Literally hours after being mentioned on Mashable.com, vConvert.net put itself up for auction. The winning bid was 15,700 EUR (~ $21,045.85). It looks as though the folks at vConvert.net have turned a nice profit. This is reminiscent of last month's InviteShare.com debacle; wherein, one week after being featured on TechCrunch.com, they were purchased by the same TechCrunch.com for the speculated amount of $25,000. Leveraging popular blog traffic to help sell your site may be the way to go if you are unable to finance your growing Infrastructure needs. However, if this is not the case, you can't blame anyone (including vConvert.net) for striking while the iron is hot. Congrats on the online real estate flip! Description from vConvert.net: "This service allows you convert an Online Video like 'YouTube videos' to more popular formats like wmv, mov, mp4, mp3, 3gp etc. vConvert.net converts FLV to the selected format faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder. When you submit a url, it will download the file to server and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file."

The Landlord - Introducing Pearl

Webmaster.com is running an interesting discussion about domain names and has coined a phrase that covers a recent interest of mine--predictive domaining. Predictive domaining is where you "put your futurist hat and go domaining." Simply put, it is the practice whereby one registers a domain name based on the future potential of that name...and yes, someone has already snapped up predictiveDomaining.com. For example, the concept of REST or RESTful web services has yet to its way into the corporate mainstream. However, as Burton Group predicts, "'Today, it is only innovators that are really working with REST,' she said. 'In three years, we should see the early adopters start to play with REST.  It will probably be five years before it is adopted by the early majority. We anticipate that the late majority will probably not pick up REST for at least another 10 years.'" With that being said, I quickly snapped up RESTwebServices.com and RESTfulWebServices.com (both currently parked) as I "predict" that these domains may become relevant domains/search phrases in the years to come. While I don't see myself as the Miss Cleo of domaining, at $6/year, I do see this as a low-risk, high-potential personal investment.

Book Description Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application.

PingMe takes a unique approach to keeping track of things you need to do - it's mobile and interactive. Just create a Ping, set a date and you'll receive a reminder by E-mail or TXT to your phone. Not a good time? Pings are interactive! Just reply to the message to reschedule for a later date or time. You can even create new Pings on-the-fly from your mobile device, or tag your Pings to create contextual to-do lists. PERSONAL SIDENOTE: I have had a similar idea in my mind for weeks that I may need to prematurely kill because of this. PeriodicPing.com -- my first startup abortion? The first, maybe...the last, probably not.

Copyright © 2007 Walt Disney Pictures In this follow up to the box-office hit “National Treasure,” treasure hunter Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) once again sets out on an exhilarating, action-packed new global quest to unearth hidden history and treasures. When a missing page from the diary of John Wilkes Booth surfaces, Ben’s great-great grandfather is suddenly implicated as a key conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s death. Determined to prove his ancestor’s innocence, Ben follows an international chain of clues that takes him on a chase from Paris to London and ultimately back to America. This journey leads Ben and his crew not only to surprising revelations - but to the trail of the world’s most treasured secrets.

The Netflix Community Blog has posted a response to the demand from the Mac and Firefox user communities for the ability to watch Netflix movies instantly--the same way Windows/Internet Explorer users can today. See excerpt below... "...And that's our holdup for the Mac - there's not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn't license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we'll be there. I'll also say that Silverlight 1.1 looks like a promising candidate - but that its DRM isn't likely to be fully available until 2008. Firefox for Windows is a different issue, and one we hope to address by early 2008. An upcoming version of our movie viewer will support Firefox as well as some new features, and I'll post more on that as we get closer to deployment."

John Tierney's attempt to persuasively free your mind. See excerpts below:

"But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation."

"If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation."

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How does it work? You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You'll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session.

"...shares of the Chinese search leader haven't been able to hold their ground due to a very weak overall stock market. Consequently, the stock has fallen back to about $190 per share. In my opinion, this pullback has opened the door to an interesting trading opportunity... Analysts all seem to agree that the growth in Baidu isn't done. The internet and paid search markets both remain very young. Credit card penetration and advertising are both expanding and gaining momentum throughout the company. As credit card penetration increases, the eCommerce market stands to begin developing throughout China -- a market that has become a very large user of paid search platforms in the United States. According to the company's management, it only reaches 1% of the addressable market at present -- clearly indicating the potential for continued or even accelerating growth..." See the entire article at http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/08/14/time-to-pick-up-baidu-bidu/

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