Archive for July, 2009

Jarvis Coffin: Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google continue feeling their way around the room

Many times over recent years as the competition has played out between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google (and AOL, I suppose) I’ve thought of a line from Henry Kissinger’s book, “The White House Years” describing the duel between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The line goes like this:

“The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.”

It’s always seemed such an apt description of the exertions of the “superpowers” online and, especially, their affect on the room. This week’s announcement of the Yahoo! and Microsoft search deal brings it to mind again, though the deal is relatively benign in relation to it’s affect on the overall Internet advertising market. Search happens on a mountaintop these days. It’s only scary when the companies living at that altitude climb down off the mountain to carouse in the streets of the Internet community swinging their clubs at each other, blindfolded.

Maybe the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal announced this week will keep them all confined to the mountain for a while, which should be fine with the rest of us.

More on Microsoft

Dr. Jon LaPook: Eastern Medicine in Western Culture

About a quarter of all Americans are obese. This week the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that obesity-related diseases account for an estimated 147 billion dollars in medical costs annually in the United States. That’s 9.1 percent of all medical spending, up from 6.5 percent in 1998.

If you do the math, the report suggests we could pay the entire ten-year trillion-dollar bill for health care reform by lowering our obesity rate from 25 percent to 8 percent and thereby saving 100 billion dollars annually. And after ten years we’d have 100 billion dollars a year left over.

Obviously, we’re failing miserably to curb the obesity epidemic. But is there a country with a low obesity rate that we can look to as an example? China comes immediately to mind. In recent years the obesity rate in China has soared as urbanization and Westernization have introduced an unhealthier diet and more sedentary lifestyle. But traditional Chinese culture still serves as a model we can study, leading to an obesity rate of only 2.6 percent in 2002. Just as experts are looking to countries around the world for ideas on how to fix our broken health care system, we should be exploring the traditions of other cultures — now and in the past — for ideas on how to follow healthier lifestyles.

During this week’s CBS Doc Dot Com, I visit two Chinese physicians practicing in New York City who are trying to integrate the best of Eastern and Western medicine.

Eastern Medicine in Western Culture Pt. 2
Dr. Jon LaPook and Chinese physician Dr. Wang discuss the benefits of acupuncture and other common practices associated with Eastern medicine. Click here for video.

Eastern Medicine In Western Culture Pt. 3
Dr. Jon LaPook undergoes a traditional Chinese medicine exam. Click here for video.

Western Medicine For Chinese Patients
Dr. Jon LaPook speaks to Dr. Pong, a Chinese physician who practices Western medicine for a predominantly Chinese patient base. Click here for video.

Western Medicine For Chinese Patients Pt. 2
Dr. Pong, a Chinese physician who practices Western medicine, relates his experience growing up with Chinese medicine. Click here for video.

Watch CBS Videos Online

More on Health

Amitai Etzioni: Obama’s victory? Give me a break.

If this is a victory, I sure don’t know what a defeat would look like.

A July 29th New York Times headline states, “In victory for Obama, House panel approves Restraints on Executive Pay.” First, you should note that an approval by a panel and a token will buy you a ride on the subway. By itself, it is not worth much. The House has to approve it, and – given the lobbies lined up — it may not. More fatally for the bill, the Senate is quite unlikely to support such an anti-Wall Street move.

Wait, wait, I am just warming up. The bill does not limit any one’s pay by one penny. It merely allows shareholders to vote on the matter. If and when they do – the vote is not binding! That is, the corporations are free to pay their executives all they want, anyhow.

You may say the corporations will be embarrassed to pay through the nose after their shareholders vote not to grant monumental pay raises. However, so far there have been no signs, no hints, that these Wall Street firms are embarrassed by anything.

Finally, you should know that unless limits are set on the total compensation of executives, all such a bill–if enacted, if acted upon, if heeded–will lead to is just more gaming.

Here is one method of gaming that should give you a feel for all the others. I was a guest of a CEO of a very large insurance company. He even gave me a ride on his private jet. I asked him how much he spent last year on the entertainment of customers, fellow workers, and politicians. He responded with a wide smile: “About 300 dollars.” When he saw that my jaw dropped down about as low as it goes, he added with a chuckle: “One of my assistants makes all the arrangements and signs on the checks and credit card slips with his name.”

The fact that the CEO felt free to tell me all this shows you how impressed he and his friends are by Obama’s “victory.”

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor at The George Washington University, and the author of The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics. He can be reached at icps@gwu.edu. www.gwu.edu/~ccps/securityfirst

More on Barack Obama

Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea: The Diary: Traveling to Jerusalem

Originally posted in the Financial Times

Israelis can be great grumblers, yet the global economic crisis engenders fewer moaners there than elsewhere: “Our banks,” said one caustic tycoon, “never liked lending anyway.” Expensive clubs and restaurants in Tel Aviv are full, tourism is flourishing; one hears Russian and French spoken almost as frequently as American English in the halls of palatial hotels.

Jerusalem, however, is increasingly austere, ruled by an Orthodox mayor. Young couples prefer to live outside the city and even senior cabinet ministers commute to Tel Aviv and its garden suburbs. Yet it is still a uniquely dignified setting for ceremonious public occasions. I was there to collect a Lifetime Achievement award in the memory of Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jewish Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993 who earned the respect of Arabs as well as Jews and who was hailed as the greatest builder of the city since Kings David and Herod.

I was overawed at the thought that my forerunners were Helmut Kohl, a great ally of Israel, Isaac Stern, the violin virtuoso and founder of an Israeli music centre, and Professor Bernard Lewis, dean of Middle Eastern history experts. I knew Teddy slightly while I WAS still a schoolboy in Vienna when we were both members of the Zionist Youth Movement. Shortly before the war he ran the underground transports of young Jews in central Europe to Palestine. At that stage of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish drive emigration was still allowed, even encouraged. Teddy negotiated with Adolf Eichmann at Gestapo HQ for their release.

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Affiliate Window launches URL shortener for affiliates

Affiliate Window has today added another release to its suite of affiliate tools in the form of a URL shortener called tidd.ly.

Creating deeplinks is an essential part of any affiliate campaign for merchants with multiple products, so the development of this URL shortener is a welcome solution to the previously arduous process presented by long linking URLs.

Tidd.ly allows lengthy links to be transformed into short and tidy URLs at the click of button. This function will make it even easier for affiliates to promote products on the likes of Twitter allowing increased exposure for merchants and more conversions for everyone.

Tidd.ly is an extension of the Affiliate Window ‘Deeplink Builder’ with a simple button called ‘Create Shortlink’ that will transform the link into the tidd.ly format in just one click.

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Pinoy Information Hype: WordPress AutoBlog Plugin

AutoBlogged is a powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates blog posts from any RSS or Atom feed. Autoblogging is a great way to automate your WordPress posts so you can focus your efforts on earning money with your blog. With dozens of features, AutoBlogged is one of the most powerful autoblog software plugins available for WordPress and the best way to get automated blog content.

Features:

* Image and video support
* Custom post templates
* Advanced post filtering
* Enhanced tagging engine
* Regular Expression Search & Replace
* Create thumbnails for images
* Override feed data with your own values
* Supports many premium WordPress themes
* Fully supports WordPress 2.7 and later

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10 Reasons Why People Fail At Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is one of the fastest-growing and profitable businesses today. It is an excellent way for anyone to start a small business with little investment, no overhead, and high profit margins. Anyone can get up and running with an online
business in hours. Sounds like an easy way to make money, doesn’t it? Compared to other offline small business ventures, it is.

Yet internet marketing failures still vastly outnumber those who have succeeded in internet marketing. For every story you hear of someone making $10,000 a month at internet marketing there are hundreds of untold stories of those who failed to
make a profit or only made a few dollars and then quit. Why do so many fail when the potential to succeed is high?

1. Failure to plan – No matter what type of business you are running you need a business plan with well-defined goals. What are your short-term and long-term goals? What steps do you need to take to meet those goals? Write out your plan and review it frequently. You are running a small business. Treat it as one.

2. Failure to work the plan – So you already have a business plan? Are the following it? A plan means nothing if you don’t follow it. Work the plan every single day. Revise it if necessary but don’t detract from it.

3. Making goals too big early on – Many internet marketing failures try to do too much too fast. You are not going to create the ultimate web site for dog lovers overnight. Start small with dog training tips and add content daily. Those 1,000+ page web sites took months or years to build, so will yours.

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