Ash K. Gilpin

 
Photo by Donna Barnett

A cargo container that apparently fell from a ship washed up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina today and spilled thousands of bags of Doritos brand tortilla chips on the beach. Scavengers collected the chips, which were apparently still fresh due to their airtight packaging. It was unknown which ship had lost the cargo or to what port it was bound.

 
Photo by Barbara Satterthwaite

The cargo container apparently fell off a ship at sea and broke open.

This is an update to my orginal AGLOCO post. 

No Spyware In The Viewbar

AGLOCO Viewbar will have absolutely no spyware. The Viewbar tracks your Internet surfing and serves advertising based on the web page you’re visiting. Everything the Viewbar tracks will be spelled out in the privacy statement. This is really nothing new. Many other toolbars, like Google’s, already track surfing habits. In addition, the Viewbar will offer privacy and phishing protection and an uninstaller should you wish to remove it for any reasons.

1 Hour Of Surf Time = 1 AGLOCO Share

In the beginning of this program, AGLOCO will be rewarding members with shares of the company. 1 hour of surfing time equals 1 share of the company. Members will be able to accumulate 5 shares per month based on the current limits. Members will get 0.25 shares per hour for people in their network. How much will those shares be worth? Maybe zero, maybe millions. It really depends on how fast the network grows and how well management handles this growth.

As AGLOCO starts to earn income from the Viewbar, members will be able to trade their hours for cash as well as shares. The amount per hour will be adjusted periodically to reflect income earned and company net worth. After a successful IPO, surf hours will mostly trade for cash, but shares will still be available. However, don’t expect to get 1 share per hour at that time.

Personally, I am hoping AGLOCO grows like crazy and attracts the attention of the big boys (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc). Instead of doing an IPO, the company will be like YouTube, and get bought out. However, unlike the YouTube deal, the AGLOCO members will make big money on it. YouTube got huge because of their user base, yet the users got nothing of the $1.65 billion that Google paid.

Give it a try, you can sign up here - it’s completely FREE.

Mitsubishi and big manufacturers are promoting a technical standard that’s expected to greatly expand the color palette on televisions.

The standard, xvYCC, is meant to update the televised color spectrum for the Digital Age. The current standard, BT.709-5, defines the ranges of reds, greens and blues that TV’s can display. The new standard will broaden the range of colors, adding shades of cyan or bright green, which should lead to more natural-looking colors.

“You’ll be able to see richer and more colors,” Vik Murty, senior manager of product marketing at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, said during a presentation Wednesday at audio and entertainment tech specialist Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco. “This opens a new set of colors that no one has ever seen on a TV before.”

The current standard works for most televisions, but it constrains the capabilities of LCD televisions with light-emitting diode (LED) backlights and rear-projection TV’s with digital light-processing technology, Murty said.

Mitsubishi has plans to incorporate the standard into TV’s beginning in April of 2007. Broadcasters are also starting to build xvYCC-compliant systems so they can deliver programming that takes advantage of the standard. Others are working on it too: Sony showed off small screens with the technology earlier this year.

Mitsubishi also plans to come out with a TV that uses lasers, rather than lightbulbs or LEDs, as a light source in late 2007, he added.

The new standard will further be enhanced by Deep Color, an existing technology that smoothes out the fine gradients between shades of colors. In some older digital TV’s, viewers can see faint bands in a color field as the colors get lighter or darker. In a TV with Deep Color, the bands disappear, and images in shadows become clearer.

The acronym xvYCC is a rough equivalent for the standard more formally called Extended YCC Colorimetry for Video Applications. The standard is governed by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Over the past 4+ years, Google Answers project has had over 800 participants - a passionate group of individuals committed to helping people find the information they need and sharing their incredible knowledge to others.

Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn’t drink water emitted by your air conditioner.  Unfortunately, Google Answers won’t be accepting any new questions; however, the existing questions and answers are still available.

Although Google Answers will be closing its doors on new Q’s and A’s - the experiment did provide a lot of material for future product developments.

With more than 10 million members, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites. Membership was once restricted to college students, but amid rumors of a buyout last summer (after Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace), Facebook started tinkering. It added a feature called News Feed, which keeps members informed about the activities of other people in their networks. Then it opened its doors to the world. Although CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused to comment on acquisition rumors, he did talk about all the changes.

Users really hated News Feed. Facebook expected people to be a little bit shocked, but really failed to communicate what the changes were. The stuff they were making visible was stuff people could already see.  However, a lot of people are now writing in and saying things like, “You know, after looking at this more, and getting a sense of what it is, this is really a valuable thing.”

All-in-all, Facebook has created a social networking niche.  People have responded well to it and it continues to grow and be amongst the most popular sites on the internet.

Break.com, a video sharing web site similar to YouTube, announced that it will pay $400 for user-generated videos and as much as $2,000 for animated shorts. When Break launched last year they offered $50 per video and later raised that to $250 before the increase to $400.

With Google backing the massively popular YouTube, competitors have increasingly turned to paying contributers in an effort to lure them away from YouTube. Metacafe launched a similar program called “producer rewards” earlier this year.

Google Inc., in an effort to help expand at providing software that helps users create and post their own materials on the Internet, has acquired a California startup company that develops online collaboration tools known as wikis.The announcement came Tuesday through separate postings at Google’s and JotSpot Inc.’s Web journals. The terms were not disclosed, however.

JotSpot Chief Executive Joe Kraus said JotSpot would be able to tap into the Internet search leader’s large user base and robust data centers capable of handling any growth.

“Our vision has always been to take wikis out of the land of the nerds and bring it to the largest possible audience,” Kraus said in an interview. “There’s no larger audience that you can reach than one you can reach through Google.”

Wiki tools, popularized by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, let users to create, modify and even delete information on what others in a group have worked.

According to reports, Mozilla Firefox 2 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE) are both vulnerable to a bug that steals the login-id and password of users, with the help of a fake log-in page.The bug has been dubbed as “Reverse Cross Site Request vulnerability” (RCSR) by Robert Chapin, who first discovered the flaw.

Reportedly, the attack was first carried out from a profile page using a specially crafted HTML that hides the genuine MySpace content from the page, and displays the fake login page instead. The fake page is then sent to another Web site, along with information regarding MySpace users who visited the page using Firefox.

The attacks seen on MySpace.com are likely to move on to Firefox as well because the Firefox Password Manager automatically enters any saved passwords and user-id/s into the form, whereas IE is not capable of filling in the saved information automatically.

Therefore, Firefox is more likely to get affected by the flaw, as compared to IE.

According to Chapin, users of both Firefox and IE need to be aware that their information can be stolen in this way when visiting blog and forum Web sites at trusted addresses as well. Further, an RCSR attack is more likely to succeed than an XSS attack because neither IE nor Firefox are designed to check the destination of form data before the user submits them.

Moreover, the browser doesn’t indicate the exploitation as it is conducted on a trusted Web site.

As of now, no fix has been issued by Mozilla, and it’s not very clear if the other versions of Firefox are also affected by the flaw. Users have been advised to disable the “Remember passwords for sites” from the preference link in Firefox.

Additionally, these attacks could also be highly effective against firewall of local network servers and HTTPS addresses that are not otherwise accessible because the attacker does not need direct access.

Read more on this at TechTree.com

AzoogleAds, the online marketplace for performance-based solutions.

AzoogleAds, founded in 2000, is a profitable and rapidly growing online marketing solutions provider. A pioneer in the performance-based advertising industry, AzoogleAds generates the highest volumes of quality traffic through its network and its proprietary search technologies. With unparalleled industry expertise, the AzoogleAds team can deliver the most comprehensive and cost-effective strategic online marketing campaigns for advertisers of all sizes and across all industries. For publishers, AzoogleAds provides high-impact campaigns that enable publishers to maximize earnings on their inventory. AzoogleAds offers a complete solution for optimizing campaign performance through innovative technology and unrivaled expertise in search and performance based marketing.

AllAdvantage is back! For those of you who don’t know, AllAdvantage was a site that paid you to surf the Internet. What’s more, it paid you when you refer other people to surf, and paid you again if those people referred other people - all the way down to four levels.

AllAdvantage 2.0 also has a new name, AGLOCO, which stands for A Global Community. This time, the founders are doing things a bit differently. They said that AllAdvantage failed the last time because the timing, not the concept, was bad. Perhaps they’re right, and there is certainly nothing wrong with trying again. If they can sign up as many people as they did last time, and the advertising market doesn’t implode, I say they will have a good chance of success.

The AGLOCO Viewbar

 

The Viewbar that is installed at the bottom of your web browser is back but instead of paying a flat fee per hour like the last time, it will give you a share of income the Viewbar earns. In addition, that income may be paid in stocks as well as cash. This avoids the mistake of paying out more than they make, which is the mistake that AllAdvantage made.

The Viewbar features privacy protection, spyware protection, phishing protection, member IM and voice communications, RSS feeds, broadcast communication, community tips and other functions.

Sharing income with users is nothing new. Tons of sites and many revenue sharing forums do that already. What is unique about AGLOCO is their multi-leveling marketing model.

Multi-Level Network Marketing

When you run the AGLOCO Viewbar, AGLOCO will pay to you to surf the web (currently up to 5 hours per month). Once the five hours are up, you can turn the Viewbar off until next month. However, you also make money on every hour the people that you referred surf the web, and income is made for every hour for people they referred down to 4 levels. There is no cap on how much you can make because of this.

According to the AGLOCO member calculator, if you sign up 20 people and those referrals sign up 5 people, and those sign up five all the way down the 4 four levels, you would earn 19,530.00 per month! However, that figure is not a dollar amount - it reflects earnings in both cash and stock of the company. The stock price has yet to be determined.

AGLOCO plans to be a 100% member owned company. The amount of shares you own will relate to the amount of people you refer. The company will share advertising and affiliate revenues with its members. Assuming it gives 50% of all revenue to members in cash, the other 50% is held by the company. Of the 50% held, company management gets 10% as their fee for running the place. The remaining amount will then be distributed to company shareholders (the members) as dividends.

Once you sign up you will be given a user ID. Use this ID to sign up other people. The easier way to do that is the put the ID into the URL. For example. http://www.agloco.com/r/BBBB3103 is my URL. Just replace the BBBB3103 with your ID and you’ll get credit for all signs from your link.

You can sign up for AGLOCO here.