Suffire.com | Geek Stuffs, Technology Related

pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/valleywag/2008/10/schmidthands_01.jpg” width=”243″ height=”288″ align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ /Let’s face it: Google’s every attempt to venture outside its holy circle of search and ads has been a financial nonstarter. So is it thinking about getting into the energy business? Yes. Read between the lines in CEO Eric Schmidt’s a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/technology/internet/28google.html?_r=1ref=technologyoref=slogin”statements to the emNew York Times/em/a. “Our primary mission is one of information,” he says. “As to whether we will be in these other businesses, we will see.” See? When a project is some years off, America’s CTO out-and-out lies. Remember how he denied, for years, that Google was working on a Web browser, and then presto ta-da, Google Chrome emerged fully formed from the forehead of Sergey Brin? Right. So if Schmidt is merely ditherating about the idea that Google could play in the energy business, you might as well be getting utility bills in your Gmail tomorrow./p br style=”clear: both;”/
img alt=”" style=”border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;” border=”0″ src=”http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=637e3821db6070bfb74d931191befaba” height=”1″ width=”1″/
img src=”http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=637e3821db6070bfb74d931191befaba” style=”display: none;” border=”0″ height=”1″ width=”1″ alt=”"/div class=”feedflare”
a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/valleywag/full?a=yiJxD77D”img src=”http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/valleywag/full?d=120″ border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/valleywag/full?a=tX79WX1R”img src=”http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/valleywag/full?d=41″ border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/valleywag/full?a=wYeEV5cz”img src=”http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/valleywag/full?i=wYeEV5cz” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/valleywag/full?a=ZMRYARMs”img src=”http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/valleywag/full?i=ZMRYARMs” border=”0″/img/a
/divimg src=”http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/valleywag/full/~4/O_8tvLw4vwE” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Today was your last day to register to vote in California. Coincidence or not, today was also the day Google CEO Eric Schmidt decided to stump for Barack Obama. Is Schmidt trying to sway undecided voters, or just aiming for a government post? Either way, today’s featured commenter, Churchill, explains why this wouldn’t work:

Schmidt is 53, no young voter will listen to anybody over 35.

Did you know? Besides sitting on Apple’s board of directors, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been an informal adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In fact, he lurves Obama so much that’s he not just going to endorse him (shock, right?) he’s going to actually campaign for him next week. And not just ’cause Obama might be good for business! No, he says he’s “doing this personally.” Very possibly because he wants to be the nation’s very first Chief Technology Officer, a position Obama said he would create last year—maybe not-so-coincidentally right before he paid his first visit to Google!

While Schmidt says the Goog is officially neutral, the WSJ notes that “Congress is considering measures that could have an adverse impact on Google’s business” like “rules that would allow telecommunications companies to charge different prices for different levels of Internet service,” i.e., net non-neutrality. Obama has said that he is pro net-neutrality, which would benefit Google. Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, Google employees have donated nearly half a million dollars to Obama’s campaign, and a mere $20,600 to John McCain as of Aug. 31, according to the Journal (which would likely make them among Obama’s top corporate donors, since Verizon employees’ $155,000 for McCain placed among his top 20 corporate donors ever).

Tuesday is the first day Obama and Schmidt hit the trail together, but some speculate he’s been doing some campaigning of his own with Obama for a while—to be Obama’s first tech chief:

Asked at a speech this month whether he would consider entering the political arena, the 53-year-old Mr. Schmidt shouted, “H-, no!” But some tech and media executives speculate that he might desire a role in an Obama administration, possibly the chief technology officer post Sen. Obama has said he would create.

I have to say, there are few more qualified than Google’s CEO, especially since Bill Gates dreams beyond tech now, and Steve Jobs is perfectly happy within his own little world at Apple. Who would be your dream tech chief be? [WSJ via Valleywag, Image: Real Dan Lyons]

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool,” Eric Schmidt told an audience of magazine publishers assembled at Google yesterday. Wait, what happened to the magic Google algorithm that reverse-engineers our reputations? Does it now rank pages by brand, too? I hope so, because when I Google myself at midnight all I see is Valleywag, Valleywag, Valleywag. I’d like to believe Google knows something my agent doesn’t. (Photo by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

So-called “postroll” ads — commercial clips which play automatically at the end of a video — are coming to YouTube, NewTeeVee reports. It’s an embarrassment for Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who had insisted users hate postroll ads and predicted YouTube would find a new, more effective ad format. The postrolls, while they may make ads on YouTube more desirable, don’t solve YouTube’s real problem: The vast majority of its videos aren’t suitable for carrying ads, because of their content or uncertain copyright status. As a result, YouTube has a far smaller share of online-video revenue than it does of online-video traffic.