Shephard Fairey really hit the big time when his Obama print was picked up by the Obama Presidential Campaign that I discussed in last year in this post.
Having subsequently designed the official Inaugural Poster for Obama, he looks well positioned to become the go-to guy for reshaping how we visualize the White House, even with their awesome face lift they had.
Shephard Fairey has now got into the presidential souvenir pool with a set of commemorative plates (above).
Produced in a limited edition of 500 each, the plates feature Obama's visage at center with a border of slogans culled from last year's campaign. The plates can be purchased individually for $89, or as a set of two (one of each color) for $178, from The Future Perfect
Shephard was even asked to do a Martin Luther King Jr. image for Google to honor Martin Luther King day.
So I see that Google has a new competitor now but has no threat that people have said.
The search engine Cuil launched this Monday and their servers crashed due to an overload of traffic. Anna Patterson is the president of Cuil and was the architect of Google's large search index TeraGoogle which launched in early '06. They generated so much of a buzz that they were able to get $33M in financing.
Cuil instead of ranking searches based on popularity, it focuses on the content of each page.
Since '99, Google has focused on providing services that are platform-independent in this way. Its search engine can be accessed from any browser on the web. You have Gtalk, Google maps, Google mail, Blogger (that we are using), Ditto Google Groups, Google Images, Froogle, Google Alert, Picasa, Google Analytics, and recently Glabs.
Notably Picasa, Google Desktop Search, and Google Earth, a neat program for handling and organizing digital photographs) are written specifically to run under MSFT Windows, but the most heavily used services are all independent of OS and hardware. The company has taken Scott McNealy's aphorism - 'the network is the computer' - and has made this into a reality.
This sounds all good news to us with all this free services but makes me wonder how ethical can they be. Lets take a look at Gmail, its free email to sign up and you initially get 2 gigabytes of storage to each subscriber. That is reasonably enough to ensure that you never again have to delete a message (well for the majority of the people unlike myself which may need another new account).
On the other end, your emails reside forever on a Google server. How is Gmail free, you are probably wondering .....one word- ADVERTISING. Google has a software that scans all your emails and has the ability to identify key words/phrases and then puts what it regards as relevant ads on the right-hand side of the screen (Ad words). Google claims that their messages aren't actually 'read',but a process in which email messages are scanned by spam-blocking software. I don't find that all true because if you think about it, all the the ads selected for display in your Gmail are logged (they have to be, so that advertisers can be billed) and those logs will inevitably reveal something of the context, if not the content, of the scanned messages. I feel anyone who is using Gmail is therefore sacrificing a degree of their privacy compared with the other email services that are out there like Smart Mail, Squirrel Mail, and etc. That's why there are civil liberties groups who have attacked Gmail on the grounds that it violates the trust of email service users. They point out that while the software scans it creates lower expectations of user privacy in the email medium and so establishes a potentially perilous precedent. The Founders of Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin has brought Google into a multi-billion dollar corporation Its corporate mission: 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. So how come Gmail has not entered the world of China? Or does it have anything to do with Yahoo signing the agreement to censor?"
Since Google is one of the most innovative companies in our world today, I wonder if it could ever get to this level of innovation.
Is it possible?
Side note: Remember when you typed in the word miserable failure and what would pop up as the first site? Recently the result of the "Google Bomb" changed.
