Category: News

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It is May 1990. For several months, reporters had been prepared by Microsoft to cover what was being billed as the most important event in the history of software. It was the beginning, we were told, of the end of DOS, and the birth of a new software “ecosystem” that enabled independent developers to build graphical applications for the first time, without having to jump through the many hoops and stroke the countless egos of Apple. Microsoft would have a hands-off policy in the development of software that supports what was being called, for the first time, the Windows Operating Environment.

Sure, it still used the MS-DOS bootstrap, but don’t tell anyone that. And sure, that bootstrap still required 640K of conventional RAM, but don’t tell anyone that either. The real benefits were to be seen in something Macintosh itself couldn’t do: run more than one application at once, with true multitasking and pipelining for the very first time…and all in color.

The prospects for applications were boundless, and Microsoft wanted to be seen as opening all the doors and not stepping through them first. The first question in journalists’ minds was, would there be a counterpart to Hypercard? Without a Hypercard, Windows may as well be broken. Rest assured, we were told, a company called Asymmetrix would provide the toolkit that would revolutionize programming, with a bit of Microsoft’s funding. The next generation metaphors for Windows were being created not by Microsoft but by Hewlett-Packard, for a product called NewWave — again, Microsoft made certain journalists knew, with its help but not its supervision. And the world would know Windows was for real when it used an everyday spreadsheet with a name familiar to everyone: Lotus 1-2-3 G.

In the spring of the turn of the decade, I had a regular series in a magazine that was widely considered to be “Computer Shopper in exile,” called Vulcan’s Computer Buyer’s Guide, staffed by many former Shopper regulars who would, like myself, become regulars there again once a dispute with the new owners, Ziff-Davis, was resolved. I had the lead role in covering the biggest software release in history, for a magazine whose editors told me flat out, “Use as much space as you need.”

Months earlier, Microsoft had granted me some of the first demonstrations of Dynamic Data Exchange ever shown outside its laboratories. It was astounding to me, and I was proposing to write a book on it all, except that none of the book editors at the time knew, or appeared to care, about running two applications at once. “We want a book about Excel or a book about Word,” one editor told me toward the close of a conversation. “No one wants to read a book about Excel and Word.”

It was uncharted territory, as every editor I worked with kept reminding me. One of these days, my former Shopper editor told me, you’ll be writing this story in May and someone on the other side of the screen will read it in May. But for now, it was the August issue we were working with, and complete with interviews with everyone we thought would matter — Asymmetrix, HP, and Lotus included — I headed forward for 33 pages of draft copy, with a full head of steam…

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Friday, October 23rd will be a big day for PlayStation Home as it marks the arrival of three spaces dedicated to three major titles of the year: Uncha…

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

I was sitting in the dentist’s chair getting my teeth drilled, while the technician complained about her now-worthless Sidekick. With no way to access her contact lists, she couldn’t get in touch with her family due to arrive in DC for a reunion, and had to rely on the frequently failing device as a simple inbound line for family members to contact her. When that failed, she had to use a payphone.

It was a pretty sad story, and thousands of users were faced with a similar communication breakdown…for more than a week.

People threaten to sue Google when Gmail goes down for mere hours. But the poor Sidekick customers lost use of their phones, lost their personal data (in some cases permanently), and even lost the ability to turn off or restart their devices for upwards of nine days.

Microsoft and T-Mobile claim to have finally restored much of the lost data, and now offer a recovery tool on the T-Mobile site, but the incident was just too tremendous to simply walk away from. The whole concept of Web-based, shared, and distributed cloud services now has a huge black mark smeared across it, even though the Sidekick’s contact, calendar, photo, and info sync only vaguely constitute a “cloud” service.

The resulting cloud doubt was never as clearly portrayed as it was by ABC News columnist Michael Malone, who said, “What counts is that we never really ever trust the cloud again.”

But “the cloud” — the marketing buzzword — represents much of what the computer industry has been working toward for years: small, fast, and lightweight consumer end devices relying heavily on their persistent connection to a network (whichever one that may be) to provide information, storage, and processing on demand.

It’s not something one can particularly trust or distrust.

I liken it to home PC security. You can’t simply say the whole Internet is untrustworthy because it contains viruses, scams, and information of dubious authenticity. You take the good with the bad, protect yourself, and tread lightly.

There’s only so much your antivirus software can do to protect you if you’re recklessly clicking through everything, installing whatever fake plug-ins you’re told to, and voluntarily submitting personal information when asked. Similarly, if you’re uploading information to a single hosting service without backing it up somewhere, you’re putting yourself at risk.

Unfortunately, Sidekicks are a risk.

Regarding the fiasco, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently said, “Non-Sidekick users, we are not earning their trust back, but I think people are going to say, ‘Hey, look, show me what you are doing to ensure this does not happen to me.’”

The devices have been compared to thin clients, where there is no mechanism in place for a client-side backup of all the data stored on the Danger/Microsoft servers, so users are given only minimal control over their data.

This degree of control is one of the critical elements in establishing confidence in cloud-based services.

“All risk cannot be removed,” said Erik Laykin, leader of the Global Electronic Discovery and Investigations group at independent financial advisory and investment bank Duff & Phelps. “After all, we are still relying on hardware and software systems, both of which can fail.”

“Both organizations and individuals need to consider some factors [when] turning their data over to a third party…What are the risks we opening ourselves up to? Where is this data going to be (US, India, China)? What kind of backups and redundancies are in place? Who are the third party’s subcontractors?” Laykin said.

Risk-benefit analysis, therefore, is another critical element.

“My clients are corporations and law firms, but consumers have to be aware of the risks too. For example, as an individual, I outsource my backups to online storage services like Carbonite. Do I accept that as the final solution? No. I make a physical backup because I can’t always rely on my third party. Sidekicks unfortunately lack flexibility in this area.”

But because we cannot rely solely on a cloud service, does that mean that ABC News was right to suggest we can’t trust the cloud?

Laykin said no: “I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, and we all know the plane can drop out of the sky for a thousand different reasons. But does that mean I can never trust airlines to get me there safely? Of course not. We trust that the airline has mitigated those risks, but protect ourselves and our families with insurance in the unlikely event that something happens.”

It’s situations like the Sidekick data loss that could ultimately restructure the way we deal with data protection.

“For the last ten years, the insurance industry has provided coverage to mitigate data loss, which usually addresses hosting data,” Laykin said. “Data insurance for individuals may not be something widely available today, but I envision policies like that being part of the average user’s portfolio twenty years down the road.”

Today, groups like Laykin’s can assess the risks for companies looking to move their data into the cloud, but incidents like the Sidekick outage could trigger the demand for stricter regulations. “We may see a day in the future where organizations and companies like Microsoft or Google are rated on how safe and accessible their data is. Right now, it’s still a brave new world in terms of third-party data management.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

The Facebook Gift Shop may soon get a lot better.  A new report indicates that full songs are coming to the store, and a clever option that should even allow them to be transferred off the site is also part of the plan.

Brad Stone wrote this afternoon that Facebook will integrate Lala into its store.  He then continued, "And Lala is the perfect partner for this.  It charges 10 cents (or one Facebook credit) for a ‘Web song,’ which can be played online in perpetuity; for full price, usually around 10 credits, the recipient of the music gift will be able to download the song and transfer it to their iPod."

Facebook will have to be careful that the introduction of Lala doesn’t turn it into autoplay-era MySpace; no one needs Nickelback blaring from their speakers every time a new page loads.  Otherwise, though, the idea sounds solid.

Look at it this way: would you rather send a friend a few pixels that look like a mug of beer, or a four-minute song by some great band?  Most people would go for the second option, ensuring that Lala’s music will become a hit among existing Facebook Gift Shop users.  Then, as gifts are given and word spreads, a lot more people are likely to spend a little money.

Unfortunately, it’s unknown exactly when the Facebook-Lala integration will take place, so stay tuned.

Sometimes, these collection societies write the jokes themselves, it seems. PRS, the music collection society in the UK, famous for going way over the line in demanding money from people (remember the time it demanded a woman pay up for playing music for her horses? Or how it calls small businesses and if they hear any music in the background, demand payment?), has done it again. It threatened a shop assistant for singing out loud (public performance!) while stacking the grocery shelves, demanding she pay £1,000 for the privilege. Of course, why was she singing? Because PRS had already threatened the owner for having a radio — so he got rid of the radio.

Of course, as with the horse debacle, once PRS realized the PR nightmare it had created for itself, it apologized (and sent some flowers). But, that hardly makes the situation better. Why is PRS demanding such things in the first place? Given the long trail of similar examples, this isn’t just some random one-off accident. It’s basically how PRS operates. And that’s because it’s structured its business so that its “investigators” aren’t really “investigators” at all, but sales people. They have every incentive to get as many companies to pay up as possible, no matter if there’s any real performance at issue.

On top of that, the very fact that PRS forced this shopowner to take away his radio should show how backwards and braindead PRS’s strategy is. The radio in the shop isn’t a “public performance.” It’s not the reason people go to the shop. But it did help promote the musicians PRS supposedly represents. Not any more. Musicians in the UK should be furious at PRS for making it more difficult to get their music heard, let alone for threatening someone for singing while stocking the shelves.

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This just mysteriously appeared on our doorstep. The return address on the label leads to Verizon’s PR company, Weber Shandwick. We’re going to do a video unboxing in just a second – in the mean time, any guesses as to whats inside?

“The Senate has sidetracked legislation raising Medicare payments for doctors by $247 billion over the next decade,” The Associated Press reports. “The 47-53 vote was 13 short of the 60 needed to advance the measure, and reflected bipartisan concern that it would have raised deficits if it became law” (10/21).

The Wall Street Journal: “Without the needed 60 votes to proceed to the bill, it is effectively shelved. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), alluded to that outcome Wednesday, saying he expected the Senate would ‘pick this up again’ after it considered a broader health-care measure.” Action by Congress is still necessary in order “to avoid a 21% drop in physician payments under Medicare” slated for January. It it appears that a temporary solution is in the works, the Journal reports. “‘Right now, we’re going to a one-year fix,’ Mr. Reid said” (Yoest and Kendall, 10/21).

Even before the vote, Reid talked about the expected outcome.

Time’s Swampland: “I don’t bring anything to the floor unless I think I have the votes,” Reid said to reporters while answering a question about the apparent shortfall of support. “I was told by various people that we’d have 27 Republican votes, which seemed reasonable since Senator Jon Kyl was the co-sponsor of this legislation. So I was stunned when I was told by his co-sponsor, Senator Stabenow, that, no, he wouldn’t support it” (Newton-Small, 10/21).

The Hill: Earlier today, “Reid told colleagues that the AMA said it could deliver 27 Republican votes for the legislation, according to two Senate Democratic lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity. … Reid said at a news conference Wednesday that he would bring up the 10-year freeze after the healthcare reform legislation is passed and will settle for a one-year fix in the meantime” (Bolton, 10/21).

Reid “pointed to what he called the ‘Republican Senate’ for trying to stop the measure from advancing,” according to Roll Call. “Reid and other top Democrats called the Medicare payments vote — otherwise known as the ‘doc fix’ — the ‘first vote’ of the health care debate and appear to be looking to cast Republicans as obstructionists before the actual debate on the broader overhaul begins.” But many Republicans have opposed the measure because it does not include off-sets to cover its price tag. As many as eight Senate Democrats said they would oppose it, too. (Stanton, 10/21).

A pair of new additions have been announced for Lenovo’s ThinkPad line. So all of those business people who shunned Windows Vista and held onto XP can finally take the plunge to a new OS. These new notebooks are optimized to run Windows 7 along with a host of other little goodies.

Powered by Intel Core2 Duo processors, a 16:9 HD screen, HDMI and VGA outs are just some of the features. Lenovo also really hit the VoiP market hard with these. You’ve got WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and some models have 3G built in. The camera resolution is supposed to be better, but we didn’t get any specs for it, so who knows. The integrated microphone now has a dedicated mute button for when you need to cut the audio. These laptops are even EPEAT and Energy Star certified to be green. So you’ll know that you aren’t horribly destroying the planet when you buy one.

The SL series is the lowest of the ThinkPad’s but the new SL410 and SL510 are the only members to be certified under Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience program. I’m not really completely sure what that means. According to the press release, “certified PCs deliver a faster, richer and easier computing experience over identical configuration, non-optimized PCs.” So they have the same hardware, they just run better for some reason? Why not just optimize all of them?

These should hit stores tomorrow, with a starting price of $529.

“Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), two key moderates, met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Wednesday morning — their second meeting with the leader this week as a part of their ongoing effort to shape the final Senate health care reform bill,” Roll Call reports.

Although Democratic leaders were aiming to vote on reform legislation by Thanksgiving, Snowe said, “That would be optimistic.” In response to a question about whether a final vote could occur before December, she said, “That would be my sense” (Drucker, 10/21). 

According to Politico’s Live Pulse, Snowe also said, “I think the issue is that making sure everyone has the opportunity to express themselves through the form of amendments, I think that’s key. … because everybody, certainly on the minority side should have the ability to offer amendments. I got a sense that [the majority leader] is very much disposed towards that.” Snowe also echoed the Republican theme that Democrats are rushing the health overhaul. “But the criticism will likely hold more weight coming from swing-vote Snowe, who Democrats have gone out of their way to accommodate throughout the process” (Frates, 10/21).

Meanwhile, on the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters today that the House would approve health care reform by Thanksgiving, according to MSNBC. “We’re on schedule, and we’re pleased from our standpoint that we will have a bill passed well before Thanksgiving — and hopefully in time for it to be signed with the work done with the Senate to be signed before Thanksgiving but certainly this year.” But MSNBC also notes less optimistic comments from last week from other members of the House leadership and  that “even the most dedicated Democrats will say privately that it is a long-shot for health-care reform to be passed through the House and Senate by Thanksgiving” (Russert, 10/21).

Charlie Mamrak has joined Chicago-based private equity firm Linden LLC as an operating partner. He previously was CEO of PML Microbiologicals.

PRESS RELEASE

Linden LLC, a Chicago-based private equity firm that focuses on middle market leveraged buyout investments in the healthcare and life science sector, today announced that it has further enhanced its operating talent with the addition of Charlie Mamrak as an Operating Partner.

Mr. Mamrak brings over 20 years of life science and laboratory experience to Linden. Prior to joining Linden, Charlie was CEO of PML Microbiologicals, where he and his team grew revenues 90% in under three years. He then engineered a highly profitable divestiture for their private equity investors to a strategic buyer. Prior to PML, Charlie was CEO for a private equity backed contract packaging and manufacturing business focused on solid dose pharmaceuticals. Before his private equity experience, Charlie held several general management posts at Fisher Scientific, leading both the Acros Organics North American and Global Custom Chemistry businesses. Charlie also held senior positions with Sigma-Aldrich where he helped develop and launch their line of Discovery HPLC columns. Earlier in his career, Charlie worked in and managed several contract research laboratories including DuPont, CH2M Hill and Corning Laboratories. Charlie studied Biomedical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University and holds a Bachelors degree in Biology and Chemistry from Moravian College.

Mr. Mamrak augments Linden’s prestigious group of Operating Partners who collectively have over a century of healthcare experience. Together with Operating Partner Mr. Fran Lunger, former CEO of Millipore, Charlie will work closely with Linden’s investment team to research and identify new opportunities in life science as well as supporting portfolio companies. Linden anticipates that Charlie will serve as a Board Member and operating executive of at least one platform company.

About Linden LLC
Linden is a Chicago-based private equity firm focused exclusively on leveraged buyouts in the healthcare and life science industries. Linden’s strategy is based upon three elements: i) healthcare and life science industry specialization, ii) integrated private equity and operating expertise, and iii) strategic relationships with large corporations. Linden’s portfolio includes BarrierSafe Solutions International, Behavioral Centers of America, Corpak MedSystems, Drayer Physical Therapy Institute, Focused Health Solutions, Ranir, and Suture Express. For additional information, please visit www.lindenllc.com.

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By now, every health care reporter in the country should have at least heard of the Dartmouth Atlas, and those who haven’t should probably go to Wikipedia or the Atlas website itself before committing another word to the topic of health care reform. The Atlas’ notoriety among reporters and the general public is only recent, despite the fact that the researchers involved have been compiling their data for nearly 20 years. But their central message has been absorbed by health care policy wonks and many of the members of Congress who are involved in crafting health reform legislation: Our health care system delivers a huge amount of unnecessary care, maybe as much as 20 to 30 percent of every health care dollar.

Many researchers and providers agree with this assessment, and I’ve had individual physicians tell me that they know for a fact that patients are being put at risk in their hospitals by all the unnecessary care they receive. So why are a handful of administrators and doctors at some of the nation’s most prestigious academic medical centers trying to discredit Dartmouth’s findings? The answer, in a word, is money.

Using Medicare claims data, the Dartmouth Atlas shows that different hospitals deliver wildly differing amounts of care to patients with similar conditions and similar levels of illness. In two seminal papers published in 2003, Dartmouth’s Elliott Fisher showed that patients who had suffered a hip fracture, heart attack, or had colon cancer that needed surgery, got very different care, depending upon where they lived. For example, a heart attack patient who lives in, say, Los Angeles, will receive about $7,000-worth of extra care over the course of a year than a similar patient in Salem, Oregon. That $7,000 of extra Medicare spending in LA wasn’t due to higher prices, it went towards more services – more hospitalizations, more drugs, doctor visits, tests, and procedures.

Nobody disputes these variations in spending or utilization. The part that makes doctors and administrators in places like LA see red is Dartmouth’s conclusion that all that extra care doesn’t necessarily result in better outcomes. It’s mostly waste.

They worry that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will use Dartmouth data as a benchmark for measuring health care efficiency and try to wring savings out of the most inefficient regions — Los Angeles, for instance, down-state New York, all of New Jersey, Miami and McAllen, Texas (which was profiled as the most expensive town in America for health care in a New Yorker article). The Baucus health care reform bill would create and fund an “innovation center” within CMS, with broad powers to experiment with different payment options aimed at “bending the curve,” reining in the rate of growth of health care spending. According to Fisher, 20 to 30 percent of inpatient hospital days and 30 to 40 percent of specialist visits could be eliminated in the most inefficient hospitals without hurting patient outcomes.

To do that, CMS could employ a range of incentives such as a shared savings program, which would reward administrators for emulating more efficient hospitals – places like Intermountain Healthcare, in Utah, and the Geisinger Clinic of Pennsylvania, which were recently cited by President Obama as medical exemplars. Another way to control costs and encourage better care would be to spare providers in more efficient regions from across the board cuts in Medicare payments.  

Rather than stepping up to the plate and vowing to get to the bottom of their spending problem, some academic medical centers are instead attacking the Dartmouth findings. They explain away the data by saying their patients are poorer and sicker, and therefore need more care. In Los Angeles, for example, where 15 percent of the population is below the poverty line, the average Medicare recipient costs the federal government $10,810, compared with $6,705 per recipient in Minneapolis, where 10 percent of citizens are below the poverty line. 

This claim, that poverty and illness lie at the heart of variation in Medicare spending,  makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t hold up to careful scrutiny. Poverty does influence health, but it can’t account for the extraordinary differences in the volume of care delivered by academic medical centers – even when they are located within a few miles of one another. In Manhattan, for example, chronically ill Medicare recipients, whether they are poor or not, are given about 40 percent more services at New York University Medical Center than nearby Columbia Presbyterian. In Chicago, African-American Medicare patients suffering from chronic illness, who are generally poorer than white beneficiaries, spent 46 percent more days in the hospital at Rush-Presbyterian than African-American beneficiaries using the University of Chicago. There’s no evidence that patients at Rush-Presbyterian and NYU are enjoying better outcomes.

Academic medical centers are supposed to lead medicine toward better, more effective care. They are typically considered centers of excellence, beacons of sound medical science. Trying to discredit the Dartmouth data is a distraction from the real work that’s needed to understand and remedy the extraordinary amount of money spent on care that does not appear to make a difference in health.

Shannon Brownlee is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

Yup, Miles Davis is about as far away from Lady Gaga as you can get. Monster Cable has yet another pair of headphones that are emblazoned with a famous musician’s name. And if you were here two sentences ago, you might have guessed that that artist is Miles Davis. You’re a good guesser!

You’ll find the headphones as part of the Miles Davis Tribute Set, which includes said headphones and a super-de-dooper deluxe copy of the jazz man’s famous album Kind of Blue (Note: I know nothing about jazz, but even I have heard of Kind of Blue). This deluxe version comes with a DVD, linear notes, yada yada yada.

So, basically, we’ve got a pair of Monster Cable headphones with a Miles Davis logo on it, and a spiffy version of his best known album. Price? Oh, you know, $400. (Eh, that may seem expensive, but headphones can get very expensive, very fast if you’re not careful.)

No release date, I’m afraid, but it is available for pre-order from Monster Cable’s Web site.

via iPodNN

We’ve tried to articulate this before when various (often self-proclaimed) elitists like Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen or Mark Helprin bash the rise of social media or the fact that “anyone” can publish. They love to highlight all of the bad and ridiculous stuff that people decide to publish. And, no doubt, plenty more bad stuff gets published. But… at the same time, a lot more good stuff gets published as well. Umair Haque lays this out perfectly in talking about the new media landscape in terms of “soda” and “wine.”

Now consider an open mediascape. Here, there are a million blogs — or more — that are predictable, partisan, and pedestrian: soda. But the quality of information has already hit rock-bottom, and at the bottom, soda offered via blogs is just a substitute for a slightly different flavor of soda offered on shock radio. The soda anyone can now offer in an open mediaconomy isn’t that much worse than the soda that big producers already offer.< Here’s what’s different: the wine is of a higher quality. In an open mediascape, what is truly different is not the quality of soda, but the quality of wine. Sure, there are ten thousand rabid bloggers who have Glenn Beck on eternal robo-repeat. But I also have access to Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, Robert Reich, and Paul Romer. I can hang out with Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson, and Rick Bookstaber.

In an open mediaconomy, yes, there’s plenty lethally unhealthy soda on offer — but I also have access to a new world of fine wine. In a closed mediaconomy, I’m out of luck: I’m stuck mostly with soda.

The net effect is this. The worse stuff is not that much worse. But the good stuff is way, way better.

I’d argue that even if the worst stuff is worse (and, at times, it is), that doesn’t really matter, since the good stuff is still way, way better.

Separately, this argument applies in many other fields beyond just media as well. For example, we’ve seen claims that because societies that didn’t have strong patent laws exhibit lots of copying, it means that there’s no innovation that happens there. And, yet, that’s not really true at all. Yes, there’s a lot more copying, but that doesn’t preclude more innovation — and often that greater level of copying helps incentivize more innovation by giving those who can innovate more reason to try to stand out from the crowd. A perfect example of this is in the fashion space, where a lack of a fashion copyright has led to lots of competition — and, yes, lots of copying — but also a lot more innovation.

This can be difficult for some to understand, because they only look at the percentages, rather than the absolutes. They look at the percentage of those in the market producing “good content” or “innovating” and assume that’s the best way to measure. But if they looked at it from an absolute standpoint, concerning how much good content is being produced (while ignoring the bad content) or how much new innovation is being produced (ignoring the copying), they’d realize the actual, absolute, outcome is much better than before.

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In Q3, Uncle Sam was the green IT king maker. Read the, “Green IT Q3 Wrap-up.”

Gameloft just sent over this teaser trailer for an upcoming title, “Chuck Norris: Bring on the Pain”. Sure, Chuck’s a bit late to the iPhone game if he’s looking to milk this meme for all it’s worth – but we had to share the video with you, or he’d burst through our office wall and roundhouse kick us in the face. We didn’t want that to happen.

What not to do if you are a large company and have a secret project — ship a box full of relevant collateral to a retail locale with a stern looking label that reads “Don’t Open Until 10/25″. A new connect has come through with some pricing details on T-Mo’s Project Dark, and as usual, we’ve ripped it apart and deciphered it. Pics and pricing after the bounce.

Thanks, justfinethanku!

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Family Plan – Includes 2-lines + 2-year commitment

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• Unlimited Talk + Unlimited Text – $120
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Why be a video game rockstar if you can’t hear it? Have you always wanted to put your foot on something while you power chord-ed your way to stardom? For those of you who are using the stock speakers in your TV to play Rock Band, Guitar Hero, or Harmonica Hero, first off, shame on you.

The Stage-Gig speaker system is being debuted at the College Music Journal (CMJ) music festival in New York City. Modeled as a stage monitor, the Stage-Gig gives you a 6.5″ woofer, silk tweeter, all with 40 watts of output power. It has two sets of RCA plugs so you can theoretically chain as many of these units are you could possibly want.

If you don’t have any better speakers, these offer you a simple, plug-and-play upgrade for your game console. XBox, Playstation, Wii, anything that uses RCA audio outputs will work. Look for it in early November and expect to shell out $99.95.

Only a small percentage (9%) of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) currently use Twitter to market themselves, according to a new study by BIA/Kelsey.

In addition, 32 percent of SMBs report they plan to include social media in their marketing plans in the next 12 months by establishing a presence on social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

Stephen Marshall,
BIA Kelsey,
Director of Research
and Consulting

More than a third (39%) of SMBs plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their own websites in the next 12 months, and 31 percent plan to include links or ads placed on social sites or blogs.

"Social media is clearly gaining traction among SMB advertisers," said Steve Marshall, director of research and consulting, BIA/Kelsey. "As local consumers increasingly gravitate to social networks, local businesses understand they need to be part of the conversation."

"This opens up a market opportunity for local media companies that offer products and services that enable local advertisers to easily integrate social media into their marketing efforts."

The study found the adoption of social media by SMBs is more widespread among younger businesses. The percentage of SMBs by age of business currently using Twitter for promotion is as follows:

•   16 percent of SMBs in business three years or less
•   11 percent of SMBs in business four to six years
•   6 percent of SMBs in business seven to 10 years
•   2 percent of SMBs in business 11-plus years