Last week, I scolded colleague Mihaita Bamburic for writing old news — charity auction for coffee with Apple’s CEO. When I saw the item, someone offered $50,000 for 30 minutes with Tim Cook. About 24 hours later, when Mihaita posted: $180,000. Now, after 84 bids and 13 days to go, the number is $600,000. That bid, placed five days ago, looks like as much as anyone will pay.
I know that Apple products are notoriously pricey, but there is something simply unfathomable about paying so much for a cup of brew with Cook. No disrespect to him, but I could see this kind of cash to sit with Steve Jobs, who isn’t available for obvious reasons. The winning bid (so far) is worth $20,000 a minute. The cash does go to charity. But really, pay $333.33 per second?
Cook in demand is good public relations for Apple, which needs an image makeover. The Teflon flakes off after all, not a situation imagined a year ago, with the stock reaching for a new high (achieved September, $705.07). But since, every badmouthing sticks to the once resistant surface. The charity thing is good timing. But there’s more underway. Cook will appear on stage at this month’s D11 conference. Yesterday, Apple announced a $17 billion bond offer, the largest in corporate history.
Apple’s recent problems are about perception, not performance, and reflect waning confidence in Cook’s leadership. Finally, the company makes real effort to generate some sense that Cook can lead in the wake Jobs left behind. Not that any of this helps the stock, which from Friday’s close is up 8 percent in late-day trading today. Hey, every little bit helps.
Regarding the value of Cook’s time, if my rough calculations are correct, during calendar first quarter, Apple generated 2,249,053.03 profit every 30 minutes. From that perspective, maybe $600,000 is a bargain. What would you pay for coffee with Cook?
Adam Grant, author of the book Give and Take , recently gave an “Authors At Google” talk at the Googleplex, discussing his work.
The publicist for the book describes “Give and Take” as changing our “fundamental ideas about how to succeed – at work and in life”.
“For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck,” they say. “But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. Give and Take illuminates what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common.”
President Obama has nominated former cable and wireless lobbyist Tom Wheeler as the future chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The president also nominated Commissioner Mignon Clyburn as the acting chair for the time between Wheeler’s Senate confirmation and the departure of current Chairman Julius Genachowski in mid-May.
As we covered yesterday, Wheeler is a choice that both sides of the regulatory divide support, which is something in an arena as divisive as telecommunications regulation. The congratulations from public interest groups and industry are pouring in, and we’re setting down to compose or list of the challenges we believe Wheeler will face, including the IP transition and the upcoming incentive auction.
Moving forward with plans for mature offline web apps, Google announced Wednesday that it is previewing Packaged Apps in the Chrome Web Store. At this time only folks using the developer channel of Chrome OS or the Chrome browser for Windows can see the apps directly by searching the Chrome Web Store, which are broken out into their own “Apps” category.
Although Google is just getting started with these, the concept adds a much wider range of capability for web apps written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Currently, most of these web apps are Chrome extensions, which are comprised of just enough code to run in a browser with an online connection.
Packaged Apps, however, look and behave like a traditional application because unlike extensions, they contain all of the code needed to run. That means some, if not all, functionality works offline. Note that these are also different apps from what Google calls Native Client, or NaCl, apps: Those are truly native apps written in standard programming languages with HTML wrapped around them.
I’m not currently using the developer channel of Chrome OS on my Pixel, so I haven’t tested any of the previewed Packaged Apps yet. But I plan to soon. I’ve been playing SparkChess, an HD 3D chess game that has computer opponents. Instead of playing solely online, the SparkChess packaged app fully supports offline use. The obvious upside is that my Chromebook Pixel isn’t “just a browser” any more.
For now, the Packaged App preview is really intended for developers to test out their app’s installation process and such; that’s why only users on the Chrome dev channel can see them. Google hasn’t yet given a timetable for widespread Packaged App support on the stable channels, so perhaps we’ll hear more details in two weeks; we’ll be reporting live from the Google I/O Developer event in San Francisco.
Also: stay tuned to our weekly GigaOM Chrome Show podcast as we’re looking to dive deeper into the Packaged Apps v. Native Client apps comparison in an upcoming episode.
Precog, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup that’s trying to seed the market for advanced analytics on unstructured data, is coming out of beta on Thursday with a line of appliances designed to let everyday users get started on making sense of social, web and application data. The company’s underlying technology has remained the same since we profiled Precog in September, but a journey into the world outside Silicon Valley has changed its thinking about how to market and deliver its product.
Put simply, Precog’s technology lets users ask questions of their unstructured data (e.g., stuff sitting in Hadoop, MongoDB or any other non-relational data store) in whatever format it was created — JSON, logfile, XML, what have you. This is different from the standard operating procedure of querying unstructured data — including the current SQL-on-Hadoop craze — which usually involves somehow transforming data into a format that a relational engine can read before beginning the analysis. Precog also features visualizations, charts and reports designed with these new types of data, and presumably larger datasets, in mind.
CEO John De Goes and COO Jeff Carr
However, Founder and CEO John De Goes told me, the company came to realize over the past several months that as much as what it’s doing might fall under the “data science” umbrella, that’s the wrong messaging. Outside of Silicon Valley, he said, “a lot of companies don’t have the technological sophistication to understand the whole data science thing” — they just want to know that they can ask deeper questions of the new data types they’re storing in their NoSQL databases without having to perform ETL operations on it or write a lot of complicated code.
And the bigger those companies are, Precog COO Jeff Carr said, the less likely they are to want a cloud service like Precog initially offered.
So the company took both lessons to heart and is rolling out a line of appliances (physical or virtual) that complement its flagship cloud service, each targeting specific use cases. The first three are social media, web analytics and application data, and the appliances are equipped with baked-in capabilities important to each of those fields. The social media one, for example, will feature advanced sentiment analysis and natural language processing, while the web analytics one will focus on features such as behavioral clustering.
Under the covers, though, each appliance still runs on the broader Precog platform, Carr noted, and someone who buys one just to get started in a specific area can pretty easily (i.e., without reaching “super-coder” status) turn it toward other data types and other types of analysis. But right now, De Goes added, no one really knows what it means to have an analytics product designed for unstructured data, so the appliance approach should make it easier for large enterprises and non-tech companies to digest.
An example of web analytics in Precog.
It’s a “baby steps” situation, explained Carr: “Don’t sit there and try to think about how to solve every problem all at once. Let’s try to sit there and think about data types you know you’re having problems with [now].”
Analyzing data in its native format has advantages beyond just omitting an extra transformation step, though, and the Precog team thinks companies will get hip to these advantages as they begin to understand the analytic aspects of non-relational databases as well as they do the operational aspects. Often times, these will be new use cases, which is why Precog considers itself more complementary to than competitive with traditional data warehouses, SQL-on-Hadoop tools and BI software.
One early customer is using Precog to match up résumé data — often enhanced résumé data — with job openings, which is a tricky proposition in a relational format because résumés can include so much personalized information or content that doesn’t fit into a schema at all, really. Another user, a large telco, is trying to build new data products for its customers by mashing together all sorts of internal and third-party data in numerous formats.
Carr compared the shift to the shift from just flat files to relational data decades ago. “It’s happening again,” he said. “It has to happen again … people are not going to abandon JSON because it does’t fit neatly inside a table.”
Precog is telling the right story around why unstructured analytics matters, but one has to assume there will be a major shakeout in the big data analytics space over the next few years. There are only so many new technologies companies can absorb at once — Hadoop, NoSQL, SQL on Hadoop, unstructured analytics, Platfora, in-memory, stream processing, next-gen analytic databases, etc. — and it’s hard to predict which messages and capabilities will win out.
However, unless Hadoop really does become the lone dumping ground for all non-operational data — regardless the source — technologies like Precog that can act as the analytics layer across numerous data stores would seem to have an advantage.
In Google’s latest Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts is asked about a common SEO misconception that he wishes to put to rest. The answer: Google is not doing everything you read about in patents.
Cutts says, “There a sort of persistent misconception that people often have, which is that just because a patent issues…that has somebody’s name on it, or someone who works at search quality, or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are using that patent at that moment.”
He continues, “Sometimes you’ll see speculation, ‘Oh, Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that the domain was registered.’ That doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily doing that. It just means that, you know, that mechanism is patented.”
Cutts recalls, “Somebody else at Google had gotten a patent on the idea (or the mechanism, not just the idea, the actual implementation) by which you could look at how people had changed their webpage after an update, and basically say, ‘Oh, these are people who are responding to Google, or they are dynamically SEOing their stuff,’ and so there were a lot of publishers who were like, ‘Ugh, I’m just gonna throw up my hands. Why bother at all if Google’s just gonna keep an eye?’ and you know, ‘If we change, and Google’s just using that and monitoring that, and changing their ranking in response,’ and it’s the sort of thing where just because that patent comes out, doesn’t mean that Google’s currently using that technology.”
“So, patents are a lot of interesting ideas,” he adds. “You can see a lot of stuff mentioned in them, but don’t take it as an automatic golden truth that we’re doing any particular thing that is mentioned in a patent.”
It is true that patents provide a lot of insight into the kinds of ideas that Google is thinking about, and often we can only really speculate about certain things that it is actually implementing.
Yesterday I attended the Minnesota High Tech Association Spring Conference. It’s always a good opportunity to see folks and hear about what’s happening in the high tech industries and what folks are thinking about. It seems they are thinking about innovation, cloud computing and mobile technology.
I heard a lot of speakers talk about the need to open up their technology and their ideas –in terms of getting feedback from customers, getting customers to help spread the word (generally via social media), listening to what others are doing. Technology projects can no longer be done in a vacuum – because the technology outside of that vacuum changes so quickly.
I tried to take notes during the sessions I attended. Also I have a video of my colleague Bill Coleman talking about the MIRC project. All of the Tekne Award recipients from 2012were invited to speak at the conference – and the MIRC project was a recipient.
The morning keynote was Scott Durschlag Best Buy
Where is Best Buy going?
Case for Change
Market Landscape – channel shifting
Competitive Environment – need for strong brand differentiation
Consumer Dynamics – connected lifestyles
Digital Context – role of social media
Renew Blue
– Reinvent CE retail by delivering delight anytime, anywhere on any device
– Optimize digital customer experience
– Build open & adaptive web 3.0 platform
– Enable deep personalized relationships with customers
We support thee-Fair Marketplace legislation. Folks like Best Buy have been playing on an unleveled playing field when Internet-only businesses don’t have to charge tax.
We’ve been working on Data Center Legislation.
Breakout Session: The Spectrum of Innovation
Dana Lonn, Managing Director CATT, Toro
– Any problem is solvable – key to innovation.
Paul Mattia, VP, RD&E, Foodservice, Ecolab
– Innovation Metrics
– Be Public about recognizing innovation
– “Connect people with values (make people love their job) – inspires innovation”
Mike Schaefer, Vice President, CTO, Global Research and Development, Tennant Company
– Innovation is not optional
– Innovation must be part of your strategy
– Diversity and talent are important – getting different points of view
– Don’t believe your own press releases
Questions:
How do you incorporate social media into innovation strategies?
At Ecolab it’s easy. Our customers are restaurants. The pressure of TripAdvisor has made people want to be cleaner.
Toro – we’re just starting. We watch for comments on our products. We don’t tap into open innovation and asking the world for ideas. We’re working on how that applies to us.
Tennant – We’re early stages too
How do you approach failure?
Ecolab – We tell them that we don’t expect them to succeed every time. We share stories of failures. Sometimes it’s a matter of being ahead of your time. We try to learn from failure.
Toro – Wharton Business school professor talks about the need for performance originations and learning organizations – the question you ask relates to that tension.
Tennant – We have a review process, which helps people get on board.
How do you see mobility play in?
Toro – One challenge – we think of products and projects. We were educated to define everything then freeze specs and come out with a perfect product years later. That’s not the world we live in today.
In a large company, how do you work with innovation outside of your company?
Tennant – Must ask what’s happening in adjacent spaces.
Ecolab – We host events that lets people experience what the customers experience.
Session 2B: IT | The Changing Role of the CIO (Room L100 I/J)
Today’s IT organizations are facing a barrage of changes; Cloud Computing, Social Networks, Mobility, SaaS, etc.. World class IT organizations are adapting by taking on a Service Orientation for their departments. Through IT-as-a-Service initiatives, our panel of leading CIOs is able to provide their stakeholders a greater return on investment – but it isn’t always so easy. Come hear what challenges and strategic approaches have been used and how they have led to greater success.
§ Moderator – Todd Hauschildt, CEO, SWAT Solutions, Inc.
Patrick Joyce, CIO, Medtronic
It’s all about change. Always looking at what’s the next change.
Disruptive technology – means we now work as a broker of technology and as an educator.
IT is the business.
Tim Thull, CIO, Medica
Establishing a more adaptive IT staff. We have needed to be faster. We’re having to react in real time.
We decide where to get involved and where to stay away. We focus on control, cost-effective and security.
Alan Abramson, CIO, Health Partners
The role has moved from being a one-stop –shop to more of a business partnership. Service is also playing a larger role.
I have two rules with technology innovation:
Any technology that is sufficiently developed will be adopted despite opposition. The question is – when it is sufficiently developed?
As adoption takes place, there’s a lag between start of use and value of meaningful use.
We talk about mobile phone as if it’s a new things – it’s been around for 40 years.
Final Keynote: Jim Link, Author The New Creativity
When skill meets will magic happens – the same is true with creativity.
We are getting worse at creativity – probably because we’re thinking and teaching it the wrong way.
People who are creative are:
Curious: People who are creative are observant, studious, thoughtful. They work to know more about their field. They are always noticing things and filing them away until later.
Inquisitive: they dig to get more info. They pursue things until they find their answers.
The more collect – they more you connect.
Creativity comes from
Curiosity -> drive analysis -> created idea-links materials -> making connections
As BlackBerry begins rolling out its second BlackBerry 10 smartphone, the struggling vendor will at least have some good momentum to build on coming out of April. According to market watcher Net Applications, BlackBerry gained usage share in April after losing share in each of the two prior months. While BlackBerry only accounts for a minuscule portion of global mobile usage — 1.51% in April, less than Symbian’s 1.73% — it’s at least moving in the right direction, up from the low of 1.39% it hit in February. IOS shed about 1.5 points in April to fall to a still-dominant 59.04% according to Net Applications, while Android smartphones and tablets gained more than a point to climb to 26.02%.
TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2013 was held this week in New York City, with plenty of focus on tech disruption, as well as a lot of apps, demonstrations, funding announcements and product announcements. Funding announcements came from SkyTree, which secured $18 million and Dwolla, raising $16.5 million. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #TCDisrupt.
Dwolla raises $16.5 million
Payments network company Dwolla announced that it has raised $16.5 million in new Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company’s previous investors, Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round. Highlighting Dwolla as an example, legendary venture capitalist Fred Wilson was at TechCrunch Disrupt New York and stated that ”money is information, like bits,” noting that giving currency a spin that puts it in a continuum with the many blogging and content companies that his firm has invested in over the years.
“A16z makes bets on companies that change the underlying fabric of their markets and, like Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub, we think Dwolla is going to do it in the banking world,” said Scott Weiss, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and new Dwolla board member, in a statement about the investment. “The fact that Dwolla’s network can simultaneously meet the needs of a complex enterprise or government, while allowing a parent to pay the babysitter with her phone, reflects just how simple and strikingly different this solution is in the marketplace.”
With the funding Des Moines, Iowa based Dwolla will double its workforce in Iowa and New York. It will also open an office in San Francisco, adding to existing staff in Des Moines, New York, Omaha, and Kansas City. The Bay area office will be led by Dwolla’s Chief Operating Officer, Charise Flynn, and will be mainly focused on product and business development and marketing. Dwolla CEO Ben Milne explains why he is so excited about the funding announcement, and why Andreessen Horowitz makes sense – including the fact that he and Marc Andreessen were both born in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
“The reality is that our fundamental business is allowing anybody with an Internet connection get access to their money and exchange it with anybody else they want to receive it,” Milne says. “A lot of that adoption is going to come instead from third-party platforms and products,” he adds. “I don’t see people going to Dwolla.com more and more – I see them doing that less and less, while our software is just facilitating the payments.”
Skytree receives $18 million
Machine learning company Skytree announced that it has closed $18 million in Series A funding with U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) as the lead investor. Package delivery giant UPS and Sun Microsytems co-founder Scott McNealy joined the new investor syndicate. The new financing will help fuel an aggressive growth strategy to disrupt the Big Data Analytics market with enterprise-ready Machine Learning. As part of this transaction, USVP General Partner Rick Lewis has joined Skytree’s Board of Directors.
“A new era has dawned, in which enterprises are demanding the advanced, real-time business insights that only Machine Learning can provide. Skytree makes the power of Machine Learning available to all enterprises, with a striking performance advantage over their competition. Since the company’s launch in February 2012, customers have validated our view that Skytree has a huge lead in this fast-growing market. Skytree’s team, technology, and customer traction have made Skytree the company to beat in applying Machine Learning for Advanced Analytics,” said Rick Lewis, General Partner, USVP.
When you think “big data,” you probably don’t think of the United States Postal Service (USPS). As it processes more than 528 million pieces of mail each day, the USPS has become an active participant in the big data revolution, and operates one of the most powerful non-classified supercomputing databases in the world.
Residing in the Eagan IT and Accounting Service Center in Eagan, Minnesota is the core of the USPS supercomputing operations. The supercomputing and revenue protection program helps to cut fraud on its reported $65 billion in annual revenue. To detect fraud on 528 million pieces of mail each day the USPS started building IT architecture in 2006, and has been expanding it ever since. Simultaneously processing data from 6,100 mail pieces per second requires some hefty compute power.
“All of this happens in an average of 50 to 100 milliseconds,” says Scot Atkins, USPS program manager. “If something is off – a package with insufficient, duplicated or fraudulent postate – it is detected and intercepted in near real-time. A distribution clerk can reassess a package, errors can be tracked down, and fraud attempts – large or small – are reported to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for further investigation.”
The system used to process and detect fraud is impressive. In a recent interview the USPS in-memory database was noted at 16 terabytes, up 6 terabytes from a 2010 Oracle case study report. Coupled with a transactional database it will perform billions of mail piece scans in a standard 15 hour processing day. Real-time scanning performs complex algorithms, powered by a SGI Altix 4700 system. Oracle Data Warehouse keeps fraud results stored in 1.6 terabytes of TimesTen cache, in order to compare and then push back into the Oracle warehouse for long term storage and analysis. Data ingest rates exceed 1.5 million records ingested per second per 16 core blade.
Fighting fraud, waste and abuse is top of mind for USPS and government organizations, as budgets are cut, and billions of dollars are lost in duplicative payments, overpayments and fictitious vendors.
A recent study suggesting that Siri and other voice-to-text services are just as dangerous to use while driving as traditional text messing is seriously flawed, according to one of Siri’s co-creators. The study, conducted recently by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University, found that drivers who were texting took about twice as long to react as drivers concentrating only on the road. The delayed reaction times were roughly the same for drivers using Siri, but the service’s co-inventor Adam Cheyer argues that the study “seems to have misunderstood how Siri was designed to be used.”
An old ad for Filigranes Bookstore, advertising Franz Kafka’s literary classic, The Metamorphosis, has drawn some buzz from the reddit community, appearing in the “WTF” subreddit, and ultimately drawing thousands of upvotes.
Now that’s a viral ad. The ad is drawing this buzz years after it was released. It’s been around since 2008 at least. That’s the power of reddit.
Here’s a question for you: Is a company-provided device a benefit? You don’t pay for hardware, software or service but might get older gear as hidden personal cost. I ask, because if Gartner is right, you’ll soon pay, whether or not you want to. A survey of CIOs finds that 38 percent of companies plan to stop providing employees with devices by 2016. Wait a bit before reading on and think about what that really means.
“We’re finally reaching the point where IT officially recognizes what has always been going on: People use their business device for nonwork purposes”, David Willis, Gartner vice president, says. As someone working from home full time since May 1999, I must confess to rarely using company-issued computers or other devices. But that was my choice, and one often not supported by IT departments. Now, for many workers, there will be only choice of bringing their own.
BYOD Trends
So-called “bring your own device” is not a new trend. Cell phones, laptops and PDAs like BlackBerries and Palms are among the devices coming in the back door before being approved to go out the front door, starting in the 1990s. Numbers are larger with smartphones and tablets, but nothing more. What’s different now: Economics. As companies slash budgets amid troubled times, letting more employees bring their own makes increasing sense. Meanwhile, cloud services shift some of the in-house software development and corporate need to support specialized homegrown applications across managed devices.
“BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades”, Willis says. Mid-size companies with 2,500 to 5,000 employees are biggest adopters. Globally, BYOD is standard operations in three of the four BRIC countries — Brazil, India and China. Adoption is lowest in Europe; United States twice as much.
In many emerging markets, there is no switch from company supplied to bring your own. But in geographies like North America, compelled-BYOD means employees will pay for devices or services they didn’t before. Fundamentally, companies shift some, or all, the financial responsibility to workers.
Shifting Costs
Right now, about half of companies with BYOD programs subsidize devices. Gartner sees rapid increase in the number of companies offering nothing whatsoever and recommends they do just that. Rather, at most, there should be compensation for service, such as cellular for smartphones. “The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs”, Willis says.
Conceptually, BYOD eases other, hidden costs. If the company supplies device and software, employees demand support and complain more. If they bring their own, they feel more ownership, responsibility, reducing IT helpdesk and related costs.
By 2017, Gartner expects that one-half of employers will demand employees provide their own devices for work purposes. This represents a stunning shift in costs. Most companies don’t provide cars or other transportation for people to get to work. Should they provide laptops, smartphones and tablets, too? That’s a question for you to answer in comments.
Security Matters
BYOD is the answer to the “How do you we cut tech costs?” question, but not necessarily the right one. During my days as an analyst in the last decade, I counseled companies to beware of commingled behavior and data around devices employees used professionally and personally. For sure, someone buying the device is more likely to use it personally — hey it’s theirs — creating, if nothing else, security risks. They potentially increase, when the starting point of management is employee rather than employer.
Willis sees security differently, and perhaps he’s right. The new trend recognizes what I’ve done for 14 years — “use a personal device in business. Once you realize that, you’ll understand you need to protect data in another way besides locking down the full device”. He’s right about that. Nevertheless, is it really sensible for companies to essentially encourage data leakage that increases security and privacy risks?
Debating this topic in BetaNews group chat today, Ian Barker makes an astute security observation: “I suppose if it’s your own laptop you’re less likely to leave it on the train!” Yeah, that’s an even more common trend, eh? Bring your own device home from work?
UCLA researchers and their partners across Los Angeles County have been awarded an $11 million federal grant to fund research on community-based interventions aimed at reducing the higher rates of stroke and death from stroke among disadvantaged Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans.
Research has shown that stroke risk can be substantially lowered by increasing physical activity, controlling blood pressure, adopting a healthy diet, quitting smoking, lowering cholesterol and, for certain individuals, taking medication like aspirin.
However, the underserved populations targeted by this research program are frequently prevented from achieving these health goals by a variety barriers, including a lack of transportation for doctor visits, an inability to afford medication, insufficient knowledge about how to change their lifestyle, living in neighborhoods where infrastructure or safety concerns prevent walking, and an inability to read food labels in English, among others.
The Los Angeles Stroke Prevention/Intervention Research Program in Health Disparities is a multi-partner research center funded by the National Institutes of Health that will conduct two randomized, controlled, community-based trials of stroke-prevention interventions. One will measure how much the risk of recurrent stroke is lowered by teaming community health workers with physicians and nurses at Los Angeles medical centers serving low-income populations.
“These community health workers will conduct home visits to outreach to patients with a recent stroke,” said the research center’s director, Dr. Barbara Vickrey, vice chair and professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “They will use mobile health technology to help them educate and empower these patients to make changes in their diet and physical activity and to promote the use of home blood-pressure monitors and medications that substantially lower the risk of another stroke.”
A second trial will assess the impact and sustainability of a culturally tailored behavioral intervention designed to provide stroke risk–factor education and increase physical activity, primarily walking. This program will be delivered by staff at senior centers serving African American, Latino, Chinese and Korean communities in Los Angeles and is designed to be self-sustained after the study is over.
An additional study will analyze several decades of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to identify changes in biological and social risk factors for stroke over time across different racial and ethnic groups. Hopefully, Vickrey said, this research will identify new risk factors that can be controlled through future interventions.
“The goal of the program is to learn what is effective in reducing stroke risk in underserved minority populations, which are at higher risk and have worse outcomes,” Vickrey said. “We know that we have effective treatments to control risk factors for stroke, and now we need to create and test effective and sustainable ways for patients to access medications and to succeed in lifestyle changes that will prevent stroke. What we learn from the center’s research could improve stroke prevention for those in Los Angeles County and also could be exported to communities with underserved populations across the country.”
The multi-disciplinary, collaborative center builds on UCLA’s established partnerships with other health care systems, including Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, Olive View–UCLA Medical Center and the University of Southern California. Partnerships also include many local community organizations, such as Healthy African American Families, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and multiple senior centers, as well as the American Heart Association and the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging.
A central component of the program will be the creation of a community action panel made up of individuals representing the racial and ethnic diversity of Los Angeles. This group will formally and regularly review and present advice on the work in progress and the products of the center overall, promote ways to effectively disseminate the work in the targeted communities, and provide feedback to investigators at every stage of the research. An annual symposium also will be held to engage community members and academic investigators in Los Angeles and foster the sharing of knowledge.
“At the end of five years, we’ll know we’re successful if our interventions are effective and if we can identify new targets for future interventions to reduce disparities in stroke risk,” Vickrey said.
She added that they also will be identifying and educating future investigators and research staff, many of whom may be from these minority communities, to continue in disparities-intervention research in the future.
As part of the “Musicans At Google” series, singer/songwriter Margot B. recently stopped by Google NYC to give an acoustic performance, including songs from her current CD “Live At The Hazlett”. Google has now made it available on YouTube.
She performs the songs “Cool” and “Complete”. She also gives a short interview, discussing Rent, volunteer work, Black History Month, and the indie music scene.
Electric car maker Coda Automotive said on Wednesday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the District of Delaware and will seek to restructure the company around selling batteries instead of electric cars. Coda plans to seek a sale of the business within the next 45 days.
Coda said that an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group will provide enough financing to keep its energy storage business operating and will also act as the stalking horse bidder in the sale process. Coda CEO Phil Murtaugh said in a statement that:
“We believe the restructuring process that we have entered into today will enable the Company to complete a sale and confirm a Plan that maximizes the value of its assets, serving the best interests of our stakeholders.”
Bloomberg reported that Coda listed assets of as much as $50 million and debt of as much as $100 million in the Chapter 11 filing. The company raised $320 million over the years from investors including Aeris Capital, Angeleno Group, New World Strategic Investment, Indus Capital and Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners and Riverstone Holdings.
Coda shipped its first electric sedans in the spring of 2012, after many months of delays. Coda first aimed to launch the car back in late 2010, but then pushed that back to late 2011, and then early 2012. It’s not an uncommon story for an electric car startup. Fisker Automotive also took much longer than it had expected to deliver the first Karmas, and Tesla also faced delays over its first car the Roadster.
But sales of the Coda electric sedan never took off, and the company reportedly shipped less than 100 cars. The car cost $37,000 before the $7,500 U.S. tax credit, and had an official 88 mile range (the distance its batteries can go on a single charge) with a fuel mileage equivalent of 73 miles per gallon. Critics said the car’s design was dated, and the price too high to compete effectively with the Nissan LEAF.
Coda launched its energy storage business last year and through that unit has been selling batteries and battery management systems to act as energy storage for the power grid. Coda’s battery technology is based around lithium iron phosphate batteries, and a good chunk of its intellectual property is around the cooling management system and software. The batteries are similar to the ones that it was using in its cars, and the main difference is that while the car batteries are flat, the grid batteries are organized in a tower, and 25 batteries grouped together creates 1 MWh worth of storage.
As I reported yesterday, Coda was starting to be buried in lawsuits. The company had a half dozen filed as of yesterday, including suits over unpaid bills and a class action lawsuit by a former employee.
Based on 2012 results, the combined company would have $24.8 billion of revenue and $2.7 billion of free cash flow. As of March of this year it has approximately 43 million subscribers. The deal terms were complicated including a 1 for 2 reverse stock split by MetroPCS, a cash payment of $1.5 billion to its MetroPCS stockholders and the proposed NewCo made up of T-Mo and MetroPCS acquiring all of T-Mobile’s capital stock from Deutsche Telekom in exchange for approximately 74 percent of MetroPCS’ common stock.
While the deal was approved by shareholders and regulators, the combined company still is trying to fight it out in a highly competitive and saturated mobile market. As my colleague Kevin Fitchard wrote when the deal was announced, this is a deal about beefing up T-Mobile’s spectrum so it can keep fighting Verizon and AT&T. Meanwhile Sprint, the nation’s third-largest carrier is in a deal of its own trying to buy Clearwire with cash provided by new partial owner Softbank.
It’s like a soap opera where everyone’s fighting for the airwaves. However, those fights are in the future, and today we just have to watch the stock and ponder what this means for the customer. Luckily, Fitchard already explained how this deal affects customers, so read that while you watch the stock.
Google is celebrating Labour Day with a homepage doodle in countries where the day is celebrated on May 1. This includes a number of countries across Europe and Asia.
Many of these countries, including India, China, Nepal, and Pakistan consider the 1st of May a public holiday. Most offices, banks, schools, etc. remain closed.
Here in the U.S., Labor Day is not celebrated until September. It will be interesting to see if Google reuses this doodle when the time comes in a few months.
Wikipedia has a great breakdown of when Labor Day is celebrated in different countries around the world.
France gets a different doodle today for Fête du Travail:
Here’s a look at the doodles Google ran around the world last week.
On Wednesday, AT&T scored another smartphone exclusive. This time it’s the LG Optimus G Pro, an Android 4.1.2 handset boasting a large 5.5-inch, full high-definition screen. Pre-orders for the phone, which is $199 with contract, begin on May 3 and AT&T will sweeten the deal with a free Quick Cover folio case for the handset.
LG’s Optimus G Pro is the follow-up to the company’s Optimus G from last year. That phone was also very similar to the Nexus 4 that Google partnered with LG to design and build. As good as the Optimus G was — it has been one of LG’s best sellers to date — the new Optimus G Pro offers substantial upgrades including:
Qualcomm’s 1.7 GHz quad-core processor and 2 GB of RAM
Full 1080p resolution on the 5.5-inch display, which is 400 pixels per inch
A huge 3140 mAh battery, which should easily last a full day
Rear camera with 13 megapixel sensor and front-facing 2.1 megapixel camera
Internal storage of 32 GB with a micro SD expansion slot
Of course, the phone uses AT&T’s LTE network where coverage allows and falls back to HSPA+ service as needed. I’m not a fan of smartphone exclusives — here’s why — but this is another solid smartphone offering from AT&T that should rival its other flagship phones ranging from the Apple iPhone to Galaxy S 4 and HTC One.
The state of Nevada now has its first legal online poker site since its legalization in February. Online residents of the state (21 and over) may partake.
The site is UltimatePoker.com, and is run by “online poker specialists” with over 30 years of combined experience. It’s also backed by Vegas gaming leaders, but perhaps most importantly, it has the government’s seal of approval.
UltimatePoker’s team includes: Co-founder and Chairman Tom Breitling, CEO Tobin Prior, CTO Chris DeRossi, and CMO Joe Versaci. The company is a subsidiay of Station Casinos.
“Ultimate Gaming represents the next generation: A new breed of real money online gaming company backed by regulation and driven to create authentic entertainment experiences across online and social casino platforms,” the site says. “Ultimate Poker is a licensed online poker room, leading the way through extraordinary service, best-in-class rewards, and a true-to-its-roots poker experience.”
According to Reuters, the site will operate under a 30-day license while it “works out the kinks”. It will then most likely be granted a formal license.
“Ultimate Poker is a licensed online poker room in the state of Nevada, leading the way through extraordinary service, best-in-class rewards, and a true-to-its-roots poker experience. Created by online poker specialists and backed by Las Vegas gaming leaders, Ultimate Poker brings fun back to the online felt by merging entertainment, competition, and the gaming lifestyle. Ultimate Poker is the exclusive online gaming partner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the fastest growing sports organization in the world, and is the online poker product of Station Casinos, the preferred gaming destination for Las Vegas locals.”
Expect many more sites to follow Ultimate Poker’s lead. Delaware and New Jersey have also legalized online gambling, and will no doubt be keeping an eye on how UltimatePoker.com pans out for the state of Nevada.
Last week, I scolded colleague Mihaita Bamburic for writing old news — charity auction for coffee with Apple’s CEO. When I saw the item, someone offered $50,000 for 30 minutes with Tim Cook. About 24 hours later, when Mihaita posted: $180,000. Now, after 84 bids and 13 days to go, the number is $600,000. That bid, placed five days ago, looks like as much as anyone will pay.
