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Home - posts tagged as News
Ning closures: a blow to Cialis posted on August 19, 2010
 News
Back before President Obama was inaugurated, my colleague Peter
Elstrom and I came up with an idea for crowdsourcing a BusinessWeek
story. We'd launch a social network on Ning called BWInfrastructure, and the
community that gathered there would develop and debate ideas on how to
spend the trillion dollars of stimulus spending that was en route
We put up the site, scores of people signed up. It wasn't anywhere close
to the smash hit we were hoping for, but still. It gave us enough for
our crowd-sourced BusinessWeek
story.
After the story, I promptly forgot about the site. But this week I got
this email from Ning warning me that if I didn't pony up some
subscription fees they'd shut down the formerly free site. Ning wrote:
Your network has grown up a
bit since you started the ball rolling. You have grown to 4201 members who have collectively helped you add
unique photos, some
interesting videos, and 135 spirited
discussions. Well done!
4201 members? Here I had forgotten about the site, and it
apparently had taken off! Were there thousands of people on the site busy debating pressing
investment needs of the United States? I went and took a look at the
old place. I quickly saw that it had long since abandoned the focus
on infrastructure spending. The folks active there, if you can call them
that, are a bunch of bots spamming for Cialis, Tramadol and other
medications. They're blogging, signing up as members on the site. They
can't get enough of it. I checked out the member list, and saw hundreds of
them are there: Bon, Kros, Krek, Ganna, and
English-song-lyrics-download-03.
Spam, it seems, is a close cousin of entropy. We humans use
enormous energy to organize and structure information. But as soon as we
loosen our grip, spam flows in. It has no organizing principal, it
obeys no rules, recognizes no limits. The BWInfrastructure site will close down tomorrow, but In the long run, spam prevails.
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Posterous DOS attack. Someone should write the story posted on August 12, 2010
News
I have a blog on Posterous, a very interesting and agile Web service. Just now I received an apologetic email from the company's CEO, Sachin Agarwal. He says that over the last six days, Posterous has been victimized by powerful Denial of Service Attacks. When the first one hit, last Wednesday, the Posterous team raced to move to new data centers. Another one hit on Friday. It was a crazy six days for Posterous. A tech leader named Vince, Agerwal writes, "worked like a mad man until he passed out on his desk."
Briefly, in 2002/03, I was acting info tech editor at BusinessWeek. If this were a Thursday night back then, I'd be preparing for Friday's story meeting, in which I'd propose a 4-column narrative on the Posterous attacks. Here's a very innovative and popular start-up, I'd argue, whose very existence was threatened by these attacks. (I still don't know where they came from.) It would make a great story. It would give us insights into the dangers surrounding us and a look at a start-up battling them.
But why, another editor would surely ask, should we care about Posterous? (Of course, if the editor in chief appeared to be interested in my story, that question might remain unasked. These meetings were exercises in Kremlinology.) In any case, I'd have to make a case for Posterous. Still, I hope someone somewhere is considering writing a story about it. I'm far too busy with my book to report the story. But it's one I'd like to read.
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You might be wondering about my blog on Posterous. I started a BusinessWeek alumni network on Ning. When Ning demanded payment for what started out as a free site, I migrated all of the content to Posterous. I look at it not as an active blog, but as a private archive of BusinessWeek history.
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The New York Mosque posted on August 8, 2010
News
I don't usually write about politics or religion, but the controversy around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York has been obsessing me lately.
Some
of the protesters against the Mosque refer to it as a "victory" mosque,
meaning that certain Muslims will celebrate it as the site of the
"victory" on 9/11/01. Since there are some 2 billion Muslims on earth,
that's probably a safe bet. But consider this: Thousands of U.S.
Muslims are serving in our armed forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere. Do those people consider 9/11 a "victory?" And are the
Mosque critics being fair to these soldiers by grouping them with the people
they're risking their lives, on our behalf, to fight?
A second
point: We are extremely fortunate in this country to live in ethnic and
religious peace. There is prejudice, injustice, and anger, of course,
and incidents of violence. But considering that we're an enormously
diverse nation of more than 300 million people, I think the level of
peace and (relative) harmony here is nothing short of remarkable. Among the Muslim populations in the UK and France, there is a much greater sense of grievance and alienation. This has fomented violent uprisings in the Paris suburbs and has fed violent extremism in the UK. We have been spared these problems, in part because we don't have the same colonial histories in Muslim countries (though we're gaining them now), and because our own Muslim population is multi-ethnic and integrated into American society.
The worst thing we could do is communicate to American Muslims that they are a distrusted and detested minority. It would bring us closer to religion-based conflict in this country. And yet that's the message in the protests against the mosque in New York.
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PepsiCo stumbles with science blog posted on July 15, 2010
News
It's no secret that the economic model of journalism is in flux.
It's hard to figure out how society will fund news-gathering and
editing. But this is also a problem for companies, which suddenly don't
have vast pages in the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and Fortune to
tell their story. They're searching for alternatives. This can lead to
controversy.
Case in point. Last night I visited one of my favorite math blogs, Good Math, Bad Math,
and was startled to see that Mark Chu-Carroll, the Google computer
scientist who authors it, was pulling the plug. He was objecting to the
announcement of a new blog on the ScienceBlog network, a food research
blog called Food Frontiers. It was to be produced by PepsiCo.
Fellow blogger PalMD quoted the announcement:
On behalf of the team here at ScienceBlogs, I'd like to welcome you to
Food Frontiers, a new project presented by PepsiCo.
As part of this partnership, we'll hear from a wide range of experts on
how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous,
science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and
enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in
science, nutrition and health policy. In addition to learning more
about the transformation of PepsiCo's product portfolio, we'll be
seeing some of the innovative ways it is planning to reduce its use of
energy, water and packaging.
On July 6, Chu-Carroll wrote:
Seed has, in its corporate wisdom, decided to let Pepsico buy its
way into a blog on ScienceBlogs. Pepsi writes SMG a nice check, and
suddenly their content gets mixed in to the ScienceBlog RSS feeds, the
ScienceBlog feed to Google News, etc., exactly the way that my blog posts do.
This is not acceptable.
Well, on July 8, Seed pulled the plug on Food Frontiers with this announcement:
We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your
immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe
strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven
social change, this was clearly not the right way.
How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead
science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a
large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the
science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue
with this community engage? We'll open this challenge up to everyone on
SB and beyond in the coming days so that we can all find the right
solution.
This
issue extends far beyond Seed and its Scienceblogs networks. Back when
BusinessWeek was fat and its readership unflagging, a steel company in
the midwest could count on being written about occasionally. (I covered
steel for five years from Pittsburgh.) Tech companies could explain the
details of genetic engineering or neural networks to reporters, and
sometimes those stories would make their way into detailed articles.
It's
harder these days. There's far less space in traditional ad-based media,
and smaller staffs to fill it. And much of the coverage focuses on what
readers want to read: Stories about tech gadgets and news that can move
their portfolios.
This is leading companies to launch or extend
their own media businesses. When I left BusinessWeek, my good friend
and colleague, Steve Hamm, went to IBM. Essentially, he's working as a
journalist there, researching and writing articles and producing
videos.
These changes force journalists to grapple with new arrangements and potential conflicts. When I left BusinessWeek, I signed on as a blogger at SmartDataCollective. At the very top of the blog is a little banner: Sponsored by Teradata. I get a monthly stipend. So now, if I write about Teradata or its competitors, I have to make that disclosure.
I didn't have to bother with such details at BusinessWeek. The conflicts certainly existed, since we were paid by companies we covered. But all the dealings were taking place on a different floor, and managed by different people. Now, more of us are handling them as individuals. And companies like PepsiCo are struggling to figure out how to reach the public with their message in a more complicated media world.
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NYT article on IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer posted on June 17, 2010
News
We've been waiting for months for this New York Times magazine article about Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer--and the subject of the book I'm writing. (Here's a video on it produced by IBM and its agency, Ogilvy and Mather.) Back in January, when I was still writing the book proposal, I was at some of Watson's "sparring sessions" with Clive Thompson, the writer of the piece.
Back then we thought the story would run in February, maybe in March. But stories that have no peg no news, "evergreens," can get bounced for months. Happened to me at BusinessWeek all the time.
Anyway, I think it's a good overview of the Watson project and the challenges involved. If you read it and want to know more about something, please let me know. I can address some of the questions here--and more of them in the book.
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| The Ogilvy-produced introduction of Watson.
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Gravel roads: developing backward posted on May 3, 2010
News
A gravel road (in Bedford County, Pennsylvania)
In North Dakota, I see in BusinessWeek, is tearing up some asphalt roads and returning them to gravel. As I rode my bike over ice-ravaged roads in Montclair (NJ) over the weekend, I was wondering about the economics of road repair. If it's in the national interest for people to drive less and walk (and ride) more, wouldn't it make sense to let the roads continue to worsen? Or does the bad infrastructure, in addition to breaking axels and ruining tires, handicap the economy and make us less competitive?
I didn't come to a conclusion. Clearly, though, the Bloomberg administration is carrying out a variation of this strategy by closing off key parks and intersections to traffic. They're upping the pain of driving in New York.
Decades ago, I covered endless selectman's meetings while covering local government in Vermont, at the Black River Tribune. When the road budgets came up, someone would inevitably suggest tearing up the asphalt and going back to dirt or gravel. The local ski industry, based around Okemo Mountain, wouldn't have stood for it. But who skis in North Dakota?
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Rating agency data: Getting gamed posted on April 24, 2010
News
It looks like the rating agencies, which contributed so much to the housing bubble (and bust), made it easy for banks to game the numbers. According to a story in today's New York Times, they shared their formulas. This apparently was in the interest of "transparency," but it made it a cinch for the banks to engineer questionable offerings that would rate AAA.
This would be a bit like Google sharing the details of its search algorithms. Companies would have an easier time than they already do optimizing their Web pages for high ranking. Of course, the search engines do provide some of this information--again, in the interest of transparency.
But there's one crucial difference. If a search engine sees that someone is gaming the formula and distorting the results, they can tweak the algorithms. The rating agencies, by contrast, have less room for maneuvering. Every change affects billions in securities.
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I'm flying to Berlin this afternoon for ECOM 2010. Making a strategic decision to leave the laptop at home and travel only with the iPad. The only thing that's hard to do with the iPad, I'm afraid, is blogging. (It's a software issue with my Adobe platform. I wonder if it has to do with the spat between Adobe and Apple...) They usually have plenty of public computers at these conferences...
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Math to free up Mexican cash posted on April 20, 2010
News
While researching The Numerati, I traveled down to Miami
for the annual awards ceremony of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. This is the kind of organization I
never dreamed I'd be covering. But what they do is fascinating.
Operations Research is the applied math used for modeling and
optimizing just about every industrial and logistical process on earth.
Sometimes it's things you'd never think of. In last night's award ceremony, for example, the winner was the Mexican securities clearing house, Indeval.
Using operations research, they optimized the settlements of securities
transactions. Yes, it sounds boring. But it makes a difference, because
while transactions are closing, the banks have to hold onto money. This
new process reduced liquidity requirements by 52% in cash and 26% in
securities.
Just one sign of how much things have changed in Mexico: When I was the
BusinessWeek bureau chief in Mexico City, from 1987-92, we had
ridiculously high phone bills, both for the office and my home office
in the city of Cuernavaca. My secretary had to go to the bank with a
bodyguard. She would return with stacks of cash. I would drive them to
Cuernavaca, and my wife or I would take them to the telephone company
to pay the bill. Talk about high liquidity requirements to close slow
transactions.
Then there was the time we had our first of two babies in Mexico, in
1988. (He's graduating from college next month.) The birth cost less
than $1,000. We expected they would bill us. But they demanded cash. We
couldn't leave with the baby until we came up with it. It was Saturday
and our bank was closed. We did not have bank cards with access to
ATMs. So we had to call friends of ours, baptist missionaries, to scare
up enough money to bail out our baby.
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"Freemium's" broken promises posted on April 19, 2010
News
"Freemium," I'm learning, is not to be trusted. For those who
haven't read Chris Anderson's book, Free,
or been briefed on thousands of Internet business plans over the past
five years, Freemium involves luring masses of users to free services,
and then enticing them to pay for "premium" services. Google docs,
Flickr, Skype, Ning, they all run on Freemium--or used to.
Now I'm seeing, Freemium is risky. Companies can lure you in, lead you
to entrust them with writings, photos, entire networks of friends and
colleagues, and then they can coerce you into paying for it--or losing
it all.
I encountered this risk a couple weeks ago when I went to Flickr,
Yahoo's photo site. Here's what I saw:
I've been posting on Flickr sporatically since before Yahoo bought it
in 2005. This new threat means that every time I add an image from 2010,
I'll lose access to one, starting with the photos I uploaded from
Paris.(Update: This, as commented below, has been in effect since 2006. I just didn't get close to the limit until recently. I still object, since it wasn't the policy when I signed up. But hold the tears: I still have those pics on my
computer. I put them online to have access to them everywhere, and
to protect against hard-disk crashes.) In any case, I promptly paid
Google for 20 gigs of storage and uploaded hundreds of photos to its Picasa service.
(What do I do if Google quintuples its fees next year? That's one of
the risks, and conundrums, of entrusting data to cloud services.)
Now I see that Ning, the "free" social network service, will be coercing
its free users to migrate to paid services. This one really irks
me. Last summer, when BusinessWeek was put up for sale, I launched an
invitation-only Ning network for BW staffers, past and present. It has
attracted hundreds of members and continues to serve as a meeting place
for our scattered ranks. We congregated there with the understanding that the service was
free. And now that we're established, we're getting hit up.
This seems unethical to me (and to Shel
Holtz). The right thing to do would be to respect promises made,
grandfather in free services, and to start charging for all new services
today. But extortion, clearly, is much more effective. The problem is this: Once companies resort to these tactics, how can we trust them? Who's to say they won't jack up the rates with similar threats a year or two from now?
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Webinar on April 21: Value in Unstructured Data posted on April 2, 2010
News
| I'll be moderating a webinar on Apr. 21: Finding Value in Unstructured Data. If you have some time that day, please join us. I'll be talking with execs from Accenture, EDW, and Teradata. It's an subject I've been thinking about a lot. In fact, one of the points I've been making in recent talks is that the old adage about Garbage In, Garbage Out isn't true anymore--at least in a lot of emerging data markets. This is sponsored by Smart Data Collective, the blog I've been contributing to since January.
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@MichaelPizzo My pleasure. Another book u might like is Afterthought by James Bailey. Not new, but puts data in context of sci/math history
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The Book Bag - Zoe Page
The Wall Street Journal - John Derbyshire
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Milos Vec
The Guardian (UK) - Steven Poole & Christopher Exeter
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