If you have a quality event, promote it

Eugene Loj specializes in advance ticket sales and event promotions, but he offers this caution to potential clients:

I don’t think it’s right to hype or advertise something where you can’t meet or exceed the customers expectations. For the purpose of this article, the word hype and promoting/advertising are one and the same. If you can’t [deliver] on your promises, don’t hype it.

But then he continues:

Here is the interesting part ... I’ve seen more instances of great events not being hyped enough as opposed to over hyped. I honestly think too many events fail because they don’t advertise or [promote] enough. Not because the event wasn’t well planned or well executed.

As an example, he cites the Canadian International Air Show, reprinting a letter from Jennifer Brown, Executive Director of the show:

At Canadian International Air Show (CIAS) HQ, we receive a TONNE of calls and e-mails from people interested in scoring access to our exclusive VIP waterfront enclosure. I knew there was a market to sell the CIAS VIP Experience to; but I needed help getting it off the ground.

So you have a customer base clamoring - whoops, they're Canadian, I guess they're clamouring - for VIP tickets, and Loj helped Brown to sell them.

In 2009, we were able to generate $61,645. of VIP tiket sales; $21,270 of which came in the first 60 minutes of tickets going on sale!

And there's one more thing that Brown makes a point of noting:

And the most shocking part? The Canadian International Air Show is a FREE event.

Let's face it - any air show (planes, fireworks, whatever) is by definition a free event, since you can look up into the sky and see the stuff in the air. But in this case, people were willing to pay a premium for a more exclusive experience, and Brown delivered.

No, that doesn't mean that I'm putting my Empoprises blogs behind a paywall.

Yet.

Do you want to eliminate ALL the tax loopholes? Well, do you?

Whether you're an Occupier, a Tea Partier, or whoever, you're probably mad at the unfair nature of the tax code, and how people take advantage of loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of tax.

And perhaps you're wondering why those terrible tax loopholes aren't eliminated. After all, the 99% outnumbers the 1%, and people outside the Beltway outnumber people within the Beltway.

In fact, why don't we go ahead and eliminate the three largest tax loopholes? Over two years ago, David Leonhardt even helpfully identified the big three.

So, who's going to go to Congress and demand that these be eliminated?

After all, if they're the biggest three loopholes, then they should be eliminated, right?

I detect a pause in your call to action. Oh, very well, I'll let you know the big three that Leonhardt identified.

No. 1 is the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance. [The 2010] health overhaul will start to shrink this loophole in coming years, but the pace will be slow.

Tax health insurance! Get rid of the loophole! Um...who's with me?

OK, let's look at the other two.

Nos. 2 and 3 are the mortgage-interest deduction and the tax break for 401(k) contributions.

Uh, yeah, let's...eliminate...

Leonhardt astutely observed:

If Democrats and Republicans can come together to reduce these tax breaks, which will simplify the tax code and bring down the deficit, it will be very good news. It will also be surprising.

Even so-called "flat tax" proposals aren't that flat. If you read the Heritage Foundation's 2012 flat tax proposal, you'll find the ever-popular exceptions:

The only remaining deductions are for higher education, gifts and charitable contributions, and an optional home mortgage interest deduction.

And even this proposal is considered "radical."

Understanding your competition - a lesson from Afghanistan

Nathan Peterson was an Oklahoma State University football player who is now a coach at OSU. But between his playing and coaching days, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a first lieutenant, deployed to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, of course, the U.S. (and other) forces are fighting against the Taliban. In the course of an April 2013 interview, Peterson noted something interesting about the enemy.

They don't even know who they're fighting sometimes. They called us Russians plenty of times.

Your average U.S. person will react with a jolt at that revelation, especially if they're older. Those of us who left college long ago well remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, an invasion that the U.S. opposed. So to an American, being called a "Russian" by an Afghan is especially jarring.

But we have to remember the Taliban perspective. As far as the Taliban is concerned, there's no difference between a Soviet and an American. The Taliban considers both of them to be invaders in their country.

Whether in war or in business, if you fail to understand your enemy/competitor, you cannot defeat your enemy/competitor.

Slice and dice, or turn and burn? You can't be completely environmentally friendly

Everything has unintended consequences.

You want to be an environmentally responsible citizen, and you fear the effects of coal, oil, and especially nuclear energy. So you turn to something much more environmentally friendly - such as wind farms.

Or, as James Ulvog describes them, slice and dice operations. You see, birds fly into the turbines, and as a result hundreds of birds are killed per year at a single site at Altamont Pass. (Altamont just can't get any good press, can it?)

Well, what about solar? Solar power won't chop up birds, will it?

Well, solar power can do other things:

A small bird, barely the size of a human hand, had its wings reduced to a web of charred spines. No longer able to keep aloft, the bird was found on the ground after it had flown through the intense heat of a solar thermal project soon to go online in the California desert.

There is no perfect energy solution, so people are forced to make tough choices.

The customer is always wrong - that lulu of an idea is a lemon

From the Chicago Tribune:

Lululemon has long been known for making athletic clothing that could withstand many years of wear and washes.

But trouble surfaced in March when the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company recalled its top-selling item, women's black yoga pants containing its proprietary Luon fabric, after determining the pants were too sheer.

The Tribune went on to quote from a Bloomberg TV interview.

"Frankly, some women's bodies just don't actually work [for the yoga pants]," Chip Wilson said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg TV.

"It's about the rubbing through the thighs ... how much pressure is there," he said.

You can imagine how that went over with Tribune writer "Tribune Staff Report."

The founder of Lululemon said women's bodies may have caused the sheerness problems that plagued its high-priced yoga pants earlier this year.

When the Los Angeles Times got a hold of the story, Susan Denley summed it up as follows.

Ouch.

St. Joseph's Aspirin - at least on my computer, definitely not for children

Remembering the aspirin that used to be "for children" and is now part of a "doctor approved aspirin regimen," I was surprised to visit http://stjosephproducts.com/products/aspirin/ and see the embedded links.

Somehow, "a doctor-approved aspirin regimen may reduce the risk of heart mail order viagra without prescription attack viagra or stroke" doesn't sound quite right.

But when one of my Facebook friends checked http://stjosephproducts.com/products/aspirin/, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

What do you see?

My answer on facial detection sex accuracy is answered

(The usual disclaimer applies. Although I do not work with face detection software, I do work in the biometrics industry.)

In a previous post, I blogged about the Amscreen technology that Tesco is using for several purposes, including determination of the sex of the person who is viewing an onscreen ad. I wondered about the accuracy of the technology.

It turns out that Amscreen's facial detection technology is provided by a company called Quividi, and in a December blog post, Quividi provided an answer to that very question.

A test was performed by an independent research company in the USA to evaluate the accuracy of Quividi’s classification algorithms.

Viewers saw a short video clip and at the end of that clip the system ‘read’ them and showed a male video clip to males and a female video clip to females.

The test was very successful and overall we saw a 93% “instant” accuracy rate (i.e. the ability to tell for each single person his or her precise gender) after scanning 856 people.

Specifics are available here, including this interesting tidbit:

52 of the females were wearing baseball caps and our accuracy of this group was only 42%. If we look at the accuracy of the software without any women wearing hats, the accuracy rate increases to over 96%

So when you removed the baseball caps, the female sex detection software was in a league of their own. But shouldn't it be the other way around?

Horse without a face? Tesco, the Biometrics Institute, and Mister Broad

I need to start this with the disclosure that I work in the biometrics industry, and in this role I have been involved with products that offer facial recognition.

But not facial detection:

Tesco's introduction of facial detection (not recognition) systems at its petrol forecourts (The Telegraph, 5 November 2013) is just another example of the public getting exposed to new technology without fully understanding what is happening. But who is asking the consumers what they really want?

"While Tesco is saying that currently images, pictures or personal data of customers are not being recorded or captured, there is a very small step from detection and categorisation to recognition", explains Isabelle Moeller, Chief Executive of the Biometrics Institute. "The main concern is that personal data could be collected without prior consent of the individual. The key privacy principle that must be observed is the principle of informed customer consent."

Ms. Moeller is raising some valid questions, but I found myself all caught up in the use of the phrase "facial detection." When I first read it, I wondered if the software was detecting whether a face was present or not - a situation previously explored by society expert William Broad, whom you may know by another name.



The reason that Moeller used the phrase "facial detection" is because the software is not used to specifically identify a person, according to the referenced Telegraph article:

The 'OptimEyes' system will be rolled out into 450 Tesco petrol forecourts, which serve millions of customers a week.

It works by using inbuilt cameras in a TV-style screen above the till that identify whether a customer is male or female, estimate their age and judge how long they look at the ad.

I am not familiar with this particular product, but the task before it seems difficult. I speak from experience - when a phone solicitor calls me and hears my voice, half the time the solicitor refers to me as "ma'am." (Note to cold-call solicitors: when you refer to someone by the wrong sex, your chances of making the sale are reduced.) I need to investigate and see what level of accuracy this software provides in identifying sex, but it's clearly not 100% - just throw Boy George and Chaz Bono before the cameras and see what happens.

And to top it off, this is being implemented at Tesco - a company that has previously been unable to distinguish a cow from a horse.

At some future point I'll pay an exteneded visit to Amscreen's website to find out more about the technology, and we certainly have to consider the issues that the Biometrics Institute raised.

But for now, let's see what Mr. Broad had to say about age detection.



(Time for another playlist?)

#page462 Buying and selling athlete futures - welcome to Fantex

When I speculated about the company that will eventually replace Walmart (and Amazon), I assumed that this company would reduce cost by passing most employee costs and all inventory costs on to other parties. In my example, a store (Empoprisorium) would provide a company (for example, Vizio) with an area of floor space within the store. Empoprisorium would operate the cash registers for the entire store, but (unlike Walmart) Vizio would be responsible for providing the employees to staff its store area, and would also be responsible for managing the inventory and stocking the shelves. Vizio would end up paying Empoprisorium - among other things, Empoprisorium would get 25% of all of the gross sales from Vizio.

The idea of one business taking a cut from another business is nothing new. We see it all the time. Think of the world of athletes and sports agents; the agent gets a cut of the athlete's earnings.

But what if an entire business is based upon getting a cut from the earnings of others?

Welcome to Fantex:

Fantex Inc. has agreed to buy 10 percent of the future earnings of San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis for $4 million in advance of selling shares to the public.

Two weeks ago, Fantex announced the first public offering for an athlete when it filed to raise $10.6 million priced at $10 a share, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Fantex’s main source of income was listed as Arian Foster, a running back for the Houston Texans who has pledged 20 percent of the money he earns both inside and outside the National Football League to the company in exchange for most of the proceeds of the IPO.

But that's only part of it. Fantex also lets you "buy" and "sell" shares in these athletes. Here's how it works:

Fantex is an all-new marketplace where you can buy and sell shares linked to the value and performance of the brand of an athlete — It's real money, real investments, and a real athlete’s brand. However, because you can only trade Fantex, Inc. tracking stocks on this platform, there is no assurance as to the development or liquidity of any trading market.

Now in the social media world there is a lot of starry-eyed wonder (and a lot of jokes) about a social media "expert's" personal brand. However, in the case of professional athletes, they truly are personal brands. Fantex counts on this relationship:

Fantex, Inc. creates a unique brand building platform for athletes to increase the reach and engagement of their brand. Fantex, Inc. signs a contract with an athlete to acquire a minority interest in their brand and builds a plan with a goal to increase its value, leveraging its marketing expertise.

So what does Fantex get?

To finance the acquisition of the contracts, Fantex, Inc. intends to offer equity securities in Fantex, Inc. and establish a tracking stock linked to the separate economic performance and value of the brand associated with the tracking stock – such as income earned from contracts, endorsements and appearance fees. Fantex, Inc. will typically attribute 95% of the acquired brand income under the brand contract to the tracking stock. In addition Fantex, Inc. will attribute to the brand certain expenses of Fantex, Inc. including in certain cases specified expenses related to other tracking stocks that may be issued in the future. Holders of shares of a tracking stock will have no direct investment in the business or assets attributed to the brand contract, associated brand or athlete. Rather an investment in a tracking stock will represent an ownership interest in Fantex, Inc. as a whole.

However, as is true of any investment, there are risks:

[Vernon] Davis lost an endorsement deal with Vita Coco brand coconut water when he talked about a rival drink on his Twitter site this month, according to ESPN....

[Arian] Foster injured his hamstring in a game against the Kansas City Chiefs on Oct. 20.

And later, Foster left a November game with a back injury.

It's no secret why "Fan" is part of the name of Fantex. In the same way that stamp collectors buy stamps and get nothing tangible in return, Fantex presumably hopes that fans will snap up tracking stock in specific athletes that they like. It takes the game of fantasy football to a whole new level. I'd call it "fantasy football on steroids," but perhaps that isn't the best choice of words.

#page462 OK, we won't kill you, but you had better not make any sandwiches

In an earlier post about the company that will eventually replace Walmart (and Amazon) at the top of the business heap, I included my proposed letter to Vizio, enticing them to participate in my planned store, the Empoprisesorium. A portion of the letter read as follows:

Within your little space, you have complete freedom to sell the stuff any way you want - well, except for a few little rules that we'll impose on how you sell things. If you're a franchise operation yourself, you'll recognize some of the things that you'll see in our 1,000 page guide that we provide to sellers.

Which reminds me - on about page 383 of the guide, you'll see that all sales that you conduct in our store have to pass through our cash registers. None of this booking sales on the floor that go some other way. If we catch you making sales that don't go through our cash registers, we will kill you. Literally. See page 462.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Outside of criminal activity, no one would kill someone else in a business dispute.

But there's a lot that business can put into an agreement.

Rick Holman, who has shared stuff with me in the past after I wrote about former WAAY reporter Shea Allen, has shared something with me again - and this one involves a franchise that I recently visited (well, not the Michigan location in this article).

A woman is fighting to work at another sandwich shop after Subway enforced her non-compete contract, which she regrets not fully understanding when she was young and signed it....

Several weeks later [Leah] Benene got a job at another sandwich shop. But then she got a letter which contained a copy of the non-compete contract she signed back in December of 2009....

It's a document - she signed - saying she can't work at a competing business within one hundred miles for a full year after leaving Subway. Benene also received this letter from the company attorney telling her she must honor the contract, and the lawyer contacted her new employer as well.

"They also sent the non-compete letter and the lawyer letter directly to that franchise, and, since then, I've been terminated from there," says Benene.

This is just part of the story - the whole thing is here.

I'm not sure how lawyers define "competing business." Is a McDonald's a competing business? An Outback steakhouse? The Swedish meatball area at an Ikea? Of course, the broader the definition of "competing business," the less likely that Leah Benene will be able to find work, meaning that she could theoretically starve to death.

See page 462.

P.S. I was curious to know whether The Wrath of the Internet had struck the Yelp page for Benene's former employer, but as of now it has not.

P.P.S. Not sure what Shea Allen is doing these days. She may (or may not) be writing a book.

#page462 What will the company that replaces Walmart (and Amazon) look like?

If you were to ask anyone who the defining retailer is in the United States today, the answer would probably be Walmart. Some people love the place, and then there are a number of people like Cory Briggs (see my Empoprise-IE posts on Briggs) and Sprawl Busters who are fighting Walmart.

But - and this may surprise some people - Walmart will not last forever, and will eventually be replaced by some other company. Amazon is already threatening Walmart.

In the aforementioned Empoprise-IE blog, I recently addressed this at a local level. A new Walmart opened in Ontario, California at the end of last month; when will it close? It's quite possible that the Walmart that opened with great fanfare just a few days ago may be closed by 2023.

Perhaps it's impossible to speculate what the replacement to Walmart will look like, but I'd be willing to bet that the replacement will pay fanatical devotion to cost control.

Now I know what you're saying - how can any company contain costs more than Walmart? Walmart's non-union policies keep its wages low, its vast buying power exercises supplier control, and it long-standing technological innovation helps manage the Walmart empire efficiently.

However, it's a truth of business that if there's a company that excels at something, a company will pop up that can do it better.

Let's look at two parts of Walmart's financials.

First, take a look at the "Operating, selling, general and administrative expenses, as a percentage of net sales." For the five fiscal years up to January 31, 2012, this percentage was about 19% to 20%.

So all that a competing firm has to do is to get that percentage down to 18%. Or 15%. Or 10%. Or lower?

Now let's take a look at another line - inventories. On January 31, 2012, Walmart inventories were over $40 BILLION dollars.

That's a lot of inventory that's on hand, even with Walmart's vaunted controls. What if Walmart could get the same amount of sales with inventories of only $30 billion? Or $20 billion?

Or $0?

Hear me out. What if we had a company that could do the business that Walmart did, but with a lot less employees and with no inventory - AND could do it by maintaining brick-and-mortar stores where people could walk in and IMMEDIATELY purchase products, unlike Amazon where you might have to wait a day (or longer) to get your stuff?

And interestingly enough, Amazon itself may offer the solution to this problem.

When you buy things from Amazon, you're often not buying from Amazon. In the fine print, you often see that a particular item is not being sold by Amazon, but by some other company. As of March, these third party sellers accounted for 40% of the unit sales conducted through Amazon. Amazon charged fees to those third party sellers, thus getting a cut of their sales. Those fees covered things such as the use of Amazon's website, and the use of Amazon's warehouses.

What if Amazon - or some other company, perhaps a new company - carried this same concept to brick-and-mortar stores, but added more innovation (or more ruthlessness) to it?

This is, of course, nothing new. Every week, there are physical stores that are mere shells, in which independent sellers hawk their wares. These stores are more commonly known as swap meets. But what if you get rid of the cheap Vietnamese trinkets, and replaced those with high-end items, provided directly from the manufacturers? The manufacturers would be ecstatic because they'd have control over the selling of their stuff without depending upon distributors, retailers, and other middlemen - but there would be a price.

So, although I still have to raise a teeny tiny bit of capital to execute this, let me share the first draft of my sales pitch. This is for my future store, the Empoprisorium (Empoprises Emporium). And I'm sending the pitch to well-known electronic manufacturer Vizio.

William Wang
CEO
Vizio
Irvine, California

Bill,

Here's the deal.

Right now your products are the at mercy of Costco employees and Walmart employees that don't really care about your products, and who may be transferred to the dog food aisle next week. Perhaps you could start your own store, but why not place your products in a store where a lot of people go, and where you can have complete control - and I mean complete control - over how your products are sold?

Here's how it will work.

We provide the store, the cashiers, and the delivery docks. We'll provide you with one or more aisles of floor space to sell your stuff. If you rent space in the back, you'll pay a certain amount. If you rent space in the front, it will cost you a little more.

You provide the salespeople for your part of the store. Rather than depending upon a clueless store employee, you provide the people directly. You compensate them any way you want to; we don't care. You see, the Empoprisorium operating and SGA costs are kept below 5%, so we can't provide employees for anything but the cash registers. You provide the salespeople.

Oh, and you provide the products that you want to sell in the store, and you get them on the floor. None of this "send it to the distribution center and add it to inventory" stuff. Empoprisorium doesn't carry any inventory. And again, we can't provide employees for anything but the cash registers. And our cash register people won't unload your trucks. Get your salespeople to do it.

Within your little space, you have complete freedom to sell the stuff any way you want - well, except for a few little rules that we'll impose on how you sell things. If you're a franchise operation yourself, you'll recognize some of the things that you'll see in our 1,000 page guide that we provide to sellers.

Which reminds me - on about page 383 of the guide, you'll see that all sales that you conduct in our store have to pass through our cash registers. None of this booking sales on the floor that go some other way. If we catch you making sales that don't go through our cash registers, we will kill you. Literally. See page 462.

Oh, and those sales that pass through our cash registers? We take 25% of the gross sales. That's in addition to the fees that we charge you for floor space. Oh, and a few other charges that are listed on pages 668 through 724 of the guide.

At this point, you're probably hemming and hawing and saying that Vizio would never do business like that, and that Walmart never does anything like that to Vizio. Well, If you don't like our terms, you can keep on selling through Walmart. And Costco. And as far as we're concerned, you can go ahead and sell through Kroger and A&P while you're at it. And you can watch your business go down the toilet while you're at it. (Whoops, that's supposed to go into the Moen letter; I don't think that Vizio makes toilets yet.)

You see, it really doesn't matter to us at the Empoprisorium. You know those Walmarts that are near and dear to your heart? Well, they're all going to close pretty soon - look at the Walmart that just opened in Ontario in 2013 and is about to close because of lack of business. The Montclair Costco and the Montclair Target and the Montclair Best Buy already closed after we opened our superstore in Upland.

So if you're counting on selling your stuff through those stores, forget it. You have to deal with us now.

By the way, Sony has already claimed the space right up front. If I were you, I'd claim the space right behind them right now, before that gets claimed by KitchenAid.

I await your reply.

John Bredehoft
CEO Empoprises d/b/a Empoprisorium
"No inventory. Few employees. Immense profits. Plus page 462."

Giving complex kitchen applicances the finger

I need to start with two disclosures.

First, I have a personal bias toward product designs that are simple. In my view, simple designs mean that fewer things can break.

Second, I must disclose that I work in the biometrics industry.

The second disclosure is required because I am going to talk about a Whirlpool patent application. IPWatchDog:

Today, we’re featuring one patent application that may provide an incredible improvement to computer control systems on home appliances. This application would protect a system of analyzing user characteristics to determine the individual’s identity and bring up a personalized interface....

This patent application, filed by Whirlpool with the USPTO, would protect a system of personalizing the user interface for appliance computing systems. Sensors included on an appliance would be capable of logging biometric information of a user, such as height, appearance and voice. This data can be analyzed to determine the exact identity of a user.

Once the user’s identity has been determined, the appliance user interface can display a personalized interface template.

This is all right and fine, and in a way I support all this stuff, because it has the potential to make more money for me.

But before the applicance industry goes down the biometric route, shouldn't it get its oven temperature sensors to work reliably first?

Freedom to talk about failing (sequel to my earlier post)

Larry Rosenthal has reshared a series of pictures from an event called FailCon - yes, a conference about embracing failure. If you saw my previous post, the conference organizers clearly fall into the positive (Zach Epstein) camp rather than the negative (Scott D. Anthony) camp.

As is his wont, Rosenthal summarized the conference succinctly:

Mother of all #MIPS Conferences. FAILCON 2013!?

you cant make this stuff up.... really... no seriously.

If you are unfamiliar with the #MIPS hashtag, it stands for "media induced psychosis." I provided an example of it here.

So why does FailCon rank in the #MIPS category? While I personally believe that there can be valid conversations about risk and failure, the FailCon discussions appear to be...well, rather insular. Let's look at the conference's about page:

Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it.

As Anthony notes, however, you don't want to embrace it too tightly.

FailCon is a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers, and designers to study their own and others' failures and prepare for success.

No problem here, but the next sentence is a doozy.

We all have founded, worked for or invested in startups that have failed.

ALL of us? Again, this points out the myopic nature of Valley "experts" - something I've discussed for years. The entire business world does not revolve around tech startups. Some people work for startups that sell posters. Some people work for companies that are well past the startup stage. But when decision-makers in the Valley assume that the world is just like them, well...failures can happen. Let me share a very prominent example. Steven Edward Streight has shared an article that appeared back in June of this year:

As the first website to be demonstrated by a sitting President of the United States, Healthcare.gov already occupies an unusual place in history. In October, it will take on an even more important historic role, guiding millions of Americans through the process of choosing health insurance.

How a website is built or designed may seem mundane to many people, but when the site in question is focused upon such an important function, what it looks like and how it works matter. Last week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) relaunched Healthcare.gov with a new appearance and modern technology that is unusual in federal-government websites.

"It's fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview. "It's basically setting up a web server. That's the beauty of it."

The article goes on to praise the wonderful technologies that were going to be part of the new website, using important words such as "open" and "transparent."

This is better than a big block of proprietary code locked up in a CMS [content management system].

Well, if you've been paying attention to the news over the last few weeks, Healthcare.gov launched - and offered huge opportunities to, as the cool kids say, "embrace failure."

But let's go back to FailCon's "About" page:

We're smart, we keep up with the latest in technology trends, but sometimes things just don't go as planned. How can you predict what will work and what won't? Well, you can't.

Once you've performed your Stuart Smalley daily affirmation saying how smart you are, you then turn around and say that there's no way to predict what will work and what won't. There is a kernel of truth in the statement, but only a kernel. If one looks at past performance, incorporates simulations, and (most importantly) does a ton of testing, you can get a pretty good idea about whether something will work or whether it won't work.

But that involves too much effort. Better to quote a few buzzwords, throw something against the wall, and hope it sticks.

And just hope that your VC sources are a little patient.

But when your VC source is the U.S. taxpayer, and there's a large group of people that really WANT your project to fail, then the "embrace failure" mantra will NOT lead to success.

#page462 You can make a killing in business

Business often engages in heated competition, but in most cases said competition does not lead to death.

There are exceptions:

William Fowler, the head of the small Adams County, Colorado company Fowler Software Design, shot his former employee Thomas Ciancio three times in the head in December 2009 then attempted suicide using the same gun, possibly because Ciancio confronted him about large amounts of money he had funneled from the company into a church or charity.

For the identity of the "church or charity," read entry number 5 in this collection of "10 Business Execs Suspected of Murder."

But what if killing becomes a standard part of legitimate business?

It could happen.

Stay tuned; more details tomorrow in the Empoprise-BI business blog.

Freedom to fail to fail?

I've been thinking about the phrase "freedom to fail" lately, so I thought that I'd read some varying views on the subject.

On the positive side, Zach Epstein (in the midst of a Google praisefest) said the following:

Google has proven time and time again that it’s not afraid to fail. While some of its big gambles have crashed and burned, others have grown to become core businesses for the Internet giant. It is impossible to innovate without taking risks, and the fact that Google is more successful than most of its rivals is directly related to its willingness to take chances.

However, Scott D. Anthony sounds a word of caution:

But that doesn’t excuse stupidity and sloppiness.

The best innovators approach uncertain problems thoughtfully.

After quoting from Vince Lombardi (who clearly had opinions on winning), Anthony continued:

You need to demand—and expect—success, but understand that success sometimes means deciding not to proceed with a project. If an innovator reaches that end point by smart and careful action, celebrate. If he or she reaches it any other way, well, fire away.

So can we celebrate the freedom to fail, or do we need to emphasize the freedom to fail to fail?

Non-binding pay resolution defeated. Next slide please.

Remember in September, when I blogged about Larry Ellison's no-show at a keynote address that he was supposed to give at Oracle OpenWorld? You see, instead of giving his keynote, he chose to hang out at the San Francisco Bay to watch a boat - his America's Cup boat. (America won, if you didn't hear.)

On the day of Ellison's no-show, you'd think that the world had ended. But a few days later, people seemed to have calmed down. I wrote at the time:

So while the no-show looked really bad on Tuesday, it's probably all but forgotten a week later, unless you have an ax to grind with Ellison anyway.

The Oracle yacht is long gone from the bay, replaced by a Google barge. But it's possible that Ellison's no-show was still remembered. After all, questions are circulating, asking whether Ellison earns his pay.

Now I have no problem with high employee compensation, even if said compensation is very very high. If a sports figure earns billions of dollars for his or her team, then the sports figure deserves to earn tens of millions, or perhaps even hundreds of millions. Likewise, if a corporate executive makes a lot of money for a company, then that executive deserves compensation that is orders of magnitude above my own.

But a lot of investors thought that Larry Ellison's compensation is too high:

A majority of Oracle shareholders demonstrated their opposition to the compensation of the software giant’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, on Thursday, voting against a nonbinding resolution on the company’s pay practices.

More than two billion shares were voted against the company’s “say on pay” measure at Oracle’s annual meeting on Thursday, while nearly 1.6 billion were voted in favor of the proposal.

However, as Michael J. de la Merced notes, 1.1 billion of those 1.6 billion "yes" votes were cast by Larry Ellison himself.

Now this was a non-binding resolution, and similar attempts to unseat some of Oracle's directors failed. But in the corporate world, where shareholder control of a company is virtually non-existent, even a no vote on a non-binding resolution is a major shakeup.

Mary Taylor Simeti and Anthony Bourdain on the proper calculation of business costs in Sicily...and New York

If you run a business, you need to properly account for costs - something that Anthony Bourdain discussed on CNN recently while talking about Sicily. Mary Taylor Simeti started the conversation by noting that many things, such as meals are expensive. She then explained why this was so:

More so that the store can afford to pay its extortion money. The big change that has happened is that up until the mid-'80s, the late '80s, there were a great many Sicilians who thought if they were honest and didn't have anything to do with the mafia, they could live without being affected by the mafia. Apparently 80 percent of the businesses in Palermo and 70 percent in the rest of Italy that pay extortion.

Bourdain responded:

But not everybody pays the bite. A small but growing coalition of businesses have joined a group called Addio Pizzo (ph), a grassroots organization taking a stand against the mafia's traditional mere total control over the food chain, from farm to table.

Bourdain then noted that the inflated costs are not restricted to Italy:

I come out of the restaurant business in New York. You got taxed with every laundry order every time they took your trash away. It was built in to all your basic services.

And if you fail to account for these costs, bad things can happen.

H/T Friends of Ours.

What tools can the German press safely use, and what sources can Feinstein consider reliable?

The Deutscher Journalisten-verband (DJV), the union of German journalists, has released the following statement, which I am reproducing in the original German as released:

Konsequenzen ziehen

Der Deutsche Journalisten-Verband rät Journalisten dazu, bei Recherchen und digitaler Kommunikation auf die Suchmaschinen und E-Mail-Dienste von Google und Yahoo bis auf weiteres zu verzichten.

Hintergrund sind aktuelle Berichte über die mutmaßliche Ausspähung der beiden Anbieter durch die Geheimdienste NSA und GCHQ. „Die Recherchen von Journalistinnen und Journalisten sind genauso vertraulich wie die Kontaktdaten der Informanten und die Inhalte der Kommunikation mit ihnen“, sagte DJV-Bundesvorsitzender Michael Konken. Es sei skandalös, dass die Geheimdienste in ihrem Überwachungswahn offenbar keine Grenzen kennen. Appelle an die Regierungen, den Informantenschutz und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung zu garantieren, blieben offenbar wirkungslos. Wo es möglich sei, müssten Journalisten die Konsequenzen ziehen und ihre Arbeitsweise verändern.

„Es gibt durchaus andere Suchmaschinen und Anbieter von E-Mail-Diensten, die nach bisherigem Kenntnisstand als sicher gelten“, sagte Konken. Bei vergleichbarem Leistungsspektrum dieser Dienstleister sollten Journalisten wechseln, mindestens aber Verschlüsselungstechniken anwenden.

Die massenhafte Überwachung durch Geheimdienste und der Schutz der Pressefreiheit sind Themen, mit denen sich auch der DJV-Verbandstag 2013 vom 4. bis 6. November in Hannover beschäftigen wird.

Referat Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit:
Hendrik Zörner
Bei Rückfragen: Tel. 030/72 62 79 20, Fax 030/726 27 92 13

Reuters explains what it all means:

The union representing German journalists advised its members on Thursday to stop using Google and Yahoo because of reported snooping by U.S. and British intelligence....

"The searches made by journalists are just as confidential as the contact details of their sources and the contents of their communication with them," said Michael Konken, head of the union which represents about 38,000 journalists.

More here. Konken notes that there are other search engines or email providers that may be used, but did not specifically endorse any one or the other. (With reason; the NSA may have hacked those also.)

Oh, and as long as I'm talking about NSA activities, I might as well address a little tidbit regarding Dianne Feinstein's current outrage.

For those who missed it, Senator Feinstein issued a statement on October 28 about U.S. intelligence monitoring of foreign leaders. The statement read (in part):

Unlike NSA’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.

So, how did Feinstein learn about these U.S. government abuses? Hint: she's talked about the source before, back in June.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Monday said the 29-year-old man who leaked information about two national security programs is guilty of treason.

Feinstein said that she doesn’t see National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden as a hero or a whistle blower.

“I don't look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it's an act of treason,” the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters.
The California lawmaker went on to say that Snowden had violated his oath to defend the Constitution.

“He violated the oath, he violated the law. It's treason.”

But now that Snowden has revealed rogue intelligence actions that even Feinstein didn't know about, has she changed her previous assessment of Snowden?

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lashed out at the National Security Agency on Monday after learning it spied on foreign leaders, but she still thinks NSA leaker Edward Snowden is a traitor.

“I’ve said what I’ve said. I stand by it,” Feinstein told The Hill Tuesday when asked about her past comments on Snowden.

Well, if he's a traitor, then you can't trust what he said. So why is Feinstein claiming that the NSA didn't provide her committee with sufficient information?

And I bet that they didn't check the applicants' homes for violent video games either - polygraph tests and employment

Well, we now have our latest example of government incompetence, and both Bush and Obama are implicated. Witness this shocking revelation:

But what the media and other agency watchdogs ignored are carefully parsed statements by the CBP that place the quality and character of its workforce in even deeper jeopardy. The surge of CBP recruits to the training academy began in 2006. CBP’s own figures, for example, show that Border Patrol recruits to the academy doubled from 2005 to 2006, then doubled again the following year; there were 926 trainees in 2005, 1,889 in 2006, and 3,912 in 2007.

However, CBP Internal Affairs waited until 2008, fully three years after the surge in recruitment by the CBP, to begin “…implementing a requirement that CBP conduct polygraph examinations of all prospective CBP law enforcement agents and officers by January 2013.”...

Does CBP have the numbers of agents and officers who were never given the polygraph? Has it identified them as possible risks? Has it followed up with regularly scheduled polygraphs of all agents and officers? The answer to all of these questions seems to be “no.”

A pretty sexy story - Customs and Border Protection, required by law to implement polygraph tests, failed to do so in some instances. And you know what that means! It means...well, what does it mean?

Let's ask the National Academy of Sciences (yeah, I know them), who issued a 2003 report on the scientific basis behind polygraph tests. Here's an excerpt:

Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy.

So, what does CBP's polygraph failure mean? We really don't know.

Before you loudly proclaim that Silicon Valley could implement a health care website better than the government did...

...consider that it took Google YEARS to roll friendly URLs out for Google+ users, despite the fact that a committed friendly URL lover was on the Google+ team.

My friendly URL, by the way, is https://plus.google.com/+JohnEBredehoft/.

Ridiculous ends to business associations, the McDonald's edition

Compared to other industries, my industry is a relative lovefest.

Take McDonald's. Ketchup is obviously an important condiment for McDonald's, and although most ketchup at U.S. locations is unidentified, there are two markets that use Heinz ketchup. Heinz is also used at McDonald's locations outside of the United States, the result of a 40 year relationship between the two firms.

That relationship is ending. Why? Because Heinz's new CEO used to have another job:

McDonald's Corp (MCD.N) on Friday said it plans to end its 40-year relationship with ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co, since that company is now led by Bernardo Hees, the former chief executive of hamburger rival Burger King Worldwide Inc (BKW.N).

Note that Hees USED TO work at Burger King. He does not work at Burger King any longer, having left in June 2013 when he accepted the Heinz position. However, his mere presence at Heinz appears to...um, stain the company's reputation with McDonald's.

Despite the fact that Hees presumably knows McDonald's industry better than any previous Heinz CEO.

And despite the fact that Heinz's hiring of Hees presumably deprives McDonald's competitor of a key asset.

Oh well. If you decide to smuggle Heinz ketchup into a McDonald's, please let me know.

The downside of being a nation of law

On the whole, businesses prefer to operate under a system of law. While this can have some disadvantages for a business, the upside is that everyone works under a predictable environment, and an even playing field.

But some instances make you wonder if the laws should be changed.

Take this example, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation sentenced one person and imposed other penalties on two other people for something described as "prescription fraud."

A Florida man has been sentenced to prison for his role in importing cancer drugs manufactured overseas and then illegally selling them to doctors in the U.S.—and two doctors who bought the deeply discounted medicines have been held accountable as well.

Martin Paul Bean pled guilty to selling unapproved and misbranded drugs, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud, and other federal violations and was sentenced recently to two years in prison....

Two doctors have admitted knowingly buying the foreign drugs. One of them, a Pennsylvania oncologist whose practice purchased nearly $1 million worth of the misbranded drugs, was recently fined $100,000 and ordered to place ads in two medical journals warning of the dangers of unapproved drugs....

In its article, the FBI explained the economic motivations for breaking the law.

Cancer medicine is expensive, [Special Agent Brad] Godshall explained. “A single course of chemotherapy can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.” At the same time, many cancer patients being treated by oncologists are eligible for Medicare, and reimbursements to doctors from Medicare have been cut, providing further incentive for physicians to buy non-approved discounted drugs. “All those factors added to Bean being able to successfully carry on his fraud for so long,” Godshall said.

But then, buried in the middle of the FBI's article, you can find this little tidbit.

The drugs Bean fraudulently sold turned out to be the foreign equivalents of the same drugs manufactured for the U.S. market.

While Godshall notes that the drugs easily could have been counterfeit, the fact remains that in THIS particular case, patients were given lower-cost drugs that were equivalent to the higher-cost legal drugs. So the patients were not harmed by the "fraudulent" drugs that they received, and in fact benefited from them because they were obtained at lower cost.

So who was harmed by this fradulent activity, if the patients were not? Actually, there were people who were harmed: the Food and Drug Administration (whose rules were flouted), the pharmaceutical companies (who received less net revenue than they would have otherwise), the stockholders of those pharmaceutical companies (whose return on investment was similarly depressed), and the doctors who obeyed the law (who lost patients to the doctors who obtained the discounted drugs).

But a question could be asked - does this particular law hurt the patients that it was intended to protect?

Nicolae Popescu's e-commerce listings were fake, but his release wasn't

Business depends upon trust, and Nicolae Popescu and others are alleged to have violated that trust:

Charges were unsealed against Romanian national Nicolae Popescu, currently a fugitive, along with five of his compatriots and one Albanian who also remain at large. U.S. law enforcement officials have issued alerts for the men through Interpol, the international police agency.

The seven are accused of putting fake listings on eBay, Cars.com, and other sites (including self-created phony sites) that purported to list cars and motorcycles.

Prosecutors say the gang secured bank transfers from victims using fake invoices purporting to be from PayPal and other online payment services.

But the real story is why Popescu is a fugitive. It turns out that he was arrested in 2010 - but released himself. Oops.

One of the ringleaders of the group captured last week, Nicolae Popescu, 'released himself' from custody and is now at large. Apparently when the initial arrests were made, the legal documents under which they were being held were set to expire at 1830 on the day of their arrest. The DIICOT prosecutors were working madly to make their claims to hold each of those arrested for 29 days further investigative period, as is typical in Romanian law, but when 6:30 PM came and went and no papers had been served against Nicolae, he asked to be released, and legally, there was nothing that could be done to stop him!

This is yet another case in which a deadline, rather than being negotiated away, actually had some sway. Therefore, Popescu is a free man today.

The definition of a successful TWTR IPO, in 140 characters or less

A successful IPO is one with max money for the company not the investor. If prices rise post IPO, the company left $ on the table.

More feature creepiness - dimensional obfuscation and multi-gigapixel digital images

In a post that appeared earlier today, I said the following:

There are numerous examples of ways in which feature creep results in us buying features that we never use. How many people use their sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for...well, for sport utility?

In that earlier post, I failed to mention the one product that REALLY exhibits feature creepiness.

Digital cameras.

Before I talk about today's digital cameras, let's go back a few years to 2003 and see what the New York Institute of Photography was recommending for digital camera resolution.

At this point, we recommend purchasing a camera that is capable of capturing images of three million pixels (that's three megapixels) or more. There are lots of situations when you'll want to capture smaller files, but if you want to print a good "8x10" image you'll need a minimum of three megapixels. Four megapixels might be even better if you find a camera that's in your price range.

Again, this was written in 2003, when you had to pay a pretty penny to get four megapixel resolution on your camera. Fast-forward eight years, and you still had to lay out a pretty penny to get a high-resolution camera - but the scale had changed a bit.

The new top-end model from medium-format camera maker Hasselblad is now on the market, and it's not cheap: the 200-megapixel H4D-200MS will set you back 32,000 euros, or about $45,000.

If you've decided to hold off on that BMW purchase and buy a camera instead, go here for information.

But hey, isn't that 200 megapixel camera a hundred times better than a 2 megapixel camera? According to Ken Rockwell, no.

For normal 4x6" (10x15cm) prints, even VGA (640 x 480 or 0.3MP) resolution is just fine. Digital cameras did this back in 1991!

In 1999 when digital cameras were only 1.2 or 2 MP, each megapixel mattered if you were making bigger prints.

Today, even the cheapest cameras have at least 5 or 6 MP, which enough for any size print. How? Simple: when you print three-feet (1m) wide, you stand further back. Print a billboard, and you stand 100 feet back. 6MP is plenty.

Sharpness depends more on your photographic skill than the number of megapixels, because most people's sloppy technique or subject motion blurs the image more than the width of a microscopic pixel.

And there's a mathematical basis for Rockwell's assertion:

Pixel Count, expressed as Megapixels, is simply multiplying the number of horizontal pixels by the number of vertical pixels. It's exactly like calculating area. A 3 MP camera has 2,048 (horizontal) x 1,536 (vertical) pixels, or 3,145,728 pixels. We call this simply 3 MP....

It only takes a 40% increase in linear dimensions to double the pixel count! Doubling pixel count only increases the real, linear resolution by 40%, which is pretty much invisible.

"But," you may be saying to yourself, "there are multi-GIGApixel images floating around. And that's like cool and stuff."

Let's take a look at one such image, the 150 gigapixel image of Tokyo.

Over the course of six hours, photographer and 360cities.net founder Jeffery Martin captured the fascinating 600,000 pixel-wide panorama upon the roof of the lower observation deck on the Tokyo Tower. A high-powered Fujitsu computer -- packing 192GB of RAM, 2 quad-core Xeon processors, and a 4GB graphics card -- spent three months stitching together the mosaic from 10,000 individual photos captured by Martin.

Yes, that 150 gigapixel image consists of 10,000 mere mortal images (OK, they're still pretty high resolution, but not by much). Interestingly enough, the $45,000 camera does something similar, but it only combines six images into a single image.

So we only have to wait a few months, or perhaps a few weeks, for someone to create a TERApixel image to make everyone drool. Just combine 100,000 10 megapixel images and you've got it. Or spend $45,000 for the 200 megapixel camera, stitch a mere 5,000 pixels together, and you have your terapixel panorama.

Meanwhile, most of us will still take 640 x 480 pictures and be happy.

Just in time for Halloween - The Noise from My Kitchen (and Laundry Room)

My previous post quoted from advice (given in 2008) by someone who calls himself Technician Brian. While his personal website has disappeared, his corporate website is still online. And, as it turns out, Technician Brian does not limit his advice to fancy ovens. Here's how a recent blog post began:

Late at night, when the house is dark and quiet, perhaps you have heard a whirring or a gurgling sound and you wondered to yourself if it might signal a problem with one of your household appliances. You are not alone, many of us have had this experience. Especially when your appliance is new, these noises can cause concern for the homeowner.

Technician Brian wrote this post on September 25, but it would have been more timely if he had written it on October 25. Halloween is approaching, and unless you're a Lutheran running around with a hammer and nails, your thoughts often turn to the spooky.

The teenagers had brought the beer up to the creepy abandoned summer home and were having a good time when they suddenly heard a gurgling noise coming from the kitchen. Petrified with fear, two of the teens decided that the best course of action was to go to the kitchen itself and make out.

Actually, considering how bad some of these movies are, perhaps it's better that Technician Brian didn't go that route. He probably likes the sensible horror film that's been making the rounds lately.

So what does Technician Brian talk about in his post? He talks about possible causes for the noises from two of our most common appliances - refrigerator/freezers and washer/dryers. Go here to read his advice.

Incidentally, Technician Brian's company, All Tech Appliance Service in the Portland, Oregon area, also has a presence on Google+ and Facebook.

Oven temperature probes are feature creepily too smart for their own good

As Thanksgiving approaches in the United States, I'm sure that I'll be seeing many more hits on this blog for malfunctioning Kitchenaid oven temperature probe stories.

If this is your first visit to the blog, you may want to see what I've previously written in September 2012. And October 2011. And November 2009. In these posts, I've documented cases in which the Kitchenaid oven temperature probe mechanisms give a false reading. This could be due to moisture near the oven probe temperature sensor connection, for example.

However, there are other causes.

The jacks will tend to corrode and create resistance between terminals after many years causing just the symptoms you are seeing. The correct way to solve the problem would be to replace the probe jack part#8186589 , or you can try and unplug the jack from the harness.

Unfortunately, to do this you have to pull the entire oven away from the wall - and this happened to be a combination microwave/stove unit.

Then you have to find the specific wires.

The two wires from the meat probe are attached to connector 5 along with those of the oven temperature probe so you cant just pull that connector, but will either need to removed pins 4 and 5 of that connector, or look for the in-line connector from the probe jack. Those should run up the side, but they may run around to the back to join with the oven temp probe harness. With the oven out a bit, you should be able to remove the control panel with screws on the side and gain access to the connector.

After receiving these and other tips from Technician Brian (whose personal website seems to have gone offline since these tips were provided in 2008), the person seeking help (TheRASGuy) was able to fix his Kitchenaid oven temperature probe problem. Another Internet success story.

But two things struck me about this whole episode. The first was a comment from TheRASGuy:

8 years of Electircal Engineering school and I am worried about operating on my appliances geez..........

Think about it; our ovens - yes, the things that we use to cook food - have evolved in such a way that someone with 8 years of electrical engineering school needed advice to fix them.

And the second thing? TheRASGuy didn't even fix the oven - he just disconnected the faulty part:

Since we do not use the probe and it is flaky at best I am going to leave it disconnected - we never probe cook anyhow.

Think about it. Kitchenaid (and, to be fair, other manufacturers) have gone to great lengths to develop this technology to allow ovens to automatically shut off when the food being cooked reaches a certain temperature. The technology, like all technology, is not 100% accurate, and is susceptible to failure due to things such as moisture and corrosion. When problems are encountered, they may be easily fixed (by using a hair dryer to remove moisture) or they may be, if I may use an electrical engineering acronym, a PITA to fix.

And guess what? Most of the people who buy these high-end ovens never use the feature.

There are numerous examples of ways in which feature creep results in us buying features that we never use. How many people use their sport utility vehicles (SUVs) for...well, for sport utility?

And it looks like these automatic oven temperature probes fall into the same category.

That's a turkey of a blog post idea

It's no secret that most of my blog posts are written in advance of their publication. I hope this doesn't shatter the illusions of some of you that I'm awake at 4:55 am on weekday mornings, trying to get my 5:00 am post ready.

In some cases, the post is written well in advance. For example, some of the posts in my empo-jooryst series were written three months in advance of their publication. There was a reason for this - some of these posts were written from my perspective as an alternate juror while a trial was going on, and I did not want anyone to see these posts until long after the trial had ended.

(Incidentally, if you've been following my comments on that trial, the oft-rescheduled sentencing hearing was held on October 18...and was promptly rescheduled to November 8. If all goes well, the defendant will be sentenced before he dies of old age.)

Well, I've written another "scheduled in advance" post - this time for this blog, the Empoprise-BI business blog. I wrote it a few weeks ago, and I scheduled the post to appear on Thanksgiving.

That's Thanksgiving 2014.

As for why I don't want this post to appear until then...well, I can't exactly say that yet.

Hopefully the Blogger platform will still be around late next year.

Know your target demographic, the Reader's Digest Edition

A business can't be all things to all people. Home Depot is not going to reach out to people who constantly travel and live in hotels. HBO is not going to reach out to people who hate movies, boxing, and dirty words.

And Reader's Digest apparently knows its target demographic. The following message appeared on its Facebook page:

Finish this sentence: Before I die...

What if you CAN'T use technological devices?

Every industry is based upon particular assumptions - assumptions that will not hold in all circumstances. For example, my industry - the automated fingerprint identification system industry - is based upon the assumption that a person has readable fingerprints. For some people, such as bricklayers or people who work with a lot of paper, this is not true.

Many of the industries based upon social media - and, for that matter, many other industries - are based upon the assumption that everyone is online. However, this is not true for a variety of reasons - economic reasons, religious reasons, philosophical reasons...and the danger of addiction:

Isaac Veisburg was born in Venezuela and raised between there and Miami. He's all done with the reSTART program and is now working as a personal trainer. But it was a long road. He went through the six-week, in-patient part of the program twice....

He bailed on the program after a few weeks and went back to college in Washington, D.C. At first he tried to stay away from gaming, but he was depressed, fighting with his parents and had car problems.

The stress started to mount, and the Saturday before classes even began, Veisburg was back in front of the computer. He says he downloaded a game and didn't leave his computer for 42 hours.

"And then I slept. I slept through my first class Monday, and I didn't go to class the rest of that day, and the day after, or for five weeks after that," he says.

So what does a technology addict do in a world filled with technology? Not much, as it turns out.

After a year in rehab, [Will is] finally done and planning to move back home to Oklahoma to try to find a job. But that's tough to do without using a computer and an Internet connection.

"It's a constant struggle," he says. "It's just that I have to structure my life to a point where I don't feel tempted to waste time on it."

He says he has to hold himself accountable, by having a job, a social life and exercising — and by setting time limits on his Internet usage. He's not planning to get a smartphone any time soon, either.

Silicon Valley is Devoid of Reason, the Michael Hiltzik Edition

In case you missed it, I posted two opposing items early this morning - Silicon Valley is Devoid of Reason, the Monday Edition and Silicon Valley is Incredibly Attractive, the Monday Edition.

As you can figure out from the title of this post, I found something online that supports the first of the two arguments. (I'm on vacation today, and have time to do all sorts of things - install doorknobs, ride around in my nephew's Jeep without my nephew present, and read about BART.) But before I present what I found online, let me quote from the conclusion of my first post:

Oh, and there is (if I may borrow a Valley phrase) "one more thing" -

If we ever reach the stage where we can completely automate government to a point where it doesn't need any of those pesky humans around - then we can perform the same thing and automate all of those Silicon Valley companies, and get rid of you.

Well, Michael Hiltzik just wrote something in the Los Angeles Times that goes well beyond anything I said in my post. I don't know Hiltzik, but The BART strike brings out class ugliness in Silicon Valley was obviously not written by a Tea Partier. After noting some of the anti-union comments from the Valley's elite, Hiltzik concludes HIS post as follows:

Blaming the workers for the impasse is a peculiarly one-sided interpretation of what's happening. Sure, you could say that 2,400 non-automated, human employees stand in the way of Silicon Valley's determination to "build something." But it's equally true to say that BART's nine board members and its general manager are the real obstacles to a settlement. Maybe Silicon Valley should figure out a way to automate them.

Silicon Valley is Incredibly Attractive, the Monday Edition

Decades ago, I happened to see a piece of correspondence from Walmart to one of its suppliers. The letter was apparently in response to a letter from the supplier, and it concerned Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). This standard, fairly revolutionary at the time, allowed a supplier to communicate with a retailer via electronic means, so that purchase orders and the like could be sent by modem, from computer to computer, rather than by paper.

Walmart, with its dedication to managing stores and inventories as intelligently as possible, was a pioneer in EDI. For some of the suppliers, however, EDI merely represented a set of onerous new requirements and controls.

The one thing that I remember from the letter was that Walmart was assuring the supplier (presumably in response to a sarcastic comment in the supplier's original letter) that the supplier would NOT have to move to Bentonville, Arkansas.

Walmart understood, long before anyone else did, that location didn't matter. The increasing power of computers, and the ability to connect these computers via modem networks, meant that a buyer in Bentonville could communicate with a supplier anywhere in the world and complete a business transaction in seconds. The money would transfer from Walmart's computer to the supplier's computer (or to their respective banks), and the inventory status would be updated on both computers also - pending, of course, the actual arrival of the trucks at the desired locations.

It's a lesson that I've taken to heart, most recently in a post entitled Silicon Valley is Devoid of Reason, the Monday Edition. That particular post, like most of my posts, was written in advance of its publication.

But before my rant could be published, I ran across a story about a company that specifically desires a geographic presence in Silicon Valley.

The company? Walmart.

The country’s largest retailer, which for years didn’t blink at would-be competitors, is now under such a threat from Amazon that it is frantically playing catch-up by learning the technology business, including starting @WalmartLabs, its dot-com headquarters....

The company has had a small presence near Silicon Valley for more than a decade, but until recently, engineers in the area barely knew it existed. It signed a lease three years ago for the San Bruno office, north of the valley — and across the street from YouTube — and is opening another this fall in Sunnyvale, home of Yahoo, in the heart of the valley.

And in order to attract talent, Walmart California has to do things a little differently than Walmart Arkansas.

For example, at press events in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart’s headquarters, the menu tends to be ham sandwiches, chips and iced tea. At a recent event in San Bruno, it was white asparagus panna cotta with house-smoked salmon tartar, morel mushroom macaroons and charcuterie from a whole pig.

So perhaps geographic proximity matters a little more than I thought. After all, the Walton family has a few billion dollars more than the Bredehoft family, so perhaps they know what they're doing.

Incidentally, the story illustrates something else - nothing lasts forever. About a century ago, all of the small markets were wiped out by the A&P stores that sprung up across the land. A&P, in its turn, was wiped out by the Safeways and Krogers. Those stores, in turn, are being adversely affected by the Walmarts - and now the Safeways and Krogers are crying foul, ignoring the fact that they had destroyed competition back in their own heyday. Today, it's quite possible that all the people who want to see Walmart destroyed are going to get their wish - and when Amazon takes over, with ruthless business processes that make Walmart look like amateurs, those protestors will long for the days when the Bentonville company actually hired people at welfare wages, rather than not hiring anyone at all.

Meanwhile, the consumers should enjoy the moment. As Don McArthur commented about the forthcoming competition between Amazon and Walmart,

I see free virtual servers in my future.

And what about men? And others?

Have you heard about the UN Women auto-complete campaign, in which predicted search results from Google effectively demonstrate how many people feel about women? For example, if someone types "women need to" into Google search, the most popular suggested search at the time was "women need to be put into their place."

Well, just for fun, I figured that I'd try a few searches about men.

(Men shoulder bag?)

But then I thought I'd make this a little interesting. While there are claims that there are "wars" on various religious and ethnic minorities, there is a common claim that there is a culture war against Christians. Well, let's run that thesis through Google auto-complete:

I'm sure the United Nations will get right on this problematic "christians must die" message...but will they object to it, and support it?

But let's take a look at a few related searches; perhaps Christians aren't the only ones being threatened.

Well, if nothing else, Christians, Muslims, and atheists can all come together and mutually protect each other from death threats. We CAN all just get along...

Silicon Valley is Devoid of Reason, the Monday Edition

I am this close to starting a new blog and entitling it "Silicon Valley is Devoid of Reason."

Let's face it, the blog would get plenty of traffic.

Note that I'm not speaking of the tech world in general - we certainly have our own issues. I'm speaking specifically about the geographic location of Silicon Valley, in which people think foreign accents are bad, Microsoft users are worthless, you should NEVER be ridiculed for wearing Google Glass, tract housing is beneath the Valley (despite the fact that many of the Valley's advances took place in tract housing), rural people are idiots, women don't belong in the boardroom, every employee of a company should be a "social media expert"", and so on and so forth.

One of the most amusing ones to me is when Valley people - those people who are pushing for a virtual lifestyle - insist that you have to be geographically located in the Valley to be worthwhile. Erick Schonfeld wasn't qualified to lead TechCrunch because of his New York address. MySpace failed because of its Los Angeles location.

But that's nothing compared to Silicon Valley's latest delusion.

Remember when Kinja was briefly down? When it came back up, I got to the Valleywag article that I wanted to read, and then proceeded to the New York magazine article that was the source for Valleywag's information.

Now I know what some of you are saying - a media publication that isn't based in Santa Clara, San Mateo, or San Francisco counties is worthless. But hear them out.

[I]t's surprising that in an interview last week, [Chamath] Palihapitiya revealed that he is entirely emblematic of Silicon Valley's extreme myopia when it comes to the political system, and dismissive of those who suffer when the system grinds to a halt.

At the beginning of the government shutdown - something that eventually was estimated to have caused $24 billion in damage to the economy - Palihapitiya said the following:

We're in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we've known it now for probably four or five years. But it's becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no longer in LA. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there's no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero ...

This analysis was based upon the stock market's reaction to the first day of the government shutdown. As anyone with any sense would know, extrapolating economic trends from one day of stock trading is equivalent to judging Twitter's uptime based upon a one-minute sample.

But then he went on.

Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid.

New York magazine noted - correctly - that Palihapitiya's analysis was just a teeny bit faulty. He ignored the hundreds of thousands of government employees who were suddenly without paychecks, and who therefore probably weren't going to buy any Zynga virtual goods or buy something from a web advertisement. Just think if the government shutdown had lasted for a couple of months - some of the hundreds of thousands of furloughed employees may have even resorted to CANCELLING THEIR INTERNET SERVICE.

But eventually, most Silicon Valley folks realized that government might be a good thing.

The first blow came when NASA shut off its Google+ feed of kewl stuff. In the hierarchy of virtual things, NASA kewl stuff easily falls into third place behind cat pictures and pictures of bacon. And when NASA shut off the spigot, most of the tech-weenies realized that this government shutdown was serious business.

Most of them. I remember seeing a complaint from one person who was incensed that NASA wasn't posting. Google+ is free, the person reasoned; why can't they just keep on posting their stuff? This person sadly didn't realize that the Anti Deficiency Act, based upon Constitutional principles, explicitly prohibited volunteer work. See my Google+ post on the topic.

Now I of course do not share the delusions of those virtual alfalfa farmers in Silicon Valley. I didn't cry and freak out when NASA shut down. I didn't even cry and freak out when NIST (essential to my work) shut down. Not at all...but I'll admit that when Loren Feldman's "Monday Matters" was affected by the government shutdown, I whimpered a little bit.

Meanwhile, other government services shut down, and techies soon realized that Palihapitiya's assertion was incorrect. For example, I'm sure that many were arguing about whether the government shutdown would have a negative impact on employment. Well, they argued and argued, but couldn't settle the argument - because of the government shutdown, unemployment figures were unavailable.

But if there were any Silicon Valley people who clung to the conclusion that government didn't matter, those illusions were shattered last Friday - and it had nothing to do with the Federal government shutdown. You see, local government matters also:

Tony Sanchez was frustrated by the extra time the bus took, “I work in Hayward. It took two hours, rather than an hour, to get down here. I have to waste more money because the bus was more expensive than BART.”

The Valley, of course, has come up with a solution:

The BART strike is disrupting life for almost a half-million Bay Area commuters, including Silicon Valley workers, to the point where it’s sparked a debate over whether the region should use driverless trains.

Problem solved! Right?

Well, even if BART has driverless trains, you still need people to maintain the tracks.

And even if you were able to completely automate BART, you still have all of those buses that need drivers and mechanics and everything else.

And even if all of the mass transit were completely automated and did not require a single employee, you still have all the roads that are built by the government. And no one who is serious has advanced the idea of a self-building road.

Oh, and there is (if I may borrow a Valley phrase) "one more thing" -

If we ever reach the stage where we can completely automate government to a point where it doesn't need any of those pesky humans around - then we can perform the same thing and automate all of those Silicon Valley companies, and get rid of you.

Kinja is down (OR, WAS DOWN)

I received a 503 error when I tried to read a couple of Gawker articles this morning. So I went to front.kinja.com and confirmed the issue.

As of now, there's no update at Kinja's Twitter account.

[UPDATE: IT'S BACK UP.]

English is funny

One day recently, I received an e-mail reply that said

I resent it as well.

I was puzzled, and couldn't figure out why the person who sent me the e-mail was so mad. All that my original e-mail said was that I had sent an e-mail to someone else. Why would this person be resentful about my sending an e-mail that I was supposed to send...

...oh, never mind.