Million Dollars, Nice!

A student in England has almost reached his target of one million dollars, and he’s only 21! He came up with the idea after jotting down ideas before he went to bed on how to become a millionaire before he went to university. Then he came up with the million-dollar idea, sell pixels at USD $1 a piece on his homepage, MillionDollarHomepage.com

This man is Alex Tew, hailed as an advertising genius by the many companys who are using his site to “make internet history”. Alex believes he can make his goal by the end of 31st December 2005. In fact as of writing this, he has already made USD $936,700. The student says advertisers get to keep their ads for a period of five years from purchase and he says he will use the money he has made to guarantee it. Alex has said he has already got numerous job offers from companies aiming to secure his money making talent.

Alex is doing business management course at Nottingham and needed GBP £7000 a year to complete his studys. He is understandable overwhelmed by the success he has achieved: “It’s just nuts. I’m in a state of disbelief. It’s like Monopoly money but then I look at my bank account and there’s a lot of cash in it.” The method is simple, his website is made up of one page divided into 10,000 boxes, each 100 pixels in size. Companies can buy one or more boxes for USD $100 each and cover it with a logo, which, when clicked on, transports web users to the customers’ own site.

The figures add up with the site now carrying over 240 advertisements and has 30,000 hits a day. Even the actor Jack Black, star of School of Rock and Shallow Hal, is using the site to advertise his band Tenacious D. The British National Union of Students say 90% of students are in debt. But the only money worries Alex now has is what to spend it all on. He has already splashed out on a black mini for himself, as he thinks of what to do with his new found fortune.

Click Online

In case you have never looked at it, Click Online is the flagship technology program for the BBC. It broadcasts on the internet and can be viewed even on a 56k modem. I have been watching click online for over a year and a half now, I first saw it on BBC World, while holidaying in Portugal. It also broadcasts on BBC News 24 at 7am on a Sunday morning (I heve never seen it at this time!). Although by its nature a technical program, it is very much aimed at the average PC user and so most things are explained fully.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

I got it! UPS delivered the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. What can I say? It is pure magic! The features are great, it includes:

• Web Browser (Opera

• Flash Player version 6

• Email Client

• Internet Radio

• News Reader

• Media players, Image viewer

• PDF viewer

• File Manager

• Search

• Calculator

• World Clock

• Notes

• Sketch

• Games

Whats more is it runs on Linux, making it totally extendable. It even has its own developer site at maemo.org, where applications

can be downloaded. Hot on my list were Doom (the Game) and GAIM (Instant Messenger, uses Google Talk, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, etc). Unfortunately their is no skype for Nokia 770 just yet, but hopefully it will be here soon. Nokia has promised an upgrade in 2006, that will include VOIP, such as skype.

All major formats have good support on the Nokia 770, including: * Audio: MP3, MPEG4-AAC, WAV, AMR, MP2, [OGG - (With download from Maemo)]

• Image: JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNG, Animated GIF format,

SVG-tiny, ICO

• Video: MPEG1, MPEG4, Real Video, H.263, AVI, 3GP

As soon as I took it out of the package, within minutes I was surfing, the only delay was trying to find MAC address (as my router uses access control list) which I eventually found underneath the battery. I thought this was a bit odd as Mac Address’ are easily attainable when it is connected to a network, so hopefully Nokia will revise this! The media card is also only 64mb, which gives a total free of about 108mb space. RS-MMC (The media card it uses) only come in prohibitive sizes and are expensive, this will most likely change if it is widely used.

The stand that comes with it is the most difficult part of the package! It took me 20mins to try and figure out how to use the stand. All in all it is not a great stand, just two lumps of plastic. The battery seems respectable at the moment, with a predicted time of three hours battery life and seven days standby. I got a bit more then three hours when I first opened it, it worked out just a little over 3hrs 20mins. Not bad for a 2/3 full battery Nokia packs with new devices!

Not surprisingly, reviews are excellent for it. A lot of noise is made of the fact that it is so customisable and that all of the programs for it are free! Abiword is also a must have, it opens and edits documents. It compared to other tablets is quite cheap, at about €369 including delivery, in Ireland.

I will be posting updates on my free Wifi testing campaign soon, its all about to kick off! I will let you know best free wifi spots in and around Dublin area! Anywhere you think I should go? Please tell me, it will be useful!

Related

Nokia 770 Review:

http://www.mobileburn.com/review.jsp?Id=1376&source=HOMETOP

Applications Available for Nokia 770:

http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog

Official Site:

http://www.Nokia.com/770

Google Video

What a fantastic service Google now offer with their Google Video platform. There are a couple of reasons why I like it, mainly because it is available to upload your videos on all platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac) and is available on Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Netscape), Opera and Internet Explorer. This is important in creating a better all round user experience. If only Yahoo! would follow Googles example and open up Launch Cast to other browsers besides an outdated version of Netscape and Internet Explorer.

I have a critiscism of Google Video also, and that is it takes too long to approve videos (8 days in my case), the should at least give an expected time-frame and allow notification through email when your video is accepted and available live on Google. Other than that the service is pretty good and as it is still in the Beta testing phase, Google have promised to make it better. This could be a precursor to Google trying to launch its own media-for-sale in the form of Music videos, who knows? One things for sure, it is going to steal the thunder from launchcast. My first video I have uploaded is below, it is called We Hate Coogie Bear : The Motion Picture

External Links

Google Video

We Hate Coogie Bear : The Motion Picture

Yahoo! Music

Eurosceptics

The British Press annoys me so much, they way they contantly get it wrong accross the board about the EU. I am a fond supporter of the EU for all its faults and cracks. But I love freedom of the press and like organisations who uphold basic journalistic standards, such as rhe BBC. This leads me onto the evil man behind it all, Rupert Murdoch owner of The Sun, BSkyB Television, The Times and other media outlets. It seems all he pushes is his agenda, whether it be the Bush Right-Christian agenda on Fox in the US or Eurosceptic view in his British interests.

I speak of this because of the shocking facts I discovered on an EU website, by the commissioner for the EU in The UK, its at:

http://www.cec.org.uk/press/myths/index.htm

Honestly some of the things that are published are unbelievable! One can only guess Ruperts motives (maybe to foster the “special relationship” between UK and USA even further?) Who knows? One thing is for certain, the US resents the EU’s bargaining power and good relations with China and Russia. One to hit the headlines was US supposedly using spy planes to ferry people to be tortured in countrys such as Egypt (Known for bad Human Rights record).

I think British People do not realise how beneficial giving money to aid development is, take my own country , Ireland for instance. Fourty years ago we were a backward nation with no prospects, Now we are one of the richest in Europe and will become a contributor to the EU soon. We should aim to replicate the “Ireland Effect” in the new accession countrys to help the develop. If they grow, it means an enlarged market for British made products, thereby helping generate more wealth - what goes around comes around, this is not a battle for identity with France or Germany any more!

The Future.....

While using instant messenger I had a brainwave, what will the tech landscape look like in the future? So here’s What I think could happen: IBM will buy Sun MicroSystems and make a new opensource OS, it will be based on Ubuntu. Microsoft will purchase AOL and roll out its products on the Web, such as MS Office, it will have a slow start to Vista, but it will pick up through peoples eagerness to buy the latest hardware. Google will buy Opera, invest in Mozilla and consolidate Opera into Mozilla, it will also buy Adobe (for their PDF format), get its way to publish an online bookstore through Google Book Search. Yahoo will continue to buy extra companies to add to its list of a zillion services, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us .

What do you think? Post me comments!

In Sickness and in Health!

I have a throat infection, so I get a week off!! I went to the doctor and I am on vibramycin antibiotics. I was coughing blood (not nearly as nasty as it sounds). Now I can get some relaxation in before Christmas!! I hope to do a guide to restricted formats on Ubuntu soon, especially W32 Codecs and how to get all the good formats it offers (Divx, MPEG1-4, Windows Media, Quicktime Media and RealMedia)

We should all be using free formats, but everyone uses proprietry formats. If anything makes the transition to Linux that bit smoother, its the ability to play and view all their media.

Wireless, New Design and Web Services

Welcome to the new and improved Duey Finsters. As I mentioned before, I hope to receive a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet soon, so I will be checking the free wireless services offered by Eircom in Dublin and at McDonalds reataurants.

You may have noticed the new look and this revamped blog. You may also question where has Duey Finsters Web Services gone? It is still here, but me and Thomas Whelan, who run it, cannot decide on a name. Maybe you all could help us out? Since well over 97% of all the words in the dictionary are registered as dot coms, we have no clue what to call ourselves.

We are looking for a unique name, that could be trademarked, so anything you suggest, you give us permission to use royalty-free (We might throw you a million, when we make ours).Once we get a name, the dot com will be registered and a totally new site will be designed.

Also new is a guides section, which will be part of the blog. The idea is I can write guides so other people can see how easy it is to actually do stuff. I plan to write a guide (Including pictures) for Linux and Windows using encrypted mail. On Linux, I will show both command and KGPG (the KDE graphical key maker) and on windows I will use WinPT (Windows Privacy Tools).

The Music and Bookmarks section are going to take a while for me to implement properly, as I am still practising using PHP to render XML, but it should be fun. They both use feeds, Last.fm for music and del.icio.us for bookmarks. That reminds me, I just saw del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo!, I hope they do not ruin it like they did to Flickr and stick their name and advertising in every concievable space on the page.