Silicon Cloud

How can we not crave the Pac-Man plug in game. It doesn’t get any more retro than this. Simple concept allowing you to plug in this little beauty into your TV and play some of the coolest old-school games around. And it’s got PAC-MAN…

Ok so you also get Bosconian, Dig Dug Rally-X and Galaxian but most importantly a straight port of the orginal (and still the best) Pac-Man game. Quite simply still the best game around and one of those classics that started the video-game movement. Would we be playing WoW and others if the likes of Pac-Man, Sonic, Mario and Pong were never made?

We expect this will be available from many good retailers – and some poor ones too!

Popularity: 2%

Amusing Employment Slogans

• * If you do a good job and work hard, you may get a job with a better company someday.
• * The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off due to budget cuts.
• * Sure, you may not like working here, but we pay your rent.
• * Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings—they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
• * A person who smiles in the face of adversity probably has a scapegoat.
• * If at first you don’t succeed—try management.
• * Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
• * Never quit until you have another job.
• * Hang in there: Retirement is only 30 years away!
• * Go the extra mile—It makes your boss look like an incompetent slacker.
• * Pride, commitment, teamwork—words we use to get you to work for free.
• * Work: It isn’t just for sleeping anymore.
• * There are two kinds of people in life: people who like their jobs, and people who don’t work here anymore.

Popularity: 3%

This cool looking wooden clock has numerals that seem to apear from nowhere. When not displaying the time this clock looks like a scandinavian well sanded piece of wood. When the clock is on, a very thin veneer on the front allows the shiny LED display contained within to show through. How cool is that?

It looks like magic. The beautifully clean design has no visible buttons, hiding them all at the back to give the clock an extra sleek look. Bascially it’s a time-piece for the cool geek, who wants their toys without looking like being considered dorky. We like.

Popularity: 3%

Have you ever sat there thinking ‘I wish I could buy something that did…’ We can buy dancing iPod docks, or little robots disguised as dogs, and mobile video phones with 2+ mega-pixel camera’s. Sometimes though that simply ain’t enough. Here’s our list of items that we really wish existed but can’t find them (yet).

1) The wi-fi enabled car stereo. We’ve searched high and low for one of these. What we’re after is a car stereo that either connects to our iPod or features a hard-drive. When we get back to our house/apartment we hit the ‘sync’ button and it goes off and downloads our podcasts and synchronises our music with our PC. Simple yet effective. Imagine having to fight for bandwidth with your car… or ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks when your sat in a jam.

2) The iPod phone. We’ve seen the Rockr and the Sony Walkman phone, but thery’re not quite there yet. What we want is 30-60Gb storage on our mobile phone. They’ve got to be working on it. Someone’s got to be bringing one out soon. Unfortunately we want one NOW. (Impatient aren’t we?). Come on Apple/Sony/Whoever give us what we want. Please…

3) The Sky+ improvements. One for the UK users. Why oh why didn’t Sky put a netwrok port or USB port onto their sublime Sky+ boxes? Ok it’s probably for commercial reasons, but imagine being able to dump your recorded Sky+ content onto you PC or to your video iPod digitally. You can do this with a slingbox, but wouldn’t it be great to have One box under your TV that did it all? With the advent of Sky High Definition which has got uur mouth’s watering, we’re just wishing we could stream it wirelessly around our house.

4) The High Memory PSP We love the Sony PlayStation Portable, it’s a beautiful piece of kit, but you can’t help thinking that Sony could have made it better. There simply isn’t enough memory available. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a PSP with iPod memory sizes? At present we only seem to be able to get 1 or 2 Gb memory sticks, that’s hardly much if you want to pre-load a few movies onto it before you go on holiday. With the apparent demise of UMD based films (Some major Hollywood studios have already ramped their production rates) we need more memory available. How about a 30 or 60 Gb Hard-drive add on. Come on Sony, you know it makes sense.

Popularity: 2%

How can we not want one of these… The 60Gb video iPod, the daddy of them all. At first Apple started by playing music, now selling over 1 billion songs, then a brief sojorn into photo’s. The advent of the podcast made the iPod a truly ‘must-have’ item. Now they move into video’s and we simply cannot resist. The whopping 60Gb edition can store upto 15,000 tunes, 20,000 photos or upto 150 hours of video playback. Reports of upto 20 hours battery life make this simply irressitable.

Apple have also managed to shrink the thickness of the iPod to even greater proportions. Keeping the click-wheel with which so many people are familiar. This technology allows you to find, play, skip and pause your tunes and videos with a single thumb. When married to iTunes, to watch video podcasts, music videos and your favorite TV shows, plus of course synchronise your exisitng tunes and buy new music. It’s quite simlpy the best feature rich iPod to date. (Until the next one!)

Popularity: 2%

In the current world of the internet, contextual advertising is THE way of bringing revenue to the webmaster. The technique of projects such as Google’s adsense, or Yahoo’s contextual ad’s is bringing in huge amounts of revenue for the Search Engine giants. The question you should be asking is how do you increase the revenue to your own website.

At first it appears that it’s all about placement. Have a look at a search term on Google. Where are the adverts placed? Right at the top of the page above the first organic search result. Rumors are that this placement technique by Google brings in a click-through rate of somewhere between 20%-25%! This placement technique may seem obvious and you’re thinking that all you have to do is to throw the advert at the top of your page and the clicks will come. Correct. The clikcks will come, but you can maximise the click-through rate of these clicks. How many times have you found yourself simply ignoring the advertising on a website? You have become ‘banner-blind’. So do you put the advert at the bottom of the page hoping that someone will click the advert after reading your well-written article. Nope. Most visitors don’t read the whole article, either skip-reading it or just not being interested enough to finish it. In fact i’m surprised you got this far…

So how do you increase the click-through rate of your contextual ads? integration. Look again at the results page on a Google or Yahoo search. The adverts don’t look like adverts, they have the same look and feel as the rest of the site and are only barely identified as being ‘sponsored-links’. The trick is by making the visitor believe that they are clicking on a link that will bring them value. I’m not saying that you have to be devious and hide the adverts in you page.

I expect that you’re now thinking ‘I already know all this stuff’. In that case great, well-done, your already maxmising your revenue. But think to yourself, can I do more? Have a good look around the internet, see what others are doing. Can you improve your placements or color theme’s? On this page, you may have already noticed the contextual adverts on the page. I expect that you noticed the one at the beginning of this article right underneath the title and with the first paragraph’s text wrapped around it. You may have noticed the one at the bottom of the page at the end of the article (I live in hope that someone will click it one day). There’s also a small one integrated into the navigation menu on the right hand side of the page. Finally the most subtle advert is right at the top f the page above the site’s menu graphics. This very subtle positioning and appearance of integration into the site is a particularly effective method of maximising the clicks and therefore revenue from contextual advertising. If you have any other suggestions of how to improve the placement of adverts, without annoying the visitor then please comment.

Popularity: 2%

Some rather clever(!) webmasters have come up with many ways of irritating the visitor to their site. Here we sum up our top 12 favourite irritants. We find that the best way for any budding webmaster to gain maximum irritation they should combine as many of these as possible.

1) Pop-Ups – This tried and tested technique is a sure fire way to annoy or irritate any potential visitor to your site. This can be made more effective by using more than one pop-up per page view or to absolutely maximise the irritant level this technique should be using in conjunction with the Pop-Under (see item 2).

2) Pop-Under – Potentially more irritating than the pop-up, the skilled annoyer can utilise this technique to great effect. Utilised well, especially by using this technique when a visitor is trying to leave your site will guarantee annoyance and that the visitor will never return. Particularly successful if multiple instances are used.

3) Ban Right Clicks – This is a particularly effective technique to annoy the net-savvy visitor to your site. not only are you preventing the user from stealing your valuable content by preventing them from using right-click, save. but the intrepid annoyer is also preventing people from using the right mouse button to:

• - Use the ‘forward’ and ‘back’ buttons.


• - Open any links in a new window (or tab – firefox users)


• - Bookmark the page so they can visit again


• - Print the page (IE users)

4) Music – Forcing people to listen to your choice of music is one of the professional annoyers most deadly weapon. Used well this technique can guarantee that the hapless visitor to your site will leave quickly never to return. For a really top-level ‘grade A’ annoyance put the music on ‘loop’ and place the controls to stop the music somewhere difficult to find preferably at the bottom of the site. This technique can be enhanced even further by combining with the obscure plug-in (see item 10)

Popularity: 100%