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WHY FACEBOOK WON'T WIN IN CHINA, THERE ENTRY MAY JUST BE TOO LATE, AND CHINA'S CENSORSHIP POLICE WILL BE TARGETING IT

If the rumors are true, Facebook is planning to enter China's social-media market through a partnership with the local search giant Baidu.

Facebook will face strong local competition and the same regulatory and political pressures that defeated other Western internet giants like Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Twitter, according to industry experts who appeared on this week's episode of Thoughtful China, a video program produced in Shanghai.

Sam Flemming, founder and chairman of CIC said.

"China already has social-media properties providing value in a very fragmented social media landscape, so I'm just not sure what compelling value Facebook can provide in a meaningful way.  To become literally the Facebook of China is not going to be easy in a market that's already very social."

In addition, Facebook may have waited too long, warned James Lee, a global media analyst at CLSA.

"When you have a hyper-competitive space, you need to be there on day one."

China's appeal is understandable. The country is home to the world's largest internet market and it has a vibrant social-media scene, with successful social-media sites such as:

• RenRen 
• Kaixin001 
• Qzone
• 51.com 
• Tencent QQ IM
• Sina Weibo.

Chinese media analysts also question whether Facebook has picked the best suitor in Baidu.

T.R. Harrington, founder and CEO of Shanghai-based Darwin Marketing and a search-marketing specialist says Baidu is not necessarily the best choice for Facebook to enter the Chinese market, because it takes established social networking partners that understand China's social-media market. 

"There is a natural relationship between search and social.  It would make a lot more sense to work with someone like Sina's Weibo [or] Tencent." 

Thoughtful China is produced by Normandy Madden, senior VP-content development, Asia/Pacific, at Thoughtful Media Group and Ad Age's former Asia editor. See earlier episodes of Thoughtful China here.

 

COMMENTARY:   I've been covering China's social networking scene in numerous posts (January 17, 2011, February 12, 2011, February 16, 2011, February 28, 2011, April 11, 2011, June 12, 2011, June 13, 2011, June 20, 2011, and June 27, 2011) for some time now, and the market has grabbed my interest due to its diversity, immensity and competitiveness of the market.  

In the U.S. Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are the clear dominant leaders in social networking, microblogging and social gaming respectively.  In China, there is generally one dominant player and two major followers within each category of China's social media ecosystem as you can see from the following graphic.

According to eMarketer, social network users in China will more than double in number, from 207 million in 2010 to 488 million in 2015.

Individuals in China use social networks to communicate with family, friends, brands and the government. Several studies show they enthusiastically follow brand and product websites, forums and social network sites, often promoting favorite products to their numerous online connections.

The increased use of social media presents nearly limitless opportunity for brands to engage consumers. However, social media marketing is a tool to get a foot in the door. Aspiration can be a strong motivator for purchases, and brands can benefit from the increased prestige perceived by social media users in China.

All together there are probably close to 1,500 social networks of all types in China. Groupon alone has over 1,000 copycats and is having a hell of a time penetrating that Chinese market.  

Here's a list of China's Top 15 Social Networks:

  

China Resonance, a leading Chinese social media agency prepared a brief profile of the Top Social Networks in China.

 

Endelman Digital prepared the following Infographic that maps out the social media habits of internet users all across Asia.  It's not difficult to see why Asia, and China specifically, are such an attractive social media markets.  

[Click The Above Image to Enlarge]

Facebook continues to dominate the Asia with a strong presence in 9 out of the 13 countries featured in the infographic map, while in countries like China, South Korea and Taiwan, it’s dominated by a local social networking service.  It can also be concluded that video viewing eats up the majority of Asia’s time online, while blogging falls a close second in most countries.

Penn-Olson points out that the data used by ComScore only represents PC-based internet users, but this leaves out a very substantial chunk of Asians staring at the internet through their phone or at an internet cafe.

This explains the low percentage of social network usage in China as one of its top Social Networks, Sina Weibo, is said to be accessed via mobile by 50% of its users.

Despite this flaw, the Infographic still proves to be a pretty good overview of social media activity in the region.

The Chinese government views social networks with suspicion because they could be use to criticize and fument resistance against China's entrenched Communist leadership.   Microblogging sites, even though they are faring well so far in allowing freer discussion, remain hot targets for Chinese government censorship because of the ‘citizen journalism’ aspect of them. And it looks like if Sina Weibo wants to go global, they’ll still have to comply with Chinese Internet regulations, which may put a slight damper on the efforts. Let’s have a look at some facts about Internet censorship in China: 

• The Chinese government began a project known as “The Golden Shield Project” in 1998; today, that project employs approximately 30-50,000 “police” who monitor blogs, chat forums, and even email — these individuals also ‘guide’ conversations online.
• In 2003, as part of “The Golden Shield Project,” The Great Firewall of China was launched and began blocking web sites on an array of sensitive topics and heavily restricting access to content from many others, like Flickr, Wikipedia, Google, and of course Twitter, which along with Facebook was blocked in China in 2009. Want to try it out? Check out this neat resource, greatfirewallofchina.org, and see if your favorite website is accessible in mainland China. As of the writing of this article, SourceCon.com is free & clear!

China is unknown territory for Facebook, and Chinese social networkers are "fully vested", having settled on one or two favorite social networks, so Facebook will have a huge problem convincing them to switch from their existing social network to Facebook China, or whatever it will be called.

If Facebook partners with Baidu, as has been frequently rumored, it is going to face huge obstacles penetrating the Chinese social networking market because of differences in culture, the diversity and large numbers of competitors, and you can bet that it will be a huge target of China's "censorship police."  A great example of just how extreme China's censorship efforts can be is the experience of Google, who was eventually banned and left China in disgrace, and even to this day, is the target of numerous cyber attacks.

Courtesy of an article dated July 25, 2011 appearing in Ad Age Global, an article dated May 25, 2011 appearing in TNW Asia 

THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE SOCIAL MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

The term social media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content (photos, videos, links, etc.)."  Social media are media for social interaction, as a superset beyond social communication, but mainly still communicating just interactively using ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques.

Social media can take on many different forms, including forums, social networking sites (Facebook, Google+, MySpace), location-based social networks (foursquare, Gowalla), social blogs (Tumblr, posterous), microblogging sites (Twitter), wikis (Wikipedia), podcasts, photo sharing sites (flickr), music sharing (Napster), video sites (Youtube), virtual gaming sites (World of Warcraft), virtual social worlds (Second Life), rating sites and social bookmarking.  By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media:

• Collaborative projects (Wikipedia). 
• Blogs and microblogs (Twitter). 
• Content communities (Youtube). 
• Social networking sites (Facebook ). 
• Virtual game worlds (World of Warcraft). 
• Virtual social worlds (Second Life). 

Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.  Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

If you thought Facebook or MySpace started the social media crazy, think again.  Social media actually began in 1970, long before many of today's social media youth were even born.  Here's the History of Social media thanks to the good folks of Tenthwave.

[Click Image To Enlarge and View Horrizontally]

Courtesy of Wikipedia and The Nicky Blog and Tenthwave

WILL HIGH VALUATIONS AND PRE-IPO EXITS IN THE SECONDARY MARKET AMONG INTERNET DARLINGS LEAD TO THE NEXT BUBBLE?

FACEBOOK INVESTORS AND STAFFERS CASHOUT

While Silicon Valley and Wall Street debate whether a new technology bubble is in the making, some early Facebook employees are not taking any chances. They’re leaving the company to cash out on millions of dollars in stock options while Facebook’s valuation continues to soar.

One former Facebook employee, referring to the dot-com crash a decade ago said.

“If you’ve seen the world blow up once, you just don’t know what’s going to happen a year from now.”

He joined the company in its early days, and left a few months ago so he could sell some of his shares. A company policy bars current employees from selling stock. Declining to make his name public when discussing a financial decision, and also because he did not want to upset Facebook he said.

“It seemed very risky to stay in a situation where all of your liquidity was tied up in what I consider a high-risk company.” 

He is hardly the only tech industry insider cashing in to minimize his financial risk in case the value of private companies starts heading south. Employees and investors at dozens of hot start-ups have sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of shares, fueling a booming market in private transactions.

As Facebook’s valuation has soared past $50 billion, making it by far the highest among Silicon Valley’s crop of hot start-ups, many employees who own stock options and have been at the company since the early days after its founding seven years ago have been eager to profit.

Aware of that, Facebook has helped to broker sales for those employees twice — in 2009, when it allowed insiders to sell $100 million to Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian venture capital firm, and again this year, in a deal through T. Rowe Price, the investment firm. Employees were limited to selling up to 20 percent of their vested shares. For some, it wasn’t enough.

One of the employees who left recently said.  

“Even if I could sell all 20 percent, having 80 percent of your wealth in one illiquid asset is pretty insane.  It’s not enough to make yourself bulletproof if the world blows up.”

Still, fear of a bursting bubble is not the only factor behind sales of shares by employees. Early employees who leave Facebook or any other private start-up typically have 90 days to exercise their stock options. When they do, they face a high tax bill. An employee who exercises $10 million in shares may face some $3 million in taxes, and in many cases the only way the employee can pay 

Facebook has been driving the trend; last year, it accounted for nearly 45 percent of all the trades on SecondMarket, a leading marketplace for private company shares. Many of those trades came from Facebook’s first 200 or so employees who joined before the fall of 2007 and own shares or stock options. (Those who joined later received restricted stock, which cannot be sold until Facebook goes public.) According to several former employees, about 100 of the early employees have left the company, a figure Facebook declines to confirm.

And although they have left for many reasons — and Facebook insiders say that starting a new company is the most common one — guarding against a decline in share price has been a consideration for some.

Another former Facebook employee who left in recent months, and who also would not make his name public said.

“I was happy to sell 5 or 10 percent, so I could have a cushion in the worst-case scenario,” 

GROUPON EXECUTIVES AND INVESTORS CASHOUT BIG TIME

Perhaps no company has seen its early investors and founders take so much money off the table so quickly as Groupon. The company is still losing money, but some insiders have already become rich on it. Out of $946 million that Groupon raised from investors last winter, $810 million went into the pockets of the chief executive, Andrew Mason; the chairman, Eric Lefkofsky; and others. In April 2010, many of the same insiders pocketed an additional $120 million.

Mr. Mason and Mr. Lefkofsky declined to comment, through a Groupon spokesman. The company, which recently filed to go public, is in a “quiet period” that restricts executives from discussing the business publicly.

LACK OF IPO'S, ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY, BUBBLEMANIA AND TAXES HAVE DRIVEN STARTUP EARLY CASHOUTS

Founders and early investors have sold shares in their start-ups for years, usually through brokers and a small network of funds specializing in private-company transactions. But such sales have expanded greatly in recent years, with early rank-and-file employees participating in deals in ever-growing numbers.

Employees have become more interested in selling, in part because companies are taking longer to go public. And workers’ eagerness to see tangible reward has promoted the creation of a number of businesses to serve their needs. These include trading platforms like SecondMarket, specialized brokers like Felix Investments and even a new lender who will help employees turn their paper wealth into hard cash without having to sell their shares.

Hans Swildens, the founder and a managing partner at Industry Ventures, a decade-old company that has bought shares in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Chegg and eBags said.

“In the last two years, a lot of employees in the Valley woke up to this market.” 

Still, fear of a bursting bubble is not the only factor behind sales of shares by employees. Early employees who leave Facebook or any other private start-up typically have 90 days to exercise their stock options. When they do, they face a high tax bill. An employee who exercises $10 million in shares may face some $3 million in taxes, and in many cases the only way the employee can pay those taxes is by selling some shares.

And plenty of employees believe their companies’ values will keep going up. While they may need the money — to buy a cottage in Palo Alto, for example — they would prefer to hold on to their shares. A new, secretive fund, called 137 Ventures, is hoping to balance their desire for cash and their hope to profit from a boom, if it continues.

The fund plans to lend money to start-up employees who put up their shares as collateral, according to several people who have been briefed on the fund. As part of the deal, 137 Ventures charges “12% interest on the loans, as well as a 10% fee paid in stock.”   If for some reason the value of the stock being used as collateral falls to zero, the employee is not responsible for repaying the loan. 137 Ventures views such loans as investments and will only lend money to employees at companies that it sees having strong growth potential.

137 Ventures is expected to file regulatory forms on Monday indicating that it has raised $35 million, mostly from institutional investors. It has held preliminary talks with Zynga and others, to get authorization to cater to their employees. Justin Fishner-Wolfson, who heads the fund, declined to comment.

Some veterans of private company markets say they are not willing to say the tech industry is in a bubble yet, but they have started to worry. Kenneth B. Sawyer, the founder and managing director of Saints Capital, which has been active in secondary markets for more than a decade. Mr. Sawyer says there are only a handful of companies that merit high valuations.

“We are not sure that the valuations we are seeing are sustainable in the long term.  Just because a great company is valued highly doesn’t mean there should be a halo effect on the others.”

IPO'S ARE DRIVING THIS FRENZY

Technology startups fortunate enough to have their IPO's are increasing investor exhuberance to unreasonable and dangerous levels raising the potential of a future tech or internet bubble.  When you compare the IPO's of past technology companies with those of today and planned in the near future, you will notice one thing stands out--the valuations of some tech startups have skyrocketed to the point where there is no place to go but DOWN.   Investor's have already built into those valuations future revenues and earnings potential.  But, what if these startups are unable to live up to those high expectations?  One poor revenue quarter, and its an elevator ride to the bottom.  

COMMENTARY:   I don't have a problem with outside investors or staffers cashing in their shares to obtain liquidity, but I have a few issues:

• Outrageous Valuations - There is no attempt to use generally-accepted valuation methods that discount future earnings to take into account risk and uncertainty.  Many of today's startups have not created sustainable and predictable revenue models like well established publiic companies.  Their valuations are based solely on hype, euphoria, investor over-exhuberance and a whole lot of future potential.
  • LinkedIn is a great example.  Post-IPO it had a PE ratio of 700 times earnings. 
  • Facebook is presently valued at 87.5 billion and a multiple of 85 times earnings (47 times revenues).  
  • Groupon has been criticized for having an unsustainable business model, several have even called it a Ponzi scheme, and although it had revenues of $760 million in 2010, it has never earned a profit, and thinks its worth $15-$20 billion in its coming IPO.
  • Twitter, seeks to raise $800 billion on a valuation of $8 billion.  It's 2010 revenues were $50 million, and it is projected that it will do $150 million in 2011.  It's earnings are unknown.  That's a multiple of 53 times revenues.   

• Secondary Market Brokers - Secondary market brokers like SecondMarket and SharesPost behave like they are the New York Stock Exchange.  Those firms have managed to create a private country club for wealthy investors, venture capital firms and investment banking firms to invest in the stock of private companies.  
• Stock Auctions and Scarcity Create Artificial Demand  -  The number of shares floated for trading by secondary market brokers represents less than 2% of the total shares outstanding for many of the top startups whose shares are traded in the secondary market. In spite of this, the prices paid is supposed to represent the "market price" for those shares. Scarcity has driven share prices to artificially high levels because of the low number of shares being offered at auction.  
• Lack of Transparency - Startups like Facebook and Twitter do not publish their financial statements.  When Groupon and Zynga finally filed their S-1 Registration Statements for their IPO's, it was evident that their estimated revenues and earnings had been over-hyped. Groupon has yet to generate a profit, and Zynga barely squeezed out a profit at the end of 2010.
• The Facebook Halo Effect - Facebook's high valuation has been a key driver for the valuation of other internet startups.  There's a infatuation with "bigness".  Investor's look at the number of users, and automatically assume huge revenues and earnings.  Groupon and Zynga are great examples at just how wrong that assumption is.

SecondMarket just released their Q2 2011 Private Company Report, and it's no surprise that most of their business was internet startups, especially social networks (Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Groupon and foursquare were the top five).  I was surprised to discover that accredited investors represented the largest proportion of buyers by number of transactions (62%) and total dollars (47.6%).  I was also surprised to discover that SecondMarket is brokering the private stock of SharesPost another secondary market broker.

Here are some excerpts from their current report.

"The Private Company Report describes SecondMarket’s completed private company stock transactions and most-watched private companies. In the first half of 2011, SecondMarket completed $268 million* in private company stock transactions, a 75% year-over-year increase from 1H 2010, when total transaction volume was $153 million. SecondMarket’s total transaction volume now exceeds $750 million, reflecting more than 650 transactions completed since 2008.

This quarter, SecondMarket expanded the report to include additional detail around participant engagement on SecondMarket. The data is organized into three sections:

COMPLETED TRANSACTIONS BY INDUSTRY

In the second quarter, Consumer Web and Social Media companies accounted for 87.6% of private stock transactions, followed by Business Products and Services (7.3%) and Retailing and Commerce (5.1%) companies.

COMPLETED TRANSACTIONS BY BUYER TYPE

Institutional buyers accounted for over 52% of private stock transactions by dollar value in Q2. Hedge funds, asset managers and secondary funds alone drove 45.7% of all transactions by dollar value, representing more than $51 million in transactions. Although accredited individuals completed more transactions than institutions, institutional buyers completed transactions of much greater average value. Hedge funds, in particular, completed 5% of the total transaction count, but accounted for nearly a quarter (22.2%) of transaction value in Q2.

The composition of sellers in Q2 2011 did not change from the prior quarter. Ex-Employees continued to constitute a vast majority of sellers (94.2%), followed by Employees (4.4%) and Other (1.5%). There were no sales by Founders or Outside Investors in Q2.

DEMAND BY INDUSTRY

In Q2, SecondMarket participants submitted the most interests to buy or sell shares in Consumer Web and Social Media companies. Balanced buy and sell interests for Consumer Web and Social Media companies potentially supported a more efficient market with a greater number of completed transactions in this sector.

Two sectors had unbalanced buy and sell-side demand: Retailing and Commerce generated twice as many buy interests as sell interests, while Business Products and Services generated six times as many sell interests.

TOP TEN MOST WATCHED 

The following chart summarizes the ten private companies with the highest number of watchers on SecondMarket. For the fourth consecutive quarter, Facebook was the most-watched company, with 7,868 watchers as of June 30. Twitter, the next most-watched company, followed Facebook with 4,133 watchers.

Following the IPOs of LinkedIn and Pandora, two new companies entered the most-watched list: Dropbox, an online repository for files, and LivingSocial, a daily deals platform.

THE RISING STARS

“Rising Stars” includes private companies on SecondMarket with the largest quarter-on-quarter increase in total watchers.

The number of SecondMarket participants watching Kickstarter, a platform for funding creative projects, jumped 820% to 92 watchers in the second quarter. PopCap, a company that develops and publishes video games, came second, climbing 647% to 112 watchers. The number of SecondMarket participants watching Sharespost increased 642% to 193 watchers. LegalZoom, which offers both business and personal legal services, attracted 161 watchers by quarter-end. Lending Club, a peer-lending site that launched in 2007, reached 145 watchers in Q2.

THE NEWBIES

“Newbies” tracks private companies that started the quarter with fewer than ten watchers and gained significant traction by the end of Q2.

SurveyMonkey topped the list with 50 watchers at the close of Q2. Based in Portland, OR and founded in 1999, SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool that enables its users to create their own surveys quickly and easily.

Following SurveyMonkey were Coupons.com, a digital coupons provider based in California (42 watchers) andHipmunk, an online platform designed to easily book flights (41 watchers). Also new to being watched wereJustin.tv, an online community where users can broadcast and watch live video (40 watchers), and YouSendIt, a company specializing in digital delivery of files and other content (34 watchers).

VC SCOREBOARD

New to SecondMarket’s Private Company Report this quarter, the “VC Scoreboard” tracks the ten venture capital firms with the most portfolio companies in SecondMarket’s 100 most-watched list. Sequoia Capital leads with 11 portfolio companies on SecondMarket’s most-watched list, followed by Accel Partners and Union Square Ventures, which tied with eight most-watched portfolio companies.

As you can see from the above information, SecondMarket is doing a lot of business and making a lot of money on trading commissions.  However, a larger percentage of individual accredited investors are buying the private stock of internet startups, making you wonder whether insiders and early investors in many of these startups, will leave those individuals (albeit wealthy individuals) holding the bag when the music stops.     

The lack of transparency and the outrageous valuations for startups that make nothing should concern every investor.  I am also concerned that the Securities & Exchange Commission or SEC, is looking into liberalize the sale of pre-ipo private company shares by changing the 500 shareholder rule to 1000 shareholders.  Startups, accredited investors, venture capital firms and investment banking firms are all lobbying to make this happen, but is this a good thing? Will this lead to furute mainstreet investor abuse?  Will this lead to a future Internet Bubble?  

Courtesy of an article dated June 19, 2011 appearing in The New York Times Technology and SecondMarket

 

 

 

GOOGLE'S 'SOCIAL MEDIA HUB' STRATEGY COULD BE THE SECRET SAUCE GOOGLE+ NEEDS TO TAKE ON AND DEFEAT FACEBOOK

Social media is no longer just about Twitter and Facebook. Granted, at the time of their release, both of these entities rewrote the rules when it came to sharing our lives online. Facebook made it easy to become a voyeur of the lives of soon-to-be moms who you dated at university; Twitter gave you 140 characters into which you could cram your controversial opinion; and location-based services like FourSquare and Gowalla rewarded you for your loyalty. At the height of Facebook’s dominance in the week of 13 March 2010, more people visited Facebook than Google. It seemed strange that, with all the amazing yet disparate products under its wing, Google was floundering in the social media pyre.

     

The meteoric launch of Google+ (20-million users in less than 3 weeks) can be seen as the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes of such failures as Buzz and Wave – the word ‘Circles’ immediately comes to mind here. Users are invited to collaborate with whomever they want to include and those who are excluded are oblivious to it, that’s quite a nifty way to manage the message socially. This form of ‘targeted sharing’ is in keeping with their core money-spinner, Adwords, too. More on that later though.

What we can confirm via Joseph Smarr is that Google+’s backend is built mostly using BigTable and Colossus/GFS and that they use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce which many other Google applications do. What this means, in the bigger scheme of things, is that Google+ isn’t a Facebook killer – it’s a social media game changer, and here’s where some imaginative integration speculation can spice things up:

• Google+ and Docs = collaborative publishing on the fly. As more groups of people begin to collaborate on cloud-based documents it’s going to be important to publish information to certain groups (read Circles) as well.

Eventually, different departments within a business could start publishing information within their Circles and could increase their productivity through this efficient means of data dissemination.

• Google+ and Youtube = exponential video sharing. The chances of a video going viral increase exponentially when you’ve got influencers sharing with their Circles. With over 20-million potential influencers Google+ is now a very nice home-away-from-home for Youtube. Hangouts also mean increased brand engagement: imagine talking to the Isaiah Mustafah (The Old Spice guy) in real time.

Waiting around on Twitter for your brand to reply to you is going to be so old-school when you’ve got real time brand immersion.

• Google+ and Latitude = Foursquare killer. It’s easy to see how having a location-based application like Latitude could fit into a conglomerated social media environment. You can check in, your friends know where you are and, once Google+ allows in brands and businesses, it’s going to be easier than ever for them to do loyalty targeting.

As an aside: If we cast our minds back to November 2010 when rumours of Google acquiring group buying company Groupon were rife we can see the potential in having a group buying application linked to a location based service – this could be a compelling marketing tool for small and medium businesses.

• Google+ and Translate = a true social media Babel fish. Ever get sick of having foreign friends who are probably posting the most interesting things, but you can’t understand Swahili? By integrating Google Translate into Google+, we may no longer have to wonder what our foreign friends are saying or commenting about us – it’s automagically translated.                

• Google+ and Sites = Facebook Fan page killer. There’s only so much you can do to your Facebook page in order for it to stand out from the rest. Not so, if Google+ integrates Sites. The potential for celebrities, businesses and eccentric geeks to differentiate their pages from each other is going to be huge, coupled with the fact that this allows different forms of transactions to occur, from leading generation to crowd sourcing, your ‘site’ on Google+ could cover it all.

And, the real kicker:

• Google+ and Adwords = a viable, trackable and ROI effective monetisation model for social media. Gone are the days of trying to justify the value of a ‘Like’ on Facebook or a retweet by an influencer on Twitter, with Adwords contextual targeting advertisers will be able to target Google+ the same way they do with Gmail. Added to this is the kind of demographic data (age, sex, interests, +1′s) that Facebook has previously only been privy to — which makes targeting your ads in a social media environment so much more effective. As an addition, if it’s reporting you’re after: consider that linking Adwords to Analytics is done fairly easily as it is.

In the bigger scheme of things, Google+ is Google’s Chocolate Factory when it comes to being the one-stop shop for all of their amazing (yet currently disparate) peripheral applications. Given a bit more time, these wild speculations could be the death knell for some of the more favoured social media entities.

COMMENTARY:  I applaud MemeBurn's Graeme Lipschitz for his keen insight into the future of Google+ as a social platform for sharing information and content by integrating all of its product offerings   What Mr. Lipschitz was referring to is Google's strategy of creating a Social Media Hub. In April 28, 2011, Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea reported that Google had filed a patent for a "Social Hub".   Here's what Mr. Slawski says about Google's Social Hub.

"Google is becoming more social on a number of levels, but really doesn’t have a central hub where those social interactions can all be seen at once. That may change in the future, and a new patent application from Google shows an example interface that such a system might use. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Twitter seeing this screenshot from the patent filing:

Another look shows icons that indicate a wider range of status updates and snippets and notifications that might be available:

Google already has worked social features into many of their offerings. Some of the pieces of Google’s somewhat distributed social network include:

•  
  • Google latitude – Allows you to find your friends on a map and share your location with the friends you choose
  • Google Buzz – Sharing real time status updates, messages, and multimedia
  • Google Reader RSS Newsfeed Reader that allows you to share items with others
  • Google Places – The sharing of recommendations and reviews for places that Google tested under the name “Google Hotpot” has been merged into Google Places
  • Blogger – Enables you to start and maintain a blog quickly and easily, comment on other blogs, and “track” favorite blogs
  • Orkut – A social networking and discussion site
  • Gmail – Email program
  • Picasa Web Albums – photo sharing site
  • Google My Maps – Enables you to create your own personalized maps and share them and collaborate upon them with others
  • Google Talk chat via text, voice, and video
  • YouTube Upload videos, comment, favorite, like, befriend, create playlists and interact with others
  • Google My Library – Build a library, annotate it, and share it with friends
  • Google Docs – An online office productivity suite that allows people to share and collaborate on word processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets
  • Google Friend Connect – Enables people to add social widgets and features to their websites
  • Google Knol – wikis that can be published by individuals or as collaborative efforts
  • Google Panoramio – Photo sharing involving posting images of specific places where pictures can be incorporated into Google Earth
  • Google Profiles – A page to share more information about yourself with others
  • Google Sidewiki – Enables people to annotate and comment on any page on the Web and share those annotations with others who can rate and respond to them
  • Google Sites – Enables you to create public or private web sites that can be collaborative efforts
  • Google +1 Button – Allows you to “like” a result that you see in Google Search Results pages, and let others who are connected to you to see your vote. These buttons may become available for placement on web sites in the future.

The Google patent filing describes a hub and corresponding user interface for social interaction, and possibly may include an availability indicator that would show whether other parties are available for interaction. The patent filing is:

Social Messaging User Interface
Invented by Christopher D. Nesladek, Jeffrey W. Hamilton, Jeffrey A. Sharkey. Prasenjit Phukan
Assigned to Google
US Patent Application 20110099486
Published April 28, 2011
Filed: October 28, 2010

Abstract

Hubs for social interaction via electronic devices are described.

In one aspect, a data processing device includes a display screen displaying a social interaction hub, the social interaction hub including a collection of records. Each record includes a counterparty identifier identifying a counterparty of a past social interaction event, a mode indicium identifying a mode by which the past social interaction event with the counterparty occurred, and a collection of mode indicia each identifying a mode by which a future, outgoing social interaction event with the counterparty can occur.

The counterparty identifier, the mode indicium, and the collection of mode indicia are associated with one another in the records of the social interaction hub.

There’s been a lot of talk from Google in the past few months about becoming more social, though as can be seen from my list above, Google does have a lot of social elements already available.

Chances are that we may see some kind of social hub come from the search engine in the future that may help centralize many of their social features.

It’s possible that it may take on an appearance like the one shown in this patent filing, but we won’t know for certain until Google’s ready to bring their social pieces together in one place as one Google social network.

The patent filing’s description and screenshots don’t seem to integrate as many of Google’s present social features together as I might like to see, based upon what Google already offers, including things like personalized My Maps.

What do you think might end up in a Google social hub?"

The Social Media Hub is so important to Google's future, that new Google CEO Larry Page reported told Google staffers that 25 percent of their bonuses would be tied directly to the success of a social strategy.

Google's Social Hub is the equivalent of Steve Job's Digital Hub Strategy, something I am very familiar with and wrote about in a blog article dated March 28, 2011.  

The Digital Hub Strategy was Steve's grand vision of the future that capitalized on an emerging Digital Lifestyle that included text, images, video and sound.  According to Steve, the MacIntosh was to become a Digital Hub, providing a seamless and more efficient system for storing, duplicating, viewing and sharing this digital content between external digital devices like digital cameras, MP3 music players, DVD players, personal organizers and digicams.  The Digital Hub Strategy worked to perfection, reshaping Apple from a strictly computer business to a consumer electronics products maker built around digital devices and digital content.  The Digital Hub Strategy gave birth to the iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iPad and Apple TV, and the rest is history. 

In a blog post dated June 23, 2011, Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt gave some hints of a Social Media Hub describing Google's social media strategy as follows:

"Our social strategy is to take our current products, get users to give us social information and make our current products better." 

Mr. Schmidt's comments came just about a week prior the announcement of Google+, but I didn't take Mr. Schmidt's very seriously because Google has bumbled several attempts to enter the social media space, and I didn't think they had the social network culture.  However, I did say that I thought Eric might be "purposely keeping things vague and close to the vest while they develop a social media platform."  How prophetic my comment has become.

Whereas the MacIntosh was the Digital Hub for all digital devices and content, Google+ will be the Social Media Hub for integrating Google's product offerings from Gmail to YouTube, and anything else that comes along.  

While Facebook is continually spending capital to develop and add new features and third party apps to its social media platform, Google did things in reverse, Google has has found a way to integrate all their disconnected product offerings into a single platform so they are more visible and easily accessible.  The integration does not require extensive investment, and can be integrated  fairly easily.  Google+ serves that strategy beautifully.   

Courtesy of an article dated July 29, 2011 appearing in MemeBurn

TEN WAYS TO IMPROVE GAS MILEAGE TO MEET PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PROPOSED NEW 54.5 MPG STANDARD FOR 2025 VEHICLES

 

With higher fuel standards on the way, here are some technologies that you might see automakers adopt, or adopt more often.

The White House and the major automakers are on the verge of a deal that would raise the average fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks to 54.5 mpg by 2025, according to theWashington Post.

It's a definite jump. Right now, the fleet average mileage for new cars coming off the line is 28.3 MPG and will have to jump to 34.1 mpg by 2016.  The White House had been shooting for an upper limit of 62 mpg by 2025 while the lower limit had been touted at around 42 MPG. Thus, the compromise figure of 54.5 MPG is toward the middle with a nudge to the high side.

So what will automakers do to get there?

1. Diesel. Diesel engines generally get better mileage than their gas counterparts and auto manufacturers have managed to cut down the particulate matter, SOx and NOx, that gave diesel a bad name in the '70s, '80s and '90s. Nearly half of all U.S. gas stations have diesel now too, Audi execs tell us. Both Audi and Volkswagen have seen tremendous pickup in diesel sales.

General Motors last week announced it would bring out a Chevy Cruze that gets 50 miles per gallon in 2013. Ford has diesel cars in Europe that can compete with that: the company might now be encouraged to bring them to the States. Volvo has a diesel hybrid coming. And think of all of the pickup trucks, those money spinners for U.S. automakers, that could go diesel.

2. Electrics and Plug-in Hybrids. 'Duh' is the word you are looking for. Consumers are still waiting in line to get Nissan Leafs and the Chevy Volt from GM. A Russian oligarch just rescued Think, the electric car maker from Norway, out of bankruptcy. Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and other manufacturers all have electrics coming. Demand seems quite strong. The question is really what percentage of the overall car market electrics and plug-in hybrids will occupy. Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has said electrics will constitute 10 percent of industry shipments by 2020 -- 85 millin cars will be sold and 8.5 million will be electric, he claims.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has said electrics could account for 12 percent or so of vehicle sales by 2020. Both Ghosn and Musk are advocates. Cynics put the figure in single digits. Cynics also warn of evaporating incentives. And range anxiety is real: just ask these stranded Nissan drivers.

Personal view: 10 percent seems very possible. Battery prices, the big sticking point, are declining. Many automakers also see it as a way to gain market share. Nissan transformed itself from a listing laggard in Japan to a technology leader. Mitsubishi, which comes out with the all-electric "i" for the U.S. in a few months, will sell it for $28,000. That's less than the Leaf. By 2018, Mitsubishi will have EV's on the market.

Perhaps more importantly, EVs are fun to drive. After you test drive one, you want one. They can be impractical, but so can SUVs and look how well they sold.

3. Regular Hybrids. Ford execs predict that 10 percent to 25 percent of their cars will be electrics, plug-ins or hybrids by 2020. But the vast majority will be regular hybrids.

4. Stop-Start. Also called microhybrids, these cars are like regular hybrids but they have very small electric motors that engage mostly to allow a car to get started quickly. With a micro, a gas engine can go to sleep at an intersection. General Motors recently annoounced a 2012 Buick LaCrosse that will come with its micro technology, which it calls eAssist. It will get 37 MPG on the highway. Yes, below the 2025 standard, but it's a start and will certainly help the fleet average coming from a particular manufacturer.

A microhybrid system can improve gas mileage by 6 percent to 10 percent, Dan Squiller, CEO of battery maker PowerGenix told us last year.

5. Waste Heat. We love waste here. It's America's untapped source of power. Approximately 50 percent of the energy purchased gets lost as waste heat, according to UC Berkeley. Engines are particularly attractive sources for waste heat: some estimate that 85 percent of the energy injected into engines gets wasted.

That heat can be captured, compressed and then exploited to run the air conditioning system. Panasonic has developed a waste heat AC system for cars: it is derived from a household AC unit. (See award-winning video here.) Tempronics, Phononic Devices and Alphabet Energy are also working on devices for converting waste heat into electricity. (Tempronics -- like tempura with electronics -- is particularly focused on cooling, as well.)

6. New Engines. Pinnacle Engines is working on an opposed-piston gas engine, while EcoMotors and Achates Power have opposed-piston diesels. Pinnacle says it can improve fuel consumption by 25% to 50%.

Opposed piston engines were used in aircraft in WW II, but have been refined and retrofitted now for cars. These engines also require fewer raw materials like steel.

So far, these companies have yet to penetrate major auto makers. The big names don't like to license outside technology and all three are licensing firms. Pinnacle and EcoMotors are working with companies in Asia, while Achates is targeting heavy truck makers. Still, with these new deadlines, the big automakers may begin to reach out. In any event, the technology may appear in the U.S. through another route: China. BYD, among other Asian manufacturers, hopes to expand to the U.S.

Expect also to see new, improved engines from the established players. Ford is expanding the number of models of cars it makes that will come with its touted EcoBoost engines. GM and Toyota have worked on HCCI engines for years. (Include Transonic Combustion in the startups-with-mileage-tech-to-license category.)

7. Plastics and Carbon. Weight. It's the third fuel. If you drop weight, mileage goes up. Aptera has struggled to bring a three-wheeled electric car to market. But one of the more impressive aspects of the car is the body. It is made from a durable, lightweight honeycombed material that is six times stronger than steel.  Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur will give you $100 if you can dent it or scratch it.  I couldn't.  

Bright Automotive, a startup that spun out of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is working on light delivery trucks. GM is an investor. Non-metallic bodies can also be curved for great aerodynamics.

8. Hemp. Yes, George Washington grew it, but nearly every automaker is tinkering with ways to replace traditional car materials -- aluminum, rubber, etc. -- with sustainable ones like old plastic and hemp. Some of these should weigh less. Many of these materials should come to market quicker than new materials in auto bodies -- Ford and others already exploit soy and other renewables -- because they often don't have to serve a structural or safety purpose.

9. Wacky Transmissions. Fallbrook Technologies pulled its IPO earlier this year, but the invention, the NuVinci, is still intriguing: a highly variable transmission that relies on balls instead of gears.The company claims it can improve mileage by 12 percent to 15 percent. (See photo.)

10. Hydrogen. Honda and other automakers keep pushing out the deadline for hydrogen cars, and for good reason. Hydrogen is dirty to make, you can't transport it easily and the cars cost a ton of money. But hydrogen cars are incredible to drive -- better than other all-electrics -- and Honda and Mercedes continue to research the concept. Maybe by 2025? Class, discuss.

COMMENTARY:   I wished all automobiles could get 50 mpg now, not by 2025.  The world's automaker's have no choice.  We're running out of oil, and hydrocarbon emissions have dramatically increased the possibility of a greenhouse future.  For my money the Auto Moto scooter is the way to go--83 mpg, and looks like a lot of fun to drive.

 

Courtesy of an article dated July 28, 2011 appearing in GreenTechMedia

 

SPEED-RIDING: PART SKIING, PART PARAGLIDING, AND ONLY FOR HIGH-ENERGY LUNATIC THRILL SEEKERS

Speed-Riding is an interesting activity that combines both skiing and paragliding into one exhilarating experience. Usually, speed-riders start off by skiing down the side of a mountain and as they pick-up speed, they also start to catch big air. Eventually they'll leave the mountain behind altogether and go soaring through the air, before eventually returning to Earth, hopefully on their skis once again.

The video below, which comes our way via the Adventure Journal, does a good job of showing off the sport. Caught on helmet cam, the video starts out with a typical skier out for a downhill run. But eventually that skier runs out of snow, which is when things start to get a bit interesting. I couldn't help but hold my breath as I waited for him to gain some altitude, and I can't be the only one to watch this video and fear for the safety of those skis.

Speed Riding Chamonix 3 juillet 2011 GoPro HD 960

 

COMMENTARY:   That's what I cool, but mighty dangerous and should only be tried by experienced professional dare-devil skiers cum paragliders with a penchant for dying early.  But, if you cannot get enough, here's another complete with a crash.

 

Courtesy of an article dated July 28, 2011 appearing in Before It's News 

THE JUST-IN-TIME 'DISPOSABLE WORKFORCE': CORPORATIONS HIRE LESS, RELY ON TEMPS AND PART-TIMERS AND OUTSOURCE JOBS

Today, American companies are perfectly content to operate with less people, relying on temporary workers and part-timers in unprecedented numbers, and for longer periods of time, while continuing to outsource jobs overseas in order to reduce costs and remain competitive so they can pad the bottom line and keep their shareholders happy.

Here's what's happened over the past 10 years:

• The U.S. economy's output of goods and services has expanded 19%.
• Nonfinancial corporate profits have risen 85%.
• The labor force has grown by 10.1 million.
• But the number of private-sector jobs has fallen by nearly two million.
• And the percentage of American adults at work has dropped to 58.2%, a low not seen since 1983.

What's wrong with the American job engine? As United Technologies Corp. Chief Financial Officer Greg Hayes put it recently: "Sales have come back, but people have not.''

   

WSJ's Willa Plank reports the nation's CEOs do not see an economic recovery underway and do not plan to hire workers anytime soon. Also, over the past ten years, the American adult work force has dropped to 1983 levels. Photo: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

That's largely because the economy is growing much too slowly to absorb the available work force, and industries that usually hire early in a recovery—construction and small businesses—were crippled by the credit bust.

Then there's the confidence factor. If employers were sure they could sell more, they would hire more. If they were less uncertain about everything from the durability of the recovery to the details of regulation, they would be more inclined to step up their hiring.

Something else is going on, too, a phenomenon that predates the recession and has persisted through it:  Changes in the way the job market works and how employers view labor.  

Executives call it  "structural cost reduction" or "flexibility." Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon calls it the rise of "the disposable worker," shorthand for a push by businesses to cut labor costs wherever they can, to an almost unprecedented degree.

Looking back at the percentage of Americans with jobs in the 1990s (rising) and the 2000s (falling), Princeton University economist Alan Krueger estimates that 70% of today's job shortage is simply cyclical, the result of a disappointing recovery from a deep recession. But he attributes 30% to changes in the job market that began a decade or more ago.

Consider these new trends:

Past

When business slumped, employers cut work forces and accepted less work per employee. During the deep recession of the early 1970s, the output of goods and services in the U.S. fell by 5% and employment by 2.5%. Economists puzzled over "labor hoarding," or the tendency of companies to hold on to unneeded workers.

Present

In the most recent recession and the previous two—in 1990-91 and 2001—employers were quicker to lay off workers and cut their hours than in previous downturns. Many also were slower to rehire. As a result, the "jobless recovery" has become the norm.

No one talks about labor hoarding any longer.  Between the end of 2007 (when American employment peaked) and the end of 2009 (when it touched bottom), the U.S. economy's output of goods and services fell by 4.5%, but the number of workers fell by a much sharper 8.3%. Today's puzzle: How and why employers managed to boost productivity, or output per hour of work, like never before during the worst recession in decades?

In an earlier era, when more Americans worked on assembly lines, many layoffs were temporary. When business bounced back, workers were recalled, often because of union-contract guarantees.

At the worst of the 1980-82 recession, 1 in 5 of the unemployed were "temporary layoffs."  In the recent recession, the proportion of temporary layoffs never exceeded 1 in 10. In part that's because fewer Americans work in factories, where production can be stopped and restarted; if a restaurant doesn't have enough customers, it goes out of business.

Economists Erica Groshen and Simon Potter of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said.  

"When layoffs are temporary, subsequent recalls can take place quickly." 

When layoffs are permanent, job recovery is slower, they say. If the employer wants to hire, there's the time-consuming chore of sifting through applications.

The New Corporate Hiring Mentality

• Stock Prices and Profitability - Corporate employers are more concerned over their bottom line and maintaiing their stock price to satisfy shareholders 
• Less Workers Is Better - The recession showed corporations they could do more with fewer workers than many of them previously realized.
• Full-Time Workers No Longer Needed - In a survey of 2,000 companies in 2011, McKinsey Global Institute, the think tank arm of McKinsey & Company, found 58% of employers expect to have more part-time, temporary or contract workers over the next five years and 21.5% more "outsourced or offshored" workers. 
• "Just In Time" Worker Technology  -  According to McKinsey,  "Technology makes it possible for companies to manage labor as a variable input. Using new resource-scheduling systems, they can staff workers only when needed—for a full day or a few hours."
• Importance of Temporary Help Agencies - Temporary-help agencies are playing an ever-larger role—from providing clerical and factory workers to nurses and engineers.

Black & Veatch, a Kansas City, Mo., engineering firm, which shrank from 9,600 employees before the recession to about 8,700 today, is hiring about 100 workers a month. About 10% of its workers are temps, says Jim Lewis, the firm's human-resources chief.  Mr. Lewis says.

"That's a quick way to bring people in, and gives you a little time to see if growth is going to hold or not."

It also makes it easier to cut back in tough times. Workers, in short, now can be hired "just in time." And many employers apparently don't think it's time yet. Because they can hire temps almost instantly, there's little need to hire in anticipation of a pickup in business.

When they do hire, big U.S.-based multinational companies are more able and more willing to hire overseas, both because wages are often cheaper there and because that's where the customers are.

In the 1990s, those multinationals added nearly two jobs in the U.S. for every new job overseas; in the 2000s, they cut their U.S. work forces by 2.9 million and increased them abroad by 2.4 million, according to the Commerce Department.

Hal Sirkin of Boston Consulting Group says rising wages in China are dulling its edge as a low-wage nirvana. In 2000, wages of Chinese production workers averaged 3% of what their American counterparts made. Today, they are at 9%. BCG expects the figure to reach 17% by 2015. Mr. Sirkin predicts that will prompt some manufacturers to move jobs back to the U.S.

How many? He is still working on an estimate. But one thing is clear, though, "These are $15-an-hour jobs," he says, "not $30-an-hour jobs."

Even though the government counts 4.68 unemployed workers for every job opening, some employers insist they can't find workers with the skills they need at wages they can afford.

Federal Reserve surveys of local economies find employers from Boston to Kansas City to San Francisco reporting difficulty in hiring workers "with specialized technical skills, particularly in the health-care and technology sectors."

But workers without college degrees find well-paying jobs scarce in the modern U.S. economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 25.3 million Americans over age 25 without high-school diplomas: Only 9.8 million, or less than 40% of them, were working in June. About 1.6 million said they were looking for work; the rest weren't even looking.

COMMENTARY:   In a blog post dated July 10, 2011, I wrote about the root causes behind America's high unemployment rate and why I thought this situation was no going to be changing anytime soon.   I do not use the term, "disposable worker", in my blog post, but draw the same conclusions mentioned in the above article and dwelve deeply into the forces behind the current jobless recovery. Here's that post: 

The Root Causes Behind Todays High Unemployment Situation, And Why This May Not Change Anytime Soon

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In a blog article dated July 22, 2011, I wrote about what Apple could do with its huge $76 billion cash hoard.  I also pointed out that hoarding cash is not an Apple phenomena, but is common practice in both financial and non-financial industries.  Here are a few highlights of that post:

• In October 31, 2010, US non-financial corporations had accumulated nearly a trillion in cash since cash bottomed at $400 billion during the financial meltdown of September 2008. 
• In March 31, 2011 the 376 nonfinancial S&P 500 companies, or about 91% of the nonfinancial companies in the S&P 500, aggregate cash and short-term investment balances total $1.023 trillion. 
• Three sectors--information technology, health care, and industrials--account for 67.3% of nonfinancial S&P 500 cash totals, compared with 67.2% in the final quarter of 2010.
• According to government data, American multinational corporations have kept abroad more than $1 trillion worth of foreign earnings accumulated over the last five years. Microsoft, Google and Apple have offshore $29 billion, $17 billion and $12 billion respectively.
• According to Federal Reserve data, companies in the United States have $2 trillion stashed in bank accounts, Treasury securities and other investment-ready assets. And this excludes cash held abroad by their foreign subsidiaries to avoid taxes.
• According to the Federal Reserve, at the end of April 2011, U.S. financial institutions held over $1.6 trillion in cash in excess of their reserve requirements.

The hoarding of cash doesn't stop with corporations. Many wealthy American's are also hoarding cash, not in US banks, but foreign banks.  In a blog article dated July 20, 2011, I wrote about the practice of American citizens maintaining illegal bank accounts in several major Swiss banks in order to avoid paying income taxes on the earnings from their foreign investments.  According to the IRS, the practice of maintaining illegal offshore bank accounts by hundreds of thousands of Americans has cost the U.S. government an estimated $300 billion in lost tax revenues.

Courtesy of an article dated July 27, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal 

HOW ADLENS SELF-ADJUSTABLE GLASSES CORRECT THE VISION PROBLEMS OF THE WORLD'S POOR AND DURING EMERGENCIES LIKE JAPAN'S EARTHQUAKE

For the millions of people around the world lacking access to affordable eye care, Emergensee glasses from Adlens Ltd. might be the solution.　The glasses are self-adjustable and can help both near- and far-sighted people.

Adlens sees an opportunity to provide its products to people in the developing world as well as in emergency situations, such as evacuations following disasters like recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan.

 

"Adlens Emergensee" are glasses equipped with adjustable dials. A single pair can correct the vision of 90% of the population - useful for people who lose their glasses in disaster scenarios says James Chen, co-founder of Adlens.

For its product, Adlens has been selected as a finalist in the Asian Innovation Awards.

The World Health Organization reports that at least 153 million people world-wide live with uncorrected visual impairment, and the resulting loss in productivity is at least $120 billion a year.

The WHO says visual impairment is one of many obstacles facing developing countries trying to lay down the infrastructure for economic growth because it can decrease efficiency and motivation to learn or work, and compromises safety in work environments.

Emergensee glasses use Alvarez lenses, comprised of two plates sandwiched together that adjust the strength of the lens depending on how much they overlap. The technology takes its name from its inventor and 1968 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez. Each lens can be adjusted to help focus eye refractions of 0.02 to 0.50, a measure of eyesight, meaning the strength of the lens changes from -6.0 dioptres to +3.0 dioptres, a unit of lens focus, by rotating dials on the side of each frame. Yoshinobu Nakajima, chief executive of Adlens Japan, says this range means the glasses help 90% of refractive-error cases. Refractive error is a visual impairment that occurs when the eyes cannot correctly focus on images.

 

Since its inception as a company in the U.K. in 2005, Adlens has been working with various humanitarian projects to distribute its affordable glasses to less-developed areas of the world, including Tibet and Ghana.

Emergensee glasses are also used in Rwanda, where there are only 10 professional ophthalmologists for its population of 10 million, according to Oxford University. Since 2009, Adlens has worked with Vision for a Nation, a nongovernmental organization that is screening the eyes of the entire population over the age of 8. The Alvarez technology is employed in one of the variations of free adjustable eyeglasses distributed alongside regular reading glasses to people who need them.

In April 2011, Japan became the first commercial platform in developed countries to market Emergensee glasses for what Mr. Nakajima calls "soft emergencies." Priced at ¥4,980 ($61), they are being sold on a variety of platforms—including the Internet and department stores—and are promoted as quick alternatives for people who may have lost, forgotten or broken their glasses.

The fact that each lens can be easily adjusted independently is how Emergensee will seek to be a step above commercial reading glasses that are already available. Mr. Nakajima also recommends them as additions to personal disaster evacuation kits.

Adlens's goals for the future are to improve on current Alvarez lens technology, and make the current design—one that strikes a resemblance to chemist goggles—more fashionable.

But most importantly, Mr. Nakajima wants to develop lenses that can help the remaining 10% of refractive-error cases that are outside the corrective ability of Alvarez lenses.

In addition to lens technology that use digital technology to automatically focus on images, which many other lens creators have set their sights on, Adlens is working on fluid-filled lenses called Adlens p.o.v. The technology uses the fact that light is refracted, or "bent" when it enters water from the air. Adlens p.o.v lenses contain an adjustable amount of fluid to focus on images as needed.

Adlens p.o.v. allows you to adjust glasses to your vision in a simple process that takes only minutes. You can change the lens power by turning the dials on the sides of the glasses to adjust the amount of fluid contained in the lens. This way, you can determine the lens power for near or distance vision quickly and easily. Once at a desired power, you seal the lenses and remove the adjusting dials. Lenses are protected by a polycarbonate cover, making them both durable and easy to care for. Adlens p.o.v. adaptive eyeglasses work as everyday glasses for distance vision as well as for looking at things near you like computers and mobile phones.

Mr. Nakajima said.  

"Eventually we hope to create a product that will accommodate people who cannot function without their glasses." 

Recently, Adlens donated 1,000 pairs of Emergensee glasses to local governments in Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, two of Japan's hardest-hit areas. The glasses were distributed in refugee centers and to people living in temporary housing.

Mr. Nakajima says Emergensee glasses have been useful following the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. When he went to distribute the glasses in Miyagi prefecture, he estimated that 30% of glasses-wearers evacuated their homes without their glasses.

He said.

"Many people who needed these glasses are in their 50s and 60s.  They need reading glasses, and they really liked these because they could be adjusted to different strengths."

He said local governments are considering stocking Emergensee glasses in case people need them in future disasters.

COMMENTARY:   As far as I am concerned, the Adlens Emergensee glasses are the Product of the Year for 2011.   It's an incredibly cool idea whose time has come.  There are millions of people in undeveloped countries, countless poor around the world, the homeless, and people who have experienced catastropies like the earthquake in Fukushima, Japan, who need glasses and would welcome this wonderful product.  

Courtesy of an article dated July 26, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal 

 

 

BLACKBERRY MAKER RESEARCH IN MOTION RETRENCHES, MAKES A LAST DITCH TURNAROUND EFFORT, BUT IS IT TOO LATE?

Research In Motion Ltd. said it will cut 2,000 jobs, almost 11% of its work force, the latest move in a make-or-break scramble to resuscitate its products and keep the company that essentially invented the smartphone from becoming an also-ran.

The BlackBerry maker has struggled to stanch its shrinking share of North American smartphone sales in the face of an onslaught led by Apple Inc.'s iPhone and products run on Google Inc.'s Android operating system.  In June 3, 2011, comScore reported that the Apple iPhone had officially overtaken RIM's BlackBerry as the No 2 mobile phone in the U.S.   

 [Click To Enlarge Image]

In July 5, 2011, comScore reported mobile phone market shares for the month ending May 2011, and this showed that RIM BlackBerry had lost even more market share. 

•  Smartphone Platform Market Share - 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May 2011, up 11 percent from the preceding three month period. Google Android ranked as the top operating system with 38.1 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers, up 5.1 percentage points. Apple strengthened its #2 position with 26.6 percent of the smartphone market, up 1.4 percentage points. RIM ranked third with 24.7 percent share, followed by Microsoft (5.8 percent) and Palm (2.4 percent).

•  OEM Market Share - For the three month average period ending in May, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 24.8 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, followed by LG with 21.1 percent share and Motorola with 15.1 percent share. Apple strengthened its position at #4 with 8.7 percent share of mobile subscribers (up 1.2 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 8.1 percent share.

The company's long-time co-chiefs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, have promised to revamp their own devices.

But investors have dumped the stock amid profit warnings, product delays, executive departures and dwindling confidence in the two leaders' willingness to embrace big, strategic change.

RIM shares have lost more than half their value so far this year. Last month, the company warned it would shed jobs as part of a wider cost-cutting effort as executives promised to navigate the Canadian company through a "transition" towards more competitive products.

But Monday's job cuts were deeper than expected. Nokia Corp., facing a similar erosion of market share, cut or transferred about 7,000 staff in April. While Nokia is a much bigger company than RIM, the cuts at the Finnish device maker represented just 5% of its global work force.

It's also the first significant culling of staff at RIM in its short, super-charged history. In 2002, the company—then just 2,000-employees strong—laid off 200, marking its biggest retrenchment until now people.

In recent years, RIM has added thousands of workers to keep up with demand for its BlackBerry phone. It more than doubled the size of its work force over the last four years. After the cuts announced Monday, RIM's work force will be about 17,000, the company said.

RIM also disclosed a series of senior executive changes, including the retirement of Chief Operating Officer Don Morrison, who had previously been on medical leave. The shifts didn't appear to satisfy shareholders, many of whom have called for a more wholesale overhaul.

RIM shares fell 4.4% to $26.67 at 4 p.m. Monday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. It now has a stock market value of $13.9 billion. By comparison, Apple's market cap has swelled to $369 billion.

Robert McWhirter, head of Toronto money management firm Selective Asset Management Inc., sold the remainder of his 58,000 RIM shares about three weeks ago. He said he worries that RIM, which has always put a premium on the engineering that goes into its devices, will struggle to compete in a market now driven largely by the availability of applications for such devices.

RIM faces "significant challenges," he said. 

The company has bought itself some time with its restructuring efforts. It has promised a line of next-generation BlackBerrys in coming months and years that executives say will compete better with iPhones and other, newer competitors.

Sales of BlackBerrys are still growing quickly in many overseas markets, and the company has little debt and a hefty cash hoard. It had nearly $20 billion in sales in its latest fiscal year.

Mike Abramsky, an analyst at Royal Bank of Canada, has a neutral rating on RIMM stock, but said, 

"RIM has a good strategy, but can they execute on it?"

The stakes in the turnaround effort go beyond the company's tidy, corporate campus in Waterloo, Ontario, a few hours' drive from Toronto. Canada's economy is dominated by mining and energy companies, and RIM has long stood out as the country's most important technology firm—one of the few Canadian corporations with a globally recognized brand. 

It has also become an incubator for an eco-system of smaller companies that have created a high-tech corridor around Waterloo and its university that many liken to Canada's version of Silicon Valley. Amid RIM's recent troubles, the community has rallied around Messrs. Lazaridis and Balsillie.

Ian Klugman, president and chief executive of Communitech, a non-profit support network for tech start-ups in the region said. 

"It's not the end of the road by any stretch of the imagination. It's a new road for RIM." 

Ian McLean, chief executive of the Greater Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce, said Monday he recently bought about 10,000 Canadian dollars ($10,500) worth of RIM stock for his children's education fund.

Still, many Canadians have seen parallels between RIM's current woes and the meteoric rise and fall last decade of another Canadian tech giant: Nortel Networks Corp., which declared bankruptcy in 2009 after failing to find a merger partner to weather the global financial crisis.

RIM placated some disgruntled shareholders earlier this month, promising to review a structure that allows Messrs. Lazaridis and Balsillie to serve as co-chairmen and co-CEOs. Investors and analysts have criticized the arrangement for discouraging an independent board from pushing back enough on strategic decisions.

Neither executive was available for comment Monday.

One small, activist firm succeeded in getting a vote on the structure on the July 12 meeting's agenda, but pulled it after RIM agreed to review the structure.

At RIM's annual meeting earlier this month, Mr. Lazaridis said the company was taken off guard by a smartphone "arms race" that exploded in North America with the debut of the iPhone in 2007.

RIM was slow to realize the threat and upgrade products that could capture new consumers while holding onto RIM's security-minded corporate client base.

During the last two years, RIM made several steps to right the ship, buying up companies to provide a new operating system, browser, and design shop. RIM now says it plans to launch its first phones and tablets using the new operating system, QNX, by early next year.

RIM launched its PlayBook tablet to mixed reviews earlier this year. RIM has acknowledged it didn't do a good job marketing the product, and has promised more user-friendly versions of the tablet in the future.

RIM said Monday the size of the workforce reduction was in line with preliminary estimates it factored into earnings guidance provided last month. Details about the cost of the job cuts and other operating expense reductions will be disclosed in the company's second-quarter results, expected on Sept. 15, the company said. RBC estimated the cost of the restructuring at about $200 million to $250 million.

The company said Monday one of its three chief operating officers, Mr. Morrison, will be leaving. Mr. Morrison has been on medical leave since mid June.

RIM had previously maintained his medical leave was temporary and that he would return to the company. The company said it will farm out his responsibilities to existing executives. Thorsten Heins is taking on the expanded role of COO for product and sales, consolidating responsibility for all product engineering, including hardware and software. Jim Rowan will take on the expanded role of COO for operations.

Amid the turmoil at RIM, several senior executives have abandoned ship. The company's top marketing executive left the company just weeks before the launch of the PlayBook, and several other senior marketing executives have left RIM since.

COMMENTARY:  In June 10, 2011, I profiled Apple and how it has succeeded in totally dominating the mobile app market in a period of four years.  Apps is what made the Mac a success, and apps is what has made the iPhone, iPad and Android phones a success.  The same thing cannot be said about BlackBerry.   Let's look at the number of apps available for the BlackBerry, Android and iPhone between March 2010 and March 2011.  

• BlackBerry:
  • March 2010: 5,000
  • March 2011: 20,000
  • +15,000 or 300% 
• Android:
  • March 2010: 30,000
  • March 2011: 250,000
  • +220,000 or 733%
• iPhone:
  • March 2010: 170,000
  • March 2011: 350,000
  • +180,000 or 105%

As you can readily see from the above chart, Android apps grew nearly 7 times faster than those for the iPhone between March 2010 and March 2011.  BlackBerry apps grew by 300% during the same period, but only increased 15,000 apps.  That's 205,000 and 165,000 less than Android and iPhone apps respectively.  Essentially, BlackBerry did little to compete against Google Android and Apple in the app market, a self-inflicted wound if there ever was.

Research in Motion also made another major strategic mistake.  Of the big three smartphone manufacturer's Research in Motion was late in introducing a touchscreen phone, the Torch 9800, in August 3, 2010.   However, by the time the Torch was introduced, Apple iPhone had fully exploited its first-mover advantage, Google was growing like crazy, and both were stealing huge chunks of market share from BlackBerry.   It's fate may have already been sealed.

However, I would not write-off BlackBerry entirely.  BlackBerry's market share outside the U.S. has remained relatively stable, and it also commands a huge share of enterprise users, who value its reputation as a workhorse.  It's also No 1 among federal government workers with 500,000 phones.  However, in order to prevent its market share from eroding even further, it must take a huge gamble--it should introduce an Android-compatible touschscreen phone as soon as possible. This would allow its present user base to access the 250,000+ apps available for the Andriod, and give it a fighting chance to compete with the Apple.  I think Google would welcome that arrangement, allowing it to dominate Apple even more, and maybe even allow BlackBerry to take back some of the market share it lost to Apple.

Research in Motion was also very late to the tablet market, introducing the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet  in September 27, 2010, but the new tablet was not available for sale until late December 2010, missing most of the Christmas shopping season.  The PlayBook was a decent tablet. I tested it myself.  It supported Adobe Flash, had multi-tasking features, a higher screen resolution than the iPad, but it was heaver and its battery life was inferior to the iPad, and most importantly lacked sufficient apps to draw buyers.  It claims it has sold over 500,000 PlayBook's, but this is a far cry from the nearly 22 million iPad's that Apple has sold through the end of June 2011.    

Having said this, Research in Motion, really needs to gut its entire product design and engineering team, and recruit new blood, that can design the next generation of BlackBerry smartphones and tablets capable of competing with the iPhone, Samsung, Nokia, HP, Sony and Motorola.  If it cannot develop better design and engineering, it should try to acquire the technology.  It's not enough simply to make incremental smartphone and tablet changes like it did with the Torch 9800 and PlayBook tablet, it really needs to differentiate itself, and "put a dent in the universe", borrowing from Steve Jobs.  Can it do that remains to be seen.

Courtesy of an article dated July 26, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal Technology 

A REQUIEM FOR THE END OF NASA'S 30-YEAR OLD SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM, WHY IT HAD TO END, AND WHAT'S REPLACING IT

Why the Space Shuttle was one of the must successful design experiments of all time.

The Space Shuttle is no more. Atlantis returned safely to Earth yesterday, ending the final mission of NASA's 30-year program. The Shuttle was, as Christopher Mims aptly put it on Technology Review, "one of the most complicated pieces of technology ever conceived." It was also a triumph of design in the best, most expansive sense of the word: The STS (Space Transportation System) program literally set out to rethink manned spaceflight from the ground up. Post-Apollo, sending people into space became a design problem: not just "how," but why? What if manned spaceflight was no longer a Cold War pissing match or a bid for the glory of mankind, but as routine -- mundane, even -- as long-distance trucking? That's lateral thinking that would put IDEO or frog design to shame -- yet it came out of a massive government agency. Not only that, it got built. And it worked. For 30 years and 135 missions.

To celebrate that success, and to capture my own mixed emotions about the end of the STS, here's a Shuttle tribute montage that I made:

STS requiem from Small Mammal on Vimeo.

 

Of course, "it worked" isn't actually that simple. Challenger and Columbia are a testament to that. And the vision of routine "space trucking" never came to practical fruition either. Ironically, though, the design vision was too successful -- even though every Shuttle mission was risky, experimental, and expensive, the American people did come to consider it a mundane event, barely worth flipping the channel to watch during commercials. Hey, did you hear one of the space mechanics dropped a wrench in orbit today? Haw, haw!

But the Shuttle did touch us and connect with us and inspire us, in the way that only world-class design can. It may have been a "space truck" in our heads but in our hearts it was a symbol more powerful and global than the Nike swoosh, Apple logo, or possibly even the American flag. The Space Shuttle, as an experimental vehicle, outlived its usefulness. But as an emotional lodestone -- for NASA, for America, for the idea that humans, as a species, can take something awesome and terrible as going into space and make it look as easy as flying an airplane -- it was essential. And there is a void in its wake. Filling it will require another quantum leap in not just science and engineering, but also in design thinking -- in "solving for why."

 

COMMENTARY:  I am sorry to see NASA's Space Shuttle program finally end, but the Space Shuttle Program was 30 year old technology.  Every single launch was emincely complex, fraught with hidden dangers, delays and repairs before and after each launch, and everyone watched nervously everytime a Space Shuttle was launched and returned from space.  When they said, "Let's light this candle", they weren't kidding.  I am thankful that Barack Obama saw the wisdom of ending the Space Shuttle program.  He has taken the heat for ending the program mostly from the Right, but it was time for the damn thing to go as you shall see below.

What Happens To The Remaining Space Shuttles?

After 30 years of spaceflight, more than 130 missions, and numerous science and technology firsts, NASA's space shuttle fleet will retire and be on display at institutions across the country to inspire the next generation of explorers and engineers. 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on Tuesday announced the facilities where four shuttle orbiters will be displayed permanently at the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program. 

• Shuttle Enterprise -  The first orbiter built, will move from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.
• Shuttle Discovery - The Udvar-Hazy Center will become the new home for Shuttle Discovery, which retired after completing its 39th mission in March.
• Shuttle Endeavour - Which is preparing for its final flight at the end of the month will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
• Shuttle Atlantis - which will fly the last planned shuttle mission in June, will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex in Florida.

Bolden said. 

"We want to thank all of the locations that expressed an interest in one of these national treasures.  This was a very difficult decision, but one that was made with the American public in mind. In the end, these choices provide the greatest number of people with the best opportunity to share in the history and accomplishments of NASA's remarkable Space Shuttle Program. These facilities we've chosen have a noteworthy legacy of preserving space artifacts and providing outstanding access to U.S. and international visitors."

NASA also announced that hundreds of shuttle artifacts have been allocated to museums and education institutions. 

• Various shuttle simulators for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum of McMinnville, Ore., and Texas A&M's Aerospace Engineering Department
• Full fuselage trainer for the Museum of Flight in Seattle
• Nose cap assembly and crew compartment trainer for the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
• Flight deck pilot and commander seats for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston
• Orbital maneuvering system engines for the U.S. Space and Rocket Center of Huntsville, Ala., National Air and Space Museum in Washington, and Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

If you want to look back into time, review history and learn something new about NASA's Space Shuttle Program, visit the Official NASA Space Shuttle site.

What's Replacing The Space Shuttle

So what is going to replace NASA's Space Shuttle?   SpaceX, America's first privately-owned and funded (albeit with some government loan guarantees) spacecraft company.  SpaceX launches will cost 40% of what they cost using the Space Shuttle, and the different Falcon rocket configurations provide greater safety, flexibility and lower costs per launch, depending on the size of each payload. The Dragon spacecraft was designed to carry both astronauts and freight, and both the Falcon rocket and spacecraft are recoverable and reuseable.  I have covered SpaceX in numerous blog articles.  You'll find most of them HERE.  Enjoy.

Courtesy of an article dated July 22, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design