Geek Culture: Trouble Meeting Girls? Look to the Clouds!

So, you'd like to have a girlfriend, but you're too awkward to go out and meet one? Can't find any women who would understand your comic book and gaming habits (trust me, it's hard to find them, but they are out there)? Afraid of daylight? All you WoWers still living in your parents' basement can take a sigh of relief. If you're the kind of geek who's having some difficulties in the lady department, then look no further than Cloud Girlfriend.

In four easy steps, the nice folks at CloudGirlfriend.com will help you out of this mess:
          Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend.
          Step 2: We bring her into existence.
          Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network
          Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.

You'll be the envy of all your Facebook and Twitter friends who will think that you have done the unthinkable and branched out and met someone. But wait! Doesn't Facebook's Terms of Service clearly state that it doesn't allow for the creation of fake people? It does. Some good information is already available on Q&A site Quora, and CGf.com co-founder, David Fuhriman, successfully dodged this question. He noted that other people make up fake personas all the time, and that the created people will in fact be active Facebook users, even if they aren’t real people. Cloud Girlfriends will be real people, not programmed bots, and that there will be no adult services/chat offered. This is simply a ruse to make people (possibly even yourself) think you have a girlfriend.

Don't worry, ladies. Plans are in place to make Cloud Boyfriend happen, if CGf ever gets off the, er, ground.

Technology: Broadcasting - Going Mobile

Over recent years, we've seen a great deal of change in the way we receive our media content, primarily thanks to the internet, and more recently, our handheld mobile devices, such as the iPhone and BlackBerry.

The first to feel the winds of change was clearly print media such as newspapers, followed closely by the music industry with shifts from physical delivery systems such as the CD to "digital downloads" via the illegal types of Napster, Kazaa, and their legal brethren, iTunes. Walkmen laid way for the Discman, which has now become little more than a paperweight with the advent of the MP3 player, such as Apple's iPod devices, first introduced in fall 2001.

Years later, traditional television and radio broadcasting has had to address the way their viewers and listeners alike want to take in their content. Netflix has had a big hand in the way that viewers watch their content - in my own home, I can watch nearly any movie or TV show from my game console, any one of our many computers, or via our mobile phones. Most cable or satellite providers also make On Demand content available to their subscribers; they also make DVRs with large capacity storage for their subscribers to record any program they want, to watch at a later time. Long gone are the days where you had to hunt for a blank tape to record a specific show.

Smartphone penetration is significant and increasing. Pandora and other pureplay streaming listening is increasing. Still, the impact has been generally minimal on FM and AM radio. But make no mistake, habits are changing. The seeds of this are happening today with streaming audio, and radio can’t afford to ignore what is happening in that space. Its future depends on it.

For radio, we are seeing this accumulation of changing behavior occur before our eyes. From fewer commercials to the ability to share our listening experiences with friends to On Demand access via podcasts to pausing and skipping songs, there is a gap in functionality that will increasingly lead to a streaming tipping point.

When consumers start to say that radio annoys them because it can’t do this or it doesn’t have that, then you will start to see consumer adoption change. Many forward thinking broadcasters are already making the changes necessary to move with the times. Streaming audio has long been available via station websites, and many broadcasters are also offering their fare via applications for smartphones. One of the best parts of that is that you can now access stations from across the country that you couldn't before. It IS a small world, after all.

Entertainment: Google Music

After much talk and speculation as to when this might happen, a number of music industry sources are saying that Google has reached a point where its employees are testing a new Google Music service, which would allow users to buy and store music in the cloud, making the songs accessible from just about any web-connected device including your PC, tablet or smartphone via streaming.

For those who don't know what "The Cloud" is, it refers to "Cloud Computing", where information is stored and presented to the users in a simple way that is easy to understand without the users needing to know how the services are provided. This simplified view is called an abstraction. Similarly, cloud computing offers computer application developers and users an abstract view of services that simplifies and ignores much of the details and inner workings. A provider's offering of abstracted Internet services is often called "The Cloud".

 

 

Proof that Google Music exists was found a couple of weeks ago when a user on the XDA Developers forums did an update to the latest build of Android Honeycomb and a new music option appeared and started syncing with his collection. It turns out that it was indeed a working version, the insiders have said, although the final version will likely look a little different.

Such a service from Google has been widely speculated about for years, and at one point we thought it may launch last year, but the main problem with launching such a service is getting the major music labels to sign up to licensing and royalty deals. Negotiations with at least some of the top publishers and with the four largest record labels are still ongoing, with delays primarily due to the complexity of the subject matter: Google is after cloud music rights, and not just for songs acquired from Google Music.

Apple's iTunes has made no move to offer a cloud-based solution for streaming music yet, and that’s exactly what Google wants for its Music service. It’s new ground for the music publishers and therefore they are cautious of signing away their music to a large online database users can access forever. The fact that Google is thought to be testing Google Music internally does suggest progress has been made, though. If the service is working, then music publishers can see exactly how it functions and come up with a deal they are happy with, or changes they require. The issue then becomes can a deal be struck that both Google and the music industry is happy with?