Let’s check out the speed of these tiny autos. Here is a drag race between the two rivals, Tesla EV VS. Tango EV. Now, I hear if you get one of these your trips to the gas station may be cut down to a once year chore… if you use it for short distances, it may go as far as once in a car’s lifetime.

Now, I am sure there are some energy efficient models sold in every department store around the country, but just walking into a store and buying that shiny showcased appliance certainly isn’t as much fun as building one yourself. Homemade washing machine? sounds like fun.

And, who says it has to be some large techie project? check out this energy efficient clothing washer below. It needs no power, little water and runs on leg power. I’ll call this the  “good for your heart” model. Can’t beat that with a stick.

This one here, a bit more complex than the previous washer model above. A lot more work to build, but, you get a lot more washer. Also, you get more of a health benefit for using it since now you aren’t just walking to do the laundry, but cycling. The cool thing about this one is you no longer have to worry about your clothing shrinking in the laundry and not fitting you. Along with the shrinking clothes, you will also have a shrinking waistline. If you do laundry for a large family, you may have to sneak in a few cheeseburgers between loads to make sure that you don’t out-shrink than your clothing. The environment friendly washer below is also a dryer.

Check it out.

If the above model is too complex, there is a scaled down version that is a washing machine only

The giant ship will be called “The Oasis of the Seas” and will accommodate 5400 guests plus 3000 crew. Now that’s more people than what occupy the city I live in.

Royal Caribbean  says the ship will have two 24 hour buffets and have 16 decks to hold the 2,700 state rooms they pan on having. The Oasis will be around 1200 ft. long, 154 ft. wide and come up 213 ft. above sea level. This ship is going to actually have neighborhoods that revolve around certain themes.

I found this chart for comparison of past giant vessels, btw, the Oasis will weigh 220, 000 tons

The infamous Titanic dwarfs in the midst of the Oasis of the seas.

Passenger / Military
1912 Titanic - White Star Line 46,328 tons 9 decks 3,000 people
1934 Queen Mary - Cunard 81,237 tons 12 3,131 1,019
1939 Bismark German-War Ship 50,000 tons  880 people
1962 Carrier Enterprise -US Navy 89,600 tons 5,830 people
1973 Carrier Nimitz - US Navy 97,000 tons 5,680 people1,092 134 30
1991 Monarch of the Seas - Royal Caribbean 73,941 tons 11 decks  2,350 people
2000 Explorer of the Seas - Royal Caribbean 138,000 tons 15 decks 3,114 people
2001 Adventure of the Seas - Royal Caribbean 138,000 tons  15 decks  3,114 people
2002 Brilliance of the Seas -Royal Caribbean 90,090 tons 13 decks  2,501 people
2004 Queen Mary 2 - Cunard 150,000 tons 23 decks 3,873 people
2006 Ultra-Voyager -  Royal Caribbean 160,000 tons  4000+people

Hopefully, Unlike previous monster ships, these guys will at least include enough life rafts for the 8000+ people aboard…. just in case the floating city needed an evacuation.

The air car is made by Tata Motors, an Indian company, in collaboration with the French company MDI.  The production models will be sold in Europe and Australia. Seems they thought that bringing it to the U.S. would not be a great idea because of the lower speeds and power… maybe they need to reconsider that since the gas price issue hit the U.S.

The OneCAT, is supposed to be the first production model made for urban and rural driving specifically designed to be driven in congested cities and priced in the $5,100 to $7,800 range has a range of 125 miles before needing more air. Gas stations will have compressors and the charge about $2 per fill-up.

 This is the motor that powers the air car

Where do I get one? 

Easy, isn’t it? ha, ha… NOT! Not only do you need to memorize new key positions… but the colors they go to as well. Reminds me of those 1980’s memory games where you have to memorize a color and a number.

This is the HHKB handmade and super expensive keyboard from Japan. Each keyboard is made to order and there is a 3 month wait time between ordering the keyboard and it being shipped. I hope the 3 months is how long it takes to make one since the price tag on the HHKB is between $4k and $5K. This is not the $4.99 made in Japan plastic babies that I tend to shop for at all.

So here’s what makes this keyboard so expensive…

For one, HHKB stands for Happy Hacking Keyboard and I believe that name alone should be cause for a small discount. It’s just so wrong for a “luxury” product.  I would expect some exotic name or maybe even being named after its creator, but Happy Hacking? that sounds about as expensive as calling it the Acme 37069B.  If the name alone does not convince you to shell out part of your kids college fund, maybe these features will.

The HHKB is completely handmade by fine craftsmen and every key is individually laquered with something called Urashi. Urushi lacquer is made from the sap of a plant native to the northeast Asian forest called Rhus vernicifula. Items laquered with Urrushi can be traced back as much as 6800 years.

Each key receives as many as 10 individual coats of this laquer with a sprinkling of gold dust to finish it off. Now, personally, I would have a difficult time using this keyboard since the keys are polished smooth and left blank.

Oddly enough the website these are sold on is in Japanese only, maybe they skipped the english version of the site thinking the $5k wooden keyboard may not catch on in the U.S.

I must admit that as luxurious as the HHKB may be, I am much more excited about getting a really cool 50 buck flexible keyboard. Yahoo even makes them in purple! Somehow, I doubt the HHKB has any cool color choices.

Check out this baby! This is the Listening Dish NG3800. This is the ultimate gift for the paranoid computer geek who moonlights as the neighborhood peeping tom.  Not only does it capture the sound from 100’s of feet away, but video is captured as well thanks to the ultra powerful handy dandy Zoom lens. Plus, as a bonus, it has a built in recorder so you can play back anything that went by too fast over and over until you make it out.

Record people talking behind your back and play back the evidence when they deny it! Ultra Cool! The product description below also states that if you cant make the audio out completely, the optical zoom will allow you to read their lips. WOW!

From the product description page here are the really cool and creepy selling points:

“Eavesdrop on what your boss is saying in the parking lot–or find out what’s really going on with your kids and their friends. Get a tip at the racetrack, hear what the police are telling someone at a takedown, listen to what two suspicious-looking men are planning down at the corner. “

Yes, this extraordinarily powerful, electronic listening device lets you “hear” and “see”  from 300 feet away. Viewfinder with 10x prism optical system lets you zoom in and see what you’re hearing close up. Sounds and images impossible for the human ears and eyes to pick up will now seem as if you’re only a couple of feet away. Imagine sitting in the upper deck of a pro baseball stadium and being able to hear and see players talking in the dugout. Outdoorsmen and nature lovers will be thrilled at the sound quality of this ingenious listening device. The Orbitor Electronic Listening Device features a playback system that records up to 12 seconds and comfortable, full-size headphones. Requires 1 9V battery (not included). Is someone talking about you? Now you’ll know.

To enhance your use of the Orbiter Electronic Listening Device, we’ve added a playback system that records up to 12 seconds on the digital chip–so you not only hear from afar, you have an electronic record of it. The viewfinder has a 10x prism optical system to view your subject even closer, so if you’re checking out a person, you’re able to read their lips as well.

Want one? I know you do. For around $600 (I think) you can be top dawg of the neighborhood watch program in your area and the envy of every peeping Tom from miles around. Hey, and no worries about getting busted… you can here en coming from blocks away!

Buy one Today 

but wait… theres more..

If you save files to your computer, you may want a “just in case” layer of protection so your family doesn’t find out you’ve been spying. Check out the super duper fingerprint scan security mouse for the ultra paranoid. This mouse needs a finger print scan to operate.

An aquantance of mine bought a site and paid a hefty price because the sites Alexa rank was taken into the sites value.  He based his traffic estimation on the fact that he already had an established site getting n visitors and his site’s Alexa ranking was not as good as the site he was purchasing. He believed that his new acquisition would have 2x+ the traffic of his existing site because its Alexa score was more than 3x better than his.

At this point you can guess he was very disappointed after the purchase.  The site was over-valued and had actual traffic far below expectation. His own site with the far worse Alexa rank outperformed his new site many times over.

If you read my post about real traffic vs. Alexa guesstimate you can see for yourself that a site’s traffic really should not be estimated using Alexa for any type of business decisions.

These are the 4 sites I tracked over a few months from a previous post (the first 2 sites are over 5 years old and the last 2 are under a year)

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 4 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 4 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Anyway, A few interesting things have happened in the last few months. The site I was tracking as site 3 had an image that gained 1st page social bookmarking status for a few days. Now, I am talking about an image that got linked to heavily, not the home page or anything important. The traffic being sent to the image did not reach any of the main pages and the traffic was pretty much useless towards the site itself since people looked at the image then commented about it on the social site.

Alexa picked up that totally useless image traffic and the site spiked to under 50k Alexa, however, what is interesting is that after the image was no longer popular and the link was removed, the Alexa ranking came back down (up), it leveled out at a much better rank than before the spike even though real traffic had actually gone down a bit. Actually, just about every time there has ever been a spike in traffic, Alexa seems to pick it up.

It’s all very interesting and the only thing any of this seems to prove is that while Alexa may be a great tool to track trends, it really should not be used to gauge real traffic when trying to compare different sites. Just because your site A has an Alexa rank of 80k with n traffic does not mean that site B with same Alexa has the same traffic.

I keep a list of about 100 different sites with the real traffic stats as measured by a java script tracker. I will have to take the time to post those and the Alexa scores for each site to do a larger comparison. well, as soon as I find the time to look up so many sites in Alexa.

Sounds reasonable, right? not always. He, like so many others get blinded by those numbers right below the video. You know… the views. Open up YouTube or one of the other video hosting sites and on the first page you get a list of current videos, many of which have been viewed millions of times. Those ridiculously high numbers seem to blind people to the point of losing all sense of marketing THEIR products.

(more…)

I have seen too many people place a lot of decision weight into a sites Alexa rank, sometimes being very disappointed, other times pleasantly surprised. I wanted to see how good the Alexa guesstimate really was.

Some people see it as the prime tool for site valuation while others dismiss it as fluff. I had to know for myself. Through my own sites and those of my clients I have a good deal of data for many different sites and I decided to track 4 sites and see how the Alexa data compared to the real metrics.

From what I know, Alexa uses ISP data as well as some user data to rate a sites traffic. I would imagine the data they collect serves as a sample group. The problem with sample groups is that unless the group is a true sample of the worlds internet user base, the results could be heavily skewed.

Now I am not sure if they base stats on samples, but, It would be kinda difficult to get data from every single user, so I assume its based on some type of sampling.

Alexa does state they use ISP data, I do not know which ISP’s, but there can be many issues with using an ISP as a sample of any population of internet users. For example, if the ISP data used is from a dial-up provider, you can expect that media based sites would suffer and your sample group would be occasional internet surfers, as opposed to daily die hards. If it was a dedicated line provider, it would be heavily business oriented. Sounds logical… right? anyway, I had to see how the 4 sites I picked did.

I used 2 sites that were well established, and 2 fairly new. The reason I chose these was because 1 new one and 1 old made a pair that received close to the same amount of real traffic (site 1 & 3, 2 & 4) and I wanted to see how accurate the rankings were.

The first established site had a traffic base between 1k and 2k daily, all visitors going to the homepage with 50% of the traffic coming from PPC.

The other well established site was an old single word domain that goes back to 1998, most traffic is organic SE and it consistently receives 800 to 1.3k daily.

The third site, was a newer blog that would receive 1k to 3k visitors to many different pages of which 1/3 to 1/2 would be the home page.

The last site was an informational site that was at about 600 daily with a growth that would put it in the 1k to 2k range within a few months.

At the beginning of the test period I logged the Alexa rank of all 4 sites.

I tracked this over 3 months because Alexa uses a 3 month average and I used these sites because they had close to the same page views and traffic

Here is how it looked when I started and I am rounding off the numbers

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 3 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Well, you can look at those numbers and make your own judgments on accuracy. The first thing that really amazed me is that site 1 and 2 are both established sites with single word domain names in the same type of traffic field (the same surfers would most likely visit both) Site 2 has always received less traffic than site 1 but 1/2 of site 1 traffic is ppc and site 2 Alexa score is incredibly better than site 1 when both sites are in the same niche and both are over 5 years old.

At this point I have 2 sites with little growth and that have not shown growth in years, also 2 sites that are growing. I did a few things to the first 2 sites to see how it tracked also site 3 had a roller coaster of a 3rd month.

Since its a bit long, I will save it for another post in a few days.