Category: News

As aid and relief workers begin to flow into Haiti, Children’s Hospital Boston is sending its own disaster response team to the devastated country. On Tuesday, an earthquake hit 16 miles from Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, affecting as many as 3 million people, with as many as 100,000 deaths likely, according to the International Red Cross.

From Children’s, Shannon Manzi, Emergency Department pharmacist, David Mooney, MD, MPH, director of Trauma Program and Gary Fleisher, MD, Children’s pediatrician-in-chief are currently en-route to Haiti. The photo (above) was taken by Manzi at 3 a.m. this morning as the team waited to hear when and where they would be deployed.

Manzi is providing updates via email when she can. This afternoon she wrote:

Everyone is loaded on 2 buses and awaiting transport to the airport. No one has had more than 1 hour of sleep since leaving yesterday afternoon and there is no sign of any sleep time soon. We are being met on the ground in Haiti by the Marines and will get our orders from there.

Lots of safety briefings about infectious diseases such as malaria, TB, and HIV which is endemic. We will all have to be extraordinary careful as there will be no sharps removal systems, etc.

Here’s an update from David Mooney, also traveling with Manzi (their plane is shown right, photographed less than an hour ago).

We’re about to take off to Haiti.  I’ve taken my malaria med and re-upped my tetanus just in case. We’ll be the first US medical team in and expect to get there before our medical supplies.  The chaos in the streets is scary, but we’ve got to get there before it’s too late.

We’re told there are lots of soldiers at the airport and our plan is to camp out there tonight. It’s really exciting and pretty scary.  We have to carry with us everything that we need, including food and water and have to assume that our bags down below won’t make it.  All of their systems are reported to be out.  When the stuff arrives we can self-sustain for 3 weeks, but will be a bit pinched until then.

We hope we can control the flow of humanity that we expect to flock to our site. It hurts to see the hurt kids on TV and not already be there.

We’ll keep you updated as we hear more about the mission.

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple’s iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace and the millions it generates in revenue each quarter – revenue that ranges from $60 million to $110 million according to previous estimates from a Bernstein analyst report cited in 24/7 Wall St.’s post.

However, in order to generate the $450 million figure, the author of the post uses some questionable back-of-the-envelope calculations that raise some flags. Our sources say that the real number is closer to $15 million to $20 million instead.

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Piracy: Not Even a Big Issue

The reason why App Store piracy isn’t as rampant as it could be is simple: Most people don’t bother to jailbreak their iPhones, the first step to gaining access to tools that allow for pirated app downloads. However, keep in mind that jailbreaking isn’t done just for purpose of pirating applications. Thanks to a now-easier-than-ever process for jailbreaking, iPhone owners can choose from a number of software programs that automate the advanced hacking required to gain control over the device. Once jailbroken, you can install all sorts of unauthorized third-party applications to your phone via unofficial app store likes Cydia or Icy. Last year, we looked at a number of reasons why you would want to jailbreak by listing some of the better jailbroken apps, including one that turns your iPhone into a modem, a themeing app called Winterboard, and multiple apps that bring video to the video-less iPhone 3G. But let’s be honest. A good many jailbreakers are hacking their phones to gain access to apps they don’t want to pay for.

In October of 2009, mobile analytics firm Pinch Media dispelled some of the myths about App Store piracy. Most notably, they found that “try before you buy” as a reason for pirating apps was a myth. That’s referring to the claim made by the jailbreaking community that one of the main reasons they pirate apps are because the App Store doesn’t offer trial periods for paid applications. If the developers themselves don’t offer a free “lite” version of the app, there’s no way to tell if the app is going to be worth the price, claim the jailbreakers. But Pinch Media revealed this desire to demo apps was just an excuse. After tracking the jailbroken app ecosystem for many months, the company found that the conversion rate is only 0.43% for pirate-to-paid apps. In other words, the pirates aren’t trying and buying later. They’re just trying and trying and trying.

That can be bad news for some developers. 24/7 Wall St.’s report references developers like Neptune Interactive Inc. and Smells Like Donkey Inc. who each have apps with 90% piracy rates. Another developer, Web Scout Inc., sees a 75% piracy rate for a $.99 game and Fish Labs sees a 95% piracy rate for a $7 game. This seems to show that piracy rates increase with app prices. For example, notes the report, expensive apps like TomTom’s $79.99 GPS program and its Garmin counterpart are found all over file-sharing sites like thepiratebay.com.

However, piracy shouldn’t really be a major concern for developers, no matter what the rate. In fact, after the merger of mobile analytics firms Pinch Media and Flurry, they’re even considering doing away with the piracy-tracking feature due to lack of use among developers. Flurry’s VP of Marketing, Peter Farago, tells us that most of their customers (the developers using the service) are from developed economies like the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. It’s outside of these countries where the majority of piracy takes place, as they noted in a report last year. In these less developed economies, developers aren’t actually losing sales to pirates – those illegal downloads would have likely never been purchases anyway.

$450 Million?

The $450 million figure cited in the report was based on an average piracy rate of 75% per paid app – or three pirated downloads for every one. With 510 million paid app downloads, the number of pirated app downloads is 1.53 billion. With an average price of $3 per app, that would lead to $4.59 billion in losses for both developers and Apple combined. Since most pirates wouldn’t have paid for the apps anyway, the estimated 10% who would have paid brings the figure to $459 million in lost revenue.

Is that fuzzy math? Well, the calculations do make a lot of assumptions to reach the final result. For example, the 510 million is an assumption based on analyzing Berstein’s report, but Pinch Media’s own analysis from October 2009 claimed that number is closer to 610 million. Today they’re saying it’s more like 750 million (3 billion paid downloads over the lifetime of the store, with roughly 25% paid).

Also, using average numbers like the 75% piracy rate and the average price of $3-per-app aren’t going to be anywhere near as accurate as an actual app-by-app review would be. And as Mashable notes, the 75% piracy rate may be accurate for games, but other paid applications are likely to have a much lower rate.

Finally, the 10% who would, in theory, go buy the app later might be an overly generous estimate. Pinch Media found that only one in 14 would do so.

More Like $15 Million

Farago did a little back-of-the-envelope calculations of his own this morning and found the $450 million to be excessively high. With 3 billion downloads over the lifetime of the App Store with 25% paid, that’s 750 million paid downloads. At an average price of $3 per app (the one figure he agrees with in the 24/7 Wall St. report), you’re looking at 2.25 billion in gross revenue. Developers get to keep 70% of that, or 1.6 billion (approx.). But the blog post is asserting that lost revenues from pirated apps are about a third as large? That sounds suspicious. Extrapolating from these figures, even if as much as 10% of the iPhone-owning community were pirates shopping at an alternative app store, we would be talking $160 million in lost revenue (10% of 1.6 billion), not $450 million. A 10% piracy rate is probably not even accurate, though – it’s too high. Farago says they’ve found the rate to be closer to less than 1% in reality. However, since these are rough estimates, he states that Flurry would say the number is more likely to be in the range of $15 million to $30 million at the most – a number much, much lower than what the 24/7 Wall St. blog claims.

In the end, piracy shouldn’t even be that much of an issue for developers. It seems that ever since the launch of P2P networks for file-sharing, everyone from record executives to movie moguls have claimed that piracy is killing their respective industries. But is it really? Those pirated downloads don’t necessarily represent actual lost sales. Without a way to download these things for free, they would have simply never been purchased in the first place (for the most part, that is). The same holds true for app sales. Developers should focus on increasing sales among the user base that is paying by making the app worth the money, updating it with new features and marketing it effectively. Mooning over the lost revenue – be it $15 million or $450 million – won’t help.

Discuss

In the past I’ve often been listed as the nominal professor for various graduate students taking “reading courses,” which basically meant “I’m going to be doing my research, but there’s some university requirement that says I must be registered for a certain number of courses each term, so please sign my sheet.” But this term I have two students doing honest-to-goodness reading courses — trying to learn some specific material that isn’t being offered in any structured course offered at the moment.

And — it’s great! Anyone have their favorite suggestions/anti-suggestions for reading courses? The method I chose was the following: the student and I consult on a course of readings for the term. Every week, the student reads through the relevant material. Then once a week we meet, and I sit in my chair and take notes as the student gives an informal lecture, as if they were the professor and I was the student.

Obviously good for me, since I get to brush up on some things that I knew really well some time ago but haven’t thought about recently. And the students get to dig into something they really care about. But the somewhat-unanticipated bonus is that the students get fantastic practice in teaching and giving talks. Since it’s just one-on-one, we can stop at any moment for me to point something out or for them to ask a question. And I can expound upon my theories of chalkboard etiquette, such as the need to speak out loud every single symbol you write on the board. Over the course of a single hour, I can see the student’s presentation skills improve noticeably (from “good” to “even better”).

The world being what it is, it’s not possible for every course to be taught with just one student and one professor. But despite all the very real advances in technology and pedagogical theory, I still believe that the best teaching happens with two people sitting at opposite ends of a log (or equivalent), passing words and ideas back and forth. Everything else is just trying to recreate that magic.

Segway is the UK’s problem now. Details are scarce, but the company has merged with a UK-based firm backed by Jimi Heselden, Chairman of Hesco Bastion and an investor in the independently owned Segway U.K. distributorship. Segway has also received funding to support future growth. [The Last Mile]

T. Boone Pickens has cut his massive Texas wind-power project with G.E. in half thanks to a lingering credit crunch, shortage of electricity transmission lines and the availability of cheap natural gas.

WSJ: Mr. Pickens in May 2008 announced plans for the biggest wind farm in the U.S., by amount of installed megawatts, to be located in the Texas panhandle. But Tuesday he said he would cut his order with GE to 333 turbines from 667 machines and use them for wind farms in Canada and Minnesota.

That means the Pampa Wind Farm slated for north Texas—and postponed last summer until at least 2013—won’t happen under current conditions.

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See Also:

• T. Boone’s New Natural Gas Media Campaign Takes ‘Talking One’s Book’ To A Whole New Level
• Wind Power In Texas Is Cutting The Cost Of Electricity

The Director of NCSP manages the $3.4 million AmeriCorps State federal grant program including planning, organization, implementation and evaluation of all program components; provides technical assistance and expertise; directs the technical operations and activities necessary to implement the program; coordinates services with local, State and Federal agencies, and service agencies; plans and supports disability inclusion strategies.

Responsibilities:
Review and analyze federal regulations, state laws and AmeriCorps administrative requirements to advise and/or formulate appropriate policies, procedures and interpretation to guide successful implementation of the commission’s AmeriCorps programs.

Ensure all components of the AmeriCorps Programs are implemented in compliance with the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Create and maintain tracking/monitoring system, in concert with Grants Officer, to meet federal grant compliance requirements; communicate commission policy and procedures to program organizations and community.

Design, modify and implement commission’s risk-based monitoring strategy to ensure consistent oversight of state’s AmeriCorps programs; assess AmeriCorps program goals and accomplishments to determine effectiveness.

Write commission’s Requests for Proposals (RFP) for AmeriCorps, coordinate and manage each grant review process, communicate and assist applicants.

Conduct research on best commission practice.  Collect data, analyze and write CNCS progress reports.  Maintain information on sub-grantee performance and communicate data to stakeholders.  Manage ongoing AmeriCorps evaluation and system improvement processes. Act as main point of contact for CNCS reporting site, eGrants.

Develop and manage annual training plan calendar based on needs assessments from AmeriCorps program staff and members.  Recruit trainers for the courses and trainings requested.  Evaluate, analyze, and report findings to stake holders for all trainings and workshops.

Provide one-on-one technical assistance and compliance guidance to AmeriCorps sub-grantees and potential applicants.  Provide guidance to sub-grantees on their pre-service training member development plans.  Facilitate and lead monthly Program Director meetings, InterCorps Council meetings and RI AC Alumni Association meetings.

Assess the commission’s disability inclusion program goals and accomplishments to determine their effectiveness.  Develop partnerships within the community of agencies and organizations providing services to people with disabilities.  Inform/ create recruitment materials focusing on the needs of applicants with disabilities and the state agencies that serve the population.

Facilitate and process sub-grantee requests for reasonable accommodations for AmeriCorps members who are disabled.

Monitor/ assess AmeriCorps staff and member needs and coordinate appropriate trainings on topics pertaining to disability, inclusion, or recruitment.

Coordinate and manage logistics for AmeriCorps specific retreats, trainings, events, and meetings, including: Opening Day, MLK Day, Justice Talks, Citizenship and Civic Engagement, Disaster Preparedness, Closing Day, National AmeriCorps Week, etc.

This position minimally requires:
Bachelor’s of Arts/Science Degree.

Experience in program administration, supervision, grant writing and reviewing, grants administration, budget management.

Excellence in communications, human relations, planning/management and customer service.

How to Apply:
Mail resume and application letter to:
Bernard Beaudreau, Executive Director
Serve Rhode Island
655 Broad St., Suite 202
Providence, RI 02907

Or email to: bbeaudreau {at} ServeRhodeIsland(.)org

Application Deadline:  Friday, January 22, 2010

Serve Rhode Island is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list.

If you compare this list to the last one, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures (who previously was No. 1). Now, the always-provocative Paul Graham of Y Combinator is No. 3, whereas he wasn’t even in the top ten on the old list. Other new entrants to the top 10 include Mark Suster of GRP Partners, Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and soon to launch his own seed fund, and Bijan Sabet of Spark. Some VCs who dropped out of the top ten include Marc Andreessen and David Hornik of August Capital.

Four VC blogs in the top ten are new under the Cheng’s method, which better captures which ones are capturing attention since it is based on an average of the last quarter’s audience. Of course, this method does not capture people who read the blogs via RSS. So pick your poison. You can subscribe to the Top 10, Top 25, Top 50, or Top 100 on Google Reader, if that’s your thing (can someone create corresponding Twitter Lists for these VCs?).

Cheng is a managing partner at Volition Capital, which was Fidelity Ventures until it was spun off on Monday. His own blog, Thinking About Thinking, ranks No. 12.

Top 10 VC Blogs (Average Monthly Uniques, 4Q09)

1. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, A VC (100,279)
2. Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, How To Change The World (82,838)
3. Paul Graham, YCombinator, Essays (71,924)
4. Brad Feld, Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (45,633)
5. Mark Suster, GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (39,389)
6. Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (23,084)
7. Dave McClure, Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (21,462)
8. Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital, Redeye VC (12,972)
9. Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital, Bijan Sabet (12,451)
10. Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (12,097)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, has launched a compelling new feature today: the ability for users to create curated lists of iPhone apps and Android apps. The new feature, which is similar in some ways to Twitter’s list functionality, allows anyone to create lists of their favorite apps by category and lists are limited to five apps. Appolicious has also launched an iPhone App Developer Directory that aims to connect businesses with app developers.

Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The ability to create lists is a sure to be popular amongst users of the platform and could be a useful resource for consumers looking to get both user and expert opinions on apps in certain categories. Curators of lists can list apps, the reason and rationale behind their choice, any related links or tweets, and why they’re qualified to make that selection.

Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007. Warms is enthusiastic about the new iPhone app business directory, which he hopes will become a defacto resource for businesses, brands, retailers and developers. The directory will launch with several thousand profiles of various app developers.

The startup faces competition from Appsfire, 16 Apps, mPlayit, and others.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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This Saturday, Kathy Griffin will arrive to slice and dice a few celebrities, and I’m guessing there’s some Tiger on the menu. If you’d like to see one of the funniest women in America, jump online now and reserve your tickets for the 8 p.m. show at the Dodge Theatre.

If you’ve watched Kathy’s comedy specials or her Bravo reality show, “My Life on the D-List,” you know how fearless she is. So far, Kathy says she’s been banned from “The View,” “The Tonight Show,” “Late Night with David Letterman,” then re-banned from “The View” after making a joke about Barbara Walters. She’s in hot water again after dropping the F-bomb while hosting the New Year’s Eve Show on CNN with Anderson Cooper.

Some Kathy trivia: she won “Celebrity Mole” on ABC; hosted an NBC reality series, “Average Joe” and has won a Grammy and two Emmys. Oh, and she dated Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cheery co-founder, who had a truly terrible debut on “Dancing with the Stars.” Steve, we’re begging you, no more dancing.

If you’ve never seen any of Kathy’s stand-up routines – and I’m betting you have – you can check out her newly released DVD, “Kathy Griffin: She’ll Cut a Bitch.”

Right there, you know it’s not Disney on Ice, so leave any kids at home. Then go and laugh till it hurts. You’ll actually be glad you’re not Tom Cruise or Rihanna.

The mislead of hate and rage to one’s self instead of people around in belief of causing loss of people around. (A character in that kind of a structure has not had regular and sufficient mother- child relation in one’s early 1-2 years. The depression the person goes through is related to a real or assumed loss.)

– As a person, one’s surroundings and expectations from future, ideals and one’s real situation could be so very different from the real world, so distracted and so inappropriate that being not able to reach these high standards may lead to weakness and loneliness thoughts and depression.

– One’s super ego could be so powerful and dominant that it restricts, blames, takes away from comforting and pleasure-giving activities, as if torturing.

– People around one may expect so many things that it’s impossible to establish. This may lead to some thoughts of weakness and misery and turn them into depression.

– There exists no one that one could love, respect, be proud of, get support and company, follow the footprints, idealize as a father, mother, teacher, relative etc. in a certain level. This affects the development of character in a negative way and may lead to loss of self- confidence and eventually depression.

– Separation or loss of parents in childhood may lead to build wrong or insufficient mechanisms to get over stressed circumstances lacking of support and this may prepare some base to depression.

– The characteristics are important in depression progress. The tendency to depression is higher in people who are obsessive- compulsive, addictive, hysterionic and in borderline having personal disorders.

Related posts:

1. What Are The Symptoms of Depression? (Clinical Depression-Major Depression)
2. 10 Factors That Increase The Risk of Depression
3. Depression in Children

Last year we wrote about two contradictory rulings in France involving lawsuits by companies upset about how Google Suggest works. As you probably know, as you type a query into Google, it tries to “suggest” the rest of the query, based on common searches beginning with what you typed. This is all done automatically and is an algorithmic function of what people are actually searching on. The “problem” was that in one case, people were searching for the name of a company, Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance (CNFDI), and one of the most popular searches, meaning one of the suggested searches, was to follow CNFDI with “arnaque,” which means “scam.” In one case, from a company called Direct Energie, the court ruled that it was Google’s fault — and oddly blamed the fact that the results were not alphabetical to suggest Google was at fault. The better ruling came in the CNFDI case where the court pointed out that search engines are “important tools for the free circulation of ideas and information,” and the fact that many people were questioning whether CNFDI was a scam was, in fact, important and potentially useful information, and thus not libelous by itself. It also said that the burden on free speech would be too great if Google were forced to remove the suggestion.

So much for that ruling. Reader Mike Read has sent in the news that an appeals court has reversed the CNFDI ruling and found Google liable. Its reasoning is that Google lets people alert the company to “offensive” terms in Google suggest, and it believes that “scam” is an offensive term. I have to question that logic. If people are legitimately concerned that there are scams going on, why shouldn’t that be expressed?

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Somewhat lost in the intense excitement of Palm’s presentation at CES was a Pre-related demo by Skiff, the newly-formed Hearst spinoff which is teaming with Sprint to offer electronic versions not only of books but of newspapers, magazines and blogs. While Skiff is developing its own standalone e-ink Reader, it is not limiting its service to the device. Instead, Skiff will offer its content for PCs, tablet devices and (most relevantly) smartphones.

As reported by Dan Costa on PCMag.com, Skiff was at CES last week, and demonstrated its reader for the first time, together with a prototype with color e-ink. It also, though, showed its software running on a Viliv tablet and a Palm Pre (a logical choice, given the company’s partnership with Sprint). While the article (and another piece by Engadget) did not provide launch dates for the Pre software, nor discuss whether non-Sprint Pres would be able to run Skiff, it is good to see yet another content player focus on the Pre as a delivery mechanism.

This year…some faculty and staff say they are ramping up their efforts to reach out to the broader Waltham community and provide more organized support to local nonprofits….“I think that right now we are in the midst of building really good partnerships,” Grady said.

»Read the full article in the Boston Globe.