Yes, they are. And it’s shameful, childish, and embarrassing to reality television. X Factor should be ashamed of running a vocal competition only to put those hopefuls out there like puppets for a dog and pony show with fake animals.

For some reason, during group numbers and many other performances they have the contestants sing in the studio, and use all the studio trickery in the world to optimize their voice, and then play it back on TV while they act like they are singing live.

Come on X Factor, loose the tracks, loose the lip syncing, and replace the host while you’re at it. The rest of the show’s content and production is way too top notch to stoop to such ridiculousness like lip syncing.

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Sharon Bialek says, "He suddenly reached over... put his hand on my leg, under my skirt, and toward my genitals." She then says that Cain added, "You want the job, right?"

Herman Cain spoke today in a press conference and stated with confidence that Bialek is lying. Three times he said, "I have never been inappropriate with a woman." I do find it interesting that in his language he repeatedly "rejects these claims." For better or worse, the words reject and deny are two different words in my book. I reject gas prices, but they are what they are. But seriously, I knew lots of people in college that viewed their actions as appropriate, when many would easily argue the same actions inappropriate. The choice of words was to grey for the subject at hand.

Still, at this point I error on the side of his innocence. There are just a few things I would have had him say had I been on his team.

At length, Cain described how he and his team watched the allegations on TV "over and over, over and over, and over and over." During that time he says, "I tried to remember, if I recognize her, and I didn’t. I tried to remember if I remembered that name, and I didn’t."

Now wait a minute. You mean to tell me a woman has come forward and accused him of putting his hand on her leg, up her skirt and then some... and he his racking his brain trying to think, do I know this woman? Have a seen this woman? Do I recognize her? Do I recognize her name?" Really?!

Let me say this. If you’re a guy, and you were in a car, and you’ve been married for 30 years, and you put your hand up another woman’s skirt where Sharon says you did.... you’re going to remember that. So his thoughts racing to, "do I recognize her" and "do I remember that name" is really something else. Certainly any man, including Cain, can think to himself, "I either did, or did not sit in a car with a woman that I was not married to, and put my hand up her skirt." That either happened, or it didn’t. Who cares if you recognize the woman? Who cares if you remember her name? It’s the primary allegation that needs refuting.

Why couldn’t he have just said, "This claim of me sitting in a car with this woman and putting my hand up her skirt is the dumbest thing I’ve heard since Obamacare. That never happened. I don’t know this woman, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen her in my life."

It’s a tough call to judge at this point. I do think he came off real strong in his press conference, much stronger than I expected. What he said and the certainty in which he said it were very compelling. His strength in answering the reporter’s questions was exceptionally strong. But still, at its core, I think he must emphatically deny the actions that he has been accused of. That has to be in addition to him not recognizing her. Without doing that, he isn’t slamming the case shut. He’s closed the door, but there’s still a draft coming in, and it doesn’t smell quite right.

What do you think?

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For starters, donations that come in via text messages can take anywhere from 30 to 120 days to settle. The donor texts their donation, then the mobile phone service provider adds the dollar amount to their bill. At some point in the next 30 days, the mobile phone bill gets mailed to the donor. Around 15 - 30 days later, the donor pays their mobile phone bill. At some point after that, the phone company sends the donation (minus their fees) to the organization who solicited the donation. That’s a long time for a donation to get to the recipient.

Other problems with texting to donate are with the donation caps. Mobile phone companies typically cap the donation at $10. This helps avoid abuse and fraud. Compare that to the average online donation of $200, you would be paying a lot of services fees and waiting a long time for those $10 donations.

The real major issue with donations by text is the amount of money the non profit actually gets to keep after all the fees. There are few backbone service providers that provide the glue to move money over these text donations. They have monthly fees anywhere from $50 to $200, additional transaction fees, and set up/registration fees. On top of that are the fees the mobile phone service providers charge. There is no flat rate across the board here as all mobile service providers impose their own fee structure. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and other mobile carriers all have their own schedule of fees. Normally you can expect that to be around 10%. An article recently published by Caf� Online stated that organizations are now retaining UP TO 90% of text donations, and that is suppose to be GOOD news. Loosing 10% off the top of each donation is not good news, that’s awful news. Put those fees on top of the monthly fees and transaction fees imposed by the application providers and now you are looking at something hopefully in the 80 percentile range.

All in all, because it’s new and buzz worthy, text to donate is going to turn heads, but in the end, it just doesn’t add up.

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The iPhone Facebook app has had a bug for sometime now that yields an annoying error every time you try to upload photos through the app. Error: Your photo could not be uploaded at this time. You can save this photo and try to upload it again later.

However, you can save and try later, but it still won’t take it. Until Facebook fixes their iPhone app, you’ll have to use the work around fix.

Go to www.Facebook.com/mobile from your iPhone browser. Log in. On the landing screen you will see a link near the bottom left that speaks to uploading photos via email. They will assign you a random email address like blabla123blabla@m.facebook.com. Add a contact in your phone named Facebook and type the assigned email address in as the contact’s email. Now, when you view your pictures on the iPhone picture viewer you have the option to email that photo to someone. Email it to your Facebook contact and just put your comment/caption in the subject line and wa-la, it will show up on your wall lickity split.

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Why is this so important? For one, these square-shaped QR Codes are going to start showing up everywhere. Two, they are free to use and store a LOT more data than the typical bar code. Three, they can be used in so many different ways. Imagine watching a commercial and seeing a QR Code in the bottom corner of your TV. While watching, you might let your phone scan the code from where you’re sitting and it could take your phone’s browser to a web page with more information about the product, or directly to a screen to buy what you just saw. Or the QR Code could automatically have your phone call a certain number. No typing, just a quick scan and you’re off. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of different applications for these things and ease of use and probable adoption by many industries will make it as common as displaying a phone number in the years to come.

Want to try it out? First, download a QR Reader for your smart phone (I use QR App on the iPhone). Then try these below.

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1. Our health care is a broken system and it’s bankrupting the American citizen.

Are you sure? I’ll give that a maybe, but is it health care that is bankrupting America, or is it the effects of frivolous lawsuits on health care providers? Oh, so it’s complicated. Well then if that’s the case, let’s not throw out broad statements just to make a great sound bite.

But let’s assume it is bankrupting America. Does that mean the answer is a government takeover? We all know how good the government is at running things. They couldn’t run a small business for 2 months without driving it so far into the ground it would come out on the other side.

2. If you like your current health care plan, you can keep it.

So what I’m being sold is: health care is broken, but if we want to keep our broken health care plan, yes we can. That’s about as desperate of a sales speech as I’ve ever heard. Basically it means they’ll spend a ton of money trying to fix something, and if it doesn’t work, the people can just stay the course, only with $940 billion less. Now that is an attractive offer... for a MORON.

3. Health care reform will save $1.2 trillion dollars in its second ten years.

Please, please, try not to laugh. In all seriousness, all who believe that raise your hand. What’s that? Not raising your hand? I’m shocked. If the government has an example of anything they have done on at least half this scale that saved the money they said it initially would, a bogus pledge like that might actually carry water. But really, $1.2 Trillion dollars? I would love to meet one person who sincerely believes the government can do something this drastic that will save $1.2 trillion dollars. Now keep in mind, $1.2 trillion right now is about $2.4 trillion in 20 years at the current inflation rate. So if in 20 years it saved us $1.2 trillion that’s 600 billion in today’s terms. So how much is it going to save? I mean since we’re lying about numbers anyway, how much is it? $600 billion? $2.4 Trillion? What’s it going to be? The government doesn’t know what something is going to cost NEXT YEAR, much less at the end of the "second ten years". Who speaks like that anyways? I’m offended that the government treats the people like a bunch of sheep, who can’t possibly know what’s best for them.

Realistically, this reform will not save the country money. What’s that? How do I know? You need proof? Let’s take a look at government experience:

The U.S. Post Office was formed 235 years ago. It’s broke, subsidized, and can’t compete with private UPS and FedEx.

Social Security was formed 75 years ago. It’s broke & failing worse each year.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - 72 and 42 years old respectively. They are broke, failing, corrupt, and caused the housing crash and credit melt down of 2008.

Medicare and Medicaid formed 45 years ago and the government has been trying to sweep them under the rug ever since. They are bankrupt failures.

Amtrak was formed 40 years ago. Guess what? It runs at a loss and it was bailed out less than 2 years ago.

So wait, maybe the government has turned over a new leaf. I mean, that’s all old stuff right? Maybe we should talk about the $787 billion dollar Stimulus Bill of 2009 which has and will continue to primarily benefit the recipients of non-bid government contracts. And how about Cash for Clunkers? You know, the catch phrase program that stimulated the economy of Japan? Those are all screaming successes right? The stimulus bill fixed unemployment right? What’s that, it’s worse now? Even worse than Obama said it would be if they didn’t pass the stimulus bill? Oh, did anyone tell the government?

Anyone with an IQ over 7 should see a pattern here. Please forgive me if I hear the government say they will spend $940 Billion and save $1.2 trillion while making my health care better when their track record is a resume full of failure.

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Years ago I started up a coffee shop with some friends. If someone followed us around and graphed how we spent our time before we opened, I guarantee you the results would make me cry. We pooled the money together and got cracking. We settled the legal structure, secured a lease, bought equipment, installed the POS (point of sale) machines, bought insurance, wrote employee schedules, and on and on. But just looking back, we spent gobs of time thinking and dealing with pieces to the puzzle that were trivial. We spent a lot of time on decorating, planning the music play lists, booking events (bands), and what not. We spent a lot of time thinking about things that weren’t involved with agenda of being profitable. In fact, I can’t think of much we did that was on the profitable agenda. That was a mistake of magnificent proportions. We were more concerned with running a cool coffee shop than running a money making machine. We just bought stuff, set up stuff, planned stuff, prettied up stuff, and the like. We should have sat down with excel and planned out to the penny where money was going and where it was going to come from. That was a huge mistake.

When you choose the fun and interesting agenda over the revenue agenda, you become busy. And for the record, busy is not a good thing. In business, busy should be defined as spending too much time doing things that are not important, and not enough time doing what is important.

So why do we business owners drift towards fun and interesting and away from profit from time to time? For one, fun and interesting is easy, and protecting profits is hard. Turning a revenue stream into a moat takes a lot of work. Just visualize a moat. Remember that thing was not built over night. It probably was a stream a long time ago. But someone did a lot of work to stack tens of thousands of stones several meters high to line the walls around and in inside of it. That moat is a revenue stream all grown up. I believe the business owner’s job is to turn revenue streams into moats.

So with every agenda, you have to ask yourself: is this truly valuable? Will the time invested have a positive return? A perfect example is one of my favorite charities in Houston put on an $11,000 fishing tournament, but only raised $7,000. They flushed $4,000 because they chose fun and interesting over revenue.

For you business owners out there, focus on revenue. Without revenue, you don’t have a business, you have an expensive hobby.

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Certainly, the logo does become the business’s mark as they sign their products and marketing materials with it. But when you are coming up with a new logo, how important are those decisions to shave a corner there, deepen the blue there, or shrink the symbol there?

As an entrepreneur or business owner, logo decisions will be a true test of your decisiveness. Having worked with over a 100 start-ups, I have seen people waffle for days on end over some of the most non-impacting decisions ever known to man. That is the trap; to over think it, and tweak it to the ends of the earth. Often times, it is one of the few creative/subjective processes that one is involved in. Those people usually either could not care less, or worse, are on track to make up their mind right after the second coming of Christ.

Barring any terrible design decisions, here is where I rest on the issue. The value of a logo sits on a continuum between design and perception. On the left side, and early on, the value of the logo rests on the design, and how well it graphically represents the business. On the right side, after business successes/failures, and brand awareness settles, you have perception. The perception phase, which is far longer than the initial phase, depends on the quality of the business. The coca-cola logo would never be talked about if the whole world ignored the soda. The K-Mart logo would not carry its loser value if the business had not inherited its inferior reputation. If Nike shoes were uncomfortable and placed 9th or 10th in people’s minds as the athletic shoe of choice, the swoosh would have a negative perceived value. On the contrary, the swoosh is as cool as it is and carries amazing brand recognition because of the success of the business and the quality of the shoes, not because it is a swoosh.

Do your best to not over think your logo decisions. Focus on the business. If your business succeeds, the logo is good.

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Fame is a drug, but much more like coffee and alcohol than crack. If you take crack, we know exactly what is going to happen to you. If you’re on coffee or alcohol (or fame), the outcome is far more unpredictable. Results vary by individual. But either way, if you get too much of it (fame), bad things will happen. Even Bono sings that no one should be too good at celebrity. And if there ever was a lethal dose of fame, people like Elvis and Michael certainly had it.

But here is my real takeaway from the media circus that is Michael Jackson’s death. If you are a parent, a wife, a husband, or you sincerely love anyone more than you love yourself; pay attention to the fifteen second speech that Michael’s daughter Paris gave at his extremely public memorial service. There was genuine, deep, real, unscripted, sadness from here father’s passing. Possibly unknowingly, she showed the whole world her deepest hurt. If you saw it, and were not even temporarily moved, then check your pulse, the girl lost her father. It is sorrow at its deepest.

It is no secret now that Michael was routinely taking drugs that doctors now say created the perfect storm for the event of his death. I can not imagine that anyone is shocked to learn there was at least some substance abuse in his fame filled life. But I feel confident if Michael could have seen the sadness of his children, family and loved ones, (but primarily his children) at his own memorial service, he would have quit those drugs cold turkey, and never looked back.

I can’t think of anything that I wouldn’t stop doing (or start doing) to ensure that I never have to see my daughter Ava go through that kind of pain.

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