Lance Armstrong-backed photo sharing service Mobli is giving people a chance to win $100,000 by giving up Instagram. The company has just kicked off a campaign called #mylastinstagram, complete with a new site at MyLastInstagram.com.
Users are encouraged to download Mobli (of course), upload a “creative/funny/original” photo, use Mobli’s #mylastinstagram filter, post that photo to Instagram, and tag it with the same hashtag.
“Say goodbye to Instagram, their boring filters, and cropped photos (for at least 3 months, you won’t miss it… we promise!),” Mobli says.
According to NBC Bay Area, Mobli is going so far as to fly a plane over Facebook headquarters repeatedly with a 100-foot banner advertising the contest.
I doubt the contest will do much to reduce Instagram’s share of the photo sharing space (if the privacy freak out didn’t), but it’s a clever way to get some app downloads, I suppose.
Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the global data center industry:
Oracle opens Japan data center. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it is opening a data center in Japan, to support its RightNow Cloud Service. With a data center in the region Oracle can manage service level objectives and data governance for local customers. Oracle RightNow Cloud Service combines Web, Social and Contact Center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the Cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust and strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. “We are dedicated to simplifying IT so customers can focus on driving business innovation,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd. “Oracle’s latest data center is a signal of our commitment to the success of Japanese companies. It will free them from the burden of software management, allowing them to have more resources to engage with their customers.”
Akamai and Korea’S KT expand partnership. Akamai (AKAM) and Korean telecommunications company KT announced that the companies will expand their strategic partnership. Using Akamai’s Aura Managed CDN, KT will have dedicated CDN capacity that is available for its own content applications or third party CDN services. ”The era has come where culture and digital content are leading the market. Our main priority is to ensure access to content from any device, at anytime, anywhere,” said Heekyung Song, Senior Vice President, Enterprise IT BU, KT. “Through this partnership with Akamai, KT will provide a CDN platform specializing in media delivery, web performance and security so companies can focus on developing quality content and web applications without concerns about delivery.”
ITG expands with Interxion in London. Interxion (INXN) announced that ITG, an agency brokerage and financial markets technology firm, has expanded its hosting relationship with Interxion by adding a new London based data center. ITG currently maintains data center space with Interxion in Stockholm, and selected Interxion London for its central city location and access points to leading trading venues. “We are committed to continued investment in technology where performance benefits can be passed to our clients,” said Rob Boardman, CEO of ITG Europe. “Whether you’re looking for sophisticated automated tools, the highest quality dark block liquidity, or personalised high-touch trading, you can rely on our continuous history of innovation to improve your performance while reducing costs.”
As an examination of the evolving economics of snapping celebrity photos, Jenna Wortham’s Tuesday New York Times blog post about how a recent candid pic of Beyonce spread across the internet is pretty revelatory. Lurking below the surface, though, I think there’s an even bigger story about how easy it is to snap and publish photos of everyone — not just celebrities — and for those photos to spread further and faster than ever before possible.
Just recently, for example, some relatively harmless (albeit juvenile) “big dongle” jokes put two unwitting conference attendees in the public eye and cost one of them his job. He wasn’t on stage; he was sitting in the 10th row during a talk. The woman who tweeted their images and her complaint ultimately lost her job, too, but her misfortune doesn’t cover his rent.
Even ten years ago, that woman wouldn’t have had a cellphone with a camera and an internet connection and a platform to spread the pic to thousands of Twitter followers — and their followers — in seconds.
I’m not certain privacy laws created at the dawn of the photography era and advanced during the print-media era are well suited to protect our solitude and anonymity in the Instragram era. I actually wrote about this in September 2011, but now seems like a good time to re-raise some of the tough legal questions that phenomena such as self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. Here are some situations where the social web confuses traditional definitions of public and private, and publication versus publicity:
If a celebrity’s friend tweets a photo of that celebrity smoking pot in his own house, is that information protected because it’s newsworthy?
If I’m an individual who simply wants to keep to myself — no Facebook, no Twitter, not even an email address — is writing about me on a personal blog or Facebook page, or uploading (and/or tagging) photos of me, “highly offensive to a reasonable person?”
Even if a disclosure is highly offensive, does publication via social media constitute publicity? What if the publisher only has 3 friends? Or 100? Or 2,000?
Does something going viral change a publication among friends into publicity?
What if a Flickr photo from an intimate dinner with friends, not highly offensive, but potentially embarrassing just because someone is ugly, goes viral and the subject becomes a laughing-stock? What’s the recourse?
You can insert Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest into those example and the questions remain essentially the same.
And with photos, especially, there’s a lot to consider:
[T]he confluence of facial-recognition technology, cloud computing and big-data processing could soon make it possible to determine a person’s name and any publicly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it all starts with a single photo on Facebook.
For someone who has intentionally kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share willingly. All because his friends are sharing the details of their own lives online.
A Google Image search for “fat guy speedo.” Public? Yes. Fair to be presented to the entire world with one click? I don’t know.
For us everyday, non-celebrity types, going out in public used to provide anonymity because we were just another face in the crowd. A dinner or party with some friends, even a family reunion, used to be a relatively private affair. Now, we’re just an Instragram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule.
It used to be there was public and then there was public. There was private and there was private. For better or for worse, social media and smartphones are blurring those lines. Maybe we need some boundaries.
Google has added live transit information to more cities on Google maps. Users can now access live departure times for seven lines on the New York City subway system (MTA) and buses and trams in the greater Salt Lake City area (UTA).
“With these updates – part of the millions of live transit schedule updates we process every day – you get instant access to the latest information right on Google Maps, making trip planning a cinch,” says Google Maps Partnership Development Manager, Soufi Esmaeilzadeh.
“Riders on the nation’s second largest subway, Metrorail in Washington, D.C., can now see live service alerts, including unplanned delays and scheduled track work, straight from Metro’s Control Center on Google Maps,” adds Esmaeilzadeh. “To adjust your travel around the alerts you see, simply choose another suggested route or change your departure time.”
There are now pick-up locations, departure times, estimated travel time, and fare amounts for over 800 cities in over 25 countries, with live trip updates only available in select cities.
This week, Google announced a new initiative to help marketers better understand the impact of mobile on their businesses both online and off. The campaign, called “Full Value of Mobile,” includes a Calculator tool as discussed here.
Google has now put out a handful of videos related to the initiative, which we’ve compiled below.
This one is aimed at showing you how an in-store purchase can originate with a search on a smartphone:
The next one shows how replacing a shredded suit was made possible through a purchase on a mobile website.
This one shows how a spontaneous party was made possible with purchases made via phone calls:
This one shows the purchasing of a new dog collar on a laptop based on research done on smartphone after “being inspired while out and about.”
This one shows how a pizza order from a smartphone app led to a romance:
The last one includes all of the above stories in one.
“Customers’ constant connectivity through mobile has created new paths to purchase that start on their smartphones,” Google says of the video. “They can call a business, download apps, look for store directions, buy on a mobile website or continue on a different website . As a marketers, it is key that you account for all these new types of conversion and understand the return on investment you’re getting from your mobile efforts. This video, ‘How they got there’, is a short story told backwards that will show you 5 ways in which mobile can drive value for your business.”
The device has not even become available for people to buy yet, outside of the lucky chosen few who won Google’s contest. Should this really be outlawed before we can really see how they can be used?
H.B. 3057 was recently introduced in the West Virginia legislature. It would add existing traffic safety rules in the state, specifically including a ban on “using a wearable computer with head mounted display”. This is described as “a computing device which is worn on the head and projects visual information into the field of vision of the wearer.”
The bill doesn’t single out Google Glass, of course (there will be plenty of competing devices), but it is a response to Google’s much hyped device. The bills authors see the amendment as an extension of not texting while driving. It’s understandable that they would want to prevent more deaths from reckless driving before they occur. However, an outright ban on the device could potentially prevent lives from being saved too.
You have to take into account that at this point we have no idea what these devices are really capable of, and it’s highly likely that developers will create applications that actually enhance safety. Consider this talk from one of the Google Glass engineers, who was actually talking about this kind of technology as it pertains to contact lenses (but it still applies here).
During his presentation, he outlines possibilities for the future, which include several types of vision improvement, such as “super vision,” night vision and multi-focal electronic lenses. In other words, it’s possible that at some point, devices like Google Glass could actually be used to help the vision impaired see better and more clearly. It’s possible that they can enhance anyone’s vision at night. Obviously, any of these scenarios could actually prevent auto accidents.
But that’s all just speculation for a possible future. The point is, do we want to have these devices banned before we really know what they can do? For that matter, if the technology makes it to contact lens form, how would any law ever be enforced?
It’s also worth considering what they’re already capable of today, and that is, for one, shifting the focus from devices that require you to look away from the road. You’re taking your eyes off the road when you look at your phone, or even your dashboard/console. With Google Glass, you’re not.
As Matt Peckham at Time says, “West Virginia already bans texting while driving or using a phone without a hands-free device…But isn’t Google Glass also a hands-free device for your eyes? A way of potentially freeing you from looking at things that might otherwise take your eyes completely off the road, whether glancing at your phone to check the time or answer a call or scan the weather?”
Still, it’s not that simple. I, for one, have not had the pleasure of trying one of the devices on, much less driving while wearing and operating one. I can’t speak from first-hand experience. It’s entirely possible that it does create distractions, and maybe there is valid argument for a ban. But banning the devices this early seems like a snap judgment that doesn’t take into consideration all possible factors.
Apple Insider has been working hard to unearth information about the Apple data center project in Reno, Nevada. After a drive-by shed little light, the site has obtained some aerial photos and one close-up of a new structure on the Apple site.
“As the project site was still being finalized, the company asked for permission to begin work on an initial, aproximately 20,000-square-foot structure to get head start on the construction project,” AppleInsider reports.
This is similar to the approach the company has taken in Prineville, Oregon, where a small structure was deployed quickly, with two larger buildings to follow.
What does this Apple facility look like? Hop over to Apple Insider for a quick look at the photos, and then come back. It’s a long, rectangular structure with a sloped roof with a peak in the center. Let’s see, where have we seen something like that before …
That’s an image of the Yahoo “Computing Coop” data center in Lockport, New York. The similarity shouldn’t be too surprising, since one of the Yahoo data center executives who worked on the Yahoo Lockport project, Scott Noteboom, now is a leader of the data center team at Apple.
There are some similarities between the two designs, but some differences as well. Both retain the “coop” structure, adopted from chicken coops that channel hot air into the upper area of the building. Both have large louvers and fans, effectively turning the building into a huge air handler to circulate air around the IT equipment.
But the Apple facility in Reno appears to be missing the “cupola” that runs along the crest of the roof on the Yahoo data centers, which allows rising server waste heat to be evacuated from the highest point of the roof. This suggests that Apple is using a different approach in handling the removal of hot air. The AppleInsider photos don’t present a full view of the positioning of the louvers on the side of building, but there are large fans and louvers at the end of the facility – which could mean an airflow pattern in which fresh air enters the side of the building, flows through the servers, and then through the hot aisle and into a plenum that brings the hot air out through the end of the building. Or not – only Apple knows for sure.
It’s interesting to note that the design in Reno is different from the smaller “tactical data center” that sits alongside the 500,000 square foot main building at Apple’s campus in Maiden, North Carolina. Here’s a photo from Apple:
As is the history with Apple, many of the technical details remain undisclosed. But what’s clear is that Apple is using a combination of small and large facilities, and mixing traditional big-box brick-and-mortar structures with pre-fabricated modular components to speed its time to market. It’s a flexible approach that matches facility design to capacity planning – as well as the possibility that workloads are being matched to different types facilities (as Facebook has done with its cold storage data center).
If you’ve been on Facebook in the last day or two, you’ve probably seen a whole lot of red equal signs as people change their profile pictures to show their support fo marriage equality. ‘Equality’ was the top term buzzing on Facebook on Tuesday, followed by DOMA, and Supreme Court. Also on the list: Prop 8, SCOTUS and Defense of Marriage.
It’s been interesting to see the creative ways people are using the red equal sign in their own ways. Appropriately, Martha Stewart Living went the cake route:
The post currently has nearly 14,000 likes and nearly 16,000 shares. The profile picture is still Martha Stewart’s face, however.
The red equal sign image started with the Human Rights Campaign, which posted it on their Facebook page. It’s a play on the campaign’s logo, which is traditionally yellow on blue.
It’s highly likely that many of the red equal signs will continue to penetrate your Facebook news feed throughout today, as the court will hear arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act. As previously reported, a number of tech companies, including Facebook itself (and Google), have filed an amicus brief arguing that the act is bad for business.
Mashable, which pointed to the Martha Stewart image has a slideshow of various brands that are showing their support.
Residents of Santa Clara, Calif. not only have a new smart meter program but free outdoor Wi-Fi to boot. The city’s non-profit electric municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power (SVP), is taking advantage of connected electric meters by integrating support for a second public unencrypted Wi-Fi channel, allowing the city to blanket the airwaves with free Wi-Fi.
SVP expects to support around 5,000 daily connections on the new public network, which has an SSID, or network name, of “SVPMeterConnectWiFi.” There’s no login, no password, nor credentials of any kind needed to use the outdoor wireless network. Utility data from the meters will be sent securely, however.
While the new network should add convenience around town, residents shouldn’t expect super high speeds: SVP says the connections will top out around 1 Mbps, which is slightly slower than 3G mobile broadband speeds. But for occasional use to check email, social networks and other light usage, those speeds should be more than sufficient; plus, you can’t beat the price!
Yahoo and CNBC announced the launch of Big Data Download today. This is a new twice daily online program hosted by CNBC’s Courtney Reagan, and regularly featuring Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief Aaron Task, senior columnist Michael Santoli and co-host of “The Daily Ticker” Lauren Lyster.
“‘Big Data Download’ is a daily digital program that taps into the big data revolution to deliver valuable information to everyday investors and business decision makers,” Yahoo says in an email. “The show, which will air twice each day, will draw upon sources including Yahoo! Search data, social sentiment and investing algorithms created exclusively for this program from the Yahoo! Labs team.”
“The inaugural episode of, ‘Big Data Download’ examines whether the housing market is really in recovery, by looking at both housing stocks and Yahoo! Search data,” the company says. “In the second episode, ‘Big Data Download’ drills into gas prices. Are you being ripped off at the pump? ‘Big Data Download’ explores oil, gas, distillate inventory numbers to shed light on where prices should be and which companies will get a lift when the price goes up.”
Thursday’s episodes will look at “key economic indicators that tell where the S&P 500 should really be right now,” and a controversial new program at Bank of America.
The show will air regularly Monday through Friday at 11AM and 2PM Eastern.
Last summer, Yahoo Finance and CNBC announced a partnership to reach a wider audience, and share information and ad revenues.
Flipboard has launched a big overhaul with version 2.0, which transforms the reading experience to something of a creation/curation experience. Now, in addition to reading news in a magazine-like format, you can create your own magazine-like experiences based on your interests.
“When you search, we instantly create a magazine out of your results. It’s faster, more visual, and easier to navigate,” explains the Flipboard team in a blog post. “And, for the first time, you can collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful magazines. These can be private, or if you want to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, you can make them public and share them on Flipboard and beyond. Now everyone can be a reader and an editor.”
Users can hit the + button next to articles, create “magazine” names, and addd descriptions. There’s no limit to the number of magazines you can create (at least that’s what they say). In addition to news sources, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, LinkedIn and Tumblr can be used for magazine content.
The new Flipboard also comes with more content, including a partnership with Etsy, which should mean good things for the rapidly growing online marketplace.
There’s a bookmarklet, which users can add to their browsers and use it to addd any piece of content on the web to Flipboard.
“If you’d like to be inspired, tap on ‘By Our Readers’ in the Content Guide, which contains a selection of magazines from staff and friends of Flipboard who’ve been experimenting with 2.0 in our beta program,” says Flipboard. “They include bloggers like Gardenista’s Michelle Slatalla, entrepreneurs like Kate Kendall, curators like Bureau of Trade’s Michael Phillips Moscowitz, small business owners like Elizabeth Leu, musicians like Linkin Park, and people with passions around graffiti, fashion, apps, horses, travel, food, kids and more. We’ll be highlighting many of them—and people like you!—in our blog in the coming weeks.”
Other new features include: a new content guide, commenting, more recommended reading, subsections in partner magazines, newspapers and websites, fast section switching, and optional Facebook Open Graph integration.
Flipboard’s redesign, of course, comes at a time when a lot of people are looking for replacements for Google Reader. For power users, Flipboard has hardly been an adequate alternative. Sure, it’s pretty, but for organizational and productivity purposes, it just hasn’t fit the bill. For the casual news reader, however, it’s an eye-pleasing experience, and possibly even better now.
Flipboard has a reported 50 million users. It’s unclear when the new features will make their way to Android.
While the physical infrastructure that makes up the internet is colloquially known as a “series of tubes,” thanks to the late Sen. Ted Stevens, the physical infrastructure that comprises the cloud has no friendly sobriquet. What could we call it? A huddle of hypervisors? A bunch of boxes? A cluster of nodes?
But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.
Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.
Structure 2012: Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, Chris C. Kemp – CEO, Nebula and Co-Founder, OpenStack, Sameer Dholakia – Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix
This year’s focus: The physical cloud
Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?
We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.
Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments
And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.
One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.
So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.
A look at the interior of an Equinix facility in Singapore, where the company has announced plans to build a data center. (Photo: Equinix)
In a period of strong data center growth in Asia, Singapore is the hottest market in the hottest region. Today Equinix announced the latest in series of major projects in Singapore, teaming with real estate investment trust Mapletree Industrial to build a 385,000 square foot data center that will add capacity for another 5,000 cabinets of servers and IT gear.
Equinix has two existing data centers in Singapore, where the colocation and interconenction provider reports strong demand from financial and cloud companies. The new facility will be adjacent to Equinix’s existing SG1 data center, and will be interconnected through a dedicated fiber network, allowing customers in SG1 to expand their business within the Equinix platform. The build-to-suit project is scheduled to be completed in the second half of 2014.
“Singapore is growing in importance as a cloud hub for the region,” said Clement Goh, managing director of Equinix South Asia. “Global and multinational companies have seen Singapore as a gateway for diverse connectivity to the other Asia Pacific markets. Equinix is committed to catering to the increasing demand for data center and interconnection services in Singapore. Our new data center will help our financial and cloud customers drive new business and collaboration opportunities, improve performance and reduce operational cost with low latency and high proximity.”
The new Equinix IBX data center will be a seven-story building situated within one-north, a 200-hectare development by JTC Corporation designed to host a cluster of research facilities and business park space in the biomedical sciences, IT, media, physical sciences and engineering industries. Located in the southwestern region of Singapore, the property is easily accessible via major expressways and the public transportation network.
“We are pleased to work with Equinix as it achieves another milestone with the development of its third IBX data center in Singapore,” said Tham Kuo Wei, chief executive officer of Mapletree Industrial Trust (MIT). “The commitment from Equinix demonstrates its confidence in MIT’s development capabilities in customizing high specification industrial facilities. This collaboration allows Equinix to focus on its core business while MIT manages the capital expenditure and development process.”
Industry bellwehthers Equinix and Digital Realty Trust have both actively expanded their space in Singapore. Other companies that have deployed data center space in Singapore over the last two years include Google, Amazon Web Services, IO, IBM, Salesforce.com, SoftLayer and NTT.
The Minnesota Cup is a competition that rewards good business ideas. Here’s the quick take from the Minnesota Cup website…
Have the next great business idea? The ninth annual Minnesota Cup competition opens for entries on March 25! The Minnesota Cup supports and accelerates the development of breakthrough business ideas from across the state to build the vibrancy of Minnesota’s business community. Minnesota residents have until May 17 to submit entries on the Minnesota Cup website to compete for $200,000 in prize money.
There are six divisions:
LifeScience & Health IT
High Tech
Energy & Clean Tech
Social Entrepreneurship
General
Student
You can only apply to one division. But the application process seems pretty straightforward. The contest is only open to Minnesota residents. I’d love to see some of the prizes make their way out of the Twin Cities!
Recently public smart grid player Silver Spring Networks has started working on a deal with Singapore utility Singapore Power to build a wireless smart grid network including smart meters. The deal is Silver Spring’s first in Asia and Silver Spring Executive Vice President, Global Development Eric Dresselhuys tells me he hopes it will be the “anchor customer in the region.”
Asian markets are growing at a fast pace and Silver Spring is trying to get a toe hold into the region. Dresselhuys says utilities in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos and even India, look to Singapore Power as a leader. The utility has 2 million customers, and the deal is actually with the company’s division that owns the electricity transmission and distribution, SP PowerAssets.
The pace of the growth of smart meters in the U.S. has been expected to slow down in 2013 and 2014, and then pick back up, according to Pike Research. That’s partly because the early adopter utilities in states like California have already adopted smart meters. The temporary drop is also because the Department of Energy stimulus funds gave smart meters a temporary pop a couple years ago. Networks in some states, like ComEd’s, have faced other types of logistics hurdles.
Outside of the U.S. there’s a lot of growth going on, and particularly in developing countries where economies are booming. Silver Spring has already built networks in Australia, but is looking hard at Latin America. According to Pike Research, while less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, and is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020.
It’s another edition of the weekly call-in show where we answer your tech questions. We start off the show with the big news that T-Mobile finally has its own iPhone and LTE network. Then we get right into your questions about another CDMA Nexus phone, Chromebook tips, and what’s the best keyboard for Android?
To be a part of the show, just call in and leave a voicemail at 262-KCTOFEL. If you do, we’ll play back the question on the show and answer it. Or you can tweet me at @kevinctofel on Twitter. Each week, I’ll answer as many questions as I can while keeping the podcast to a manageable amount of time: 20 to 30 minutes at most.
Show notes: Hosts: Kevin Fitchard and Kevin C. Tofel
What are the chances of Verizon getting another Nexus phone?
Can any Chromebook or Chromebox run the crouton scripts for Linux?
Why would anyone wait for the phone to ‘arrive’ at T-mobile when there’s already an unlocked GSM model?
In further recognition of UCLA Health’s reputation for world-class patient care, more than 200 UCLA physicians have been named to the prestigious Best Doctors in America list for 2013.
The national list, which is compiled every two years by Boston-based Best Doctors Inc., is based on an in-depth, impartial peer survey of doctors working in a variety of specialties. Only the top 5 percent of physicians in the country receive this honor.
“Earning a place as one of the Best Doctors in America is a singular honor,” said Dr. David Feinberg, president of UCLA Health. “This is a testament to our physicians, who provide excellent patient-centered care. We are grateful to our gifted and dedicated medical team throughout UCLA Health, which goes the extra mile every day to save lives and deliver compassionate care to patients in our community, one patient at a time.”
For its list, Best Doctors conducts an exhaustive, peer-reviewed survey of the medical profession, polling more than 50,000 doctors across the U.S. and asking them this question: If you or a loved one needed a doctor in your specialty, to whom would you refer?
The doctors surveyed are asked to provide an assessment of the clinical abilities of their peers within more than 400 sub-specialties of medicine. The millions of individual data points collected through this process are compiled using algorithms that correct for statistical bias, yielding the list of the physicians deemed the “best” by their peers. The list identifies specialists who are considered by fellow physicians to be the most skilled in their fields and most qualified for reviewing and treating complex medical conditions.
The goal of the Best Doctors in America list is to identify the best trained, most experienced and most skilled specialists, regardless of where they practice, according to Best Doctors Inc.
UCLA’s world-class specialists made it into every specialty category listed in the Best Doctors database. UCLA Health’s group of experts listed in the database includes world-class heart, pediatrics, neurology and neurosurgery specialists.
Best Doctors Inc., founded in 1989 by Harvard Medical School physicians, works with the best 5 percent of doctors, ranked by impartial peer review, to help people get the right diagnosis and right treatment. Gallup has audited and certified Best Doctors Inc.’s database of physicians and its companion Best Doctors in America List as using the highest industry standards survey methodology and processes. The global health solutions company, which has grown to over 30 million members worldwide, uses state-of-the-art technology capabilities to deliver improved health outcomes while reducing costs. Best Doctors seamlessly integrates its trusted health services with large self-insured employers, insurers and other groups in every major region of the world. The company also designs and implements international insurance programs that help people be sure they get the right health solutions.
The UCLA Health System, which comprises the UCLA Hospital System and the UCLA Medical Group and its affiliates, has provided a high quality of health care and the most advanced treatment options to the people of Los Angeles and the world for more than half a century. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA, Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA, and UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica (which includes the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital) deliver hospital care that is unparalleled in California. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is consistently ranked one of the top five hospitals in the nation and the best in the western United States by U.S. News & World Report. UCLA physicians and hospitals continue to be world leaders in the full range of care, from maintaining the health of families to the diagnosis and treatment of complex illnesses.
The USDA “census of agriculture” is a government-run farm surveillance program designed to register and inventory detailed private data on farm assets, operations and personnel. A census form is mailed to each farmer in the United States, accompanied by threats of compliance…
President Obama’s regulatory and fiscal policies have been blamed for keeping unemployment high, but one industry where there has been dramatic jobs growth is not likely one the president is happy about – firearms.
”Guns and ammo are selling briskly these days, and…
The health benefits of human breast milk are vast, and researchers from Sweden have uncovered the presence of yet another substance in breast milk with incredible cancer-fighting abilities. As reported in a study published in the journal PLoS One, the substance, known…
