Rev2.org

You’ve probably seen the Air Force commercial where the young recruit, walking across an airstrip talks to the camera about his job in security.  About how they defend our nation against electronic attacks and malware threats.  These are some of the new cyberwarriors the military is falling all over itself to recruit.

In Melbourne, Florida, the New York Times reports, the private side of that (legitimate) military hacking is highlighted.  The nation’s largest military contractors, including Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and others, are all vying to grab fresh new talent to fulfill their cyber contracts with the Pentagon.

These companies are looking for creative experts in cyber security: both hacking and designing countermeasures.  Ads for “cyberninjas” are becoming common now.

A Raytheon office south of the Kennedy Space Center is home to dozens of engineers busily trying to crack the Pentagon’s computers.  If they succeed, they don’t get arrested; they get bonuses and a new cappuccino machine.

Another part of the group’s mandate is to create virtual weapons that can be used to attack enemy systems.

Welcome to the cutting edge of the new battlefield.

“Everybody’s attacking everybody,” says Scott Chase, who is one of the managers of the Raytheon unit.

There is over $10 billion currently being spent by government on cybersecurity and that number is expected to rise considerably in the near future, potentially doubling as early as next year.

So in a time of recession, layoffs, and hard times for developers and engineers, one field of work is skyrocketing in growth and potential: hacking.

Got Parents? That should be the tagline for this site. Or maybe “Got SugarParents?” OK, it’s not really that bad and might actually be useful, especially for long-distance parents of college students, boarding school kids, or separated families. Other uses could include grandparents or extended family as well.

BillMyParents is a website that allows kids to shop on shopping portals and sites with BillMyParents acting as a sort of alternative payment source: kind of a combination of PayPal and Delicious. It works by allowing children to shop and mark things they’d like. Then parents can revue those items and decide whether or not to buy one or all of them.

Sound a lot like an Amazon Wish List or Watched Items on eBay list? That’s basically how it functions, but it’s not site-specific, so kids can shop from just about any site on the ‘Net for things they’d like.

Parents retain full control over what is purchased and what isn’t as well as their children’s information—items can be shipped to the parents rather than the children, protecting privacy, for instance.

BillMyParents is a useful site, all told, and as the retail sites it functions with expands, it will become even more so.

All of that said, BillMyParents may face some competition soon. Rumors say that PayPal is working on a similar system and it’s likely that the eBay company would have a much bigger leg up on a service like this.

Right now, BillMyParents is free to use and they monetize mainly through affiliate sales. Definitely worth looking into if you have a need for this type of service.

The Google Maps duo Lars and Jens Rasmussen had an idea: what if communications technology began with email, IM, phones (and VOIP), etc. all already in place?  What would be invented then?  Their answer: Google Wave.

During the Google I/O keynote address on Wednesday, Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra laid out what the company thinks will be the future of the Web.

With the new HTML 5 standard coming, and browser makers poised to jump in with both feet when it does, Google is thinking not about integrated 3D graphics, built-in movie streaming, or any of the other plug-in-less wonders that are promised with HTML5, but instead the search giant is thinking about communication.

Although everyone uses email online and most people use instant messaging and probably other (similar) services like Twitter and Skype, these are currently all separate entities.  They don’t mesh well and the apps that do combine them can’t help but be clunky.

But what if they weren’t?

That’s the Google Wave vision outlined in his address:

The vision has become the buzz of the tech news sites.  Google’s official blog lays out the idea, in the words of Lars, while TechCrunch has covered it no less than four times so far (that I could find).  It even blipped on the O’Reilly radar.

So what’s all the hubub about?  Revolutionizing communications on the Internet, for one.  If anyone is capable of doing it, it’s Google, I’d say.  From the looks of it, that seems to be their plan.  This could get interesting.

It appears that what a lot of insiders had been predicting has come true.  Last night, the Time Warner board of directors approved the spinoff of its America OnLine (AOL) unit.  While AOL was operating as an independent company within Time Warner, it was not independently traded on the market.

Currently, AOL is owned almost entirely by Time Warner with Google holding a small, 5% share.  That share will be bought out in the spin off process, which is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

Kara Swisher at BoomTown is reporting that sources inside are saying that Tim Armstrong (AOL CEO) plans to make sweeping changes to the company’s structure.  This includes pigeoning many of AOL’s recent acquisitions like Bebo into a ventures unit  to attract outside investors.  Another big change will be to the various attempts at re-branding the company has seen under past leadership.  Anderson reportedly plans to focus on pumping the AOL brand as well as key AOL services like ICQ and AIM.

Meanwhile, as Anderson continues with his 100-day sweep of AOL, buzz has been happening around what the removal of leadership of both People Networks and Platform-A units in AOL has meant.  It appears that the plan is to consolidate like services into departments and combine services.

Of course, speculation over the valuation of the new AOL is also underway.  Frederick Moran, a respected analyst at Benchmark, figures that the new AOL is worth about $5 billion.  He arrives at this figure by separating the dialup business that AOL still dominates (AOL owns Earthlink) and it’s other top performer, the Platform A ad grouping.  Between them, they have a valuation of close to $5 billion.

Further, AOL has 107 million unique visitors per month across its properties and several advertising networks and other sources that provide revenue steadily.  The separation and independent stock holding will also allow AOL to better leverage itself for acquisitions and transactions.

The official press release from Time Warner is, of course, generally un-revealing.  Some base information on the deal, including how the 5% share Google holds will be moved into Time Warner shareholder’s portfolios in a tax-free move, are given, however.

Overall, this is probably a very good move for AOL, since it’s seen nothing but stifling and heavy decline since being brought under the Time Warner umbrella.  Now it’s a question of whether Tim Anderson’s vision can carry AOL into a new market.  AOL’s brand stigma is fading, so the time may be right (as Anderson is apparently guessing) for the AOL brand to be brought forward once again.

Fans of Google Sightseeing, the site that takes you on a tour of the world through the eyes of Google Earth and Google Maps will agree that the site is popular for many reasons, most of which center around its motto “Why bother seeing the world for real?” and the humor inherent in many of its tours.

Back in August of 2005, the site did a tour of Target stores which feature the huge Target symbol on their rooftops. You can read that original tour by clicking here. Turns out, Target accidentally started a trend. The stores in question had the logo painted on their rooftops as part of a visual campaign targeting (haha) overflights coming into nearby airports. Pictured here is the Target in Queens, NY, which looks like a bad day at the range.

The mention of the stores on Google Sightseeing set of a short-lived blitz as various media and news outlets noted the accidental advertising potential that Target was seeing thanks to Google Earth and Maps.

This set off a lot of buzz as marketers began seeing the potential. Soon, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Maxim Magazine got in on the deal. Both companies went to Nevada and created giant versions of themselves in the desert.

A giant Colonel Sanders was painted off the Extraterrestrial Highway in Rachel, Nevada. Made up of 65,000 one foot square painted tiles, the whole montage came together like pixels on a screen. They used 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 5,000 beige and 12,000 eggshell colors as well as 28,000 black tiles.

Maxim Magazine, at about the same time, created a 8,250 square foot magazine cover in the dessert outside of Las Vegas to celebrate their 100th issue. Needless to say, it was hot out there in the desert.

Of course, no one can forget the Giant iPod from Space prank played in 2006.

All of this sparked a flurry of advertising forms based on using Google Maps. In 2006, ad campaigns involving satellite mapping began appearing everywhere. Mapvertising, Satvertising, Roofvertising, and interactive online advertising games like Scavengeroogle and others were everywhere.

Many of these died off very quickly. Often the long lag time between putting up an advertisement to be seen from Google satellites and when it was actually mapped by them meant several months (or longer) would pass before the campaign could get underway. The inability to know when, exactly, the photo might be taken also caused logistical problems.

Of all of the Google Maps advertising schemes hatched out during the 2006/2007 years, few have stuck around. The popular game of geocaching, where participants use GPS units to find “caches” of stuff and trade for new stuff then update a website, did see some popularity profit from the Google Maps craze, however. Most know that you can enter GPS coordinates directly into a Google Maps search and it will go to that location. Insertable Javascripts can be used to extract GPS coordinates as well.

Companies occasionally use geocaching to promote their products. Most recently, Ford is included some urban geocaching in its ongoing social media campaign for the Ford Focus.

The only straight advertising that seems to have kept any traction, though, is realty advertising via Google Maps. To have a real estate sales site that doesn’t integrate Google Maps or Mapquest is to be stuck in the 1990s. Most realtors link to maps to the property, at the very least, and many include satellite photos of the property in question as well. Some of the more sophisticated even offer Google Maps tours of some of their offerings.

With all of that, the little tour of Target stores at Google Sightseeing seems to have set off a new spin on advertising online. Perhaps, with the new rise of social networking online, a resurgence of advertising via Google Maps is forthcoming.

Can you imagine the scale of a massive rivalry should Vegas casinos square off like this or Sam’s Club and Costco? It could be fun to watch.

WolframAlpha.com, the new information search tool, has been up and running for over a week now.  If you want to know exactly how long, just put “how old are you?” in the search box and WolframAlpha will tell you.

That is one of many little Easter Eggs that the search tool has in it.  The new site has a lot of interesting uses–I’m beginning to use it regularly.  Here’s our favorite list of WolframAlpha eggs so far.  Type them in (or cut-and-paste) to see how Wolfram reacts:

1. Hello
2. Why did the chicken cross the road?
3. What is the answer to life?
4. To be or not to be?
5. Where am I?
6. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
7. How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
8. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
9. 88 mph
10. Where are you?
11. How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?
12. How are you today?
13. 1.21 gigawatts
14. Where have all the flowers gone?
15. How many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
16. Are you an alien?
17. To be or not to be?
18. What is the speed of an unladen swallow?
19. Where is God?

Of course, my favorite isn’t as easy to come by.  When WolframAlpha’s servers are too busy, it comes up with this screen:

Got more? Leave a comment below with your favorite WolframAlpha Easter Eggs!