World's most expensive accident? Eight Ferraris, a Lambourghini, and two Mercedes

A luxury car pile up Sunday in Japan littered the highway with 13 sports cars, including eight red Ferraris. There were no serious injuries.

Police investigate damaged Ferrari cars on the Chugoku Expressway in Shimonoseki, southwestern Japan, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011.

Hindsight may always be 20-20, but you don’t need particularly great foresight to know many of the gadgets on today’s market won’t be around in 2020 given how quickly the tech industry keeps changing. In the first half of the 2000s, retailers were buzzing about the prospects of MP3 players and netbooks, but by the end of the decade, those products had largely been replaced by smartphones and tablets.

As tempting as it may be to imagine otherwise, some of the gadgets you may rely on most right now will likely suffer the same fate and be killed off or made obsolete by the end of this decade. Sure, you may still be able to find these products for sale in certain niche stores, but they will no longer be produced for a mass-market audience.0You can still find and buy VCRs and there are people still using mainframes from 1992, so it’s not like this stuff disappears forever,” says Stephen Baker, an industry analyst at the NPD Group. Baker notes that the main reason retailers continue to market and sell outdated products is to cater to shoppers who buy them for nostalgia’s sake, but for all intents and purposes the market has left these products in the dust. So which popular products today will join the likes of VCRs, cassette players and transistor radios in the next few years? MainStreet asked five tech analysts to offer their thoughts on the gadgets that will largely be phased out by the end of this decade.

Photo: mroach/Flickr  Standalone GPS Systems The days of spending $200 or more on a standalone GPS device won’t last much longer, analysts say. “Portable navigation devices like those sold by TomTom and Garmin will probably not be sold in 2020, just because mobile phones will have taken on that function themselves and because GPS systems will be standard equipment in cars,” says Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester, a market research firm. As a result, there won’t be much of a need to buy a product whose only function is to tell you directions. If there is a demand for these GPS systems, it will likely come from a very specific segment of consumers. “Maybe you could argue there will be a market for guys climbing Mount Everest or long-distance truckers or the military, but for the vast majority of consumers, standalone GPS systems will be irrelevant and redundant,” Baker says.

Photo: Jinx!/Flickr E-Readers The e-reader

Social networks are so popular these days that many  marketers and small business owners may feel compelled to use them regardless of whether they make sense or not for the business. I’ve recently been helping some clients to make these decisions, which can be expensive if poorly considered, and I find that many people still have some very basic questions. So I’ll devote a few posts to practical advice that may help clear up the confusion.

Why all the hype?

Online communities have been around since the earliest days of the Internet and in commercial services like CompuServe and The Well. So what’s different today? In 1998, a site called Classmates.com, which is still thriving, introduced the concept of “profiles” and “friends.” While this nation seems second nature today, it was revolutionary at

Google Celebrates Its 13th Birthday with a Doodle

In celebration of Google’s birthday, here’s a look back at Google’s birthday doodle since 2002 -

2002 – Google’s First Birthday Doodle

Google came up with its first birthday doodle in September 27, 2002. The search engine giant turned the letter “L” into a 4 along with a virtual birthday cake accompanying it. During this year, Google introduced some major features, which include -

• Google News
• Google APIs
• Google Labs
• Opened its office space in Australia

2003 – Google Turns 5

Google celebrated its 5th birthday by presenting a doodle similar to its 4th birthday. The letter “L” was changed to 5 and had a cake along with a cap on top of the “O”. During this year, Google acquired Blogger.com and introduced Google AdSense.

2004 – Google Celebrates 5th Birthday

Google had too much of cake in its last 2 years of celebration and decided to go on a diet on its 6th birthday. The 6th anniversary of Google doodle saw balloons and the letter “O” replaced with 6. In this year, the company said that it sold 19,605,052 shares with an opening price of $85 per share. At present, Google’s stock price is $531. It introduced the following services -

• Orkut
• Gmail
• Google Official Blog
• 100+ Google domains
• SMS for mobile
• Google Desktop Search
• Google Scholar
• Google Book Search
• Opened a Tokyo R&D centre

2005 – Google Turns 7

Google certainly missed the cake in its 6th birthday and this time it decided not to go on a diet. The Google doodle included 7 pieces of cake along with the letter “L” replaced with 7. This was a big year for Google, as we saw several number services launched including Google Maps and Google Talk.

Services launched by Google during this year were -

• Google Maps
• Google Codes – code.google.com
• Google Local for mobile
• My Search History
• AdWords
• Blogger Mobile
• iGoogle
• Mobile Web Search
• Google Earth
• Maps API
• Google Talk
• Personalized Search
• Google Blog Search
• Google Reader
• Google Analytics
• Google Transit
• Gmail for mobile

Google logo

The Google logo since May 6, 2010. The major difference in comparison to the previous logo (valid since May 31st 1999) is the reduced distance of the projected shadow behind the word Google.

Google has had several logos since its renaming from BackRub. The current official Google logo was designed by Ruth Kedar, and is a wordmark based on the Catull typeface.^[1] The company also includes various modifications and/or humorous features, such as cartoon modifications of their logo for use on holidays, birthdays of famous people, and major events, such as the Olympics.^[2] These special logos, some designed by Dennis Hwang, have become known as Google Doodles. Google subsidiary YouTube has also featured some custom logos to highlight special events occurring on the site, these have been unofficially nicknamed "Yoodles". As of 14 February 2011 (2011 -02-14)^[ref], Google's own gallery features 1002 logos.^[3]

The Google logo used from May 31, 1999 until May 5, 2010, dropping the previous logo's exclamation point. This is still used as a secondary logo.

The Google logo when a background image/doodle is set on the home page

The Google logo in 1998, used until May 30, 1999.

In 1998 Sergey Brin created a computerized version of the Google letters using the free graphics program GIMP. The exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo.^[4] "There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."^[5]

In 2010, the Google logo received its first major and permanent overhaul since 1999. The new logo was first tested in November 2009,^[6] and was officially launched on May 6, 2010.^[7] It utilises an identical typeface to the previous logo, but features a distinctly orange-colored "o" in place of the previous yellowish "o", as well as more subtle shadow rendered in a different shading style.

The Google logo font is Catull BQ, and it was created for Berthold in 1982 by German designer Gustav Jaeger. Catull has a calligraphic feel with contrasting stroke weights and distinctive serifs.^[8]

Google Doodle

The first Google Doodle^[9] was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. Hwang has been designing the Google Doodles ever since.^[10] Clicking on a Google Doodle links to a string of Google search results about the topic, which can drive a lot of traffic to unsuspecting sites.^[11]

Google doodles have been produced for the birthdays of several noted artists and scientists, including Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Rabindranath Tagore, Louis Braille, Percival Lowell, Edvard Munch, Nikola Tesla, Béla Bartók, René Magritte, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Akira Kurosawa, H. G. Wells, Samuel Morse, Hans Christian Ørsted, Mohandas Gandhi, Dennis Gabor, Constantin Brancusi, Antonio Vivaldi, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Jules Verne among others.^[2] Additionally, the featuring of Lowell's logo design coincided with the launch of another Google product, Google Maps. Google doodles are also used to depict major events at Google, such as the company's own anniversary.^[12] British novelist Roald Dahl has been featured, with the logo containing characters and items from some of his books, such as Matilda. The celebration of historical events is another common topic of Google Doodles including a Lego brick design in celebration of the interlocking Lego block's 50th anniversary. The anniversary of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds has also been celebrated. On February 14, 2007, Valentine's Day, the Google