Thursday, February 09, 2006

This is your brain on commercials

Using brain-scan images of people who watched advertisements aired during Sunday's championship game, researchers can show which ads triggered various emotions in viewers, causing them to be fired up or emotionally flat.

Not surprisingly, most of the ads had one response in common: repelling viewers.

"Almost all the ads induced their greatest activity in the amygdala, a center of the brain most associated with detecting threats or danger," Joshua Freedman, a UCLA clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and co-founder of FKF Applied Research, said in a statement.

Advertisers take note; viewers take comfort.

Maybe we should introduce this tool into evaluating our learning design?

Monday, February 06, 2006

Google, E-Bay back plan to let hotspot owners charge for Wi-Fi access

Google, E-Bay back plan to let hotspot owners charge for Wi-Fi access:

Ok -so the previous post talked about how our internet wings were getting clipped by the telcos'cableco - now a fight back - from the free and open front - we now have an opportunity to share our home based wi fi networks - thanks to FON, the Spanish startup. Fon wants to share your hotspot with Fon registered users - for a fee or free.

FON is a global community of people who share WiFi connections dubbed "Foneros". To become a Fonero, you go to FON, to download software that you install in your router, you place your antenna by a window and you share bandwidth with other Foneros from anywhere in the world.

And Google, Skype and other venture capitalists are tossing $22 mill into Fon's hands to make it happen. Yes, there may bece significant opposition from Internet service providers - who may not want you to share your hot spot but can't do much to block you from doing so.

Here's how FON plans to make money:
At FON we plan to make money with characters we call the Aliens. To us the world is divided into Linus, Bills and Aliens. A Linus shares his/her bandwidth for free with other Foneros, Bills share their bandwidth for a small fee, and Aliens don't share their bandwidth at all.

If you capture FON´s signal and you are not a fonero in 120 days you will have to pay to use the FON signal. Our rates for Aliens will be like those of public transportation, a price of a subway or bus ticket. So FON will provide either free WiFi or very low cost WiFi. Still if you are using FON everyday it´s better that you become Fonero by signing up for broadband with your local ISP cause those low cost rates add up to more than their monthly charges if you log in everyday.

What do we do with the money from Aliens? We share it with the ISPs so they support FON. Also in case you are interested in FON only to make some money and not to get free WiFi roaming we also share it with you. At FON you can choose. If you become a fonero to obtain free WiFi everywhere you are a Linus fonero, if you become a fonero to make money out of your WiFi connection you are a Bill fonero. We at FON think the world is built by Bills and Linuses (Bill comes from Bill Gates and Linus from Linus Torvalds

The End of the Internet?

The future of the Internet is being decided without your inpout. In the U.S. continued lobby action from the telecom sector is eroding the freedom we enjoy now on the web. They envisage the internet as a "private space" controlled by them, subscribed to by you, and certain information pumped through the fast pipe, while other information is relegated to the slow pipe or no pipe at all. You can be sure that peer to peer comunication would be severely curtailed if not eliminated. Be afraid, be aware, be involved. Your futur depends on your actions.
" The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. "

"Besides their business interests, telephone and cable companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local oversight from electronic media - the ability of city or county government, for example, to require telecommunications companies to serve the public interest with, for example, public-access TV channels. The Bells also want to further reduce the ability of the FCC to oversee communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and Congress - via a new Communications Act - will back these proposals. "