Coke vs. Pepsi( just Joke)

An airplane full of a shipment of Pepsi flying over Africa had a malfunction, and went down.
A few weeks later, the Pepsi Companysent a rescue plane.They searched the area and found a tribe of cannibals.They walked up to the Chief of the tribe and asked him if he knew anything about the crash.
The Chief said, “You betcha!”
When asked where the crew was, the Chief replied, “We ate the crew, and we drank the Pepsi.”
The Rescue crew were shocked. One man asked, “Did you eat their legs?”
The chief replied, “We ate their legs, and we drank the Pepsi.”
Another rescuer asked, “Did you eat their arms?”
The Chief replied, “We ate their arms, and we drank the Pepsi.”
After looking totally perplexed for a minute, a third asked, “Did you…you know…eat, their…’things’?”
The chief says, “No.”
“No?” asked the rescuer.
“No,” replied the Chief, “THINGS go better with Coke.“

How to: Create Google Alerts to “Follow” Interesting Topics

“Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams”   (Google)

To create your Google Alerts, follow these steps:

1. Visit http://www.google.com/alerts

You will see a page that looks like this:

2. Enter the term you would like to receive alerts about. Ex: Small Business News

3. Choose the type of alert you would like to receive. For example, you may select news,  blogs, discussion, etc.

4. Decide the volume of messages you would like to receive. How frequently would you like an email notification?

5. Lastly, select the email address where you would like to receive alerts.

These settings can be edited any time by simply visiting the Google alerts page above and managing preferences.

image credit: warrentedarrest

10 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Google

1. The First Google Doodle

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Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

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2. Interesting Figures from the Google IPO

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While the initial price for Google’s stock at its Initial Public Offering in August 2004 is an interesting stat in itself, there’s more to the story. The opening price for Google’s stock was $85 per share. At the time of writing, the stock price was $483 but has soared as high as $600 in the past year, making GOOG a rather nice investment for many.

A bonus factoid from Google’s IPO process is the value Google stated it hoped to raise on its S-1 form — as much as $2,718,281,828. It may just look like a string of numbers to non-mathletes, but 2,718,281,828 is actually the first ten digits of the mathematical constant ““e”,” showing that even as their company was planning to go public, the Google guys could still geek out with a bit of numerical humor.

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3. The First Google Storage Was Made From LEGO

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As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanfordnow showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

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4. Google’s First Ever Tweet

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Google’s first ever Twitter post was as satisfyingly geeky as you could hope for. The message, sent in February 2009, reads “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”

For anyone not fluent in binary, here’s a hint — it’s a well known phrase from the company’s homepage. Got it? Yep, it reads: “I’m feeling lucky.”

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5. Google Rents Goats

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This one isn’t actually one of Google’s infamous April Fools’ Day jokes: Google rents out goats. Yes you read that right. It rents goats from a company called California Grazing to help cut down the amount of weeds and brush at Google HQ.

The operation of 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) is kind to the environment, and as Google puts it: “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

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6. Google’s Impact on Language

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While you’d think the news that the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary adding “google” as a verb to their lexicons in 2006 would thrill the search engine, Google was actually none too pleased with the development.

“We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services,” the company wrote in a blog post at the time.

The rationale behind the semantic displeasure was that Google had “a brand to protect,” and feared Google would “slip from trademarked status into common usage.” Now, four years later, we have to say Google was fighting a losing battle — just ‘google it.’

However, we’ve found some other Google-themed linguistic delights for you — a Google staffer is commonly referred to as a “Googler,” while a new team member joins as a “Noogler.” Nooglers also used to wear a Google gym.

Backing this up, here’s a stat from Google — “Bay Area Googlers consumed approximately 5,500 pounds of handmade chocolates from the snack bins in the microkitchens in 2007.” Wow.

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9. The Google Logo Was Not Centered Until 2001

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Google’s famously sparse homepage is considered a classic design in the online world. The Google logo, however, wasn’t actually centered on the page until March 31, 2001. As early users will remember, the homepage had a bias to the left-hand side, and even earlier — back in 1998 — Google sported a Yahoo-style exclamation mark.

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10. Google Has a Company Dinosaur

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By all accounts, there are many wondrous sights to be seen at the Googleplex, but one of the most arresting is surely the gigantic T-Rex skeleton — nicknamed “Stan” after a “real” dino found nearby — that looms menacingly at Googlers in Mountain View.

Joining Stan in the unique campus decorations is a scale replica of the SpaceShipOne, enormous Android-themed models, pink flamingos, a large LEGO man, Google-colored phone boxes and grown-up size ball pits. One thing seems for sure — just like the company itself — life at the Googleplex must be far from dull.

Source: http://mashable.com/2010/06/19/10-google-facts/

One of the disappointments of the Tokyo Motor Show which opened today was the lack of information on many of the concepts on show, and in particular, Honda's much awaited first real electric motorcycle. Up close, it looks like the real deal, but not one scrap of information was available on even the specifications. Honda wasn't the only culprit but with its extraordinary technology, we were expecting more.

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Indeed, it appears as if the manufacturers have come to some sort of private agreement on how much effort will go into the show, just as they did in 2009 when the show was almost aborted due to the Global Financial Crisis, but went ahead with many exhibits significantly cut back in scale and effort.

This year there have again been significant problems in Japan, with the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear radiation problems, but the show in general is only a shadow of what it once was. Four years ago the Tokyo Motor Show was a powerhouse of automotive technological innovation demonstrating Japan's world-leading mastery of the automotive arts and sciences.

Showing concept bikes and cars with little or no additional information beyond the initial promotional press release is not doing the Japanese Automotive Industry any favours. This year the Tokyo Motor Show and the country's consumer electronics equivalent, CEATEC, joined forces to promote each other and Japanese technological prowess.

It seems like the abysmally poor presentation of information (no information available in English) which has characterized CEATEC and kept it as a sideshow on the expo circuit (when it shouldn't be) seems to have rubbed off on the automotive industry too.

Good luck to the Japanese automotive industry - what was once a showcase of expertise to the world appears to be in significant demise.

As for Honda, just when are we likely to see something more than a mock-up for its electric motorcycles? China is selling millions of electric scooters and motorcycles every year, yet we've seen little from the world's supposedly foremost motorcycle manufacturer other than promises.

Faced with exactly the same threats from Japan, the British Motorcycle Industry also buried its head in the sand. History has a funny way of repeating itself.

source : http://www.gizmag.com/hondas-electric-superbike-shown-but-wrapped-in-secrecy-or-apathy/20676/

Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 17-21, in Orlando

STAMFORD, Conn., October 19, 2010—  Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 21.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.   As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.
“Companies should factor these top 10 technologies in their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
“Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test or more aggressively deploy the technology.”
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:
Cloud Computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.
Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.
The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.
Social Communications and Collaboration.  Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3)Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.  Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.
Video.  Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.
Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.
Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.
Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.
Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.
Ubiquitous Computing.  The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT. In addition, it gives us important guidance on what to expect with proliferating personal devices, the effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities that will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.
Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers.  A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

A video reply of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies presentation will be available via the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Webinar Series. The webinar series will provide full video replays of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo keynotes, as well as selected Gartner analyst presentation. More information is available athttp://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/Gartner/27d8d40b22-4312-intro.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpoCelebrating its 20th anniversary, Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world's most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world's leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees' annual planning efforts. IT executives rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/symposium/us.

More exclusive content, expanding multi-media coverage, including Twitter feeds and comments from the Gartner Blog Network will be available at Gartner’s SymLive site at http://gartner.com/symlive.

Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo include:
October 25-27, Tokyo, Japan: www.gartner.com/jp/symposium
November 8-11, Cannes, France: www.gartner.com/eu/symposium
November 16-18, Sydney, Australia: www.gartner.com/au/symposium

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