PitchCandy

Google’s social strategy and analysis has been unveiled through Paul Adams killer slide deck, embedded below, Google’s lead user-experience researcher AKA Genius.

I’m thinking we’ll be saying hello to Google Me pretty soon…

Thats right… The New England Sponsors announced… I think its a joke..!

Check out the Rugby Ad in the Czech Republic… I concur, football is for girls..!!!

Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet. Watch an overview video below, sign up for updates, and learn more about how to develop for Google TV.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF YOU WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930s 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s !

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints..

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 5.30pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because…….

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K..

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with Matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY, no video/dvd films,

No mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

Only girls had pierced ears!

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time…

We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help Dad make ends meet!

RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on

MERIT

Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullie s always ruled the playground at school.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They actually sided with the law!

Our parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like ‘Kiora’ and ‘Blade’ and ‘Ridge’ and ‘Vanilla’

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL !

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

10 reasons why now is the perfect time to get started with the mobile web

Virginia Campbell, a 100-year-old Lake Oswego resident, uses her iPad at the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community. Campbell has never owned a computer before or an iPhone!

As you may have heard, there’s a vast cloud of volcanic dust which has turned most of Europe into a no-fly zone. It is estimated 28,000 flights have been cancelled since the huge cloud of dust from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland entered European air space.

Most people have pointed blame at the Eyjafjallajokull volcano naturally erupting in Iceland. However, a source close to the Icelandic Parliament has hinted that it’s a PR stunt, that has kind of gone a tad wrong!

You may remember back in 2009, the Icelandic economy imploded and the nation got blacklisted. As a direct result the tourism industry in Iceland has been hit and something had to be done. It’s believed that Iceland hired the publicity company, Rockefeller Sacks & Vickers to reinvent Iceland as a desired country to visit.

The campaign was focused around the tag line “Icelandic Sex is ther hottest Planet” and the publicity company arranged for the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano to have a slight awake call, in the shape of a 11 tonnes of dynamite.

What was meant to be a gentle tremor and a sure fire tourist attraction, however the stunt grounded half of Europe!

Rockefeller Sacks & Vickers said… “OK, we slightly miss calculated with the dynamite - but we’ve had some cracking coverage, we even got on SKY NEWS. We apologise for the few hundred thousand people who have been grounded, but there’s no such thing as bad PR - right!”

Here’s a real life lesson on the Viral Whoosh, better than any other dumbass graph pointing to the sky.

1 - Dude1 is dancing on a hill side…
2 - Dude1 is joined by Dude2…
3 - Dude2 encourages Dude3 to join…
4 - Dude4 and Dude5 joins
5 - The Viral Whoosh…. and the movement is made!

Dude1’s are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Dude3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Dude23 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob.

We need more Dude3, they are the Master Crowd Scourers …

So the lesson for a viral whoosh: Find 2 or 3 believers in your viral, people who will encourage others. Another tip is to create a the feeling of mass participation, so that people on the hillside will join your whoosh, the simple words “You are one of 142,574 visits today”

You may have heard of a internet search engine thingy called Google… Well, late last year they bought a mobile advertising company AdMob for $7.50 or $750m.. The purchase has been subject to competition concerns - looks like the Legal Eagle are getting all flustered

Lawyers at the US Federal Trade Commission will reportedly urge the government to block Google’s planned $750m acquisition of AdMob due to competition concerns.
Source: Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Lawyers at a U.S. regulator plan to recommend that the government try to block Google’s proposed acquisition of mobile advertising firm AdMob on antitrust grounds, a source familiar with the matter said.

“The staff (at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission) believes there is a significant competitive problem and they are prepared to make a recommendation to sue,” the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The source noted that the staff lawyers at the FTC could still change their opinion as negotiations with Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, progress.

The move comes as Google, which generated 97 percent of its $23.7 billion in 2009 revenue from advertising, faces a growing list of investigations in the United States and Europe on issues of competitiveness.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the FTC has assembled an internal litigation team to prepare for a possible effort to challenge Google’s AdMob deal and that it had briefed Congress about its concerns about the deal.

Any recommendation by the FTC staff to sue would still have to go through several more steps, including approval by the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition as well as by the agency’s commissioners, before the government acted, said antitrust lawyers.

Google did not respond to requests for comment. The FTC was not immediately available for comment.
Regulators have been reviewing Google’s $750 million deal to acquire AdMob for months. Google announced the deal in November and said in December that it had received a second request for information from the FTC.

For Google, acquiring AdMob would help bolster its ad business on the popular new breed of smartphones like Apple Inc’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One.

In January, Apple acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising firm that provides similar services to AdMob, for an undisclosed amount.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, the chairman of the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary committee, sent a letter to the FTC urging “close scrutiny” of the deal. He noted in the letter that he had not reached a conclusion on whether the FTC should challenge the transaction.
In an earlier statement in response to the Wall Street Journal article, Google said it was continuing to work with the FTC and that there was “overwhelming evidence that mobile advertising will remain competitive after this deal closes.”

The potential AdMob challenge is the latest example of the increasing regulatory scrutiny which Google has experienced as it has grown. The U.S. Department of Justice has challenged Google’s settlement with book publishers and authors’ groups that would allow the search giant to create an online digital library.

In February, Google said that European regulators were looking into complaints from three companies, one owned by Google rival Microsoft, about Google’s search ranking practices.