fcc-westky.org

“When we first launched, semantic technology was the story,” Spivack said. “It was novel then, but now we have to show the value, and to do that we can’t emphasize the semantic technologies in Twine. It’s under the hood and that is where it belongs. We surface the value of semantic in lots of ways, such as with the recommendations. Next year users will be able to create their own data types and build an ontology without knowing it’s an ontology.”

Twine Overview from Twine Official on Vimeo

In about three weeks, an update to Twine 1.0 will add a more advanced bookmarking tool and natural language crawling to improve relevancy. “Every page added to Twine will use natural language processing to determine what is the content versus ads, navigation, and other elements. We’ll put the full text in our search index and generate tags and create a summary and then crawl every link in the text one hop out and bring that content in as well,” Spivack said.

Next year Twine will unleash more of its semantic power, with richer support for structured data and a two-way API for getting data in and out of Twine that will attract application developers, Spivack said. In addition, Twine will introduce a new monetization scheme. “Twine will be to marketing what Google was to advertising,” he boasted.

In order to keep the 50,000 active users and grow its base, the key change from the beta in version 1.0 is a simplification of the user experience. “When we started beta, Twine was about collecting, organizing, discovering, and sharing, and all were equal. It turns out that tracking interests is the most important, so that is what we are emphasizing,” Spivack said. Among the more consumer friendly enhancements, the site navigation is streamlined, site performance is faster, moderation features are improved, users can invite people from their e-mail address books, and the recommendation engine explains why an item was recommended and allows a user to opt out.

The Semantic Web aspect of Twine, which was touted when it first launched, has been relegated to the background.

The minimal set of interest network features allows Twine users to track and discover relevant organizations, products, people, places, tags, and items, such as photos, documents, and recipes, that match their interests. Twine has a social dimension in the way it leverages the wisdom of its members, via bookmarking, tagging, and shared connections. Underlying Semantic Web technologies provide concept mapping (such as interrelationships between topics or people) and more relevant and structured search results.

After less than a year, Radar Networks is going from beta to version 1.0 of its Twine “interest network” Web application based on Semantic Web technologies. “We are not spending four years in beta,” said Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack. “We have a minimal set of features ready for prime time.”

Below is a video from Radar Networks outlined the new features of Twine 1.0:

Radar Networks is in good shape to weather the economic storm. The company raised $13 million in Series B funding from Velocity Interactive, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Vulcan Capital earlier this year.

In the last six months of beta testing, 500,000 users visited Twine and 50,000 remain active, Spivack said. Half of the Twines created are public and members have added about one million items to the database. “The most interesting statistic is time spent–which has risen in the last month to 12 minutes per session and continues to trend up. This is more than tracking and discovery sites like delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon receive,” he claimed.

“Advertising is pull-based, passive, and on the side of pages. Marketing is sponsored and highly relevant content that is targeted and delivered to someone in their in interest feeds. It will be clearly marked and users have to option to accept or reject it.” The concept is similar to what Facebook has attempted to do with its Beacon program. Spivack said that company has filed patents for its monetization concepts, including a way for users to market semantic objects. “We can provide interesting socio-economics around the content that people collect, share, and buy, and build a one-to-one channel between marketers and users.”

“Usually, we don’t change our forecast that frequently. We’ll usually update it every quarter and the changes are small, like maybe 5 percent to 6 percent,” said Andrew Bartels, a Forrester research analyst. “But it’s been hard to ignore what’s been happening in the markets in the last three weeks and we needed to take note of it in our forecast.”

Forrester Research on Wednesday revised its best-case-worst-case scenario for U.S. IT spending. Rather than possibly posting an upside above the base, Forrester is warning, at the extreme, the situation could get worse than its September base projections.

Back in September, Forrester made a base prediction that IT spending would grow 6.1 percent in the U.S. and between 7 to 8 percent overseas. Forrester, at the time, also noted a potential existed that IT spending could exceed its base projections.

“They should assume our base is what’s going to happen, but also prepare for the alternative,” Bartels noted.

That said, Bartels is hoping companies will use Forrester’s revised best-case-worst-case scenario update to make conservative plans for their businesses.

But a dramatic downturn in the markets, a virtual chokehold on credit availability, and a financial crisis that has rapidly spread from the U.S. to world markets has prompted the research firm to revise its “alternative view” from that September report.

Forrester is now warning IT spending growth in the U.S. could come in at 2 to 3 percent for 2009 and 3 to 4 percent worldwide. And the research firm noted that some of the quarters in 2009 may actually post declines in IT spending.

Forrester, however, accounted for weakness in the economy when it updated its September forecast and, as a result, has no current plans to change its base forecast. Bartels added that, given the lack of visibility companies have in this current market, it’s premature to issue a completely revised 2009 outlook.

“To protect the human, patient, and privacy rights of all Americans, the final stimulus bill must include an informed consent requirement,” said Brase, who also warns that allowing federal officials to define “effective” care will lead to rationing of it.

Billions will be handed to companies creating these databases. Billions will be handed to universities to incorporate patient databases “into the initial and ongoing training of health professionals.” There’s a mention of future “smart card functionality.”

“Congress must close a number of the unnecessary and damaging loopholes designed by industry that have been added to the economic recovery package,” said Ashley Katz, director of Patient Privacy Rights. PPR is especially concerned with a section of the Senate bill, which did not exist in the House of Representatives version, that may permit marketing literature and direct mail to be sent based on the contents of a patient’s e-records.

Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct fellow at the free-market Hudson Institute, wrote an opinion article this week that argues the e-records idea comes from Tom Daschle, who withdrew as a HHS nominee amid questions about his lobbying and nonpayment of income taxes.

What didn’t come up during the president’s first press conference was how one section of the convoluted legislation–it’s approximately 800 pages total–is intended to radically reshape the nation’s medical system by having the government establish computerized medical records that would follow each American from birth to death.

The databases will, “at a minimum,” include information on every American’s race and ethnicity. They will be used for “biosurveillance and public health” and “medical and clinical research,” both of which raise privacy questions. They will become part of a “nationwide system for the electronic use and exchange of health information.”

The Democratic politicians pushing this bill have far-reaching ambitions. The legislation (PDF) (on page 244, for the curious) hands to a still-to-be-named health care bureaucrat the “goal of utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.” Selecting official standards will be left to the Department of Health and Human Services (page 265).

Twila Brase, a registered nurse and head of the Citizens’ Council on Health Care, a grassroots group in St. Paul, Minn., says the “stimulus” bill should include explicit informed consent before sensitive and confidential patient records are injected into a national database.

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. says he believes PPR “is right to be concerned that the Senate bill would allow for the commercialization of confidential medical information. It changes the incentive structure in data collection.”

In the absence of the so-called stimulus bill, doctors and companies have been gradually moving in that direction, individually weighing the costs against the benefits and choosing the technology that best suits their needs.

“What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment?” McCaughey wrote. “The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the ‘tough’ decisions elected politicians won’t make.”

HHS would be required by law to improve the adoption of e-records “over time by requiring more stringent measures of meaningful use.”

“Without those protections, Americans’ electronic health records could be shared–without their consent–with over 600,000 covered entities through the forthcoming nationally linked electronic health records network,” said Sue Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom, a nonprofit group that advocates health care privacy.

Because the House version is different than the Senate’s, negotiators from each chamber will meet to draft a final version, a process that has already begun.

Plus, the federal government will use its vast purchasing power–think Medicare and Medicaid–to compel adoption of e-records that meet government “standards and implementation specifications.”

Starting in 2015, government reimbursements to physicians who are not participating in the federal e-record effort will begin to decline.

This is the gradual process that the Democrats who wrote the legislation, and sent it the floor without the benefit of a single hearing, hope to short-circuit. The bill punishes physicians who are not “meaningful users” of a government-certified e-record database, and specifies certain procedures and information exchanges that will “satisfy” the requirement.

Short-circuiting a gradual move toward e-health records
Many physicians are moving toward electronic health records for reasons of their own, including market pressure, convenience, and efficiency. This happens as old systems are being replaced or upgraded, questions about security find better answers, and doctors and their staff become more familiar with the technology.

commentary The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved an $838 billion “stimulus” bill by a 61-37 vote, capping more than a week of political sparring between critics of the measure and President Obama, who claimed during a press conference that an “economic emergency” made it necessary.

Yet nowhere in this 140-page portion of the legislation does the government anticipate that some Americans may not want their medical histories electronically stored, shared, and searchable. Although a single paragraph promises that data-sharing will “be voluntary,” there’s no obvious way to opt out.

Also, a “policy committee” will be created inside HHS to devise “the implementation of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure.” But of the 18 members, only one is required to have any knowledge of privacy and security matters.

There are two pro-privacy components of the “stimulus” package. The first says that e-records holders “shall have a right to obtain” a copy of their data in an electronic format. The second includes a notification requirement in the case of a data breach if the information is not encrypted–although, according to the definitions used, no notification is necessary is the unintentional disclosure was made “in good faith.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, in response to a mail survey last year that 38.4 percent of physicians reported using full or partial e-records system, not counting billing. This is up from 25 percent in 2005.

There were 656 reports of breaches last year, compared with 446 for 2007, and an estimated 35.7 million records were potentially breached based on notification letters and information from breached companies, the study released this week found.

The reports of insider theft more than doubled to represent 15.7 percent of the breaches, while more than a third of the breaches were a result of data on the move, such as stolen laptops, and accidental exposure.

The breaches are broken into five different data loss categories and industry areas.

Reports of data breaches in the United States increased 47 percent in 2008 from the year before, mostly as a result of lost or stolen equipment, and accidental exposure of data online, according to a new study from the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center.

Breaches from data theft by employees doubled, to nearly 16 percent, while hacking and use of data-stealing software represented about 14 percent of the breaches. Only 2.4 percent of all breaches had encryption or other protection methods in use, and only 8.5 percent of victims using password protection.

(Credit: Identity Theft Resource Center)

The breaches run the gamut, including: laptops stolen from Merrill Lynch and Starbucks; bank card information stolen from fake card readers at gas stations in Georgia; Ohio State University student Social Security numbers exposed on the Internet; a former Library of Congress employee using co-workers’ data to open bogus credit card accounts; a Seattle school district inadvertently releasing teacher data to a union; financial information on mortgage files abandoned outside a Boise recycling center; and the World Bank Group’s computer network being penetrated.

More than 80 percent of the breaches were electronic in nature, with the rest involving paper documents.

I asked Blodget several months ago what was the smartest thing he’d done this year. He responded: “Not buy newspaper stocks.”

“Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?” Godin asks. ” You wouldn’t have to pay much per story to build a semi-pro cadre of writers and reporters. When you organize the news (delivering unique perspectives to people who want to hear them) you influence the conversation.”

A Web publication doesn’t worry about space.

He said among the ways the Times blew it was by not buying or creating competitors to Zagats or Yelp. “That’s a quarter of a billion dollars worth of value that the paper with the most influential restaurant reviews page didn’t create,” he said.

The man who killed newspapers is supposed to be Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, the Internet publication that has at the very least helped dismantle the newspaper classifieds business.

Newmark, though, typically denies Craigslist pushed newspapers to the brink of extinction, which is where they most certainly appear to be today. Newmark will tick off plenty of factors that contributed to the fall, not least of which was “they refused to speak truth to power.”

That may or may not be true, but it’s hard to miss how badly newspapers misplayed the Internet and a lot has been written lately about that. Seth Godin, a noted pundit, author, and the founder of Yoyodyne, has an interesting point of view on the travails of The New York Times. He argues that a decade ago, the Times failed to recognize the huge opportunity of using the Web to extend its brand.

Godin scolds the Times for “abdicating” its role as the last word on book reviews and he suggests Times, should dramatically boost the number of stringers it uses so it can offer readers hyper-intensive coverage about niche subjects that matter to them. Godin’s point here seems to be that the Times, like most general newspapers, was traditionally restricted in its coverage because of limits on space. Only so many stories could fit in a daily paper.

I worked for newspapers for 10 years. I love the Times. But there’s no arguing the company and many other papers appear to be stuck in the past. I visited the Times’ relatively new Manhattan headquarters a couple of months ago. All that glass and steel shooting into the sky, the gift shop and polished wood floors, made me wonder if the place wasn’t a huge and enormously expensive tombstone for the newspaper industry.

Nobody has chronicled the Times’ financial crisis as thoroughly or with as much unrestrained glee as the blog Silicon Alley Insider. Henry Blodget, the Silicon Alley’s founder and former tech analyst turned journalist after a scandal drove him from Wall street, argues that the Times’ cost structure is bloated with big salaries and newsprint costs that no longer make sense when competing against Web publications…like his for example.

(Credit:
Seth Godin)

Seth Godin

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Blodget sees potential for a restructuring in Redmond that would fit into the long-running, on-again-off-again Microhoo saga:

It’s unlikely that Microsoft will be laying off a lot of people in departments and regions that are doing well, and considering the recent upturn in console sales, we have a feeling that at least most of the people working in the
Xbox 360 departments will be pretty safe.

The latest to report on the possibility of layoffs at the software giant is the blog Fudzilla, which puts the number of job cuts at 15,000, or nearly 17 percent of Microsoft’s worldwide operations. The January 15 date is a week before Microsoft’s second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for January 22.

Microsoft also has a briefing for financial analysts planned for January 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with the headliner listed as Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division.

Wall Street veteran Henry Blodget says the target areas mentioned by Fudzilla make sense, but not the high volume of job cuts:

Unless Microsoft’s business has been absolutely crushed in the past two months, there is no reason for the company to suddenly cut this much cost. Microsoft’s margins are still fine, and much of its revenue is generated from multi-year contracts (and is therefore unlikely to see a massive intra-quarter hit).

Fudzilla sees the biggest hit coming for the MSN unit, where Yusuf Mehdi recently took over as marketing chief while the company continued to look for an executive to run its overall online services group:

Those purported layoff numbers are up from earlier rumors, which suggested that 10 percent of the company’s employees would lose their jobs.

In October, word leaked out of Microsoft that it would be closing its MSN Groups service on February 21, to be replaced with Windows Live Groups.

So far, we haven’t managed to confirm what departments or regions will be hit the worst, but we’re hearing that MSN might be carrying the brunt of the layoffs. We’re also hearing rumors about the possibility of somewhat larger staff cuts at Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Mark January 15 in your calendar: Rumors of layoffs at Microsoft peg that as the day the bad news will come.

The only way we could see Microsoft laying off this many people is if the company decided to eliminate business units. And if Microsoft did decide to restructure its business, it would likely sell rather than shut down divisions, including MSN (If Microsoft wants to get out of the consumer Internet business, which it should, the best way to do it is to spin its online operations into Yahoo in exchange for a big piece of the company.)

Cisco has been exploring new markets in order to find new areas for growth, a normal pursuit by megacompanies, both in terms of new products and new geographies. This is what companies that measure their revenues in billions of dollars must do in order to grow by billions of dollars.

I admit that I can’t figure out the new Cisco Systems. It’s making a big push into consumer electronics, as reported by CNET, adding things like home audio systems to its portfolio of products.

But I’m losing track of just what Cisco stands for, and I assume that I’m not alone in this. Even as the company grows, it needs to maintain a common theme to that growth. It says it “enables people to make powerful connections–whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity.” That’s a great mission, but how does home audio fit into that statement? Making powerful connections with one’s music in one’s home? I don’t get it.

commentary

Even so, I can’t shake the feeling that Cisco still has a lot of room to grow within its general “networking everything” mission without getting into things like home audio. If you disagree, please let me know why.

Sure, Cisco isn’t alone in overstepping the boundaries of its mission. Microsoft’s entry into the gaming market with the
Xbox doesn’t exactly fit into its implicit corporate mission to reduce the cost, and improve the ease of use, of software. Perhaps once a company reaches a certain heft, it doesn’t need to have every division singing to the same sheet music.

Does Cisco still provide networking equipment?

The answer, of course, is yes, but I wonder if the company risks diluting its brand as it makes forays into markets beyond networking. Perhaps that’s the point.

In tandem, it’s building out a corporate collaboration story, complemented by things like telepresence solutions.

But Web-based video isn’t without its challenges or without controversy. Sending video over the Internet eats up a lot of bandwidth. And peer-to-peer applications, such as BitTorrent, which distribute video have come under fire over the past year as a network menace.

Americans are watching more video on their PCs via broadband connections than ever before, according to a recent report published by market research firm ABI Research.

Cable operator Comcast finally admitted that it has been slowing down BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic. And it has provided a plan for managing traffic, which doesn’t include singling out specific types of traffic. The Federal Communications Commission ordered the company earlier this year not to monkey with customers’ traffic. Other cable operators, such as Time Warner Cable, are talking about metering heavy bandwidth usage in order to deal with the surge of online video.

Another important driver for watching TV online has been the proliferation of faster speed broadband connections. Cable operators have steadily been pushing up their speeds. And services like Verizon’s Fios service, which runs over fiber optic lines directly into the home, have also boosted broadband speeds.

Meanwhile, older consumers are watching more short clips online than actual TV shows. Three quarters of those over 65 who watch video online responded that they have never watched TVs or movies online, according to the survey.

All of the major TV networks in the U.S. are currently offering at least some of their TV shows online. Some of the shows can be accessed right from the network’s Web site. But video aggregator sites such as Hulu.com also help consumers find what they’re looking for. Hulu was launched as a cooperative venture of TV networks to provide easy access to movies and TV shows.

While sites like YouTube that offer short clips of user generated videos have gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of years, the ABI report shows that viewers are also interested in watching TV shows and movies online.

Of course, much of the growth in this area comes from younger consumers. When asked if they watched long-form content such as TV shows or movies online, nearly half of those under the age of 25 and 53 percent of those aged 25 to 29 said they had done so at least once a month.

Over the past year, the number of U.S. consumers who had watched a video streamed through their browser doubled over the past year, going from 32 percent a year ago to 63 percent today. ABI analysts attribute the increase to more rich content available on the Web as well as faster speed Internet connections.

“Today’s younger consumers are developing habits that will mean drastic changes for the video entertainment market,” Michael Wolf, research director at ABI said in a statement. “Many consume a large percentage or even a majority of their video entertainment through online distribution today, and we believe that this trend will continue to accelerate as more efforts are made to put this content on various non-PC screens.”

Agreed.

Keep it simple.
Don’t make assumptions.
And never, ever trust tech more than you really have to.

Frank Hayes, writing in Computerworld, does a great job recounting how an Excel to PDF conversion resulted in Barclays Capital making a multi-million dollar mistake in their offering to buy part of Lehman Brothers. In and of itself, it’s an interesting story, but Hayes concludes with this advice for using technology:

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.