• a program with 3x increase in majors
• alums from Deloitte Consulting coach students in Systems Analysis and Database courses
  
• a model curriculum open-sourced to all
• one of the most innovative courses anywhere (TechTrek)
• a killer business plan competition that this year had the winning team coached by a Sequoia Capital mentor (see below)
• a speaker series that has brought to campus Rich Miner the week the Google G1 dropped
• Reggie Fils-Aime during the US launch week for the DSi
• TechForGood – Metcalfe on GreenTech, Kane on OLPC, and Heywood on PatientsLikeMe
• freshmen working with real clients with $200 in Google AdWords accounts
• faculty that have racked up research publications in academia’s consensus tier-one journals ISR, MISQ, J. of Marketing.

Many of us have been working investment-banker hours at academic jobs and I think we’ve earned a mention as a top program. Friends, we’d appreciate your help in sharing our hard work and wonderful efforts with the world. Your stories & comments about the impact of our program are welcome. Thanks!

WakeSmart Tops BCVC Venture Competition
WakeSmart was awarded the $10,000 Grand Prize in this year’s $15K Boston College Venture Competition. Members include Juniors Greg Nemeth, Ryan Flaherty, Peter Wojda, and one Yalie Arun Gupta. Second Place – NetGene’s Cloud Computing effort, which includes BC’s Brad Hayes (headed to Yale’s CS Ph.D. program) and TechTrekker Shahbano Imran. Human Capital Management (income-based loans), and the sophomores behind Novis Geo (home-based geothermal installation) tied fir third. There’s a QuickTime video of the event, also online. Each of teams participating in BCVC is paired with an experienced executive mentor. The winning team was fortunate enough to be paired with a BC alum at Sequoia Capital – the Sand Hill Road legend that funded Google, YouTube, Apple, EA, Oracle, and so many others (did you catch that, BusinessWeek?).

Tech for the Other Three Billion
While we’re innovative here at BC, we’re also proud of pioneering work done at other schools. This week’s shout-out goes to Jim Patell’s class at Stanford Busines School, and his ’06 students, Nedjip Tozun and Sam Goldman, founders of D.Light. The firm uses next-gen LED lights, nifty power-management, and cheap solar panels to create an alternative to ubiquitous kerosene lighting. Most WiG readers (including me) are in the dark about kerosene lighting, which burns, pollutes, and poisons, and in some places eats up some 15-20% of the poor’s income. The world’s poor spend about $38 billionj a year on kerosene for lighting, alone. At $25, D.Light’s lamps are expensive for those earning less than $1 a day. But adopters have seen average monthly income increased from $12 to $18. Users can perform craft-work, study, and other tasks at night, and save the time spent traveling to buy more kerosene. DFJ and other ventures have backed the effort. A great story following our successful Tech for Good effort at BC. Thanks again to all who attended and promoted, and particularly to our three outstanding speakers who are changing the world!

Netflix Top DVDs Surprise
For those using the (free) Netflix Case. Crash is still on Netflix most requested list even three years after it’s released. A look at the list shows the astonishing power of recommendation queue, and the appeal of films that weren’t box-office boffo. E-Weekly’s pop-watch gives a rundown of some of the lower-budget surprises “No Country for Old Men, Walk the Line, Babel, Hotel Rwanda, Michael Clayton, Syriana, Million Dollar Baby, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Finding Neverland, The Constant Gardener, Memoirs of a Geisha, Mystic River, Good Night, and Good Luck, Ray, Sideways”. As the case points out, “Netflix actually delivered more revenue to Fox from the Last King of Scotland than it did from the final X-Men film”.

Putting Twitter’s World to Use
You must read this – it’s a 10 on the ‘geek goose bumps meter’. Ignore the “I’m making a sandwich” banter, and the desperate masses hoping to pump up their ‘followers’, Twitter (at over 14 million users) is break-out impactful. Starbucks uses Twitter to correct hateful rumors (“no coffee for the troops? Not true”). Dell got an early warning sign on poor design (“apostrophe & return keys too close on Mini 9″ – quickly corrected for Mini 10 launch). Intuit monitors competitor Mint.com & encourages Quicken Online signups. A wellness spa tweets when last-minute cancellations can tell customers of an opening (with Twitter it remains booked solid). Surgeons & residents at Henry Ford Hospital who tweet during brain surgery. And some tweets are from those so-young they’ve got ‘negative age’. Twitter.com/kickbee is a fetal monitor band that sends tweets “I kicked Mommy at 08:52” (I *want this* for TFMG, who’s pregnant with our third – a little girl due in late June). From Earthquake warnings to protests in Modova, 14 million users are posting nearly 100 million tweets a month. Paul Saffo offers a great quote “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles”.

And if you missed the celebrity Tweet news this week, Oprah’s on Twitter (her first tweet – ALL CAPS). Sarah Lacy pointed out that about 1/3 of the folks in her (highly-recommended) book have now been on Oprah (you go, geeks!). And ‘dude’ Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to be the first million-tweet account. Twitter is now part of my MI021 class, and TechTrekkers are pushing Twitter campus wide. Time you got on? Be sure to get TweetDeck – an easy (and addictive) way to monitor traffic on Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps, but DON’T USE IT DURING CLASS!

Cuban Fined for Tweets
Gotta love this one. Dallas Mavericks owner (and tech-made billionaire) Mark Cuban was fined $25,000 for twittering aspersions at NBA Refs. His quote: “can’t say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does )”. For the record, the fine works out to $510/word.

The Secret Behind Twitter’s Growth
Twitter was built on the popular Web toolkit Ruby on Rails. This works great for the user interface of the front end, but it can’t scale for the backend (which you know if you’ve seen the Fail Whale at the right). To help Twitter meet the needs of the 14 million+ increasingly heavy Tweeters, the site has turned to Scala to handle the back-end. An obscure programming language developed circa 2003, Scala is designed to handle concurrent processing so that system resources can be accesed and used simultaneously. This is critical when millions of tweets need to be sent out simultaneously to different devices worldwide.

A Pricing Revolution Looms in Online Advertising
The Wall Street Journal charges as much as $64.60 CPM for banner ads that run on its site. This rich WSJ premium comes from the assumption that its readers are precisely the high-income demographic that many advertisers covet. But with new behavior tracking and demographic targeting technologies, other websites will be able to identify these premium, desirable net surfers. And when ads can be rifled scoped into a broader array of sites, the WSJ may find its ability to charge a premium goes away. BusinessWeek sees the potential for targeted ad rates to drop by 95%. Not only are costs lower, click-thru rates for this kind of targeting are higher. ValueClick, puts the click-thrus on targeted ads at 110% to 840% higher than average. Good for advertisers, bad for content providers. And what’s the net impact on ad network revenues?

Putting Patient Privacy in Peril
According to legal complaints filed against the UCLA Medical Center, over 1,000 people (most celebrities) have had their medical records inappropriately accessed; Brittany Speers, Maria Shriver, and Farrah Fawcett among them. Recently Kaiser canned 15 employees for unauthorized peeks at the OctoMom’s records. But with stimulus dollars targeted at digitizing health records, is the potential for abuse increasing? New legislation requires firms sharing data to keep audit trails of the info flows, and some penalties on prying and abuse are strengthening. But patients aren’t notified when data is shared. Here’s where the trouble comes in: Pharmacies regularly sell detailed records of patient medications to clearing houses, which can then sell the info to insurance companies and other interested parties. Pharmacy customers have unwittingly been denied coverage because of this info flow. According to BusinessWeek, certain government agencies also don’t need patient consent to view medical records. The Secretary of the Health and Human Services Dept., for example, can legally access every citizen’s health records, including psychotherapy notes.

Connecting the Dots in Healthcare Informatics
According to the NY Times “The federal government’s economic stimulus package is dedicating $19 billion to speeding the adoption of electronic health records, so demand for health informatics specialists is skyrocketing”. One doc pegs the demand for Health-Care IT specialists at roughly 70,000. The Web 2.0 lecture from last Fall (podcast) includes several Health Care / IT examples that you’ll see in this summer’s updated peer-production / Web 2.0 chapter. Slides from the talk are also online.

A continued thanks to WiG readers who continue to tolerate the period of ‘every 2-3 weeks in geek’ as I continue to work toward my book deadline. Draft chapters continue to be posted on http://www.gallaugher.com/chapters. Those interested in the FlatWorldKnowledge model might check out a recent blog post by one of my publisher’s investors.

Tech For Good @ BC, Friday, April 3, 2009. Featuring Three Killer Talks @ Three Different Times & Locations:

9:00-9:50AM, Fulton 511: Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet & General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners (and the Metcalfe behind “Metcalfe’s Law”): on Internet History Lessons for Solving Energy

10:00-10:50AM, Merkert 127: Chuck Kane, President & COO of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) on the firm’s pioneering efforts to provide laptops to the world’s poorest children.

2:00-2:50PM, Fulton 250: Ben Heywood, Co-Founder & President, PatientsLikeMe on the firm’s groundbreaking and inspiring efforts to empower chronically ill patients.

Share the flyer with friends!  All are welcome!

Google: Beware the eBay Curse
Sarah Lacy’s BusinessWeek column on the challenges facing Google preempted the faberNovel “Why Google Could Die” slideshow, and both are great, provocative reads. I’ve also put together a bunch of slides for this semester’s Google lectures, and the numbers are staggering: the world’s #1 brand, a near 70% (and growing) share of search, and advertising gains the prior year ahead of all major media companies – online or off. But nothing lasts forever, and Lacy points out that the future of the web is in organizing people, not information. Much of this strength is out of Google’s grasp, either in the ‘dark web’ behind the login of Facebook, or via instant-response on Twitter. Yahoo’s Terry Semel could have once bought Google for $3 billion. Should Google pony up for Twitter before the price rises even more? Google will have to improve acquisition results, having shuttered Twitter-like also-ran Jaiku and the mobile social tool Dodgeball, while Blogger is still an also-ran behind WordPress. Gmail remains an innovation leader – Gmail actually ranks 10th in overall web traffic behind YouTube. But Gmail continues to trail Yahoo Mail, a service responsible for 50% of US web e-mail traffic (and that includes 40 million paying customers from Yahoo’s ’07 acquisition of Zimbra). BTW, the Parisians behind “Why Google Could Die…” also produced last December’s “Everything you wanted to know about Google but were afraid to ask”. A note to service marketers on the web - it’s also VERY interesting to see how a relatively unknown French firm has twice in the past five months become the talk of the tech blogosphere by post some insightful slides. And while we’re on the subject of pundit speculation – Blodget posted a stat-rich piece on oow Facebook Could Kil Google.  Of now that former YouTube CFO (and Google VP) Gideon Yu is out at Facebook, the firm needs a new CFO.

How to Twitter
Julia Angwin at The Wall Street Journal offers some insight to those not already in the Twitteratti. There’s clearly a lot of garbage on Twitter, with many would-be cyber-stars ‘following’ everyone in hopes they’ll be ‘followed’ and gain a rankings-rise. But the savvy are using Twitter as significant promotional tools. The latest? Celtic Paul Pierce Twittered he’d give away free tickets to the first five fans spotted wearing a Pierce jersey and shouting the password ‘Truth’ (his nickname). Value that encourages fans to regularly tune into Pierce Tweets, and that gains a boatload of media crossover coverage. Value is the key: Zappos’ Tony Hsieh blasted some of his best engineers out of geek-paradise SF to join his Vegas firm, in part by first Twittering secret code words for a ‘free drinks’ bash, then selling techies on the firm’s top-ranked culture and work environment. It was a one-man recruiting blitz that did an end-run around the conference and was laser-focused on attracting exactly the kinds of candidates Hsieh wanted. Twitter has become so important to firms that Salesforce.com has included a feature to search, monitor and respond directly to Twitter chatter. As an aside, firms looking to leverage the power of microblogging internally, behind a firewall they can control, should check out SocialText 3.0 (the enterprise social networking tool we use to power our class wikis in the Carroll School). Oh, and for the shameless plug – I’m at http://twitter.com/gallaugher.

A Facebook Addict Gets Twitter Religion
More fun news from TechTrek. My student Eric Nam explains why Facebooking Undergrads want Twitter in his recent guest post to Sarah Lacy’s blog. Eric is spearheading a student-led drive to improve technology on campus. You can follow him at: http://twitter.com/ericnam.

Google Prepares Venture Fund
Google Ventures, co-led by Fall BC TechDay speaker (and Android co-founder) Rich Miner, is expected to invest $100 million in the next 12 months. Look for some of the green-tech efforts supported by Google.org to shift to the venture arm. According to the announcement, Google Ventures has already made two investments: Silver Spring Networks, a firm that makes tech for managing electric grids, and Pixazza a firm that embeds ‘to buy’ links in online images (check out the website).

Google Voice May Threaten Other Phone Services
The startup GrandCentral was snapped up by Google a little over a year and a half ago. Now the Google iteration is ready to go live as Google Voice. The product allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring on all phones simultaneously – home, office, work, wherever. Google Voice will also offer a single voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And (note to Skype) it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the US and for a small fee internationally.

And for one more Googly bonus item: Google VP Marissa Mayer, one of the most powerful women in business, was interviewed on The Charlie Rose program last month (see link for video).

Google to Offer Ads Based on Interest
Leveraging the $3.1 billion acquisition of graphic ad-server DoubleClick, Google has brought surf-tracking technology to AdWords running on the partner network. Dubbed “interest-based ads”, the effort will notice where a user surfs, and will begin to target ads based on perceived interests. A big step, since AdSense ads on partner networks typically gleaned keywords from a page’s content (my students will remember ads briefly appearing on the Week In Geek - aka WiG - advertised hair replacement firms & wig shops). While the tactic (which others call behavior tracking) will freak out some, the search sovereign is the last of the big players leveraging this tech in text-based ads, and is empowering consumers to a degree that far-outpaces rivals. Google will be the first of the major firms to let users see and edit the information it has compiled about their interests. To access it, users will just need to click on a link that accompanies each ad. Google will even offer a browser plug-in, in case cookies that identify a user as ‘opting out’ are deleted or expire.  Here’s a video where Google describes the new service.

Apple Raisese iPhone Ante
In eight months since Apple released the app store, 25,000 apps have been written, resulting in 800 million downloads. The firm has sold 17 million iPhones and 14 million iPod touches. The new v.3 software update will include cut & paste between apps, the ability to write e-mail in landscape mode, peer-to-peer networking for things like gaming & contact swapping, and links to a host of new third-party accessories including blood pressure monitors. Developers also get new payment options, including in-game upgrades and subscriptions. The March 17th keynote is online.

Trailing Apple, Nintendo & Sony Push Handheld Game Downloads
Neil Young, not the geezer Canadian rocker, but the former EA executive who now runs game firm ngmoco says the iPhone is as “important a moment in the game industry as the introduction of the (Atari) VCS, or the NES, or the Game Boy, or Xbox Live, or massively multiplayer games”. iPhone sales are outpacing sales of Nintendo DS and PSP, and that the biggest hits (60% of the top 100 apps) are games. The AppStore is growing by 165 apps a day. With Apple’s example, Sony & Nintendo are prepping stronger moves into downloadable apps.

iPhone Apps Case Study: To Charge or Run Ads?
Bo Wang, developer of the brick-break iPhone game Galaxy Impact, provides a detailed autopsy of the firm’s initial experiment in free/ad-supported vs. for-fee-game. Graphs & download details are offered, and conclusions are summed up on the end. An interesting read for would-be iPhone entrepreneurs.

AdMob’s iPhone Ad Business Exploding
In Feb., mobile ad network AdMob served up 1.2 billion ads worldwide to iPhone and iPod Touch users, representing 18% of the firm’s business, up from just 1.3% of business a year ago.

Rethinking Software Support
Want a reason to jump into the clouds? Consider that half of Oracle’s $22.4 billion in sales last year came from maintenance and support contracts. This 85% margin coin makes Larry Ellison one of the world’s richest, but the hefty price tag on software support is pushing even big dogs like EMC to ditch Oracle for cloudy firms like Salesforce.com, where maintenance & support go away. The journal also points out that the industry loves the term ‘cloud’, but can’t define it very well. Anyone struggling is welcome to check out the chapter ‘Software in Flux’, which provides a managerial overview, complete with definitions and examples of Cloud Computing, SaaS, and the infrastructure investments made by cloud firms.

Will Cisco’s Project California Rock the IT Sector?
More disruptive news - this time from Cisco. The firm has more cash than ANY tech firm - $30 billion. And although its business continues to gush profits, it needs big, billion+ markets to move the stock needle forward. The company has entered no fewer than 28 different markets, ranging from home digital music systems to public surveillance systems. But its latest gambit may be the riskiest. By combining servers, networking equipment, and storage, Cisco hopes to grab share from a host of cloud-serving vendors, but also risks alienating partners like IBM (which currently resells about $2 billion in Cisco gear). It’s the cloud market that Cisco CEO John Chambers covets. 50% of the eight million servers sold each year reside in Internet data centers, up from 20% in 2003.

eBay Retreats in Web Retailing
With visitor traffic dropping by 16% and its first ever revenue decline (down 7%) this past holiday quarter, eBay announced a renewed focus on collectables, vintage, used, and overstock items. The move is an acknowledgement that attempts to go head-to-head against Amazon in new item sales haven’t succeeded. CEO Donahoe says flatly “We aren’t a retailer. We’re going to focus on where we can win”. The firm will continue to grow gargantuan PayPal, striking a deal that will make it the exclusive payment mechanism for RiM’s Blackberry application store.

Microsoft Shuts Encarta
Redmond killed Britannica when parents who once spent $2,000 on a rack of leather bound books started spending $2,000 on a PC. But then came ‘the crowd’, and it seems Wikipedia has killed Encarta. The NY Times takes Encarta to the woodshed – pointing out that Wikipedia scored 97% of ‘online encyclopedia’ visits in January, while Encarta had 1.27%. Perhaps entries that still have Joe Biden listed as a “U.S. Senator” show Encarta’s problem with trying to edit such broad tracts of knowledge.

The Sunday Times also reviewed the new book The Wikipedia Revolution. Wikipedia, a site that functions on roughly $7 million in donations and grants (previously it was below $3 million), is now within shouting distance of the traffic numbers posted by Amazon and eBay (roughly 60 million January ’09 visitors). Does your firm have a strategy for dealing with a world where the top 3 hits on your brand/firm/executives likely include a crowd-sourced entry?

IT Innovations Help Kiva Expand its Microfinance Mission
During our “Tech for Good” week, it’s only appropriate to highlight ComputerWorld’s recent cover story on Kiva. The firm leverages technology to create microfinance markets linking primarily western investors with worthy and impactful entrepreneurial efforts in developing countries (scroll down to catch the video).

Google & Indian Village Phones
Google Labs India launches a public message board where a centrally located PC can be used to record and respond to community notes. TechCrunch reports that the service is geared at developing nations where not everyone has a computer - think of it as village voicemail on shared computers.

Kenya Plugs Into Mobile Crowdsourcing
There’s a quiet, mobile payments revolution brewing in Africa. As MIT’s Technology Review points out: Kenya’s SafariCom offers MPesa that can be used to pay for a taxi or water from a remote village’s well. “Electricity is sold, pay-as-you-go, in Kenya, and a startup there lets people buy prepaid cards and authorize them using their phone. Thirty percent of the population now pays that way, instead of standing in line.” Now MIT researcher Nate Eagle’s new effort, Txteagle, hopes to create a text-driven online market for services. Think of it as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk via cellphones. Participants, who perform the small tasks requested, get paid in small blocks of money or in chunks of airtime. Although Nate’s an MIT guy, we like his last name & hope he succeeds. Look for rollouts in Rwanda and the Dominican Republic, soon.

Do you Viv?
Undergrad TechTrekkers from a few years back met then Facebooker Arul Velan, and have been looking for word on his new startup ever since. It’s out – Viv is a platform for encouraging firms to go green in a way that drives profits. It’ll be fun to watch the firm’s roll out. Good luck Arul!

A Great Time to Launch a Good Startup
Great companies are often formed in crummy times. The enclosed graphic posted by Brad Feld offers some inspiration for those of you braving the startup world in these tough times.

The PC in 2019
More from MIT: a fun attempt to show what PC interfaces in 2019 might look like. Scroll down & click the video.

Newspapers: Thinking the Unthinkable
A long, and provocative note by Clay Shirky on the decline of the newspaper revolution. Tough to sum up, but worth a read by anyone concerned with our evolving world where newspapers aren’t necessary, but journalism is.

Offbeat Name? Then Facebook’s No Friend
If your last name’s Batman, you’ll have a hard time registering for Facebook. Plus side? Your name is wicked cool!

Roche buys Genentech for $46.8 Billion
A quick note on perennial TechTrek stop Genentech. Not unexpected. And we suspect Roche won’t meddle at all with the organizational magic created by the geniuses in the South Bay.

The Conficker Worm: What Happens Next?
By the time you read this we’ll likely know if we’ve been punked in what the Washington Post called ‘The World’s Longest Rickroll’, or if the Conficker has, in fact, unleashed its cyber-nastiness. Those who want a quick primer can catch the 60 minutes broadcast on the hyper-worm, which as infected millions of Windows PCs worldwide. And if you got the WiG before April Fool’s day, the AP ran a piece on how to run clean.

DVD rental firm Netflix Defies the Naysayers
Why do we use Netflix as the first Carroll School undergrad case on strategy? The firm has continually trumped rivals. Last year the firm hit 10 million subscribers, revenues were up 13%, and in this market the stock price has doubled in the last three months. Digital downloads present a challenge (and Blockbuster just linked a deal to stream, Netflix-style, over TiVo), but for a firm constantly pronounced dead by the press, it’s got more lives than an ally cat.

The Onion Visits Historic Blockbuster
Just Brilliant!  Worthy to show when covering the Netflix Case!

My Dinner in Edmonds
Thanks to the wonderful students on Edmond’s 8th (Lizzy, Katherine, Stephanie, and Ji-won), who invited me back to the floor, where 20 years ago I was an RA. Also in our local press, TechTrek got front page coverage in The Heights!

New Draft Chapters are Up at www.gallaugher.com/chapters!

• Software in Flux: offering a managerial overview of changes in the software industry, including Open Source, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, and more.
• Software – A Primer: offering a basic intro to software categories, TCO, and software failures.

Comments, corrections, suggestions, and perceptions are all welcome! Look for more chapters & cases, soon!

Save the Date - Tech For Good @ BC, Friday, April 3, 2009. Featuring Three Killer Talks:

• 9:00-9:50AM, Fulton 511: Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet & General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners (and the Metcalfe behind “Metcalfe’s Law”): on Internet History Lessons for Solving Energy
• 10:00-10:50AM, Merkert 127: Chuck Kane, President & COO of OLPC on the firm’s pioneering efforts to provide laptops to the world’s poorest children.
• 2:00-2:50PM, Fulton 250: Ben Heywood, CEO & Co-Founder, PatientsLikeMe on the firm’s groundbreaking and inspiring efforts to empower chronically ill patients.

The Coming Facebook-Twitter Collision
In her latest column, Sarah Lacy (who gets my vote as the smartest journalist in Tech) gives a shout-out to the TechTrekkers (she had dinner with my students last week). Sarah points out that Twitter’s key advantage lies in asynchronous communications. On Twitter, someone can choose to “follow” you, but you don’t have to follow them. Up ‘til now, Facebook feeds worked two-way, with both parties having to ‘friend’ each other, making Twitter ideal for celebrities and others who want to communicate with a mass audience without friending them. Recent Facebook updates bring Twitter-like features to Zuckerberg’s site, allowing public personalities (and firms) can communicate with fans & followers on Facebook. Apparently Facebook offered half a billion for Twitter (that’s a firm with 175 million users coughing up over $83 bucks for each of Twitter’s 6 million users). Twitter says no – the firm’s just ramping up. Who should fear? How ‘bout Google. As Lacy points out, Web 1.0 was about organizing information, Web 2.0 is about organizing people, and both Facebook and Twitter have a leg up on Sergey and Larry in all things social graph (remember Google killed Jaiku, its Twitter-like service. Or perhaps you didn’t remember b/c neither you nor anyone else used it). Stay tuned – even in the downturn we’re not quite done with nosebleed valuations. BTW: Sarah’s brilliant book, Once You’re Lucy, Twice You’re Good, was requried reading on this year’s TechTrek.  It’s a GREAT read on the current gen of Valley entrepreneurs!

Video: The Daily Show Explains Twitter
“It’s no wonder young people love it. At least, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people!”

How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives
Fortune’s cover story lays out why Facebook is the most significant Internet product since Google. Far from being a fad, Zuckerberg has developed the equivalent of browser-based crack. The avg. Facebook user is on the site for 169 minutes a month (for comparison, the New York Times’ website hold users for only about 10 min./month). No longer just for the undergrad set, we’re all addicted. 18-24 yr. olds currently make up only a quarter of users. With 175 million ‘citizens’, if Facebook were a country it would be nearly as big as Brazil.

Them’s bigger-than-SuperBowl numbers, and FB is as mainstream as they come. Starbucks wrapped its service day and Election Day promos around the site, with feeds spreading the coffee giant’s message like the most virulent digital Ebola. E&Y recruits on Facebook, Dell will soon follow. Salesforce.com has built Facebook access into its latest platforms. Microsoft will borrow FB features for the next Windows. And Facebook has become the go-to place to organize everything from political events to fundraisers. Where are the profits? Be patient. Says Zuckerberg: “We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone’s name, find the person you’re looking for, and communicate with them, that’s a really valuable system to be building”. And now everything from CNN to DonorsChoose is sharing data with the mega site. Says one entrepreneur “If there are [175 million] people in a room, you’d better be in that room”. Sure the firm has accepted $400 million in venture coin without solid in-the-black numbers, but as board member Marc Andreessen points out on Charlie Rose – FB could bring in a boatload of revenue by splashing banners on the login page. It doesn’t. Instead Facebook is taking time to weld itself to users’ lives, as it experiments and innovates to build durable revenue tools. Those waiting for a Friendster-like Facebook collapse ain’t gonna get one.

Salesforce Hits Its Stride
Benioff’s baby is a behemoth. Salesforce.com’s $3.5 billion in revenues represents a 60% five year annual growth rate. The firm has now moved beyond SaaS to become one of the major players in cloud platforms. Some clients are running over a dozen custom apps in the firm’s Force.com cloud. All good, but there’s another secret about the SaaSy cloud – margins aren’t anywhere near those of traditional software. Remember, the marginal cost of shipping bits is pretty much zero, but the marginal cost of hosting a customer in the cloud has to factor in bandwidth and boxes, plus the staff to babysit all that tech. That’s why although Google’s US ad revenue has outstripped Microsoft’s Windows revenues since Summer 2007, Windows remains the more profitable franchise. Salesforce’s numbers paint a similar picture. The firm’s 4% margins are pretty skimpy when compared to the 25% take Oracle snares from competing products.

Topps Launches 3D Baseball Cards
Baseball card firm Topps, now owned by former Disney chief Michael Eisner, is shipping packs of 3D Live cards. This is very slick. Hold up a Topps baseball card to a webcam, and the image shown on screen has a little computer-generated image of the player popping up from the card. Place it back on the table and you can use the keyboard to control pitching and batting. Check out the video of what you’d see on screen when using the technology.

Why the Music Industry Hates Guitar Hero
Music video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have snared $2.3 billion in the past three years. Geezer rockers Aerosmith made more from the band’s special edition Guitar Hero game than from any previous album. Problem is, Ed Bronfman and others from old-school music are grumbling that their take isn’t big enough, and ‘ol Ed is threatening to pull Warner Music’s tunes from future deals. BTW both Guitar Hero & Rock Band were created by Cambridge-based Harmonix. The firm sold Guitar Hero to Activision (which has introduced all subsequent versions), then sold out to MTV when the Viacom crown-jewel coveted Rock Band. See, the East Coast CAN do consumer tech!

Hulu’s Hurdles
The NBC/Fox video sharing site focused on two things: 1) building the best playing experience on the web and 2) offering up lots of first-rate content. The success of shows like The Office, 30 Rock, Family Guy, and the SNL political season all helped spike usage stats. This is key because all these shows target a web-savvy demographic that lacks the anchor-time that planted a past generation on the couch for ‘prime time’. Students, late-night office workers, road warriors, and anyone with a nightlife, all found that Hulu gave them a way to pop into the pop culture that they previously skipped.

Although far behind YouTube, Hulu actually makes money (a modest $12 million in profit in ’08). And now the channel pressure kicks in. Hulu initially invited CBS to join, but the Tiffany Network balked. Then CBS bought CNet and got TV.com, a site that had the right to distribute Hulu videos (Hulu streams more video, but TV.com actually had more unique visitors in January). Hulu pulls content from TV.com, CBS cries ‘you broke our deal’. Hulu also started blocking content on Boxee, a little device that allows a web experience over the TV (while networks have created Hulu, they aren’t too keen on accelerating the death of the network, especially when brought about through someone else’s device).

Food for thought: NBC has said the Net saved ‘The Office’. Could a site like Hulu have done the same for a show like the critically acclaimed, but ignored ‘Freaks & Geeks’? That show was an early venue of Judd Apatow, one of the most successful pop culture directors of the past two years. Will net-streamed video help high quality program gain audience and avoid an early axe?

Michael Moritz: Lessons from a Long-Ball Hitter
The Sequoia partner has emerged as one of the leading Valley VCs. Some interesting tidbits. Mortiz was a journalist for Time before joining Sequoia in 1986. The firm’s $12.5 million investment in Google (co-led with Kleiner) was eventually worth over $2 billion, a 160+ bagger. We spent some great time at Sequoia last week, where two BC alums are now on the roster.

Venture Capital and Start Ups Feel More Pain (Study Says)
It’s interesting to compare this with data from a recent Fenwick & West study on the state of SF/Valley VC deals. While a year ago we saw power shift to the entrepreneur as the cost of startups & speed of web 2.0 efforts meant less cash needed to attract a following & prove a concept, now power is shifting back to VCs. Valuations are clearly down. ‘Down-rounds’ (where firms receive lower valuations than the prior round) are up – hitting 47% in December. And VCs are demanding ‘pay-to-play’ among syndicate partners – deals where if an investor isn’t in a subsequent round, they risk having their shares converted from preferred to common stock.

Hal Varian on How the Web Challenges Managers
I’ve spent a lot of time studying Google lately. Our (mostly freshmen) students will be participating in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, working with real clients on AdWords projects. I’ve had four Google visits to three locations in the past year. And I’m knee-deep writing a chapter on Tech & Advertising. As part of prep, I’d dug up a McKinsey interview from last Oct. featuring Google Chief Economist (and Berkley Prof) Hal Varian. Insightful stuff on how the Web Wave, with infinite bits and no inventory shortages, shifts businesses in a far more different way than the tired old electricity or railroad analogy that many used to describe the revolution in the past. The Net created a situation where firms had intellectual property that was free to distribute and easily accessed, but no way to monetize it. Inventory from publishers + an advertiser’s need for action = Google’s AdWords auction system (where Varian spends much of his time). AG (After Google) we’ve gone from “Copyright 1997: Do Not Distribute” to “Copyright 2008: Click Here to Send to Friends”. Riffing on Herb Simon’s “A Wealth of Information Creates a Poverty of Attention”, Varian predicts that the hottest job of the next era will be statistician; read those who can find, filter, and focus attention. Curiously, statistician is already among the top three on jobs rated (and mathematician is #1)!

What an Antitrust Case Against Google Might Look Like
Wharton Prof. Eric Clemons shares his insight from past work in the Carrier Reservation System and Banking ATM markets to posit a possible government case against the search giant. While my work has also been used in anti-trust work (Brattle Group leveraged my browser/server research is dreadfully boring to all but academics, but it can be found  [here] and [here] to help determine the $750 million Microsoft / AOL settlement), I’m not convinced Google’s actions constitute an abuse of the natural state of a market where network effects are at work. Nor am I willing to suggest that Google’s ability to nurture other, possibly money-losing markets (e-mail, Office) is an abuse of power. With Berkey’s Hal Varian on one side and Wharton’s Clemons on the other, we may get a courtroom smackdown featuring two of academia’s more prominent information economists.

Plugging In To Transformation
Vasant Dhar and Arun Sundararajan of NYU offer an insightful piece on the importance of investing in technology during this downturn. To build on the points made; while many brokerage firms successfully made the wrenching shift to online trading, music firms botched the shift and gave power to new intermediaries (most notably Apple). Players in the video space are now at their destiny-defining moment as users unplug cable, go to the movies less, and think about Netflix, Hulu, and others, as worthy and cheap alternatives. With so much uncertainty and a painfully weak economy, where should firms invest? Good choices are technologies that increase customer intelligence and improve business intimacy. The good news is these technologies are low cost. The bad news is that few managers understand them and have the skills to exploit them. Marketing is moving away from an era of directly influencing consumers to one where they are “reacting to their customers’ electronic intent” or mediating “the influence that customers have over one another”. All this offers more support for our success at repositioning our curriculum to cover peer production, SaaS/Cloud, online advertising, and the broader strategic thinking that surrounds all of these trends.

Do You Know 2.0
YouTube users have likely seen this, but it’s an updated version of a video I’ve assigned to past classes prior to our globalization discussion. It still gives me goose bumps.

Cloud is the New Dotcom
From TechCrunch, a selection of video highlights from the “Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?” event. Featured talks are from Salesforce’s Benioff, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels, Google’s VP of Engineering - Vic Gundotra, and a panel with Ning’s Gina Bianchini and FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit.  Another example for those faculty using the Software in Flux Chapter

Save the Date:
Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet & General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners (and the Metcalfe behind “Metcalfe’s Law”) will speak in Fulton 511 on Friday, April 3, 9AM. Topic: “Enernet [as in Energy Net]: Internet History Lessons for Solving Energy”. Part of a full day of talks under the heading “Tech for Good”.

Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work
Half of the firms involved in Web 2.0 are dissatisfied with their efforts. McKinsey does an autopsy on failed efforts and contrasts with successes. Among the findings: although these are bottom-up tools, adoption needs help from the top (e.g. an executive champion); what’s in the workflow won’t get used - efforts will fail unless they dovetail with existing processes (no one does extra work unless there’s value). Includes some neat examples from Pixar (who used a video wiki that fit with animation-centric tasks), Lockheed Martin, and Google.

Commentary: we’ve seen some wonderful examples of firms that have created their own firm-centric Web 2.0 efforts (MyStarbucksIdea.com is among the best), but I’m interested in hearing your thoughts and examples on how organizations should react to and engage communities that form outside their control (whether on Facebook, in the blogosphere, Twitter, or other community-creating spaces). Please send your comments to john.gallaugher@bc.edu. Sorry there’s still no comment field in the blog. A new WiG will be coming with better two-way features later this year.

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
Talk about Atoms to Bits – if the New York Times replaced its print version with a digital copy on the Kindle – and GAVE AWAY the Kindle, it’d actually SAVE MONEY! BusinessInsider ran the math: assuming the Times’ delivery costs are $644 million per year (sources suggest it’s actually MUCH higher), it’d cost about $297 million to give a $359 Kindle to the 830,000 readers who have subscribed to the New York Times for two years or more. Of course, the Kindle experience isn’t anything like the visceral delight one gets from dismantling a fat Sunday paper, and the crossword puzzle can’t be done on the Bezos eBook (yet). But there are two curves out there – one that states that after the recession commodity prices like ink & paper will go nowhere but up. And another that says technology costs will drop as sophistication improves. My first Audible (now a part of Amazon) subscription circa 2000 came with a free MP3 player. It’s only a matter of time before Kindles are free. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it’s coming. And you’ve probably seen the Kindle 2.0 is out, although the Writer’s Guild is freaked out about the text-to-speech feature and claims it’s illegal.

Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can!
Speaking of free, a couple of issues back we reported that Monty Python now gives away free content via the troupe’s free YouTube channel. Well now we have results - sales of Python videos are up 23,000%! Maybe there’s something in this for a guy who gives away his textbook online! The kind folks at Educause profiled my work on the forthcoming book of text and cases “Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology” from FlatWorldKnoweldge. Look for new chapters online at http://www.gallaugher.com/chapters, soon (including Software in Flux covering open source, SaaS, and Cloud Computing).

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots
Alpha geeks are creating Twitter hacks that do amazing things. One guy rigged his washing machine to give him a tweet when his spin cycle is through. Another has a home security system that tweets when it senses movement inside the house. “Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control”. A firm named Botanicalls, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets thirsty house plants alert you when they need water. Twitter even helped Lance Armstrong recover his $10,000 bike after it was stolen! Still no business model as the firm rides up the hockey stick of subscribers, but it just nabbed $35 million from Boston-based Spark Capital. Pew says 11% of adults have used Twitter or other ‘microblogging service’. For the record, very few of my students Twitter - Facebook is all they need. Pogue at the NY Times offers a guide for Twitter n00bs (and a little video, too, that shows a real-time feedback example - a nice example for faculty using my Web 2.0 Chapter). And if you feel left out, Geekmania is the service that will Twitter for you (fun read). I’ve got a modest Twitter account, but you’re welcome to connect if you’d like.

Congressman Twitters Secret Mission to Iraq
Things not to do on Twitter: reveal your undisclosed location. Apparently Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan didn’t get the memo. The dude sent Tweets from the green zone, and pithy jubilance about getting BlackBerry service in Baghdad. The problem? The congressional mission was secret! Gadzooks, man, a little discretion in the war zone.

Goodbye, PC (and Mac). Hello, services
I guess that chapter on SaaS and ‘the cloud’ comes at a good time. It’s clear this is the future of computing. Look at the numbers: despite the economy, IBM’s earnings rose 12% - Big Blue’s hardware business was down 20%, but the growth is from the services biz. IBM’s outsourcing biz alone grew 45% last quarter. Intel’s earnings are down 90%, Microsoft’s down 11%, but Mark Benioff’s renting a white truck plastered with a billboard to tool around Silicon Valley declaring that Salesforce.com is hiring. Here’s a great quote on trends from Benioff “customers are not going to bring out their checkbooks for the cost and risk and complexity of big database purchases, or application server purchases, or data center purchases. They’re buying more services, and fewer servers.” As Fortune states, “hardware isn’t dead, but our relationship with it may be changing”.

Tech Execs – Now Boardroom Stars
OK, so I had to modify the title so a particular word wouldn’t flag the WiG e-mail as spam (Fortune, take note). But it’s clear that CIO = “Career Is Over” was your Mom & Dad’s era. Now if you’re not a biz-geek, you’re nobody. I’m hesitant to whistle past the graveyard in this economy, but overall demand for tech workers continues to exceed supply. And it looks like firms continue to pay a premium for workers with Tech skills. And two of the top 10 Best Jobs on Jobs Rated are in Tech.

Confessions of a TED Addict
The 25^th TED series (Technology, Education, Design) is held this month. Those in the know have enjoyed the TED podcast archive, riveting talks on everything from Gore’s climate talk to Clinton on poverty to the OLPC. It’s worth a visit. Everyone I know who’s a fan of TED uniformly raves about Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight”, where Taylor, a brain scientist, relays what her body went through during and after she suffered a stroke. Of course, it may be better to watch the podcasts than be in the crowd. At least when Bill Gates unleashed a swarm of mosquitoes during his malaria talk(here’s the video).

From Olive to Grape
A non-tech update, but one that’s been part of our Grad TechTrek for two years. BC MBA Alum Miles MacDonnell continues to win awards for his family’s Round Pond Vineyards (where Miles is COO). Round Pond’s estate Cabs have scored spots in The S.F. Chronicle’s Top 100 Wines in 2007 and 2008, and Rachel Ray stopped by on her show’s tour through Napa. And the whole Gallaugher family loves Round Pond’s syrups (blood orange & meyer lemon)! On January 2^nd, when the Grad TechTrekkers were about to head to Napa, Miles’ business occupied the entire front page and more of the Wine section of the SF Chronicle (yes, the Chronicle has a Wine section). The vineyard has a new visitor hall and tasting area and is a simply magnificent place to visit while in wine country. Congrats, Miles!

Reaching Through the Locked Door
A little over two years ago, a promising Smith student named Maggie Worthen was incapacitated by a stroke just months before her graduation. But now Maggie has been able to definitively communicate for the first time since she was stricken, thanks to EagleEyes, and the work of BC Profs. Gips and Olivieri (IS) and Tecce (Psychology). It’s difficult to read a story about EagleEyes or see a demo without getting a lump in your throat. The story from the Chronicle offers one of so many that demonstrate how proud we are to have this work at Boston College. And the work continues. Peter Olivieri is now adapting technology from EGI, the gear featured in the 60 Minutes ‘Brain Power’ segment that includes a cap that allows a wearer to think letters and have them appear on screen – no movement needed. Whoa! Our bit of Star Trek happening on the Heights.

TiVo Economics
Justin Wolfers offers a brilliant assessment of why you need a TiVo: “Let’s say my hourly wage is $100, and so I value these marginal couple of hours at around $200. I’m home around 50 weeks per year, and so Tivo gives me a total of $10,000 worth of time per year. I will get to enjoy this benefit for the rest of my life, and so we should take a net present value of this benefit stream. Using a discount rate of 5 percent, this yields a total TiVo-related bonus of $200,000 worth of leisure.” Put that way, you ought to run right out and get “God’s Machine”. Or, if you live in Newton, like I do, Comcast will gladly squirt the software down to your existing box.

Health 2.0: Patients as Partners
ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease) strikes roughly 4 to 8 people in every 100,000, yet there is no cure and few treatment options. The lack of interest from commercial drug firms (not a ‘blockbuster drug’ sized market) and the slow pace of research in the area prompted a radically new social networking site from Cambridge-based PatientsLikeMe. While US HIPPA laws prohibit insurers and providers from most data sharing, PatientsLikeMe doesn’t fall subject to these restrictions. Instead the firm has an openness policy, where patients publicly post and update highly detailed charts of their treatment regimes and progress. The result goes way beyond the average patient-to-patient bulletin board, creating effectively the largest source of post-clinical trial ALS data in the world. The power and impact of the network are significant. When a then-unpublished Italian study suggested positive benefits for treating ALS patients with the drug lithium, the PatientsLikeMe community banded together to run their own trial, immediately sharing results. Drug industry action on the finding was doubtful – the patent on lithium had expired and the ALS market is too small. While the site’s trial did not support lithium use, the study enrolled over five times the participants in the original study, with no delay in results sharing. A false-hope was quickly quashed, and many will now avoid sinking funds into a treatment identified as ineffective years ahead of what the conventional approach would yield. PatientsLikeMe has expanded to other choric diseases, including MS, Parkinson’s, HIV/AIDS, and depression. Membership is growing by 35% a month, with the firm expecting to hit one million by 2012.

The implications of these sites are enormous. A March NYTimes article identified how one PLM member, MS patient Todd Small, was able to call up member profiles on a drug he’d taken for years, clarifying that his physician had been grossly under-medicating him for over a decade. PatientsLikeMe and other Community 2.0 sites like doc-focused Sermo might identify side-effects long before manufacturers verify them and come forward. In these sites, pharma firms have an organized source of clinical trial participants, too. All this while patients and caregivers can leverage the wisdom of the crowd to help choose everything from doctors to drugs to plotting other life decisions (especially important for rare conditions like ALS). There are clearly concerns with large groups of patients pursuing unproven claims. While unaffiliated with the PatientsLikeMe community, it is noted that the drug minocycline was once thought to benefit ALS patients, yet was later found to accelerate the disease – many jumping into a treatment like that could prove disasterous. Yet although many researchers wouldn’t endorse patient-run trials, as Nature Biotechnology recently stated “For patients with limited life expectancy, the ability to participate in a very rough, low-level clinical study on a new treatment is far more appealing and timely than waiting for clinical data to be published in peer reviewed literature.” BusinessWeek also offers an excellent slideshow of Health 2.0 sites.

Say Cheese: 12 Photos That Should Never Have Been Posted Online
A warning for aggressive Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr posters, and an interesting set of examples for faculty looking for material when discussing the Facebook Case. BTW: Good Morning Silicon Valley reports that the “Drunken Pirate” student teacher had the denial of her degree upheld by a circuit court judge. Ouch!

Pants by Lagerfeld, Shirt by Microsoft

Looking for a holiday gift for your most-geeky friends & relative? On Dec. 15^th, Microsoft will be offering retro-80s look shirts featuring the firm’s old school corporate logo, DOS designs, and even the mugshot of a young Bill Gates. Rapper Common will be the celeb spokesperson for the ‘soft wear’, and contributed designs, as well.

Why Twitter Turned Down Facebook
Apparently a few weeks back, Facebook offered to buy Twitter for half a billion bucks (mostly in stock). The site does claim 6 million users and has become a social phenomenon, playing a deeply influential role during the Mumbai terror attacks (among other events). But that still is a lot of coin (more than 83 bucks a user) for a two year old firm with just 25 employees and no visible revenue model. The Times summarizes plans made public by Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams on how the firm will innovate and develop revenue models.

Koobvirus Attacks Facebook

More Facebook news: Have any of your Facebook ‘friends’ sent you a note saying ‘You look awesome in this video’? Well, it’s not a friend, it’s a virus that’s trying to trick you into installing spyware on your PC. The site redirects the user by saying they need a Flash upgrade to view the file. The ‘upgrade’, of course, is spyware that lets criminals snarf instances of sensitive data that move through your PC. Credit card numbers and passwords are now up for grabs.

Microsoft to Google: Get Off of My Cloud
Redmond is prepared to build some 20 data centers at costs that could run as high as $1 billion each. Running the effort will be Debra Chrapaty, VP of Global Foundation Services. Microsoft has honed the task of opening data centers to just a matter of days, getting the San Antonio facility up in less time than it took a local western wear firm to delivery Chrapaty’s custom-made cowboy boots. Servers show up in pre-configured shipping containers filled with as many as 2,500 servers. And cooling these boxes is easier than managing the heat of an entire building. Power bills (which run about 40% of data center operating costs) are likely to drop 1/3. A host of cloud services are about to be rolled out, including Windows Azure, which lets firms run software on their own hardware as well as through a sort of ‘computing utility’ delivered by Microsoft, and an increasing consumer-facing push that includes plans for SaaS exchange, Office, and the various offerings from Windows Live.

China Internet Cafes Switching to Chinese OS
Chinese authorities recently forced cafes using pirated versions of Windows to go legitimate with either legal copies or open source alternatives. But Radio Free Asia reports that some Chinese cafes were being required to install a Chinese version of Linux (Red Flag) even if they were using authorized copies of Windows. Chinese who access the Web at Internet cafes must register using their government-issued identification cards, and Internet use in China is regularly monitored for objectionable activities. That said, the article fails to recognize that there is a thriving blogger population in China, and that Web 2.0 is pushing Chinese activism along far faster than many in the West realize. The OS dilemma presents an interesting problem for Microsoft. Does the firm enforce piracy and push those who can’t afford the OS into the waiting arms of Linux, or does it cut prices in the mid-term, assuming that at some point a more IP-friendly China with it’s inevitably higher per-capita income will eventually bring in profits?

Google’s Gatekeepers
Google has enormous influence over which content is consumed, worldwide. The firm owns YouTube and has a 63% plus market share in search. This influence becomes particularly sensitive as the firm expands globally, and Google inevitably runs up against local customs and laws that force it to examine its openness. For example, Thais take great offense at insults to their king. Turkey has strict laws prohibiting offense to the founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Ataturk. Video violating these laws range from ribbing from Greek soccer fans to incendiary Kurdish separatist videos. Google Deputy General Consul Nicole Wong says that when confronting the issue, “I remember one night, I was looking at 67 different Turkish videos at home”. A peek at inner workings of Google’s internal group assigned to respond to international appeals for video and link removal shows the minefield the search sovereign must regularly navigate. There are 13 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute. Which videos are illegal in Turkey? Which violated YouTube’s terms of service prohibiting hate speech but allowing political speech? Which constituted expression that Google and YouTube would try to protect? Another layer – Turkey is a nation with strong nationalist elements and the firm feared for the safety of its local employees. While the firm has been forced to block sites from France to China, Google has agreed to report all the government-prompted link removal to chillingeffects.com, a censorship-tracking group within The Berkman Center at Harvard. The shutdowns aren’t limited to foreign traffic. Senator Joe Lieberman’s office pushed Google to take down Jihadist videos. Unsatisfied, the one-time democratic VP nominee and McCain’s favorite democrat pushed Google to draft new guidelines prohibiting videos “intended to incite violence.” The article should be a required discussion piece in any course confronting the ethics of Internet computing.

Tips for Finding Employment in Tough Times
I returned to the US from my first post-MBAjob in 1990, after spending a stint working for non-convertible Soviet rubles (perhaps the lowest starting salary of any US b-school grad that year). The market was awful, with Route 128 hemorrhaging tech-savvy managers during the first Bush recession and the collapse of the mini-computing industry. So I’m acutely empathetic to the plight of prospective grads. BusinessWeek Online offers some advice for job seekers in a dismal market.

Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe Even in Your Computer
How aggressive are these Malware firms? A Russian company that sells fake antivirus software that actually takes over a computer pays its illicit distributors as much as $5 million a year. One European estimates that web scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year. A Georgia Tech study estimates that as many as 15% of all computers online are infected by botnets software, where computers become ‘zombies’, controlled by third parties that attempt to perpetrate click fraud, launch cyber attacks, or engage in other miscreant behavior. Some malware programs have grown so sophisticated that they can disable anti-virus software and keep out computing malware products. A Microsoft research reported one malware program even turned on Windows Update after taking over a PC, presumably in order to ensure that rival code couldn’t enter. The Times offers a Web Crime glossary.

Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War
The BusinessWeek cover story (left) ran nearly a decade ago, but the battle rages on and increasingly tilts in Amazon’s favor.Three years ago eBay had 30% more traffic than Amazon. Today they’re nearly even at over 80 million active users. And while eBay’s stock has faltered and growth is relatively flat, Amazon’s market cap has zoomed past the Palace that Pez built. What’s happening? Sellers of more commoditized, fixed-price goods are migrating to Amazon, where third party vendors now account for 29% of sales. eBay will always be the first-choice destination for unique, highly differentiated products. The price-setting mechanism of auctions will always be valued for collectables. But auctions actually get in the way when you want to buy regular stuff – books, toys, clothes.  The NY Times also points out that these firms’ attitude toward innovation is influenced by compensation structure. Amazon execs get performance-based stock grants resulting from annual evaluations. But for years eBay gave cash and stock bonuses based on quarterly performances. The street regularly punished Amazon, largely because they didn’t get where the firm was headed. But the risk-taking, longer-term view that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pushes throughout the firm’s culture has led to a number of well regarded initiatives and despite aggressive spending and hiring, steady, predictable growth.

How Google Has Ears
iPhone users with the free Google app installed got a killer update this week. Google on iPhone now understands spoken search entries! Just hold the iPhone up to your head & the device’s sensors can tell you’re about to speak. Google has been able to hone speech recognition based on years of experience with its free GOOG-411 phone directory service (Have you tried it? Dial 1-800-466-4411 ‘800-GOOG-411’ from any phone). Worked great for me, but apparently Google has a hard time understanding the British.

TiVo, Domino’s team up to make us all fat | Digital Media
The super-smart innovators in Alviso are at it again, TiVo now serves up the ultimate in couch-potato on-demand ordering. When a Domino’s pizza ad appears onscreen, TiVo users will be able to use their remote controls to call up a menu and place an order (you still have to pay cash when the delivery shows up at your doorstep). TiVo has several other remote-control-based ordering deals, including with Fandango (movie tickets) and Amazon (video) – and the device is becoming a real channel of commerce. TechTrekkers had a wonderful time with the TiVo folks last March, and look forward to visiting again in ‘09.  Click image at left for screenshots of the interface.

Eat and Tell
Ever seen someone taking a photo of their meal with their phone? If you Yelp, you know why. With over 4 million reviews and 15 million visits a month, the site has blasted past Zagats and Citysearch to become the web’s most popular review site, and new iPhone apps make Yelping, and Yelp referencing, faster and more convenient than ever. Yelpers leave cards (‘you’ve just been yelped’), and the most highly regarded Yelpers (tagged as ‘Elite’) are often courted to attend special events hosted by restaurants and wines that covet their input. Good R&D, but risky if folks suspect you’ve got a ‘sock puppet’ shilling for their supper. And this is no longer just about restaurants. Now Yelpers review everything from real estate agents to religious institutions to physicians. One NYC Yelper claims post-op pics of her plastic surgery helped generate a thousand referrals for her doc.

The Doctor Will See You Now – Online

Why not take a house call through your laptop? That’s the idea from American Well. Starting in January, patients of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Hawaii, will be able to have 10 minute online appointments, including a co-pay, just like in a doctor’s office. Meetings can be extended for a fee, and docs can file prescriptions through the system. Uninsured will have access too, at far less than Emergency Room rates. Docs are compensated less than an office visit, but more than a phone consult (which most don’t get paid for, anyway). American Well handles scheduling, insurance, even payments sent directly to the doc’s bank account.

Pain and delight: Who’s firing, who’s hiring
Jobseekers may want to check out this set of spreadsheets from CNet, showing where the jobs are (and aren’t).

Geeks of the world rejoice, there is now a YouTube Monty Python Channel.

Facebook’s View of the World

Engineers working at the Facebook Hackathon have created a remarkable visualization video showing a sort of global mapping of real-time usage of the site.  See the social-graph form. Students who have travelled with me to the Googleplex have seen a similar demo that runs just off of Google’s main lobby.  For more details.

Desperately poor workers in Guiyu harvest the tech via acid baths, open-air burnings, and with detritus streamed in the ground & rivers creating the highest levels of cancer causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies are 6 times more likely to end in miscarriage, and that 7 of 10 kids in the region have too much lead in their blood. As 60 minutes was reporting, thugs jumped them and tried to steal their cameras and did steal the soil sample they collected. A recent government sting from Federal Government Accountability Office found that 42 American recyclers were willing to sell eWaste illegally to US Hong Kong brokers.

Commentary: This is heroic reporting by 60 Minutes and the story needs to be told. At BC, we’ve been teaching the example of Guiyu for years in an effort to create responsible managers who understand not only the promise of Moore’s Law, but also the challenges and ethics of managing tech product end-of-life. THIS IS WHY I’ve created a free textbook, available online and to all.  Management education fails when students aren’t taught to think deeply and critically enough to consider these issues. For more on Guiyu, see “Moore’s Law and More” at http://www.gallaugher.com/chapters. Please share this content with others. And profs, if you use this content in classes, please let me know. Thanks!

Upward Mobility
Citizens that that are ‘unbanked,’ or very badly banked, represent 70 percent of the world’s population. Without banks, many in need of cash fall to the mercy of loan sharks that charge 2 to 10 percent monthly interest. A Bangalore startup called mChek is leveraging mobile phones to support microfinance, with half a million people using their mobile phones to pay their phone bills and purchase a goods and services as diverse as airline and movie tickets. Cheap phones and the right software could be a financial lifeline to hundreds of millions. Great Multimedia, including a field report on mobile banking in India and an interview with venture firm DFJ’s Indian executive director (see side bar in article).

Propelled by Internet – Obama Wins
The Week in Geek is non-partisan. BC seniors have had the good fortune to have seen both Obama and McCain speak on campus. But one really has to marvel at how deftly the Obama campaign leveraged technology – all campaigns will be different from here on out and the Net will play a vital role.

The role of technology in politics had been growing. The ‘00 McCain campaign was the first to run targeted banner ads. Howard Dean raised record bucks online in ’04. And don’t forget that Karl Rove was a former database marketer who brought his tools to the GOP. But the Democrats not only learned from Rove, they wrote a whole new playbook (much of it built from Boston’s own Blue State Digital). The breadth of tech leverage in the Obama campaign was staggering. The campaign hired Facebook founder Chris Hughes to strategize for my.BarackObama.com. The site helped supporters organize, participate in calling campaigns, fundraising, and neighborhood canvassing. Wired points out that using My.BarackObama.com,  “Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, my.BarackObama.com registered over 1.5 million accounts.” Much of the $600 million raised by Obama came through the Web, and as testament to the breadth of the effort, the average contribution was less than $90. The Obama camp regularly sent highly-focused e-mail appeals, most of which embedded a video (BarackTV) that offered campaign updates, challenged opposition ads and claims, and combated the latest Internet rumors. Obama’s VP pick was announced via text message. Supporters were coached on texting during the Denver DNC. Election day text messages encouraged supporters to knock on doors to ensure neighbors had voted. It was also tough to surf the web without seeing an Obama ad. Some were highly interactive, like the ones challenging users to compare how they’d fare under the McCain vs. Obama tax plans. The campaign even bought ads inside 18 video games targeting 10 states that allowed early voting. Obama has more Twitter followers than anyone else, by far. And the Obama campaign’s iPhone application would scan your contacts for people you know in swing states (even measuring how you contribute vs. other callers), offer info & maps to local events, campaign news, and more (photo at left).

On top of this consider tech’s broader impact: there was primary debate sponsorship by Facebook, while other debates took questions from YouTube. The left-leaning blog, The Huffington Post rose to be a larger website than the web-arm of all but a handful of US newspapers. New rock-stars like Nate Silver with FiveThirdyEight.com were created. The will.i.am video was viewed by well over a million times. The Net was not just mainstream in this election - it became a powerful political force for reshaping politics. PoliSci majors with campaign aspirations of their own had better start taking Information Systems classes.

Hard Times? Not for iPhone Developers
Craigslist is loaded with iPhone developer job listings. Of course, working for someone else has to compete against going it alone. Steve Demeter, who developed the game Trism, brought in a quarter of a million dollars in just two months. No overhead, no marketing, no inventory. Steve just wrote the app, uploaded it to Apple, and waited for the checks to roll in from Apple at $.70 on the dollar. The developer of the $1 DrumKit app reports bringing in about 500 downloads a day – not bad. He left Facebook Apps (which were quickly adopted, but brought in no money) for the more reliable income stream from the AppStore. Apple recently launched iPhone University, giving schools free resources and software to teach iPhone development.

The iPhone is huge. In case you missed it - Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones last quarter. That not only puts it ahead of the Blackberry, it accounted for 39% Apple’s $11.6 billion in revenue – more than Mac sales! And Apple is selling a LOT of Macs. A few years ago you’d be hard pressed to find any Macs toted by my students – now incoming BC students choose Macs at the rate of 56% over Windows machines.

Personal Pod Transport is Coming
As a guy who can’t drive (bad eyes), I love this idea. Personal pods are battery-powered, driverless cars, supporting as few as four passengers. Cars wait taxi-style at stops, just get in and you’re taken to your destination without having to stop at each station (a second lane whisks pod cars past without delay). Closed-circuit television will keep tabs on the pods to prevent mishaps — not that any are expected. Sure there have been experiments. As Wired points out “A five-station PRT system in Morgantown, West Virginia (population 29,361) has ferried people between downtown and the West Virginia University campus since 1979. It carries as many as 16,000 people a day and has never experienced a major accident.” But now in Europe “More than a dozen cities are planning pod-car systems as part of the country’s commitment to free itself of fossil fuels by 2020.” It costs from $25 to $40 million per mile to build a this kind of system. Expensive, but potentially a bargain compared to the $100 to $300 million per mile for light-rail.

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