Friday Morning Pot Pourri

It seemed like a busy week and there was a bunch of stuff I want to highlight:
- Skype now has more than 100 million registered users  – nearly double since eBay blew its brains out to acquire Skype for US$4.1-billion. It's nice to see the Skype PR machine is alive and well.
- Not sure about the secret sauce behind Memeorandum but the mesh conference spent  seven hours in the top spot yesterday. Hey, looks mesh is getting some more love today.
- a new Canadian-made vertical search engine called Eluta, which helps people find job announcements, will be officially launched next week. Nice, clean look – very Web 2.0-ish.
- Wired reports that researchers at the Carleton University in Ottawa are looking at the idea of a biometric security device that “users a person's thoughts to authenticate her or his identity”. No more passcards? Cool.
- With podcasting apparently becoming the New Radio, Frank Barnako suggests that podcasters such as Podtrac, Kiptronic and Rocketboom aren't seeing a lot of love from sponsors. According to Forrester, the mass audience will be there in four years; maybe advertising will follow along cautiously. Business 2.0 has a story that declares video blogs are booming and advertiers are starting to take not.
- My Nortel blog – All Nortel, All the Time – had record traffic yesterday. It could have been a post on Mike Zafirovski and/or a column in the National Post on whether Nortel should merge with Siemens' communications group.
- It's encouraging to see Toronto is awash in Web conferences these days. Aside from mesh, there was iSummit last month and the MSN/Sympatico Digital Ad event yesterday. Meanwhile, Kate Trgovac (a.ka. My Name is Kate)  is busy working on a plan to bring BlogHer to Canada. I should also mention the thriving TorCamp/BarCamp activities.