertise to you when they can advertise with you.

Check out Museum of Me.

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50Gbps Silicon Photonics: The Fast Future of Tech

July 30, 2010 by

According to this Anandtech.com article, Intel demonstrated a true Silicon Photonic interface for components on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Intel demonstrated the world’s first practical data connection using silicon photonics – a 50 gigabit per second optical data connection built around an electrically pumped hybrid silicon laser. They achieved the 50 gigabit/s data rate by multiplexing 4 12.5 gigabit/s wavelengths into one fiber – wavelength division multiplexing. Intel dubbed its demo the “50G Silicon Photonics Link.”

Wow.  Think of what that really means.  The limits of Copper cabling be damned!  As it becomes easier and easier to integrate, we’ll see linkages for some of the simplest things.  Imagine a data switch that uses these!  Instead of the 1-10Gbps speed cap that we have now, we could transfer data at 5X that speed!  Of course, I don’t have the slightest idea what the data cap is on the internals of a switch, so the copper on the boards might limit the full throughput, but even the added speed from pc to switch and from switch to server would bring an incredible gain in speeds.  And it goes without saying that gamers will be all over this technology for their high-end gaming rigs.  And if it’s truly that much cheaper than the current toslink connections, it could become a standard in most IT backrooms to link things together with fiber.

The list could go on with the potential benefits and gains from this sort of technology.  Here’s hoping they find a way to bring it into production quickly and cheaply.

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Who’s Teaching Who?

February 27, 2009 by

Part of my day job (a small part really) is to take some continuing education type modules that are meant to help all of the staff where I work to learn the basics of our industry along with the basics of phone answering and computer usage.  I’ve had several jobs that have had similar programs (Radio Shack comes to mind) and with all of them, there is some degree of antiquatedness to be expected.  Many of the computer manuals, for instance, still talk about 28.8 bps modems.  The more updated ones usually will talk about 56k modems and maybe even a quick blurb about the emerging “broadband” technologies.  The one I was working on recently even talked about the UseNet system!

But what really got me was the following bit of text:

cpublunder

Can you spot the glaring errors in that paragraph?  I’ll give you a hint.  Intel is the manufacturer of the Pentium and Celeron CPUs, not a competitor with them.  And they never have been.  Intel made, makes and will make the Pentium and Celeron brand CPUs.

And this is a educational module for our staff.  So, I ask again, who’s teaching who? (whom?)

*if you’re curious, Intel introduced the Pentium chip in 1993 and the Celeron chip in 1998.  Coincidentally, 1998 is the year that I purchased my first personal PC (not owned by my parents) and it had a Intel Celeron 333.  Very high tech at the time. 🙂

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What is Qassia?

March 5, 2008 by

I got an email today asking me to check out this new beta program called Qassia. I went over, signed up and started poking around. This is what I was shown right away just before signing up.

Hi! Welcome to my profile page at Qassia, the most amazing resource ever. Wanna join Qassia? All you need to do is click on “Sign Up“. Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add – only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your websites. Qassia rocks!

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you’ve got nothing to lose. See ya around!

I have to say, I was slightly intrigued. They say that it’s in beta, but from what I can tell, you can sign up through anyones profile page. All you have to know is a username. Then you can poke around and sign up.

They’ve got a rather funky system going. It reminds me a little of Squidoo. The idea is that you enter in your website addresses and they get put into a SEO friendly (they ask for the anchor text) directory. Your placement in the directory depends on how much Qassia money you have. You earn money by adding “intel” to the site. “Intel” is classified as any kind of intelligence. Information basically. You also earn money by screening intel. In the end, the intel gets graded. The higher the grade the better it gets placed. The better it gets placed, the more Qassia bucks you make from it. They also share ad revenue through Adsense. That works very similarly to the forums at Digital Point in that you enter in your adsense id and they just put up your adsense ads. Supposedly, you get 100% of the ad revenue from the showing of your intel. Pretty generous.

At the moment, the colors of the site are not great. And the beta doesn’t really seem like a beta if you just have to know a user name to go to the sign up page. But, it is also a new site. Which means it doesn’t have much for content just yet, but new stuff is getting added all the time. Which also means that you and I have the opportunity to add a lot of content and have it be fresh to the site and also some of the only content. The proverbial foot in the door sort of situation. Early bird gets the worm. etc…

I’m gonna be toying around with it. You can sign up at my profile or through this sign up page.

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