Today I found out that my Gmail account – paulbenetis@gmail.com – was disabled.  My buddy sent me an IM and said that he received a bounce back when trying to send me an email.  This account was mainly set up as an additional email address and was forwarding all my emails to my other Gmail account, and I give it out to people so it easy from them to remember.  Therefore, I don’t ever go to Gmail and login to this particular account.

Right away I went to mail.google.com and tried to log in and received “Sorry, your account has been disabled.” error.  No explanation, no anything!

There was a link provided to get some help and I was able to fill out a form to submit to Google.  I am not sure if Google will ever get back to me…

This really worries me however as my main Gmail account has a lot information that is valuable to me.  I use Google’ services with confidence that the services they provide will be there for a long time to come, but situations like these are really discouraging.  How can I trust the service on my other account will stay active?

I understand that if you use the account to send spam emails but this wasn’t the case at all.  This was my personal account!  I really hope the form I filled out gets me somewhere.

Another really weird thing that I noticed:  I tried to sign up for another Gmail account just now, trying to use paul.benetis@gmail.com, and instead of saying that this name is already taken, it gave me a message that this particular user name has been disabled!  Is my name becoming some blacklisted name with Google?   NOOOOOOO!

If you are having the same issue do this:

Click on the little tool button on top right and go to ‘Options’.

Uncheck the ‘Use DNS pre-fetching to …..’ box and try to access some pages now.  

Worked for me, see if it works for you.

With DVRs gaining popularity, the companies are afraid that they are not reaching all of the viewers with their continuous bombardments of our TVs. New ways of reaching the consumer are required and video games are one of the channels that are not yet exploited.

So far companies have been able to place ads in video games, but there is a problem with placing an ad in an environment where the consumer is not forced to look at the ad. For example, you watch the commercials (if you don’t have a DVR) while waiting for the show to continue. You might not pay much attention to them, but there they are in your face and that is what companies care about. In a video game, however, the ads are placed in the environment around you but that doesn’t mean you have to stare at it – after all, you are busy playing the game. If you do, however, look at an in-game ad, these companies want to know that. They want to know if their ad is reaching the audience. There is really no way of knowing whether or not I looked at the Intel ad while blasting away some aliens. Without this information advertisers are unable to create any strategy for their ad campaigns.

So here is the point of this post. Marketing company Neue Digitale, based in Germany, says that they have found a way to help advertisers with their dilemma. Supposedly, they developed the technology that will record players’ in-game actions which will provide very detailed information about the ads that are placed in the game’s environment. Such actions include how many times the players looked at the ad, at what angle, and for how long. If these guys can actually execute what they are promising, I am sure they will be raking in some serious money in no time.

If you have been living on the moon for the past 7 month so so, AGLOCO is a global community of Internet users whose active members can be paid for all their online activity. In addition to getting paid for your own browsing, you can also be paid for the browsing of people that you refer. So, if you haven’t signed up, go do so.

Become a member of Agloco

Feedburner handles RSS feeds for thousands of bloggers around the world. It was founded by Sam Sethi back in 2003.

According to TechCrunch:

The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

Wow. My congrats goes to Sam Sethi, founder of FeedBurner. Finally the hard work paid off.

Yesterday Google introduced the new beta version of Analytics. Some of the new features include:

• Redesigned reporting interface which allows more customization; hence, you can get your data how you want it
• Trend and Over-time Graph which allows you to compare info for specific date ranges. (I tried it out and its pretty damn cool)
• Map Overlay feature is improved to give you more detailed info for geographic locations.

Until now. Devin Hester who returned the 2006 Super Bowl kickoff for a touchdown, and who set an NFL record with six kick return touchdowns in the regular season will have a 100 point speed rating. Pretty cool, even though he might not be the fastest NFL player to day.

The only question now is: How many players will try to use Hester as a wide receiver? I know a lot of them will. Hell, I might try it out myself just to see how fast he really is. Good thing EA’s improved player ratings in Madden ‘08, so just having a fast guy will not get you a good receiver.

Bear down, Chicago Bears….

Also, Tony Chung was kind enough to add my site to his blogroll. This is a very new blog and getting people over here is not an easy task, so this is good news to me.