Empoprise-BI News - 5 July 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

As always, contact me via my gmail account (empoprises) if you have any questions or comments.

Behind the Scenes

I don't talk about it much, but I occasionally mention how my division was sold from one company to another in early April. The transition is continuing; last week I officially turned in my employee badge from the old company (which had the new company's name pasted on it) and got my new official badge. And other transitional things are happening all over. So far so good...

Special Features

As you might know, I've spent a lot of time enjoying my latest addiction - to Facebook's "Farm Town" application. I wrote about it last week, and even created a FriendFeed room dedicated to the game. But I still haven't gotten around to writing about one Farm Town strength - the Farm Town people have figured out the monetization game, in a way that leaves other free services such as Twitter and FriendFeed in the dust. I've been thinking about the post for weeks, but haven't gotten around to writing it yet...

Upcoming

I have a Wal-Mart post, again related to medical issues, coming up. And for the other stuff, we'll just see, won't we?

Is smaller truly better?

The current rage against the machine is against the Sony Walkman, which recently became so old that you can't trust it any more. Jake Kuramoto links to Scott Campbell's review of the Sony Walkman. The 13 year old Campbell, who is more used to an iPod, generally did not care for the classic device.

Although I don't have time to get into it now, there are some fascinating lessons about how "intuitive" a user interface truly is. People such as myself (and Jake) presumably intuitively know that audio cassette tapes have two sides, but that is not intuition, but learned behavior - something that Scott Campbell never experienced.

And there also isn't time to get into other assumptions that people make - for example, Campbell's puzzlement about the Walkman not having shuffle capability. If you're only used to iPod-like storage or CD storage where it is fairly easy to find the beginning of a song, the realization that cassette tapes don't generally have such an easy way to find specific tracks can be unnerving.

I'm going to focus, however, on Campbell's first impression - that the Walkman is "monstrous."

[My dad] had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book....

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

The underlying message of all of this is that big is bad, and small is good - specifically, that the size of the iPod is more of an ideal size for an audio playback device. (Let's ignore the fact that the Walkman itself is much smaller than a boombox, or a record player.) When Campbell boarded his school bus, he got the same reaction from others.

As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: "No-one uses them any more." Another said: "Groovy." Yet another one quipped: "That would be hard to lose."

My friends couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box....

But wait. Let's...um...rewind. (This will take a second.)

"That would be hard to lose."

That Aberdeenshire schoolkid may have realized the inherent problem with miniaturization. At some point, the devices get TOO small. Now you're not going to lose a boom box, and you'd have to have a pretty messy room to lose a Walkman. But an iPod nano? They get lost all the time:

14-year-old Shannon Derrick lent her new iPod nano to her friend Stephanie Eick to listen to on their last day of middle school in June. Stephanie allegedly returned the nano to Shannon's desk when she was done, however when Shannon returned from wherever she was at the time, her nano was not there.

That particular incident ended up in a lawsuit between the parents. And while such things normally don't go to court, there are plenty of problems with missing nanos. Here's something from Apple's own website.

Found a lost iPod Nano (Silver)
Posted: Dec 17, 2007 10:13 PM

Well, my dad found it on the delta airplane, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
I know the name of the owner.
I know the iPod serial number.
I think this person lives in California.

Her first name is Sharon.
Contact me, I want to mail it back!

I'll probably be asking you questions about your iPod to make sure it's yours.
Like what is your last name, what music is on there (you should know, it's on your iTunes.)

Please please contact me.

The recommendation in the thread, by the way, was to provide the serial number to Apple, who would then contact the owner. But let's go down a little bit in the same thread:

My 7-year-old son found an iPod in a snow bank last week, and much as he will be disappointed if he has to give it back, I do want to teach him to do the right thing by trying to find the owner. All we have is the name of the device (which looks like the person's first name), the song list, and of course the serial number.

And it's not just the nano. Later in that very same thread:

I lost my ipod touch in Shady Grove Metro Station in the parking lot. I dropped it during snow. I just upgraded with the new stuff. I have not had a chance to place my information there. Is there a way you can trace it The UPC is B590912179.

Oh, and there's another plane-related thread here:

Need help connecting a lost iPod Nano with its owner
Posted: Jun 30, 2009 5:25 PM

If anyone could help me out, I'm sure some iPod owner will appreciate it.

I was on a flight from Minneapolis St. Paul today, and buried deep in the seat pocket I found what appears to be a 4th generation iPod nano.

There's a first name on the iPod, and of course I have the serial number.

Also see WikiAnswers.com. And Gumtree. And probably the bulletin board at any junior high or high school.

So in essence, you have a poorly designed product that easily falls out of your pockets and gets lost in plane seats and in the snow. Yes, I know that people admire the aesthetics of the device, but how useful are the aesthetics if you can't find the danged thing?

Now there are solutions to these lost items, one of them being BoomerangIt, a tag with a serial number, a web address, and a phone number. This could potentially be an ideal situation if you lose a small item.



BoomerangIt Label by mimmms used under a Creative Commons License

Well, maybe. The labels themselves are 1/2" x 9/8"; what if your device is smaller than the label?

Not that this will stop engineers and marketers from making even smaller stuff - at some point, expect "nano" devices to be replaced with "pico" devices that fit in your ear and get lost in your breakfast cereal, to be followed by "femto" devices that fit on the end of your fingernail and can be lost if someone breathes heavily.

Is this progress?

OK, FriendFeed real-time search is cool, but what are the benefits?

The word is rolling across the tubes. FriendFeed, which has had constantly-updating real-time feeds for some time, has now added this capability to searches. Both Jesse Stay and Louis Gray have written about this capability, and have embedded it also - Stay on the right sidebar of his blog, Gray in the post itself.

But is this useful? Whenver I think of FriendFeed real-time, I think of Steven Hodson. Back when the constantly-updated real-time feed was the default flavor for the FriendFeed beta, Steven Hodson became physically ill:

Have you ever felt like you’ve just gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali and come out the worse for it?

Well that is pretty similar to the last twenty minutes I’ve sat here watching the real-time web go scrolling by at breakneck speed on the new Friendfeed beta site. Besides being in bad need of some Gravol (anti-nausea drugs for you non-Canadians) I am really wondering if this fascination with slapping us in the face with all the world’s inanity is really what people like Tim Berners-Lee thought of when the whole idea of the real-time web came about.

And just yesterday, Rob Diana wrote a post which asked the question "Is The Real Time Web A Solution In Search Of A Problem?" Now he did identify a couple of cases - emergencies, major breaking news - but that was pretty much it. Even Louis Gray doesn't want to spend all day at a computer searching for up-to-the-minute mentions of his name.

So anyways, I've been thinking about ways in which this technology can be applied in my life, and here's the best that I've found so far. As you know, I work in the biometric industry, and one of my FriendFeed saved searches relates to various biometric technologies. This is represented by the search term http://friendfeed.com/search?q=facial+recognition+OR+fingerprint+OR+biometric. (It was longer, but I started to have problems with longer search strings.) The results of this searh look like this.



Now I'll usually check the search once every day or two. But would it benefit me to have a window constantly open with this search, so that I would know immediately when one of these biometric technologies was mentioned?

In my case, no.

But there are some people who would benefit - people who monitor their corporate brands. Now "Jesse Stay" is in a way a corporate brand (as are we all), but he'd probably be more interested in monitoring mentions of SocialToo.



And Daniel Ha certainly has something he'd like to monitor.



And, come to think of it, I could always monitor mentions of this blog.



But as to whether any of these searches require a real-time feed, it depends upon two factors: the traffic, and the importance. For example, Daniel Ha is running a service that people such as I depend upon, and it is imperative that he know about mentions (positive or negative) as soon as possible. In my case, if someone were to say "Empoprise-BI is the stupidest blog that I have ever read," the world would not end if I wasn't immediately made aware of the statement.

And I haven't even gotten to the big corporations. You can bet that Motrin is monitoring corporate mentions after the whole Motrin Moms thingie. And what about Chrysler?

Now the drawback, as Gray noted, is that the best FriendFeed search can only search FriendFeed. This is what I said:

So if you enter a blog post title, all that FriendFeed knows about is the title. But if you then append portions of the post (or the entire post) as one or more comments, then FriendFeed can search that also (provided you're not using an "intitle" search or something like that). One ramification is that if you really want people to see your blog post content, and it's not critical that they go back to the original source to do so, then you should append your entire blog post as a comment - and coincidentally, FriendFeed recently expanded its commenting capabilities to allow long comments.

Now this post will automatically show up in FriendFeed, but only the title will show up. So people searching for the word "cool" in FriendFeed will find this, but people searching for "the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965" will not...unless, as I mentioned above, I choose to paste the entire post into FriendFeed as a comment.

For Aaron Copland's sake, I won't do that.

So when will we see reports about THIS outage? (Farm Town is down!)

When Rackspace or Twitter or FriendFeed goes down, a bunch of big names (and some smaller ones) rush-release blog posts chronicling the outage.

I'm not sure if Michael Arrington is going to take the time to report this one:



A Farm Town forum thread chronicles the issue. After a few "I can't get in" posts, the message above was posted by one of the users.

Downtime for Farm Town, the extremely popular Facebook application, has some ramifications for players, because the longer the application is down, the more likely it is that your crops will go to waste. In my case, I have some grapes that need to be harvested in the next 4-5 hours - unless time magically stops in Farm Town.

I'm not the only one who is concerned. @theoriginalkob tweeted:

When the Farm Town app is down, do ur crops still grow? Are my crops gonna go to waste?

She then continued:

Better question: Why am I addicted to fake farming?

Please place your tray tables in the upright position - Air New Zealand has nothing to hide

During my recent cross-country trip, I had to pay to check my single piece of luggage. But at least I didn't have to pay for my soda water or peanuts. You see, just about all of the airlines are adding fees here and there in a desperate attempt to increase their revenue. But when an airline decides to move in the other direction, just there mere announcement of no fees apparently isn't sufficient. Therefore, Air New Zealand declared that they have nothing to hide:

[U]nlike other airlines, which increasingly add hidden charges to fares in an effort to increase falling revenue, Air New Zealand has nothing to hide.

Not at all. You see, there is a 45 second commercial that makes this point strongly. Let's just say that body paint was strategically used.



This is complemented by a safety video that is shown on domestic Air New Zealand flights.



As the New York Times puts it,

Passengers on the video’s maiden flight Monday — the 7 a.m. from Auckland to Wellington, on New Zealand’s North Island — may have never paid more rapt attention to the line “undo the seat belt by lifting the metal flap.”

Not So Clear

People who know me knew that I was definitely tracking the Clear story, but I haven't had an opportunity to say anything about it (at least on the blog) until now. Why was I interested? Because I work in the biometrics field, and although my employer was not directly affected by Verified Identity Pass ceasing operations, it obviously has potential effects for growth of the biometrics industry.

If you missed the story last week, let me catch you up. SecureIDNews:

Verified Identity Pass, which operated the CLEAR service that helped registered travelers zip through security checkpoints at more than a dozen airports in the U.S., announced it is going out of business....The company cited an inability to negotiate an agreement with a large creditor to continue operations.

Again, this was not an issue with the technology that was used; it was an issue with the business plan. You had to pay a rather hefty price to register with the program, and in this recessionary environment where companies are cutting 401(k) matching, you aren't going to see a lot of firms pony up to pay for a Clear pass, nor are you going to see a lot of employees bearing the cost on their own.

This of course will not affect biometric passport and visa programs, which are (a) much cheaper for the purchaser, and (b) mandated by various governments.

But what will happen to the data that Clear collected? One Clear user isn't happy:

"They had your social security information, credit information, where you lived, employment history, fingerprint information," said Clear customer David Maynor, who is chief technical officer with Errata Security in Atlanta. "They should be the only ones who have access to that information."

Maynor wants Clear to delete his information, but that isn't happening, the company said....

Well, that's one way to put the desert to good use

I live in a semi-desert area, although sometimes it's hard to tell because we have water sprinklers running everywhere. But it is a semi-desert area, and as such it gets a lot of sun. This has proved useful to people who like to make movies, but desert areas can be put to other uses. For example, the deserts in Africa can be used to power Europe:

[Desertec] aims to harvest the sun’s energy — using a method known as concentrating solar power, or C.S.P. — from the vast North African desert and deliver it as electricity, via high-voltage transmission lines, to markets in Europe. Eventually, its backers say, it could satisfy as much as 15 percent of the European Union’s power needs.

One of the persons quoted in the New York Times article put it this way:

Europeans need energy and have cash. Africans have sun and territory. It is quite logical to combine all this.

Of course, one person noted that Europe would therefore be dependent upon a power source that it doesn't control. Sound familiar?

If this project is built, Europe will shortly become dependent on it, and the Islamic world will have a second, and much tighter, noose to add to the oil one.

More here.

All the fat cats went home. Happy now?

Part of the reaction to the recession has been a definite anti-rich attitude. It began with concern that companies receiving U.S. government aid were still holding fancy events in exotic locations, but then graduated to attacks on business practices in general, whether companies were receiving government aid or not. Recently I saw that one of my technical publications was warning its readers that CIO pay would be capped.

Well, those who are worried about the so-called excesses of business can take heart that their dreams came true at the recent U.S. Open:

The sun was shining and the temperature was around 70 degrees at Bethpage State Park on Tuesday afternoon, perfect for watching golfers prepare for the United States Open this week. Indeed, tens of thousands of fans who paid $40 were walking the course.

Few fans, though, seemed to be in the 50 or so hospitality tents, some of which cost $230,000 to rent for the week. Several tents lining the first fairway had signs on their doors that read, “Tent Closed.”

Their absence, although early in the week, was another reminder that corporate spending on sports — even at premier events like the Open — is continuing to sag as the recession wears on....

To help make ends meet, the U.S.G.A. has trimmed spending this year. The tents for the news media and others are less ornate, for instance, and silverware in the dining areas has been replaced with biodegradable plastic forks and knives.

That will only partly offset the decline in revenue from the hospitality tents. Some companies that agreed to rent them before the financial crisis took hold are not using them to avoid having to pay for food and beverages, or to steer clear of unwanted scrutiny....

The more muted atmosphere at the event...could trim hopes of an economic windfall for the municipalities near the golf course. In 2002, when the event was also at Bethpage, security was so tight that fans could not stop in nearby areas. Business dried up.

Of course, this only affects isolated municipalities. A few months ago, an entire state was targeted.

Hawaii has suffered one of the worst winters for tourism in recent years....

Hotel occupancy rates in the winter were the lowest in at least five years, and in February -- traditionally the state's busiest month -- the rate dropped to 75%. That was the lowest level since 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, when it fell to 69.7%, according to Smith Travel Research.

The firm said today that the rates for February have ranged from about 80% to 88% over the last five years. The average daily room rate -- another key measure of the industry's health -- dropped 12.4% in February from the same month in 2008....

Hawaii's problems are compounded by an increasingly hostile attitude toward business travel, particularly when major corporations are laying off hundreds of workers and accepting government bailouts.

In 2008, business travel, such as conferences, conventions and business incentive programs, accounted for about 7% of all tourism in the state, or 442,000 visitors, according to state officials....

132 meetings and business trips have been canceled so far this year and next year, representing a loss of 87,003 room nights. The cancellations amount to a loss of $58.8 million in direct revenue and the loss of 694 full- and part-time jobs in the state's tourism industry....

So who gets the blame for this precarious state of affairs in vacation destinations?

Obama himself may have contributed to what many tourism officials see as the vilification of business travel during an Indiana town hall meeting in February.

Asked about corporate spending and the federal bailout, the president said: "You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime."

Later, the White House tried to clarify the statement, saying the president encouraged travel, except for companies accepting government bailout money.

However, one forgets that imposition of these restrictions on government beneficiaries puts them at a competitive disadvantage. Think of it; you're a top salesperson, and you have a choice between working a Firm A, which sends its top performers to Hawaii, and Firm B, which caps sales incentives to five times the minimum wage in response to political demands. Where are the good salespeople going to work? And where will the bad salespeople end up?

That is, of course, assuming that people can get jobs. I don't think that cities near prestige golf courses are hiring a lot of people right now. I don't think that Hawaiian travel firms are hiring a lot of people right now.

But I assume that this is what the fat cat condemners wanted. Not only are the fat cats staying away, but now their absence is throwing other people out of work.

Happy now?

Empoprise-BI News - 28 June 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

This is a weekly (so far) newsletter devoted to my business blog, Empoprise-BI.

Behind the Scenes

I promised last week that I would get into some behind-the-scenes stuff this week. Well, as you probably figured out at some point in the week, I was out of town. I left southern California early Sunday morning to head to the Police Security Expo in Atlantic City, New Jersey, returning back here on Thursday.

It was a successful show for my employer and for me personally, although the casinos didn't get any of my business (having gone to Vegas frequently, I had no compelling desire to lose money at the Atlantic City casinos).

I shared some pictures from my one walk down to the Boardwalk (did you catch my Monopoly joke in my first post)?).

And, of course, on my trip back I shared an additional observation on the insanity of Jim Koch, as discussed previously in this blog.

Ironically, Ed McMahon died this past week, and McMahon actually got his selling start hawking things on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Special Features

When I wasn't talking about Atlantic City, I was having my delayed realization about parallels between today's Facebook and the AOL of the 1990s. If you missed it, here's a quote:

Although derided today, AOL used to have a HUGE mindshare. When people thought of online, they thought of AOL. In the same way that ESPN and others have a Facebook page today, companies in the 1990s made sure to have their AOL keyword....

Scoble schmoble. Oprah schmoprah. Hollywood made a whole dang MOVIE about AOL. Top that, Ev, Jack, and Biz.

I noted that this idea was unoriginal with me, and referenced a 2007 post from Jason Kottke. I didn't dig into it at the time, but Kottke focused on the proprietary nature of the environment used to create Facebook apps.

I've no doubt that Facebook is excited about their new platform (their userbase is big enough that companies feel like they have to develop for it) and it's a savvy move on their part, but I'm not so sure everyone else should be happy about it. What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that's different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It's difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously...imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Kottke also noted that the Internet is "more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007." But is it?

And after I wrote my Facebook post, I ran across Rob Diana's Facebook post and Jake Kuramoto's Facebook post. Remember how Steven Hodson and I previously talked about the wall that prevents people from seeing inside Facebook-land? Well, that's changing. Rob Diana:

Some people may complain that “Facebook is too closed” or “walled gardens will fail”. There was even a good conversation on FriendFeed about this. There is a very strong feeling from developers that a closed system like Facebook can not succeed. While I tend to agree that a completely closed system will have difficulties, Facebook has slowly opened up little by little to a decently open system. They still have some work to do before they become as open as Twitter, but the foundation has been started.

Kuramoto looks at this from the perspective of the Facebook user:

The Facebook experience has always been one of a controlled environment, where the symmetric follow model protected you from outsiders. Plus, they’ve always been the anti-MySpace, more private, less noisy.

So while some people want to see Facebook more open and searchable, there are some who will resist this idea and want to keep their private stuff private. It will be interesting to see how these competing philosophies war it out.

Upcoming

You know how some have worried about business executives making obscene amounts of money, and businesses staging obscenely lavish events? What happens when businesses listen to the criticism and the lavishness stops? I'll discuss who gets hurt in this scenario, and it's not just the executives.

The Twitter Book

Or "I'm on Twitter - now what?"

New arrivals, 2nd floor, Barnes & Noble, Costa Mesa, California.

Smooting export markets in China

One of my favorite books is Dave Barry Slept Here, Barry's late-1980s version of a U.S. history text. By the time Barry had reached the Great Depression, he derived great joy from constant repetition of references to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the 1930 Act that is often cited by free-traders and Hoover-haters alike as an example of all that is wrong with the world. In reality, Smoot-Hawley (formally the Tariff Act of 1930) was not exactly what President Hoover ordered. Wikipedia:

When campaigning for president during 1928, one of Herbert Hoover's many campaign promises to help beleaguered farmers had been to increase tariffs of agricultural products. Hoover won, and Republicans obtained comfortable majorities in the House and the Senate during 1928. Hoover then asked Congress for an increase of tariff rates for agricultural goods and a decrease of rates for industrial goods.

The House passed a version of the act in May 1929, increasing tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods alike.

Economists spoke with one hand on this one, warning that an increase in U.S. tariffs would harm the country. They were joined in their opposition by key industrialists such as Henry Ford, to no avail. Hoover personally opposed the bill, but was convinced to sign it.

Afterward, it appeared that the economists were right, since exports from the United States to Europe declined sharply, but there is not universal agreement regarding whether Smoot-Hawley was the primarily cause of this decline, or just the inability of Depression-ravaged Europe to afford American products regardless of the tariff rate. The eventual response to Smoot-Hawley was Bretton Woods and GATT, designed to lessen tariffs between nations.

Smoot-Hawley still appears in political discourse, although sometimes the facts are somewhat confused, as when a Republican House member blamed FDR for the "Hoot-Smalley Act." (Presumably she exercised her power to...um..."revise" her remarks in the Congressional Record.)

John Foley and Jeff Segal touched upon the act in an article on China in the New York Times:

A request from Beijing that local governments “Buy China” is worrying — and hypocritical. Even as President Hu Jintao joined leaders of Brazil, Russia and India at a summit meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in calling for an end to protectionism, a diktat from several Chinese ministries suggested that government projects should favor domestic suppliers in spending some $586 billion of fiscal stimulus money. Such doublespeak is dangerous. Countries with bloated export sectors shouldn’t throw stones....

Recall the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, in which the United States raised tariffs against imports to protect domestic industries and shore up employment. At first it worked. But when other countries retaliated, unemployment in the nation more than doubled. China might face a similar problem. And with civil unrest Beijing’s greatest worry, such a price looks too high.

Jim Koch, pleasantly insane

He even has special GLASSES for his beer.

Atlantic City International Airport.

Will Wal-Mart revolutionize clinics in the same way they have revolutionized prescriptions?

While Washington talks about controlling health care costs, Wal-Mart is actually doing something about it. Its low-cost prescriptions, which have been matched by some other pharmacies, have had a major impact on health care costs for many Americans.

But another health care effort by Wal-Mart has met more rocky ground:

Two years ago, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) announced plans to have retail medical clinics in 400 of its stores by 2010 and said it saw the potential for as many as 2,000. By February 2008, the retailer had 78 clinics. But now,—after failed venture-capital collaborations, a few faulty partnerships, and a reassessment of the business model—it has only 31.

So what happened? According to BusinessWeek, the status of one of Wal-Mart's competitors tells the story:

Retail clinics need customer traffic to cover their $500,000 to $600,000 yearly operating costs....Walgreens (WAG) subsidiary Take Care Health Systems, for example, operates more than 345 offices and sees patients as young as 18 months. By expanding its hours and services, Take Care Health had estimated sales of $450,000 per location in 2008

Until you get more traffic, this will be a money-losing operation. And Wal-Mart's clinics are not owned by Wal-Mart, but by third parties who may not have the deep pockets to build a client base. And they may have problems getting investment:

Wal-Mart requires its independent operators to hire health professionals to deliver care, says Mary Kate Scott, founder and CEO of Scott & Co., a health-care consultancy. For venture capitalists looking to invest in a rapidly profitable business, running a co-branded clinic with two partners is a difficult proposition. "When you don't deliver the service or own the brand or own the space, you have almost nothing," Scott says. "Essentially, the investors lost with the Wal-Mart strategy."

In January 2008, nascent clinic operator CheckUps closed its 23 Wal-Mart locations across the South after failing to raise enough money. Then in June, Colorado-based SmartCare Family Medical Centers shuttered all 15 of its in-store businesses. RediClinic, whose largest investor is AOL (AOL) co-founder Steve Case's Revolution Health Group, parted ways with Wal-Mart in December, shelving plans for 200 co-branded clinics nationwide.

But part of the problem may be Wal-Mart itself:

Wal-Mart's clinics, however, are typically situated inside near the store's main doors—along the same row as its photo studios and Subway sandwich shops—rather than near its pharmacies, and may catch a consumer's eye only on the way out. Plus, the company doesn't allow signage directly outside the store to promote the clinics and restricts indoor signs to areas near the clinic offices....

But before these stumbles, people were already speculating that the effect of the Wal-Mart clinics on health care would be substantial. RNCentral.com detailed some effect in February 2008. A sample:

1. More immunizations: With immunizations available at Wal-Mart, they're much more convenient for those that may not have time to go to the doctor. As a result, more people will be immunized, and the risk of contagious disease will be lowered.

Read the other 19 here.

Facebook is the new AOL

Perhaps it was the Caesar salad.

Perhaps it was the Jack & cola.

But something clicked in my non-trendy brain during my dinner at Applebee's earlier this evening. My stunning realization probably already occurred to you some time ago, but you have to remember that I am not trendy so it takes me a little while longer to figure these things out.

So anyways, I was eating my Caesar salad and drinking my Jack & cola at the Applebee's in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (After being on a business trip for a few days, my body often tells me to keep things as simple as possible; I would have gone to Subway, but the local Subway has been closed all day.)

As I ate and drank at Applebee's, I was half-watching the TV out of the corner of my eye. The TV was tuned to ESPN, which was showing the College World Series in baseball. But ESPN had taken a brief break from the game to let the viewers know about the ESPN page on Facebook. That's when it hit me:

Facebook is the new AOL.

Perhaps the Caesar salad (or something else) was bringing to mind Steven Hodson's June 22 Inquisitr post that touched on Facebook's commanding presence:

For Facebook it is all about having the people using its service believe that Facebook is providing them with a home on the web where they can gather with friends, where they can share their stuff, and where they can find out what their friends think of products and services.

OK, so Facebook is a destination, so why am I referring to Facebook as the new AOL? I've already referred to a Jake Kuramoto post in the Oracle AppsLab blog that asked the question

[H]ow can AOL still be #4 on the April 2009 list and still have 104 million uniques in a month?

Now I'm not talking about AOL's numbers (which, by the way, are actually GREATER than Facebook), but to AOL's presence of mind. Although derided today, AOL used to have a HUGE mindshare. When people thought of online, they thought of AOL. In the same way that ESPN and others have a Facebook page today, companies in the 1990s made sure to have their AOL keyword.

But if you want to realize how big AOL was back in the day, remember this.

Perhaps some of us talk about the "Scoble effect," where a mere mention from Robert Scoble can result in a huge spike of interest in a website or a product.

Perhaps some of us talk about the "Oprah effect," where a mere mention from Oprah Winfrey can result in a REALLLY HUGE spike of interest in a website or a product.

But those are small potatoes compared to AOL's power back in the day. Scoble schmoble. Oprah schmoprah. Hollywood made a whole dang MOVIE about AOL. Top that, Ev, Jack, and Biz. MSNBC, in its April 2009 slam of AOL, talked about the movie - and the heyday of the service:

America Online helped me and millions of others find their way onto the Web and into the world of e-mail at a time when only engineers and scientists had the keys to those kingdoms.

The dial-up service wasn’t the first — Prodigy, CompuServe (later bought by AOL) and others preceded it. But AOL was the easiest and most friendly with its digital greetings of “Welcome!” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

As hard as it is to believe now, there actually was a time when being told e-mail was sitting in your inbox was considered exciting, and not exacting.

And who could quibble with the charming 1998 movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? It marked AOL’s heyday and represented a cultural milestone: We were on our way to blending real life — including romance — with technology.

But there's another similarity between the AOL of the 1990s and the Facebook of today that has nothing to do with mindshare. Let's return to Hodson's Inquisitr post that discussed Facebook as a "home" on the web for many:

It is this place that Facebook strives to give the illusion of openness while at the same time making sure that none of the potentially lucrative data they are collecting every minute after every second....

Already Facebook is in position to cause Google a lot of financial pain as more and more traffic is being driven blogs and websites from within the walls of Facebook. The battle of SEO supremacy may already have been lost without a shot being fired. Google’s big guns of SEO have come up against an enemy that doesn’t need to rank anything because its members are more interested in what their friends suggest rather than cold analytically produced results. To top it off Facebook is the biggest part of the web that Google’s spiders can’t crawl.

You see, companies of the 1990s HAD to have that AOL keyword presence to reach the Americans who were on-line. And the content on AOL was inaccessible to those who weren't paying the AOL membership fees. In a similar way, Facebook is developing this whole ecosystem behind its wall that non-Facebook users cannot access.

Just as AOL was the Internet to many in the 1990s, Facebook is the Internet to many today.

But will Facebook suffer from the same decline that AOL has? While AOL still has a large amount of traffic, the numbers of AOL subscribers have dramatically declined:

AOL had about 27 million customers in the United States at its peak in 2002, but is now down to about 7 million, a relative shadow of itself. Some of those subscribers are folks who live in areas that don’t have high-speed service available; others just don’t need or want to pay for it.

Will Facebook suffer the same decline as AOL? Inquisitr commenter Tsudohnimh thinks so:

All the content within Facebook is a closed system. You can't embed videos, you can link to most pics, you can't share content outside of their playpen and this is not a sustainable system.

Facebook's clunky UI and lack of decent blogging features require content production to be done elsewhere and as long as that is the case their walled garden mentality will not work.

But Hodson is not sure:

I might have at one time agreed with the 'not a sustainable system' unfortunately I'm not so sure any more.

Oh, and in case you're still under the illusion that my "Facebook is the new AOL" realization is new and exciting, Jason Kottke was writing about this on June 29, 2007.

Looking at corollary behavior to answer an age-old question

I'm one of those people who believe in the free market and the invisible hand and all that, and there's a question that's been bugging me for years. Some governments have seen fit to mandate that all bars be non-smoking, for the convenience of non-smokers. However, if the majority of people are non-smoking, it seems intuitive that even without government regulation, some bars would open up that would cater to non-smokers. However, that did not happen, and I always wondered why.

Then I read Outside the Beltway, which linked to a post of Megan McArdle. McArdle also wondered why the free market didn't produce non-smoking bars, but then realized the answer:

You can explain it through preference asymmetry and the profitability of various customer classes: heavy drinkers are more likely to also be heavy smokers, and they are the most profitable customers. Bar owners don't want big groups of people who are going to take up three tables for an hour and a half while nursing one white wine spritzer apiece. They want people who are there to drink. In a competitive equilibrium, they couldn't afford to go non-smoking because they'd lose their most profitable customers to all the other bars.

Yet another example of intuition gone awry.

Purchasing from my airline seat? Not exactly.

Pan-Am Flight attendant, 1970 by John Atherton (gbaku) used under a Creative Commons License

I began reading a Riverside Press-Enterprise article entitled "Sky Shopping" and got all excited. Unfortunately, my excitement was a little premature.

You see, the vision that popped into my head when I read the headline was of a personal screen at my seat from which I could buy useless items at will. I have previously written (in my Empoprise-NTN blog about NTN Buzztime trivia games) about the ability to play trivia from your seat on Delta Airlines flights (note: the Delta system is not connected with NTN Buzztime). So if you can play trivia, why not buy things? It would also be green, since you could do away with the printed SkyMall magazines.

So this was the image in my mind as I began to read the Press-Enterprise article. And the opening paragraph certainly supported my mental image:

Air passengers soon could shop, reserve theater and theme park tickets and purchase vouchers for taxis or trains -- all from their airplane seats.

The article then describes the GuestLogix product OnTouch. But I was a little puzzled when I saw this statement:

The Toronto-based company said its "transaction platform" currently serves more than 90 percent of U.S. air passenger trips and 50 percent of European trips.

Huh? I thought to myself. I have NOT seen personal screens on anywhere near 90% of my flights. 9% maybe, but not 90%. But I kept on reading, and I realized that my mental picture was woefully inadequate:

Flight attendants currently swipe credit and debit cards on GuestLogix's hand-held devices to charge passengers' food and drink purchases.

With OnTouch, the flight attendant would enter the code to purchase an item from the SkyMall catalog or for a show on Broadway.

To buy SkyMall's $59.95 noise-canceling headphones, for example, the passenger provides a credit or debit card and shipping information, and the item is delivered to their home, office or destination.

For tickets, the passenger is given a voucher and credit card receipt which are presented at the will-call window.

So instead of my vision, in which I would just punch up the appropriate purchase from the convenience of my airline seat, the true vision is that you have to flag down the flight attendant, in between his/her drink and food runs, and point to the item on page 57 of the printed SkyMall magazine and say that you want to buy that.

This does not strike me as a wonderfully efficient system, and it's no surprise that the flight attendant unions aren't that hot on the idea either.

Flight attendants "are safety professionals, not sales people," said Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants that represents members working for 20 airlines....

Laura Glading, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represent 19,000 American Airlines flight attendants, said the group is not taking a vehement stand against the idea. "We're saying it has to be negotiated," she said.

Actually, the underlying issue is money. If flight attendants ARE going to be used as salespeople, then they want to negotiate the commission that they will receive.

It's too bad that the economics don't allow for this to be a way to get personal screens on all of the airlines, so that we can place our own orders without the middleman/middlewoman. But this is a much more expensive proposition than just throwing a few credit card readers on to a flight.

Atlantic City Boardwalk

Between Ballys and Caesars.

Looking away from the ocean, toward Atlantic City.

Told you this was a business blog.

That's why they call it Atlantic City.

Not that they have a...um...monopoly on the ocean.

Bigger is better? Chain stores occupy bigger locations

I grew up in the 1970s, and I remember a store that even at the time was unusual. It was an A&P grocery store in Alexandria, on Quaker Lane just down the road from a small theater. Both establishments are long since gone. You'll note that I referred to the A&P as a "grocery store" and not a "supermarket" - when a grocery store only has four or five aisles, the word "supermarket" somehow doesn't apply.

Several years later I lived in the Upland/Ontario California area, and remember that there used to be a Vons at the southwest corner of Foothill and Euclid in Upland. Eventually that store was closed in favor of another brand store (Pavilions) in another part of the city), but eventually it was decided that a Vons needed to be opened in central Upland again. But when they did so, they didn't try to use the space from the existing Vons. Instead, they built a bigger facility on the NORTHWEST side of Euclid and Foothill.

For those of you who don't live in the Southern California area, I should note that there have been a number of grocery store chain mergers over the last couple of decades. Long-time residents may remember Hughes, Luckys, Alpha Beta, and some other chains that have long since disappeared via merger. And the newly-merged companies eventually ended up closing some of the stores. Just one half mile west of the street-hopping Vons, you can find two shopping centers that used to have two grocery store anchors. The stores closed, and one became a gym while the other became an Office Max. Now the Office Max is closing.

With a few boutique exceptions (Fresh and Easy comes to mind), the general trend for stores has been for small stores to either get bigger, or to close entirely. When I lived in Portland around 1980, Fred Meyer was unusual in providing a bank inside its stores. Now this is the norm (partly because banks have been closing their traditional branches and moving into stores instead).

Of course, as you get bigger and bigger, you end up getting really big. And what happens when the big stores close? A small store gets bigger. This is happening in my local area:

Experts say it won't happen right away, but the [chain store closure] trend will likely send numerous value-oriented retailers into expansion mode as they look to grow their presence by snapping up big-box leases and buildings at bargain rates.

For example, when the Mervyns chain closed down, one of the chains that grabbed Mervyns locations was Forever 21.

The value-priced women's clothing chain Forever 21 is poised to grow again, after it recently acquired 15 leases of bankrupt Gottschalks, which will soon be shuttering all of its stores. Forever 21 by year's end will have new stores up and running at Riverside Plaza and Hemet Valley Mall.

And I'm not even mentioning the very big stores, such as Wal Mart and Ikea. Things are just getting bigger and bigger.

I've seen a lot of changes in the last 40 years, but what will I see in the next 40 years? In 2050, will the site of an old Super Wal Mart be occupied by a 7 Eleven, in which people complain about the paltry selection?