* The Motley Fool jumped in on the proceedings with the FOOLottery, a game that turns the traditional lottery notion on its head. Check out the company's fabulous "Play now, play us later" technology, with odds stacked 110 percent in your favor: "Fifty percent payouts from the state lottery are a rip-off. It's a bear market every day with regular players losing tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. FOOLottery! reverses that. We pay out 110%, which means that for every dollar put in, players win back $1.10. Our average player will profit, and our winners will make a fortune." We won't bore you with an exhaustive explanation, but you can play the game here and read about the origin of the game as told by Hope Nelson-Pope, vp of global marketing. Also be sure to read the fine print that contains gems such as this: "Any income tax liability is the sole responsibility of the winners, but think about how much money you'll have available to pay the tax!" It's just like the 1990s Nasdaq...
Gmail -- Now With Infinite Storage
Now onto the real news about Google expanding its free e-mail storage, courtesy of the AP: "'Our goal is to make sure storage is no longer an issue for Web mail users,' said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products. The announcement was made on the first anniversary of the Internet search engine's launch of Gmail, which surprised many users with its generous storage allotment and prompted rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to boost the capacity of their own free Web mail services."
| ___About Random Access___ Random Access is a daily column by Robert MacMillan that explores the latest trends in technology and how they are changing daily life. Random Access won't tell you why a new gizmo will revolutionize your ad server. It will tell you about episodes from daily life -- exasperated waiters who use blogs to vent about their customers, whole runs of salmon injected with nanoparticles for individual tracking in Norwegian fjords and the growing number of DJs who are sick of being sidelined in favor of iPods. (Only one of these stories is fake.) Most of what you see will be culled from news sources and blogs from around the world, though we will supplement Random Access with original files on the novel, unusual, bizarre and reactionary happenings in the world of technology and society. E-mail: Send links and comments. | | |
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News.com's report reminded us that a lot of folks thought Google's unveiling of Gmail last April Fools' Day was potentially a joke: "Gmail's 1GB of free storage at the time was widely thought to exceed the lifetime needs of most e-mail users without the need to delete a single file. By contrast, rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft offered about 10MB of storage, seeking to charge customers who wanted more."
The real joke, even at the time, was Yahoo, Microsoft etc. thinking that 10MB of free storage would be enough. Remember when leaving your Hotmail account unchecked for more than a few days could get you frozen out of the system? People treat their e-mail in all sorts of ways. Some print out the ones they want to save and store them in a file cabinet. Others have turned their e-mail accounts into digital stacks. Either way, 10MB wasn't cutting it for any of us. The question for next year's April Fool's Day is whether the 2-gigabyte capacity still meets our needs...
Not Blogged Out Yet?
Many people claim that they get their best ideas in places where it's inconvenient to write them down, such as the shower or in the car. These are the people who should find some relief with "Rabble," a new technology from a San Diego-based company that is expected to debut this month. The San Jose Mercury News reported that the technology, created by Intercasting, "streamlines the now-cumbersome process for publishing text or images from a cell phone to a Weblog. It also creates a way to search mobile blogs for items of interest -- from homes for sale in a particular neighborhood to updated tour information for a favorite band."
Experts see Rabble as a way to help people indulge in location-based wireless services, allowing people with common interests to find each other in their communities. More from the paper: "Michael McGuire, a research director of GartnerG2 in San Jose, said Rabble's immediacy is bound to appeal to the growing ranks of bloggers. He can see subscribers to a Sacramento Kings blog using the technology to alert one another when post-season tickets go on sale in San Jose. 'I've been blogging about Amos Lee... I find out he's got an extra show or he's doing a store opening. Picture, boom. There are all kinds of visual queues all of us, as tribe members, will relate to.'" I grant you, it sounds pretty cool, but what is this talk about tribes? Robert no grok.
More Free Press For Google
We're also feeling a little dodgy about another new Google item. "Ride Finder" in theory allows people to find taxis, limos or shuttle services based on the real-time position of the vehicles, the company claims. Now active in several locations, it offers maps with pins stuck in them to locate the vehicles. If it's a joke, it's not particularly funny so we're assuming that it's one more effort by the company to throw spaghetti at the wall and see how much of it sticks. The Ride Finder service shows up at Google Labs, which includes several other works in progress such as Google SMS, Google Suggest and Froogle Wireless.
Good Enough for Government Work
Citizens rejoice! The National Research Council has published its long-awaited report, "Signposts in Cyberspace" ... seven years after Congress asked for it. Ordered up in 1998, the report was supposed to be handed in within nine months. More, from the Associated Press: "In the intervening period, Google emerged to dominate the Web, technology executives made then lost billions in stock options, lawyers shut down Napster over music piracy, high-speed Internet connections soared and the number of Web addresses climbed from 2.2 million to more than 65 million. The job of Commerce secretary, the top U.S. official responsible for overseeing the study, turned over three times." As NRC official Charles Brownstein told the wire service, "Time got extended."
It was, in fact, all those twists, turns and sudden leaps forward in the technology world that slowed the report's completion, Brownstein also said. He added, in what I imagine must have been a somewhat querulous tone, that Congress didn't pony up the $1 million to cover the costs of assembling the report until 2001 -- three years after lawmakers commissioned it.
Among the report's unremarkable findings:
* The root structure underpinning the Internet is very strong.
* The servers that run the Internet shouldn't be located near each other in case of natural disaster.
* There should be Internet suffixes added to the list that includes .com, .net, etc.
* Hackers might prove problematic.
It almost feels like too cheap a shot to say it, but I can't resist: These are our tax dollars at work.
Do Adjust Our Dials
Mapping the world of culture is like mapping the Internet. It's possible, but complicated and difficult to see everything at once. That means occasionally issuing some corrections and clarifications. In an entry on Monday, I wrote that Interpol was the first band whose concert at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., was broadcast live on National Public Radio's Web site. As an alert reader noted, Wilco had been on a month earlier. Thanks, Caroline.
Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.
