Repost if you can. This ad is the first TV Ad ever to be run nationwide in Pro of Marijuana legalization. It started today, 4/20 “four twenty” a date that matches the pot-iconic number. It’s time it’s legalized, it’s not like they’re not smoking, you might as well tax it, create jobs, export it and explode a billion dollar industry. If America does it, the rest of the world will follow, and damn it, it’ll be cool as hell.

I’ve finally taken a week off from work, and I decided to go to one of the must-visit cities on my list while my wife does her Indian journey with her sister. I’m in London, and I must say I’m not that thrilled yet (I haven’t seen anything so far), maybe it’s cause I’m alone, maybe it’s the weather, maybe I’m tired, or maybe I’m too cheap for the freaking prices so far in this city. Here are some of the thoughts I’ve had so far during the trip:

• American Airlines for the first time had really good food during the flight. Also the movies on demand rocked, I could watch Valkyrie and Yes Man.
• As we started to descend I realized I would not see the sun again during the whole vacation. Anywhere from 10,000 meters to like 100mts from the ground there were layers and layeres of clouds and fog.
• Subway cars are tiny



• The subway system is a piece of cake
• Every thing is twice as expensive as in New York, and it pisses me off
• There’s a never ending drizzle
• At first I thought the whole place would sound like I was in a harry potter movie, so far I’ve only heard Polish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and very little English with British Accent
• Everything reminds me of my wife, traveling with her is 10 times more fun than traveling alone
• It’s been only a few hours, hopefully I’ll get used in a couple of days on how crossing the street works, even though there’s signs in most places “Look right!” “Look Left”, I still have to think hard to figure out where cars are coming from on some streets. It’s all so crazy, they should switch.



• I forgot my power adapter
• Everything is too expensive, 20 pounds for the internet connection on the hotel is not good at all, that’s like $30 usd. In 2 days I’d pay my monthly ISP with that amount of money back home
• I still think the US is the best fucking country in the world, no matter how much people hate it, I find everything in america so convenient it’s hard to change it for any other country, at least for me

Update
In the afternoon after I walked more then I got more excited after I went to a few landmarks like the London Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Picadilli Circus (below). I finally got some sleep, but I still feel that I’ve some jetlag on me, so I’ll take more of this sunday to sleep it off, that’s what vacation is for, resting.

The conclusion of the first day, most things in this country are backwards. I’ll try to make a list of them, it’s not only the driving. The bread toaster this morning was backwards, you’d get the bread down by pulling a lever up… wtf.

That’s a screnshot of my wife’s iPhone finally running skype.

We just tried it for a few minutes and:

Good

• Looks and feels like skype. It evens has all the sounds you’ll hear on the desktop client
• There’s no lag when it comes to Instant Messaging
• Sound Quality is Great
• It’s a great option to make calls when you are traveling outside of your own country. Now you can take your iPhone with you and not pay for international roaming to effing AT&T (or your carrier) and use any internet enabled WiFI network to make your calls. It will rock even more if you have SkypeOut. Update: According to GigaOM the application works only over WiFI, which is great for me. When you’re out you use the regular phone. If you travel abroad, just piggyback on some WiFI network you find.

The Bad

• We could call from her iPhone to my Skype client running on MacOSX, but I couldn’t call her back
• The iPhone’s lack of background application running kills the purpose of skype. You’d have to have the application open all the time for it to be useful. As soon as the app closes your session dies, so there’s no way to get notified if someone called or messaged you
• The contact list (if you have hundreds of contacts) was very laggy to load

So far this is just a glimpse of what phones will be able to do in the future when wireless internet will be as common as electricity. When I first heard about WiMax the first thing that came to mind was “No more cellphone bills!”. The day we have broadband internet access everywhere for free (think the wireless spectrum that will be left for grabs once the TV stations go all digital) all we’ll need is an iPod (since it supposedly runs on the iPod too) or internet mobile phone and Skype or similar VoIP software.

Related Posts
Review: Skype for iPhone. Verdict: Awesome.
Skype calls over 3G working on 3.0 Beta
Skype Now Officially Available for the iphone

I feel it’s my geek given duty to make a post about this presentation. I was lucky to finally have the time to watch their hour long presentation and Q&A session at the Game Developer Conference 2009 (which ends a couple of days from today). They could have not picked a better place to finally demo their technology.

In short, they’ve introduced a huge new concept to the video game industry, I’d call it “Cloud Gaming” to not only host the games, but also host the processing juice. You won’t need a console anymore, they keep the hardware to execute and stream the game to your screen. They support TV (with a miniconsole), PC and Mac.

So bear with me, they say they have solved the issue that you’re thinking about now, Lag. The people behind this worked on apple to create Quicktime, and they identified differences between what it takes to compress linear (regular) video, vs Interactive Video. They say their compression algorithm doesn’t take seconds of lag (like when you stream over a webcam), but miliseconds. They have custom chips to process the graphics, and I bet they might even built their own network protocol right on top of IP.

So what are some of the implications of this:

• We’ll all be able to finally play Crysis and even more demanding games on low end PCs
• No more buying more hardware, no more upgrading your PC to be able to run games, no more buying consoles
• All your games live on the platform, so you can play from any computer, and you’ll keep the state of your game until the last time you hit the Pause button
• Your friends can see you play, live. I bet we’ll be able to see live tournaments, we’ll start seeing a new breed of famous people get more attention, the Elite gamers. Imagine seeing the best Call of Duty player in the world playing live
• New Genres of video games will emerge on this platform, maybe even new genres of entertainment, think new Live Broadcast shows where participants use an avatar to either act or compete (game show)
• Game Developers not need to think of the rendering limitations that they might have nowadays, and will be able to design games that could only be imagined in the past. Render quality only thought for movies will now exist for video games, think of virtual reality now
• There’s about 100 million PCs/Macs/Laptops out there that are not ready today to play high end games, now they’ll have the possibility of playing virtually any game by installing a 1Mb plugin from OnLive.com
• Takes Piracy out of the Business Equation
• A bigger gaming audience makes an even better case for companies placing advertisement in video games, maybe there will be a lot more high end free games with bigger audiences, think the next Grand Theft Auto coming out for free with superb real life like graphics rendering, all ad sponsored and free to the consumer. The amount of people that you could have playing a great game for free would make other developers think twice about charging for their games and having their virtual worlds ad sponsored.
• No more installs
• Now multiplayer will have almost no latency since all players live inside their datacenter, you only get the latency of your ISP if there’s any
• Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft must be shitting their pants
• Services that sell used games are going to be selling vintage and their business will be reduced

However I think there will always be room for the old consoles. This is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, we have grown up with consoles for almost 30 years and there’s a lot of changes to push into people’s minds:

• How do you convince me, that finally made up my mind after years and dropped $500 on a PS3 to play with my friends in latin america online to switch to this, if my friends will probably have no way to even have access to the system in years to come?
• How do you convince PC gamers that rather pay for the hardware and pirate the games? (There’s plenty of those, probably the majority of the PC gaming population outside the US never plays for a PC game, and doesn’t get into consoles because they pirate the games) into renting or buying games on the cloud?
• How do you convince all the people that they should switch when their gaming experience depends entirely on being connected to the internet. So If the ISP is having issues I can’t play? isn’t my console awesome?

It seems that many of these complains are similar to all the complains brought upon business models that didn’t exist online and that are now thriving. This presentation left me with my mouth wide open, and I highly recommend you watch it. You’ll be blown away by the power of the UI, and how as you Browse for games, you can even see how other people are playing live, it’s like streaming video is nothing for OnLive. Really sick technology.

In the case that they succeed, I just can’t wait for them to have competition by the existing big brands, it’s going to get so interesting once cloud gaming becomes the defacto platform, maybe we as consumers will end up playing games for free, all sponsored with in game ads.

Just by listening to the guy if you’re a techie, your mind will start to fly to barely start to imagine the awesomeness of the technology that should be behind this. I can imagine anything from custom virtualization technology, to custom GPUs, custom network cards, custom network protocols on top of IP, deals with major internet backbone networks, ISPs, deals with game publishers, sick level API development, incomprehensible comprehension technology for my retard brain… when I see shit like this, I always think… how the hell is there people that still believe in god? Mankind is the closest thing there is to something like that! I’m thankful for people in this world that can think so big.

The service is supposed to launch next Winter 2009, but you can sign up to be a beta tester

To pull this Marketing Stunt, you need to own a billion dollar corporation, publicly traded with a market cap of about USD $100 billion traded on the NASDAQ. Then you need to have yearly revenues of $21,795,550,000 or about $41,467 per hour.

Having all this money, there’s an ingenious evil marketing strategy you can implement that will make you look good, get your free press and it’s only going to cost about $150,000, which is the equivalent of let’s say 3.6 hours worth of your revenue, so think about it, in 3 and half hours from now you should have the budget for it.

If you have made up your mind 3.6 hours after reading this, here is what you need to do:

1) Start modifying the logo of your company on every holiday or special occasion.
2) Create and promote a competition in all schools across the country for kids to redesign an “out of the box” version of your logo, and offer $50,000 in prizes.

Open the competition to all U.S. residents between the ages of 5 and 18 who attend elementary and secondary schools (i.e. grades K-12) in the U.S. The National Winner will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to your main Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab. (This is where you’ll spend roughly $50k)

The Prizes will go as follow:

What your company gets in exchange:
Free Press on all major media outlets TWICE, once when the competition is announced and once when the winner is announced. You know that if you wanted to get that amount of attention it would cost you millions of dollars in advertising. Nothing beats free press baby!

Best of all, you will inspire millions of kids ages 5 to 18 to admire your company and your brand, you will imprint your logo in their brains permanently, they will redraw it over and over while thinking how to make your company better. They will even write essays about you.

All the kids get to think they’ll make the best logo and win the first prize (poor bastards). This is the best time to create an image of trust in their minds when they think of your brand. In the future it will be hard for them to pick any other competing company over yours. In the end they will also be more than willing to work for you once they’re old enough.

And remember… Don’t Look Evil!