ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

A day after Groupon chief executive Andrew Mason gave Kara Swisher what’s come to be known as the “death stare,” at the Wall Street Journal‘s D: All Things D conference, Groupon announced (bit didn’t file) its initial public offering (IPO). The two-year-old company hopes to raise US$750 million, making it one of the largest recent IPOs. With 7,000 employees and 83 million subscribers in 43 countries, Groupon remains unprofitable. Groupon uses an accounting trick called adjusted consolidated segment operating income on its S-1 to magically turn a US$413.4 million loss in 2010 into a profit of US$60.6 million. What’s especially troubling is that Groupon raised US$946 million last January, spending all but US$209 million in payouts to the founders and early investors. I suspect Groupon will wish it filed on announcement. But, no worries: Mark Andreessen says there’s no bubble.

It had to happen sooner or later. Combine an untraceable digital currency with onion routing and one of the first things that’s bound to pop up is an anonymous, reputation-based market. That’s just what Silk Road is. Because it’s anonymous and because it’s new, Silk Road is mostly about underground goods that are generally illegal. Adrian Chen, writing for Gawker, explains how Silk Road works (mostly resembling something straight out of a William Gibson novel). The authorities will, of course, crack down on the drugs being bought and sold through Silk Road (because the goods ordered are physical, they have to leave the bitstream; that’s the weak point). And BitCoin isn’t as anonymous as it could/should be—a public log of all transactions is recorded. But those same authorities will almost certainly totally miss the true revolution lurking below the surface of Silk Road: A truly anonymous, untraceable, alternative currency leading not just to anonymous, reputation-based markets, but an entire agora.

In what I hope is a trend, a branch of Bank of America had to cut a check or risk losing its furniture to public auction. A couple from Ohio purchased a home in southwest Florida from Bank of America in 2009. They paid cash, so there was no mortgage or other BoA encumbrance on the property. On 16 February 2010, Bank of America filed for foreclosure on the property, voluntarily dropping the case two months later. The Circuit Court judge on the case ordered Bank of America to pay the couple’s legal fees. Bank of America sniffed twice and ignored the order. Earlier this week the couple, their lawyer, a moving crew, and two Collier County sheriff’s deputies appeared at a Naples, FL branch of Bank of America with a court order for either US$2,534 or furniture to be sold at public auction. Dick Hogan, writing for the Ft. Myers News-Press, quotes Todd Allen, the couple’s attorney just before Allen entered the bank: “I’m leaving the building with either cash, a check, or a whole lot of furniture.” Steven Beardsley, writing for Naples Daily News reports that at about the same time as the court ordered Bank of America to pay the couple’s legal fees, Bank of America’s local attorney, the David J. Stern law firm, was being investigated by the Florida Attorney General for questionable foreclosure practices. Beardsley also notes that the case isn’t over. Todd Allen told him that he’s going after Bank of America to cover his fees. “If Bank of America doesn’t pay it, we’ll be back doing this again,” Allen told the reporter.

ESRD

As Medicare begins tracking spending on individuals it will be able to reward hospitals that keep costs lower and provide qualitatively better care to patients in relation to competitors that don’t. Hospitals, of course, are not real happy with this new performance measure, citing that the new initiative—“value-based purchasing”—includes the 90 days after a patient is discharged from the hospital. Performance tracking begins next month and the reward-punishment based on the tracking begins in October 2012. Charles N. Kahn III, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, told Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, that his organization supports performance based pay for hospitals, but holding hospitals accountable for patients three months after discharge is “unrealistic, beyond the pale.” Some percentage of Kahn’s member hospitals will be punished for poor performance under the new initiative, so of course he’s going to see it as unworkable. Medicare has had qualitative data on hospitals for quite some time but has never made it public. Finally, patients will be able to make an informed decision about hospitalization.

“Do you want to live in a country where a poor person who wants health insurance has to give up a kidney?” That’s the question Gabriel Danovitch, a transplant surgeon at UCLA poses to Michael Booth, writing for the Denver Post in an article about compensating organ donors. It’s no secret that organ waiting lists have grown. A generation ago, cadaver organs could be procured in about a year; now waiting lists on either coast are approaching 10 years. Some in the medical community, like Arthur Matas at the University of Minnesota, are outspoken in their support for compensating organ donors through a variety of means including paid health insurance. Others, like Danovitch believe any system of compensation for organ donation will devolve into the rich exploiting the poor. What will likely tip the balance for the US Congress, at least in the realm of kidney failure, is the fact that organ transplants are very expensive but significantly cheaper than dialysis. Booth has been doing a generally excellent job covering dialysis issues since DaVita moved its corporate home to Denver, but he makes the mistake of conflating liver and kidney failure in this article. A person with liver failure will die without a transplant; a person with kidney failure can live indefinitely on dialysis without a transplant.

Internet

Google has rolled out its +1 button for websites allowing users (that are logged into Google) to actively recommend content on independent websites. These recommendations will appear in Google’s search results for the user’s social network. It’s been added to Hasten down the wire.

Twitter has rolled out its Follow Button allowing users to follow specific Twitter accounts based on content on websites. The content author’s Twitter username appears next to the “follow” button. When users click on the Twitter username, the author’s profile and latest tweets appear. I’ll be working on adding this to Hasten down the wire in the future.

The United Nations has published a report (.pdf; 143KB) saying, unconditionally, that internet access is a human right. Accordingly, disconnecting anyone—individually or collectively—is a violation of human rights and international law. With regard to individual disconnection, the report calls out France directly: “The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” Addressing collective disconnection, the report puts the entire globe on notice: “The Special Rapporteur remains concerned that legitimate online expression is being criminalized in contravention of States’ international human rights obligations, whether it is through the application of existing criminal laws to online expression, or through the creation of new laws specifically designed to criminalize expression on the internet.”

Law

Matthew Lasar, writing for Ars Technica, has a really good explainer on the legal history of warrantless wiretapping in the US.

Privacy

Jim Stogdill, writing for O’Reilly Radar, has absolutely nailed the problem with personalization, relationship marketing, online tracking (tags, bugs, pixels, beacons, and all the rest), behavior modeling, and every other online marketeer wet dream by asking merely for an ethical bargain. Stogdill uses the example of his local independent bookseller who makes personalized reading recommendations for him based on their conversations. The bargain is ethical because it’s obvious and transparent. These ethical bargains are necessarily individual by nature, because it’s as impossible to have a conversation with a corporation as it is for one to behave ethically under current US law. And because, as Stogdill writes, “... real relationships aren’t built on asymmetry….”

Publishing

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have announced schema.org to support a common vocabulary of structured data markup for web pages using microdata. With more than 100 new markup types, this isn’t going to get adopted overnight, but it’s coming and if you publish on the web you should probably be working on this now. If you’ve already been using Google’s rich snippets, think of this as an extension. If, like me, you’ve avoided rich snippets because it’s Google-specific, now’s the time to rethink that.

Technology

Google has announced its Google Wallet mobile payments system to compete with Square’s offerings. Google Wallet relies on near field communication (NFC) to work and currently is only compatible with Sprint’s Nexus S. More Android smartphones will be supported in a few months. Google is using MasterCard’s PayPass network that currently has 300,000 retail nodes (120,000 in the US) The current version of Apple’s iPhone does not have an NFC chip. Within hours of Google’s announcement, information of a PayPal lawsuit alleging misappropriated trade secrets and recruiting agreement contract violations became public.

User experience

Aaron Gustafson has published Adaptive Web Design. You’ve probably never heard of Gustafson—he’s a behind-the-scenes tech editor—but you will. Jeffrey Zeldman writes of Adaptive Web Design: “This isn’t just another web design book. It’s an essential and missing piece of the canon. Our industry has long needed a compendium of best practices in adaptive, standards-based design. And with the rise of mobile, the recent significant improvements in desktop and phone browsers, and the new capabilities that come with HTML5, CSS3, and gestural interfaces, it is even more vital that we who make websites have a reliable resource that tells us how to take advantage of these new capabilities while creating content that works in browsers and devices of all sizes and widely differing capabilities.”