Number one for number two

Good news for the growing segment of the Second Life community who've scripted hacks to enable their avatars to defecate. A little bird tells me that the folks over at Linden Lab are nearing the beta stage on a useful little widget that measures mercury levels in virtual poop.

My humble marketing advice: Narrowcast this sucker with a 43Things campaign aimed at the health conscious-shit fetishist longtail.

POLITICS: The '08 Presidential Election will be won or lost on SmugMug

SmugMug is a very interesting bleeding edge company that is doing some fantastic, if risky things in a developing space. It's quickly becoming a favorite of that most politically influential of demographics, roughly profiled as:

• 14-17 years old
• Dialed-in to the new
• 'Gaming' the game of life (as well as video games)
• Underweight
• Living at home ... wherever 'that' is
• Likes stickers

So which US presidential candidate is appealing to the SmugMug vote? Answer: Democrat Chris Dodd. The 'Man from Willimantic' is the only nominee for either party who's even got a SmugMug profile. That makes him the early favorite for the presidency in our book. Watch this space for more.

UPDATE: TITQ reader Salvatore informs us that Chris Dodd doesn't actually have a SmugMug profile.

Location, location, location

This morning, I was talking to a VMware Parking Lot Fellow and he told me that physical locations are just as important to people as virtual ones. It's a radical thought, but it got me thinking. What if there was a way to measure how much people like going to a certain place, like a street or a movie theater?

Then it struck me that it would be a really useful experiment to tear down a building, let's say a shopping mall, and see if people would still go to that physical location and look for bargains and try to ride the escalator and stuff. I bet they would.

And I bet some forward-looking people are already planning that experiment.

3-D is the new 2-D

One of the best things about talking to really smart technologists is everything. Especially when they pick up the tab! (Just kidding, guys!)

Anyhow, today I was eating lunch at Piccolo Pete's on Bayshore with the staff of Google. They told me that the next evolution of search was going to surprise a lot of people. I agree. We all said that when you want pictures, you go to Flickr. And when you want videos, you go to YouTube. But where do you go when you want holograms?

We didn't know the answer to that. But I bet some really smart people do.

One Laptop Per Child blows goats

Look, I like OLPC. Mostly because it's an acronym. But what sort of 1.0 thinkers dreamed up this project? (Get it? 1.0? As in 'one-point-oh'? As in 'one' laptop?)

Limiting a child to just one laptop is yesterday's thinking. How about two laptops? Or three or six or eight? Heck, how about 100? The OLPC initiative is a noble thing. I'm not questioning that. But Nicholas Negroponte needs to get a little more ambitious, a little more imaginative. That's where innovation happens, at the nexus of ambition and imagination. Why limit ourselves to counting numbers at all? There's a word for unlimited potential. And that word is 'infinity'.

Also, what's with the laptops? Who wants to lug around a 3- or 4-lb. slag heap of industrial melt-off in this day in age? Do I look like Tenzing Norgay to you, motherfucker? How about an iPhone, or better yet an Android, or better yet a next-gen ultra-mobile PC that hasn't even been invented yet? With bundled kNoodle SDKs?

I don't even know what 'per' means. It looks Latin. And Latin's a dead language. I'm not a nativist or a xenophobe, but let's face it. These kids already have every disadvantage. Let's give them a head-start by making them speak in the living language of technology ... English.

Okay. I hate to be nit-picky, but I'm not really sure I like 'child' here either. 'Kid' is more fun, and kids like fun stuff. Even better: 'friend'. Because we're all supposed to be friends in Negroponte's future utopia, right? Or how about we go even further? Let's tie this whole thing in with social networks. Because isn't that what this project is all about?

So forget the clunky 'One Laptop Per Child'. It's branding suicide. I'm going to suggest we go with: 'The Infinity Open-Source Ultra-Low Voltage Next-Gen Handset Operating System Kernels (English equivalent of 'Per' TBD) Friend Request Initiative'.

Now that's got word-of-mouth buzz written all over it!

Are you kNoodle-ing your social calendar?

I'm not going to mince words, pull any punches or give you any of that marketing bullshit. I'm going to tell it to you straight:

kNoodle is a game-changing social networking app that's going to add dynamic value to your life and serve as a forward-looking delivery system for unparalleled vistas of human interaction between the decision-makers of today and the thought-leaders of tomorrow.

So what's kNoodle? It's my name for any and all killer apps that have yet to be developed in the future. And it's going to change lives.

Fuck hardware

Hardware, software, I don't care what you want to call it. It's ruining innovation. I want SKUs and SDKs, not a bunch of crybaby bullshit from semiconductor dinosaurs who are doing nothing to drive technology.

When I want to migrate my RSS feeds from my Twitter account to my Skype account, I know better than to expect Intel to make it easy. In fact, I'm not sure any of the very smart social networking developers I speak to and dine with on a daily basis even use transistor-based technology at all anymore.

Moore's Law can suck a fat dick as far as my tag cloud is concerned.