Virtual worlds - nothing to get hung about?

Track Impunity Always (TRIAL) is a Swiss organization that, in its words, participates "in the fight against impunity for the perpetrators accomplices and instigators of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of torture." Back in 2009, it co-sponsored a study on the extent in which humanitarian law is reflected in popular video games.

Guess what? Often it's not.

[T]he rules of international humanitarian law are often not taken into consideration within the game design. This may not be surprising, as these computer and video games are not meant to serve as didactical tools to teach the rules of war, but rather to entertain their players. The practically complete absence of rules or sanctions is nevertheless astonishing: civilians or protected objects such as churches or mosques can be attacked with impunity, in scenes portraying interrogations it is possible to torture, degrade or treat the prisoner inhumanely without being sanctioned for it and extrajudicial executions are simulated.

Obviously TRIAL has its opinions on the matter, and it made a recommendation:

[At least a few] games show that it is indeed possible to include rules of international humanitarian law and human rights in war games. It is regrettable that game producers hardly ever use this possibility to creatively incorporate the rules of international law or even representatives of such rules (such as the ICRC or the international criminal courts etc.) as specific elements in the course of the game. Pro Juventute and TRIAL call upon the producers of computer and video games to use their strong creativity and innovation for this purpose. It would mean a wasted opportunity if the virtual space transmitted the illusion of impunity for unlimited violence in armed conflicts.

Recommendations are recommendations, and whether gamers agree with it or not, there's certainly no harm in TRIAL recommending the incorporation of aspects of international law into video games.

But what if the recommendations go beyond recommendations? Enter the International Red Cross, where this topic was raised during a December 1 conference session (PDF).

Video games and IHL: how should the Movement take action?

While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL. Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: “what should we do, and what is the most effective method?” While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer.

There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action.

And how do you take action against those who are "virtually violating" international humanitarian law?

One of the world's largest and most respected humanitarian groups in the world is investigating whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games.

If they agree those standards should be applied, the International Committee of the Red Cross says they may ask developers to adhere to the rules themselves or "encourage" governments to adopt laws to regulate the video game industry.

Yes, the teenage boy in the bedroom could be a war criminal, just like Adolf Eichmann, Osama bin Laden, and Hideki Tojo. Or so it appeared in some of the articles that started to appear.

As the headlines spread, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued the statement that I have reproduced below. So everyone who's upset at the Red Cross can calm down and go back to donating at your local blood bank.

Hmm, blood bank. Sounds violent.

Here is the ICRC statement:

Is there a place for the laws of armed conflict in video games?
08-12-2011 FAQ

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement recently discussed the implications of video games that simulate real-war situations and the opportunities the games may present for spreading knowledge of the laws of armed conflict. Some questions and answers on this subject are provided below.

Why is the ICRC interested in video games that simulate real warfare?

The ICRC is interested in issues relating to video games of this type, i.e. games simulating warfare where players face choices just like on a real battlefield.

In real life, armed forces are subject to the laws of armed conflict. Video games simulating the experience of armed forces therefore have the potential to raise awareness of the rules that those forces must comply with whenever they engage in armed conflict – this is one of the things that interests the ICRC. As a matter of fact, certain video games already take into account how real-life military personnel are trained to behave in conflict situations.

Part of the ICRC's mandate, conferred on it by States, is to promote respect for international humanitarian law – also known as the law of armed conflict – and universal humanitarian principles. Given this mandate and the ICRC's long history and expertise in matters relating to armed conflict, the development of these games is clearly of interest to the organization.

A few media reported that certain virtual acts performed by characters in video games could amount to serious violations of the law of armed conflict. Is this correct?

No. Serious violations of the laws of war can only be committed in real-life situations, not in video games.

Does the ICRC work with video-game developers to make sure the law of armed conflict features in certain games?

The ICRC has expressed its readiness to engage in a dialogue with the video gaming industry in order to explore the place of humanitarian rules in games. The ICRC welcomes the fact that certain video games on war-related themes already take the law of armed conflict into account.

Shouldn't the ICRC be primarily concerned with real-life warfare?

Absolutely, and real-life armed conflict and its humanitarian consequences are in fact its primary concern.

With its roughly 12,000 staff, the ICRC carries out humanitarian activities in situations of armed violence all over the world. It is often the first organization to arrive on the scene when conflict erupts and to attend to the needs of people detained, displaced or otherwise affected. It also strives to bring about improved compliance with the law of armed conflict and thereby contribute to creating an environment conducive to respect for the dignity of persons affected.

Why does the ICRC show interest in video games but not, for example, in books, comics, TV series or films?

The ICRC is occasionally approached by filmmakers or authors who want to portray its activities in past or present armed conflicts. It has thus had contacts with various segments of the entertainment world beyond the developers of video games. The ICRC is not interested in all video games – only in those simulating armed conflict. Some of these games are being designed and produced by the same companies developing simulated battlefields for the training of armed forces.

What was said on this subject at the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent?

The 31st International Conference met in November 2011 in Geneva with the overall objective of strengthening international humanitarian law and humanitarian action. In a side event, participants also explored the role that the law of armed conflict plays, or does not play, in simulations of war. They considered various ways in which the rules applicable in armed conflict could feature in simulations. The side event was an informal discussion; no resolution or plan of action was adopted.

Generalization and specialization are everywhere

(Apologies in advance to the non-Americans for the large amount of Zeds in this post.)

Each of us has specific knowledge in some areas, and lacks specific knowledge in other areas. It is not enough to say that Person A is "technical" and person B is "not technical" - in reality, person B knows a bunch of stuff that person A doesn't know. Someone who knows every Internet service port number may not know the difference between EJ and The Other EJ in the Meaty Cheesy Boys. Even a biometric expert who knows all about the Type-17 iris record in the ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2007 standard may not know about the Type-18 DNA record in the ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011 standard.

In short, there are times when people know a lot more than you about a specific topic, and there are times when you know a lot more than someone else about a specific topic.

Yet you somehow have to communicate with the other person, even if the person is an imbecile who doesn't know EJ from The Other EJ. Trisha Torrey may not know about the Meaty Cheesy Boys (her loss), but she has written an about.com article about effective patient-doctor communications. Torrey makes this point:

Good communications really boils down to two things: respect for each other, and the ability to manage expectations.

One of Torrey's suggestions is valuable for any situation in which the specialist uses strange acronyms or phrases:

Doctors are trained to use a lexicon of med-speak that baffles us patients. General medical terms are used by all doctors or many specialties. Other words and concepts are specific to body systems, conditions, diseases or treatments. In all cases, you'll walk away much more satisfied from your visit, having learned what you need to know, if you stop your doctor and ask for a definition or description when he uses a concept or term you don't understand.

Whether you're a physician or a sanitary engineer, it's helpful to remember that your audience does not have the knowledge that you do, and that some terms may need further explanation.

Sorry, this isn't a plumbing blog

I was looking at the analytics for my October post about Total Plumbing Services in Alabama, and I was curious how people got to the page.

Were they searching for information on Alabama plumbers?

Were they searching for information on John Bredehoft (plumber, blogger, lawyer, doctor, or Indian chief)?

No. The majority of them were searching for a plumbing blog that featured Disqus comments.

Well, I hate to break it to the people that arrived here, but this is not a plumbing blog. If you want a true plumbing blog, visit the blog for Schoonover Plumbing & Heating, at http://blog.schoonover-hvac.com/.

And be sure to leave them a Disqus comment; their most recent post didn't have any until I came along.

Why you should never name something after a living person - the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility

I don't have to worry about this happening personally, but I have a strong belief that monuments should not be erected to people who are still living. Whether you're talking about a park, or a school, or whatever, it is premature to honor someone while he or she is still alive.

The person might be the greatest person in the world, but - but -

Let's take the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility in Colorado. This jail was named in honor of a former Arapahoe County Sheriff, honored as sheriff of the year. According to an Arapahoe County web page:

The Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility has come a long way since Arapahoe County opened its one-room jail house in 1865. Located at 7375 S. Potomac St., Centennial, the Detention Facility, which opened in 1987 and renamed by the Board of County Commissioners in 2002 to honor former Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan, is a 299,241-square-foot facility with the capacity to house 1,166 inmates.

Sullivan retired in 2002...and ran into trouble in 2011, caught in a sting operation in which he would only deal meth to men who had sex with him.

Arapahoe County people are shocked, but it just goes to show that you never know who a person is, or who a person will become.

Don't remember the Alamo - "tweet seats" in theaters

Last month I wrote about the Alamo Drafthouse, who REALLY doesn't like it when people text in its theaters. When an irate caller left a message after being thrown out of a theater, the Alamo Drafthouse turned the call into a public service announcement.

The Alamo Drafthouse's opposition to texting in theaters is not universal.

Shawn Rossi shared the story of the "tweet seats" phenomenon in which certain establishments, including the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh NC, the Dayton Opera in Dayton OH, and the Indianapolis Symphony in Indianapolis IN, permit people in the back rows of the theater to use their smartphones to their heart's content. (Glencoe, IL does not have a "tweet seat" section.) Mara Siegler:

Those on board with using social media during performances tout it as a way to let others now their feelings and reactions in live time, and as a participatory function that allows them to be a part of the performance from their seats.

Hmm, sounds like what happens when we cover Larry Ellison during Oracle OpenWorld, except that the music isn't as loud and the visuals aren't as red.

East coast girls are hip, I really dig those styles they wear

I was recently copied on the following e-mail correspondence:

Last year you provided me with quite a bit of information regarding [REDACTED] that I shared with those in attendance. (I think it helped distract the crowd from the fact that I was the only guy there who didn't wear a suit.)

I have lived in California for over a quarter century now, and I have worked for tech companies for most of that time. And I am well aware that the attire that I wear here is substantially different from the attire that I would be wearing at a brokerage firm in New York City.

As I write this, I am in a "dressy" mode - namely, I have long sleeves on my dark red shirt. And my shoes even have laces.

Suit and tie? I don't think I've worn those since my father's funeral several months ago - despite the fact that I've been to church numerous times over the last several months. Yes, the churches in California are a little more casual also.

As much as I would prefer that the world valued content over appearance, I am forced to admit that if I wore my dark red shirt with no tie into certain business environments, I would not be taken seriously.

But it works the other way also. If one of my (non-executive) co-workers were to show up at my cubicle in a suit and tie, or in a business dress, my first inclination would be to ask which customer was in town. Or if the person was going to a job interview. Or if THAT person's father had died.

Attire still matters.

Fighting back against "marketing free"

Way back in 2005, I encountered a description of a series of sessions that was advertised as "marketing free."

Marketing Free

If you’ve ever been frustrated when a technical training session turns into a sales or marketing pitch then HP World 2005 is for you! This year Interex will offer a complete line-up of “Marketing Free” sessions so that attendees can be sure that they will get only the purest technical information directly from highly respected industry experts. Attendees can look for the “Marketing Free” symbol in the conference catalog to easily identify these sessions.

Plus, now you can take matters into your own hands! Every conference attendee will receive a “No Marketing” sign in their conference tote bags. If sales or marketing information begins to intrude into a “Marketing Free” session, attendees can fight back by hold up their “No Marketing” signs to let the speaker know that he/she has veered off course. Power to the people!

Needless to say, marketers such as myself were highly offended.

The issue still makes headlines, and this McKinsley Quarterly article (addressed to marketers and salespeople) makes an entirely different statement about what customers want.

At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.

According to authors Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill, customers don't want "marketing free" sessions. They want "marketing permeated" sessions.

However, it's probably all a bunch of semantics.

Let's say that you're the geekiest engineer around, and that you're going to an Interex session that discusses the Widget Macrominimizer 2.03b6 in excruciating technical detail. As you are walking through Moscone South, you pass a sign that advertises a session for the Finnishlotsavowels Macrominimizer 0.91.

Both sessions are occurring at the same time.

How do you decide which session to attend? What criteria do you use to make this decision?

On the other hand, let's go to our marketing pro, camped out with her tablet at the indie coffeeshop (no corporate Starbucks colored water for her). She's been assigned the Finnishlotsavowels account, and is prepping for the 1.0 release (she makes a note to herself - "delete the release number from the copy"). She is busily conceptualizing the needs of ALL of the various stakeholders - the engineering directors, the CIOs, the purchasing agents, and...oh yes...the users.

How does she know what all of these stakeholders need? While she may be an ace marketer, our latte-sipping expert cannot empathize with the needs of engineering managers or the other stakeholders, unless she happened to have held one of these positions in a previous life. And chances are that any marketing person has not been an engineering director AND a CIO AND a purchasing agent AND a geeky coder. (Unless the marketing person once headed a tech startup.)

At the end of the day, people require real content in the presentations and publications that they read. At the same time, they require marketing messages that answer the question "So what?"

Rural Chinese and the Wedding Computer

I found this nugget buried at the end of a FastCompany article on Lenovo. Among other things, the article talks about Lenovo stores, which are kind of like Apple Stores except (a) there are a lot more of them, and (b) you can find them in rural areas.

The majority of Lenovo's Chinese outlets are in rural areas, poised to sell computers to the millions who have never owned them. Today it's their first PC, tomorrow their first tablet or smartphone....The rural stores offer Lenovo's most affordable desktops. Priced at less than $500, they come preloaded with applications to help farmers price their crops and with features such as one-button instant messaging to simplify tasks for first-time computer users.

One of the more popular Lenovo products in rural China is the wedding computer. Rural families will often pool their money to buy a bride and groom their first PC. The wedding computer comes in red, which Chinese consider to be the luckiest color.

But when you give a wedding computer, stay away from mentioning one critical internal component:

Whatever you buy, do not give the couple a FAN as gift since the pronunciation of fan is "san", which means "disperse" in Chinese, thus considered a bad omen...

How will your marketing materials be misused in an unat-tract-ive fashion?

A rare Sunday post, for reasons that will become obvious.

Many businesses and organizations produce marketing materials to hand out to clients. In many cases these items are not necessarily controversial in and of themselves, but if they are distributed under certain circumstances, they can become controversial. For example, funeral homes apologize in advance if their marketing materials happen to be received by someone who has just lost a loved one.

Religious organizations often hand out brief marketing messages called tracts. In a sense, they're the Twitter version of a theological discourse, carrying a brief message that closes with something that salespeople refer to as a "call to action." In the case of a Christian tract, that "call to action" is to accept Jesus into your life.

Of course, you need to get the person to look at your marketing material in the first place. Thus, tracts, like any other piece of marketing fluff, are often designed to attract the eye.

And in American culture, one sure-fire way to attract the eye is to design a tract that looks like money. If you're involved in handing out tracts, money tracts can become an important part of your tract ministry.

Of course, there are some legalities to be observed:

For money tracts to be legal to hand out, they need to be no more than 75
percent of the size of a regular dollar bill.

But they certainly can attract attention:

I have been starting out with Giant Money lately in the grocery stores, etc. and people are going crazy! Yesterday I went to this computer store and to my surprise, they were training a new set of employees for a new store they are opening. Wow! I gave away 25 of them. I started at the service desk and asked if they had change for this big money. They all laugh and of course, reached out to get one (it's as if it had a magnet on it)….Managers also ran over to my check out line--they were thrilled to receive big money…people go nuts over it no matter what age they are. They tell me that I made their day and most often say they are going to hang it on their wall. Of course, I must tell them that there is a cool message on it to read during their break so that they won't hang it on their wall before they read it.

It's all right and fine if it's given out under these circumstances. But someone used the fake money in an inappropriate fashion, making it look like real money. As a tip. For a waiter or waitress.

This actually happened. A restaurant worker saw a $10 bill sticking out from underneath a plate.

As a waiter I make $2.65 an hour. I really do live off your genorosity. I'm stoked because I've been saving up for Battlefield 3.

The waiter then discovered that the $10 bill was no more than 75 percent of the size of a regular $10 bill.

I thought it was a pretty good joke and looked around for an actual tip. Nothing.

All salespeople know that you do NOT want to put a potential customer in a bad mood. So you can imagine how the waiter felt when he turned the fake bill over to read a message "Some things are better than money," followed by a reference to John 3:16.

To put it in secular terms, Jesus didn't make this sale.

This particular tract appears to have been printed by moneytract.com, a site which no longer exists. Presumably moneytract.com didn't intend for its tract to be used in this fashion, but the damage has been done. See The Consumerist and its comments, and see Friendly Atheist and its comments.

And incidentally, Battlefield 3 has a suggested retail price of $59.99. Sounds like a good way for restaurant workers who have been stiffed to take out their aggressions.

And that's all I have to say, except for the postscript. And if you're a friendly atheist (or an unfriendly one), I suggest that you skip the postscript.

OK.

The postscript is coming...

now.

P.S. As I noted in a Google+ thread on the topic:

This is what happens when you do the work of evangelizing without caring about the people you are evangelizing - in which case, the evangelism is empty.

Along these same lines, Christianity Today published comments from several people regarding the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of tracts.

The problems with signing up for a service by e-mail address

There are a number of services that want you to sign up for them. But how should you identify yourself to the service?

There are still a few services that want U.S. citizens to sign up with their Social Security Number. Because of privacy concerns, this is not advisable.

Some services allow you to sign up with your name. However, if your name is John Smith or Pedro Gomez, this may be problematic.

Some services allow you to create a handle. This is a pretty good solution, as long as you remember the handle that you used.

Some services came up with a pretty good idea, on the face of it - sign up with your e-mail address. Your e-mail address is (unless something goes horribly wrong) a unique identifier which you will presumably remember.

But what if your e-mail address changes?

Usually this isn't a problem. Just tell the service what your new e-mail address is, allow the service to verify that the e-mail address actually exists, and then you're good to go.

Sometimes, however, the one field in your profile that you CAN'T edit happens to be your e-mail address.

Why would you want to edit your e-mail address? Let me give you one example. Back in September 2008 I was an employee of Motorola. Then it was announced that our division would be sold, pending government approvals. While awaiting government approvals (in which the sale could be ratified or rejected), we had to identify the entity under a temporary name. After the sale was approved, we were merged into the IT apparatus of the new owner - a process that took some time. Because of this sale and some other events, I have had four work e-mail addresses over the last three years.

You can imagine how much fun it is to go to an account, find out that there is no way to change your e-mail address, and then have to manually request a change to your e-mail address.

Sometimes it's easier to just forget about updating the e-mail address and letting the account lapse.

So why do service providers make it so difficult to change the e-mail address associated with an account? There are a few cases in which the e-mail address is a critical component of the service itself. Yammer is an example here - since Yammer connects you with people based upon a verified corporate e-mail address, I can understand why Yammer doesn't allow me to change my e-mail address willy-nilly.

But in other cases, the restrictions on changing an e-mail address don't make sense at all. Take a certain information service provider that provides me with information every week, whether I want it or not. Even if the people who sign up with this service provider don't go through all of the reorgs that I've been through, the people in this industry - the computing industry - have been known to change jobs from time to time. If qualification for the service was 100% dependent upon the company that employs you, I could understand why it would be hard to change your e-mail address at will. But somehow, I suspect that the service would continue to provide me with information no matter where I was employed.

So if you are a service provider and are wondering why you have so many dead accounts, perhaps it's because you wouldn't allow your subscribers to update their e-mail addresses.

Hesitate - negotiate (passengers vs. airline in Hong Kong)

Just about everything that you encounter has a list of terms and conditions, in which things are printed in black and white. In the proposal world, I encounter a number of terms and conditions from various customers. No, I won't give any examples, but I can say that at the end of the day, just because something is printed on paper does not mean that it will come true.

CNN reports a case in Hong Kong where some airline passengers were due compensation. According to the letter of the contract between each passenger and the airline company, the compensation was supposed to be a certain amount. For the nine-hour flight delay, the compensation was supposed to be $50 (I don't know if that is US$50, or some other denomination).

But some passengers used a clever negotiation tactic:

When Hong Kong Airlines flight 752 from Singapore arrived at 530 a.m. Wednesday morning, the airline says 80 passengers refused to get off. The travelers, mainly members of package tours from mainland China, demanded the airline increase the original compensation offer of $50 per passenger.

Twenty-one of the passengers stayed on board for another five hours, requesting reimbursement for the unused hotel rooms they had paid for the night before. The airport police were called in to negotiate and the passengers finally at 10:25 a.m., after the airline agreed to pay them $150.

The interesting part of this to me? These were passengers from mainland China. Or, to use terms from my youth, "Red China" or "Communist China." Apparently the Cultural Revolution didn't wipe out all traces of a desire for profit-taking.

Yes, the Department of Motor Vehicles is responsible for car dealerships also

We always think about our Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) as an agency that services (or does not service) drivers within the state. But at least within California, our DMV has additional areas of responsibility, as this press release shows:

DMV Announces Settlement With Chrysler Corp.

Contact: Mike Marando, Armando Botello,
Jan Mendoza, Jaime Garza
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
www.DMV.ca.gov

Office of Public Affairs
2415 First Avenue
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 657-6437
dmvpublicaffairs@dmv.ca.gov

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 18, 2011

Automaker will pay state $955,000 for unlawful operation

Sacramento — Chrysler Corp. has agreed to pay $955,000 to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to settle allegations of unlawfully operating a car dealership within the 10-mile market area of independently-owned franchises, the DMV announced today.

In September 2011, the DMV filed an administrative action against Chrysler's occupational licenses and, as part of the administrative settlement, Chrysler agreed to pay the DMV $750,000 in monetary penalties and fines; $160,000 in reimbursements of investigation and legal fees, and up to $45,000 for post-settlement audits.

Background
On May 26, 2011, the New Motor Vehicle Board (NMVB), acting on a petition filed by the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA), requested that the DMV investigate whether Chrysler Group LLC committed violations of law in owning La Brea Avenue Motors, Inc. dba La Brea Chrysler Jeep, which was renamed Motor Village LA and relocated to downtown Los Angeles.

The law prohibits a manufacturer from owning a dealership and competing in the sale of vehicles of the same line and make with independently-owned franchisees within a 10-mile relevant market area. There are two major exceptions for manufacturers that own a dealership for less than one year and for situations where there is a reasonable plan to buy out the manufacturer's interest.

In addition to the monetary penalties, fines, and reimbursement, Chrysler has also agreed to sell the Motor Village LA dealership and to a probationary period of three years.

Oracle Learning Library - H/T @eddieawad

Eddie Awad is an Oracle ACE Director, which demonstrates that he has a deep technical knowledge of Oracle products.

I cannot write a join statement.

For those with any level of knowledge who want to learn more about Oracle products, Awad has shared a link to the Oracle Learning Library.

If you go to oracle.com/oll, you will be directed to a row of buttons that link to just about every part of Oracle's stack (although I couldn't find hardware). For example, when I clicked on the "Database" button and queried for "Active Data Guard," I received links to six items that told about Active Data Guard. One of these was a 60-minute "Oracle by Example" tutorial.

There are a variety of resources that you can consult to learn how to use Oracle products, and the Oracle Learning Library is a valuable addition to this list.

Of course Charles Manson is in his cell. The computer said so.

Bruce Schneier links to an Ars Technica post that reports on a demonstrated ability for a hacker to open a prison cell door from a remote location.

Schneier was stuck by this paragraph in the Ars Technica post:

"You could open every cell door, and the system would be telling the control room they are all closed," Strauchs, a former CIA operations officer, told the [Washington] Times.

(See the Washington Times article here.)

Think of the ramifications of this - not just with prisoners, but with everything. In the prison case, you have a computer screen telling you that Charles Manson is safely in his cell, muttering about George Harrison or whatever Manson does in his cell. But perhaps if you actually went down to the cell, you'd see that he had actually been freed (or, in Strauchs' scenario, killed).

Now extend that to other computerized systems that tell you something that may not be true. I don't believe that we can categorically state that every computer system is 100% accurate. For example, I'm sure that they put some incredible design into traffic lights, but it's probably possible for a situation to arise in which green lights appear in all directions. The possibility may be extremely small, but it's possible.

So if I'm driving down the street and approaching a green light, and I see a car on the other street approaching the intersection without slowing down, it would not be wise for me to say, "Of course he'll stop. He has to have a red light since I have a green light." (Obviously the more likely scenario is that the other driver DOES have a red light, but is ignoring it.)

But what do you do in other cases in which a computer is telling you something that might not be true?

Groupon education of its merchants

While using the Washington Post Social Reader in Facebook, I just read another Groupon problem story entitled "Groupon horror: Bakery must make 102,000 cupcakes." According to the story, Need a Cake Bakery in Woodley (UK) offered a 75% discount on its cupcakes, but didn't cap the maximum number of items available at this price. To meet the demand, Need a Cake Bakery had to hire temporary help at nearly US$20,000 - a move which wiped out the bakery's annual profits.

When stories are offered via the Washington Post Social Reader, you can use your Facebook account to comment on the story. As I read through the comments, one of the biggest topics of discussion was what Groupon should (or should not) have done to educate Need a Cake Bakery before offering its deal. So I got curious - what type of education does Groupon provide for its participating merchants?

I went to Groupon's merchant site at http://www.grouponworks.com/merchant-services. This is different from the main Groupon site - it even has a different micrologo. The merchant services site is definitely targeted toward merchants:

Merchants come first at Groupon.

The people who are searching for Groupon deals may feel differently - but I digress. The page describes Groupon's merchant education; here are some excerpts:

We collaborate with you to structure a deal that delivers on perfomance goals, expectations and service limitations....

We work with you to calculate the optimal number of Groupon customers relative to regular traffic; calculators are customized to address specific dynamics of key industries (eg, restaurant table turn rate, therapists on staff, etc.)...

We offer advice on ways to convert Groupon customers to your own -- from collecting email addresses on-site to ongoing communications to build strong relationships....

We'll monitor your campaign success and do everything we can to deliver satisfaction and recommend deal structure modifications, if necessary, for subsequent features. Over the long-term we intend to develop a partnership that constantly addresses your ever-changing merchant needs.

From the sound of things, Groupon offers merchants the opportunity to educate themselves on how to structure the deal - but once the deal is set, it's set. This is understandable, since anyone who sees a guaranteed deal for a 75% discount on cupcakes would be very displeased if the deal were suddenly withdrawn.

But even with education, does the model work? Amy Lee at the Huffington Post surveyed various sources back in June. According to Ronan Percival (as quoted by Dylan Collins, the beauty salon appointment segment requires a 10% conversion of Groupon buyers into regular clients - however, it appears that the actual conversion rate is only 1%. Back in 2010, the Wall Street Journal referenced a Rice University study, which showed varying performance between merchants:

The Rice study found that 66% of the 150 merchants responding found the program profitable, while 32% said they were unprofitable. Forty percent of the respondents said they would not run such a promotion again.

There was another interesting ramification from the Rice study:

“Satisfied employees” is the most important factor for the Groupon promotion to work successfully for a business, according to the study. If employees remain satisfied through the promotion, the likelihood of its profitability is significantly higher. The percentage of discount offered and the number of Groupons sold did not predict the deal’s profitability, nor did the percentage of Groupon users who purchased beyond the Groupon’s value or purchased again at full price.

“Because the Groupon customer base is made up of deal-seekers and bargain shoppers, they might not tip as well as an average customer or be willing to purchase beyond the deal,” said Utpal Dholakia, author of the study and associate professor of marketing at the Jones School. “So employees need to be prepared for this type of customer and the sheer volume of customers that might come through.”

Interesting observation, because if the employees are dissatisfied - especially in a small company - then the business owner is going to have a big problem. Take a look at this post:

The food lived up to its excellent reputation, but the only way to get our server’s attention was to flail my arms about like some over-eager 2nd grader dying to be called on by the teacher. If anything, service at a four-star restaurant should border on hovering. This felt more as if we were being quarantined for some highly contagious virus .... We couldn’t help but think that our early admission of using the Groupon had an overall negative impact on service.

Why?

The servers I’ve spoken with all complain that users frequently tip on the discounted amount, and not on the actual amount of the food. For expensive restaurants like the one we went to, that could mean the difference of $100 – $200.

Of course, this is not just limited to Groupon. Businesses need to evaluate every advertising method they use - their websites, their banner advertising, their telephone directory listings (remember telephone directories?) - to determine not only the business return on investment, but also the types of customers that will be attracted by the advertising medium.

And of course there is a responsibility for the customer also. The Southern California restaurant chain Don Jose offers a Fiesta Club that provides coupons once a month - sometimes more frequently. The usual coupon entitles the bearer to one free dinner entree with purchase of a second one at equal or higher value (offer good Sunday through Thursday only). My wife and I use these coupons frequently - but when we do, we calculate the tip based upon the pre-discount amount, not the post-discount amount.

Of course, I'm sure the the number of patrons from the Fiesta Club is much lower than the number of patrons who would suddenly show up if a Groupon promotion were run.

I was wrong - the NBA lockout will probably be settled in 2011

[Live from the Corner Bakery Cafe at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California]

When you read some business blogs, there may be bloggers that gloss over strong pronouncements that they had previously made, but that no longer turn out to be true.

As for me, I take perverse delight in ridiculing myself when I am wrong about an issue.

I figured that the NBA owners and players had become so entrenched in their stands that there was no way that the strike would be settled this year. In fact, I was speculating on the possibility that the owners might even consider bringing in replacement players.

Quoting from Jim Bakker, I was wrong.

Reports today indicate that the the owners and player representatives have reached an agreement, and that leaders from both sides will urge ratification. Should this happen, the NBA is hoping to hold its high-profile Christmas games.

Some effort is being devoted to determining who blinked. Some reports indicate that the owners blink, but you have to remember that the players were guaranteed to lose ground no matter what agreement was reached.

An FBI reminder in advance of Cyber Monday

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation is responsible for investing a variety of Federal crimes, including online crimes. In that spirit, the FBI has released this announcement from Special Agent Herbert Stapleton.

A healthy dose of skepticism will go a long way keeping people protected when shopping only online on cyber Monday - and throughout the year. Abide by the old adage- if it looks too good to be true then it probably is.

Go here to find the link to the podcast. The FBI warns of the following types of scams:

Fraudulent auction sales, gift card scams and phishing e-mails are among the many techniques cyber criminals use to lure their victims.

Yes, blog reading can be very seasonal

I am happy.

My Empoprise-BI business blog has accumulated enough junk valuable material so that people are reaching the blog because of things that I have already written. This ensures that the blog will continue to have a steady readership, rather than just depending upon my latest post.

I checked my analytics for Thursday, November 24 and found that the two most popular posts on that day were these posts:

• Kitchen Aid "remove probe" problem revisited, written last month.


• Remove probe? It's hard to find a kitchen aid at kitchenaid.com, written over two years ago.

Both of these oven-related posts were very popular on Thanksgiving Day, when everyone was cooking turkeys in their ovens. Hope that the birds came out OK.

What if the wireless spectrum were not allocated by the government?

OK, for some people it's obvious that Carly Foulkes is not the most important part of the AT&T/T-Mobile story.

In my previous post, you'll recall that I linked to a Google+ thread shared by Eoghann Irving. I reshared this item, and a discussion began on my own thread. Various people weighed in on the ramifications of a possible rejection of the AT&T acquisition, mentioning various scenarios (including a likely rejection of a Google attempt to take over T-Mobile, since Google now owns Motorola Mobility).

Kevin LeCureux then weighed in:

The worst thing for Telecom competition and improvement is the FCC.

To put LeCureux's comment in perspective, let me share a comment that I almost added to the thread, but didn't. My comment, which would have been addressed to Alex Scoble, would have gone something like this:

Alex, even the most doctrinaire libertarian would agree that this is good news for cell provider competition. Unlike oligopoly conditions in some other industries, the cell provider industry depends upon a scarce resource, regulated by the government - namely, the wireless spectrum. Since you can't create any more spectrum, it makes sense that the DOJ and FCC are stepping in here.

Like I said, I was thinking about writing something like this, but didn't. So when Kevin LeCureux stated that the FCC WAS the problem, I was naturally curious. So I asked:

+Kevin LeCureux, do you have a concern with the FCC's stance on the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, or are you talking about another FCC action?

As you can see from the thread, LeCureux had a problem with the idea of the FCC regulating the spectrum in the first place.

So much for my idea that hardly anyone would question the FCC's right to have jurisdiction in the AT&T/T-Mobile matter.

LeCureux promised to provide a link to a post in which this was discussed in more detail, and he did provide the link. While the main issue addressed in LeCureux's August post is rural wireless access, some of his points can be extrapolated to the allocation of all portions of the spectrum, including cellular phone access.

Let me touch on one part of the topic - if there isn't an FCC around to grant portions of the spectrum to individual companies, then how do we prevent companies from stepping on each other in the spectrum? LeCureux specifically addressed that issue:

What about interference? How would it be prevented? In the courts, just like any property rights. The company that is claiming to be interfered against could ask for an injunction against the allegedly interfering party until the matter gets a court date. The plaintiff would have to provide evidence of infringement and damages, just like any other property damage case. Each party would have to provide evidence that they were the first to use that part of the spectrum, for example by showing equipment purchases, electrical bills, independent field measurement surveys, customer invoices, and so forth.

A key part of the proposal outlined by LeCureux is homesteading - if you want a piece of the spectrum, you have to actually use it. If you stop using it, then someone else can step in and use it.

But wouldn't all of the spectrum always be in use, you may ask. Actually, Dave Burstein notes that much of the spectrum that has been allocated today is unused:

Across the vast bulk of the country, T has plenty of spectrum not used at all right now. In a very limited number of places, there's little. Across the country, the figure is probably 20-60%, but that's a wild guess. Upgrade inefficient uses and put the fallow spectrum to use, and T can easily handle five times the current demand and probably ten to twenty times without adding spectrum.

And even where the spectrum is used, it's not necessarily used efficiently. Burstein:

FCC sources tell me there's a massive efficiency improvement possible if more carriers shared spectrum but none were willing. AT&T Wireless & Cingular did a joint build in New York City that saved $100's of millions according to CFO Ron Dykes. AT&T and T-Mobile could do the same and get most of the spectrum advantage of the merger while staying independent.

And if the merger bid is rejected, that might be what AT&T and T-Mobile may have to do - although T-Mobile may not want to do so, since it would reduce the possibility of its being bought out by someone else.

Back to LeCureux's proposal. In a sense, it's a departure from the way things have been done in the past. If I buy up a whole bunch of land but don't use it, I have the perfect right to do so - well, at least until the government uses eminent domain to put a sports stadium or shopping center on my land.

And perhaps the "eminent domain" issue applies here, in a sense. Cellular provider X is sitting on a lot of spectrum but not doing anything with it. A case could be made that this harms the economy. And because of this, government needs to step in...and immediately get out of the way.

I encourage you to read LeCureux's entire proposal - there's a lot that I didn't get into here. Then I ask you to comment at LeCureux's post, or perhaps at this post or elsewhere - whether you're talking about rural wireless Internet or about the cellular phone spectrum, would a "homesteading" type of solution offer better service than the current spectrum auction system?

The 99% are armed also

On Thursday morning, Loren Feldman started a Google+ thread about Black Friday. He's against it.

I shared the following in Feldman's thread:

Black Friday has nothing to do with shopping. It's an EVENT, like the people who wait in line for days for a movie or gadget. Or the people who snare Super Bowl tickets without knowing the difference between a safety and a safety pin.

Needless to say, I wasn't out shopping at 4am or even midnight (no, I didn't go to Kohl's at midnight). When I woke up this morning, I was curious to know if there had ben any tragedies on Black Friday.

Thankfully, as far as I know, no one was killed. But, according to a Mark Krynsky link to a Los Angeles Times article, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch used pepper spray and injured at least seven people.

Yes, pepper spray.

For the last couple of weeks, pepper spray is all that we've heard about after the incident at UC Davis in which a campus police officer pepper sprayed someone. No, no one was killed by the pepper spray, but because of all of the reaction, you'd think that someone had been. Let's put it this way - Jerry Sandusky is happy because no one's talking about him any more - now they're talking about John Pike, and doctoring up pictures of John Pike, and everything else. Pike has become - A MEME.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart woman is still on the loose as of last report. And of course no one will blame the woman for the incident; it's all Wal-Mart's fault, of course.

Perhaps the occupiers will demand that all stores close between Thanksgiving and Christmas to eliminate the profit-taking corporate greed. Yeah, that's a solution.

Guess I'd better not quote Revelation on this Blogger blog

Ignore the fact for a moment that Google, the company that hosts this blog, does business in multiple countries. Pretend for the moment that Google just did business in the United States. In such a situation, Google doesn't necessarily have to listen to EU water-hating bureaucrats or Chinese firewallers - Google only has to listen to American legislators.

That in itself is a lot to listen to, inasmuch as Senator Joe Lieberman is apparently reviewing Blogger's Terms of Service, according to Talking Points Memo. This publication "obtained" a letter that Senator Lieberman wrote to Google's Larry Page on November 22. After discussing what Jose Pimentel used the Blogger/Google servers to do, Lieberman then noted:

Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content nor does it provide a ‘flag’ feature for such content.

Apparently Senator Lieberman is not aware how Google works - or doesn't work. I can just picture what would happen if Blogger had a "terrorist" flag. Some Glenn Beck supporter would flag an Obama supporter's blog for advocating Kenyan rule of the United States, and the Obama supporter would then flag the Beck supporter's blog for advocating the mass annihilation of poor people.

And what would happen? If Blogger's flagging policies were anything like YouTube's, the blog would be "permanently disabled," and you wouldn't be able to talk to anyone about it.

Now perhaps Lieberman is (understandably) sensitive about this issue because of the Dmitry Dyatlov affair - incidentally, I have no idea whether Dyatlov used Blogger to post his suggestion that Lieberman was "one Jew, who we absolutely must shoot in the face (many times)."

But in the Dyatlov case, you didn't need Wikipedia-editor types to alert the populace - one of Dyatlov's co-workers alerted the police.

And what is a terrorist post? Is it any post that could fall under the definition of treason? In that case, am I a terrorist if I publish a link to Revelation 19:14-15?

On a more serious note, this blog and every other Blogger blog includes the capability to report terms of service violations, including "Hate or violence" posts. So it appears that Senator Lieberman's concern is already covered.

Slow news day? Not for Carly Foulkes.

Here in the United States it's Thanksgiving, and of course no business news will appear today.

Or will it? Eoghann Irving alerted us to this story that broke right before the Thanksgiving holiday. AT&T, faced with adverse reaction from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission regarding its planned acquisition of T-Mobile, has withdrawn its bid - temporarily, it claims:

AT&T and Deutsche Telekom Continue to Pursue Sale of DT's U.S. Wireless Assets

Companies Withdraw FCC Applications; AT&T Expects to Recognize $4 Billion Charge; Companies Focus on Gaining DOJ Approval
Dallas, Texas, November 24, 2011

On Nov. 22, 2011, the Federal Communications Commission indicated a proposed order was circulating that would designate for hearing the applications of AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG For Consent To Assign or Transfer Control of Licenses and Authorizations, WT Docket No. 11-65. On November 23, 2011, AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG electronically withdrew without prejudice, as of that date, the pending applications listed in the Public Notice released by the Federal Communications Commission on April 28, 2011 in that proceeding. Associated manual notification of withdrawal filings also are being made.

AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG are continuing to pursue the sale of Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless assets to AT&T and are taking this step to facilitate the consideration of all options at the FCC and to focus their continuing efforts on obtaining antitrust clearance for the transaction from the Department of Justice either through the litigation pending before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 1:11-cv-01560 (ESH) or alternate means. As soon as practical, AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG intend to seek the necessary FCC approval.

As a result of the FCC’s action, AT&T expects to recognize a pretax accounting charge of $4 billion ($3 billion cash and $1 billion book value of spectrum) in the 4th quarter of 2011 to reflect the potential break up fees due Deutsche Telekom in the event the transaction does not receive regulatory approval.

About AT&T
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company and one of the most honored companies in the world. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. With a powerful array of network resources that includes the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network, AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet, voice and cloud-based services. A leader in mobile broadband and emerging 4G capabilities, AT&T also offers the best wireless coverage worldwide of any U.S. carrier, offering the most wireless phones that work in the most countries. It also offers advanced TV services under the AT&T U-verse® and AT&T | DIRECTV brands. The company’s suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world. In domestic markets, AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T Interactive are known for their leadership in local search and advertising.

Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com. This AT&T news release and other announcements are available at http://www.att.com/newsroom and as part of an RSS feed at www.att.com/rss. Or follow our news on Twitter at @ATT.

Cautionary Language Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
Information set forth in this press release contains financial estimates and other forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results might differ materially. A discussion of factors that may affect future results is contained in AT&T's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AT&T disclaims any obligation to update and revise statements contained in this news release based on new information or otherwise.

The good news? The T-Mobile pitchwoman, Carly Foulkes, apparently will be able to keep her job for a while.

Don't go vanilla on a job application

In honor of Thanksgiving here in the United States, I'll adopt a food theme for this post, although it's not really about food.

I recently participated in an election in which three candidates were running for a position within a particular organization. I won't reveal the position or the organization (although some of my readers may know what I'm talking about), so let's just say that the Widget Guild is seeking a Chocolate Manager.

As I mentioned, there are three candidates for the position. All three candidates have a lot of widget experience, as detailed in their candidate statements.

But only one of them spent any appreciable time talking about chocolate.

One candidate included an extensive resume that talked about widgets in detail. One line in the resume mentioned sweeteners, but didn't explicitly mention chocolate.

A second candidate's resume didn't talk about chocolate at all. But there was a mention of chocolate at the very beginning:

JOHN DOE
CHIEF STRATEGIST
CHOCOLATE MANAGER
JOHN DOE INCORPORATED

The third candidate did devote a long sentence to a discussion of previous chocolate experience.

Now perhaps if I knew these three people, I'd find out that all three of them have a lot of chocolate experience. But I don't know any of them, so I had to rely on their candidate statements to see how they felt about chocolate.

I'm just shocked that two of them hardly talked about chocolate at all. They trotted out generic resumes, but didn't make any effort to customize the resumes to match the position for which they were applying.

Why am I shocked? Let's just say that these, um, "widget" experts should have known better.

(empo-tuulwey) @stevedenning on Clayton Christensen, Ratios, and Absolutes

When I was taking my MBA classes at Cal State Fullerton, we spent a lot of time analyzing companies and looking at various ratios.

According to a Forbes article by Steve Denning (H/T Bill Gross via a Google+ share), Clayton Christensen believes that our concentration on these ratios is stifling innovation in the United States.

Christensen cites the story of an American company, Dell, who pursued higher profitability ratios and ended up creating a competitor:

Christensen retells the story of how Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Dell isn't the only company who has outsourced huge chunks of operations to Asia. Morris Chang, whose company TSMC is one of the beneficiaries of American outsourcing, thinks that we're crazy:

You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.

Read the rest of the Forbes article here.

In the spirit of what Christensen has said, it's interesting to read the press release which accompanied Dell's latest quarterly statement. Here are some excerpts:

Dell's continued strategic focus on higher-value opportunities, combined with an increased mix of enterprise solutions and services sales, resulted in increased profitability on revenue of $15.4 billion in its third quarter, flat compared with revenue a year ago....

Revenue for Dell's enterprise solutions and services business -- including sales of servers, storage, networking, and services -- increased 8 percent over the same quarter last year to $4.7 billion, an all-time high. As the revenue mix steadily shifts more to the higher-value enterprise portfolio, Dell is delivering on its commitment to improve profitability, with operating income up 12 percent for the quarter and at 7.6 percent of revenue for the fiscal year to date.

So Dell is moving into "higher-value" businesses - something that many people, including myself, would praise. I've been in the software industry for over two decades - sometimes in software-only situations, and sometimes in situations in which fairly unique software is bundled with mostly-commodity hardware. With this mix of hardware and software, software is obviously better from a margin standpoint.

So what has this targeted strategy done for Dell?

Revenue in the quarter was $15.4 billion, flat compared with the same quarter last year.

Remember what Morris Chang said. From Chang's perspective, are this year's dollars better than last year's dollars? And when you look at Dell division by division, you can see some cracks in the story.

Consumer revenue was $2.8 billion, a 6 percent decline. Operating income was $76 million or 2.7 percent of revenue. The migration to higher-value products has proven to be effective, with overall company revenue for the high-end XPS consumer laptop growing 207 percent. XPS revenue now accounts for nearly 20 percent of Dell's total consumer laptop business.

An outstanding success story - and it's probably the reason why I'm not typing this post on a Dell (or Hewlett-Packard) computer. In fact, I happen to be using an Asus netbook.

Of course, we all know that schlock companies like Asus are no competition for a strong American company like Dell.

And of course, thirty years ago we all knew that schlock companies like Dell and Compaq (at the moment, part of Hewlett-Packard) were no competition for a strong American computer manufacturer like IBM.

(empo-tymshft) Raining on the cloud

I have said before that IT philosophy swings like a pendulum between centralized and decentralized models. Time-sharing gave way to individual PCs, and then we centralized, and then we de-centralized. This week's buzzword is "the cloud," which leans toward the centralized end of things again. Whether you're talking about enterprise stuff, or you're talking about consumer stuff, the cloud offers you the wonderful capability to store things in a central location and access them from anywhere. Everyone involved in IT, with the possible exception of Ashton Kutcher, has been bombarded with cloud sales pitches.

But the praise of the cloud is not unanimous. Peter Evans-Greenwood argues that the cloud is outdated.

...the future of IT in business will be determined by the need to knit together a fabric of IT enabled services, many of which will be obtained externally. I don’t need a project portfolio management solution, I need a portfolio management capability backed by the tools and skills required to make it work. I don’t need a CRM solution (SaaS or not), I need a sales management and reporting methodology (Holden? Miller Heiman?) supported by technology to enable it to scale. It’s outside in thinking, rather than inside out.

What will the industry that accretes around this new need look like? If we look at many of the current on-demand / SaaS vendors, then they could best be described as enterprise software, but in the cloud!. Take the old model and make it multi-tennanted.

However, I don't see such a market happening - because of organizational behavior. In such a "cloud 2.0" market, you'd have all of these different services vendors who plug and play with other stuff. However, no vendor is willing to do just one thing. Remember when Oracle was a database company? Now they offer everything from hardware to vertical software packages. Why? Because Oracle belives it can make more money by offering a bigger share of the pie. If you go tell Larry Ellison to divest most of Oracle, and concentrate on making the best possible database that will be interoperable with everything else, Ellison (and Ellison's stockholders) will tell you to go pound sand.

So don't expect objects - whoops, that's an old term - to dominate the market any time soon.

Note to Kohl's - you want people to LIKE your Black Friday commercials

There's a reason why I'm posting this in my business blog rather than my music blog. But first, let me tell you what I'm posting about.

The song "Friday" by Rebecca Black.

I've never written a full-fledged post about the song, either here or in my music blog (although this post linked to a Google+ discussion of the song), but most everyone knows the story. In case you don't - young girl and her parents contract with some El-Lay people to create a song and video to show off the girl's talents. The El-Lay people come up with a song late one night, and the lyrics are (to put it mildly) not all that good, even for pop music. The song is then recorded, but the girl's voice is smothered in auto-tune and stuff by the El-Lay people. The video shoot looked like it was kind of fun. The video was posted on YouTube, and then it went viral.

Why? Because, according to the ears of (literally) millions, the song was REALLY BAD.

The girl got a lot of attention that she really didn't want to get, and is now trying to restart her career, but not with the El-Lay people that she worked with previously.

Meanwhile, the song has garnered a reputation on a standing with other failures, such as "Heaven's Gate" and the Los Angeles Clippers - things that cause a negative reaction when you hear about them (or, in the case of the song "Friday," hear it).

Normal businesses would run away from such failures.

But the advertising agency that does commercials for Kohl's instead chose to embrace this failure.



The advertisers, thinking that the song was catchy, added this comment to the posting of the video:

You'll be singing this song every day until Black Friday. Guaranteed.

I guess the people at the advertising agency thought they had picked a winner. This was a song that everyone was talking about! And it includes the word "Friday" prominently in the song! And our sale will take place on Friday!

What could go wrong?

Apparently the advertisers didn't consider WHY the song was so famous. And I'm sure that some advertiser is looking at the YouTube votes and wondering, "Hey, why does our video have 646 likes and 1,191 dislikes?"

Now I didn't influence that voting - since YouTube permanently disabled my account, I can't vote.

But unless you're marketing to specific audiences, you want your customers to feel good about what you're advertising. Based upon the numerous negative reactions on YouTube and on other places such as Google! and Gizmodo, people aren't feeling good about Kohl's right now.

Can airport X-ray scanners break electronic ink Kindles? It's uncertain.

Shawn Rossi shared something that led me to a widely-read Telegraph article entitled "Amazon Kindles 'damaged by airport scanners.'" Christopher Williams quotes some anecdotal evidence, and then quotes a statement from Professor Daping Chu of the University of Cambridge. Professor Chu said, in part:

[Y]ou can get a build up of static inside these machines, caused by the rubber belt rubbing. If that charge were to pass through a Kindle, it’s conceivable that it could damage the screen.

Apparently this only affects "electronic ink" screens, and doesn't affect the LCD screens used by other devices. But Amazon says that it doesn't happen at all (although the Telegraph notes that Amazon has replaced some devices):

Exposing your Kindle to an X-ray machine, such as those used by airport security, should not cause and problems with it.

This is not a new issue - I found a May 2009 report of a similar issue. Incidentally, the fact that an Amazon customer service rep stated in 2009 that X-rays could be a cause of the failure doesn't mean much to me - individual reps can say all sorts of things.

The problems with transparency

There are those that say that consumers are better served when companies are transparent. As a result, "transparency" has become a rallying cry for consumer watchdogs and boardroom activists and the famed "social media experts." (My view: if you call yourself a "social media expert," you probably aren't. My other view: if you work the acronym "SEO" into your content, I probably won't read it. But I digress.)

Years ago, I was talking with two different people at a then-competitor of my then-employer. I asked them both why they didn't print a customer list on their company's web page. One person believed that this should happen. The other disagreed, saying that the only people who would pay attention to such a list would be competitors such as myself.

I was reminded of this when I read something that Jason Alba recently wrote about company pages on LinkedIn:

The advocates are suggesting that people will come to your Company page, learn about your company, and then buy something (or something like that).

Everyone else teaches LinkedIn users how to use Companies to do competitive intelligence research, figure out how to network into a company, sell something to that company, or even steal employees from that company (recruiters would do this).

Go here to read Alba's advice about company pages (although you can probably guess what he advises).

Why business is like dating

This item in the Winter 2012 Biometrics Summit caught my eye.

9:30 a.m.

Speed Networking

Become acquainted with your fellow attendees in this informative and fast-paced forum!

Yes, "speed dating" has come to the business world.

However, you have to remember that speed dating only applies early in the dating cycle, and speed networking only applies early in the business cycle.

You still have to close the sale.

Cooking the books at Portland Garden Supply LLC in Forest Grove, Oregon

I have an MBA degree, and my coursework involved a lot of case studies. We'd look at a company's income statement and balance sheet, calculate some ratios here and there, and figure out the health of the firm.

But I never had a case study that looked like the one that's been discussed in Oregon papers in 2010 and 2011.

You see, there was a business called Portland Garden Supply, located on a street in Forest Grove, Oregon (a suburb of Portland). And someone ended up looking at the books for the business.

A financial review of the business found that over 93 percent of the deposits between July and October were in cash totaling $104,678, and 94 percent of Wen Han Chen's expenses were to Hydrofarm, Inc., a California-based wholesaler that supplies hydroponic equipment....

Well, with all of that hydroponic equipment, you'd expect to see a bunch of tomatoes and stuff for sale at Portland Garden Supply, wouldn't you? Not exactly.

"There's barely anything on the shelves. They basically hung a sign for delivery people to call them, and then the Chens would come and pick up their orders," Lufkin said.

One thing that wasn't present on the income statement was a large entry for electric bills for all the hydroponic equipment. That's because those charges never made it to the books. In fact, Portland Garden Supply's financials probably never would have been investigated if Portland General Electric hadn't discovered something.

The investigation began [in the spring of 2010] when Portland General Electric detected power diversions at several homes in the metropolitan Portland region, and alerted police.

Residential-based marijuana grow operators either tamper with their existing meters or rewire nearby distribution power lines to mask the large volume of power they need to run the lights that serve indoor nurseries, prosecutors said.

"They take 6 or 8 times the amount of electricity of a normal house," Lufkin said.

In this case, PGE estimates its losses at more than $10,000.

There was a fingerprint found at one of the homes, which led investigators to Jin Yu Chen. It appears that Portland Garden Supply's main business was to sell stuff to Jin Yu Chen. Police went after Jin Yu Chen as well as the owner of Portland Garden Supply, Wen Han Chen. Depending upon the source, the equipment was used to grow either 1,559 or 1,957 marijuana plants.

Not only did they grow marijuana and launder proceeds (insert joke here), but they also stole electricity and damaged one of the homes after a malfunctioning water system flooded the home.

I wonder if the Feds will go after them on tax evasion charges.

You have to use some intelligence with this fingerprinting device

[DISCLOSURE: I AM EMPLOYED IN THE BIOMETRICS INDUSTRY.]

Both CNET (in two articles) and New Scientist are reporting about a device from an English company called Intelligent Fingerprinting. This device uses a fingerprint for two purposes. Unlike other devices that use a fingerprint to make your preferred coffee drink, this device uses your fingerprint to perform a drug tests.

CNET links to a 10 November press release:

Contact: Simon Dunford, press officer
s.dunford@uea.ac.uk
44-016-035-92203
University of East Anglia

Prototype hand-held drug testing device launched
The world's first prototype of a hand-held fingerprint drug testing device has been created by UK technology company Intelligent Fingerprinting.

The unique device detects drugs and other substances from the sweat contained in fingerprints and will enable mobile testing with instant results.

A spin-out of the University of East Anglia (UEA), Intelligent Fingerprinting Ltd is based in the NRP Innovation Centre at the Norwich Research Park. The company developed the prototype with eg technology – a product design, development and engineering consultancy based in Cambridge.

Paul Yates, business development manager at Intelligent Fingerprinting, said: "The launch of this prototype is a significant milestone. There has already been considerable worldwide interest in the use of the technology for testing within a wide range of applications, including criminal justice forensic science, homeland security, and institutional testing such as prisons and workplaces. But the ability of a hand-held device to carry out testing in-situ brings a whole new range of benefits and opportunities."

The device will enable testing of fingerprints for illegal drugs and other substances using disposable cartridges. The samples are quick and easy to collect and do not require specialist handling or biohazard precautions. Because of the imaging of the fingerprint, they have an in-built watertight chain of evidence continuity and are almost impossible to cheat.

The potential uses for the device are wide ranging and cover testing individuals in the workplace - especially in safety critical industries where there is a need to judge whether someone is 'fit for duty' - through to screening drivers at the roadside for drug-driving impairment.

David Russell, CTO of Intelligent Fingerprinting and Professor of Chemistry at UEA's School of Chemistry, said: "The development of the Intelligent Fingerprinting hand-held testing device has been a technological success. Working closely with eg technology we have been able to design a device that carries out the full analysis and imaging of a fingerprint in only a few minutes. The first prototype will be able to test individuals for drugs of abuse but we will be working to widen the range of substances to include other drugs and health markers that are found in fingerprints."

The prototype is scheduled to go into full production in 2012 and the team will work with customers to develop new applications.

Danny Godfrey, director of eg technology, said: "Intelligent Fingerprinting's core intellectual property is fascinating, offering a unique, robust way of linking a test result to the individual. Designing a device to automate their well-defined laboratory process has required input from all of our skill groups – microfluidics, optics, electronics, software, industrial and mechanical design. The release of the prototype is a major milestone towards the unveiling of the production device next year and we're delighted to be part of such an exciting development."

But before we get all excited about the "watertight chain of evidence," let us consider exactly what this shows.

It does NOT show that the person whose fingerprint is being captured is taking illegal drugs.

It DOES show that the person whose fingerprint is being captured has failed a drug test.

There is an important difference.

One term that is often used in the biometric industry is "false positive," or an assertion of a particular connection when no such connection is truly present. The initial identification of Brandon Mayfield as a suspect in the Madrid bombings is an example of a false positive.

False positives are not limited to biometric identification; they can also be found in drug tests. For example, ingestion of poppy seed bagels can result in a false positive for morphine use. Snopes.com has documented several cases in which people lost their jobs (in most cases only temporarily) because of a failed drug test that resulted from eating poppy seed bagels (or a similar item) before the test was conducted.

Now I don't know if the Intelligent Fingerprint system has safeguards against this particular false positive. But even if it does, one has to remember that no one can claim that any particular drug test is 100% accurate. So there is always the possibility that there is a false positive - which means that the test only proves that the person whose fingerprint is taken has failed a drug test, not that the person whose fingerprint is taken is taking drugs.

And I haven't even delved into the entire "fingerprint spoofing" issue - admittedly difficult in this scenario, but in certain cases (such as a corrupt person taking the fingerprints), even this system can be spoofed.

Which just goes to show that you have to be very careful when you use phrases such as "watertight chain of evidence."

Someone's gonna find a leak.

Closing the deal? Ryan Seacrest kiises it off

Media outlets are desperate for quality content. If you can provide quality content to a media outlet, they will wine you and dine you (well, if you're Mormon or Muslim, they'll dine you) and do whatever it takes to get you to commit to provide the quality content to the outlet.

In the description below, note that "quality content" means "content that gets a lot of people to hear our advertisements."

In his spare time, Ryan Seacrest hosts a morning radio show in Los Angeles on radio station KIIS-FM. One of the features is something called "Ryan's Roses," in which a cheating boyfriend is exposed. The way it works is as follows:

• A woman calls Ryan on the radio and voices her suspicion that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone else. Ryan listens intently, sympathizing with the woman, because HE CARES. Commercial break.
• Ryan gets the woman to consent to what is about to happen, and then the boyfriend gets a phone call (broadcast on the air) from a flower delivery service, offering a free bouquet. The boyfriend is asked to say who should get these free flowers. In the ideal situation, the boyfriend then gives a name other than that of the girlfriend, the girlfriend confronts him and cries and yells, and we all listen intently. Commercial break.
• The phone call ends, and everyoone calls in with their opinions.

Hillary, you're better off dumping that boy Bill, 'cause he's a cheater and he's cheating on you and you don't need no one like that. And Monica, you're a TRAMP for going out with Bill, because you're ... well, you're a tramp.

The power of this episode is that it spans several segments, causing people to continue to listen to the station - and to all of the commercials that air before and after "Ryan's Roses" makes its call.

I was flipping stations during my morning commute on Monday, and I happened to run across a Ryan's Roses segment in progress. They were just setting it up, with the girlfriend saying what was going on, or what was not going on. And Ryan was listening intently, sympathizing with the woman, because HE CARES.

Then (after a commercial break), Ryan was ready to make the call, and just needed the girlfriend to give her on-air consent for Ryan to call the boyfriend. However, the girlfriend ended up saying "I can't do this," mumbled something else, and hung up. Attempts by KIIS to call her back went unanswered.

And all of a sudden, Ryan Seacrest didn't care so much any more. In fact, he was mad, asking what she just did, or what she just said at the end? "Did she say she had to talk to herself? Why does she have to talk to herself?"

From the perspective of the radio station, the girlfriend had just wasted valuable air time. The station had invested a lot in the girlfriend, but had no return on their investment.

From the perspective of the girlfriend, she had second thoughts about the whole thing. No contract had been signed, and upon further reflection, she felt that she was better off not pursuing the opportunity.

Should KIIS have obtained its consent several minutes earlier? But what if they got the girlfriend's consent, and then discovered that the girlfriend's story wasn't so riveting?

This is a classic seller-buyer situation, in which both parties check each other out, and then - and only then - get down to the business of closing the sale. And if either of the parties has serious doubts, the sale won't happen, despite all of the preparatory work that took place beforehand.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss on looking for work

OK, enough with all the basketball posts. Let's move to the real world and look at what real people do.

Many of the people who read this blog are employed. And many of you have worked at several different jobs during your life. In fact, I was talking with someone last week who left her job at one company, and got a better paying job at another company.

I'm sure that you agree that this is terrible - for the first company. You see, if people keep on leaving this first company, they're going to have to pay more to get new employees - something that would adversely affect the profits of the first company. It's unfair that the second company pays more than the first company, so the obvious solution is to create a system in which the second company is restricted in its employee payments. This will ensure that all companies are profitable.

As some of you have probably guessed by now, I'm a liar.



Yes, this post is about basketball. But let's look at how Ethan Sherwood Strauss framed the issue.

Were you inspired by KG’s Minnesota futility? Does a mired Chris Paul bring a smile to your ears? Does your heart flutter at the thought of Blake Griffin piling up losses for a sneering Donald Sterling?

And:

To the small marketeers, I say: If you build it, they will stay. Tim Duncan had little reason to leave San Antonio, and Kevin Durant likely won’t ditch OKC for a better nightlife. Loyalty is the reward for good stewardship.

This is only a small portion of what Strauss said. Read the rest here.

And if you want another example from another sport, look at everyone who is talking about a football team based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Yes, Green Bay, Wisconsin. With the exception of one particular quarterback, people don't beg to leave Green Bay, Wisconsin. Shouldn't they, since it's a small market?

The NBA players and a "disclaimer of interest" vs. a "decertification"

In the past, I've quoted Jim Bakker's autobiography title, I Was Wrong.

And just yesterday, while talking about Ashton Kutcher's defense of Joe Paterno, I mentioned that Kutcher should have spent five minutes researching WHY Paterno was fired - especially since it involved one of his pet causes, child abuse.

Well, in my defense, I DO spend five minutes researching my posts.

I should have spent ten.

In a recent post, I made the statement that the NBA players' union was decertifying itself. Then I got in my car, drove to work, and ended up listening to Bill Handel and Rich Marrotta.

Marrotta noted that the union is NOT decertifying, but that they are instead issuing a "disclaimer of interest."

ESPN explains the difference:

In utilizing a disclaimer of interest rather than an involuntary decertification, the players have chosen a timelier but riskier approach. The disclaimer will likely be challenged by the league as a "sham," as the NFL did when faced with the disclaimer issued by the players' association; the league argued that the dissolution was merely a negotiating tactic, and that the union was still representing the players' interests.

The NBA players' union also passed up the opportunity to use the 45-60 days before a decertification vote to continue negotiating with the additional leverage the pending vote would provide. Instead, the players decided that there was no reason to wait for a vote, because additional bargaining would be futile.

One important difference between the NBA and the NFL - the NFL players utilized the legal option immediately. As Marrotta noted, it was easy to argue that the NFL players were not bargaining in good faith.

But the NBA players have continued to negotiate through training camp, and through the first few weeks of the season. Meanwhile, the NBA owners have gone on record, effectively saying that they will not continue to negotiate, but will instead backtrack to a less favorable offer.

However, remember that legal action was already initiated - by the owners.

The NBA has an ongoing lawsuit in a federal district court in New York, in which the league is attempting to establish the lockout doesn't violate federal antitrust laws. If the NBPA decertifies and the union's dissolution is ruled lawful, the NBA is requesting player contracts become void and unenforceable. Legal analysts disagree over whether the league's federal case directly applies to decertification or only a disclaimer of interest. However, NBA commissioner David Stern said Friday agents "playing with fire" will get burned. "If the union is not in existence, then neither are $4 billion worth of guaranteed contracts that are entered into under condition that there's a union," Stern said.

Wait a minute.

So if the contracts are no longer enforceable, then there's no barrier on the NBA bringing up replacement players.

This is getting interesting.