The Week in Geek – April 18, 2009

A quick congrats to the Carroll School, which garnered 8 programs in the Top 10 in this year’s BusinessWeek Undergraduate Business School rankings, including #1 in Accounting (table). Not sure why BusinessWeek failed to rate any of the nation’s Information Systems programs, but here’s our plug for why we deserve a ranking:

• 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.