Using cell phones to lose weight

Cell phones have lots of uses nowadays; you use them for making and receiving calls (still number one use), for sending and receiving messages, for using as an alarm, for music and radio, for viewing movies, as a viewer for text books, for internet connectivity and browsing on the move, and so on. Well, add one more use to this list. You use a cell phone for losing weight ! Surprise, read this article:

Wondering how much of a diet-buster that banana cream pie on your plate is? Some Japanese have a novel way to find out: Photograph it with your cell phone and send the image to an expert.
With cell phones ubiquitous in Japan and rising concern over expanding waistlines, health care providers have put two and two together to allow the calorie-conscious to send photos of their meals to nutritionists for analysis and recommendations.
Nutritionists can work with photos from one day's meals to several weeks' worth, he said. Results come back in three days. Participants also can log onto a Web site to get further dietary information and upload photos from digital cameras.
"Patients used to fill out meal logs, but people tend to forget things or underestimate their portions," Kimura said. "Photographing meals and e-mailing them in is easier and gets more accurate results."

This seems like a very interesting use. You make full use of the data plans, you lock customers into an additional service that can provide a cut to the carrier, and has a peer pressure level. You see a friend or colleague doing this, and such a service will appeal to you as well.
Also, with obesity increasing, customers are more likely to use such a service, and if it can help reduce the obesity levels, then it will be a big boon for people.

Google upgrades its search engine

What do you get when you search in google for something ? You get a page of search results in text format, although when searching for an image, you can do an image search that shows you resulting images matching your search pattern. However, would it really not be good if you could get a composite search result, for example, when searching for a public figure, you get text searches, images and videos (from Youtube), all in the same search ? Well, this is going to be the next reality of Google search. In a presentation to press and analysts, Google presented a revamped search that integrates news, pictures, videos along with the regular text search. One side benefit of this is that advertisements on the search page could be made better looking and richer. Refer this article from MSNBC:

Google announced a significant upgrade to its core search engine on Wednesday, promising a richer multi-media experience for users and pointing the way to increased business with advertisers, the source of 99 per cent of its revenues.
Other examples included a search for Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple, that produced pictures, video and news from Google Images, Video and News along with the regular text links.
"The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialised or vertical search will see new opportunities," said Mr Sullivan in a blog note.

This entire news has been touted as something incredible and that will make the searches more user-friendly in terms of results. However, and this is a point that all of them may be missing; people were attracted to Google in the beginning because of the simplicity of its search results, and the fact that Google has never let any kind of clutter come in the way.
In fact, as per a number of interviews, the founders of Google rejected the concept of showing ads other than plain text because that would detract from the users search results. If they now give up that concept (and maybe buckle down to advertise needs), and if they screw up their implementation by making it very heavy or confusing, they will turn away a number of their users.

MySpace buying Photobucket ?

MySpace is one of the biggest spaces in the world of social networks. It fact, most people would call it the biggest space. Pretty simple to operate, it allows users to create their own profiles and put whatever they want on these pages; text, pictures, video, anything goes. The younger generation have taken to MySpace like a fish to water. But you really can't store much of photos and videos on MySpace, so users need to store these on another service and link them off their MySpace pages.
Photobucket attempts to fill that void, and allows users to store their photos and video at the site, and more importantly link them from their MySpace page so that users viewing their profile are able to see these images and videos in a very efficient way.
But one wonders as to how Photobucket makes money ? It allows millions of users to store their images and videos, but it does so for free. If they started to charge money for this service, people would switch to something else in a flash. Trying to entice advertisers by showing them lots of young users trying to update images and edit videos may not exactly work. After all, YouTube also had a ton of users, but they were not exactly able to set the advertising world on fire. So it is apt that Photobucket tries the same route that YouTube took, selling themselves to a richer buyer who is looking for this functionality.
Refer this article from Forbes:

Are MySpace and Photobucket tying the knot?
But that's what Gawker Media's Valleywag blog reported Monday morning. A few hours later, the TechCrunch blog said it had confirmed the acquisition at $250 million. Both MySpace and Photobucket representatives declined to comment--which could very well mean that something is going on between the two companies. Or not.
A brief recap: MySpace is one of the world's most dominant social networks--with 107.7 million visitors per month--and allows its users to stick just about anything they want on their pages. Many of them have been using Photobucket, a relatively unknown start-up until recently, to store the images they stick on the site, as well as other sites they visit.
MySpace’s interest in Photobucket should not serve as evidence of a probable exit strategy for other start-ups that thrive largely on the user bases of social networks like MySpace. Photobucket is a rare case. In many other instances, MySpace would prefer to build its own competitor than buy a tool or feature off a popular widget maker. And when MySpace does that, those start-ups are toast.