Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years

The only reason you’ll watch these two videos is because you trust me to add value to your lives and not sell links.

I explain how SEO-resistant technologies like Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are about to upend the search industry.

Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.

Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

Oh, and the only way you’ll watch these videos is if someone tells you to watch them. No Google. No TechMeme (this post is too short to show up there).

Rio, in your face, about gaming

New video gaming show with Rio Pesino. Al Alcorn, co-founder of Atari, is on here.

Damn, is this PodTech? Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone. We’re supposed to be lying over and dying. Or so I read on the Internet. :-)

First shoot in our nice new studio, too. It’s not quite finished, when it is, we’ll give you a tour and have you over for lunch, or something like that.

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Seagate making headlines over future of storage

Disclaimer: Seagate is the exclusive sponsor of my show, which I greatly appreciate.

BetaNews reports on Seagate’s reported moves into the flash memory space.

It’s interesting, I’ve been working on a series of videos at Sun (with the ZFS team, which makes a file system manager that’s used on a lot of data center hard drives, so they know something about the reliability of media that they sit on top of) and at Seagate (I’m interviewing several of the engineers there on Monday) to talk specifically about storage technology and management.

The BetaNews article is on point with what executives at Seagate have been telling me: that hard drives aren’t going away anytime soon.

Why not?

1) Reliability. The ZFS team at Sun told me that in their tests hard drives are an order of magnitude more reliable than flash memory is (that video will be up next week). Reliable meaning you get accurate data back out. We’ll talk more about that with the engineers.
2) Cost. Hard drives are going to continue being much lower cost per terabyte than flash will be.

That said, Bill Watkins, Seagate’s CEO, recently told me that they are working on hybrid drives where your OS would be stored on flash and everything else would be stored on the hard drive. Why do that if the reliability of flash memory is less than hard drive storage? Because the flash will be a cached version. Backed up by the hard drive. And then you get all of flash’s advantages: almost instant boot time (very fast recall out) and low power utilization since you won’t need to spin a hard drive up just to get to your OS. I can’t wait to get a laptop that has these advantages.

But he’s also emphatic that hard drives are going to be here indefinitely into the future (I won’t say “never” cause that’s a very long time, but generally technologists can only see a few years into the future anyway, so when we make grand statements you’ve got to put them into context of that smaller time frame, not something like 1,000 years from now).

Anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff coming from Seagate over the next few weeks. On September 5th they are hosting a big press event in New York and that’s when my videos will be released from embargo and we can talk more about this stuff. What the engineers at Seagate and other storage companies are doing is just amazing. I remember my first hard drive. Cost thousands of dollars and only held 20 megabytes (not gigabytes). Today a 200 gig hard drive on a desktop is considered “entry level.”

Anything you want me to ask Seagate’s engineers about this stuff?

Big news today: iPhone unlocked

I just had to add my link to the pile. Hope you’re having a great Friday.

Come visit the HP Garage

Thank you Brian Solis for the wonderful wrap up and photos of our visit to the HP Garage last weekend. Thanks to Chris Aarons and Tom Augenthaler and to everyone at HP who worked to get us inside for making this happen. Especially to Anna Mancini, HP’s Corporate Archivist, who interrupted her weekend to come and give us a little talk on HP’s history. I wish the garage could be made more open, but now that I’ve been inside I see that it’s going to be difficult to get more than a few dozen people in there at a time.

If there’s a job of the videoblogging industry it is to get all of us access to things that have forced scarcity for some reason or another. Anyway, hope you all enjoy this little look at where Silicon Valley began.

Thanks to everyone who came, made this day very special.

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Thank you iJustine

I got one of the big iPhone bills too (my son and wife had them since day one) and it didn’t bother me that much, but I wondered why someone was killing all these trees just to show me all the calls I was making. Glad iJustine spoke up about it and now the bills will change to smaller ones with only the important stuff included.

AT&T bills are way too complex, that’s for sure. I still am fighting with them to get all four of our cell phones on a single plan, too. It’s amazingly difficult, especially if you have a variety of different numbers and devices.