The Ian Bell Weblog

Samsung yesterday announcedthat they have developed a 64GB solid state drive (SSD) for use in laptops or any other portable electronics that could use a 2.5-inch drive. There was no mention of price, but with Apple and other notebook manufacturers reportedly set to announce SSD based laptops later in the year, I expect the price to be around $300 to start. Things are really starting to get interesting. Hard drive manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate better start getting competitive or they might be extinct from the consumer market in the near-future.

I posted yesterday at Digital Trends that Microsoft officially announced the Xbox 360 Elite. For $479 bucks you get a larger hard drive, HDMI connection and everything in black. But I have to wonder, what the heck makes this thing so elite? It still cannot up-convert DVD movies to 1080P and it doesn’t have a next-gen drive built-in. If Microsoft really wanted to make this Elite, they would have incorporated HD DVD, to at least go head-to-head with the PS3 and it’s Blu-Ray support. Heck, maybe partner with Logitech and throw in a fancy Xbox 360 remote control! The Elite is a disappointment to me.

Just read over at MediaBuyerPlanner.com that advertisers are already starting to line-up for the new YouTube competitor planned by NBC, News Corp., and Yahoo (possibly TimeWarner/AOL and Viacom too). Why, you might ask? Because they do not plan on using user-generated content - at least they have not said anything about it yet. Instead, they will use a collection of original broadcast contenet which we all know is easier to attach a brand via an advertisement too. User generated video content is not selling and Google is still struggling to take advantage of the YouTube purchase.

The moral of the story: When you own the content, you can sell it. Google simply does not own any original content they can sell. Advertisers are scared of advertising on non-predictive video. As a content producer, why partner with Google when you can sell it directly yourself? Business 101 - class is over

Last night, my biz partner Dan Gaul and I spent some time on Yahoo! comparing search results with Google. If you do a search for product reviews on Google, you will get results that include blogs (linking to sites that review, not that review products themselves), shopping comparison and other types of sites gaming the search engine with keywords. But with Yahoo!, we received results that were a lot more relavant and included review sites first, then the other spam results. I am going to switch my search engine to Yahoo! for a month to see how well it performs. I have been using Google for years, now it’s time for a change. Let’s see how well Yahoo! does.