I’m really not a techno geek, but I thought this story and photo were interesting. Imagine being able to create computer monitors or television screens that were on a flexible clear film. Reminds me of the current craze of roll-up keyboards and pianos. If they could get their manufacturing costs down, that would help drop a lot of weight out of laptops.

GE has demonstrated the first OLED roll-to-roll manufacturing technology.  “Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process,” said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. “Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.”

Read the rest of Joel Hruska’s story at arstechnica.com.

WP-dbManager is a good WordPress plugin that handles database optimization and backups. It was created by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan, and can be downloaded at http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-dbmanager.html.  As your WordPress tables become filled from adding posts and comments, they will need to “optimized”.  And, of course, they need to be backed up!  Lester Chan’s plug-in easily handles managing your Wordpress database.   It allows you to optimize, repair, backup, restore, delete backup databases , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.  And, it supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. 

It does all this through the “Admin” panel in WordPress.

The following is a great “tutorial” (from Tubetorial.com) the explains the basics of WP-dbManager.

Here’s a cool image application I just ran across that the was displayed at TED2007. This is Microsoft Labs technology that blows image handling into a whole new universe. Blaise shows off some impressive software.

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo.

Jeremy Palmer is moving away from information products and making his ebook, “High Performance Affiliate Marketing” a free download!

I have a lot of respect for Jeremy, he authored a great ebook in “High Performance Affiliate Marketing”, and has an informative web site.   He’s also a terrific example of someone who knows when he’s overloaded and admits it.

Here’s what he blogged the other day:

After careful consideration I decided I no longer want to sell “info products”. Quite frankly, I hate the “business opportunity” category - I think it’s filled with too many get rich quick scammers selling hype-filled ebooks with no real substance.

The fact is, making money on the Internet isn’t easy. It takes a lot of knowledge, hard work, and above all - persistence. But it’s hard to get people to understand that on an e-book sales page. Many think that if they just buy this one product or service all of their financial problems will be solved. This thinking is completely unrealistic and a recipe for failure.

The new goal of Quit Your Day Job will be to educate and support serious online entrepreneurs who understand the time and commitment required to be successful.

<snip>

It’s a bit ironic, before launching QuitYourDayJob.com (and related endeavors) I had the “Quit Your Day Job” lifestyle. But after launching the sites I created a new full-time job for myself. My increased workload created a lot of unwanted stress and caused me to drop a lot of balls. Juggling my own affiliate business and two other projects was too much.

Holy cow! An internet marketer that admits that making money online is a difficult endevour! Now that’s impressive. Pardon my cinicism, but most “gurus” gloss over the fact that they have to “work” at their business. Some have to put in a lot of long days to keep the balls in the air.

When I first started reading about internet marketing, it sounded like all you had to do was throw up a web site, grab some affiliate links, and run to the bank to cash your checks. (That may have been the case in 1998, but it is NOT the case now.)

Read Jeremy’s full post at http://www.quityourdayjob.com/blog.