Enjoy!

photo credit: kagey_b

It’s been interesting seeing the Online Gaming companies in the Isle of Man go from strength to strength. I was aware that there were a couple of companies operating a sportsbook in the Isle of Man; but I am pretty surprised, not only that they’re still around, but at the growth that they have experienced. The thing is that we are going through a recession, so a number of companies have grown smaller, or even succumbed to the bad times; but online sports betting seems to be on the rise, which is really bucking the trend.

I do know that there are also quite a large number of gaming companies located in Malta. I don’t really know all the details, but what it boils down to is that different countries offer incentives to companies to come, set up shop, employ members of the local workforce and pump money into the economy. It’s quite a good proposition, if you can avert attention from the moral pros and cons of online gaming. Still, an online sportsbook possibly is easier to justify as it’s not purely a game of chance. People following a sport can usually make an educated guess as to the outcome of an event. What do you think? Are you for or against?

Well, I came across a pioneering treatment by Dr Bert Vorstman called HIFU which stands for High Intensity Focused Ultrasound which is a non-invasive therapy that doesn’t involve radiation and has lower side effects than traditional treatments.

It’s interesting to see new technologies develop in spheres I’m unfamiliar with. Who knows, it may affect my quality of life one day!

I guess I could throw a party, invite friends round for a BBQ and dance around the fire, but what does it all mean? Well, not much really! I’m an avid user of Twitter, so I’m bound to have good stats, but is my Twitter account really all that valuable? Well, it depends on the context in which you’re looking at it. I tend to tweet about interesting thing related to business and technology, so if you’re operating in that space, sure. But if you’re a sports fan, my Twitter account probably has less value than a constipated pigeon. If you’re interested in wildlife conservation, car restoration, fishing, or one of a million varied subjects my Twitter account would be useless to you because you won’t find a single tweet about them.

There are also a number of reasons why the figures used to come up with the grading are arbitrary and easily gamed, but that’s the subject for another discussion. In the meantime, enjoy the champagne!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one type of hadron) charged with high energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized that the collider will confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model, and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

The device has been turned on but it won’t go into operation till the 21st of October. In the meantime, get your very own “I survived the Large Hadron Collider Experiment” T-shirt.

photo credit: .klash

If you’ve been following my posts over the last few weeks you’d have noticed that I was taking part in a competition organised by PicApp and FuelMyBlog. Well, the competition is now over and the winner has been announced.

The winner was BenSpark who’s off to Blog World Expo in Vegas next month. Congratulations mate!

I got a notable mention together with www.acelebrationofcurves.com; www.greasyguide.com; www.pieknyibogaty.blogspot.com.

It was a fun competition and I always love the spirit of camaraderie that these online contests bring about. I made the mistake of getting emotionally drawn into this one though. Didn’t realise until I found out how gutted I was when I didn’t win. Maybe I should have realised earlier and put more effort into winning. Andrew certainly went all out on his blog Google is not God. Still, it was a valiant effort and I was glad I took part in the competition.

Way to go FuelMyBlog and PicApp. When are you holding another one?

I’ve just come from an interesting post on FuelMyBlog’s blog entitled: SEO wins gold, silver and bronze. It’s an interesting post that compares SEO to the Olympics and The Guinness Book of Records. Here’s a snippet from the post:

A lot of SEO technology is used to make sure weaker content makes it to the top. Some SEO techniques are allowed, some are not, some are dirt evil and some evil performance-enhancing techniques are still not being detected …

I find the post particular interesting because in my mind there’s a big distinction between making your website more readable/indexable by search engines and trying to figure out how search engines work so that you get ranked before other sites which may be more valuable for the reader.

For example, let’s say I’m looking for information about a clothing company called Nautica. Assuming there are no other companies with that name, search engines should be able to tell me straight away about websites that can give me that information. However, if someone tries to elevate that keyword because they are selling, say Nautica watches, that page may have a high SERP for that keyword. Was that useful to me as a consumer? Does all this fighting for position really benefit the searcher?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling anyone who works in SEO a snake-oil merchant, however I think it’s only fair that they set their client’s expectations of what can be achieved. I’m sick and tired of receiving spam from people claiming to be able to make my websites rank first on search engines. At the end of the day, I’m sure decent search engines (that only really includes Google at the moment) can figure out what is relevant and what isn’t; and provide me with exactly what I’m searching for.

There’s a photo story on Silicon.com about gadgets from Bond films here.
Nothing much, but looks like Casino
Royale, the latest Bond film doesn’t have as many gadgets as the previous Bond
films. What a pity Anwyay, I’ll still get round to watching it one of these days.
Anyone seen it yet ?

How would you fancy an aquarium on your TV? You can now get an Ambient
Water Video Aquarium DVD. This basically gives you a number of aquariums to choose
from and is great as a background for a party or even just as a soothing background
after a hard day’s work. There’s a number of different scenes and they’re all recorded
in HD.

Throughout Europe, there is growing concern about the serious environmental problem caused by the build up of old and obsolete mobile phones. Each year, in the United Kingdom alone, over 10 million people upgrade their mobile phone to a newer model with no thought of where the old ones might end up – usually in a landfill site!

envirofone aims to help tackle this problem whilst rewarding members with substantial returns for trading in old mobile phones. Until now, nothing existed that guaranteed consumers this peace of mind whilst offering a real value for unwanted phones.

The mobile phones we receive are re-used wherever possible in areas around the world which need them. These areas usually have a poor landline infrastructure which creates a demand for the type of mobile technology some of us would class as obsolete. If mobile phones cannot be re-used, they are recycled in the appropriate manner.

They’re actually offering a fair amount of money for your phone. My old Nokia 6310i (which would be around 5 years old now – if I hadn’t lost it) would easily fetch £25.00. Check it out:

envirofone – Turn old mobile phones into cash or rewards