Vevo takes over YouTube

Vevo, the spinoff of YouTube meant for professional music videos, has finally launched—with the usual sputter that comes with highly-anticipated website debuts. The site, which has been in the works since at least March of this year , is aimed at allowing the major record labels to put their stuff online on their own sanitized part of YouTube, outside the user-generated YouTube ghetto. Vevo videos are embeddable, though there doesn’t seem to be anyway for users to participate or mash them up beyond leaving a comment. Vevo is meant to provide an online clearinghouse for label-approved music videos–the kind of professionally shot videos that often cost half a million dollars or more and used to form the backbone of MTV. Vevo will be the exclusive distributor of these videos, and will handle all licensing and ad sales, although partner Google is handling the actual video hosting and streaming.

Vevo was just launched, but it seems they didn’t do their capacity planning very well as the site is very unstable. It is currently hard to connect to the Vevo site and when you manage to connect the pages load very slow and most videos won’t play. Vevo is not available in all countries. Most music videos were viewable by all users at Youtube but Vevo locks out everyone who is not coming from the United States. Vevo, the Recorded Music Industries answer to its business woes, launched last night with a star-studded party in Manhattan. It’s a new business model powered by YouTube.

VEVO sells all the ads for the videos, and while watching videos I?ve seen everything from pre-roll ads to the next-to-video ads YouTube users are used to. Since the content is all so high-grade, VEVO can charge more for ads, meaning more money for labels, VEVO, and YouTube (who?s hosting, and showing, nearly all the videos). Vevo lets the labels take a small piece of the pie back into their pockets. I actually think this is less evil then the old model of shutting down unauthorized videos on youtube and not re-posting them anywhere. VEVO is the leading innovative online premium music and entertainment service for consumers, advertisers and content owners that blends the very best in musical content with cutting-edge video technology and a thriving user community powered by YouTube. The content is made available on YouTube through a VEVO-branded channel, on VEVO.com (the service’s marquee destination site) and through a VEVO-branded embedded player.

Vevo’s experience stinks and YouTube should be getting slammed in the media for all the problems they have. But I think the media loves YouTube and does not want to make them mad. Vevo will take a similar tack to Hulu in offering “premium music video content.”. VEVO will be an EPIC failure because users like myself will not support it plain and simple. UMG has gone from the coolest music label in the world to horrible almost overnight.

Vevo President and CEO Rio Caraeff says the company is looking to hire about 35 people to do Vevo jobs. He says they’re hiring for positions including ad sales, engineering, accounting, music programming and others. Vevo is an immense pain in the rear especially for those of us looking for videos for project use, especially official Music videos. People go online so they don’t have to worry about advertisements, and commercials, if that’s where Youtube is headed I want no part in it. Vevo simply says “we have created a unique partnership. Vevo ony works if you live in the USA.

Feb 4, 2010 at 12:22pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Is Google working on an addition to Google Maps that will take users inside stores? According to a tip received by Search Engine Land, that’s exactly the case, with their source labeling the project “Google Store Views.”

Oh Nuts — a New York nut and candy retailer — e-mailed the blog outlet claiming that someone from Google “came to their store to take pictures for a new Google Maps product,” and that “they took pictures of the inside of the store, every 6 feet, in all directions. They also took pictures of products.”

Oh Nuts accompanied this bit of intel with the photo seen below, which shows a nondescript man with camera equipment photographing the store (as seen by the store’s security cameras).

At the moment we have no way to confirm if the addition of in-store images to Google Street View is a legitimate product in the works (obviously those photos could be staged). We e-mailed Google for comment, and an official representative gave us the same statement that was communicated to Search Engine Land: “We are always experimenting with new features for Google Maps. We have nothing further to announce at this time.”

The non-confirmation is not a denial, which definitely piques our curiosity. Should the intel be legit, we think it would be an interesting experiment and evolution of the current Google Maps Street View functionality.

One thing that does add up is the fact that Google Street View has its origins in New York City (the city was one of five populated with images at launch), which means any additional enhancements to the offering would likely begin in New York as well.

In some ways, being able to virtually browse through a store without having to physically walk in could be a big timesaver, but in other ways it could be conceived as more intrusive than necessary.

While we wait to see what comes of this rumored new product, we’d like to leave you with the following video as a parting thought. Remember, Google Street View is watching.

[content credit: Mashable - img credit: Search Engine Land]

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Like a 1984 Ford Tempo spewing out exhaust and with headlights held together by duct tape, our country’s infrastructure need a little tune-up if it hopes to make it into the future without breaking down. From transportation to sewage, PopSci examines the technologies in the works that to overhaul the U.S. infrastructure.

PowerUnderground Power Lines that heal themselves

Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve

Status: Commercially available in 10–15 yearsAnother way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.

TransportationTrackless Elevated Trains

Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail

Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track

To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.

SewageTurn Sludge into Electricity

Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power

Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015

Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.

America’s Infrastructure Might Look Like…

Make Energy Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama talked a lot about the need to upgrade our country’s infrastructure, from power plants to railroads, both to create jobs and to improve efficiency. He wasn’t kidding: We lose an average of seven billion gallons of water a day to leaks in the system. Power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually. And we all remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse, but up to a quarter of all the bridges in the country are in need of attention.

Fortunately, there are some amazing technologies already rolling out, and more just waiting for the funding the President talked about. We reached out to experts in transportation, telecommunications, sewage and water to figure out what kinds of technologies might be part of this next generation of infrastructure and found that the key isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul.

Smart systems that deliver only the power needed or recycle sewage for water and energy. Cantilevered trains could be built over existing roads. Roads could de-ice themselves. Here are 25 of those transformational technologies that might become reality sooner than later.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 1: Transportation

Roads, Bridges & Trains Paul Wootton

Chicago road crews are scrambling to fill 67,000 potholes a month. Communities in Pennsylvania rely on 100-year-old water pipes made of wood. Squirrels still cause widespread blackouts. The country’s 600,000 bridges, four million miles of roads, and 30,000 wastewater plants desperately need attention. The solution isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul. Soon roads and power lines will fix themselves, and we’ll mine energy from sewage. America’s 21st-century tune-up won’t happen overnight, but we could start reaping the benefits (faster broadband! cleaner water!) within the next few years.

Cars that Report Potholes

Task: Fix the third of major roads that are in poor shape
Status: Three years to a prototype

In a new system developed at Northeastern University, vehicles that cover lots of asphalt—taxis, buses, garbage trucks—will be outfitted with acoustic wave sensors to detect potholes before the human eye can see them. Sound waves probe the top three feet of the road for telltale air pockets and small cracks, while ground-penetrating radar looks inside bridge decks for corrosion and lasers scan the road surface. A cellular data connection sends data to control centers, where it can be assembled into maps of trouble spots.

Roads that De-Ice Themselves

Task: Reduce the 1,300 road deaths a year from snowy and icy winter conditions
Status: In testing by more than 20 state departments of transportation

A new road coating called SafeLane not only gives tires more traction, it actually helps prevent the accumulation of ice and snow by holding on to de-icing salts, allowing road crews to scatter salt a couple of days before a blizzard rather than waiting until the snow is already on the ground. SafeLane consists of layers of epoxy mixed with dolomitic limestone. The epoxy layer is snowplow-proof, lasts up to 15 years, and helps seal the pavement to keep corrosive salts from leaching down to steel bars in sensitive bridge decks. Anecdotal results from its first five years in the field show up to a 70 percent decrease in winter accidents.

Bridges that Flex on the Fly

Task: Upgrade the 26 percent of decrepit bridges
Status: Pedestrian versions exist; traffic bridges in 10 years

Regular bridges are fairly rigid structures that break down over time from stress. “Tensegrity” structures disperse load over a nest of tensed cables and compressed struts that allow them to be both flexible and structurally rigid. Now the University of California at San Diego is developing traffic-bearing tensegrity bridges with feedback sensors to guide subtle adjustments in cable length, which could alleviate the shifting stresses of an overladen truck, counteract the vibration frequency of an earthquake, or disperse the load of a severed cable.

Concrete that Senses Cracks and Heals on its Own

Task: Replace miles of concrete highways with smarter versions
Status: Field-testing for self-sensing concrete in progress

Carbon nanotubes are prized for both their strength and their piezoresistance—they change their electrical resistance as they’re stressed. Xun Yu, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, is cooking up a concrete mix that contains 0.1 percent carbon nanotubes, making it harder to crack than traditional concrete, and smart too. By embedding electrodes into it as it sets, Yu can measure changes in electrical resistance to detect compression from passing cars. Future versions will better calculate speed and vehicle weight on the go for a real-time view of the road’s stress. Meanwhile, a new concrete mix developed by Victor Li, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, contains unhydrated cement grains that are activated when exposed to carbon dioxide in air and water from rain—exactly what you’d find in a small crack in the road. The reaction produces a calcium carbonate seal, restoring the slab to its normal load-bearing capacity.

Trackless Elevated Trains

Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail
Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track

To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 2: Water

Clean Water Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

Our water infrastructure is older than our roads and power grid, with many pipes sitting in trenches dug by hand in the 1800s. In parts of the Northeast, up to 50 percent of our clean water leaks into the ground between the treatment center and the tap. Across the country, we lose an average of seven billion gallons of drinking water a day to leaks—and we have an 800,000-mile network of pipes that needs constant monitoring and repair. We also use far too much energy treating all our water, regardless of its end use, and piping it long distances. Besides fixing up the nation’s pipes, the future of water is cleaning only what we need.

Clean Water like Plants Do

Task: Treat our water on fewer terawatts
Status: First small-scale versions by 2011

Plants pull water into their roots by osmosis, using tiny channels called aquaporins, a method that doesn’t require any energy. Now a Danish company called Aquaporin is developing a membrane based on that same principle to extract pure H20 from saltwater at about a third of the cost and a tenth the energy of conventional reverse-osmosis systems. The membrane’s protein channels, each just a few nanometers across, allow a stream of water molecules—and only water molecules—to pass single file at a rate of one billion per second. No pumps are needed to force the water across the channels.

A Neighborhood-Sized Saltwater Purifier

Task: Decentralize our clean-water system
Status: Prototypes now; commercial units within a year

Yoram Cohen, a University of California at Los Angeles chemical engineer, has a solution for thirsty communities in states like California, which burns 20 percent of its power treating and pumping in water from far-off high-grade reservoirs: to spread out the task. His tanning-bed-size reverse-osmosis machines could be deployed up and down the coast, with each unit tapping into the ocean to provide neighborhoods with about 5,000 gallons of drinking water per day. The units carry software that can fine-tune filtering in response to local changes in water temperature, salinity, pH and silt, and can be remotely controlled from a central operations center.

Clot Leaky Water Pipes

Clot Leaky Water Pipes: Paul Wootton

Task: Pump rubberlike blocks into our system to find
and automatically fix leaks
Status: Deployed in the U.K. in 2008

Scottish oil-and-gas company Brinker Technology has a no-dig system of pipe repair that mimics the way clots form at a cut. When a leak is detected, a service truck could drive to a nearby fire hydrant and pump in Platelets—squishy, rubberlike cubes and balls ranging in size from less than a millimeter to nearly two inches across, depending on the size of the leak. The Platelets travel in the pipe until the outflowing pressure pulls them toward to the crack. There, they bunch together to form a long-lasting clot. Utilities don’t even need to know exactly where the leak is located.

Lay New Pipes Without Digging Trenches: Paul Wootton

Lay New Pipes Without Digging Trenches

Task: Deal with 240,000 annual water-main breaks more quickly by using simple slide-in liners
Status: Thousands of feet of pipe repaired since March

Another way of fixing broken pipe without summoning the backhoes is to coat it with a new inner lining—already common today in sewage pipes, which are under less pressure because they rely on gravity to move their contents along. But Missouri-based Insituform Technologies’s new InsituMain liner can withstand the internal forces of pressurized pipe, allowing in-place repair of drinking-water mains. Instead of a full-length trench, two access points (up to 700 feet apart) are cut on either side of the broken pipe. Then workers insert at one end a flexible liner made from a felt-and-glass-fiber composite and soaked in thermosetting epoxy resin and pull it through the inner walls of the crumbling pipe. Exposing the liner to steam or hot water stiffens and seals it, leaving it flush with the inside of the pipe.

Bacteria that Make Toxic Water Glow

Task: Install phosphorescent poison detectors at the nation’s 155,000 drinking-water systems
Status: Commercially available in 2–5 years

Bacteria are little geniuses at identifying molecules. They’re also prolific, cheap, and easy to manipulate, which makes them ideal workers. Using genetically modified, nonharmful strains of E. coli, chemist Sylvia Daunert of the University of Kentucky has designed a prototype biosensor system capable of detecting a variety of drinking-water toxins, including arsenic, anthrax, lead and PCBs. The bacteria are housed in the tip of a fiber-optic cable, which dangles in the drinking-water supply. When they detect a toxin, the bacteria glow; the light they produce is carried along the fiber to a monitoring station, where its intensity is measured to determine the precise concentration of toxic molecules (sensitive down to parts-per-billion scale).

Bacteria that Make Toxic Water Glow: Paul Wootton

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 3: Power

Overhauling inefficient plants and an ancient grid

Make Energy Like Plants Do Paul Wootton

A 2006 study at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually, or about one third of national electric spending, thanks to our aging grid. Meanwhile, energy use is expected to grow by 1,150 terawatt-hours—the equivalent of adding 13 New York Cities—by 2030. A smarter power grid will surely help, but we’ll need additional innovations like these to keep up with spiking demand.

Make Energy like Plants Do

Task: Convert sunlight into chemical energy
Status: Last year, scientists found a plentiful raw material that can free oxygen from waterSolar panels are not the only energy-harvesting strategy under the sun. For years, scientists have also been trying to do what plants do—use sunlight to photosynthesize fuel. Until now, most approaches relied on impractically scarce materials like iridium as a catalyst that triggers the reaction. But last year, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to use cobalt oxide, one of the most abundant industrial catalysts. To overcome the relative inefficiency with which cobalt oxide uses sunlight to crack water molecules and free the oxygen, researchers layered the catalyst on a tightly stacked scaffold that makes it effectively 1,600 times as efficient. The net result: Arrays of cobalt-oxide panels could provide a steady supply of oxygen, protons and electrons. The next goal is to find a similarly efficient second catalyst to transform the by-products into an energy-dense fuel like methanol to give gasoline a run for its money.

Hang Superconducting Cables that Won’t Leak Electricity

Task: Replace miles of copper wire with cables that carry up to 10 times as much electricity per cubic inch
Status: 10–20 years to wide use

Instead of clearing paths for thousands of miles of new power lines to carry renewable energy across the country, we could restring the existing ones to run with high-temperature superconducting cables like those being studied at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The cables transmit electricity along a one-micrometer-thick superconductive layer of tape wrapped around a stainless-steel tube full of liquid nitrogen that cools the line down below –321ºF. In that chilled superconducting state, the lines lose no energy to resistance (today’s copper cables lose 5 to 7 percent).

Cram More Copper Underground: Paul Wootton

Cram More Copper Underground

Task: Replace thousands of miles of buried wire with a better-insulated version that carries 25 percent more power
Status: 5–10 years away from widespread use

In urban areas, overhead power lines are a nuisance and a danger, which means most electricity crosses the city in underground tubes. As urban power demands increase, we could rip up streets to lay new lines, but an easier solution is just to cram more copper into the conduits we already have. That’s what the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry R&D consortium, is aiming for with a new insulation material that’s embedded with vinylsilane-coated particles of silicon dioxide to give it 33 percent more insulating ability than existing line coatings. That means the next generation of power lines could carry up to a quarter more current without adding any more bulky insulation.

Underground Power Lines that heal themselves

Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve
Status: Commercially available in 10–15 years

Another way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.

Copper-Crawling Robots

Copper-Crawling Robots: Paul Wootton

Task: Deploy fleets of nimble robots that scoot along power lines, looking for flaws so that humans don’t have to
Status: First commercial versions around 2012Conventional inspection is slow and expensive, often requiring a helicopter flyby. EPRI is working on a robot that can autonomously survey an 80-mile length of line twice a year for cheaper and more reliable inspections. The robot will straddle the line, carrying a camera, a diffused scanning laser and on-board image-analysis software, which it will use to construct both a visual history of the deterioration of the line, as well as a 3-D map of encroaching tree branches and other potential problems.

Add Storage to the Grid

Task: Build plants full of spinning drums that store electricity, so we can finally save surplus energy
Status: 20-megawatt plant under construction in Stephentown, N.Y.

Incredibly, today’s grid has practically no storage capacity. The electricity coming out of your socket was generated less than a millisecond ago, so power plants have to continually generate enough energy for the biggest spikes. To prepare for the power fluctuations endemic to renewable energy, we’ll need to inventory excess power to use during cloudy, windless afternoons and nights. The Massachusetts-based company Beacon Power’s solution is to store the grid’s surplus energy in hundreds of spinning carbon-fiber-and-fiberglass drums. Each of its Generation 4 flywheels features a 2,500-pound rotor mounted on magnetic bearings and sealed in a vacuum to create a near-friction-free environment. Energy coming in from the grid accelerates the three-foot rotor to 16,000 rpm (about Mach 2), where it keeps spinning with at least 97 percent efficiency. To pump energy back into the grid, some of the rotational energy is bled off to power a generator on the main shaft. Each flywheel can store a 15-minute, 100-kilowatt charge and can discharge 150,000 times over 20 years.

Add Storage to the Grid: Paul Wootton

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 4: Telecom

Boosting anemic broadband speeds and wireless networks stuck in the 20th century

Faster Fiber: Paul Wootton

The U.S. ranks 17th worldwide in broadband access, but not for long—last year’s stimulus package allotted $7.2 billion for upgrading our underperforming broadband infrastructure. Our legacy copper wiring just can’t carry the data to support HD-video streaming, for instance, and next-gen wireless networks are slower to roll out than in, say, Japan, because of the sheer size of this country. But advances in fiber-optic cables and broadband blimps could bring serious speed increases to homes and smartphones.

Faster Fiber

Task: Replace our international fiber-optic trunk lines with thicker cables that carry 10 times the data per second
Status: Demonstrated last year

Our next generation of transoceanic submarine fiber cables may be built according to the Alcatel-Lucent design that recently set transmission speed records by moving data 10 times as fast as current cables. The new cables started with a fiber core that is on average 40 percent thicker than the ones currently draped across the ocean floor. Engineers designed an array of 155 lasers that emit light of different wavelengths, and in addition to encoding information in the timing of the light pulses the way current cables do, they modulated the polarization and the phase to pack extra data onto each light wave. The new fiber cables can send 15.5 terabytes—the equivalent of 400 DVDs—each second from Boston to Bilbao.

Make the Network Airborne

Task: Float broadband blimps above areas that are a headache to hardwire
Status: Delivery of a first ship to a military contractor this year; full platforms in 3–5 yearsWe’re going to need to dig a lot more fiber and copper in the coming years to meet the exploding communications demand. Or we can just float a few blimps. Sanswire, a manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, is working on a 525-foot helium- and fuel-gas-filled airship, the Stratellite, which would provide blanket broadband coverage from the tranquil heights of the stratosphere. Hovering at 65,000 feet, each blimp could provide phone, TV and high-speed Internet to an area about the size of Texas, without the lag times that have plagued satellite-based communications. Stratellites can even daisy-chain to link cities and rural areas across the country—all without a single new wire touching the ground.

Flexible Fiber

Flexible Fiber: Paul Wootton

Task: Snake high-speed fiber-optics into virtually every home
Status: Available nowCorning’s new, flexible ClearCurve cable features a nanomaterial mesh wrapped around the cable core that keeps the photons in line even when stapled, bent, or twisted around a nail—usually any such quick turns would make the line go dark. That means telecoms can finally put fiber-optic lines into people’s homes, where cables often run up against right angles and tight squeezes from the sidewalk to the house. Verizon is already using the cable for its FiOS service.

Renovating American Infrastructure,

Step 5: Sewage

Banishing energy-hogging treatment plants and rotting pipes

Turn Sludge into Electricity Paul Wootton

Every year, Americans produce 12 trillion gallons of wet sewage and burn 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to clean it to drinking-water standards. Why not put the smelly stuff to good use? Thanks to clever new technology, sewage will be reclaimed to provide power, produce fertilizer and, eventually, yield clean water. In other words, sooner than you think, you’ll be drinking your own urine.

Turn Sludge into Electricity

Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power
Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015

Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.

Drop Robots Down the Drain

Task: Deploy fleets of autonomous machines to spot leaks in sewage pipes
Status: New models that use a laser to measure inside pipes could be ready by 2011RedZone Robotics’s new Solo sewer robots will use image-interpreting software developed at Carnegie Mellon University to analyze their video feeds and tag potential problems in the pipe, so a 10-hour run can be condensed to a two-hour highlight reel of dripping cracks and grasping roots. Each Solo carries a camera at either end, sonar to scan below the water, and lasers to search sewer walls for acid corrosion.

Recycle Urine

Task: Recover phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater to make fertilizer
Status: First U.S. plant opened last June; another coming this year

Believe it or not, the wastewater of 100,000 people could yield an annual crop of about 200 tons of high-grade fertilizer. The Vancouver company Ostara hopes to use this fact to overcome our shrinking supply of recoverable phosphorus rock, one of three essential components of modern fertilizer. Ostara’s PEARL Nutrient Recycling system extracts phosphates and other minerals like ammonia from municipal wastewater and then churns the nutrients into safe, slow-release fertilizer pellets sold under the name Crystal Green. The challenge is sequestering the urine, which accounts for just 1 percent of sewage by volume. One solution: source-separated toilets (think: a little bowl within a big bowl), already being tried in Sweden and Denmark.

The entire article can be found at Popular Science By Mike Haney, and Adam M. Bright

Reverse IP Lookup allows you to put in a IP address or the website domain name. Finding what domains are all hosted on the same IP address can be a very important tool when doing competitive research and analysis. Domain research can help when doing Internet Marketing but sometimes you need to know more than just the domains on that particular IP address, sometimes you need to know all the domains that are hosted on a particular Class C IP address. For this we have found a solution to the problem. Reverse IP Domain Check from YouGetSignal.com- it also includes a host of other useful domain tools including whois.

You Get Signal - Reverse IP Lookup

Microsoft tags have started showing up in magazines and newspapers. Tags can also be placed on business cards, products, and even large outdoor signs.

“It’s the hyperlink in the physical world,” said Marja Koopmans, marketing leader for Microsoft’s start-up accelerator unit.

Tags can link to anything from a Web page to an online brochure or electronic business card (see video below). Golf Digest magazine, for example, uses tags to link directly to YouTube videos that can be viewed on an iPhone or other smartphone. That allows the magazine to, essentially, include not just how-to articles, but also instructional videos within its publication.

To be able to “read” tags with your phone, you need to download a piece of software; luckily enough, Microsoft has supported most modern smartphone operating systems, including several varieties of Symbian, the iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry and others.

Check out CNET’s video about Tag below.

I try to keep you informed as much as possible with the latest and greatest news in the Social Networking World, Search Engines, and with anything new and interesting with the Internet. The information posted at Twitter mostly points back to here.. Be sure and Bookmark this site.

http://twitter.com/james_st_john

Compare Maps online with ‘Maps Compare’. This is a unique tool that allows you to see the same map results from the 4 leading map sites; Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, and Google Earth. This is a very simple idea and does not include a lot for programing to make it happen but the idea is still a good one. You are able to compare the map data from the main 4 map sites. For anyone interested in exact map data for comparisons this can come in very handy.

Compare Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and Google Earth Maps

Reviews for the new Skype for TV (hdTV)

Coming soon, you will be able to skype from your TV. Skype has teamed up with Panasonic and LG Electronics bringing a TV that has a built in webcam and includes the necessary electronics making this a possible revolution with video conferencing and Skype calls.

With the research that Skype has presented they show that most users had a common suggestion in regards to video conferencing, and that is most people do not want to sit in front of a computer to make a video call. In most non-professional settings people had requested the ability to use a couch, bed, or other common places throughout the house to Skype with video to friends and family. And that is where the Skype for TV (hdTV) comes in to action. The new model is available to view and on display at CES 2010 and is expected to show up at your local retailer coming in the middle of this year.

One of the concerns that I have for this is the safety and security.

1. Is it possible for someone to hack into my TV and watch whats going on in my house from this device?
2. Can this Skype for TV device mis-dial, or accidentally dial when I am not intentionally using it?
3. What are the alerts on the physical TV that will show me that I am online and on a Skype call?
4. Is there a light on the top of the TV set to alert me that the camera is in use?
   If certain safety measures are not met this device could increase the ability to publicize private matters that may happen in your house or bedroom.
5. Will Skype ever start using this to advertise, and if so how do they intend on soliciting the advertisements onto my Skype hdTV?
6. What is the expected price point?
   I feel Skype is going to have to be very careful with the price point, and here is why. I can get a cheap laptop or desktop and use my TV as an extended monitor. So if Skype is going to start selling TV’s then the TV should allow me to do just as much as a typical LCD HDTV and then some. I should be able to insert a media card from my camera so that I may show it to family and friends that I am on Skype TV with. And of course if they don’t get the price right, then ts going to be an awesome idea that will never float.

The issues mentioned in here are not answered by Skype to my satisfaction yet, and I hope they will soon clear up this line of questioning. After my own questioning to potential buyers I was able to find an interesting similarity amongst almost all that I questioned. First people wanted to make sure it will not be recording them without their knowledge (and want PROOF of it – with some sort of light, lock, or other indicator), and secondly the people I spoke with will only purchase this if it is the same price or very comparable to a similar TV model.

Wordpress Plugin for your website that lets you have a complete Amazon Store

Up until now the only Amazon Store Plugin for Wordpress has been a crappy snippet of I don’t know… All I know is that it sucked and looked bad, and didn’t include a cart, and ooohhh that’s right they called themselves a Amazon Niche Store but it doesn’t have a shopping cart. To me that makes the other plugin is ‘NOT a Amazon Niche STORE‘. Im trying to lay the sarcasm & frustration on very thick because I have been looking for a solution like this for years. But it looks like my wait has finally paid off. Now you can have a completely functioning Wordpress Niche Store without much effort at all. And since it uses Amazon’s API it automates the entire plugin once it is setup. And of course since it is a plugin it can work with any template. And if that wasn’t enough it also includes a default template if you don’t want to take the time to find one or use your current Wordpress template.

This is the real Deal – not a cheap wanna-be Fake Amazon Niche Store. But as it goes I can only tell you that it is here & I will be posting a link within a few days, so be patient with me as I test this thing out to the max.

Amazon Niche Store Sneak Peak

Amazon Niche Store Wordpress Plugin - BETA Screenshot

Amazon Store WordPress Plugin

Link will be posted in a few days.

WordPress Amazon Niche Store plugin

WordPress Amazon Store

Google has finally introduced the sidewiki, its a very interesting way of allowing users to add information about any page and any website. To see the Google Sidewiki you need to download the latest toolbar for your compatible internet browser (I use Firefox). Then you just click on the button called Sidewiki and it will give you a left navigation that allows you to add your comments about any site, and even more specifically any page). Sidewiki is sure to bring a lawsuit as soon as shady companies, or larger companies get bad comments posted. Im curious how well this new service is going to work. In theory it is an amazing idea and it allows Google to take in all the information and use it to make for a true human driven search engine based on quality. This mixed with Link Building and the other several hundred thousand pieces to the Google algorithm makes for a really great data provided to Google who can then ultimately use it to better the search results.

Google introduces Sidewiki

– http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html