Garmin are selling more GPS systems than ever before, and as well as earning shedloads of money day-in, day-out, they are the cleverest long term strategisers in the GPS business too. So smart, in fact, that nobody on Wall Street has seen that they could be after their greatest rivals, TomTom!

Background

Everyone is talking about GPS darlings, Garmin, these days, applauding them on their management skills and ability to grow market share, and all that good business stuff. But suddenly Wall St says that this very same glamor boy management team have got it wrong with a couple of M&A moves.

They did wrong, apparently, first of all by not buying Navtech for $9bn. Then they really screwed things up, so the experts say, by putting in an offer today of $3.3bn for TeleAtlas, (a company smaller than Navtech) who also make maps and have $1bn cash in the bank.

Garmin trumped Wall St once already.

According to the Wall St experts, Garmin did wrong when they decided not to spend $9bn on Navtech ie they screwed up by not blowing billions all at once in order to secure the supply of a product they can get off the shelf any day of the week. (Yes, Wall St, even under Nokia ownership, Navtech are obliged by law to supply Garmin at fair market prices.) Wall St knocked Garmin down about 20% over a few days. Garmin bounced straight back, of course!

Master stroke

And now, Garmin have decided to try and take ownership of a smaller map-maker with a stash of cash in the bank and Wall St have again hammered them down 11% for so doing. How short sighted of Wall Street, because the stock will again bounce back up, stronger than ever, before going meteoric!!

It will go meteoric because of Garmin's real strategy behind the TeleAtlas offer!

On the surface Garmin made a pure counter-bid against arch European rivals, TomTom, and by entering the bidding arena, Garmin have put the onus on TomTom to raise their initial offer. 1-0 to Garmin who will make their rivals pay more than they wanted!

But it is in fact 2-0 because Garmin's move rocked Euro stock market confidence in TomTom, and the T2 stock price dropped 18%. How cruel to become embroiled in a bidding war not of your making!

But according to Ed, it could be 3-0 to Garmin, and game over for TomTom, - and Wall St would never see this one coming.

Game, set and snatch

How funny if Garmin were to announce tomorrow that not only were they buying up a few TeleAtlas shares today prior to publicising the "disastrous TeleAtlas offer" but that they also went shopping in Europe and now own enough cheap TomTom shares to get on their board and kick some butt!

Probably too frivolous a thought, but either way, plenty of savvy investors will be buying into a slice of Garmin over the next few days. They are the best.

After turning down an offer for a new iPhone, and discovering how to connect my laptop to the internet from almost anywhere, I am in the mood for a dip into the world of mobile tech.

Do you need an iPhone?

Mrs Ed, bless her, said I could have an iPhone, if I wanted. She got a big hug, and is still $399 in pocket. I don't need one.

My current phone looks like it came out of a Christmas cracker, and it is still way too feature-laden for me. And apart from depending on it for ringing my wife, I use it for almost nothing. OK, once I used it as an alarm clock and woke up 12 hours late. I am not even into IM, mainly because I punctuate and correctly spell everything. By the time I finish compiling a message, I am home and can relay the info in person.

They say the iPhone has a million other useful features, but to be honest, I have a laptop 10x better than any phone, so I will pass, thanks.

Your phone number doubles as your email address

Money Making Mike alerted me to this great idea for people like me who have trouble remembering their friends' names, let alone their friends' email addresses.

In an ideal world, everyone should register with Redinbox and append their phone number with @redinbox.com.

Ding ding, you have a simple email address to hand out, and if we were all on board, we would never have trouble remembering the email address of anyone in our phone contact list - their phone number IS their email address.

The service redirects the redinbox email addy to your normal email inbox, and it is spam free. What more do you want, apart from a scannable video chip implanted in your head that beams phone numbers and other easily forgotten data straight onto your retina when you think of a person.

PC internet card

Have you seen that dorky Brit in the Verizon ads who wades through ponds trying to escape the internet? It is quite funny, but after talking to a few "normal" non-techy friends, it seems like the message - connect your laptop to the internet via a mobile modem - is falling on deaf ears.

Hell, I am just as guilty of not getting it. I am into that sort of geeky mobile thing, (I shrivel up and die if I can't get online when we are away from home), but it didn't sink in, til recently, just how easy and affordable it is to surf from anywhere these days.

The TV ad can't take the credit for my epiphany, though. It took some well-traveled exec to show me their USB internet connect card dangling out the back of their laptop. The guy on TV has a similarly functioning card that slips into your PMCIA slot. (I think that is the techno term for the slot in the side of a laptop?)

Basically the gadget to get you online wherever there is cell phone coverage, is a mobile DSL modem supplied by the phone companies. It isn't cable but I am told it is not particularly slow or painful to use.

As far as cost is concerned, you get billed monthly - and separately from your normal cell phone. Looking into it, AT&T charge about $60 a month for unlimited access, which is a lot cheaper than daily trips to cyber cafes. Even the international dealio from Cingular is worth a look. Just saying! Mobile is the way ahead, so might as well get into it now.

Time to go. It looks like I have a phone message, and I just need to get the manual to work out how to read it.

Swicki, a cross between a search engine and wikipedia, has been developing apace. As well as a source of encyclopedic information, Swicki is also a directory, directing you to useful web sites, making it a good alternative to my favorite people at Technorati.

Quick, what's a Swicki again?

This example of the Pisstakers Swicki search tag cloud is to be found on my Search page, no less. The terms you see displayed reflect what visitors to this site want to find out about, not what I want to push down visitors' throats.

How democratic, you may say. I say, democracy is good, but is not a pre-requisite for efficiency, and Swicki is a perfect anarchical mix of "ease of use" for searchers and "productive laziness" on my part.

Ease of use - From the tag cloud, either click on an existing search term, or input your own search term and get a Google style results page. The "S" in Swicki is not exactly ground-breaking, but the Wicki part ain't half bad! If the search results are a little hazy, and you know a thing or two about the topic, go right ahead and alter or add to the text accompanying the Swicki search result.



Productive laziness
I am not lazy, but I like things that work smart with minimal input from me. Swicki is one of those zero-input from-me dynamic content providers that also has everything necessary for me to tailor search results to the Pisstakers. From a control panel, I can see a list of recent search terms and I can block the irrelevant ones, so I don't get caught up in subjects I haven't written about. I can also add info to the Wiki style results to kick start a meaningful source of info for topics covered in The Pisstakers.

A Technorati killer?

Many people, myself included, get hung up on rankings and overlook the main function of Technorati, which is to organise and promote all those blogs out there. Swicki does the same job, making sense of the morass of sites vying for our attention, but it does it in quite a simple, democratic and powerful way.



This is the list of Recent and Top Swickis by search numbers, plus Videos. And below this list is a simple layout of blogs by topic.

The Top Swicki guys have some credibility, if you put any value in Technorati A-lister, TechCrunch, but the whole search and wiki scene is less controllable by the few. This is because Swicki's system allows surfers (not just bloggers) to select AND contribute to what they think is worth while on the internet. A long way from the blogger-manipulated rankings on Technorati.

Without the manic emphasis on rankings, I think Swicki is a cool environment compared to Technorati. Not so busy either, with about 100,000 blogs to plough through. Worth a thought, at least.

Now I will crawl under a rock and watch my Technorati "usefulness to society" rank continue to fall.

Sync 2 Folders

For the Mac heads with more computers than friends, rejoice at the launch of freebie software, Sync 2 Folders. It lets you easily sync the latest version of your Broken Relationships folder with the same out-of-date folder on the rest of your computers.

Clickety-click SYNC. Now you can be doubly, trebly, quadruply synced in sadness, and all for free too.

Remember, this software is of minimal use to people with one computer or no Broken Relationships folders.

GolfCard

At last, a reason to give up on life and take up golf.

GolfCard allows you to store all of your golf scores, save the details for your favourite courses and save scores for future analysis.

But hang on, a score card that requires a computer? I remember my reaction to seeing a dweeb in a supermarket with his MacBook cradled in one arm while he picked the ingredients for some whacky recipe with the other. I was so embarrassed for him.

So, no, I can't lose all my golfing street cred in one go. I will pass on this particular option and wait for someone else to be labeled the first jerk swinging around 18 holes with a laptop in his golf bag. Next.

Ensemble ultimate RSS reader

This Ensemble RSS reader is on steroids. With so many options, you spend more time tweaking the layout than you do reading your feeds. I jest, of course, but it is a cool way to keep up with RSS stuff without being totally transmog-googlified.

Just to reiterate, these are Mac apps, so splash out a few grand and join the Mac freeware party.

The Blog Rush concept arrived in a huge wave of viral marketing, but it appears to have been quickly anesthetized by the making money online blogging community. Oh well!

There has been plenty of BS BR conversation from disenchanted bloggers who didn't earn enough for their first Porsche in the first week. Fortunately, more mature people like Jack Design eloquently explain why the money-hungry blogs out there may view it is a scam, a pyramid scheme, a good idea gone horribly wrong. The guys at Blog Rush have also been quick to step up to the plate and admit to their flaws too. Plenty of people are singing loud from the same hymn sheet - except me?

Ed got it wrong?

Reading around the issues with Blog Rush, I felt momentarily inadequate when I realised that my review of Blog Rush contained almost no mention of the flaws! I actually gave it a thumbs up. The only issue that got me annoyed with Blog Rush, is the rigid format of their widget. How superficial am I! Otherwise, I liked it - a minority position, as usual!

Far from regretting my position, though, I am glad now that I took the intuitive stance, and displayed the widget, despite my ignorance of the dodgy behind-the-scenes credits.

Blog Rush rocks

Maybe Blog Rush is flawed as get rich quick scheme, but so what?! I don't see the problem - because the basic front-end service works, and the entertainment value for me is worth a lot more in the long term than a flawed and arcane system of credits that fails to deliver quick money-making traffic.

I do want to make money one day, but it will be off the back of readers interested in good content. Therefore, in my case, Blog Rush is a great service that offers content and links that should make my readers' visits all the more interesting.Call me old-fashioned, but as long as there are 5 new links to humor related posts looping through my sidebar with every page refresh, carry on, Blog Rush. That is good enough for me.

For now, I couldn't give a rat's testicle about the flawed credit scheme. The John Chows can use false RSS feeds to game the numbers as much as they like. Blog Rush can be as unprofitable as a Sirius, as far as I am concerned. If I was a fanatic about monetizing every square pixelated inch of my blog, my attitude would of course be different, but I am not that short termist.

The future of Blog Rush

If Blog Rush folks were clever enough to invent and market the service, I presume they are smart enough to make the service sustainable. Personally, I would say that if they can't think of a way to earn big bucks and win back credibility from the Making Money On-line community, drop the John Chows like a hot potato and focus on wooing the rest of the (arguably more interesting) sectors of blogging. What do you think?

RSS subscriber numbers is one way to demonstrate the popularity of a blog, and a healthy number makes new visitors feel half way confident that they aren't the only ones at the party. Unfortunately, The Pisstakers is set up as a series of blogs within a blog and the homepage, tech, news and entertainment blogs have their own individual RSS feeds. Traffic is growing, but, the growing RSS subscriber stats for the whole Pisstakers site were split between several feeds, which wasn't great.

To overcome this slight inconvenience, xFruits have come to the rescue and aggregated all RSS feeds together under one feed. Today I can announce the most daily visitors to this site via RSS is:

Thanks.

xFruits RSS feed contest

To celebrate this landmark, I have a contest going on! If you want the chance to win a $39 Kingston memory card for your camera, GPS, MP3 player, or PDA etc, follow these simple steps.

Never before has a cable company taken so many precautions to protect the public from accidentally walking into a work vehicle parked in a private driveway miles from civilisation.



Way to go, Comcast. Perhaps the next step will be an electric cable to fence the van off. It would be the only cable that worked first time.