The Week in Geek – Dec. 9, 2008
Watching the Watchers
Kudos to BC Profs. Adam Brasel (Marketing) and James Gips (Chair of Information Systems) whose pioneering work on consumer attention to DVR ads was recently coverd by the Economist. The Brasel/Gips study (which appeared in the top-tier Journal of Marketing) tracked eye-movements while participants watched a nature documentary and observed commercials (Gips is known for his eye-tracking software and pioneering work on the award winning EagleEyes effort). The BC profs found that when people fast-forward a DVR they actually concentrate intensely on the screen, and that ads occupying the center of the screen appeared long enough for participants to remember them. The experiment inserted ads for two different brands of British chocolate bars, Aero and Flake, (neither is sold in America and therefore shouldn’t have been familiar to the participants). Those who were exposed to a brand image promoted in the center of the screen during fast-forwarding ended up choosing that brand by a factor of two-to-one! As the Economist writes “when you start to see TV ads in which the brand image takes centre stage, you will know why”.
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. 15th, 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.