BOOM!

BOOM! Im starting to see that silent explosion again, media companies and tech companies just cant help themselves from buying up those cute websites that offer utilities that seem to be worth millions upon millions of dollars. I guess we never learn from our mistakes. The way I see this current tech boom is similar to the guy who has every gadget sitting on his desk that he paid top dollar for when it first came out and now he rarely ever looks at it. An old Newton hanging off the side of the desk with an OGO and a Sega GameGear peeking out of the bottom drawer, a PALM III along with the first iPOD, hey... that's my desk!!!! Well anyway, this trend is starting to pick up speed again and I see more and more technology being developed for the sake of selling it off to larger companies.

What surprised me was that even new search engines are coming out, with Google in town you would think everyone would shaking in their shoes but I guess that's what we were all saying when Yahoo once ruled the web. I recently took Acoona (supposed to be some play off of Hacoona Matata the single most annoying term to ever come out of the 90's) for a spin. Apparently these guys have 100 million dollars to play with and some people are actually impressed! http://www.acoona.com/

I created a search engine like that in 98 called BigLinx and learned that people simply don't like refining their searches, even though our minds may tell us we do, we are creatures of habit and refining anything especially the all mighty instant gratifier, the web, is simply too much. What irks me is that when they designed this thing they completely copied Google, if your going to get in the ring for a fight you better bring something different or people will just see you as some cheap knockoff of the real thing. A search engine is where the web starts, its home page should be elegant and classic in design, the web has been around long enough for it to start taking on some of the more traditional looks of our culture. Google is boring, simple, the way geeks would design everything if they could. You'd think with Google's BILLIONS they would put a tad more effort in engaging some more users by offering many points of entry based on what a person or genre wants... for example, how about a Goth point of entry? A Fashion Mod point of entry? A Sports fanatic point of entry? Each point of entry being sponsored by the top name in that genre. Imagine sports fans! An ESPN sponsored Goggle home page that offered you sports related news, stores, scores, etc... your page could look like this...

We don't need more search engines, we simply need better branded ones. Take a look at today's New York Times and you will see the pathetic pings of another technology boom, just like gadgets on my desk the world will always want the next latest and greatest until they figure out that another one is going to come along a few months later and it will be better. Very few things today stick, the iPod stuck! The Playstation stuck, DVDs stuck, energy drinks stuck, the flip cellphone, sushi, jeans, cigarettes, pizza, beer and i cant leave out coffee. All those things have been around since they have been invented and their popularity has only grown since. There seems to be a trend in the technology world that challenges everything that emerges, and that's a good thing, but we need to not let it become this Junior High School lunch time routine... remember in lower school when food would come out and you all grabbed for fear there would be nothing left? Exactly!