W. P. Carey MBA - Executive Program - Arizona State University

Ranking pitchers

If you enjoy recording data while at baseball games, here is a new way to graph pitcher performance:

Colby Cash has created a 2-D projection of the K/Inn, BB/Inn and HR/Inn of each ERA qualifying pitcher from 2003. Basically, if you are in the upper left corner of the graph, you're very good.

Follow the link to see this graph large enough to read the details.

Here are a few comments from Baseball Musings on the pitchers in the graph:

-- Kevin Brown is located right between Clemens and Pettitte. He's a good replacement for either.

-- Vazquez is better than both Clemens and Pettite, so he should be an upgrade for NY.

-- The Yankees are the only team with three pitchers in the upper left quadrant.

And when the Diamondbacks traded Schilling, they traded the best pitcher in the game according to this graph.

Spring Training opportunity

If you only go to one Spring Training game this Spring, try to make it a White Sox game. But not just any White Sox game -- try to make it one where they are facing a National League team. The reason is that they have a new pitcher with an amazing side-arm delivery and they won't be using him against any of their AL opponents in Spring Training:

The White Sox are using an interesting strategy this spring. They are only using Shingo Takatsu against NL hitters:

With a funky, sidearm delivery, Takatsu has been baffling White Sox hitters during batting practice and his off-speed pitches have been particularly nasty.

"I don't want to pitch him against any American League team down here unless I have to,'' said Sox pitching coach Don Cooper. "I'd rather make it a complete surprise attack. Nobody's seen him, so let's keep him under wraps.''

The White Sox will play six exhibition games against the NL Arizona Diamondbacks this spring, and they also face the Colorado Rockies five times. If that's not enough to give Takatsu suitable work, the Sox have three "B'' games as another option.

What a difference 2.2 billion seconds can make

Here is a fascinating video of a woman aging 69 years (2.2 billion seconds), speeded up 200 million times so the whole process appears before your eyes in less than a minute.

This animation was created using a series of eight photographs, that were taken over the span of a woman's lifetime. A set of images, called key frames, was created from these photographs to show how she looked at different times in her life. The key frames gradually transform from one to the other through a process called morphing.

There are other amazing videos in their gallery (Playing With Time). Here's one showing changes during a pregnancy.

Maybe there is some cardio benefit

Have you ever wondered if those "push this button to cross street" buttons at busy intersections were really wired into anything? You can cease wondering, at least if you live in New York:

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.

The dawning of neuromarketing

Remember when it was part of "modern" marketing techniques to get kids to recognize corporate logos before they could pick their own parents out of a crowd; or when people were worried that changing "scents" in the ventilation system would cause people to stay longer than they had intended at the slot machines; or, the worry over subliminal advertising planting desires in us through images only our subconscious could pick up?

The new steps in marketing make those techniques seem quite demur: Emory has lent its MRI equipment and psychiatrists to the study of the human brain so that Coca-Cola and K-Mart can better understand how best to incline us to spend our money at their places of business:

By now, most of us in the appropriately concerned corners have heard at least something about Emory University’s neuromarketing research center, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences. The latest innovation in a never-ending quest to decode consumer behaviors, the institute uses Emory University Hospital’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to scan the brains of human subjects on behalf of corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, K-mart and Home Depot.

Next steps in "thought science" may be more direct: perhaps wireless electrode implants (free with a case of beverages) that set off minor seizures if you enter the "wrong" store; or cause involuntary nausea if you order the "wrong beverage"; or, won't allow you to say "charge it please" if you are ordering the "wrong product" from the "wrong place." Bawaaaahaaaaahaaaaaa ....

Crab dinner

But this time, it's not the crab. It's what the crab -- or crabs -- are eating. Ten million strong, these are not your "have them over for dinner" crustaceans:

The monster crabs, which can weigh up to 25lb and have a claw-span of more than three feet, are proving so resilient that scientists fear they could end up as far south as Gibraltar.

Energised by a mysterious population explosion a decade ago, whole armies of the crustaceans - known as the Kamchatka or Red King Crabs - have already advanced about 400 miles along the roof of Europe, overwhelming the ports of northern Norway.

They now number more than 10 million and have reached the Lofoten Islands off north-west Scandinavia, leaving in their wake what one expert described as "an underwater desert".

A plea for less pleonasm

The word of the day for leap-day.

Why CD sales are declining: another insight

Will the music industry's aggressive fight against downloading make major strides towards reversing the decline in CD sales? One argument is that it will have little affect. The reason can be seen in the graph on the left from Edison Media Research, as first shown in the eMarketer. According to this research, the largest influence on which CDs people buy is radio. Friends and relatives are a distant second. And the major trend in radio over the past three years has been consolidation:

Due to consolidation, today Radio plays a fewer variety of artists, and airs less songs. Consumers hear less music.

And they buy less. What should the RIAA do to increase the sales of CDs? Fight radio consolidation is one idea:

If the RIAA were smart -- and if you suspect by now I think they are not, congratulations, you've been paying attention -- they would hire a lobbyist to petition against pretty much everything Clear Channel Radio ever requests of Congress.

Is it really smart, though, to identify as your primary target the medium that lets the public know about your product? The trends in sales have brought levels back to what they were in the late 1990's -- perhaps it's too early to make any lasting enemies trying to reverse things immediately. And there's still no discussion about whether music is influencing the sales of music CDs.

The secrets of a successful media company

Here is an essay by the CEO of the Washington Post. The introduction:

At last week’s 2004 MBA Media and Entertainment Conference, keynote speaker Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, quickly gave two reasons why he was an odd choice to deliver the address. First, a self-described "third generation inheritor of a 19th century business," his professional experience hardly reflected the entrepreneurial aspirations of members of the audience. And second, he said, "There are several trends in the media industry, of which the Washington Post Company participates in zero." One trend the company particularly eschews is the obsession with quarterly earnings reports.

More on outsourcing

A large controversy was set off this past week when one of President Bush's economic advisors said publicly that he thought the outsourcing of U.S. jobs was probably good for the U.S. in the long run. Since then, others have joined in the debate, including academics and consultants:

Experts at Wharton and the Boston Consulting Group point out that outsourcing is as old as the corporation. Increasingly, sourcing work overseas is no longer a tactical option that can help firms save a few dollars here and there; it is a strategic necessity for any company that cares about its long-term competitiveness.

An extended essay brings some content to this discussion, information that may have been obscured by the volume of the political debate earlier in the week.

UPDATE: Tom Peters has posted "16 Hard Truths" about what he calls "Off-shoring." Among several quotes that he includes are these:

"The world has arrived at a rare strategic inflection point where nearly half its population -- living in China, India, Russia -- have been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers, who can do just about any job in the world. We're talking about three billion people." (Craig Barrett, CEO, Intel)

"The notion that God intended Americans to be permanently wealthier than the rest of the world, that gets less and less likely as time goes on." (Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics)

Inside look at the tenure process at Harvard Business School

Some new information has come to my attention about the HBS promotion process ... that, I think, sounds the death knell for the "delicate experiment" in bridging theory and practice at the school.

This posting by a faculty member at HBS on his personal blog has raised questions about the appropriateness of the tenure process at HBS. The Crimson covers the story:

"A junior faculty member at Harvard Business School is using his popular weblog to sound a warning that the school’s prestige is in jeopardy, but HBS faculty and staff vigorously dispute his claim."

Opportunities for political contributions

Continuing opportunities: For those who didn't get a chance to give to the Wesley Clark campaign while he was running for the Democratic nomination, there is a chance to give now that he isn't running:

So that I may properly transfer the incredible support, energy and resources of my campaign to the eventual Democratic nominee, I need you, one of my most loyal and generous supporters, to help today. The costs of shutting down a national organization are costly.

As he puts it, "the costs ... are costly." It's hard to say it clearer than that.

And if you still have donation funds left over, Howard Dean -- having spent about $41 million worth of donations before the primaries started -- is looking for more donations now that the primaries, for him, are finished:

Can you help by making a small contribution today?" Dean asked in his Tuesday e-mail. "I won't suggest a specific amount: $250, $100 or even $50 would be appreciated.

Even $50 would be appreciated, though it sounds like that might be the lower bound on the appreciation meter. And if you still have a bit more you wish to unload, there's the Bush campaign -- they lost some momentum at about $250 million or so and could use a boost.

There is no shortage of ways to participate in democracy.

Allergies in (to?) Western Civilization

In today's Guardian, Prince Charles is weighing in on allergies and what he sees are two trends with some strking similarities: the more "civilized" we get, the more people seem to suffer from allergies. Coincidence? Prince Charles thinks not.

There is accumulating evidence that the rise in allergies could be directly linked to the way in which we live

What part of how we live?

We spend up to 80% of our time indoors, and the sealing of our houses to conserve heat and energy, the increase in soft furnishings and the rising numbers of pets all increase the chance of those genetically at risk becoming sensitised to domestic allergens such as dust mites, moulds, cats and dogs. Similarly, at work, increasing allergies give rise to the "sick building" syndrome.

The Prince has some ideas on how to reduce some of the adverse effects of being indoors so much:

Children raised on livestock farms have only one third of the incidence of allergy when compared to their non-farming rural peers. In Africa and Asia, allergy is much higher in urban than in rural populations. It seems that exposure to higher levels of bacteria, viruses and fungi stimulates the immune response away from allergy.

Of course, people in rural Africa and Asia have life expectancies that are about ten to fifteen years less than urban Brits living indoors, but if it's allergy one is trying to get away from, it's a tradeoff to consider.

Whether or not you accept the solution, Prince Charles believes he has identified the culprits:

Factors associated with western society, such as overeating, lack of exercise and an obsession with hygiene ... are conspiring to weaken our defence against the environment.

If you aren't ready to move to a livestock farm, much less rural Africa, for the full cure, is there anything to be done at home? Yes!

acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine and controlled breathing have shown benefit

He didn't mention it, but a little less bathing probably wouldn't hurt, either. For those with allergies -- you know who you are -- this essay is for you.

Rocket Science

Rocket science for every person: "Thunderous and exciting" matchstick rockets. How to build them, how to launch them and important safety tips for the rocketeer. It's all here, with helpful illustrations.

Bettman Archive: A "Picture Mine"

Buried in a vacated limestone mine are 11 million pictures, negatives, and the information identifying them and their contents. They are under the ground in this repository to protect them from further deterioration.

They were moved from Manhattan to a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania in 2001 on the recommendation of Henry Willhelm, an authority on preserving photographs, not just because the site has iron gates and armed guards but more importantly because there they can be kept at sub-zero temperatures. Willhelm ... believes that the photographs, which had been deteriorating badly, will now last for thousands of years.

Permission can be obtained to look through the archives for various images and the accompanying explanatory information. As media expand and the ability to search and retrieve information grows, content will have greater value -- something to fill the media that are available to distrbute.

Bill Gates' Corbis company owns the archive. Gates is personally responsible for the decision to pack the archive into 19 semi trucks and move it to safety.

Looking to move up?

There are quite a few opportunities. The current Forbes issue has a list of the ten most expensive homes in the U.S. that are currently for sale (publicly listed).

The average price of the ten is a little over $49 million with the cheapest being available at $38 million. Before jumping at one of these, be aware that none of the ten most expensive on last year's list have sold yet. With a little patience, the listings may change to $38 million OBO.

At right is the most expensive, the home of Cheryl Gordon, widow of real estate mogul Edward Gordon:

Although the property isn't on the ocean, the estate has a U.S.G.A.-rated golf course, with nine drilled holes designed to be played in both directions; a 25,000-square-foot main house; 65 acres; and three ponds, one of which is so large it's described as lakelike.

The description is helpful. Three ponds for $75 million? To me, iffy. Three ponds and a LAKE (even "lakelike")? OK -- the $75 million is starting to make a lot more sense.

Interior lighting

Scientest are enabling more efficient search routines, by adding light where it hasn't been before-- women's handbags:

The very solution they were looking for is now available in the form of the Smart Surface Technology developed by Bayer Polymers and the Swiss company Lumitec. It is based on electroluminescence (EL) and is really and truly a "cool" concept because, unlike other light sources, it does not produce heat.

Orkut.com was a research project

An earlier post on social networking and the ire that a new entrant -- Orkut -- had brought to that arena didn't consider the possibility that Orkut wasn't really a business enterprise but a student gathering data for a master's thesis. This revelation makes the terms of service from Orket more understandable:

"By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials."

HACT has the information on the real motivation behind the by-invitation-only social networking site:

Orkut.com, a popular social networking Website which has attracted the attention of the some of the Internet's biggest names, was revealed today by its creators to be an elaborate "reality Internet" project to form the basis of a master's thesis.

"We figured we couldn't keep it secret much longer anyway," said Orkut Buyukkokten, after whom the distinctive blue-colored meet-and-match site was named. "I didn't think we could do it this long in the first place, actually."

Orkut.com opened its virtual doors January 23 on an invitation-only basis. Its user base grew rapidly, reaching over 50,000 in the first two weeks and attracting such Internet luminaries as Alan Cox, a well-known and important contributor to the open source operating system GNU/Linux, and Brian Behlendorf of the Apache group.

The site was revealed today as a data-gathering project for the master's thesis of a member of the Orkut.com team who wished to remain nameless.

MP3.COM assets for sale

Remember MP3.com? It had to close down because of downloading restrictions. Here are some of the MP3.com assets being auctioned off March 10 and 11th to help cover their debts: a customized Harley, a massage table, a pool table, a new Hummer (with on-board TV), wall art, old-time jukebox ... all the things one needs to run a small internet company. On-line bidding.

Senators are very savvy investors

How savvy? As a group the New York Times reports that they beat the market by 12% last year. CEO's, for comparison, beat the market by only 5%, so members of the U.S. Senate are doing about twice as well as the people who actually manage the private sector.

But what is most amazing is their timing:

Sure, they did way better than us ordinary schmoes. And yeah, they even did a lot better than top corporate executives, beating the market by 12% compared to the execs' 5%.

But who knows? Senators are probably able to hire pretty good financial planners, aren't they? Maybe it's all completely innocent. But then there was this:

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

Uncanny indeed! Maybe somebody should bring a class action suit against the entire senate. And quickly, before they pass some kind of tort reform bill that makes it impossible....

As Jane Galt suggests, having Congress put together more financial regulations may not solve all free-market abuses, though this NYTimes article makes clear that they clearly understand investments and market timing.

Global flyer getting ready for take-off

This is the VirginAtlantic Global Flyer, an aircraft designed to fly around the world on a single tank of gas -- 80+ hours at over 50,000 feet elevation without a break. There is an interesting Popular Science article describing the attempt:

Around the world on a single tank of gas has been done. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager accomplished the feat in 1986, flying Burt Rutan's brilliant propeller-driven Voyager aircraft. It was a gruelling nine-day ordeal for the duo, and it stretched aviation technology to its limits.

But Richard Branson and Steve Fossett think they can push the technology even further ... flying solo, and in only a third the time.

Sometime in mid-2004, the jet-powered Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer—also designed by Rutan—will take off from the United States, piloted by serial record-breaker Fossett, on an 80-hour voyage that will bring it right back around to the same airport.

The all-carbon-fiber frame allows this aircraft to carry four times its own weight in fuel. On takeoff, 84% of the total weight of the craft will be fuel. The plan is to ride the jetstream around the globe, increasing the speed while being efficient with fuel.

A great deal on an Hitachi microdrive

Here it is:

The $249 iPod mini contains a $479.95 Hitachi MicroDrive. So the best deal on buying a MicroDrive is to buy a iPod mini and take it apart. You get the MicroDrive for almost 50% off and you get a free pair of headphones. You can slap an old compact flash card into the mini and keep on rocking.

You'll have to reformat, though. Here's the full story:

The iPod/microdrive hack does work.... you can't format the microdrive in the camera[, though]. You need to mount drive on you system with a CF reader. Then format it FAT and it works fine. The drive out of the mini has a partition on it that their camera can't deal with. A full wipe on your machine solves the problem and gets you a cheap mammoth camera card.

Musclebots

The New Scientist issue of February 28 will contain an article on the first muscle-powered microbot:

A silicon microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine.

This distinctly futuristic development could lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that would allow paralysed people to breathe without the help of a ventilator. And NASA- which is funding the research- hopes swarms of crawling "musclebots" could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites.

No one was more surprised to see the microbots move than the team who has been trying to make moving bots but after three years of futile attempts were getting less optimistic. The microbot uses heart muscle from a rat:

The device is an arch of silicon 5o micrometres wide. Attached to the underside of the arch, the team has grown a cord of heart muscle fibres. It is the contraction and relaxation of this cardiac tissue that makes the arch bend and stretch to produce the bot's crawling motion. And the muscle is fuelled by a simple glucose nutrient in a Petri dish.

Evaluating new ideas

Here is a way to calculate a "Crackpot Index Value" for a new idea (and its author). It was developed for physics, but appears to be more widely applicable. Higher index values indicate a higher "crackpot" category. Here are a couple of the ways to get points:

10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.

10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.

10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.

10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.

10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.

Prague real estate market

Prices, availability and pictures on flats available in Prague now.

Gamblers be aware

Here's a way to make a little money on bets (probably very little, but it all depends on how much you bet): coin tosses aren't random. More correctly, they aren't totally random. There is a bias.

The mechanical coin tosser shown at right helped prove that a coin tossed exactly the same way will land exactly the same way. What makes coin tosses have random outcomes is the variability introduced through the coin flipper: different speeds, different heights, caught in different ways.

But even when these sources of variation are accounted for, there is still a slight bias -- the coin comes up heads a little more often than it comes up tails. Just about any coin and any flipper.

Persi Diaconis is a statistician with a non-traditional background. He ran away from school to join the circus, traveled with the carnival for several years, learned how to do magic tricks and has invented several himself. He later returned to formal education, got a PhD in statistics and mathematics and joined the faculty at Stanford. About ten years ago he started investigating the randomness of coin flips using machines, high-speed cameras and light attachments to count rotations. He took a job at Harvard, got the engineers there to build a mechanical coin flipper (shown above), finished up some of the technical investigation and began building mathematical models to analyze the outcomes.

Now back at Stanford, he is continuing the work. What about the coin flip at the start of NFL games? In that flip, they allow the coin to bounce on the ground, introducing more variation. Is it enough to make the outcome truly 50-50? Stay tuned.

Outsourcing's return to the U.S.

Tom Friedman went to India to observe first-hand the technical work being done there as a result of U.S. outsourcing:

when I came to the 24/7 Customer call center in Bangalore to observe hundreds of Indian young people doing service jobs via long distance — answering the phones for U.S. firms, providing technical support for U.S. computer giants or selling credit cards for global banks — I was prepared to denounce the whole thing. "How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.

Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

India's newest business area is animation, where Jadoo Works has become one of the world's leading animators:

India, though, did not take these basic animation jobs from Americans. For 20 years they had been outsourced by U.S. movie companies, first to Japan and then to the Philippines, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The sophisticated, and more lucrative, preproduction, finishing and marketing of the animated films, though, always remained in America. Indian animation companies took the business away from the other Asians by proving to be more adept at both the hand-drawing of characters and the digital painting of each frame by computer — at a lower price.

Some U.S. groups view this as bad and are trying to find legislative ways to keep these technical jobs in the U.S., many of which were never here in the first place.

Give us one more bubble

The moment is near now:

Going Public Day is the great money moment of the entrepreneurial saga. It's the jackpot that justifies why the founders took all those foolish risks - quitting established careers, assuming crushing debt, putting their families through unbearable strain. Sometimes lightning strikes: Every few years, a rising superstar goes public in a blaze of headlines, speculation, and envy and in the process mints a few billionaires whose improbable success sways the next generation of risk-takers to jump off similar cliffs. In the most exceptional cases - Intel in '71, Apple in '80, Netscape in '95 - a hot IPO can even burn a hole in the zeitgeist, creating an entrance for a fresh batch of products, companies, and visionaries to spill out on society, changing it forever.

The Google IPO brings hopes for a return to the good-olde-days when new launches were a daily event. Google's public offering carries the Valley's hopes:

This is more than what the bankers like to call a liquidity event. Already, the Google IPO seems to be heralding a great new round of public offerings - by late January, 26 tech companies were registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to financial research firm Dealogic, all apparently waiting for Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt to prime the pump. Market watchers say Google could start issuing stock as soon as this spring

As one Silicon Valley bumper-sticker said: just give us one more bubble

Wired has a great piece on Googlemania:

Google's a library, an almanac, a settler of bets. It's a parlor game, a dating service, a shopping mall. It's a Microsoft rival. It's a verb. At more than 200 million requests a day, it is, by far, the world's biggest search engine. And now, on the eve of a very public stock offering, it's cast as savior, a harbinger of rebirth in the Valley. How can it be so many things? It's Goooooooooogle.

The photo on the right shows Larry Page, left, Google cofounder and president, products; Sergey Brin, right, cofounder and president, technology. They came out of graduate school with a better algorithm for searching through a large number of character-strings. In America, that can make you a multi-billionaire.

Ripples

Victor Davis Hanson has a relatively new book out, Ripples of Battle. In the book, he discusses three smaller battles (Okinawa (1945), Shiloh (1862), and Delium (424 B.C.)) which have not received the same attention that other battles in these same wars received but were, he shows, influential in ways that are still felt today. The book is reviewed briefly here and the following is an excerpt for the book:

Millions of the anonymous have had their lives altered in ways we cannot grasp for centuries, as a single battle--with all its youth, confined space, and dreadful killing--insidiously warps the memory of friends and families of the fallen [such as Hanson's namesake uncle at Okinawa], twists the thoughts and aspirations of the veterans of the ordeal [such as Socrates at Delium], and abruptly ends the accomplishments of the dead [such as General Albert Sidney Johnson at Shiloh]. In that sense the ripples of battle are also immune from and care little for what people write and read, in or outside the dominant West. They simply wash up on us all as we speak and in ways that cannot fully be known until centuries after we are gone.

RSS in XML

If you aren't familiar with these acronyms now, you will be by the end of this year.

Here is a great summary of not only what they stand for but the business model that is motivating broader use of RSS and the implications that has for how information is distributed on the web.

UPDATE: Here is an interesting discussion of RSS (really simple syndication) versus a newer start-up attempting to accomplish the same thing (ATOM, and these users are saying they have RSS, too: really similar syndication).

Global impact alert avoided

From the BBC:

Astronomers have revealed how they came within minutes of alerting the world to a potential asteroid strike last month.

The alert would include instructions to go ... where, exactly?

At about 30m wide, the asteroid was cosmic small fry, not the type of thing to wipe out the dinosaurs or threaten our species, but still big enough to cause considerable damage after exploding in the atmosphere.

All risk is relative -- this wasn't an "end of the species" event, which gives these scientists a little more comfort than seems appropriate.

"Permission marketing"

P&G Exec Jim Stengel gave a speech on the state of the advertising industry. Amongst many interesting comments from him was this:

All marketing should be permission marketing. All marketing should be so appealing that consumers want us in their lives. We should strive to be invited into consumers’ lives and homes.

When we think of permission-based marketing, most of us think about opt-in online newsletters. We really need to expand this mentality to all aspects of marketing. We must develop creative that both maximizes the channel and appeals to the consumer. For each element of the marketing mix, we should ask ourselves “would consumers choose to look at or listen to this,” and let that be the benchmark.

Jeff Jarvis thinks this is a good first step, but doesn't quite go far enough. It's too "old media" oriented -- the internet is the new domain and it is a conversation, not a lecture. Advertisements are lectures. Jarvis comments:

So rather than trying to create a commercial you force upon a consumer that so darned good he might tolerate if given a choice, realize instead that consumers do now go to advertising when it's useful: I go to Handspring's site to learn about and buy their phone.

... I went to the TreoCentral forums to learn more about Handspring's phone before and after I bought it.
That's ... different from happening to see a good commercial about the phone.

That's the future of marketing.

As Fred Wilson said one morning, "The push model of advertising is over. It's over. It's just a matter of time before people realize it. It's toast."

Salt -- as trendy as olive oil

There used to be discussions about when to salt -- the old school (right before cooking) vs the new school (earlier). As one investigator of the new school said:

The [new school] cooks there salted everything in advance — meats they were preserving as well as those they planned to eat in a few days.

"They broke all sorts of rules ... but it worked. Their food wasn't dry, it tasted really good. I started to wonder."

Now the discussion is not only about when to salt but which salt to use:

chefs and home cooks alike can now choose from a world of salt, including Hawaiian black lava salt, gray fleur de sel de Guérande from Brittany, Peruvian pink salt and a host of other varieties that have become available in the last few years.

"Salt is the new olive oil," said Thomas Keller, the chef of the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., and the new Per Se in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

Internet now bigger than cable TV

According to eMarketer (via Jeff Jarvis), internet is now in more homes than cable TV:

...eMarketer now estimates U.S. household Internet penetration is about 67.9 percent. That compares with a 65.8 percent U.S. household penetration level for cable, according to an eMarketer analysis of Nielsen Media Research and U.S. Census data.

More significantly, Ramsey noted that while cable TV penetration has essentially been flat at about 66 percent of U.S. households, online penetration continues to expand....

“Wow,” said Jes Santoro, vice president-director of integrated media at Earthquake Media, a media shop that buys traditional and online media, upon learning of the online penetration milestone from MediaDailyNews. “I think it is very significant. But it’s symbolic as well.”

“It’s symbolic because it speaks to people’s media consumption habits,” he explained. “Think about cable, you kind of have to have it to have it to get TV reception. It’s almost like a utility. But with the Internet, people go out and get it because they want to use the Internet.”

eMarketer’s Ramsey agreed, noting that it was similar household penetration milestones that first got cable TV on the map with Madison Avenue during various junctures in cable’s history.

And this is just a measure of homes. It doesn't count the access people have to the internet at their places of work; they don't have access to cable or radio at work, so eMarketer's data actually understates the advantage of internet over cable.

Though most advertising revenues are still with TV, they will eventually follow this shift in connectivity.

More on new job creation: Yes! No! Maybe?

The New York Times has three different articles in today's edition, each addressing the topic of job creation in the U.S., each in a different section of the paper, and each coming to a different conclusion. One of the great things about big media is that they have something for just about every constituency. Read the summary here, with links to the original three articles.

Forgiving failure

More than forgiving, rewarding. This is a classic description of the Silicon Valley cultural regard for failure from Michael Lewis:

Get any prominent Silicon Valley person talking about what makes his culture special, and sooner or later he will say something like this: "We have built a new system. Unlike you people back East, we do not stigmatize people as failures. Here we understand that failure is what happens when you try. We reward it."

And it is that attitude (then) that is the foundation for hope (now) for the future:

the most important reason for the Valley's success (and future prospects) is the resilience of the individual entrepreneur .... The last round was good for some, not so good for others. On to the next one.

How many Americans own passports?

The U.S. Government doesn't provide an official estimate, but there are a number of unofficial estimates. It looks like a center point, using government statistics on population and number of passports issued, is around 20%, perhaps a little lower.

The United States is a big place, especially so when Alaska and Hawaii are included. A lot of U.S. citizens appear to be satisfied exploring at home rather than going abroad. And if the Pentagon is correct, even more will follow this trend.

Technical support nightmare

Ever feel like you were getting the run-a-round when you called the technical support 800 number that came with your computer? Here's why:

Several people confess that they've never done more with a computer than check their e-mail. Others admit they haven't even gotten that far.... Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.

This is part of Salon's (registration required) series on getting the inside story on various types of jobs, this time focusing on phone-line technical support. The primary area of training for these non-technical technical-support people is "punting:"

A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else... [quoted here]

You may not want to read the whole thing.

Super-human spam filters

This discussion documents two spam filters that are more accurate in their identification of spam than humans are. Humans come in at 99.8% accuracy while these two filters, using different techniques, both score over 99.9% accuracy. [Via original link.]

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

Elmore Leonard gives ten rules for writers. All are great and they come with his explanation of why each is a good rule and we would be better writers if we followed it.

Watch property values in the U.K.

This Pentagon report underlines the importance of paying close attention to "good deals" on property in the U.K. and "travel specials" for extended vacations there:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

That's barely 15 years from now. If you've been planning a European vacation, now might be the time to fit that in. It may be cheaper in the future, but not quite as enjoyable.

UPDATE: Apparently, many news sources were taking this report seriously. In fact, it wasn't a report prepared by the Pentagon but rather a report prepared for the Pentagon by an outside source that got some scientists together to consider a range of extreme scenarios. The scenario described above certainly fits the bill. One of its originators discussed the report last week on the BBC:

This is very much in the spirit of thinking the unthinkable. The report that we put together for the Pentagon is an extreme scenario, in the sense that most climatologists would say that this is low probability, in the sense of it happening soon, and as pervasively. But it is the Pentagon's job to think about many cases, the worst-case scenario.

"Low probability" seems like something of an understatement. Why is this report big news? Because it is being presented as a Pentagon report. Which it isn’t.

If this isn't enough overkill for you on this amazing report, here's a full history on the report, the media reaction and many links and quotes.

Moblog from your Nokia phone

New posting capability allows you to post, including pictures, to the web from your Nokia cell phone without going through your email provider: digital photo captures from on-site, along with text, directly to the web. You can see additional explanation and example photos here if you're interested.

Supercomputer / this weekend / school gym / be there

A group of students at USC are bringing together 2000 PCs to the school gym over the weekend to be linked together by high-speed networking, creating the first 'flash' supercomputer.

The idea came from one of the students in the computer science course that is sponsoring the event: the flash-mobs of last summer (where a bunch of people congregate, on very short notice, at some specified point for no particular reason, all coordinated by on-line messaging) triggered thinking about a flash-mob of a different type: people bringing their PCs together for the purpose of creating a temporary supercomputer.

How "Yankee" are you?

Take this quick quiz and it will give you a Yankee/Dixie score translated as "percent Yankee." This can be an aid at family reunions when trying to describe where you fit into the family.

"Historic on-line protest"

Grey Tuesday is the site of an on-line protest against EMI and the music industry as a whole. You may be interested to see how they have organized this protest, what they hope to achieve, and the responses of EMI to the protest.

This is clearly the type of virtual protest that would have been impossible even five years ago, but the flash-mob phenomanon of last summer showed by example what can be organized quickly and inexpensively via the web.

Nano-pork

This just in from the Oregonian:

Scientists scramble to gain footing in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology

More discussion here of the increased interest in nanotechnology as the Federal level of investment goes up:

Gov. Ted Kulongoski [of Oregon] plans to ask "Bush administration science officials" that his state get in on federal nano dollars.

To paraphrase former President Johnson, get them by their wallets and their hearts and minds will follow.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

More on outsourcing and job creation

This article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine presents information on the types of jobs that are being created as opposed to those that are being lost of over-seas workers.

One theme of the essay is that most surveys of job loss and job creation have a bias because they notice more of the job losses (in mature sectors of the economy and therefore more easily tracked job types) than they do of new job creations (in smaller, developing areas of the economy) and as a result these surveys give a gloomier picture than, in fact, is real:

In every booming job category I looked at [stone crafters, massage therapists, manicurists] official surveys were missing thousands of jobs. As the economy evolves, however, this bias against small enterprises and self-employment becomes more and more significant. By missing so many new sources of productivity, the undercounts distort our already distorted view of economic value -- the view that treats traditional manufacturing and management jobs as more legitimate, even more real, than craft professions or personal-service businesses. But the truth is, value can come as much from intangible pleasures as it can from tangible goods.

Others who monitor the labor markets disagree with this assessment:

[T]here is no reason to think that the totals of nationwide employment--which are derived from these second and third of these data sources--are substantial undercounts because of any significant "bias against small enterprises and self-employment."

There are more links and discussion here. Earlier posts on this blog can be found here and here.

Repeating history

Read this:

LONDON — "Jerry Springer— The Opera," an exuberant tribute to the American talk show, triumphed at the Laurence Olivier Awards Sunday, winning four awards including best new musical.

Now read this:

The same immoderate ardor inspired their clamors and their applause, as often as they were entertained with the hunting of wild beasts, and the various modes of theatrical representations. These representations in modern capitals may deserve to be considered as a pure and elegant school of taste, and perhaps of virtue. But the tragic and comic muse of the Romans, who seldom aspired beyond the imitation of attic genius, had been almost totally silent since the fall of the republic; and their place was unworthily occupied by licentious farce … [Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 31]

California may not be enough

Here is an argument supporting a change in the rules that would allow foreign-born U.S. citizens to be President of the United States. So long as they have been citizens for a long time.

The argument is being put forward by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"There are so many people in this country that are now from overseas, that are immigrants, that are doing such a terrific job with their work, bringing businesses here, that there's no reason why not," said Schwarzenegger, who became a U.S. citizen in 1983.

People who have been citizens for 20 years should "absolutely" be allowed to run for the Whitehouse, he said. Like himself, for example, though he said he has no interest in running for President.

Links replacing news periodicals?

An article by Terry Teachout discusses the importance of linking in the new media.

"Blogs without links aren’t blogs." Linking transforms individual blogs into a larger community—a blogosphere—whose members freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value.

Women's Wear Daily published statistics on newstand sales of magazines:

According to official figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, out of the 472 magazines it tracks, 319 reported newsstand declines and their combined newsstand sales fell 5.9 percent (3.3 million copies), not counting new titles reporting sales for the first time.

The big picture looks even worse for magazines too small to be counted by the ABC.

Teachout's comment links this to the growth of blogs on the internet, and, from there, the ethics of linking:

Nowhere in the story does the author suggest that blogging might be pulling newsstand sales downward—but I have no doubt that it is. In fact, my guess is that the emergence of blogging will transform the periodical business beyond recognition, as more people come to rely on links as their primary means of reading most magazines.

Links being as important as they are, it strikes me that bloggers ought to be scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due—and not merely to the original publication, either.

His example of full-credit: he doesn't read Women's Wear Daily, he reads artjournal.com, so he should link to WWD and credit artjournal for the link.

My example: I got the link to Teachout and WWD and artjournal from Jeff Jarvis.

Careers in applied probability

The Crossing Over host John Edward may be brought to court in Australia on charges that he really isn't speaking to the dead on his popular program but, rather, is fooling the public. For money.

A formal complaint has been made by Mark Mayer, an illusionist who knows how Edward is able to fool the public. How far has Edward gone in his deception?

"He asks questions in rapid succession, then when he gets an answer he feeds it back as if he already knew the information," Mayer said.

He alleged Edward then used probability, suggesting common names or ailments that were likely to strike a chord with the person in the audience, he said. [Emphasis added.]

The man is using probability -- apparently many people confuse this with actually talking to the dead.

Nader not a blogger

Here is the Nader for President website -- and no blog! Yet. Even the GOP, the incumbent, has a blog of sorts.

In unrelated news, Dean's campaign, which relied on blogging almost exclusively at the start to raise money and through which they raised over $50 million, finished in the red. This, after paying over $7 million in fees to the campaign's director and his company for placing campaign ads.

Pew

"Dubious accounting practices" aren't only practiced by for-profit corporations. Unfortunately, a number of NGO's and various charitable organizations, including the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts, have been found to be engaging in off-the-balance-sheet manuevers that raise questions among auditors about linking "giver's intent" with the actual use of funds. How questionable?

substitute the Pew Charitable Trusts for Halliburton and you get some idea of the fuzzy math prevailing in our nonprofit sector. Beginning this year, the Pennsylvania-based Pew Charitable Trusts changed their legal status from private foundation to public charity.

Here's the catch: Pew argued that its seven trusts should be counted separately to fulfill the charity requirement demonstrating broad public support. Incredibly, both the IRS and the Pennsylvania Attorney General agreed--even though these seven trusts are centrally administered and share the same executive management.

Given Pew's nearly $4 billion in assets, Pew's shift promises to have a seismic impact on the foundation and political worlds.

For those interested in this area professionally, you'll find the entire article interesting. For the rest of us, the article is a useful reminder that just because an organization calls itself non-profit or labels its work "charity," it is still a good idea to investigate what, exactly, happens to money we give to it.

It's up

This week's carnival of the capitalists -- a collection of links and comments on business and economics -- is up.

Searching for a better search engine -- and revenue

Google is planning to launch a free email service, easier to use than Yahoo's free email, they claim. This will build Google's database of email users, containing demographic information and preferences for a wide range of products and services, something very valuable to advertisers. Yahoo -- the search engine "that isn't a verb yet" -- has announced (last week) that it has a new search capability that rivals Google's.

The competition between these two giants of the internet is all about revenue streams: Yahoo initially focused on packaged results for its customers (financial data, portals to specified topic areas, original content) as a means of attracting advertisers. It now has 60 of the 100 largest advertisers on its pages. But it lost the search-engine war and has re-tooled to offer a more competitive alternative to Google.

But the biggest target for both Yahoo and Google is not their internet rival -- it is television advertisers:

Ultimately, Yahoo wants to take share not from other online sites but from television and other traditional media. Of all the time people spent last year using media, 4.9 percent was on the Internet. But online advertising represented only 2.3 percent of all advertising. "Advertisers are looking to get out of the broken model of television," Ms. Millard [of Yahoo] said. "They want to find the men between 18 and 34. We have them on Yahoo."

Mergers and Acquisitions

The recent resurgence in larger-scale merger activity has increased investors' fears, once more, that a company they hold stock in acquires or is acquired -- either way, the chances it turns out well for the regular investor are far from certain.

Here is a full and interesting discussion of mergers and acquisitions illustrated with many examples:

The GOOD: Apple bought NeXT, bringing not only the kernal of its newest Operating System, but getting innovative Steve Jobs to return as CEO in the process. Disney could pull off a “sequel” by buying Pixar, and getting Jobs as CEO.

The BAD: AT&T: Starting with NCR, and went straight downhill from there. A series of disastrous acquisitions to buy “earnings

The UGLY? Comcast/Disney: This deal raises numerous red flags: Disney is a pricey, under performing property with arguably the world's most overpaid CEO; Comcast has no management experience in travel/media/film/TV business.

It's a lengthy discussion with examples in almost every category of merger type.

Music market is downbeat

At right is the chart that has the music market singing the blues. In a recent article, "Never Mind the Music," in CFO magazine, the industry's problems are delineated. It isn't just piracy anymore:

Its woes go far beyond enemy number one—music piracy. Fast-changing consumer tastes, shrinking margins and the general economic downturn were all hitting the music business hard.

The chart seems to suggest that the levels now are similar to levels in the late 1990's. It's the trends that are worrying -- no industry specialists expect them to change in the next year.

The article lists the eight biggest changes to the music industry over the past ten years. In order, they include piracy, digital players (e.g., MP3 players), non-music retailers selling music (e.g., Wal-Mart), consolidation of radio broadcasters (four companies control 60% of the market).

No mention of ways in which music has impacted the music industry. It didn't even make the list.

Financial charts

StockCharts.com provides a very wide range of financial graphics. You can pay for the "no time delay" upgrade, but all the summary and close data are available for free. It's a great resource.

There are many animated charts, too. Try the carpet charts -- each technology sector is presented as a set of carpet squares with each square representing a key company in that sector. Moving your cursor shows individual stats on the various company "carpet squares" and clicking on one square converts the data on other companies to relative measures comparing the current company to the selected company.

Political quiz

One question, not multiple choice: who is the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary?

Answer: George Herbert Walker, III, the first cousin of George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President.

Via Matt Welch.

Sears moves applicances

Sears used to be the largest retailer in America. There were many concerned that Sears was too big and that it was driving out smaller competitors, plus little regional retail stores (like Wal-Mart) had a hard time getting started because of Sears' ability to obtain lower costs through volume buying.

Sears has been dealing with retail difficulties the past five to ten years and now sees its one remaining area of dominance under threat: appliances.

Apparel sales remain sluggish and the credit-card unit was sold, so Sears, Roebuck & Co. is moving to shore up its most successful business: home appliances.

The Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based retailer is adding home appliances to its free-standing Sears Hardware stores, which are being renamed Sears Appliance and Hardware. Appliances were placed in 35 of its hardware stores and should be in most of the remaining 103 by year's end, the company said Thursday.

Sears has long been the No. 1 retailer of appliances, boasting almost triple the market share of its next closest competitor. But its share has declined slightly the past two years, while those of Lowe's Cos. and Home Depot Inc. are creeping up with aggressive marketing. Both big-box competitors are adding stores rapidly.

There is some discussion of the wisdom of this shift here.

Brain cells on a chip

This kind of technological breakthrough is both invigorating and at the same time a little chilling:

Researchers in Calgary and Germany have pulled off a groundbreaking melding of machine and biology by successfully growing brain nerve cells from a snail on a silicon microchip.

Not only did the transplanted cells survive on the chip but they actually grew and incorporated the chip as it if were a brain cell.

Professor Naweed Syed of the University of Calgary said the research proves that it's possible to grow a network of brain cells and reconnect them on a specially designed chip.

What are the longer-term business implications of this type of promising research? Here is the perspective of one commentator:

Want to get involved in the business of the future? If I was back in school, I'd be looking at a neuroscience or cognitive science undergrad, followed by an MBA. This stuff is going to be big someday.

The EU and world influence

Part of the purpose behind the large amount of work required to put together the European Union was the creation of a more unified and more influential global platform for Europe. An article in the Guardian argues that this influence is decreasing:

The European Union will eventually get its internal affairs in order to some degree. But it will be doing so at a time when long-term trends are taking away some of the influence it once enjoyed, and some of the opportunities it might have expected as a consequence of European successes in the future.

These trends are not, in the first instance anyway, those to do with population, pensions, migration, and out-sourcing that have led to suggestions that Europe will be increasingly outpaced by America, India and China. More important is the simple fact of lost leverage in the three regions of most importance to Europe - the US, Russia and the Middle East.

The article also contains comments on Middle East influence. Drezner has a number of comments on the article and links to other's comments.

Jury duty makes you smarter

Here's an interesting description of jury duty from the beginning to the final decision.

And here is Dave Winer's comment on how jury duty is an example of an experience that actually helps make us smarter by instructing us on how to make decisions:

It makes you smarter about our form of government. To people in the system, the judge, attorneys, clerks, this is no surprise. But until you do it, you don't get it, 90 percent of what they do is train you how to make a decision. A relatively small portion of the process focuses on the facts of the case. It's why when you hear jurors speak after the trial, they exude such competence. It's a competence building experience.

Google vs going to the school library

The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the degree to which Google is affecting student use of libraries (and librarians -- the "orginal search engine" as they are called in the article):

Google has become the symbol of competition to the academic library. In 2003 a torrent of articles in the popular press sang the praises of Google while heralding the demise of libraries or, worse, ignoring libraries and librarians -- the original search engines. Such articles make academic librarians wince, especially with the usual quotes from students along the lines of, 'Oh, our campus has a library? I didn't know that, but now that you mention it, why would I go there?

This trend will only increase now that Google is adding text search (the search of documents in addition to their traditional search of web sites).

Productivity vs rate of employment

Here is an interesting perspective on the relationship between productivity and the chances of keeping employment. The writer (Virginia Postrel) brings a point of view to the topic that is an important contribution to understanding the current trends toward more outsourcing of technical work to overseas countries.

Glenn Reynolds comments:

it's very important that business writers start looking at this question in precisely the way that Virginia does, or protectionist sentiments are likely to grow.

A current piece in the Economist is saying that there is no "jobless recovery."

UPDATE: A little more on the Economist's cover story on outsourcing of jobs: Here is a link to their editorial. And here is the core of their argument:

For the past 250 years, politicians and hard-headed men of business have diligently ignored what economics has to say about the gains from trade—much as they may pretend, or in some cases even believe, that they are paying close attention. Except for those on the hard left, politicians of every ideological stripe these days swear their allegiance to the basic principle of free trade. Businessmen say the same. So when either group issues its calls for barriers against foreign competition, it is never because free trade is wrong in principle, it is because foreigners are cheating somehow, rendering the principles void. Or else it is because something about the way the world works has changed, so that the basic principles, ever valid in themselves, need to be adjusted. And those adjustments, of course, then oblige these staunch defenders of free-trade-in-principle to call for all manner of restrictions on trade.

In their cover-story article, they comment:

Although America's economy has, overall, lost jobs since the start of the decade, the vast majority of these job losses are cyclical in nature, not structural. Now that the economy is recovering after the recession of 2001, so will the job picture, perhaps dramatically, over the next year.

These jobs are coming back? Which ones?

Read Daniel Drezner's discussion of this topic and the Economist's take on it in particular (including nice graphics).

A new leading indicator

The ups and downs of everyday life affect just about everyone. This site compiles those individual swings from sad to happy and back and produces a "world mood index" and tracks it versus some financial indices. Input your current mood here and update the world mood index to give a more complete reading of the current overall mood of the world's population.

World Trade Center Memorial

The designs that were submitted but didn't win are all cataloged here, 5,201 of them. Expect to see a very wide range of ideas.

Aromatic email

An electronics firm in England has developed the "Scent Dome," a device that will produce about 60 different smells depending on the electronic code that it receives. By linking these codes to your email, you can trigger the release of the desired aroma as the recipient opens your email:

Smells trigger very powerful and deep-seated emotional responses, and this additional element to the internet will enhance users' online experience by adding that crucial third dimension.

The Scent Dome is set to sell for 250 pounds Sterling or about $450.

This opens up a whole new realm of "joke" emails and spam abuses. It will no doubt increase the sales of spam filters.

New weblog feature

We have added links to some faculty web pages -- the links are on the left-hand-side. Pay a visit to their sites when you get a chance.

Update on the "information economy" failure

Here's the reaction a seasoned venture capitalist has to Eli Noam's Financial Times piece referenced here earlier. He "disagrees:"

I don't know what world Eli is living in, but its not in the trenches. There is opportunity every where I look in the information economy right now. Maybe I should go up to Columbia and offer Eli a tour of it.

What is happening, as so brilliantly described by another economist, Carlota Perez, in her book "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital" is that we are at the end of the "installation" period where building infrastructure was the recipe for making money and at the start of the "golden age of IT" where using it in innovative ways will be the key to making money.

Apple isn't making a lot of money on iMacs anymore, but they are making a ton of money right now selling iPods and Airport Extremes. Soon, those cash cows will pave the way for new Apple businesses built around Garage Band and iTunes. As Jeff Jarvis said in his post, "There's somebody using Apple's Garageband in a garage right now creating a future hit that will surely be sold at Apple's iTunes store."

Eli should come down from his ivory tower and hit the streets and see what crafty entrepreneurs are doing with commoditized infrastructure. They are building the "golden age" of IT before our very eyes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is a compilation of comments on Noam's article and his thesis more broadly. The range of points of view and the pointedness of the comments makes it interesting reading.

The "information economy" is failing?

The Financial Times contains an article by Columbia Professor Eli Noam in which he explains what he sees as a massive, global decline -- potentially a collapse -- of the information economy. Here is a portion of his argument:

...we need to recognise that the entire information sector - from music to newspapers to telecoms to internet to semiconductors and anything in-between - has become subject to a gigantic market failure in slow motion. A market failure exists when market prices cannot reach a self-sustaining equilibrium. The market failure of the entire information sector is one of the fundamental trends of our time, with far-reaching long-term effects, and it is happening right in front of our eyes.

Why is this occurring?

The basic structural reason for this problem is that information products are characterised by high fixed costs and low marginal costs. They are expensive to produce but cheap to reproduce and distribute, and therefore exhibit strong economies of scale with incentives to an over-supply. Second, more information products are continuously being offered to users. And information products and services are becoming more "commodified", open, and competitive.

The main result of these factors is that prices for content, network distribution and equipment are collapsing across a broad front. It seems to have become difficult to charge anything for information products and services. The music industry is unable to maintain prices. Online publishers cannot charge their readers, except for a few premium providers such as the FT. International phone call prices have dropped, and with internet telephony will move to near-zero. Web advertising prices have collapsed. Much of world and national news is provided for free. A lot of software is distributed or acquired gratis. Academic articles are being distributed online for free. TV and radio have always been free unless taxed. Even cable TV, at 20,000 programme hours a week, is available to viewers at a cost of a 1/10 of 1 cent per hour. Newspaper prices barely cover the physical cost of paper and delivery; the content is thrown in for free...

The results and the (inadequate) strategic response of the information marketplace:

The reaction of information sector companies to the price declines is to cut costs, outsource, hedge, diversify and use new processes such as micropayments. They will try to innovate to differentiate their products. But there is a limit to the ability of individuals and organisations to absorb rapid change over a sustained period. Therefore, the main strategy will be to consolidate and cartelise in order to maintain pricing power. As a result, prices and profits rise (as well as media concentration), which will lead again to expansion, entry, and by the same economic logic, to a new price collapse, with a general downward trend in prices.

A further discussion of this carried on by Jeff Jarvis here.

Making panel discussions actual discussions

Most people know that going to a panel discussion at a conference can be a numbing experience.

With blogging techniques, though, panel discussions might be adjusted to include a lot more people, more interaction, more ideas shared and more benefit to all. Here's the first part of how panel discussions could be changed into something richer and more interactive:

With just a little added software, I think someone could blow up and reinvent the panel discussion:

1. Give the entire audience a back channel (and, of course, wi-fi). Give them a chat channel and wiki so they can share comments and resources.
2. Display that back-channel to all, including the panel (and don't be bothered by a little good-natured heckling).
3. Allow the audience to post questions from the first moment and allow the audience to prioritize those questions. (A wiki could do that.)
4. Put on the panel an advocate of the back-channel who acts as another moderator and brings up the good questions and arguments and refererences from the audience, including those not in the room.
5. Whenever possible, webcast the panel and the back-channel to get more expert input from the world.

The full discussion is interesting and practical.

Giant step

A surprising breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer:

DALLAS - An experimental vaccine wiped out lung cancer in some patients and slowed its spread in others in a small but promising study, researchers say.

Three patients injected with the vaccine, GVAX, had no recurrence of lung cancer for more than three years afterward, according to the study of 43 people with the most common form of the disease, non-small cell lung cancer. . . .

The cancer disappeared in three of the advanced-stage patients. Two of those patients previously had chemotherapy, which failed. In the rest of the advanced-stage patients, the disease remained stable and did not spread for almost five months to more than two years.

This would be great if it turns out as hoped.

And here is the "business side" of innovation in health care:

Some of my practice is helping pharma (including biotechnology) companies raise the capital necessary to get through the three phases that must be done before a drug is approved for sale. The last credible figure I saw was that a pharma company would spend north of $100 million to get a drug approved; it takes 10 years to do this.

... a significant percentage of drugs that get into Phase I don't make it to Phase II. And a lot of Phase II drugs don't make it to Phase III. And a large number of Phase III drugs fail the test. The cost above does not include these failures. The next time anyone complains about the high cost of prescription drugs should understand this. The reason Canada or EC countries get innovative drugs much cheaper is because they don't have to go through this system of bringing a drug to market. Think Thalidomide and you can understand why this occurs.

Having said all that, there are some truly amazing technologies in the pipeline that I know about. The entrepreneurial spirit and the compassion and passion that executives at these startups and nascent companies have is astonishing to be part of and makes my job all that much more satisfying. Genomics is going to make their job much, much easier and has already begun to do so.

Saffron KitKat, anyone? No? Passion fruit, then?

NestlE is changing the venerable KitKat bar this year:

Industry analysts said a growing trend towards healthier lifestyles was putting people off chocolate bars.

Sales have fallen again this past year for the bar:

KitKat sales fell by 5.4 per cent to £116million last year and KitKat Chunky was down by 18 per cent to £50.5million.

As a result, NestlE is investigating the launch of a much wider range of flavors:

NestlÈ is considering offering lemon cheesecake, liquorice, saffron and passion fruit.

Plus cumin and masala. How well bars that made their name in chocolate can migrate to other flavors -- particularly flavors like cumin or masala where it isn't even clear these are known flavors -- is yet to be seen. NestlE marketing will need to be especially creative this coming year.

Fat tax

Britain, in an effort to reign in obesity, is proposing a new tax on foods that are unhealthy and lead to weight gain. The government's sees the tax as educational:

This would be a signal to producers as well as consumers and serve more broadly as a signal to society that nutritional content in food is important.

As Jeff Jarvis points out, this will take some real flexibility to administer. The current popularity of the Atkins diet might shift today's taxes to carbohydrates. But ten years ago, everything but potato bars would have been taxed -- just the opposite of high-protein living today. And before that, eggs were seen as poison in a shell -- now a breakfast of eggs and sausage is considered a good way to fight weight and cholesterol.

It's hard to think of a tax plan that would be subject to more debate than one aimed at encouraging the eating of "healthy" foods; unless, commentators have said, Britain next moves to encouraging "good" reading through added taxes on unhealthy reading material or encouraging better attire through taxes on poor color combinations or pattern matches in clothing.

Automated checks before you can use your own property

New Mexico's State House of Representatives has passed a bill supporting the use of breathalyzers in cars -- these interlocks would check the sobriety of the driver before allowing him or her to use the car. The ACLU is involved in fighting the bill and other organizations have raised concerns about the government regulating private use of private property.

Ironically, says a professor in the UCLA College of Law, the same people that are opposing the New Mexico proposal requiring breathalyzers in new cars support the use of "smart guns" that have fingerprint or grip interlocks that only allow the owner to use the gun.

Eugene Volokh has an interesting discussion comparing the legal structure of the two initiatives: each is designed to prevent unsafe use of private property (preventing drunk people from using the car and preventing kids or thieves or crooks from using the gun); when the safety screen malfunctions, the sobriety test will screen safe users and create a hassle but when the gun check malfunctions it may create a hassle but it may also prevent needed protection, he says. Type I and Type II errors are more serious with the second than with the first, yet advocacy groups fight the first more vigorously than the second, he says.

Are these two initiatives the same? If you are interested in some of the legal comparisons, you will enjoy reading the whole discussion.

The impact of Dean's campaign

Howard Dean has formally withdrawn from the race to be the Democratic nominee, but the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) is calling him "the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater." (Original link.)

Use of humor in presentations

This is always tricky -- what seemed really funny when you and your friends were going over it at 2 AM may not be perceived as that funny by your client's CFO at 2 PM the next afternoon.

Here is some anecdotal evidence that attempts to use humor in professional settings are not only not always funny but can sometimes be genuinely detrimental to the cause.

Increasing consumer choices -- a good thing?

Not necessarily. A recent study by Stanford Business School faculty showed that at some point, added consumer choice hurts the performance of the brand rather than helping it. It's an interesting article.

Ethics on a global scale

Addressing ethical issues at the global level is challenging -- read about some real-life situations.

Speaking of music . . .

. . . assuming you consider drum solos music, that is (see previous post). Here is a site containing Iraqi music along with other examples of the Iraqi arts, including this representative piece (listen).

Famous drum solos

DrummerWorld has a great collection of famous drum solos. Here is Joe Morello (shown at right) playing the famous (and infamously challenging) 5/4 solo Take Five. The site has a collection including Tito Puente, Keith Moon, Phil Collins, Buddy Rich classics, and the first-ever recorded drum solo (listen) played by the legendary Gene Krupa. Pictures and links to more recordings by these and other drummers. (Two final links: four minutes of John Bonham's "one and only" Moby Dick solo; and the famous Phil Collins/Chester Thompson drum duet.)

Star captured by black hole

From the news article:

Two space observatories have provided the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole stretching, tearing apart and partially gobbling up a star flung into reach of its enormous gravity, astronomers said Wednesday.

The picture at right is an artist's depiction of the catastrophe. The incident was detected by a large x-ray blast resulting from the star's disintegration:

Astronomers said a star about the size of our sun neared the black hole after veering off course following a close encounter with another star. The tremendous gravity of the black hole, estimated to have a mass 100 million times that of our sun, then stretched the star to the point of breaking.

A report on the DEMO conference in Scottsdale this week

From a demonstrator's perspective, Demo is a great event because it attracts incredible press. Walt Mossberg [of the Wall Street Journal] is a fixture. He wanders the ballroom grilling companies about their new technology (I listened to his questions on a number of occasions -- he was tough but he was dead on). Walt's compatriots from the Wall Street Journal, the USA Today, Business 2.0, the trade press, etc. are all there to see what interesting things might be unveiled at Demo. As fun as it was to watch the entrepreneurs and journalists dance, I found it even more fun to watch the pack of PR people handle their CEO's. The PR folks hustle the journalists over to their clients and, when that doesn't work, they hustle their clients over to the journalists. The CEO's have been well trained by their PR folks to stick to simple messages, be energetic and be charming, and some of them even manage to do all three. But if all goes well at Demo, the many dollars spent on PR handling, conference fees, plane flights, hotel rooms, etc. will be well spent. Innumerable articles are written about Demo and if you are able to capture the attention of the press, you will get some wonderful publicity out of the show.

Not much in the Az Republic or East Valley Tribune -- in whose backyard this event transpired. The conference brought a lot of VC's from Silicon Valley into town:

I am flying back from the Demo conference in Arizona. In fact, I'd say that this flight is the Silicon Valley Demo Express. As I look around me, most of the faces I see are folks I have seen for the last couple of days at the conference. There are at least a dozen VCs I know on this flight. Rafe Needleman is sitting behind me. Entrepreneurs abound. Now that I think about it, I should stop typing and go schmooz. No thanks. I've had enough schmoozing for this week.

For those of you who haven't been to or read about Demo before, it is a conference where dozens of companies launch new technologies in rapid fire succession on stage.

Read the whole article or go to the DEMO site.

Searching through the past

Here's a unique and valuable tool: the internet archive wayback machine. Looking for old graphics, old news, old pictures or logos? This search engine provides a way of picking through old screen captures and news on companies that have ceased to exist.

Tivo for radio

This venture capitalist blog discusses how the future integration of cell phones and digital radio could impact listening behavior as much as -- or more than -- the integration of cell phones and digital photography has altered picture-sending behaviors.

Since cell phones are the ubiquitous wireless device, it is a natural next step to include radio reception with the Tivo capability to store key programs for when you can listen to them. Storing weather forecasts, market reports, or sports news so that you can listen through your earphone to the program and information you want when you want -- and not the 'drive-time radio personality' just because your break came at 5 PM -- is predicted to be one of the next steps in broadcast improvements.

Geek hierarchy

It's here. Check your lineage.

Sumo-Bots

The next generation of bots is alive and active in Japan. The founder of Robolympics just returned from seeing computer-controlled bots in action:

While in Japan, I saw the coolest thing ever! Fighting robots. But not in the traditional Battlebots sense. Imagine rock-em sock-em robots, only fully articulated and computer controlled. It's called Robo-One and it's amazing. 15" tall androids belt each other boxing style until one falls down. These mini androids are as articulate as the Sony Curio, Honda ASIMO, or Fujitsu HOAP - only guys are making them in their apartments for about $3000, rather than 10 Million. I've uploaded a bunch of videos to give you an idea. Robolympics is sponsoring a Robo-One match in San Francisco in March - along with Battlebots, sumo bots, and others. Watch these videos!

The videos are here.

Your own personal bar code

If you would like to speed up communicating some personal specifics about yourself -- cut the verbal interaction down some and convey the basics via a simple scan motion -- then personal bar codes are here to help. The UPC at right is supposed to decode as:

"32-year-old male, 173 lbs, 5'10", living in the US."

People go to Schlotzky's for WiFi

Schlotzky's is a deli chain that gives away free WiFi -- they were among the first to do so, in a bold expeeriment at one of their flagship restaurants on the main drag in Austin, TX, after Starbucks set up shop directly across the street

A recent survey of their customers surprised even Schlotzky's management:

The company has released new market research showing that free connectivity is a selection-factor for 40 percent of its customers.

An extended post on this savvy market move includes this information:

the CEO wasn't a geek; he liked seeing entire families or sports teams or groups of parents and kids come in and spent time using the high-speed connection. It's important to recall that a small but significant minority of Internet users have broadband; for the rest, Schlotzsky's offering is a profound (and free) pleasure.

[Via this link.]

Digital journalism

Here's a week's assignment for a digital journalism class at NYU:

This week's readings will be blogs. I want you to follow the following blogs for the next week and be prepared to discuss what was on each blog, how it was done, what you thought of it, etc.

Here they are:

* Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine
* Joi Ito's blog
* Jay Rosen's PressThink
* Clay Shirky's Internet Writings
* Gawker
* Radio Free Blogistan
* New Media Musings

Think about how these blogs do their thing and how they differ from one another.

If you have any interest in blogs, this collection covers the range pretty well. The site has students' comments on these blogs, comparing and contrasting them plus general comments on digital journalism.

BrickFest 2004

Making things out of Lego bricks can be a lonely task, with many small hours of the morning spent relentlessly slapping pieces of plastic together. It doesn't have to be like that, at least not when BrickFest hits town.

More than 150 Lego builders and collectors converged on Portland over the Presidents Day weekend for BrickFest PDX, a celebration of all things Lego. While plenty of individual work is on display, the big draw is the chance to interact with like-minded folks.

At right, a complete town with public transportation, a bridge, and it's own port.