How to Make Skype Portable via USB

Mark O'Neill explains how to carry your Skype around on Read/WriteWeb. I am summarising it here.

1. Create a folder and copy the file "skype.exe" into it.
2. Create another folder inside your folder and call it "data". Inside, create a text file called "skype.bat" with the following text: skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable.
3. Copy to your USB key. Done.
   

Wired: Advertisers waste millions in Second Life

Wired has an article on how corporations jumped in Second Life without really understanding what they were getting into. The end result: millions of dollars spent on virtual headquarters or "brand experience"than no one visits and plenty of marketers with nothing to show for their money but for learning how to create an avatar and stroll around. I came to a similar conclusion earlier this year: unless brands provide something of real value to SL users (which is NOT glorified advertising), why should they bother?

A periodic table of visualisation methods

How cool is that?

Via El Blogador.

TheFunded.com, when entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists

TheFunded.com

5 stars for the idea.

Battle at Kruger, one of the most popular video on Youtube

Amazing stuff.

Food branded McDonald's just taste better. Ask the kids.

Fascinating study from Stanford and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showing the power of advertising. 63 children age 3 to 5 get to taste burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, juices and carrots bought from Mc Donalds. Some are presented in their original packaging, some in non branded packs. The results:

• "almost 77 percent said the labeled fries tasted best while only 13 percent preferred the others".
• "54% percent preferred McDonald's-wrapped carrots versus 23 percent who liked the plain-wrapped sample".
• "29 kids chose McDonald's-wrapped burgers and 22 chose the unmarked ones" (not clear cut).
• "Fewer than one-fourth of the children said both samples of all foods tasted the same".

As a marketer, this is a great study to argue about why companies should invest in building brands. As a human being and citizen, this pavlovian conditioning is so sad and terrifying that I am now considering raising my children in Bhutan.

Article on CNN

Steven Wright

Witty. Emailed to me by El Blogador.

1- I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2- Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back.
3- Half the people you know are below average.
4- 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
5- 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
6- A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7- A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8- If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
9- All those who believe in psycho-kinesis, raise my hand.
10- The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11- I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.
12- OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13- How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15- Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16- When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17- Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18- Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.
19- I intend to live forever - so far, so good.
20- If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
21- Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22- What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
23- My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24- Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
25- If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26- A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27- Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28- The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
29- To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
30- The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31- The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32- The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33- Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film!

Useful sites for those considering buying a property in the UK

Property Snake shows how much a property's asking price has dropped in your area.

House Price Crash has been warning of an impeding crash for a while (called a "slowdown" or "soft landing" by property agents, surveyors, lenders and builders). I reproduced it above as it is such a powerful message.

Sony is blogging

Sony's blog.

Thanks to the Divine Miss N for the tip.

Introducing Yugma

Yugma does what WebEx do but is entirely browser based, and cost a fraction of the price (it's free for all basic collaboration services including web conferencing). I am using ioften with colleagues from the US and I am impressed by its simplicity of use and powerful features.

Paris to offer free Wi-Fi

105 Parisian locations will be covered by free Wi-Fi. They include libraries, parks, public places and so on. Would Mr. Livingstone consider a similar initiative? How about getting corporate sponsors to fund it?

Article in French

London underground dinner party

Hats off. And as one of the commenters accurately noted: " I've never seen Londoners smile on a tube before".

Shift happens

Prepare to be surprised.

Teens Leaving MySpace For Facebook?

I am reading and hearing more and more about this. See this post from YPulse for example.

European Internet users spend more time online than watching TV or reading newspapers

European internet users spend 14.3 hours a week online, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines, the research group said. 36% of people who go online said they spent less time looking at the television as a result.

BBC News

Will Facebook kill Linked-In?

Bernhard Warner thinks so in a recent Times article. He his rooting for Facebook against Linked-In, which he finds too “stuffy” and prone to macho “my network is bigger than yours” attitude. By contrast Facebook users are more laid-back and you get to know more personal stuff about them.

I've been on Linked-In for a few years and signed-up to Facebook recently, as most people I know in the UK (network effects?). I receive a lot of “spamvitations to connect” from Linked-In, mostly from people with whom I have no real affiliation to or no desire to connect with. I always politely refuse and explain that I rather have a small network of people I really know and trust rather than a loose constellation of passer-bys, only interested in their “500+” networkers’ badge.

Networking is not about collecting “connections” but getting to know people beyond what’s written on their business cards. Too many Linked-In users treat the network as a customer database. Facebook, at least for the moment is indeed a better tool than Linked-In for quality of relationships, which determines a personal network's value.

New UK Fiat website

Fiat re-launched its UK website with sleek 3D flyovers. Nice work from AKQA. I am waiting to see what is in store for the re-launch of the Fiat 500.

Fiat is a Digital PR client in Italy.

Preserving our collective memory in the digital age

The BBC is running a warning from the Chief executive of the UK National Archives: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."

Think about it, we can still read 5,000 years old Egyptian hieroglyphs or medieval manuscripts but we can't access a file on a floppy disk, read a Betamax tape or a Philips CD-I... There is a danger of loosing our collective memory because we record it on highly perishable media. And the pace of change drives the cost of re-recording it again and again for national archives, who are often poorly funded.

I reckon that in 10 years time, it will be fashionable to handwrite letters again, just because it involves efforts and makes the recipient feel special. And your letter will be preserved for hundred years for posterity, unlike that "reply all" email.

BBC article

Funny Hansaplast condom ad

The world's most expensive external hard disk

As seen on Amazon.co.uk this morning. Usually I prefer typos to go the other way.