An intrepid reader of the British website theregister.co.uk tipped the site off to an interesting bit of code on Apple’s Powerbook product page. Apparently, a 1×1 pixel tracking gif from marketing firm Avenue A is labelled as ‘apple_g5_powerbook.’ A typo, perhaps? Probably, but all other such tracking tags across the apple.com site have the appropriate (and correct) processor and product names. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but we can hope, can’t we?
Asteroid Adams
MSNBC.com reports today that Asteroid Douglasadams was among the 71 newly named celestial objects announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Adams is one of my favorite writers as I blogged about his long-awaited movie recently. Just before Adam’s death in 2001, one of the HHGTTG characters – Arthur Dent – became the name of another asteroid. Following the Columbia tradgedy, seven asteroids were named after the fallen astronauts. MSNBC.com solicited readers for future asteroid names. One reader suggested Adams, and upon further research, an asteroid known as 2001 DA42 was identified. How fitting – Douglas died in 2001, it already bore his initials, and the number 42 is, as all Guide fans are aware, the answer to live, the universe and everything.
Google Browser Rumors
In more Google news today, Reuters reports that Google has hired the lead engineer for Firefox. This comes on the heels of their registration of the Gbrowser.com domain and hiring of several Internet Explorer engineers last year.
Googling Television
Google and Yahoo are expanding their search products to television. Google Labs released their beta of ‘Google Video’ today. This system allows a user to search closed captioning and see still frame grabs of the relevant video. Some PVRs and TV tuner cards for PCs have done this in the past – tuning to or alerting when certain keywords were matched. But these projects are on a much broader scale.
In a New York Times story this morning (free registration required), Google’s vp for product management says “The long-term business model is complicated and will evolve over time.” I’ll say – the rights to aggregating video from hundreds of local television broadcasts, not to mention networks like CNN, ABC, etc., are going to be complex. But given Google’s audience, it wil be interesting to see if broadcasters see value in placement here. The Times story digs briefly into the touchy issues of rights and network deals related to these types of technologies. A worthwhile read.