A company in China has taken Google to court over copy right infringement. Google’s name translated into Chinese is “Guge,” the company claims to have that name patented.

According to the case, which was heard by a court in Beijing this week, Beijing Guge Sci-Tech Co. was officially registered at the Beijing Municipal Industrial and Commercial Bureau on April 19, 2006, but Google didn’t register the name “Guge” in China until Nov. 24 of that year.

—WSJ

Both companies claim that they were the creators of the word, and both say they have different meanings.

All that I have to say about this…these idiots in China are going to get what is coming for them. Google is going to unleash the wraith and fury of its thousands of patent lawyers, and harness the energy and power of its web presence to wipe this company of the face of the internet.

As they once said, “Don’t Mess with Russia.”

the new saying of the wise is, “Don’t Mess with Google.”

I have only realized that the skiing industry has really been on ball with emerging web technologies and has gone all out on web design, podcasts, blogs, and even wikis. I think that it is great for skiers to take advantage of information technology and spread the joy of the sport. Ultitizing these kinds of information services makes the sharing of information very fast and concentrated. Every month I wait for all of the skiing podcasts that I subscribe too come out, so I can find out what the Pros are up too, how the season is going in various places, how big the parks are out west, and how much pow was dumped out in AK in the most recent snow storm. This makes it really easy for skiers like me who can’t get out all the time to know what is going on in the skiing world.

And now some good stuff…if you skip over this entire blog at least watch this video. This is a twelve-year old kid out in Mt. Hood Washington last summer:

William Kamkwamba has a dream: to power up his country one windmill at a time.

-Wall Street Journal

Kamkwamba is a 20 year-old resident of Malawi a relatively small country in Africa. In the past couple of years he has devised a couple of windmills that power his family’s house: three light bulbs, one radio, and one television. At first, his family thought he was crazy with his idea of using a windmill to create electricity, but after studying a windmill in a magazine, he was able to build a 39 foot windmill out of blue-gum trees and used bicycle parts. With no prior education, Kamwamba electrified literally and metaphorically his neighborhood, and now with the publicity that African bloggers have gotten it, nation. What amazes me with this story is that it was because of African bloggers that this story was pushed throw the pipeline. After this news hit the blogosphere, a group of independent investors decided to fund Kamkwamba’s education.

I have learned more about Adwords over the past few weeks in preparation for the competition next semester. I am finding it to be a very good tool to get publicity and drive web traffic to websites. An Adword campaign usually takes place over a set period of time. A campaign manager chooses certain keywords, and sets bid prices for each these words. A bid price is the amount of money the manager is willing to pay Google when someone clicks on their ad after a search using those keywords. The goal for the Adword campaign manager is to get his or organization to appear at the top of the sponsored list on the search result page. There are a couple factors that determine the position of each ad. The quality of the landing site (the web page the ad takes the user to), clickthrough rate (how many times do users click on the ad), and also the amount of money (bid) that is placed on certain keywords. These variables are ultimately used to determine the position of the ad on the search results and also how much money that it costs to the Adword campaign when a user clicks on the ad. Sometime campaigns with ads in higher positions pay less money than those in lower positions depending on their quality.

I’ve been teleporting throughout the various islands of SL, and I have been looking for a romantic island to take a special someone out on a date. So far, I have been very disappointed. Most of the “romantic” islands that I have found turn out to be tacky, virtual, soft-porn orgies. I am looking for a quiet peaceful island where my date and I can get a bite to eat in an upscale restaurant, and then go take a walk on the beach, be out in nature, or chill in some sort of karma inducing location where my date and I can cuddle. I want detail to be put in this island, and don’t mind spend a couple hundred lindens. I did a little research online through sltree.com. This pointed me to a couple of romantic getaways. Midnight Reflection, Aphrodite’s Waterfall & Caverns, and The Lost Gardens of Apollo all caught my eye. When I searched the three of these in SL, I found out that they were all credible places that didn’t allow mature content. The Lost Gardens of Apollo was overcrowded, and I couldn’t teleport to the island. The other two seemed to be very nice places to go on a date. I think that I have a better idea now of where I want to go.

Next semester I will participating in the Google Online Marketing Challenge in an independent study with Dr. Jim Jansen. This is the first year that Google will be running this challenge. The challenge is targeted at university students in online marketing related fields (such as IST). Students must first find a business to do a campaign for. They must has less than 100 employees. Over a period of three weeks students will run a marketing campaign on Google Adword to drive potential customers to their clients website. Google limits each teams budget to $200. Teams of students throughout the world at different universities will be competing against each other for regional and global prizes. There are still a few spots left in this independent study. If anyone is interested, get in contact in Jim Jansen. Here is a link to Gomcha, a social networking site for students involved in the challenge.

In order to run a business on Second Life, one needs to have a general understanding of the SL economy. The currency in Second Life is referred to as Linden Dollars. Linden Labs makes the economy independent of pricing by freezing the exchange rate on a market-based currency exchange with US dollars and other international monetary currencies. Linden Labs reports that the Second Life economy generated about 3.6 million dollars in the month of September 2005. The 2006 Second Life gross domestic product (GDP) was 64 million US dollars. Estimates of the 2007 GDP are between 500 million and 600 million US dollars. If you would consider Second Life a country of its own, that would rank it at 166 just below Grenada. Second Life has a larger GDP that 20 other countries. The Second Life economy is no joke. The estimated economic activity in 2007 will create about 550 million US dollars. Money can definitely be made on Second Life.

Linden Labs has a very intersting exchange system set up. They call it LindenX. To control LindenX Linden Labs has set up “circuit breakers.” They are market mechanisms that basically freeze the exchange levels if market acts in certain ways. If the average exchange rate in any given day increases or decreases more that 10% the Exchange market freezes for one hour. 20% for two hours. 30% until noon of the next day. These circuit breakers help keep the exchange rate stable. One thing to look out for is Linden Labs handling of monetary policy in Second Life. Linden Labs maintains a currency peg of about L$270 for $1. This is similar to what the Chinese do with Yuan. This practice could be argued to inhibit change in value. Currently, the exchange rate is US$1.00 US dollar for L$267. L$51 million changed hands today.

The Second Life market is a free market or laissez-faire economy. There are two types of costs to to be taken into account when doing business in Second Life: Membership plans and Virtual Land Use Fees (Tier Fee). In order to own land in Second Life, a Premium membership is required. A Premium account comes with advanced technical support and a 512m2 parcel (if you donate 512m2 to a group). These issues are really insignificant compared to the amount of space. If the Penn State Library were to move onto Second Life they would need at least a 1/4 Region or more. An entire region costs $1675 US dollars and an additional $195 per month in Tier fees.

From this brief economic analysis of Second Life, one can assume that the Second Life economy is growing at a stable rate, and under the eyes of Linden labs, the exchange rate between Linden dollars and US dollars has stayed the same over the past few years. This makes it a safe environment for businesses. The facts about increasing annual GDP also prove that profits and revenues are possible.

So I am back up at school right now, and I have set up the Blue Beast. I ordered some parts for it before I left home. I got a Hitachi 500GB SATA HD. I had to look up some information about my motherboard because it was so old. It can only have serial ATA hard drives. I also bought more RAM memory. 2 GB of Kingston DDR will double the current amount of memory in the Blue Beast. I will also replace the sound card with a basic Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy card. I placed the order for these parts last Thursday. Hopefully they should be here in a couple days so that I can install them. The owner’s manual to the Dell XPS was my guide for the most part when I bought these parts. While the motherboard and CPU are still good, they have already been outdated. Once I get these parts installed I will partition the 500 GB HD, and put two more operating systems on (Linux and Mac).

My Family’s old computer was retired in late October and replaced with HP. This four year old Dell XPS didn’t run for more than five minutes before freezing. This was most likely due to the massive about of malicious software and zounds of applications that had been installed on it throughout the years. On top of that, the ATI video card didn’t work have the time and eventually burnt out in the end. The sound card was shot as well. I found this to be a very opportunity to learn more about computer hardware. I had been planning for a while to start playing around with Linux. The Dell XPS would be the perfect computer to learn it on. All I needed to do was clean it up and replace a couple of parts.
I started out by getting a new video card so I could have a working display. A cheap ATI Radeon HD 256 Mb sufficed. I then reformatted the hard drive. I deleted the C partition and created a new one. I used an old Windows XP installation disk to install an operating system. Throughout the next couple of days I downloaded and installed updates. I used CDs to install the drivers for the ATI video card (Windows didn’t recognize the card until I got the SP2 update. I installed AVG Internet Security suite and updated it as well.
This is how far I have gotten over a period of three days. A big obstacle that I face while doing this stuff at home is my Satellite Internet service provider. It is very unreliable, sluggish, and has a 128 Mb daily bandwidth limit. I reached this in a couple of hours, my ISP then kicked me down to sub-56k levels.
I plan on buying a TV-tuner card , 320 Gb hard drive, sound card, and 2Gb of memory. I will install this hardware when I am back up in State College next week. My Linux ambitions have lead me to Ubuntu. I will continue resurrection of the Blue Beast in the near future.

Sun Microsystems has multiple locations in Second Life. The general location for visitors interested in Sun Microsystems is the Pavilion. The first thing I did was take a guided tour of the island in hopes of learning a little about what they had to offer. The tour guide was this silver rocket chair that flew me around to various places on the island. It told me a lot about the history of the company and various features in the Pavilion parcel.

Sun opened their presence on SL in 2006, and they have the title of being the first Fortune 500 company to hold a conference on SL. From perspective of their guided tour, I found the Pavilion to be very well designed and visually appealing. The textures where detailed, and there weren’t really dull areas anywhere. Sun Microsystems doesn’t have any dedicated website for their SL presence, but there are many press releases on their main page.

In the center of the parcel there is a media center with a lot of seats and large video display screens. There was an information booth that told me Sun used this to display new products. Other Sun affiliated locations offer a tour of their new supercomputer which they showed at the 2007 conference in Reno, Nevada. Inside the visitor center there are also rooms for SL meetings and conferences. A recruitment center and press briefing lounge are located here as well.

Sun showcases their products in one of the building in the Pavilion. All of their servers are set up. You can actually open them up and see what they look like inside.

One thing that I really liked was a nifty little marketing ploy. Sun gives away free SL clothing that has the Sun Microsystems logo on it. The shirts are pretty cool, and it promotes their company as well.

I was a little disappointed in the amount of Sun employees on the site. During the time that I was touring the site I saw only one person there. The map revealed that there were only three people on the entire island. To improve their SL presence, Sun needs to get more people actively involved during the day to roam there island and talk to visitors. Without people there, Sun’s island appears very desolate and empty. I would only really recommend this island to a friend who is interested in buying products or services or looking for a job with Sun Microsystems.

IBM has a very similar island layout. Like Sun, IBM focuses on using SL as a communications and marketing platform. They have a plethora of confrence rooms and media centers, they even have a large theater. Unlike Sun, IBM seemed to have more employees on the island, and people specifically working there to help visitors out. They even had their own sandbox that had various projects under construction. Based on my tour of Sun Microsystem’s Pavilion, and a brief stint in IBM. It seemed to me that IBM had a better and more complex island.