Ford Bets the Fiesta on Social Networking

Wired has an interesting article on Ford's efforts to make their cars appeal to the millennial generation. Part of their efforts to create buzz about the upcoming Fiesta models included giving 100 cars away to people who would discuss their experiences through their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr accounts.

Pirate Bay verdict and its impact on Google

The owners and operators of Thepiratebay.org were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay compensation and damages in totalling $3.6 million dollars. 

Piratebay DOES not hold content but only provides index to the data stored on individual computers.Google provides similar indexing facility, thus there is abig debate about 'who is the bigger"pirate"?'.

Check out the news at

Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/pirate-bay-google-technology-internet-pirate-bay.html 

This verdict has again raised the same questions gain;

1. Will the law be able to keep up to technological developments.

2. What kind of revenue model can solve the problem without putting unnecessary load on the justice system time and time again.

Google has already been notified by the Newspaper industry to start paying up for the news that it aggregates , now with this verdict threatening the basic search model of Google, how will the whole industry shape up? 

A Discussion on Healthcare and IT

This blogpost from Microsoft elaborates on some of the issues that we have discussed in our class about the need for interoperability of data within the healthcare system.  The two key issues holding us back are:

First, there is the “it’s-my-data” wall put up by hospitals, insurance plans, pharmacy benefit managers, and others......

The second wall is the “waiting-for-the-right-standards-set-by-government” wall.  There are multiple excuses buttressing this wall; the core of which come down to technology, standards or policy excuses.

--

The blog is worth reviewing for those dealing with healthcare IT and in other sectors where similar ideas may be holding us back from making significant strides. 

Reinventing the Home Phone? (Verizon)

Here is the businessweek article discussing the Verizon Hub. It shows that the hub even limits some functionality that Verizon already has built into their phones.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_15/b4126065685084.htm

Thought it would be useful to read after todays discussion.
--jz

eBay Spinning Off Skype

Skype was mentioned again in the mobile presentation Monday, and eBay just announced that they will spin off Skype next year through an IPO. As most of you are aware, eBay has struggled to justify the price they paid for Skype and they later had to write down much of that value, and this "un-doing" of the acquisition is due to limited synergies with eBay's other services. However, Skype is still growing at a rapid pace, and it'll be interesting to see how this IPO will go down, especially during the current economic environment with very few IPOs taking place.

Thinking of a Social Network Strategy for your memos?

For those of you thinking of building a Social Network strategy for your memos I wanted to share with you this link to Forrester Research which gives some insight of how social network activity can be segmented and where should money be spend.

Disrupters: No more phone bills

Vonage, MagicJack and other such VoIP services are already luring customers away from traditional wireline phone services, but they all require users to pay a monthly/yearly fee. But there's a disrupter which only requires users to pay for the cost of the device - and no service fees thereafter.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/09/technology/copeland_ooma.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008120915

CEO Memo to GE Healthcare

At the end of today's class we talked briefly about the importance of data in healthcare. The value of our health information cannot be underestimated and the ability for providers to access data literally saves lives. This is the reason why you hear about EHR's constantly. GE provides an EHR along with a suite of software solutions that are supposed to encompass the needs of an entire hospital (and its affiliated provider practices). Yet, many providers still prefer best of breed solutions rather than all-in-one packages. With interoperability in healthcare still a mess and the government pumping billions into EHR's across the country (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10161233-38.html) how does GE position itself to capture the market?

I suggest one area they should consider is moving its solutions to the cloud. We all know about SaaS and the success of Salesforce.com, but in healthcare these ideas are relatively untapped (check athenahealth.com http://athenahealth.com/). GE still prefers the model of selling full software suites to consumers then adding maintenance service on top. I think there could be a mjor shift away from this model over the enxt ten years and I am not sure GE is positioned well to transition. Thoughts are welcome.

Sony Counters Amazon

As anticipated, Sony has countered Amazon's launch of Kindle 2: in partnership with Google, Sony has added 500,000 new titles to the 100,000 e-books currently available on the Sony Reader. Sony is giving away the books for free. Here's a link to the article.

More trouble for big-name publishers?

This article, published in BusinessWeek last week, predicts a big drop in the prices that major online publishers can charge for banner ads. Part of the disruptive force that is putting pressure on prices is a company called Quantcast, which uses cookies, mathematical models, and billions of direct observations each day to determine the demographic characteristics of the people that visit the millions of websites that it tracks (all of the data is anonymous). The article's theory is that if advertisers have access to this data, they will no longer need to place banners ads on marquee sites to reach their target customers.

The article also contends that publishers could use information like the data collected by Quantcast to sell ads for untapped reader segments. However, I doubt that these additional revenues would offset the revenue lost by big publishers due to the banner ad price reductions. It looks like more trouble for the big-name publishers...