The fact is if it wasn’t Google it would have been someone else but you know this technology has already been explored by Phone Companies since it was first possible to 911 triangulate the location of people making emergency calls.

Where will this end?

Is it possible to setup someones phone without their knowledge?

How could this be used by criminals.

Could someone enable a phone then tape it under your bumper and track your location? Dam right they could.

Information on how the setup works is pretty much unavailable on their site. No info about how to set your phone up or how to make sure the service is not enabled.

It seems that to setup the service you enter your phone number on google’s website then a text message is sent to the phone and when you reply the phone is now on their tracking list.

In otherwords if you can gain access to someones phone for a few minutes you can set them up to be tracked without their knowledge if you erase the message that was sent.

This seems extremely dangerous.

Anyway if you are stupid enough to use it or want to find out more about it.

http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html

The product is standard video hosting but on top of that they offer a number of plugins for a variety of different CMS / Blog packages. With their tools you can place videos on your site which isn’t an amazing feature but you can also interact with your visitors by allowing them to post video responses.

Hosting is provided by Kaltura so there is no need for you to worry about going over your web servers quota.

From Their site “Easily install and enjoy Kaltura’s FREE full featured video packages for WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, PHP, Ruby on Rails and ANY site! Typically suitable for small to mid-sized websites, our self-serve packages are community supported. Hosting and bandwidth costs up to 10GB are on us.”

So you get up to 10GB maybe before they start contacting you about buying space for your videos. Depending on the format and length of your videos this could be a decent amount or maybe just a days supply.

For more information free blog tools and a free account visit

http://corp.kaltura.com/

Supposedly once the deal goes through they will resume services but what does this say about a company that has been collecting huge amounts of data from its users.

Can anyone even begin to imagine the crap that is uploaded to these huge free file hosting sites and how much gold is in those data mines?

It really makes you wonder.

Everyone remembers when Google started offering 1GB of email and smart developers designed a way to host files on their system.  But there are many sites around the web where tons of personal data is being stored even when hosts say it is against their terms of service to upload data of that type.

People don’t seem to care it seems.

They think that the web is so large that no one will ever find their info.

But think about this Google MSN AOL Yahoo and other large search engines index huge portions of the internet and update that information continuously.

On top of the big visible engines there are thousands of specialty search bots that hammer the web looking for specific information and links to data that they can exploit for the sole reason of making money.

It maybe nice to have remote storage to backup files especially if you are on the road but you really need to be in control of your storage site or you have just opened your life or business to the world.

Hopefully Oosah will resume services but

Be Careful out there.

The fact is that once a story is reported and placed on the net there is little reason to print it on paper and distribute it by the masses of child labor or on news stands. How many times have you read something online that you thought was fresh only to tell your friends and they say they already knew about it.

In paper based news the reporting of information has become guarded. They hold back information or details of stories just so they can justify printing it. But it is not the articles or the face price that makes newspapers money it is advertising.

Ads are the primary reason that Newspapers exist today. Circulations on weekends that contain just as many coupons and sales circulars as content is always higher then daily distribution. Some newspapers have even decided to do away with publishing a few week day distributions because they can not find enough advertisers to fill their quotas.

So is online news killing the Newspaper industry?

Probably not, the more likely cause is the changes in the way companies advertise their products and lower revenues at all businesses resulting in fewer advertising dollars being spent.

Who is likely to benefit from fewer newspapers?

Local and regional websites that can produce news information might see some benefit if they can also distribute their content to large portal sites.

Google News is one such site that has started to include more unconventional news resources in their news alerts section. Although you will see AP and Reuters filling in large areas of their content smaller regional sources have and will play a big part in their news gathering technique.

So although you may never see Tony’s Pizza Blog used as a reference in online news you may see a new group of sites that can address local and regional news  while industry standards still address national and international news.

This is definately a Niche Market worth looking into.

The decision comes after not being able to come to an agreement with PRS a British Song Writers Society that wanted increases in royalties many times higher then the previous agreement that just expired.

A similar situation just occurred between Warner Brothers and YouTube where they pulled all the music and even went in and searched for personal videos that used Warner music as a background.

PRS Music Chief Executive Steve Porter said in a statement “We were shocked and disappointed to receive a call late this afternoon informing us of Google’s drastic action” .

Unfortunately when they gave Google an ultimatum they didn’t seem to understand that Google also had the right to follow through on PRS’s requests that the music be pulled.

Who is most likely to be hurt by this decision? Probably the artists because although YouTube does not charge their visitors like ITunes does when they want to listen to something YouTube is a platform that artists use to popularize their music.

Distributing Videos to Millions of Unique visitors every day is a bandwidth and production intensive task that YouTube has mastered. If Industry was to follow with their own sites who is to say where people would get their music.

SonyBMG has had a large video distribution site for years but they in no way compair to the number of visitors YouTube, MySpace or other hosters can offer.

Pretty much this is about asking for too much at the wrong time.