If you are like me, and have a 60-inch HDTV, and want the latest gear, you should be at a store tomorrow putting in an order for a Sony PS3. They go on sale tomorrow YouNEWB reports. At up to $600, though, these aren’t gonna be cheap Christmas gifts. Also, if you don’t have an HDTV yet, you’ll want to get one of these otherwise why are you buying a game system designed for HD? So, there goes another $1,000 or more (mine is still about $3,500 at stores). Whew. Just to play games.

I already have an Xbox. I’m not sure I’ll get a Playstation yet, though. I don’t have enough time to watch the HD-DVD’s that Netflix has been sending me, so don’t think I’ll need BlueRay.

But, want to know which system you’re going for? So, do you have an HDTV? Which system are you going with? Xbox 360 or Playstation 3?

Every so often I get a weird phone call that turns out to be from a pretty brilliant guy (my cell phone number is always on my blog, just look to the right column — if I can answer the phone, I will happily talk to you, I don’t return voice mails, though). One of those happened last Thursday when I was driving. I answered the call and a guy said something like “I saw your picture on Valleywag where you were drinking a beer and I thought I’d give you a call.”

Turned out that guy was Dennis Buettner and he runs the U.S. Beer Drinking Team.

I was about to hang up. But, luckily I had nothing to do but drive home from Seagate to my house. An hour of highway with nothing to do except listen to more netcasts or talk radio. So, figured I’d hear him out.

As he talked I liked him more and more. I came to learn that his business is a serious one. Big bucks. He’s been on Oprah! Who is his biggest customer?

Women!

Turns out they buy U.S. Beer Drinking Team T-shirts by the bushel for their guys (among other things). I wish I thought of this business. They are available in 16,000 convenience stores as well as the Targets and big stores. The concept was endorsed
They even have an official netcasting station.

How did he pick beer as a good place to start a business? Well, he just looked up and saw that far more beer than  movie tickets are sold in the world. Marketing 101: go where the money is.

Are you asking yourself, like I did, “why didn’t I think of that?”

Oh, and this business was started as a joke. It’s no laughing matter anymore.

But, now you know why I was drinking beer in Golden Gate Park yesterday. Anyone wanna do an unofficial SF Beer Drinking Meetup?  We might even get Dennis to come out and join us. That guy sure loves his beer.

Disclaimer, Seagate is the only sponsor so far of the ScobleShow. This post, though, wasn’t included in our deal, though it’s important for me to disclose that.

I do appreciate that Seagate is trying different approaches than just interruptive advertising on the Web. Here’s one, where they are sponsoring a design a new portable device contest, hosted over on MySpace.

I was talking with Seagate’s CEO last week (you’ll see that interview too soon, as part of the sponsorship deal) and I asked him why he sponsored my show. He wants Seagate to be seen as the company used to store your life and gave Thomas Hawk an 8GB Compact Flash card to use on Photowalking, which he did yesterday. Interestingly enough, Thomas Hawk had already bought two 750GB Seagate drives before my sponsorship came through. Says they rock. My show is done on a 500GB drive.

Anyway, this kind of advertising is a lot more interesting than if I stick an ad in your face. At least it lets me continue doing my show and bringing other stuff, like this interview with Atlassian’s CEO (they do an enterprise wiki, among other things) — Atlassian didn’t pay for that interview, but I’m appreciative that Seagate is helping pay my salary, buy machines for me to edit with, and helping pay bandwidth costs.

Speaking of bandwidth costs, wanted to call out to CacheFly. I met several of their team members at the Podcasting Expo a week ago, and they host several big-name sites like Digg, TWiT, and Revision3. How much do they charge? $.14 a gigabyte. Bandwidth gets expensive very quickly when you’re throwing around files that are more than 100megabytes. Leo Laporte says CacheFly rocks. That’s good enough for me.