ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Businesses have been sending their products to “celebrities” forever. It’s one of the oldest public relations and marketing strategies and must work because they keep doing it. So, logic would dictate that the inverse—sending competitors’ products to those “celebrities” you don’t want tainting your brand should also work, right? Apparently so, because businesses are starting to do it. Calling it “unbranding,” according to Adam Fusfeld, writing for the Business Insider.

Amy Goodman, writing for truthdig, uses the salmonella-infected egg recall and associated problems in the US to revive the “growing movement to amend the U.S. Constitution, to strip corporations of the legal status of “personhood,” the concept that corporations have the same rights as regular people.” Other developed parts of the world don’t have chicken egg-related salmonella problems because they vaccinate their hens.

When you drive a car that’s nearly 20 years old, you keep at least a passing interest in the US automobile market. I like to keep a running list of two or three cars I’d consider in my head. Just in case. Until today the Volkswagen Jetta topped that list. Well, actually, the Cooper Mini topped my list, but my wife said absolutely not. But today I found out that the 2011 Volkswagen Jetta has been retooled for American audiences. Volkswagen has made the misstep of deciding to compete with the Japanese on—wait for it—price. Turns out, not many in the US are willing to pay extra for a entry-level European sedan. But torsion beam rear suspension and rear drum brakes? You’ve got to be joking.

ESRD

The US Veteran Affairs announced that the Redsense alarm will be required in all Veteran Affairs’ dialysis centers by 10 November 2010. Research by the Veteran Affairs National Center for Patient Safety into 47 bleeding incidents indicates the Redsense alarm is the only alarm that detects blood leakage during hemodialysis. Unfortunately, the requirement covers only those dialysis patients “outside of the dialysis clinic area” (mostly hospital wards) and those “patients identified by dialysis staff at risk of a venous needle dislodgement.” That’s usually limited to patients who are uncooperative, demented, agitated, or confused. Of the 47 bleeding incidents studied, “40 of these events were serious bleeding episodes and some of these resulted in fatalities.” I’ve seen several patients nearly bleed out in my 10+ years of hemodialysis.

Bill Buhr, writing financial analysis for Morningstar and published on Yahoo!, makes a really serious error of fact in his analysis on “Why Dialysis Remains an Attractive Business.” Buhr writes, “dialysis is somewhat unique in that Medicare is the primary payer for all patients with end-stage renal disease after a period of 33 months, regardless of age.” This is incorrect. I’ve been a dialysis patient for 10+ years and remain privately insured. I’m in a distinct minority, to be sure, but there you have it. Buhr projects 2010 average revenue per treatment of US$349 to dialysis providers in the US like Fresenius and DaVita based on a blended rate of Medicare and private payers. He projects 1% reductions in 2011-14 because of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “bundling” rule. The reduction is so low because “we expect private payer reimbursement levels to mitigate the negative bundling reimbursement changes.” Buhr goes on to project a revenue growth estimate of about eight percent for Fresenius in 2010 and a five-year compound annual growth rate of about six percent for the company through 2014. He opines that “DaVita faces greater uncertainty and an elevated risk profile given the firm’s lack of diversity, as the company possesses neither a products business nor international exposure on the services side.” Nonetheless, Buhr’s projections for DaVita are nearly as bright: A seven percent growth in revenue for 2010 and a compound annual growth rate of five percent through 2014. His bottom line: “... we continue to believe that new regulations will not cause any substantial hiccups operationally for either company.”

Intellectual property

And you thought Paul Allen was the non-evil Microsoft co-founder…. He’s filed a (.pdf; 102KB) lawsuit alleging patent infringement against Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo!, and others. But not Microsoft. Or Amazon. Allen claims these companies violate patents held by Interval Research, one of his many defunct startups. Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, sussed out the four disputed patents. Trouble is, they’d apply to just about any website on the net.

Internet

Let me just say I don’t know beans about social media or gaming. I tried Google Buzz for a day or so and Google Wave for about a week; Twitter and LinkedIn ares the only social media environments in which I regularly partake. The original SimCity captivated me for a couple of months. So, like I said, I don’t know beans about social media or games—especially Facebook, which I’ve intentionally avoided, and where, apparently, the two meet. Simon Dumenco, writing for Ad Age, spills the beans about what you all have been doing. Mafia Wars has 25.9 million monthly active users (MAU) and FarmVille has 61.9 million MAU. And this is big business. Dumenco reports Disney is paying at least US$500 million for Playdom, a social media gaming company with only 4.4 million MAU. As Dumenco writes, “An American gaming company is captivating millions around the world by getting them to obsess about fake food, fake business and fake real estate. How America-right-now is that?”

Dropbox is the best software/service hybrid to come down the internet turnpike in quite some time. As one of its earliest users I depend on it (along with the tragedy of missed potential that is Apple’s MobileMe) to keep all three of my MacBook Pros synched and to share the random file every now and again. The software also lives on my iPod Touch for perusing document changes and the like. But mostly it keeps updated versions of my most recent work documents synched between three computers. And it’s nearly flawless. Glenn Fleishman, writing for the Economist, gives a pretty good overview of the software/service, noting the development efforts taking place, mostly on iOS, using the Dropbox application programming interface (API) released last May.

Jess Bachman has published an interesting infographic illustrating Google’s acquisitions. It tells the story of not only where the search giant has been but where it’s likely going.

Rocky Heckman, a senior security architect at Microsoft, tells Josh Taylor, writing for ZDNet.com.au, “The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second at Microsoft.com.”

Media

Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, poses the question “Who’s a journalist? Does that matter?” Forget about the first bit, it doesn’t really matter who is (or isn’t) a journalist and there are more important things to worry about than what to call them. Thankfully, Gillmor hits on the most important bit—shield laws—and who, if anyone, should be protected. “Some states specify who counts as a journalist, which leaves out a huge range of people who effectively practice journalism nowadays; it also encourages a pernicious, back-door licensing of journalists,” writes Gillmor. “The right approach, if we need shield laws at all, is to protect acts of journalism.”

Privacy

A federal lawsuit (.pdf; 3.3MB) has been filed in California’s Central District federal court against Specificmedia for using Adobe Flash to revive users’ browser cookies after user-deletion without the users’ knowledge. This is similar to other lawsuits filed by Joseph Malley alleging that the companies failed to disclose they were using Flash to store user cookies. Malley is the attorney who reached a US$9.5 million settlement with Facebook over its Beacon advertising system. Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, notes this “zombie” Flash cookie practice was first discovered last year when Berkeley privacy researchers published a report indicating 54 of the top 100 websites employed such practices. Some of these “zombie” Flash cookies—capable of storing up to 100KB of data—were used for tracking users; others were used to set the default volume for video streams. Unlike browser cookies which users have fairly good control over in their browser preferences, Flash cookies are user-controllable only through as set of well-hidden settings panels on the Adobe website.

Technology

Google has added voice and video chat to its Gmail email product. The new service lets users call any telephone from within Gmail. Calls to the US and Canada will be free until at least the end of the year and calls to the UK, France, Germany, China, and Japan are as low as US$0.02 per minute. Google’s new service is also integrated with Google Voice. Your Google Voice phone number appears as the caller ID and you can receive calls made to your Google Voice number within Gmail. Following it’s usual procedure, Google is rolling this out to Gmail users in waves. My own account was almost immediately updated, but from the sound of things, my University of Minnesota account may never see the service addition.

Vivek Wadhwa, writing for TechCrunch, hammers out “The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: They will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any ‘technology baggage.’” Wadhwa quickly couches that statement in weasel words: “At least, that’s how the thinking goes in the tech industry.” Age discrimination undoubtedly happens, but wrong in so many ways. Dave Winer explains why (read the comments too).