I recently lost my cell phone and this article caught my attention.
TryPhone beta has 12 handsets so far, including such popular items as the iPhone and the Motorola Razr 2 for customers to take a look. The company hopes to have between 100 and 150 handsets up by the holiday season, says marketing director Leila Modarres. It also plans to increase the interactivity of the virtual handsets.
Check it out. For someone like me who has used only one model that comes free with a subscription, TryPhone saves time and money in identifying the popular ones and the best ones that are out there. Before I go to an AT&T store in my area to actually try out different phones, I should already have a pretty good idea what I am looking for.
The IPO of the Chinese B2B web portal Alibaba.com last November raised a near-record $1.5 billion—at the time trailing only the $1.7 billion generated by Google Inc. in 2004 for the largest IPO haul by an Internet company.
The Alibaba Group—the parent of Alibaba.com—is China's most impressive Internet outfit. Founded in 1999, it comprises six main businesses. In addition to its B2B and the Taobao consumer auction portals, it owns China's most popular Internet payment company, Alipay, which solved the credit card problem with a bank transfer workaround. Alisoft, its Internet-based business management software, delivers tools that allow Taobao customers to communicate before making deals. In 2005, Alibaba acquired its search engine Yahoo! China. The newest entry, Alimama, allows Web publishers to list their advertising inventory, complete with prices and other pertinent information, and then advertisers can scroll for publications that match their needs and click to complete a deal. Alibaba has 4,400 employees working in 30 sales and marketing offices in China, Europe, and the United States.
Corporate Counsel, May 1, 2008
Weblog Strategic Sourcing Europe on Alisoft
Wikipedia on AliBlog
Customer Communications in North America
On 3 April 2008, Alibaba.com started their first official blog targeted for the international small and medium sized enterprise (SME) community, with a special emphasis on communicating with merchants in the United States. Their blog, the AliBlog, is marketed as "the latest word from Alibaba.com on our news, events, and community" while promising to be an official source for information and opinion from an employee's perspective on Alibaba.com.
I’m back from the world of car manufacturers to talk a bit about the cell phone world. Bloomberg Markets has a great article in the May issue entitled Google’s Wireless Gamble. With profits from their online advertising down and the company still growing Google is trying to find other ways to make money. In case you haven’t seen their stock it has taken a nose dive and is basically back where it was a year ago (US:GOOG). They are developing an operating system for cell phones. The system will be named Android and will be released this summer.
Looking at Apple and its famous CEO, Guy Kawasaki, Apple's former chief evangelist, admits "Steve proves that it's OK to be an asshole." The Wired Magazine April 2008 cover story is about none other than Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley legend, charismatic genius, and ... corporate tyrant ? Maybe so. But GSB Professor Bob Sutton in his bestseller The No Asshole Rule, while noting the man's legendary offensiveness, exempts Jobs from the excoriation he gives many other, uhh, you-know-whats. Typically, an insider told Sutton that Jobs could demean his staff to the point of tears, yet "be almost always right." Sutton was even shocked, shocked to find himself defending Jobs on national TV recently; he feels that most horror stories about Jobs apply to his reckless youth. In addition to Jobs, author Leander Kahney points to the Apple legacy of opacity and secrecy that has helped the company stymie competition while flying in the face of conventional Silicon Valley culture. Read how Apple and its CEO repeatedly break the Valley's rules -- and succeed.
Each year the MIT Technology Review provides a list of 10 Emerging Technologies to watch for. This year biofuels lead the list with signing of the Energy Independence and Security act signed into law which will provide funding and support to develop alternative fuels. Many of the other technologies surround computing and health. For instance better ways to diagnose illnesses and improving the way computers work and wireless power is delivered. Read all about these technologies and how they might impact our futures in the April edition of the MIT Technology Review.
Silverlink Communications® Inc., the leader in healthcare communications, introduced at the Health 2.0 Conference, a fundamentally new capability to healthcare communications – called Adaptive HealthComm Science(TM) – a discipline that combines decision science methodologies and analytics with personalization technology. This proven approach merges world-class communications techniques from consumer industries with the unique characteristics of healthcare, to drive healthcare behaviors in scale. By leveraging Adaptive HealthComm Science, healthcare enterprises can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their communications programs, improving the member experience and driving down healthcare costs.
BusinessWire, March 04, 2008
The special, March/April 2008, issue of Technology Review presents its annual listing of top emerging technologies in various industries and their frontrunners. Among those is Frances Arnold. He is designing better enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose found in biomass which can be used as biofuels. Another example is physicist Marin Soljačič, who is working on creating wireless power technology, e.g. transmitting electricity to devices without cables. To find out what all new technologies are about, read the article in Jackson Library or online.
Google is getting into the Web site building business, enabling just about anyone to quickly set up and update a Web site with pictures, calendars and video.
"We are literally adding an edit button to the Web," said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application. All sites created on the service will run on one of Google's computers.
Google acquired many of the Web-site tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.
Washingtonpost.com
Well, the sun is not coming out in Palo Alto today, and rain is on the way. The title of my blog has to do with an article in The New York Times about Silicon Valley becoming a world leader in cheap and ubiquitous solar panels for the masses. The author suggests some of the valley’s best brains are captivated by the challenge of prodcing low cost solar panels and they hope to put the development of solar technologies onto a faster track.
Local police departments, including Palo Alto, use a public database by Public Engines, a private company that works only with government entities, to plot daily crime incidents using Google Maps. 45 agencies now use the web site, which launched last spring in Washington, D.C. "Citizens can do a search in their particular community to see what's going on in their neighborhoods," Sgt. Sandra Brown of the Palo Alto Police Department said. After a recent burst of national publicity, the site handled more than 100,000 visitors in a single day.
Reported in Palo Alto Daily News
Researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom have designed an interactive color Sudoku game, one of many programs designed to explore the interplay between logic and perception as humans interact with computers. Empirical Modelling, what the scientists call this approach, pays more attention to what humans take into account and provides a practical means to explore problems that aren’t so cut and dry.
In the case of color Sudoku, it can mean a mix of perception, expectation, experience, logic, and of course, color discernment.
Reported at MSNBC
Related blog on Sudoku
Many people, especially teenagers, don’t necessarily equate loading things on Facebook with publishing to the world, but that is exactly what it is. The whole world is watching -- or at the very least the police are watching, as chatty criminals brag online about their many nefarious deeds, including homicides, rapes, vandalism, underage drinking and other miscellaneous crimes. Pictures of high school and college students swilling beer or pounding down shots have landed many a student in front of a judge, according to the January 13th issue of the Burlington Free Press. This gives credence to the Carnegie Mellon University study, "Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks", in which authors Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti point out that most users of social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendstar underestimate the security and privacy of social networking sites. Author beware !
The topic of December issue of Red Herring is the rapid development of high-tech industry in Israel. You’ll find an interview with Orna Berry, Israel Venture Association Chair, who attributes the country’s success in maintaining the leading position in today’s global economy to huge investments in the early-stage ventures among other factors. In the interview with Shimon Peres, the Israeli president reveals some major directions of developing the economy such as massive switching to electrical cars in the near future and becoming an incubator of the solar energy. Another set of articles talks about close relations between Israeli new enterprises and Silicon Valley in creating new ventures and collaborating with VC companies such as Benchmark, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners among others. You’ll find an article devoted to the state of biotech research in Israel, its successes and challenges. For more, read the magazine in Jackson Library's Periodicals section.
"Emerging IT Trends Impacting Higher Education … and Tools to Deal with Them"
Presenter: Dr. Jan-Martin Lowendahl*, Gartner analyst
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2008, 9:30am – 11:00am
Where: Room L103, Littlefield Building, GSB
Who: Open to all Stanford faculty, staff, and students (Free; limited to 30 participants)
Summary: The higher education environment is culturally complex, with a wide variety of stakeholders and rapidly changing technologies. How do you know what matters, when so much is relevant and important? What should be a priority? We will take a look at some of the IT trends impacting higher education and discuss some simple tools that can be used to bring order to this increasingly complex situation.
*Based in Sweden, Dr. Jan-Martin is a Gartner Research Director focused on higher education technology strategies including identity and access management, governance, learning technologies, and academic and administrative systems. Prior to coming to Gartner two years ago, he was the CIO at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden where his main focus was infrastructure strategies and governance. He holds a PhD. in chemistry from Goteborg University.
Registration and Question:
Registration is free and is limited to 30 participants. To register, contact Ann Groves, Higher Education Executive, Northwestern Region, Gartner, Inc.; 650-366-4942 (office); 510-821-0938 (cell)
In partnership with IBM, information giant Google is moving to use a network of perhaps one million servers to bring access to massive computing power to universities around the world. As BusinessWeek (12/24/07) puts it, this could potentially lead to Google becoming the world's primary computer. The brainchild of Google employee Christophe Bisciglia, the concept utilizes a vast network of servers called a 'cloud' that can store mind-numbing amounts of information. The scenario seems to fit Google's own corporate vision of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible. Other organizations that may be poised to use 'cloud power' include Yahoo!, Microsoft and Amazon. Read more online or in Jackson Library.
McKinsey Quarterly reports eight new ways of doing business that will shape the economy in years to come. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
Here are a few highlights:
1. Cocreation -- company harvesting talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. For example, the Linux operationg system was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. It is estimated that roughly 12% of all labor activity in the U.S. economy could be transformed by distributed and networked forms of innovation.
2. Consumer as innovators -- for instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is created by its distributed customers. Another example is Threadless, the online T-shirt store that asks consumer to submit new designes for T-shirts to be voted on by the community at large.
3. Outsourcing -- companies parcel out work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks. Topcoder, a company that has created a network of software developers in order that companies can access this talent pool instead of employing experienced engineers.
4. Extracting value from interactions -- companies invest in interactions may find smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value that is difficult for their rivals to replicate.
6. Unbundling production -- Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. Unbundling enables the supply side to raise asset utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal cost.
Read the article in December 2007 issue of McKinsey Quarterly
"That a 57-year-old divorced Greek immigrant would become the reigning queen of online political chat might come as a surprise to the legions of teens and twentysomethings who frequent forums on the web known as blogs. But that's exactly what Arianna Huffington did." So begins 'The Blogger', the cover story for Worth magazine December 2007. Two years ago Huffington launched a blog for political wonks; it is now one of the hottest sites on the Internet. Her Huffington Post, founded in 2005, attracts 3.5 million visitors daily. Read this fascinating interview with Huffington, at the Jackson Library periodicals display.
According to Jeff Lipton, Managing Director of North American CleanTech Investment Banking for Jefferies & Co., clean technologies is experiencing an investment boom as it moves into mainstream business sectors. The overall performance of 'cleantech' IPOs has been positive, with the only the biofuel sector underperforming. Read the complete story -- "Cleaning Up in CleanTech" -- in the Library, Fall 2007 issue of AlwaysON. Also in the issue is the GoingGreen 100 Top Companies list.
Gamers of Nintendo's Wii complained about "aching backs, sore shoulders, and Wii elbow." In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the motions used in sports like bowling, tennis and baseball. Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. Since its debut in November of last year, 9.27 million units have been sold. In addition to turning Wii into a new form of exercise, it is also used in hospitals to treat physical therapy patients.
Active video games like the Wii can fight child obesity, according to a report published by the Mayo Clinic in the January 2006 issue of Pediatrics.
A research team at the University of Toronto is developing a "therapeutic video game" to treat children who suffer from hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a condition that can partially paralyze one side of the body. If the children regularly use their weaker side, their motor function can improve.
Read more on Nintendo Wii in Mindshare , Time, News@UofT
On September 19, I blogged EU vs. Microsoft = $688 Million Fine about the EU ruling which upheld a previous decision concerning Microsoft’s market dominance. At that point Microsoft could have filed another appeal. In the meantime fines for not complying with the first ruling have been accumulating. Today Microsoft agreed to share the code to some of it’s server with competitors thus allowing them to write programs compatible with certain Microsoft servers. In essence agreeing to abide by the original ruling put forth by the European Comission in 2004. Read more about it at the Financial Times, CNN and Bloomberg
UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.
"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu, the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university." Some 200 clips, representing eight semesterlong courses on bioengineering, physics, and chemistry, etc. are available at youtube.com/ucberkeley. More courses are expected to be added.
UC Berkeley already was posting videos on Google, which acquired YouTube last year for $1.65 billion. Before the videos were shifted to YouTube, they were viewed 1.3 million times and downloaded 700,000 times. On UC Berkeley's local site, the school's lectures were seen 4.3 million times last year. And on iTunes, some 2 million podcasts have been downloaded since April 2006.
So guess which one has received the top view? A lecture from the School of Information and Management Systems, SIMS141 Search Engines, Technology, and Business with Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google receives a total of 46,414 views so far.
Source: SFGate.com
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is far from replacing barcodes completely but it’s used in a wide variety of industries and continues expanding into new geographical locations. Here at Jackson Library we even have a periodical devoted to the subject, the latest issue of which contains an article on RFID magic mirrors ... coming to a shopping mall near you. Here’s how they work.
You walk into Bloomingdale's (let’s say) and decide you really must have that elegant Edwardian princess gown, but not in cherry satin -- but you don’t have enough time to compare sizes or try on other colors, nor do you wish to make the purchase without consulting your fellow fashion mavens, none of whom are present. And it would please you immensely to leave the store with said gown in hand since three nights hence you intend to wear it to an exclusive upscale dinner party (yeah, right). Outside the dressing room you discover a three-panel interactive mirror with touch-screen menu. The mirror reads your RFID-tagged gown and then virtually displays it in all colors, lists all sizes, and recommends accessories. By uploading contact info from your cell phone you then IM your fashionable friends attaching a hyperlink containing your fashion choices. Any 'hot or not' feedback from your pals would then be displayed on one of the mirror panels to facilitate decision-making. “It’s the way women shop,” says Robert Savage, president of Nanette Lepore’s in Manhattan. “They like to have input.”
At Britain’s Nick Tentis Living Retail Theatre, magic mirrors will also serve as customer style guides enabling access to detailed information on clothing. “But most importantly … the tag will trigger the lighting and music in the fitting room to change based on the qualities of the piece the customer is trying on.” Slip into an evening suit and “the lighting will dim and the music will adapt to represent the night-time dining environment where the buyer likely will be wearing the piece.” And if a clerk isn’t handy to snag you another size, alert the mirror and a clerk will be dispatched to assist you (yeah, right).
With such efficiency-enhancing applications including self-automated checkout, monitoring high rollers at casinos, keeping toilets from overflowing, and tracking everything from wheels of parmesan cheese to shoppers’ personal preferences, it’s easy to see why many businesses regard RFID as a cost-effective tool for building customer loyalty. But if in the marketplace “loyalty is [merely] an allegiance to the next big thing and the next cool brand” (1 to 1 Magazine, Sep ’07), and if RFID can be used to track you as well as your shopping profile, then ostensibly advantageous RFID applications may ultimately tune in frequencies of distrust among freedom lovers everywhere.
A nine year legal disagreement between Microsoft and the European Union came to a head on Monday when the EU court upheld an appeal to the decision passed in March of 2004, that Microsoft will have to pay 497 million EUR and a portion of the legal fees for abusing its market dominance. The entire question revolves around whether it was legal for Microsoft to bundle its Media Player product into Windows and deny rivals “source code” information about Microsoft’s system which would allow them to make their products interoperable with Microsoft’s products. The appeal was struck down and this means any further appeals would only apply to technical legal issues. The actual ruling can be viewed or read online. A similar case was struck down in the US courts, that one concerning IE being bundled with Microsoft and essentially making Netscape defunct.
This case is significant because it pits the question of what importance does intellectual property play versus a free and competitive market. This means that other Silicon Valley companies such as Apple, Google and Intel who are at odds with the EU in other court cases might not get it their way.
"The Science of Play". Wired magazine (September 2007) jumps into the inner life of Bungie Studios, and the new game Halo3. In addition to reviewing several features of Halo3 (for the closet gamers among us), author Clive Thompson tracks the development process for a new video game, peering over the shoulders of the testers. The aim is to invent new weapons and levels for the games and then monitor gamers as they "play the hell out of them". The piece revolves around Randy Pagulayan, who runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a studio. Read more about the esoteric world of the video game studio online, or in the latest issue in Jackson Library.
Business 2.0 August 2007 Special Global Issue highlights the 29 best business ideas in the world. A taste of what's included: (1) the elimination of lawyers from contract creation, by the startup Negonation (via the platform Tractis), which allows anyone to create, manage and execute contracts online, (2) new company Obecure's tackling obesity with a drug that reduces craving for food, and fatty foods in particular, (3) the application of BitTorrent-type technology to phones, allowing users to send large files, like movies, via cell phone, (4) 'wave farming', encouraging firms like Oceanlinx and Wavegen to generate electricity from ocean waves and tap into the estimated $1 trillion wave energy market, and (5) 'mobile hotels' that can sleep dozens of people -- like Hotelmovil, a pre-fab unit that can be loaded on an 18 wheel-semi, driven to any site and erected in 30 minutes. Read all this and more online or in the Jackson Library copy.
The August 2007 edition of Wall Street & Technology lists the best IT managers on Wall Street on the Buy Side and Sell Side as well as the Exchanges. Each profile covers IT priorities, budgets and predictions on the newest trends and technology which will emerge in the next few years. You can also read some of the profiles online.
Free, interactive music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are a hybrid of radio station and jukebox. They provide a selection of streaming music to match your tastes, reported at washingtonpost.com.
You start at each by creating a profile telling the site which artists or genres you like. For example, at Pandora you customize a radio station by naming an artist you like. The site then serves up music with similar traits, which you can approve or reject by clicking thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Last.fm uses a different tactic by asking you to download a small program that hooks into iTune and other music software, analyzing your collection and figuring out which artists would fit.
Both sites incorporate social networking so that you can also listen to your friends' stations. Put in enough time at these places, you probably will find yourself discovering new artists.
A newer site, Musicovery, invites users to pick music by genre, tempo, date and mood which can result in it segueing from a West Coast R&B band to a folk-rock group from Algeria.
And what about making all these portable? Imagine a site like this becomes available on your shuffle!
It is believed that tuberculosis has caused 3 billion deaths in human history. TB has been known by a number of descriptive names: phthisis, White Death, White Plague -- and consumption, because it seemed to "consume" people from within. Traditional treatment and diagnosis has not stopped the scourge. The August 2007 issue of Wired profiles a little known company, Akonni Biosystems, that is working to develop a new tool called TruDiagnosis. The tool combines microfluidics, microarrays and engineering into a handheld device that uses a small sample of spit or blood to reveal, in a matter of minutes, the presence of bacteria or virus. A quick test that would identify the particular strain of TB would help doctors target the strain and treat it before it had a chance to take hold its human host. Akonni has developed test for many pathogens many drawn from the CDC’s list of bioterrorism agents. This new tool should move diagnosis into the 21st century.
Technology Review magazine (July / August 2007) in its cover story argues that the Web and the Sim (the simulated world) will soon merge into a combination of mapping applications and social virtuality they call Second Earth. Second Life, which started a mere 4 years ago with a one-square-kilometer patch of 'virtual earth' has grown to 600 square kilometers and almost 7 million users. Author Wade Roush observes the parallel development of mapping technology, and suggests a coming convergence into a single new 'Metaverse'. He cites David Rolston, CEO of Forterra Systems, who coined the term '3-D Internet' to describe this scenario. Also discussed is David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, with its detailed vision of a virtual earth. Check out the article in Jackson Library (or, one can register for free access on the magazine site.)
The biggest? Siemens. Most profitable? Grupo Iusacell. Number 23 on the list? Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Uhh, what are we talking about? BusinessWeek's 2007 Information Technology 100, its ranking of top tech performers. The bad news? Missing tech titans, like Dell, not on the list. A table includes revenues, revenue growth, ROE, shareholder return and profits for the 100. Read it online or in Jackson Library.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shunned acquisition approaches to remain independent to execute his vision of creating “social graph” and to provide services to different demographic groups in Facebook. This asset, connecting people to create value, can be used by web services such as shopping or product recommendations. Although one can get product recommendations at Amazon, at Facebook the recommendation comes from someone you know.
Its competition MySpace ranked top, surpassing Google, as the most popular website based on US internet usage for June 2007 according to Hitwise data. However, many believed that Facebook has recently outpaced MySpace in gaining unique users. Since last September, Facebook has opened up membership registration to anyone.
And what about Google? "There's no network effect [on Google]. The fact that I use Google and you use Google doesn't make us any closer to each other," said Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal and CEO at Slide, a major widget company that is devoting part of its team of developers exclusively to making applications for Facebook.
Stories at Time, AdvertisingAge
Do Something, a youth organization in New York, has created Karma Tycoon, a free online video game to introduce teenagers to the nonprofit world, encourage volunteerism, and teach financial responsibility.
Players have to watch their budgets carefully as they set up a nonprofit organization — a homeless shelter, youth center, senior center, animal shelter, or performing-arts group. They also have to apply for grants and loans, and decide whether to pay for their organizations' expenses with cash or credit. They earn "karma" points by the number of people or animals they help, but lose points if they spend too much and their organization has to close.
The nonprofit organization has also created a guide to help teachers integrate Karma Tycoon into their lesson plans for grades seven to 12.
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation awarded Do Something a grant of nearly $600,000 over three years to develop the game.
Reported in The Chronicle of Philanthro |
