Informal Insight

This Week The Internet Turns 40

It was 40 years ago this week that two computers transmitted their first message (from UCLA to Stanford). Only the letters “l” and “o” made it through before the two computers crashed. They were trying to send the word “login”.

Popular Science marks the occasion with 5 pivotal moments in the Internet’s history:

• 1969: Arpanet Connects
• 1992: The Commercialization of The Network
• 1993: The Rise of The Web
• 1999: Napster
• 2007: The iPhone

Although, I might argue that the Blackberry brought the internet to mobile devices. I do not disagree that iPhone perfected the experience and made it much less cumbersome. Also, it seems that Google should have a place on this list. Although it was not the first search engine, Google really revolutionized how the internet is used, from both a search and an advertising perspective.

Either way, happy birthday, Internet. You’ve had a good run so far.

People spent $400 million using this app

Although this number doesn’t come close to the amount people spend on Ebay.com (59.7 billion), it still seems significant that people are using the Ebay app so much. It is the first time that I’ve personally noticed a retail app that seems to really be generating significant revenue. I don’t use Ebay too much, but I can definitely see the advantage to having mobile access to you bids all day long.

Via

Dropbox on iPhone / iPod Touch

First of all, if you haven’t been using Dropbox, you should be. Here is an introduction video. The free software does many things, but the main purpose is that it automatically backs up your files online and gives you the option to share your files. It also has a website that allows you to access your files from any computer. It is essentially like an online USB drive. I’ve been using it for months now, and it is fantastic.

Well, the company has made a couple exciting changes lately. The first is a site redesign that makes navigating and sharing files much easier. The second is that they have submitted an application to Apple to bring access to your files on the iPhone / iPod Touch. The app isn’t out yet, but hopefully soon.

Here is what the application will do:

“Access your Dropbox on the go -  All the contents of your Dropbox are available for viewing.  You can even stream music and movies in your Dropbox straight to your iPhone.

Download files for offline viewing  – Add files to your ‘Favorites’, and they’ll be accessible at any time.

Take photos and videos and sync them to your Dropbox  – Take a photo from your iPhone and email its public link to a friend in less than a minute.

Share links to files in your Dropbox  – What?  Any file in your Dropbox?  Srsly?

Photo galleries  – Just like the ones online.”

Excellent news. Here is a screen shot:

Monopoly City Streets = Awesome

Last week, Monopoly and Google Maps launched a site that allows people to buy and trade streets all over the world called Monopoly City Streets. Overall it was a success, drawing 1.7 million people. Unfortunately, this was a few too many people for the servers to handle, so some people were able to buy up all the streets while others could not access the site. This and other problems (it was really easy to cheat) led to a version 2 to be launched last night/this morning, and it is very satisfying.

The rules are simple: Buy/trade streets anywhere in the world, build property on these streets, and use chance cards to either sabotage other players or build improvements on your land. To keep people coming back to the site, an offer on a street you own must be addressed within 7 days or it will automatically be accepted (no matter how crazy). Rent is collected from the property you own. Also, everyone gets a guaranteed $1 million every day.

The new launch completely reset the game, so everyone started over with no property and the default start of $3 million. The reset also introduced some new features like taxes, limits on trading, automatically repossessing all property if you don’t sign in at least once every 2 weeks, and methods for catching cheaters.

As of right now, the game is meant to promote a new version of Monopoly that will come out soon, so the site was intended to be temporary. At the end, a winner would be declared. However, if the site stays as popular as it has been so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if Monopoly City Streets stays around for awhile.

I do think that it would be fun to keep the end date as a time to declare a “winner.” Then they could reset the game and have it start over again. This would make the game more interesting and would give new people a fighting chance in the future.

If you haven’t checked Monopoly City Streets out yet, you should! Today is the “first” day of buying, so you will not be behind.

Predicting the Economy with Google

According to Google’s economist, Hal Varian, less searches are being made for unemployment benefits. This drop began in March and has continuously declined since. Google has also showed increased interest in the housing market and real estate. This leads some to believe that government agencies should consider using search data as another way of understanding the state of the economy.

In the past, Google has already shown to be good at tracking yearly flu outbreaks with surprising accuracy based on people’s searching habits. It gives a real-time snapshot of who is searching for flu keywords, and is much quicker than relying on hospital data.

It is almost surprising how reliable this data can be, and I can see how it would be useful to begin incorporating this data as another way of testing the state of the economy. In fact, I’m a little surprised that this information hasn’t been used before.