August 2012

Meaningful Use Stage 2: A Giant Leap in Data Exchange

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Meaningful Use Stage 2 rules we just issued represent a massive step forward in advancing the secure exchange of information between providers and patients to support better care across the nation. Getting the right information to the right person at the right time can be a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, anyone who has been a patient or cared for a patient understands that it’s simply not happening today.

Kindle-Exclusive Books Have Been Downloaded Over 100 Million Times

Amazon announced that its catalog of over 180,000 exclusive Kindle books have been purchased, downloaded, or borrowed from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library more than 100 million times. Nearly all of these exclusive books are available for Kindle owners with a Prime membership to borrow for free, as frequently as once a month, with no due dates.

Popular Kindle-exclusive titles include “War Brides” by Helen Bryan, which has been purchased or borrowed over 270,000 times and has remained on the Kindle Top 10 list for the past 8 weeks; Karen McQuestion’s books “A Scattered Life,” “Easily Amused” and “The Long Way Home,” which have been purchased or borrowed more than 500,000 times; and Ed McBain’s classic and long-running 87th Precinct series, which debuted in 1956 and is now published for the first time in digital and has been purchased more than 250,000 times since December. Other best-selling exclusive books include several titles from Debora Geary, particularly “A Modern Witch” which recently hit #1 on the Kindle best seller list (briefly unseating “Fifty Shades of Grey”) and “Our Husband” by Stephanie Bond, which has been on the Kindle best seller list since July. Both of these authors have sold at least 200,000 copies of their books.

Google: Making it easier to cast your ballot

To make it easy to navigate the rules and deadlines about registering to vote and how to vote by mail, Google put together an online voter guide. We’ve also added a special section to make it easier for military and overseas voters to find information about their different rules and deadlines. As we approach the final days of the election, we’ll continue to develop useful ways for voters and campaigns to engage one another around the important issues in 2012. We hope these tools will help you stay informed and participate in the election!

Court denies challenge in Tribune Company case

An emergency motion by Aurelius Capital Management to stay Tribune Co.'s emergence from bankruptcy for six months -- without putting up a required $1.5 billion bond -- was denied by a U.S. District Court in Delaware. That decision gives Aurelius, a New York-based hedge fund and junior creditor in the nearly four-year-old bankruptcy case, until Wednesday to come up with the money. If that deadline passes, Tribune Co. can begin to move forward under the reorganization plan confirmed last month by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey to hand ownership to its senior creditors.

Torching California’s Broadband Future: Why Your State Is Next

[Commentary] Gov Jerry Brown (D-CA) recently declared a state of emergency in three northern California counties ravaged by wildfires. There’s another state of emergency for Californians: It’s called SB 1161, and it leaves Californians without a protector to keep watch on the cost, service quality, safety, and availability of access to information, data, and entertainment – everything on which modern life depends.

Because just a few giant companies control the wires, they’ll be picking the economic and social winners and losers in America. Burning trees, burning up the state’s future – it’s all cataclysmic. Few in the California Legislature likely understood the ramifications of the bill they just agreed to. It seemed to be all about deregulating “VoIP.” But the problem is that the bill covers all “IP-enabled services.” Pursuant to some current Federal regulatory gymnastics, “IP-enabled services” includes not only content and functions that use wires and airwaves but also the physical wires and towers themselves. Everything these days, from thick pipes in the ground to Wired.com, is an “IP-enabled service.” All communications are using the internet protocol, and the FCC has re-labeled all of them “IP-enabled services.” It’s like calling a highway an “electric-car serving conduit” and then making it available for only rich people because electric cars are really cool.

Does High Speed Broadband Increase Economic Growth?

[Commentary] It’s a reasonable enough question: does the roll out of high speed broadband increase economic growth? If it does, if there’s more than just the private gains that users themselves capture then this might make a decent case for there to be subsidy of the installation of such national infrastructure. This paper from Arthur D Little and Ericsson (who, err, make broadband equipment so might safely be assumed to have an interest in the matter) claims that there is such an effect. It is absolutely true that if you build it they will come. We would undoubtedly find new things to do with 100 Mbits, even the 1 Gbit systems being tested in places. But we still do not know, we can only hope, that those new things would justify the costs of building such systems. We do know however, that the move from none to 2 Mbits, or from 256 k to 2 M, does indeed produce those growth dividends. Thus, in a world with constrained resources that is where we should be aiming our support. Not at all in laying fiber optic to every corner of the land: rather in putting in alternative, presumably mobile, solutions to the gaps in the current network.

GPS technology finding its way into court

The rapid spread of cellphones with GPS technology has allowed police to track suspects with unprecedented precision — even as they commit crimes. But the legal fight is only now heating up, with prosecutors and privacy activists sparring over rules governing the use of powerful new investigative tools.

The US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit stirred the debate last week when it supported police use of a drug runner’s cellphone signals to locate him — and more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana — at a Texas rest stop. The court decided that the suspect “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy” over location data from his cellphone and that police were free to collect it over several days, even without a search warrant. The decision riled civil libertarians, who warned that it opened the door to an extensive new form of government surveillance destined to be abused as sophisticated tracking technology becomes more widely available. On August 20, six days after the appeals court ruling, the U.S. attorney in Arizona cited it in defending the use of cellphone location data to help arrest a suspect accused of tax fraud. “We’re looking at the very frightening prospect of an excessive degree of government intrusiveness in our personal lives,” said Gerald L. Gulley Jr., the Knoxville, Tenn., lawyer who represented the drug-running suspect at the Texas rest stop. “I don’t think that people who go out and buy cellphones necessarily contemplated . . . the degree of intrusion in their personal life.” Gulley says he’ll appeal the case.

Voters still tuned in to traditional news media, poll finds

Facebook and Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo increasingly provide Americans their gateway for news, but the bulk of voters who catch up on current events daily turn to traditional sources, particularly local television stations, according to a nationwide poll.

Traditional news sources on TV and in print also remain more trusted than the burgeoning alternative ecosystem of blogs, late-night comedy shows and social media outlets, the USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times Poll on Politics and the Press found. The survey confirms a few widely suspected divides: Democrats and the young tend to be more trusting of a variety of media, while Republicans and older news consumers are more skeptical. Despite mixed feelings, though, the voters surveyed said by more than 2 to 1 that they got useful and important information from the media. The USC/Times poll found that with a welter of new media alternatives available, there was only one source that a majority of registered voters turned to at least daily: local television news. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said they watched their local TV news that often. That gives local stations considerably more reach than the second-most-common news source: local newspapers, in both their print and online versions. About 39% of those surveyed said they routinely turned to the local paper.

Google To Beef Up Privacy Team

Faced with a series of high-profile privacy gaffes, Google intends to hire computer "ninjas" to flag potential snafus before they pose problems.

The company recently posted a job announcement seeking data privacy engineers for the "privacy red team." The company says in the job description that it's seeking candidates to "independently identify, research, and help resolve potential privacy risks across all of our products, services, and business processes in place today." Privacy expert Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the think tank Future of Privacy Forum, says he expects that other companies will follow Google's lead and hire their own "white-hat" privacy hackers in order to discover problems before independent experts like Mayer. "It's in line with the trend in a number of areas to find problems before your critics do, and try to fix them before someone turns them into a story," he says.

The Uncanny Valley of Internet Advertising

If you ask an Internet ad guy to defend himself—to explain why you, dear Web surfer, should feel comfortable letting him serve you ads based on everything you do online—you’ll likely hear two arguments.

First, he’ll tell you that targeted ads are simply the cost of doing business on the Web. It takes billions to build and maintain sites like Google and Facebook, and you don’t pay a dime to use them. Parting with some of your private information—and agreeing to tolerate, if not always click on, some ads—is your end of the bargain.

But it’s the ad guy’s second argument that’s supposed to clinch the deal. That argument goes like this: Don’t worry, you’ll like the ads! This is the grand promise of Internet marketing. When they work like they should, ad gurus say, Web ads won’t annoy you with pitches for stuff you’d never buy but instead will delight you by introducing you to products and services that you never knew you really wanted.

Over the years I’ve spoken to many marketing and privacy people at big tech companies, and they all tell some version of this story. Before the Internet, advertising was broken. Companies would waste billions to broadcast messages to people who weren’t interested in their wares, and because we all understood that most ads weren’t selling stuff we’d ever buy, we’d ignore most of the pitches sent our way. The Internet promised to change all that, transforming the enormous advertising industry from something that was mostly wasteful into a hyperefficient, hypereffective commercial matchmaker. It’s a great theory. And then you launch your browser, load up any site, and you’re bombarded with the ugly reality. Why are Internet ads so crappy? Why are they so often so creepy? Other than those tiny text ads that show up alongside your search results—which have truly revolutionized the ad business—most commercials you see online don’t seem to know anything at all about you or what you might buy.

Benton

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