Sergey Brin starts a blog, explains the choice of “Too” as the Blog name, and discloses that he has the G2019S variant of the LRRK2 gene. The health implications associated with the mutation are a 20% to 80% elevated risk for Parkinson’s Disease.
Sergey discovered his predisposition via genetic testing at 23andMe, and deems knowledge of this risk to be fortunate in that permits him to adapt, eg support of The Parkinson’s Institute.
So far, nothing on Google itself aside from “Google is a play on googol”, but then again, Too is intended to be about Sergey and not Google…although both would be good.
Wall Street goes halvsies…
The New York Times charts the dramatic declines in market capitalization of 29 selected financial firms in the period from October 9, 2007 (shown above) to September 12, 2008 (below).
In the intervening 339 days, the value of those firms has declined from $1.86 trillion to $0.98 trillion, for a staggering loss of $880 billion. ABC is saying there will be huge job lossses on Wall Street for 2008, on the order of 170,000 jobs.
…As for what happens next, there are no less than 3 individuals vying for the title of Dr. Doom. They are Henry Kaufman ex-Salomon Brothers, Nouriel Roubini prof at NYU and one Peter Schiff. All three claim to have predicted the current predicament, and attribute it to easy credit, speculative excess and securitization of illiquid assets. Their monicker accurately reflects their expectations for the near-future.
Schiff’s claim to fame includes his correct call re the real estate bubble at a meeting of the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Association on Nov 13 2006 part 1/8…
…but enough of all this maudlin fascination with the past. We at G-M prefer to look to the future, and look forward to making a bundle, er participating, in the fabled/putative next bubble, thought by some to be alternative energy eg solar, geothermal, wind etc, possibly to peak in 2013…we’re saving our pennies. The fly-in-the-ointment of alternative energy, of course, is the on-going slump in the price of crude oil, but that can be fixed by some more wars, hurricanes and Hummers.
With all these recent camera announcements, you’d think PhotoKina was coming up, or something…
Along with the Powershot G10, Canon announced 6 new/improved digital cameras at it’s September 17 2008 launch event:
EOS 5D Mark II – 21.1 Megapixel DSLR with full-frame CMOS sensor, HD Video capture at 1920×1080, monaural audio via the built-in microphone/stereo recording requires an external microphone, $2,699.99
PowerShot SD880 IS – 10.0 Megapixel point-and-shoot, $299.99
PowerShot SD990 IS – 14.7 Megapixel Digital ELPH, $399.99
PowerShot SX1 IS – variant of the SX10 IS, but with CMOS in place of CCD which allows 1080p/30fps HD movies of up to 4GB or 29 min 59 sec
The star at the product launch was clearly the EOS 5D, with its HD movies. The specs for the 5D can be found at this link. As for marketing niche, Mogens Jensen of Canon says “professional photojournalists and wedding photographers already choose the EOS 5D for its discrete size and outstanding image quality”. Eight short movies taken with the EOS 5D Mark II are available at this link.
Canon introduces the PowerShot G10, positioned as a high-end point-and-shoot digital camera intended for “advanced amateur photographers”. DigitalPhotographyReview deems the G10 “much anticipated“, and rates the preceding G9 as “Highly Recommended (but only just) “.
The Bushnell BackTrack is a minimalistic GPS device with a compass-like form factor. Shows distance and bearing to your car, campsite, etc. Looks to be handy.
TuneUp Media relabels & cleans up missing metadata from your music collection. TuneUp creates an acoustic signature for each track and compares it to a database of 19 million songs on Gracenote. There is then a 85% to 90% chance that TuneUp will identify the correct Track Name, Artist, Album, Track Number, Year, Genre and Cover Art. It will pass the results to you for review/acceptance and then write the new metadata to iTunes. spiffy
General Motors was a start-up company 100 years ago today on September 16, 1908. Happy birthday GM!
GM celebrated by officially launching the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. The Volt’s 400-pounds of lithium-ion batteries gives it a range of 40 miles, enough for most urban commuting. The car’s 1.4-liter gasoline/E85 engine provides extended range by powering the electric drive unit while recharging the batteries. A full gas tank, together with a fully-charged battery will take you about 400 miles.
The Chevy Volt will be available late 2010. ~$35K before a potential $7,500 green tax credit.
Nokia is working hard to bring the Tube 5800, its response to the Apple iPhone, to market before the end of 2008. The 5800 is a touchscreen 3G UMTS/HSDPA phone with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS, while smaller & lighter than the iPhone. Preliminary specs for the Tube are at this link. Based on Symbian S60 v5 – with no multi-touch.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world…while Nokia targets the iPhone, others stalk Nokia. The LG Economic Research Institute has issued a report entitled “Find Nokia’s Achilles Hill“, which teaches how to defeat Nokia, or at least erode its number 1 position. The LGERIE study advises phone manufacturers to work with Google and Microsoft to support open-source initiatives, shorten time to market and focus on the high-end, where they say Nokia is not as well established.
iLounge reviews the new fourth-generation Apple iPod nano, and gives it a score of A-.
The reviewer liked the sound quality, calling it the best ever for a nano, attributing it to a change in the audio chip. On the downside, the battery life is down at least when playing games. For those interested in a teardown of the 4G, see iFixit.
Here’s how the iPod nano has evolved since it was first introduced in September 2005…
