$2.2 Million worth of prizes this year (including the home, suv and a ton of other stuff). So if you haven’t already started entering “once per day”, then don’t start now … cuz I want to win it!

You can go here to see the details and here to enter now.

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This is a great list from Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch on this year’s new Tech Resolutions …. (I love the last one) …

Okay, I know, I’m late with these, but coming up with New Year’s resolutions is tough. And isn’t there a one-week grace period anyway? Rather than do predictions, I thought I’d offer up some resolutions—things I’d like to see happen this year. These aren’t my resolutions. These are resolutions that tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook should adopt, IMHO. (And, no, they are not capable of coming up with their own resolutions. Someone has to do this for them). If you have better resolutions to suggest for these or any other company, please add them to comments.

Apple—Learn to Let Go. Don’t repeat the mistakes of history. Open up a little bit. You are helping to bring the phone and other mobile devices into the digital age. Other people and companies want to be a part of that too. Make it easy for them to build apps on top of the iPhone and your other products. (You’ve indicated that you are working on this, but we are still waiting to see the results). Command and control got you this far, but in a world where every device is connected, a bunker mentality will limit your growth.

Facebook—Stop Being a Party Hog. Release my friends and leave Scobie alone. You want everyone to create applications for Facebook, but when it comes to letting people take data out of Facebook you are not so generous. Find a way to let members take their social graph (their list of friends and social connections) with them to other Websites. If you are serious about becoming the social operating system of the Web, you need to let people party the way they want to, and where they want to (even if that is not on Facebook). Embrace this change. You’ll still be popular. The alternative is to battle a growing user backlash (and startups looking for workarounds).

Google—Go Beyond PageRank. The main way you sort search results, PageRank, is more than a decade old. It is the basis of the entire search economy. But it is also starting to be gamed in ways that threaten to dilute the value of your search results. People are buying and selling links on Web pages with the express intent of manipulating search results. You can fight this, and you are, but maybe it is time to start shifting to other ways to rank search results. There are other sources of authority on the Web besides links, aren’t there? (Don’t ask me what they are—you are the one with all the genius employees).

Amazon—Open Up The Kindle. Your Kindle Reader is a big step forward in terms of gaining mainstream acceptance for electronic books. But what is great about the Kindle is the service, not the device. It is your 90,000-and-growing titles in e-book format, seamless wireless downloading, and back-end billing linked to existing Amazon accounts that makes the Kindle worth replicating. Put out a reference design and let other companies make sleeker electronic readers that tie into the Amazon store. The design of the device itself is clunky. Stick to what you know, and let other companies build the hardware.

Microsoft—Get Serious About Webtop Apps. Productivity apps are moving to the Web, and while that threatens your Office franchise, you need to get in front of this trend now before it gains much traction. You are inching towards this with your recent Office Live Workspace beta, but you still need to get past your Barbarians at the Gate mindset. While Google, Adobe, and others try to figure out how to bring their Web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software offline, you are already did that a long time ago with Office. Now you are integrating Office apps with Office Live, but you are trying to force people to use the offline apps as their default environment. Keep that as an option, but let people create documents and spreadsheets online as well without the need to ever launch Office on their desktop.

Yahoo— Use The Traffic, Luke. I don’t know what to tell you guys (and gals). You are losing more executives than Google, Jerry Yang’s first 100 days were uneventful, and still nobody knows what your strategy is supposed to be. Your biggest asset is that you still attract more traffic than any other site in the U.S. (although Google is gaining on you). For the most part, you like to slosh that traffic around Yahoo, but you’ve shown signs that you are willing to turn that hose towards other worthy Websites, even if they have no pre-existing deals with you. Find more ways to spread that traffic and to get other Websites to return the love. Then use that natural traffic network to lure other Websites into your advertising network. Focus on dominating the growing behavioral ad-targeting market instead of trying to beat Google head-to-head on contextual and search ads.

eBay—Sell Skype. Come on, you know you want to. It was a bad fit from the start.

Source: TechCrunch.com
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he researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion.

The research is co-authored by PhD candidate Marc-André Gagnon, who led the study with Joel Lexchin, a long-time researcher of pharmaceutical promotion, Toronto physician, and Associate Chair of York’s School of Health Policy & Management in the Faculty of Health.

“In our paper, we make the case for the need for a new estimate of promotional expenditures by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry,” says Gagnon. “We then explain how we used proprietary databases to construct a revised estimate and finally, we compare our results with those from other data sources to argue in favor of changing the priorities of the industry.”

More …

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UPDATE: The Live Auctions is now Open for bidding. Now until January 10th. Take a look or start bidding.

DomainTools.com announced that it’s having their next Live Auction on Janurary 3rd. Out of over 2000 domain submissions only 170 made the cut (I actually was able to get three on the list - simplyfrench.com, aboutwifi.com, wificafes.com - so GO BID when it’s time.). Jay Westertdal also announced his list of top picks. Mine weren’t there, but I still hope they sell ;-).

DomainTools doesn’t just have “domain auctions” … it is a must-have resource for anyone related to the domain/web industry … it’s worth checking out (and bookmarking).

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Here’s a interesting read from ZDNet on using Wordpress versus a standard “clunky” CMS. He’s got some good points and really nails-down the “IT geek”.

Story:

In Scott Karp’s overall discussion asking whether blogs can do journalism–I think it’s all the same and chances are techies don’t care anyway–he touches on blogs partially being a function of their Web-native content management systems. Blogs, often delivered via WordPress, have built-in advantages over content management systems such as RSS feeds, comments, trackbacks and inline links.

And when it comes to ease of use, a blog platform beats or average CMS hands down. So why have I been stuck with so many clunky CMS systems over the years? There’s a host of reasons, but most of these afflictions come from strange IT management practices.

At ZDNet we use WordPress for blogs, but in previous positions I’ve almost always had some custom built creation that usually stinks. Sure, these CMS systems may have started out as standard, but sooner or later they turn into this Frankenstein creation. And lookout below if the guy that cooked up the code ever leaves. If there’s an open source option that has rich features why would you spend time building the same thing?

One theory I have is that there’s some secret “developer full-time employment act” that means these programmers have to do something even if it’s just replicating work that’s already been done. Kind of like New Jersey where every gas station is full serve (that had to be some full employment gambit back in the day).

Part of this “let’s build our own CMS” disease comes from your typical not-invented-here management practices. Here’s how this plays out: Geeks get together with media folks that like to pretend they know technology. Then they haggle over requirements, which typically resemble things already out there. But these folks enjoy reinventing the wheel. Then they miss deadlines. In the end, they only to build something that you could get via WordPress–if you’re lucky.

More …

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So it appears that other large news media companies are finally seeing through the crap that CNN puts out of their “so-called” news channel.

The Los Angeles Times publishes a story regarding CNN’s “self serving agenda … set for the Republican debates”.

Read it for yourself here.

A person is blind if they cannot see CNN’s political agenda.

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Startup doctoc (competitor to startup scribd) is giving away a free iPod Touch every week this month to the user that uploads the most documents each week.

Since the sites launch last week, they say they’ve “had thousands of documents uploaded”.

Sign up to get started, but you’ll have some work to do in order to catch up with ‘ryryslide‘ who’s got some 15,600+ docs uploaded (geez dude, got time on your hands?). You can see how you’re doing in real time by following this link and you can read more about the contest here.

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Stanford student Sean Anderson was the guy who gave Larry Page the name of his search engine and company:

Sean and Larry were in their office, trying to think up a good name — something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol.” Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available.

Where does Sean currently work? Microsoft.

Who owns googol.com? Surprisingly not Google.

[majority via]

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The AP reports that as part of a proposed settlement to a class-action suit Sprint Nextel has agreed to provide customers with the code necessary to unlock their phones, after they’ve finished the service and paid their bills. Sprint won’t have to pay financial damages under the terms of the settlement. Considering people have to pay out the contract—which is justified as necessary to subsidise the mobile phones— this is something all reasonable carriers should do.

The settlement, which is awaiting final approval by a Superior Court judge in Alameda County, CA, would allow the phones to operate on any CDMA network, including Verizon and Alltel here in U.S. The codes will not work on Nextel-branded phones made by Motorola that use the iDen protocol (do people still have Nextel phones?). Nor will the codes enable customers to switch to AT&T or T-Mobile, of course, as they are GSM based.

NYTimes: The company will also add information about the unlocking codes as part of the terms and conditions of service given to new customers and will instruct its customer service representatives on connecting a non-Sprint phone to the Sprint network.

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