Add to this upcoming announcement, recent frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, and private equity investments such as the $100 million infusion into Specific Media, what you have is a online advertising (bubble or) boom of unprecedented proportions.
Much of this fervor is inspired by behavioral targeting, where advertisers can use sophisticated cookie technology to highly target ads to individuals. The same behavioral targeting approach, however is beginning to risk the ire of privacy advocates and is coming under extreme scrutiny by the US Government.
Privacy Groups are proposing a do-no-track list, which is I guess a web version of the dubious, Do-not-call list. According to Advertising Age , "Privacy advocates say current standards for collecting such data, such as the Network Advertising Initiative, don't do enough to safeguard consumers against the potential pitfalls of data collection, and that most consumers don't understand how such data is being used."
The debate, which so far seems to restricted to the Beltway crowd is starting to spill into the mainstream press. This being the political season, and privacy concerns being politically-popular fodder, expect to see more noise level, which might result in if nothing, increased headaches for online advertising companies.
The groups backing this Do-Not-Track-List are your usual suspects: the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Federal Trade Commission is going to host a Town Hall entitled "Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology" starting today.
Google is responding by setting up a Google privacy channel, and attending the FTC Townhall. Other advertising industry executives such as Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda, a company owned by AOL dismisses their concerns and says this is an "advocate looking for a cause." (What's ironic, is that his dismissive attitude is in sharp contrast with his corporate master, AOL's willingness to play ball. "We want to make the opt-out process as simple and transparent as possible," Jules Polonetsky, AOL chief privacy officer was quoted by WebProNews.
He might be right - most of us are irritated by advertising and find that most of the time it is irrelevant. Better focus of advertising with certain degree of annonyminity is acceptable to many if not all Internet users.
But that kind of behavioral targeting might soon take a backseat to more individualistic targeting. Facebook's social advertising plans revolve around leveraging user information and their relationship information - something that should give a chance to privacy/consumer advocates to get their bullhorns ready, volume turned to maximum.
First, let's talk about GrandCentral's bread and butter: the one number to rule them all concept. When you first join, you'll want to add your various phone numbers to GrandCentral. This gives you one single point of access for all of your calls, and just one phone number to hand out to contacts. That may seem like a terrible idea, but GrandCentral lets you determine what calls are routed to which phones. That way, if you handed out your number to a business contact, for example, only your work number will ring when they call your single GrandCentral number. With GrandCentral's advanced screening options, you can feel comfortable giving your phone number out anywhere. 
On the other hand, when your mom calls, GrandCentral can ring just your home number and cell phone—or even every phone you've got, depending on how badly you want to talk to you mother. And when it comes to screening calls and spam calls, GrandCentral is smart. The service provides several ways to screen calls (which you can see in more detail below), including a very clever option to play the standard "This phone number is no longer in service" recording.
OK, so we were a little 
Here's an unexpected product from Sony: ramen radar. Yeah, it's a piece of software designed to help you find a ramen noodle shop wherever you are. Now, as someone who's 
Mitsubishi just unveiled a pretty amazing set of giant screens set up to create a walk-in panorama. Consisting of a whopping 17 pairs of 67-inch panels arranged in a 340-degree near-circle, this $1.3-million setup creates a feeling of total immersion. The screens are all DLP, and in total it's packed with 27 million pixels. It was custom-built for a rich, secretive customer, but Mitsubishi hopes to start producing the setup for museums and other such institutions in the future. Holy crap do I ever want to play video games on this thing. Let's make that happen, Mitsubishi. [
Can you say WQUXGA? Toshiba can. According to a translated promo page, it built the 22" "super Kousei small LCD monitor" with a resolution of 3840x2400. That's 200 dots per inch! Toshiba admits, though, that the contrast ratio is 300:1, pretty bad even if you don't believe in contrast-ratio reporting. In Japan, MSRP for this sucker is 2,079,000 Yen (about $18,000). The XP-compatible PCI card required to run it will set you back another 312,900 Yen ($2,700). Oddly enough, in our search for an image, we found 
This morning I was pointed to an article on the Washington Post about travel. If you want to find it, you can go to the Washington Post site and look around. I am sure you will find it eventually. Maybe, maybe not. Click here, click there, search, and perhaps you will find the article called "Web Travel Resources, Part I". Wouldn't it be easier if I just 
Online store creator Zlio is in the beginning stages of launching their Version 3 of their application. When we interviewed founder 
Ad Infuse, a company that delivers personalized mobile handset advertisements, announced today that it has closed 14 new mobile advertising and marketing deals and 22 new publishing deals so far in 2007. Ad Infuse hopes to finalize several more contracts by the end of the year. The company added that inventory across its content channels will exceed 160 million impressions per month as of October, 2007. 
KT-Tech, a small start-up company, has revealed its mobile phone videoconferencing application, KTvid. KTvid allows person-to-person videoconferencing in real-time over today's mainstream cellular networks. The application doesn't require the high-bandwidth of a 3G cellular network for quality two-way video and audio connectivity so its potential can be realized today. I don't know how good the picture and sound is but you can be assured that KT-Tech thinks they are high-quality. 
It's official: you can now buy a 320GB drive from WD for your laptop, and for just $200. The WD Scorpio SATA drive spins at 5400rpm and has a 8MB cache. The press release says it's "extraordinarily quiet while running at cool operating temperatures." I hope that doesn't mean it's extremely loud while running at super high temperatures. The important thing is, this timing coincides with the arrival of Mac's Time Machine and the Windows Home Server, two easy ways to offload your laptop's entire contents, swap out the internal drive, then restore your old image without a lot of tinkering. I know some of you like tinkering, but this is the future. [
Need a template for your business plan, a tutorial on Python programming, or a copy of the Gettysburg address? Document sharing web site DocStoc has more than 12,000 files posted for free browsing and downloads. Registered members can keep personal "folders" on the site with links to useful docs and get notified by email when another user uploads a file type they request. Those looking for straight-up legal forms have 
NBC Universal has hired SinglePoint, a wireless messaging service, to launch one of the biggest mobile marketing initiative ever conducted by a media company. SinglePoint will manage and execute multiple participation media campaigns such as mobile voting, sweepstakes, contests, and mobile text news alerts. By outbidding its competitors, SinglePoint has won the largest Interactive Television (iTV) contract of its kind in the mobile marketing arena.
When Facebook launches 
Can you guess which company manufactures the fastest notebook computer that runs Windows Vista ? Your choices are Sony, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, Dell, HP, Toshiba or none of these.
The gadget: The Eye-Fi. It's an SD memory card that adds Wi-Fi to any camera. Plus the free Eye-Fi service supports automatic uploads to 20 different web photo sites (like Flickr) as well as a computer on your home network. 
The idea of driving a DVI or VGA display with a USB adapter isn't new, but Sewell's latest adapter seems to be fairly cheap and useful. Their adapter costs $119 and has 128MB RAM on board, which is then powered by USB ports from your computer to drive a 1600x1200 resolution monitor at the same time as your standard monitors. Sewell claims that these USB-driven monitors have the same quality as standard DVI monitors at displays of up to 20-inches. If you're trying to power anything bigger, like a 22 or a 24-inch, you're better off getting a new video card anyway. Unless you're on a laptop, in which case you're boned. [
Gary Merson backs up our review of Samsung's new LED driven LCD displays, agreeing with my impression that its the best LCD I've ever seen. Gary's tests went deeper, revealing that the TV resolves 800 lines of motion which means that these sets have better blur resistance than even most 120Hz sets, and even some plasmas. 
