Summary: If you get an email about something that’s too good to be true, always Google it with the word “hoax” appended. You’ll be amazed to find out that Elvis has indeed passed away and aliens have not in fact invaded the president’s brain.

Today I got an email from a family member asking me about whether she should buy the iphone 5. I asked her why and she loved the idea of the “holographic keyboard”. Huh? Suddenly I thought perhaps I was getting out-geeked by family members learning about new features before I did. Say it isn’t so! Apple is usually very secretive about future iPhone Pheatures and other than guessing what’s next by analyzing Chinese case manufacturer designs, we’re pretty much in the dark until the very end.

Quick searches (“iphone 5 hoax”) landed me to this now-famous (21 million views!) YouTube which shows an incredibly impressive demonstration of the (now watch the wording here) “iPhone 5 Concept Features”.

Yes, it’s a hoax. Sorta. It’s actually a brilliant marketing play by Aatma Studios on a “concept” with “our vision of key features” that an iPhone 5 or “subsequent models” could have

In other words, this is vaporware. Doesn’t exist. My recommendation is that you wait until after the formal launch to decide if iPHone5 is right for you.

I am speechless after seeing the concept video of the iPhone 5 that is set to be released later this year. It is an ultra thin design, has a laser keyboard and has holographic display. Just Wow!

The CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, just penned a blog post combining an apology for how they handled recent price increases and an announcement of a new company spinoff, “Quickster”, which will handle the DVD-by-mail service. The idea is that Netflix focuses on streaming and Quickster focuses on DVD by mail.

I know a lot of people are upset about the price increase (if you did both streaming and dvd by mail you will now pay more for what you used to get) but IMO Reed did the right thing. Why? He is absolutely correct that companies rarely if ever transition from one paradigm to another. For example, IBM did not successfully transition to the PC market (they no longer produce PCs) and traditional newsprint companies are struggling to succeed in the online world. The best example of all, Blockbuster, is struggling to stay out of bankruptcy.

Why do companies fail to make the transition? Because they must “eat their own children” i.e. they must sacrifice their existing customer base in order to grow the new one. And as you might guess, nobody likes eating their own children (ETOC).

Netflix is at a point where they must either ETOC, fail like the rest, or spin off the old business. Spinning off the DVD business makes the most sense to me. Quickster now gets to compete in the DVD market where it will experience a slow and gradual decline while Netflix can really focus on the exploding streaming business. What will be particularly interesting is that as these two companies further separate themselves, will Netflix have the courage to “take out” Quickster like they would want to eliminate Blockbuster?

That will be the moment of truth for Netflix. We’ll see if they will be willing to “eat their previous offspring” or not.

What do you think about the spinoff? Lets try to keep the comments off the rate increase as I would agree nobody would support it and there’s no point in ranting about something we all agree on (we don’t like rate increases!). I’d like to get some feedback on what you think about the business concept of spinning off Quickster vs. keeping it within Netflix.

I’m so torn between getting and iPad right now and holding off until the Android tablets drop enough in price. Here’s one more straw on the camel’s back as what looks like a nice 10″ tablet with 16gb of storage going for $100 less than an iPad w/ the same amount of memory. Is that enough to make me buy the Android’s limited app selection? Probably not (meaning that yes, fans, I would, today, buy an iPad) but if the prices keep dropping and more apps start showing up on the Android, Apple will really have to keep cranking out the hits as they have in the past to stay out in front of this tablet monster.

What do you think?

Google Googles is one of those OMG! apps. You just take a picture of something in public and Google attempts to match the image against its database and provide you more information. It’s quite astounding and an indication of a “virtual assisted reality” future where our sunglasses constantly scan what we’re looking at and continually provides more in-depth information (think Terminator eyes).

Though that feature isn’t quite here yet, you can still get some pretty good functionality with this App. It’s worth the free install if only to try it out and show to your friends. Besides, it also scans QR codes too.

Let’s say that I’m going on vacation, and I decide to use my Android-powered phone as my primary camera. Goggles would identify landmarks, paintings and other interesting objects in my photos. I can share these facts about my vacation with my friends right from my Goggles search history.