A correction regarding the state of Ron Jeremy's career

In the course of yet another post about Moby's "We Are All Made of Stars" video, I said the following:

While JC Chasez was certainly of current interest, others such as Kato Kaelin and Gary Coleman were more famous for past accomplishments, and significant portions of the MTV audience probably didn't know who Ron Jeremy was; as DeFresno put it in her post, "Ron Jeremy is hardly a household name among fifteen-year-olds of today." Well, let's hope not.

This post elicited a comment from someone identified as "3bproducer":

Actually a lot of teens know who Ron Jeremy is. Be sure to check out his first mainstream starring role in the new movie, "Beaches, Buns and Bikinis." Ron easily steps into a similar role played by comedian Morey Amsterdam in the 1960's "Beach Party." Ron portrays a wise beach sage who owns the coolest hotdog stand on the beach and dispenses love advice to the young.

(Insert foot-long hotdog joke here.)

The commenter, who is presumably either Matt Jenkins or Charles Stanley, provided a link to the movie's website, http://www.beachesbunsbikinis.com/. The site includes a synopsis of the movie:

In this epic tale set in an industrial wasteland, the sights and sounds of music and metal heads moshing beach side emanate as CRAB SHACK SAMMIE, self-proclaimed king of the beach, announces it to be another perfect day. Crab Shack Sammie gets one of his employees to wear a new hot dog costume to help promote his hot dog stand. He knows the hot dog is a beachin' good luck charm whose presence will bring love and posterity to the beach. Arriving late to the beach party, CASPAR discovers he has lost his one true love, RUBY, to his nemesis LITTLE BIG MIKE. An unknown thief steals the magical hot dog suit resulting in bad luck descending on the beach. Afflicted by this bad luck, Caspar realizes he must act quickly to get his girl back and recover the hotdog suit so good fortune will return to the beach.

I don't know enough about movies to know if the comparison to the Funicello-Avalon beach movies (Morey Amsterdam played a supporting role) is appropriate, but the one clip that I watched on the website is certainly evocative of that innocent time.

Speaking of innocence, I ended up looking at Ron Jeremy's blog, which includes a post written after the death of Gary Coleman. While both Jeremy and Coleman appeared in Moby's aforementioned video (although they appeared in separate segments), it turns out that they worked together at other times, including the Weakest Link and the Surreal Life. Jeremy had this to say about Coleman:

“Getting to know Coleman wasn’t easy,” Ron Jeremy told AVN. “Gary was very serious sometimes. … If he didn’t know you, he’d say hi and just keep walking. … He didn’t want to spend a lot of time with people he didn’t know.”

Underneath that shy exterior was a playful soul. “He loved toys,” Ron Jeremy said. “He didn’t experience a real childhood,” he added, as explanation for why Coleman found such satisfaction in such pursuits as playing with model trains.

And unlike the Moby video, in which they appeared separately, Jeremy and Coleman appeared together in Kid Rock's "Cowboy" video (beginning at the 2:30 mark; embedding disabled by request).

Don't let the facts get in the way of a good "Apple is great, Microsoft is junk" stereotype

Ron Miller recently wrote a post in Internet Evolution that said, among other things, the following:

• Microsoft just launched Windows Phone 7.


• Microsoft concluded a deal with Facebook that integrates Facebook likes into Bing search results.


• Apple has had continuous problems with the iPhone 4, including antenna issues, supply issues, and now issues with shattering glass.

Which naturally leads to Ron Miller's conclusion - Apple is hot, and Microsoft is in disarray.

Say what?

Regardless of all of the items that Miller listed above, the only two items that were important were these:

• Ray Ozzie is leaving Microsoft.


• Apple had a good quarter.

Here's part of what Miller says about the two companies:

It seems no matter what Apple does, it just continues to make money hand over fist.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has the feel of a company that is drifting and in disarray. Whether it's true or not, it's a perception that persists, especially as executives jump ship at an alarming rate. What's more, Microsoft is facing a credibility problem.

After years of bad software (Vista, anyone?), buggy releases, and a past history of antitrust litigation, Microsoft is not getting the benefit of the doubt anymore. Unlike Apple, which can stumble with the iPhone and still come out smelling like a rose, each Microsoft misstep, fairly or not, seems to be magnified.

Perhaps the best way to understand it is to switch perspectives for a minute.

If a key lieutenant to Steve Jobs - say, Tim Cook - were to leave Apple, would Miller be reporting about an alarming number of Apple executives jumping ship?

If the Xbox 360 had significant hardware problems, and Steve Ballmer responded to them by saying "don't use it that way" or "the Nintendo is worse," and then proceeded to release a rubber to wrap around the Xbox, would Miller be falling all over himself in praise for Microsoft's wise solution?

Somehow I think not.

P.S. And then after all of this praise, Bloomberg released this story:

Apple Inc. fell the most in five months on the Nasdaq after forecasting shrinking gross margins and profit that missed some analysts’ estimates, indicating that the company is making less from each iPhone and iPad it sells.

Apple dropped $6, or 1.9 percent, to $312 at 12:45 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock slid as much as 5.7 percent earlier today, the biggest decline since May.

Of course, hour-by-hour stock trading is not necessarily an accurate barometer of success or failure, and the stock could close up by the end of the trading day. But apparently not everyone regards Apple's recent earnings as insanely great.

Working for scale - how Quinn Martin acted to grow his business

I've scheduled a post in my Empoprise-MU music blog that mentions the Beastie Boys video for "Sabotage." In the course of my post, I use that magical phrase "Quinn Martin Production."

For people who are not old as dirt, allow me to explain.

Back in the early and mid 1970s, there were so many cop and detective shows on TV that each of the characters needed to have a gimmick so that you could tell one detective/cop from another. Colombo, for example, was the guy with the raincoat. Kojak was the bald guy with the lollipop. Police Woman was...well, she was the woman. And Cannon, played by William Conrad, was the fat guy.

Frankly, I don't remember anything much about Cannon, but I certainly remember who produced it. With a subtlety reminiscent of NASCAR, each episode of Cannon prominently displayed the fact that it was "a Quinn Martin production." (Each episode also displayed "acts" for each of the portions of the show, like a stage play.)

I didn't know much about Quinn Martin, but I ended up reading about him at the Museum of Broadcast Communications web site. It turns out that Cannon was only one of Quinn Martin's productions, and that at certain points he had several shows on TV simultaneously.

How did he keep several successful shows going at once? The Museum's biography entry explains how:

[D]uring the years at Desilu and during the first years of QM, Martin surrounded himself with a cadre of writers, directors, and producers who would later ably serve him when he was juggling the production schedules of several series. Alan Armer, George Eckstein, Walter Grauman, and John Conwell are but a few of the names to appear again and again in the credits of QM productions.

Other people surround themselves with cadres - Michael Landon comes to mind here - but with Martin, it wasn't just the people. It was also the process:

Martin compartmentalized his productions. This was done not only out of necessity resulting from the volume of television being produced by the company but also because of the trusted individuals with whom Martin populated QM. At QM, the writers, producers, and post-production supervisors had very well-defined tasks and would rarely stray beyond the parameters established by Martin. John Conwell, casting director and assistant to Martin for years, often referred to Martin as "Big Daddy" because of his paternalistic approach to production.

Read the Museum's biography for other aspects of Martin's production techniques. But in my view, these are the two key points that allowed Martin's company to grow. Certainly there are people who have genius potential, such as Orson Welles. But if you actually want to grow your company, you need to surround yourself with good people, and you need to have an environment that allows things to get done even if you can't supervise everything yourself. Without lieutenants and processes, a garage shop is going to remain a garage shop. With lieutenants and processes, a company has the potential of growing beyond the garage and becoming a Microsoft or an Apple.

P.S. William Conrad's career shows how perceptions are influenced by different media presentations. When radio was the dominant medium, William Conrad had the perfect voice to play Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. But when a television version of Gunsmoke was prepared, Conrad's physique prevented him from portraying Dillon on TV.

Oh, and one more thing about Fox and Dish

When the Los Angeles Times initially reported the story about the regional Fox Sports channels and other News Corp. channels being yanked from Dish Network, they got comments.

A lot of comments.

Mostly of the "pox on both your houses" variety, although a few commenters expressed their hopes that Fox News Channel would also be yanked. (Los Angeles is a left-of-center city.)

But one comment inadvertently showed that we the people are not the most intelligent people:

The Fox networks belong to Rupert Murdoch who, surprise!, owns a 34 percent stake in Hughes Electronics, the operator of DirecTV. This is a naked attempt to push Dish Network out of the business and gain a monopoly in the Satellite TV provider market. BULLY FOR DISH NETWORK for standing up to this modern day Nelson Rockefeller!

While the commenter's conspiracy theory may be correct, I believe that the commenter actually meant to refer to John Rockefeller, not Nelson.

It's a small world after all - Dish, News Corp, and the Manilla envelope

I was trying to figure out the story about the company that Julia Roy has joined - later revealed to be Manilla - when I ran across this press release announcing the cloud storage service startup's executive staff. Here's a portion of the release that discusses Jessica Heacock Insalaco, the new entity's Chief Marketing Officer.

Insalaco, CMO of Manilla, has spent her career in strategy and leadership roles in the telecommunications and media industries. She was most recently CMO of Dish Network, the third largest multichannel television provider in the U.S.

And before that?

Insalaco has held other consumer marketing positions at Cox Communications, News Corp and US West.

Did you catch that second firm, News Corp? You can bet the Dish subscribers recognized that immediately.

As anyone who has cable or satellite television in the U.S. knows, there are periodic confrontations between the content providers and the cable/satellite companies. As a deadline nears, the content providers decry the fact that the cable/satellite providers aren't fair, and the cable/satellite providers emphatically state that the content providers are greedy, and it's necessary for the cable/satellite providers to defend you against this terrible price gouging. There are warring commercials and warring websites...and in the end, both parties reach some type of settlement which is good for them, but not good for the consumer.

Well, normally they reach such an agreement. News Corp. and Dish Network have moved beyond that point, and as I write this, several News Corp. properties are unavailable to Dish Network subscribers.

And there are warring websites. Here is part of what Dish Network says at one of their several websites (this one is foxshakedowndish.com):

We regret that FOX Networks, the owner of some Regional Sports Networks, FX and National Geographic Channel, removed their channels from the DISH Network line-up. FOX has demanded a rate increase of more than 50%. An increase this large would force DISH Network to pass these costs on to our customers, which we are unwilling to do during these tough economic times.

Here's part of what Fox (News Corp) says at their getwhatipaidfor.com website:

Myth: Fox is seeking a 50 percent increase in programming fees for FX, National Geographic Channel, and our 19 regional sports networks.

Fact: We are not seeking a 50 percent increase for FX, National Geographic Channel, and our 19 regional sports networks. And we are not asking you for any more money. We are simply asking DISH to compensate us fairly out of their massive profits for Fox’s entertainment and sports programming services they sell to their subscribers. We have made what we believe are fair and reasonable proposals to DISH – ones that are consistent with our agreements with the hundreds of other cable and satellite companies with whom DISH competes for your business. To date, DISH has not responded with a proposal that is reasonable by comparison to the hundreds of other deals we have in place for these same channels.

Of course, there's one other consideration that News Corp, to my knowledge, hasn't publicly addressed yet. News Corp. doesn't just make money from the cable/satellite providers - they also sell advertising. And since the viewership for the affected Fox properties has been cut, shouldn't News Corp. be lowering the rates that it charges its advertisers? We'll see.

Now I'm sure that Jessica Heacock Insalaco, who has worked for both companies, has her private views on this whole fiasco. But at the moment, she's presumably limiting her public conversations to her new job, and not talking about the old ones. And even the new job is still in pre-launch, so she's not even talking about that yet.

All I know is that if Insalaco still has the account that she got while working for Dish, she's not settling down to watch FX this evening.

(empo-tymshft) No, no, no! Using Facebook as your corporate identity is NOT a new innovation

Louis Gray shared this item from Eran Hammer-Lahav ("The Growing Web Identity Crisis, Courtesy of Facebook"), but I couldn't get past the end of the first paragraph.

A concerning trend is showing up in recent TV and print advertisements of companies using their Facebook profile pages as their web identity instead of their own domains. Most of these companies are big corporations with a well-established web presence. Using social networks to connect with consumers and promote brands is not new, but using these identities as the primary corporate web identity is new.

Um, no it's not.

Remember AOL keywords?

I wrote about this in 2009.

Jason Kottke wrote about this in 2007.

Everything is cyclical, turn, turn, turn.

And this re-emergence of the AOL-like environment on Facebook is being done for the same reasons - if you want your users to find your stuff, it's easier to set up a page on Facebook rather than to tell them to type in a separate URL (rhymes with curl) and put in all that http double dot slash slash stuff. Let's face it, if referrer URLs give you the willies, then you're not going to be necessarily concerned about the ramifications of going to facebook.com/superproduct rather than superproduct.com.

The benefits of conference co-location (Business Analysis Forum within Building Business Capability 2010)

I'm not there, but there's definitely an interesting conference taking place this week. Actually, there are three interesting conferences:

Building Business Capability 2010 is three co-located conferences for the price of one. Our Chairs have created this never-before event recognizing that all three pieces of the puzzle can help you create effective, complete business solutions. Attend just one conference, or mix sessions across all three – your choice. Join an unsurpassed group of professionals tasked with building more capable organizations. Whether you are interested in Business Process, Business Rules or Business Analysis, or simply want to make your organisation more agile, responsive and effective, don’t miss this opportunity! See the whole picture and share experiences with like-minded practitioners and managers.

Since my primary interest is in business analysis (although I have interests in the other two areas also), I investigated the Business Analysis Forum microsite to see what that track looked like. Here's a sample:

Tuesday | 11:30am - 12:30pm | Business Analysis Forum Track

Presentation
Nonfunctional Requirements: Forgotten, Neglected, Misunderstood

SPEAKER(s):
Ellen Gottesdiener
Principal Consultant, EBG Consulting, Inc.

ABOUT THIS SESSION:

Non-functional requirements are essential to build the right product, right. Yet analysts, developers, and business customers often struggle with when and how to define and document non-functional requirements. Some teams neglect non-functional requirements during requirements analysis, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements. Or they specify them incompletely, or with un-testable attributes. Join Ellen Gottesdiener in a fast-paced survey of key practices to help you identify and define non-functional requirements. By acknowledging the equal importance and value of non-functional requirements, your team will create requirements documentation that fully captures the product's needs.

Key Learning Objectives:
1. The different types of non-functional requirements (quality attributes, external interfaces, and design and implementation constraints)
2. Practical techniques to represent quality attributes and how to define their acceptance criteria
3. Visualizing external interfaces
4. Tracing non-functional to functional requirements.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s):
EBG Consulting, Inc. principal consultant and founder Ellen Gottesdiener is an internationally recognized facilitator, coach, trainer, speaker, and expert on requirements development, product chartering, retrospectives, agile requirements, and collaborative workshops. Ellen’s company provides high-value training, facilitation, and consulting services to agile and traditional teams. Author of two acclaimed books (Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger), Ellen delivers training, facilitation, and consulting services globally; speaks at industry conferences; writes articles, blogs, and tweets; and is an IIBA (BABOK™) expert reviewer and contributor to the BABOK agile extension. EBG’s Web site provides a variety of useful practitioner resources as well as access to Ellen’s free eNewsletter Success with Requirements.

But the strength of the conference is that you can pick and choose between the tracks, allowing you to tailor a conference experience that is similar to your own needs.

As it turns out, I'll be attending a separate conference in California later this week - one that, although much smaller, offers its own two-track presentation.

MySpace in Online Privacy Breach

Today's tempest in a teapot regards a Wall Street Journal article with the title Facebook in Privacy Breach. An excerpt from the top of the article:

Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure.

But if you scroll a little farther down the article:

"A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user's Internet browser or by an application," the [Facebook] spokesman said. Knowledge of an ID "does not permit access to anyone's private information on Facebook," he said....

Which leads Kashmir Hill to wonder:

Using “breach” to describe this strikes me as overwrought. The applications reveal your name, that you are on Facebook, and possibly which application(s) you’ve downloaded. Is that something that we should be freaking out about?

But perhaps most significant, Hill also refers to a tweet from Jeff Jarvis on the topic:

WSJ Facebook slam makes no mention of its competitor, MySpace.

As you probably know, the Wall Street Journal and MySpace are owned by the same company, News Corp.

More on News Corp. later in the day...

Getting half the message

Have you ever decided, rather than enjoying the full spectrum of a particular experience, to only enjoy part of it?

For example, have you ever watched TV with the sound off?

Jandy Stone recently wrote a post that talked about two episodes of the NBC show Community. Her post moved me to offer this comment:

I still haven't watched Community yet. Well, technically I've watched Community, but I haven't listened to it.

I recently flew from Dallas to Paris, and from Paris back to Dallas, and in both instances American Airlines was showing, among other things, various items from NBC. However, I wasn't wearing the headphones, so I was only seeing video with no audio.

As the video played out before my eyes, I saw a show (which I had never seen before) which appeared to show Chevy Chase and some much younger people in a school situation. However, from my video-only perspective, it appeared to me that each of the people in the group were taking turns teaching subjects to the other students - some type of an educational collective, as it were. It wasn't until I read up on the show later that I realized that this was a more traditional college, and that ALL of the people were students.

Perhaps I'll watch the show with both audio AND video someday... :)

And according to Stone, I've missed out on a lot:

I can imagine watching it without audio would be a pretty different perspective. It's got some of the finest dialogue in TV right now, you should really check it out with audio. :)

Now I'll grant that my TV and movie consumption (or, more accurately, my lack thereof) is fairly non-standard, but I'm certain that a lot of us do similar things at one time or another. It's much more common, for example, to LISTEN to TV without watching it - perhaps we're cooking, or perhaps we're playing Starfleet Commander or something. Or maybe we're texting behind the wheel of a large automobile and not paying attention to the road in front of us. Or maybe we're "reading" Playboy Magazine, but we're skipping over the text and only looking at the pictures. (No, I didn't mean that YOU were reading Playboy; I was referring to someone else.)

Or let me give a better example. When [INSERT POLITICAL EVENT HERE] happened, you went and read all of the wise commentary that agreed with your interpretation of [INSERT POLITICAL EVENT HERE], but you skipped over the misinformed, inaccurate, stupid and dangerous commentary that opposed your interpretation of [INSERT POLITICAL EVENT HERE].

Regardless of the circumstances, there are times when we intentionally focus on some of the information available on a particular topic, while intentionally ignoring other information. This can have its advantages - for example, it allows us to focus on Chevy Chase's physical comedy without being distracted by his verbal wit, or it allows us to focus on Miss December's airtouched physical beauty without being distracted by her turn-offs ("guys who don't have a sense of humor," or "guys who don't appreciate long walks on the beach," or whatever passes for turn-offs these days).

On the other hand, this focus on some information while ignoring other information clearly can have its disadvantages, since we obviously get a skewed picture of a particular situation. Witness my misinterpretation of Community, for example. The consequences could be catastrophic - if we don't look at the road in front of us as we drive, we could die. Or they could be catastrophic in other ways - if we ONLY read news sources that state that Bush, Obama, and the Illuminati are in a secret Brussels-based alliance to enslave us, then we're going to waste a LOT of money buying gold, canned food items, and weapons at inflated prices.

The important thing is to RECOGNIZE when we're only looking at part of the picture, ACKNOWLEDGE that we're only looking at part of the picture, and PERCEIVE the ramifications, both positive and negative, of our laser focus/limited vision/skewed perspective on part of the topic we're exploring.

The varieties of human experience

You know the Moby AT&T commercial? (You know, that one.) Well, that got me thinking about Moby's original video for "We Are All Made of Stars" (see this previous post). And I'm not the only one who's been thinking about that video. Sharla DeFresno:

What is most illuminating about Moby's journey through the underbelly of Hollywood is not the status of such celebrities, but our recognition of them. Watching the video is like playing Where's Waldo? I propose that the meaning that we assign to the celebrities in the video is much more important than the celebrity itself. It is our ability (or lack thereof) to identify the celebrities that express a lot about ourselves.

Not that DeFresno is making any value judgments here:

This difference should be viewed as not a value judgment, but merely an indication of alternative experiences, exposure to media, an fascination with current events.

Or, as DeFresno notes, not-so-current events. While JC Chasez was certainly of current interest, others such as Kato Kaelin and Gary Coleman were more famous for past accomplishments, and significant portions of the MTV audience probably didn't know who Ron Jeremy was; as DeFresno put it in her post, "Ron Jeremy is hardly a household name among fifteen-year-olds of today." Well, let's hope not.

And this is an issue that goes beyond Moby videos. I'll have a little more to say about this later in the week, but if you are following a person (rather than a topic), there are some things that the person says that are not addressed to you. If you're a co-worker of mine, and if you read something on my Facebook page about the Ffundercats, you're probably going to think that my spell checker's broken.

Is such information bonus information that benefits the feed, or excess information that degrades it?

Will Africans save Africa?

Business 360 shared an interesting hypothesis.

[A] South African academic, Greg Mills, who has written a book called “Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It.”

He argues Africa is poor because “Africa’s leaders have made this choice.” It’s a controversial angle, but the basic premise that poor leadership has steered generations of African countries down the path to poverty is not new.

All of us who live in Africa can name leaders – from presidents to local municipal workers – who have made their communities poorer. It's not just the Mugabes or Mobutus of this continent who have shattered Africa’s promise, it is the often nameless, mid-level workers whose corrupt or incompetent actions result in schoolchildren not getting books, for example.

More here.

The non-existent division between blogs and traditional media

Over the weekend, I happened to visit a post in the Inquisitr - normally I read the Inquisitr via RSS feeds - and I was asked to take a survey. The survey had little to do with the Inquisitr itself, but was instead designed to gather information on the readers of the Inquisitr.

One series of questions, however, bugged me when I took the survey, and it continues to bug me now.

The questions asked for my views on blogs versus traditional media.

The thing that bugged me about the question is its underlying assumption that these were two distinct entities. While this might have been the case when I started blogging seven years ago, it is clearly not the case today.

Take the publication that I was reading at the time, the Inquisitr. I assume that under the old perspective, I would be required to file the Inquisitr into the "blog" category. Yet I can tell no difference between the pieces in the Inquisitr and those in so-called traditional media - either the stories that the Inquisitr buys, or the stories that are written by Duncan Riley and others on the Inquisitr staff.

Now perhaps you're not familiar with the Inquisitr, but you're probably familiar with the Huffington Post. Although it's technically a "blog," it has emerged as a reputable source of information.

And even if you buy the old distinction that the Huffington Post is just a blog, then how do you categorize something such as http://blogs.wsj.com/? Is it a blog, because it has "blogs" in its title? Or is it traditional media, because it is a Wall Street Journal publication? And if you argue that this is traditional media because it's owned by an old-line company, then how do you categorize My_____ (a/k/a MySpace)? Is "Tom" suddenly part of the old guard media because Rupert owns him?

As time passes, the distinction between blogs and traditional media is becoming more and more of an artificial distinction. Perhaps the distinction should be between corporate-owned media and media that is not corporate-owned - regardless of whether the corporate owner is News Corp or Nichenet Pty Ltd.

The perks of business

I recently had occasion to revisit Frank Murphy's blog. Murphy, now based in Tennessee, used to produce radio shows for both Kevin & Bean and Mark & Brian. (Not simultaneously.) In his blog, he told a story from the Kevin & Bean days that shows how jobs, even when they involve extensive work, have some perks attached.

My wife and I had planned to take [their daughter] Meaghan and some of her friends to a “grown-up” restaurant like The SmokeHouse or The Castaway for her [tenth] birthday that year. Our plans changed when I found out I had to work.

KROQ had been chosen to promote the world premiere of “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.”

However, this provided the Murphys with an opportunity.

The marketing representative from Warner Bros. was more than sympathetic to my plight. She gave me enough premiere tickets for us to move the birthday party to the Village Theater in Westwood.

Well, Meaghan certainly got her "grown-up" event. But it got better.

After the screening, we took Meaghan and her friends to the after-party at a nearby venue. The stars had a VIP area roped off for them. It was relatively easy to get Jim Carrey’s attention and ask him to lean forward for a picture with the birthday girl.

But the benefits don't end there. Frank Murphy just provided Meaghan with a copy of the picture, which may net Meaghan great wealth.

A team-building exercise at my daughter’s office could win her a $5 Starbucks card this week. The boss asked the employees to share a story about their most memorable birthday.

If Meaghan wins, she should buy the Warners rep a triple shaken half syrup goat milk latte. Yes, that will use up most of the gift card, but it would be worth it.

Blackberry and Blogger don't play well together

If you visit my blog, you can see an option that allows you to subscribe to the blog via e-mail. This option is directly maintained by our kind non-evil overlords at Google, and under most circumstances it hums away, doing its thing.

But lately I've seen a couple of exceptions.

First, I received a message that one of my blog posts could not be delivered to a particular Blackberry e-mail address. I won't print the address, or the name of the person who holds it, other than to note the last name is very presidential.

But recently I received a new message, regarding the same address:

subject [SUSPECTED SPAM] Delivery Status Notification(Failure)

Your message:
To: [deleted]
Subject: =?utf-8?B?RW1wb3ByaXNlLUJJ?=
Sent Date: 14:19 +0000
has not been delivered to the recipient's BlackBerry Handheld.

The rest of the message reproduced one of my blog posts, which actually wasn't sent to a Blackberry address, but to the address of an educational institution. Apparently "the President" is sending notifications to a Blackberry, and the Blackberry doesn't like them.

Is anyone else having problems getting messages to their Blackberrys?

[A disclosure is in order. I used to work for Motorola.]

Another product for an uncool target market - the Jitterbug

Back in July, I wrote a post about leasing your home phone, noting that this option (available from QLT Consumer Lease Services) would primarily appeal to people of an older generation.

Fast forward to this week, when I read this WinExtra post and looked at the picture of the nice man holding the mobile phone. The nice man happens to be a man named Steve Ballmer, who's pretty much been running Microsoft since Bill Gates announced his plans to, borrowing a phrase, Do No Evil. But when I saw the picture of Ballmer, I observed:

But he looks like a calm, nice gentleman. Not one who's going to run around and yell and stuff like that. Of course, someone with that look should probably be selling the Jitterbug, not a Windows 7 mobile phone.

Ah, the Jitterbug. I don't think I've written about the Jitterbug before now, and I became curious regarding how they approach their target market of people (usually older) who just want a mobile phone that works, without all the fancy and confusing gadgets that most phones have today.

I gravitated toward the customer service page, figuring that Jitterbug would want to differentiate itself in that area. And they do:

At Jitterbug, we don’t believe in automated voice systems or hiring someone outside the United States to answer your calls. That’s why we’ve developed a special team of 24-hour, U.S.-Based service professionals that includes our helpful Customer Service associates, as well as our friendly Jitterbug Operators. Our U.S. based Customer Service experts are standing by to assist you with any questions you may have about your new Jitterbug cell phone or your service. We’re here to listen and learn from you and we are committed to providing a helpful service experience.

And if you think that the paragraph above doesn't mention "helpful," "friendly," and especially "U.S." enough, check the following paragraph:

Our live, friendly Operators are also 100% U.S. based and available to assist you 24-hours a day. You can reach the Jitterbug Operators by dialing ‘0’ on your Jitterbug phone anytime, day or night. Our Operators will always greet you by name and they can assist you with everyday Jitterbug services, like updating your Phone Book, connecting your calls, or helping you find numbers through directory assistance. Give us a call anytime. You’ll discover that we don’t treat you like an account number, because we consider you part of our family.

To reach our helpful Operators, dial ‘0’ on your Jitterbug phone, 24-hours a day.

Personally, I believe that the helpful description of how to dial the operator can be even more helpful. Pretend that you've never encountered a phone before in your life, and you're asked to dial the operator. Do you dial the letter "O" or the number "0"? Now Jitterbug phones (see here) tend to have very large numbers, but even so, it might be a little confusing to dial something other than the letter "O" to get an operator.

EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT JITTERBUG'S TARGET AUDIENCE IS USED TO DIALING THE NUMBER "0" FOR OPERATOR. Heck, they've been doing this for decades.

I'll try to delve into Jitterbug a bit more in a future post, but it appears that they know how to market to their target audience.

The two-tier employment system at NRK - Pia Beathe Pedersen is not alone

The whole Pia Beathe Pedersen brouhaha has focused attention on the use of temporary workers at NRK in Norway. This article, in Norwegian and entitled "M for midlertidig," starkly illustrates this fact by contrasting the treatment of temporary and permanent employees at NRK. Here's a quote from the article:

I NRKs lokaler sitter Simonsen og diskuterer vikarsituasjonen med Grete Ingebjørg Berge og Anne Cathrine Syversen. Berge er vikar mens Syversen ble fast ansatt etter åtte år som vikar. De gjør stort sett samme jobben og det er vanskelig for en utenforstående å skille dem. Mens Syversen har et adgangskort med NRK-logo og et pent bilde på, har Berge et adgangskort med en stor M på. M for midlertidig.

Here's how Google Translate rendered the paragraph:

In NRK premises located Simonsen and discuss the situation with temporary Grete Ingeborg Berge and Anne Cathrine Syversen. Berge is filling in while Syversen was a permanent employee after eight years as a substitute. They do pretty much the same job and it is difficult for an outsider to tell them apart. While Syversen a pass with NRK logo and a nice image, Berge has an access card with a big M on. M temporarily.

Other differences are noted, but the article emphasizes this vivid illustration of a two-tier system in NRK. But to get NRK's side of the story, the article quotes Heidi Pleym, Editorial Director at NRK.

– Nå er det mye negativt fokus på det å være vikar. Det å komme inn som vikar er også en god rekrutteringsarena for å få vist seg fram, sier redaksjonssjef Pleym.

– Men hvorfor har NRK egne kort til midlertidige ansatte som stempler dem som ikke-ansatte. Er ikke det ekskluderende?

– Jeg har aldri tenkt på det og sett på det slik, svarer Pleym.

Or, courtesy Google:

- Now there is much negative focus on being a substitute. Coming in as a substitute is also a good recruitment arena to show themselves, "says editorial director Pleym.

– But why has NRK own cards for temporary employees that stamps them as non-employees. Is not it exclusive?

– I never thought about it and seen it like this, answers Pleym.

What is journalistic objectivity?

I wanted to call your attention to a fascinating conversation that Erin Kotecki Vest (@queenofspain) has launched, via a blog post of hers called The Death of Lois Lane. Here's her basic thesis:

Citizen journalists and traditional journalists are not the same. You can combine the two, but in the process you kill traditional journalism.

From this thesis, she ended up stating the following:

I am no longer a traditional journalist. I gave that up the minute I opened my mouth. I am now a blogger. A pundit. A columnist.

Toward the end of her post, she questions whether the rules that she was taught were ever really put into practice. Yet she was taught them, and she believes in them.

Maybe journalists were always the ideal, but never really existed. Maybe we all strived to be straight forward and unbiased and worked our tails off to make sure we got you the news and you got it opinion free. I know I did....

Maybe this is my romanticized version of news. Maybe it’s my plea to find the light inside the darkness of so much noise and information and my hope that the cream rises to the top. But more and more I’m finding it’s not the cream, it’s the crazy, loud, brash, and obnoxious. Social media has pitted the serious journalist against the shock jock, and America loves a good train wreck.

And in the comments, several people (including myself) questioned whether objective journalism has always been around, or if it was just a recent 20th century invention. But after a mention of Rebooting the News by Francine Hardway, news rebooter Jay Rosen entered the discussion and shared something he wrote a while back:

The basic unit of journalism is the report, an account of what happened. The longer I’ve studied it (which is, uh… 25 years) the more I’ve come to see that “objectivity” as practiced by the American press is a form of persuasion. It tries to persuade all possible users of the account that the account can be trusted because it is unadorned.

Some specific ways in which it does this are: playing up facts gathered and playing down opinions; using constructions like “he said,” or “according to the Senate report” rather than “I think;” refusing to characterize what easily could be characterized; rehearsing rather than resolving disputes; betraying no position on controversial items, and so on. J-school students when they are taught to write in this style are often told not to use the word “I” and to lose the adjectives.

But then Rosen questions the very idea of objectivity:

That’s why you should trust it: because it appears unadorned. The way we capture this in popular culture is by reference to Joe Friday: “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

That’s not to say that an account presented this way actually is pure fact. No way. There is no act of journalism that is not saturated with judgment. Even a photograph is framed by the picture taker. When I refer to “Just the facts” I simply mean: that is how the story asks to be understood, not… “that is all there is to it.” There is always more to it.

Rosen's piece doesn't have open comments, but Vest's does, if you want to join the discussion.

Hey, Mr. Ballmer, at least Robert J. Steiner likes you

Something came up in my feeds that interested me on many levels. Yes, many levels. The post was entitled Top 20 hot Tech Stocks that Will Make Me Rich, and was written by Robert J. Steiner of CEOWORLD Magazine.

(Incidentally, I would think that something called "CEOWORLD Magazine" would have a limited readership, but at least it would be pre-qualified for advertisers. Perhaps I should write "Head of State Magazine"; only a couple of hundred readers max, but what a set of readers!)

Anyway, back to Steiner. Even any kind of discussion of his picks would require a lengthy disclosure statement on my part. He picked a former employer of mine (Motorola), a current competitor of mine (Cogent), a major supplier of mine (Oracle), and a bunch of other firms. And the information is not necessarily up to date. The blurbs don't discuss Motorola's moves toward splitting into two (not three) separate companies, or Cogent's moves toward selling itself. At least the blurbs recognized that Oracle sells hardware.

But it's interesting to look at Steiner's picks. Let's say they're...um...contrarian to the conventional wisdom. For example, take a look at this pick:

Microsoft (MSFT)- Microsoft Corporation develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a range of software products and services for various computing devices worldwide. The company’s (sic) Windows & Windows Live Division segment offers Windows operating system, Windows Live, and Internet Explorer. It offers Windows operating system, which include Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP Home, as well as Windows Live suite of applications and Web services. Microsoft’s (sic) Server and Tools segment provides Windows Server operating systems, Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Azure, Visual Studio, Silverlight, System Center products, Biz Talk server, Microsoft consulting services, and product support services.

Let's face it - if you saw a headline declaring that you could make millions off Microsoft, you'd probably check to make sure you weren't reading the Onion or eSarcasm. WinExtra in particular has noted that, while Microsoft sometimes deserves the derision it gets, sometimes it successes go unnoticed in a tech media world infested with google i's.

But at least Steve Ballmer can take comfort in knowing that Robert J. Steiner is in his corner.

(Incidentally, CEOWORLD appears to be a project of Lucentbyte. Amarendra Bhsuhan is not only Lucentbyte's CEO, but is also its PERMANENT Chairman. Now that's stability.)

And the advertisers are more reviled than the politicians who hire them

Earlier today, you might have seen a post that I wrote that talked about politicians' self-loathing, and how they may be less popular than outbound telemarketers. Later that morning, I made the following comment on my Empoprise-BI Facebook page:

Of course, by the time this election season is over, "advertiser" will be more reviled than "politician."

Maybe we don't have to wait for the end of the election season for that to happen. Ramona, a commenter at David Allen's blog, is already sick of the ads. In a comment about this post, Ramona asked the following question of Mr. Allen:

Is there a code word I can enter into my television set to stop receiving all the political ads?

If anyone would know, I thought it would be you.

While I also have a high opinion of David Allen, it turns out he can't do everything.

Afraid not. If you find out the code word, be sure to let us know. (My personal solution is to not turn on my TV, but that wouldn't work for most people.)

Now I'll bet that someone is currently developing some technology to zap political ads. Let's face it, there are entire industries devoted to zapping ads in general - take, for example, the remote control that can fast forward a program in 30 second increments. And there are services that do the same thing for online ads (here's an example). Meanwhile, there are entire industries devoted to preventing us from zapping ads. For us older folks, the whole thing reminds us of the Cold War, the missile buildup, defensive measures such as the Strategic Defense Initiative (also called, to George Lucas' horror, "Star Wars"), and the best acronym of the 20th century, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).

Which brings us to Steve Dahl - yes, THAT Steve Dahl - who has apparently left the world of disco demolition for a life as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. And Dahl, being the opinionated sort, has this to say about the political ads we know and hate:

Campaign commercials are a windfall for radio and TV outlets. It's entirely possible to watch the evening news without seeing any commercials other than negative ads about local politicians. There are lots of allegations. Not paying taxes seems to be a hot topic. Often when someone prominent doesn't pay taxes, he or she has suffered a catastrophic financial setback. The implications in the ads are that they cheat. The more apt point might be that they don't even know what they are doing with their own money. I'd like to see each candidate screen his commercials in front of the others, followed by unlimited discussion in a public forum. Make them accountable at least for the ads they run.

Dahl then discusses particular Illinois ads. Since I'm blessed with only seeing the California ads, I don't know exactly what Dahl is referencing, but it sounds like Illinois ads are as slimy as the ones out here.

My favorite political commercial so far during this election season is the cartoon of Alexi Giannoulias driving his family and several others to the poor house. The ad is funded by American Crossroads, a Karl Rove brainchild. It compares letting your friends vote for Giannoulias to letting them drive drunk. For his part, Giannoulias calls Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk a liar every chance he gets. I would like to see Giannoulias animate something along the lines of "Pinocchio" to really drive the "Kirk is a liar" point home in matching cartoon style.

OK, I guess the California ads are slimier. There's been an ad running for at least a week now that shows Meg Whitman's nose growing.

But the truism that political ads make money for those who show them doesn't necessarily hold in the online world. Earlier this year, Technograph reported that Carlo Ople was blocking all political ads from his website. Ople:

I noticed that the CTR of my various sites went down over the past few months. I decided to observe for a week and I noticed that my blogs are being flooded by political ads. Not just from Manny Villar, but also from Bayani Fernando and Mark Jimenez. It looks like my site visitors are sick and tired already of politics to the point that they refuse to click them at all, hahaha!

Of course, television ads use a different payment formula, so the only way to reduce revenue for the stations is to follow David Allen's suggestion, not turn on your TV, and hope that enough people do so in the month before an election that the stations quit selling ads to politicians.

Or perhaps someone can start airing negative ads about the negative advertisers. I've written the script for one such ad already:

It's October! Look who's back in your home! It's the negative political advertisers!

Here they come with their outrageous claims about political opponents.

Isn't it enough to make you sick?

Well, just ignore those ads and listen to some positive advertising for a change!

(This message sponsored by the Coalition for Positive Thinking, a grass roots group of concerned citizens, with major funding from the Coca-Cola Company, Procter & Gamble, and the new General Motors.)

A profession that is even more reviled than the telemarketing profession

In a previous post, I attempted to find some tips for those who are employed as telemarketers. While I was able to find a few tips, it's much easier to find tips on how to AVOID telemarketers. For example:

Alex apparently believes that because he needs $250 a week, anything he has to do in order to earn that, no matter how repulsive to those he interacts with, is justified (perhaps because he's not a suburban white guy), and that those who are unhappy with his behavior are somehow obliged to simply roll over and take it.

I would point out to Alex that just as he maintains that he has the right to make my life more unpleasant by calling me to attempt to sell me things I don't want to buy, I have the right to deliberately try to make his life more unpleasant by using the sort of techniques on the web page, and furthermore, to try to encourage other people to do so as well.

But as the air gets a little colder in the southern California autumn, I think that I've found a profession that is even more reviled than the telemarketing profession.

There will be an election in California in about a month, which means that the television and radio airwaves are already filled with election ads. California is a proposition-happy state, so a lot of those ads either support or oppose one proposition or another. Yet regardless of the proposition in question or the stance on said proposition, all of the advertisements have one thing in common.

All of the advertisements agree that the politicians are evil.

Ads that support a particular proposition state that the proposition was expressly designed to support the people in their fight against the abuses of the politicians.

Ads that oppose a particular proposition state that the proposition was put on the ballot by evil politicians in order to try to fool the people. While the proposition claims to make things wonderful, the REAL purpose of the proposition is to allow the politicians and their cronies in Sacramento to raise taxes, gut services, and buy expensive wines for themselves.

Oh, and there's one other thing that's common about all of the advertisements.

All of the advertisements themselves were written by politicians.

Perhaps the politicians refer to themselves as "the dedicated public servants who teach your children." But in reality, they're the Sacramento-based political action committee funded by the teacher's union.

Or perhaps the politicians refer to themselves as "businesses, providing jobs in your community." But in reality, they're the Sacramento-based political action committee funded by the business organization lobby.

Regardless of how much someone may claim NOT to be a politician, the truth remains - if you're running for political office, or contesting something on a political ballot, then you ARE a politician...whether you like it or not.

So, in essence, you have politicians who are funding ads saying how evil politicians are.

If that isn't self-loathing, I don't know what is.

So much for the Bean, revisited - technology overtakes "Millionaire"

I've referred to the story before, and some radio fans in the Los Angeles area know it. Back when Regis Philbin hosted "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire," TV star Ray Romano appeared on the show and was asked to name the capital of the country of Georgia. He chose to phone a friend, the friend being KROQ radio disc jockey Gene "Bean" Baxter, well known as an expert on obscure information. However, Bean was unable to name the capital of the country of Georgia, which caused Regis to remark, "So much for the Bean!"

I am Geek linked to a Matt McGee post entitled "How Google Ruined My Favorite Game Show." McGee attended a taping of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," and learned about a change in the game that we know and love.

[O]ne person asked why, before the 2009 season, the show dropped the “Phone A Friend” lifeline. This was a way for contestants to call a friend or family member to get help with a tough question.

“Because of Google,” Mecurio said. “Everyone would call their friend and the friend would start Googling to get the answer. The contestant would be like, ‘Hey Joe, aspirin. A-S-P-I-R-I-N.’ We could hear them typing on their keyboard!”

Mecurio went to say that they want the show to have a human touch — that humans should answer the questions, not computers. So that was the end of Phone A Friend.

This raises some questions about the nature of human augmentation - is Google really non-human, and if so, then are index cards with scribbled notes also non-human?

Oh, and by the way, Google's not the only game in town. Wolfram Alpha knows stuff too.

Another call center post - how to telemarket and keep your sanity

I've written several posts in my Empoprise-BI business blog about call centers, but I've never gotten around to the major issue with call centers.

For outbound call centers, you have to make calls.

I happen to know someone who recently started a telemarketing job, and the person was drained by the first day. Some people have a personality for telemarketing, and some don't. I wondered if there were any tips that would help telemarketers deal with the pressures of the job. I found a Michael Russell article, and looked to see what advice he provided. Here's one tip:

Telemarketers are given a script. They are told under no uncertain terms to follow the script. But the truth is, these scripts can get annoying and make you sound like a robot. So if you find an opportunity to get away from the script, even a little bit, do it. Don't let your supervisor bully you. If he should catch you and asks you why you deviated from the script, tell him that you felt it was necessary to do so. If you ended up making a sale, show him your sheet. That should shut him up.

More tips here.

eHow provided another tip:

Develop a simple spiel.

That sounds like it could certainly help, and even if the simple spiel leads to an equally simple rejection, perhaps that just means that you can make more calls. (Ironically, while I was writing this paragraph, I received a telemarketing call from a full services financial firm. I let him give his simple spiel, then told him that it wouldn't be necessary for him to send the information he wanted to send to me. I'm sure that he made his next call within ten seconds of the termination of our brief conversation.)

However, the big question that a telemarketer has to face is how to deal with negative people. Unfortunately, when searching for information on this, I found a lot more information on how call recipients can deal with the negative presence of a telemarketer in their home. Perhaps the reason for this is that while you can be a recipient of telemarketing calls for a lifetime, one's stint as a telemarketer is generally quite short.

Any telemarketing manager will tell you privately that the people under his oversee are not loyal sled dogs to be fed, they are tires to be changed and the advancement structure is full of all sorts of checks and balances to make sure that the floor is always filled with the most skilled but underpaid voices at all times....

[T]here is no future on the calling floor, and a bad month is always fatal. Think you can't have a bad couple of weeks? Well you will, and you will be fired or (more likely) driven to quit, every time.

The second of two hippos that I encountered in France

My week in France was very intense from a work perspective, and I was working until about 9:00 pm most of the time that I was in France. There was, however, one exception. Because many of the attendees of these business meetings were from outside of France, the organizers planned a special dinner in Paris. We were not told the location, but just before I arrived, I was asked if I was allergic to horses. Luckily for me, I wasn't, because we ended up at the Hippodrome Paris Vincennes. This is a horse racing venue, established in the 19th century, and host to both horse races and huge music concerts in the 20th century.

Well, Bono wasn't there the night that we came, so we only had the horses to deal with. We started the evening by taking a tour of the stables. The tour was conducted in French, but one of our group translated. We then went to the upper level to eat dinner and watch the horses. Inasmuch as this was a French restaurant, and not an American one, the dinner lasted through all seven of the races.

So what did I eat? Well, after the evening was over, I communicated to a fellow Disney-lover that I didn't eat Bambi, but that I did eat Donald, and he was delicious.



And, of course, there was horse racing, and gambling. One would think that the material that we were studying during the week, which included tools for risk analysis and mitigation, would have helped us in selecting our horses. Well, the tools certainly didn't help me, since I lost two euros on the single race on which I bet. Then again, perhaps the fact that I only bet on one race indicated that I was doing a good job at reducing my risk.


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One of two hippos that I encountered in France

I encountered two hippos during my trip to France last week. And both were delicious.

I encountered my initial hippo the day that I arrived in France. The hotel in which I was staying did not have a restaurant, so I had to seek out a place to eat lunch. Said establishment had to meet my criteria, including (a) it had to be within walking or bus riding distance, since I didn't have a car; (b) it had to accept American credit cards; and (c) there had to be a fairly good chance that I would be able to communicate with the wait staff in some manner. Luckily for me, the Port of Cergy offered several places that met these criteria, one of them being a branch of the Hippopotamus chain of restaurants.

Now I had come to France armed with Rick Steves' French Phrase Book & Dictionary. Rick Steves, if you haven't heard of him, has created a series of European travel videos, and his phrase book notes that he is a "monolingual speaker." For Steves that's a plus, since he believes that he has determined the bare essentials needed for communicating in Europe. In addition to providing some details on the French languages, Steves offered a little advice:

Never allow your lack of foreign language skills to isolate you from the people and cultures you traveled halfway around the world to experience.

Specifically:

Keep things caveman-simple. Make single nouns work as entire sentences ("Photo?"). Use internationally-understood words ("auto-kaput" works in Bordeaux). Butcher the language if you must. The important thing is to make the effort. To get air mail stamps, you can flap your wings and say "tweet, tweet." If you want milk, moo and pull two imaginary udders. Risk looking like a fool.

Well, I didn't have to pull any udders, but I could easily point to pictures on the menu to make my preferences known. And most of the waiters that I encountered, both at Hippopotamus and at the nearby Old English Pub, were able to communicate in English anyway.

For those who know me, my biggest challenge in eating at a French restaurant was to eat like a Frenchman. Again, let me turn to Rick Steves:

In France, slow service is good service (fast service would rush the diners.)

I just had to keep this in mind, kick back, and enjoy myself.

Should you find yourself in the port area of Cergy, Hippopotamus is at 8 Rue Jean Bart. The Old English Pub is across the way at 5 Rue Jean Bart. There are several other restaurants in the area, but I didn't have the time to visit all of them - for most of the week, I ate dinner at the office. But there was one exception - the other hippo...


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I guess I neglected to mention that I was in France last week

There are some people who seem to share where they are every waking moment. Although I will share my location at times, there are other times when I choose not to share my location.

For example, during all of last week - or, more precisely, between Saturday September 25 and Saturday October 2 - I was in France on business. I chose not to explicitly share this fact on the Empoprise-BI business blog or any of my other online outlets, although I implicitly referred to it on occasion. For example, during the last week that I was in California, I got stuck in a huge traffic jam, and ended up telling my Facebook followers that I would instead take the bus next week. For most people, the remark went right by them. For a few people familiar with the area, it sounded like a bad joke, since there aren't any buses between Ontario and north Orange County (where I work). But to a very small select few people, this was an indication of how I would be commuting to work while I was in France. Well, once I figured out how to buy bus tickets (and that took me a while, due to my extremely limited command of the French language).

While much of the stuff that I did in France isn't of interest to the average reader, perhaps there are some things that I can share here in the Empoprise-BI business blog. But for now, I will leave you with a few general observations.

First, if you know that you are going to be using a computer in a foreign country that was configured for said foreign country, perhaps it's not a good idea to include the symbol for your national currency as part of your password.

Second, if you are the only American in a group of people, don't bother to publicly convert kilograms to pounds. No one else will care.

Third, if you are the only American in a group of people, it's probably best to refrain from uttering phrases such as "dragging the infield."

More later.

What is the security camera looking at? The camera will tell you.

I heard a podcast advertisement for a "thinking camera," so I went to thinkingcamera.com to read about it. The URL redirected me to http://www.myarcherfish.com/pages/meet-solo-b#utm_campaign=ThinkingCamera. Or maybe I should send you there via my own link: http://www.myarcherfish.com/pages/meet-solo-b#utm_campaign=ReadOnEmpopriseBI.

However you get there, you'll read the following description:

Award-winning Archerfish Solo™ is a thinking, wireless monitoring camera and recorder with advanced Homeland Security technology. It understands what it sees, so you can tell it what to look for and what to ignore. Archerfish will alert only on what interests you and emails you a video so you can see for yourself. You can even watch live video, on the web, any time you want!

Speaking of video, Archerfish has one:



So, according to this video, a specific perimeter can be established within the camera view, and the camera can tell the difference between a vehicle and a person. You can find out a little bit more from this discussion at CES between an enthusiastic interviewer and "Frank".



And the possibilities for expansion of this technology are endless, although some of the potential expansion ideas go well beyond what your average Best Buy might sell. (Or maybe not.) With my biometrics background, I can see that you could actually detect WHO is coming up to your front door (although the technology has to mature before "face on the fly" recognition becomes truly viable, and any home security system could only recognize the faces of people enrolled in the system, such as family members or that no-good boyfriend). And perhaps you can even recognize the TYPE of vehicle that pulls into your driveway - and frankly, if a Mercedes were pulling into my driveway, I'd want to know about it. (Video from Stemmer Imaging.)



My one question - considering how many are claiming that the U.S. national borders are porous, does Archerfish really want to use the phrase "Homeland Security technology" in its marketing materials?

Call center sex, and how a charity and a football player made a little mistake

In a previous post on this blog, I talked about how overworked young workers at calls centers based in the Philippines have been accused of doing what young workers might occasionally do - have sex with each other. Presumably these call centers were, um, servicing customers who were not seeking sex, but as we all know, there are call centers who cater to people who have an interest in sex.

Unfortunately, Feed the Children and football player Chad Ochocinco got caught in a mix-up that involves the latter type of call center. You see, Ochocinco created a limited edition cereal, but there was a little typo on the cereal box. My source for this story is the wonderfully named blog Ted Williams Head.

A portion of the proceeds from the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver’s cereal go to the Feed The Children Charity. The phone number on the cereal box for the Feed The Children charity connects you to a phone sex line, (800) HELP-FTC, while the correct number is (888) HELP-FTC.

Read more here. And if you want to know more about Feed the Children, go to http://www.feedthechildren.org/. Ochocinco has been involved with the charity for some time, as this excerpt from a January 2010 press release attests:

In an effort to help men rise to the challenge in all aspects of life, Degree Men® and Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco are kicking off a month-long Degree Men Charity Challenge campaign to support Feed The Children. On Saturday, Jan. 30, Feed The Children will distribute a semi tractor-trailer full of food and personal care items to help 400 Miami families at Santla Haitian Neighborhood Center (5000 Biscayne Blvd.) beginning at 2 p.m. Chad OchoCinco will be on hand at the event.

The distribution is the latest stop on Feed The Children’s Americans Feeding Americans Emergency Caravan, which has helped more than 30,000 families across the country in cities that have been affected by the nation’s economic downturn. Feed The Children is planning similar distributions in more than 20 American cities this year.

During the postseason, Ochocinco and Degree Men will pledge to rise to the challenge off the football field by tying donations to Ochocinco's performance on the field. They plan to donate $100 to Feed The Children for every yard Ochocinco gains during the playoffs, up to $10,000. For all men who rise to the challenge with donations of their own to Feed The Children, Degree Men won't let them down and will match all donations up to $40,000.

For the record, Ochocinco gained 28 yards during the Bengals' one playoff appearance. But I'm sure that his participation in the challenge helped Feed the Children to raise much more money.

The Madison Heights cheerleading board speaks

The Madison Heights cheerleading discussion continues in the comments to the various blog posts that I've written about the issue. See the comment that was recently added to my second post about the topic.

I figured I'd check the Madison Heights Wolverines website to see if there were any further updates, and I found one:

Parents: As board members we would like to assure all of the parents that we consider every person in this organization along with their opinion important. Our jobs are to ensure that we are doing the very best for each and every child in our program. If you would like us to address a concern that you may have, we would ask that you initially speak with your coach, the general manager or any board member directly. If you feel that your concern has not been addressed or would like to have your concern further discussed, please remember that you are welcome to any board meeting which are held the first Tuesday of every single month of the year (with the exception of January which is typically a closed meeting).

In effect, the board is functioning as a board. While some might claim that the board is unrepresentative of parents, while others claim that those who criticize the board are unrepresentative of parents, the truth is that every organization needs a governing body that actually governs. If people disagree with the actions of the board, there are presumably ways to vote the board out at the next election, or perhaps to impeach the board if necessary. If you have any sort of "throw the bums out" mentality without due process, then you'll have a situation like they're having in Ecuador right now, and I can tell you from personal experience (a family friend is currently stuck in Ecuador and is unable to continue her journey to Peru) that such actions are not beneficial.

Well, at least one American company wants to do business in Africa

I've previously observed that some large American companies don't want to do business in Africa. But I've found one exception.

I.B.M. will supply the computing technology and services for an upgraded cellphone network across 16 nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Its customer is India’s largest cellphone operator, Bharti Airtel, which paid $9 billion a few months ago for most of the African assets of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, or Zain....

The Bharti contract also punctuates I.B.M.’s Africa strategy. The company’s presence in Africa dates back 50 years, but in the last five years I.B.M. has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices and foster technology training programs — and it plans to expand aggressively in the region.

Why?

Africa is primed for growth, according to Frank Gens, an analyst at IDC. “And I.B.M. is, as it’s done before, getting in on the ground floor,” Mr. Gens said.

A message to all multimedia companies seeking to purchase the Empoprises blog empire

I've working on a couple of high-priority projects and keeping odd hours as a result - EXTREMELY odd hours - and therefore haven't had much of a chance to religiously follow the tech news. So I didn't learn about the sale of TechCrunch to AOL until I heard Episode 152 of the Braindead Techcast. (For the record, TechCrunch's own announcement of the deal is here.) If you haven't heard the techcast, Steven and Sean spent some time talking about the possible valuation of other properties as a result of this sale. Would Mashable go for over $50 mililon? Would the Braindead Techcast itself go for $1 million?

This, of course, raises the obvious question - what would Empoprises go for? And who would buy it?

As all of the leading multimedia companies know, Empoprises is a massive empire of vertical blogs that cover various topics - Empoprise-BI for business, Empoprise-MU for music, Empoprise-IE for California's Inland Empire, and Empoprise-NTN for NTN Buzztime news. These blogs are obviously a complementary fit to a new of multimedia companies with a whole bunch of money, so I fully expect to be in the wonderful position of sorting between scores of multi-million dollar offers.

So, who do I sell to?

Oprah is an obvious choice. She already has a significant online presence at oprah.com, and I'm sure that many of the topics covered in the Empoprises blog empire will fit in quite nicely with Oprah's current online offerings. Let's face it, the mom who fathered her own children goes hand in hand with the California girl who sells wishes.

But it's probably more likely that Empoprises will be sought by a firm that needs to boost its online image, and while Empoprises would certainly boost Oprah's image, the boost would be relatively small. So, which firm is in such desperate straits that it will pay any amount of money to acquire such a valuable property as Empoprises?

No, not BP. There's not really a good fit between BP and Empoprises.

If you haven't figured out the answer yet, it's MySpace.

As Steven and Sean noted, the acquisition of TechCrunch allows AOL to be a major content provider without having to use the AOL brand - a brand that, for whatever reason, has become tarnished over the last couple of decades.

Now the MySpace brand, for whatever reason, has also become tarnished. For example, the wise folks at Neowin started a thread about the site, and the 38th message in the thread read as follows:

That sites still up?
Wow, I thought it died a long time ago.

But what if MySpace recast itself as a content provider, and de-emphasized the MySpace brand and emphasized the Empoprises brand instead. Imagine the revolution that would occur!

So, multimedia companies, go ahead and leave your bids as comments to this message. But I may not be able to contact you immediately - the odd hours and stuff, you know.

In defense of my profession - proposals are hard

Now I cannot share war stories from the proposals that I write for my own company, because all of the proposals that I write are perfekt and of the highest qualtiy. However, I can certainly share war stories about the proposals that other companies write.

This happens to be a local one, from my home city of Ontario, California. It seems that the city solicited bids for some Federally-funded traffic light projects in the city, but Liset Marquez reports that one of the bidders found a problem with a competitor's bid.

Christopher Morales of San Dimas, who was the second-lowest bidder, wrote to Ontario officials that the low bidder, Bell Gardens-based CT & F, did not follow all of the federal guidelines.

Ontario's city engineer, Louis Abi-younes, talked with representatives of the Federal Highway Administration and determined that there WERE problems with CT & F's bid.

Oh, and there were problems with the bid of the competitor who reported the issue in the first place. Yes, the second-lowest bid also had errors. And it didn't stop there.

Federal Highway Administration staffers also determined that the second- and third-lowest bidders had also incorrectly filled out the forms, Abi-younes said.

The best solution was to reject all the bids, he said.

Let's face it - when multiple bidders have problems with the forms, then the agency has to look at its procedures. Or, in this case, agencies, since both the city of Ontario and the Federal Highway Administration were involved.

The good news? The Linux market share quadrupled between 2004 and 2010

Mind Booster Noori is a dedicated person. M.B.N. went through a ton of revisions of a particular Wikipedia page, compiled them, and posted the evolution of operating system usage on a quarter-by-quarter/month-by-month basis between late 2004 and August 2010.

I'm not going to steal M.B.N.'s thunder by copying the table - you can see it here - but this example goes to show that statistics can be spun in any fashion.

One way to look at the numbers is to note that the market share of Linux has quadrupled over the period - something that Linux fanbois would consider a rousing success.

Not that the Apple fanbois have anything to complain about - Apple market share doubled.

And because of these dramatic changes in the operating system landscape, the market share of Windows operating systems declined.

All the way down to 88.92%.

All that means is that it's just a little bit harder to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. But the difference between 88.92% and 96.34%, while of some concern, isn't of paramount importance to a Harvard dropout.

Shopping in India may eventually be familiar to Americans and Europeans

Not that I'm particularly an expert in this topic, but if I were to travel outside of my comfort zone in Ontario, California, I'd face the fact that the businesses in the place that I visited would probably be different from the ones at home. For example, if I were to go to India, I highly doubt that I'd run into an In N Out Burger. (For numerous reasons.)

But eventually, two well-known chains - one from the United States, the other from Europe - may end up in India:

India may decide in two to three months whether to allow companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Carrefour SA to open retail stores in Asia’s third-largest economy, an official said.

As the BusinessWeek article, an appearance by the U.S.-based Wal-Mart and the France-based Carrefour would have to overcome some current restrictions in Indian law:

Indian laws, aimed at protecting the interests of owners of small stores, limit overseas investment to single brand retail or wholesale outlets. Industry groups such as the Confederation of All Indian Traders oppose foreign investment in retail.

Right now, Wal-Mart is getting around this by working through an Indian partner, and has opened a grand total of two stores in the country.

But India is a desirable destination, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation:

The BMI India Retail Report for the third-quarter of 2010, forecasts that the total retail sales will grow from US$ 353 billion in 2010 to US$ 543.2 billion by 2014. With the expanding middle and upper class consumer base, there will also be opportunities in India's tier II and III cities. The greater availability of personal credit and a growing vehicle population to improve mobility also contribute to a trend towards annual retail sales growth of 11.4 per cent. Mass grocery retail (MGR) sales in India are forecast to undergo enormous growth over the forecast period. BMI further predicts that sales through MGR outlets will increase by 154 per cent to reach US$ 15.29 billion by 2014. This is a consequence of India's dramatic, rapid shift from small independent retailers to large, modern outlets.

So it appears that a shift is already happening. The question is how long it will take.

Another detriment to the open workspace

I pine for the days when I had an office, but I've been a cubicle-dweller for the last decade-plus. And I consider myself lucky that I don't have to work at a long workbench with no cubicle partitions - those things can make you go crazy.

And there's one other problem with them - they don't let you sleep at work.

Immediately, many of my readers - or some in certain parts of the world, including my home country - had a negative aversion to my "sleep at work" statement. It's ingrained in many of us, according to Jessica H. Lawrence.

If you saw someone grabbing a quick snooze at their desk or on an office couch, what would your immediate, split-second gut reaction be? "Lazy" or "slacker" seem to be the first words that would come to most people's minds. We have built our corporate cultures around the idea that if you can not see someone doing something that appears to be important, then they must not be contributing anything.

But Lawrence quotes Tony Schwartz to dispel that notion.

As author Tony Schwartz discusses in his book "The Way We're Working Isn't Working" just like we have sleep cycles during the night, we have cycles of higher and lower alertness during our waking life. These cycles are called ultradian cycles and every 90 minutes or so, your body gives you signals that your alertness is getting low: You start feeling restless, your attention wanders or you get that general antsy feeling that you need to be doing something else. Most of us have learned to plow through these low periods -- grab another cup of coffee or a piece of candy and we can keep going.

That method of pushing through may feel somewhat effective, but in the end it just ups our level of stress hormones eventually rendering us less effective.

Read more in Lawrence's article, The Benefits of Napping.

Why world sporting events are better than world fairs

You would think that a World's Fair, which is designed to promote business, would have a permanent positive impact on the host city. This thought would be incorrect, since most buildings at a World's Fair are torn down or moved after the event is over. It's in the rules:

Ironically...at the end of the [Shanghai] Expo, the BIE's rules require that all of the pavilions be demolished or moved. And so, if there's an Eifel Tower, a Crystal Palace, or a Montreal Biosphere among them, there's only until October 31 to know it in its natural habitat, the fabulously expensive and elaborate Shanghai Expo 2010.

But a sporting event often necessitates permanent infrastructure improvements. Although these may come at a heavy cost, at least there's the possibility of reusing them after the event is over.

An example is the Commonwealth Games, taking place in India this week. The Times of India documented one such improvement:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated India's first sports injury centre at Safdarjung hospital on Sunday. Officials claimed the centre, built at a cost of Rs 70.72 crore, will cater to athletes taking part in the Commonwealth Games and once the event is over, will provide world-class treatment to sportspersons in the country.

More here.

Incidentally, a crore is equal to 10 million, so we're talking about 707,200,000 rupees, or a little over US$15 million.

Phones aren't becoming computers - computers are becoming phones

I had an incredible, mind-expanding thought when I observed someone playing solitaire. It's probably not an original thought - I'm sure a lot of self-styled "social media experts," as well as some people who truly DO understand social media, have had similar thoughts.

Until that moment, I had naively assumed that computing power was being shrunken and made mobile. In other words, your phone (or other mobile device) was becoming a computer.

But then something occurred to me. The statement below would have been true when I first encountered a personal computer - in this case, a dedicated computer for BASIC programming - in the early 1970s.

If there were only one computer in the entire world, you could still do a lot of things with it.

If there were only one telephone in the entire world, it would be useless.

Remember - both Bell and Watson had to have telephones for their experiment to work.

But is my "useful computer" statement still true today? If there were only one computer in the world of 2010, solitaire would be just about the only thing that I could do with it.

Yes, I could listen to music - but I wouldn't be able to scrobble it. That wasn't important to me in the 1970s, but it's important to me today.

Yes, I could write, but I couldn't write a blog post and have people read it. I could write something, print it on a piece of paper, and post it in the laundromat, but it wouldn't be the same.

And forget about Facebook, Starfleet Commander, FriendFeed, electronic mail, or many of the other things that I do online. All of those activities depend upon the existence of multiple computers.

So perhaps it's more appropriate to say that our computers are becoming "phones."