Purely Business News

Microsoft and Google are bracing for battle over the lucrative electronic health records business. A recent partnership with Kaiser Permanente puts Microsoft in the lead - for now.

In a pilot program Kaiser will offer Microsoft’s Health Vault personal health-record service to their 150k+ employees. If successful, Microsoft could reach the 8.7 million Kaiser members.

Take Control of Your Records

Microsoft and Google are expected to speed the adoption of personal electronic health records, a key factor in overall improvement of health care as well as a substantial cost cutter. Both the Microsoft and Google systems put control of personal health records in consumers’ hands. This is a fundamental change from the programs currently in place, which may be accessed by patients but are generally controlled by the health care providers and/or the insurance companies. I love the idea of being able to see everything the doctor has scribbled about me.

Another huge benefit: the new records belong to the consumer and are therefore 100% transferable - crucial in our ever more mobile society. If you want to check it out yourself, you can set up a free Microsoft Health Vault account here.

Your Health: The Total Picture

The new personal health records will allow input from all types of monitoring devices. All types of information from blood pressure machines and insulin monitors, to pedometers and treadmills can be entered into the records. Even detailed diet and exercise stats can work together with blood tests and doctors’ notes to create a more complete picture of health.

All this is expected to empower consumers to be more active in their own health management. Not only is this good for our health, it potentially represents tremendous cost savings because chronic diseases ailments like diabetes and heart disease make up a huge proportion of the US health care bill. The more proactive we are in terms of prevention and maintenance, the less we’re likely to spend on treatment.

Ick Factor?
Does it bother you at a gut level that Microsoft or Google, that any company has a hand in your most private information? Will hold so much power? It’s not like all the data’s not out there already.

According to gasoline price authority Gasbuddy.com, some cheap-gas states like Wyoming outdo their more expensive brethren by up to 67 cents.

Glad I don’t live in California.

See how your state measures up

10 CHEAPEST STATES (measured using average gas prices)

Wyoming………….$3.776
Iowa………………….3.813
Missouri…………….3.815
Oklahoma………….3.825
South Carolina….3.828
Kansas………………3.855
Minnesota…………3.860
Tennessee………..3.863
Mississippi…………3.876
Alabama……………3.900

Cheapest city: Tucson, AZ: $3.777 (Weird. Arizona isn’t even on the top 10.)

10 MOST EXPENSIVE STATES

California………….$4.448
Hawaii………………..4.403
Connecticut………..4.354
Washington DC….4.249
New York……………4.205
Alaska………………..4.204
Oregon……………….4.189
Washington……….4.181
Michigan…………….4.098
Maine…………………4.092

Most expensive city: Fresno, CA: $4.510 (Also weird. Why Fresno, of all places?)

Now, for some perspective, one source says Bosnia has the most expensive gas in the world. It costs $10.86 a gallon.

I’m taking the train.

Business Pundit got the chance to sit down with PicScout co-founder Eyal Guru to discuss their latest product called PicApp. Going into this interview, I hoped to get some first-hand information on the process of building an Internet business (all the way from concept to execution).

Eyal Gura is a graduate of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program of IDC Herzliya and he earned his MBA from the Wharton Business School.

Tell us a bit about how you came up with the idea for creating PicApp.

While working hand in hand with content owners in the last 5 years and helping them fight online piracy, we realized together with them that the majority of online piracy is on blogs and small websites. 90% of the copyrighted images used online are used in a way the infringe the owners rights, however only the commercial usages are cost effective to enforce. On the other hand , blogger and online publishers that might not be able to licenses the content are still tremendously benefiting from the use of this professional content that creates traffic and readership.

How long did it take to go from concept to production? In our experience, actual development normally doubles initial expectations;-)

This is a good question! The fact that I am the inventor of the product really put a lot of stress on my team as for me the product was already ready in my mind a second after I invented it. The development took over a year, right after a period of defining the IP and filing the necessary patent applications to protect the idea. When we launched out of closed beta we were, from my perspective, behind schedule, but the good news is that the overall offering was much more comprehensive and the time to market was still within the window of opportunity.

What needs are being met with PicApp that aren’t met with standard image formats?

Standard image formats and business models do not work for the majority of online publishers. First , the price is not affordable for an individual blogger, second , the regular format enables people to just copy-paste the image without tracking it or linking it to the content owner thus infringing the content owner rights even if unintentionally. The result of these two factors is a 90% of online piracy rate for images. Other bloggers often compromise the appearance of their blogs by settling on low resolution and/or watermarked images.

And here comes picapp: Each party in Picapp’s ecosystem sees different added values:

Publishers: get high-end legal content with zero fixed cost, all in one place, high resolution imagery from the best resources , search options and image captions to describe the content better and many other features that are aimed to ease the publishing workflow (i.e. RSS feeds and lightboxes). The offerings for loyal publishers will increase gradually to include more and more cool features and tools.

Content owners get: new safe, high volume, distribution channel for images , ability to control and see where their content appear , reduction in piracy , lead generation (i.e. people who see the images and can use picapp to link to the content owners for proper licensing for brochures for example) and a new revenue source that is an incremental added value.

Advertisers that will utilize the ads space near the image will enjoy the benefit of being associated with publishers that respect copyrights and use legal content. In addition, and this is very important to realize - the best advertising out there (even in offline world) is using the exact same high quality images in order to attract people attention to the promote products and messages.

Who is your target audience with PicApp?

We would like to see picapp images on the majority of the 2 million new blog posts being published every day by the new journalists\editors of the world – online publishers and bloggers.

Have you worked on any Internet projects before PicApp? If so, did those experiences prepare you for the current challenges that you face?

That’s really depends on what you define as an internet project . Our Image Tracking product is the world most comprehensive monitoring service for online images, however it is focuses on service businesses (B2B) . Before PicScout I founded a online recruiting hub that aimed to help professional scouts meet the right professional athletes – it was in those days when you had to showcase the service in certain hotels as they were the only ones that had broadband internet. We were a bit early for the online \video streaming market and eventually crashed with the Nasdaq and were left with good business experience and lessons which were put for good use in our next ventures like Picscout and Picapp.

What has been the biggest challenge thus far with PicApp?

Convincing the world’s most prestigious content owners to give it a shot and provide bloggers and online publishers with free legal access to their content , while utilizing an advertising B-model.

In an ideal world, what’s your vision for PicApp adoption rates? Do you foresee it replacing standard image formats? Or is the target niche more narrow?

In an ideal world , content is king , and content owners revenues will correlate to the appearance of the content and their content is being used. The better looking the article is (that included the image), the more traffic it will get and more revenues will be generated to all parties. Therefore, we do not limit picapp vision just to a niche target market and do aim to have all online publishers enjoy this new image format , and will launch more new formats as we go. In terms of adoption rates, our market survey showed us that bloggers\online publishers do not actually need to use a stock photo image in every post (i.e. some posts might include a Youtube video or a personal photo they took ) however , the number of daily posts published that do need and use stock photos to emphasis and enrich their text is huge and this is where the picapp images are going to be.

Do you have advice for aspiring Internet entrepreneurs who have a solid, but as of yet unexecuted, concept?

Solve a problem (does not need to be a huge one) , then focus on the product and user experience – get as much help you can from friends and advisors , listen to beta users and create a community . Progress as much as you can without external funding. And last but not least , I believe that yes , you do need to have a solid business model.

I knew Charlie Ayers back in the day. As a corporate peon for Google, I would rejoice when lunchtime came around and I could finally extricate my eyeballs from the computer screen. (We each had two monitors. Made us work faster, supposedly.)

So I’d wait in line along with hundreds of other worker bees. We’d grab Google-colored trays, forks, cups, whathaveyou, and shuffle impatiently towards the cramped buffet. Charlie would inevitably appear somewhere from behind the wall of low wall of food dividing his elite cadre of cooks from the working masses. “One piece of meat only!” He’d holler. Or something like that. The cooks ran a ship tight enough to make even the Phish blaring from the cafe loudspeakers sound a little aggressive.

But the food was good. I mean, 98% of it was really, really friggin’ good. 2% of it, like the goat sausage stew or tofu burger sushi roll, was culinarily over my head. But wow, that man could make a heirloom tomato salad sing ecstatic showtunes. His fried chicken made me wish I had a Southern grandma.

The Charlie team even had us all drinking wheatgrass, arguably one of the most disgusting substances on the planet.

So now Charlie, probably the most famous corporate chef in history, has released his first recipe book. Food 2.0, Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google, brings Charlie’s expertise to organic foodies across the country.

The book’s layout makes it surprisingly accessible. Charlie peppers his sustainable eating philosophies throughout the beginning, while breakfast-through-dinner recipes make up the second half. Saving time and health, he says, don’t have to be mutually exclusive. He includes pages of “Smart” tips on how to select good produce, grind your own spices, make simple condiments, and freeze special flavor cubes for future use.

Then, there are his recipes. Apple brie wraps, broiled salmon-pesto-tomato bundles, screwy rabbit (that’s a drink), and a range of others–many of them Northern California hippy-inspired–made a drool string slip out the corners of my mouth.

I tried a couple of recipes. They proved as tasty as Charlie’s Google fare of yore. Simple ingredients and preparation made them a joy to cook. This is good stuff if you’re not skimping on expensive food (I wouldn’t exactly call his recipes recession-proof.)

These recipes also fueled the humans behind the Google machine in its early, wildly successful years. They’re worth trying if you believe you are what you eat, and you would desperately like to become a Googlite.

Charlie had some other secrets to success, but if I told you, I’d have to kill you. Or they would kill me.

I have no doubt that the Charlie book is a worthy contribution to the world of cooking. Whether its recipes are affordable is another question, but if you work at Google, you don’t have to worry about stuff like that…

OK, so that’s not how Startsampling.com markets itself. I stumbled on this site via Google Trends, and it’s on fire right now. It seemed unusual for a free sample site to be that popular–after all, 99% of them are scammy–so I decided to check it out.

I ended up liking it. A lot. Please know that what follows is honest-to-God not a free placement. It just sounds like one. Because I like the site.

Here’s the shtick: SmartSampling will offer you free schwag, from buy-1-get-1-free Dove bars to Tylenol, for minimal commitment. For the free stuff, you often fill out a survey or forward another company your information. The coupons, however, require no additional information (save for your StartSampling registration. I’m a 69-year-old male named Mr. Rubbles, Barney. That probably doesn’t help their market research much).

The real bonus of the site–which is why I imagine it’s so hot right now–is that it appears to be somewhat legit. StartSampling.com has taken the ubiquitous online coupon to a Web 2.0 level. They’ve organized surveys and samples so that it’s actually kind of fun to shop for them.

There’s even a forum where you can discuss coupons. It beats old-fashioned coupon clipping by a lot. I have to hand it to them for promoting the kind of activity that pisses away time guilt-free. Because, after all, the coupons and free schwag are saving you money.

Happy clipping–I mean clicking!

Recently the news has now caught on to the fact that the credit crunch is serious and estimations mean nothing until we can sort out the fundamental problem, unfortunately, that’s us.

We, almost by definition, are powered by debt in fact we owe nearly as much as were worth, that’s a figure to worry about. Really this doesn’t matter we have run as a country like this for years upon end. However, the issue isn’t the debt but who is in control of the debt, the answers simple, banks.

The banks are greedy and there is simply no lie there, for example, one bank (I won’t name names but you can probably easily find out) makes over 6- million pounds profit, yet it won’t lend money……

www.credit-cards-0.co.uk is one of the main sites that brings you the rates of every useful credit card on the market, this means you can start doing credit bouncing.

Credit bouncing is a way to avoid having to pay anything on debt and this is one of the best things to do at this current time.

Firstly you need to go to the site manually or by the link included in this post and find the best0% interest cards you can get. The page is divided extremely well for users and is easy to navigate around, simply pull up the page look across the top bar for purchases and balance transfers then scroll down till you find the card you need.

The page is broken down into a few sections:

Editors choice of the top balance transfer credit cards

Editors choice on purchases

Alphabetical order

This helps us since the first choice is one of the main things you need to do the credit bounce. Order the best 2 cards and transfer your balance onto one when it has only a month left order the next on. You then repeat the process, when the spare has ran out of its time (its spare in case of delays) order a new one.

Using this technique will enable you to stay interest free for up to a year and a half, saving you from bang charges and high interest loans currently floating about.

If you are new to credit cards or don’t understand what each heading on the tables mean then just scroll to the bottom of www.credit-cards-0.co.uk and you will find all the details you need. You will also find information on:

Balance Transfers

0% Purchase Cards

Reward Cards

Football Cards

Business Credit Cards

Charity Credit Cards

Air Miles Credit Cards

Bad Credit, Credit Cards

And more.

Plurk is rocking the social media scene of late and for good reason! Twitter is cool and I’m sure there will be many other twitter clones but to label Plurk a clone is simply outrageous. Looking back on that last sentence I wrote would you believe I signed up for Plurk almost exactly 24 hours ago?

Plurk fittingly has peace love unity and respect written all over it from the get go but that’s enough of the hippy stuff. Doesn’t matter whether it was planned or it was simply a short brandable domain that became available. I’ve heard in the plurkosphere it’s a cross of “Play and Work”. Whatever it is they have hit the big time with something that’s bound to become a blockbuster. I can’t see how it won’t.

What Are The Top 10 Reasons To Say Hello To Plurk?

1) Everything is organized on a graphical timeline. It is quite easy to interpret and makes things relatively easy and clear to follow.

2) Three different options for viewing the timeline of plurks. You can switch between everyone’s plurk’s, your plurks, or your private plurks. You’d naturally want to spend more time answering comments on the plurks you started out of respect for the people plurking. Also I would hope it’s a conversation on a topic you find of interest.

3) It has CLIQUES! That sounded bad I know but it’s just a fancy word for group. Now you can follow everyone and anyone until they spam you and if they are someone you are interested in hearing more from you can chime into that clique. So I went to check it out and the below quote is direct from plurk.

“Cliques make it easy to send plurks to a group of people. You can even filter your timeline via cliques.”

What’s even cooler is you can message a whole clique at a time? Maybe that is why there is a difference between a fan and a friend? Some people are more sensitive to perceived spam then others.

4) Each new “Plurk” is an individual thread. A dialogue that you can track on a timeline. Imagine writing about something of interest and coming back later to find an active conversation on the topic? Since I have only been a member for a day can’t confirm how long you can go back but I’m hoping a while.

5) You can easily share all types of media such as images, videos and links. The images and videos appear as clickable thumbnail; very cool.

6) It has a karma system. I’m not going to write much about it as I have no clue how it works and I have no clue when it updates except that it’s apparently not in real time.

7) You can talk in third person with a slew of choices to choose from that are also color coded. This will help the dedicated plurker know your mood simply by the color of your action. Items currently are things such as wishes, feels, has, says, is, thinks etc…

8) It’s still in the early adopters phase. As of 10:55PM June 5th 2008 the search term “plurk” on google brought up 59,300 results; “twitter” was 68,700,000. On the compete bar it showed 31,000 as the people count. I mean it probably/easily had more people then that register today alone. It’s in its infancy and now is the time to discover it. Imagine finding twitter 12 or 16 months ago?

9) It has emoticons. Whether you’re a high, moderate or low emoticon user / lover it’s good to have. It’s so easy to convey the wrong tone on email where you can write a book let alone 140 characters!

10) It has a built in top 10! It’s “intresting pluckers” features the top 10 users by karma and also lists the latest noobs who are always looking for a friend right? It also has 10 features worth mentioning for this and MANY more.

This may come across as a twitter bash which I guess it is sorta. I still like and plan to use twitter it’s just Plurk took a good idea and made it great.

Technology

B5 Media Content Manager, Christina Jones recently wrote on Biz Chicks Rule about the similarities of running a beauty salon and managing content for B5 Media. She inspired me to delve back into the catacombs of employment memories. My first job outside of the elementary school strawberry picking experiment was domestic in nature. Every Saturday I cleaned house for a ‘rich lady’. (With her husband, she owned a raspberry farm where I later worked - but that’s another set of lessons.)

Transferable Skill: Toleration of grunt work
I have literally grunted while cleaning house. It’s hard work. The ability to get over yourself and do the task at hand will be appreciated in many different jobs. When I advanced to the lofty position of Bank Teller, my supervisors loved that I would file account signature cards without complaint.

Later, when I learned that my glamorous consulting job consisted of long stretches of document inventory and tedious verification and cross referencing of facts and figures, I excelled because I was able to plow through the 80% grunt work to the 20% analysis. Had I grumbled over the easy stuff, my supervisors may have given the plum tasks to a more pleasant junior staffer. I saw more than a few MBAs who didn’t make it 6 months because of a bad attitude toward the monotonous. Gotta take the bad with the good.

Accept and Enjoy the Tedious
You learn a lot tending to the details of a business. And contrary to what some people believe, conscientiously and even enthusiastically completely mundane tasks does not mean you’ll be relegated to them forever. It signals to your employer that you’d be great at teaching (ie. delegating) them to the next quality employee who comes along. Remember, that’s how we get ahead - by helping others get ahead too.

There are many other things you can learn cleaning house. Attention to detail, efficiency, the importance of rubber gloves. Next time you’re cleaning house - for pay or just for glory (this is for you wannabe mama entrepreneurs too after all) - let your body go through the motions while your mind gets creative on the ways you can create a different situation. You just may create the work of your dreams from a tub of scrubbing bubbles!

The WSJ this morning put up an article about corporate death benefits. It turns out that the grossly overcompensated American CEO still lingers in our midst, despite the challenges that have destroyed quite a few of his kin.

The article reports that some executives, when they sign their hiring contracts, acquire fat severance packages, vested shares, a continuation of salaries, bonuses, and even “supercharged pensions”–after they die.

According to Reuters, “Compensation critics call the practice the ultimate in pay that is not based on performance.” No kidding.

Here are a couple of postmortem benefits signed on by C-level executives:

• Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries, gets a post-croak severance payment of more than $260 million.
• The CEO of Shaw Group, whom the article didn’t mention by name, will rake in more than $17 million with his cold, dead hands in exchange for not competing with the company after he dies.

But–how can he compete after he’s dead?

Companies defend themselves by saying the pay will be going to the executives’ (very wealthy) families in case of an unexpected death. These additional benefits are just part of a sophisticated pay package intended to cover all possibilities.

In many cases, compensation attorneys tell the Journal, death benefits are really a form of deferred compensation, structured partly for estate-planning or tax reasons, and that the packages help to keep executives from leaving.

Sounds like companies are stuffing money into every imaginable crevasse in order to retain talent. It just so happens that one of those money stashes is located in the afterlife.

“If the executive is dead, you’re certainly not retaining them,” Steven Hall, an executive-pay consultant in New York, tells the Journal.

Nope, but you are buying off their families.

The next time I write a business contract, I’d like to include a pre-mortem clause of $17 million. And a lavish burial in case I do die, with Prada funeral favors for my friends and family.

On the serious side–does anyone know if this is actually ethical?

Lee Odden over via Ed Kohler of the Technology Evangelist writes about Social Media Optimization. How does business leverage the opportunity to connect with people using consumer generated media tools?

I’ve distilled Lee’s tips into a easy to use and remember format for my readers here:

1. Get In.
Go where where your market is and investigate the Long Tail for related niches for your products and services. Get your brand is fair percentage of minds hare.

2. Fit In.
Create community around your brand for your percentage of minds hare to pay dividends. Go interactive and create conversations and networks around your brand. Participation is mandatory or someone else will start the conversation that you should have had to begin with. Meet your community where they are and find out what they want and deliver it. Fit in with the new expectations and habits of social networking.

3. Make Friends.
Do actually engage your market through community. Create interactive contests, polls, user feedback loops whatever allows your community to choose, create and contribute to the improvement of your brand. Allow them to submit home grown videos, photos, naming contests and any other unique and interesting experiences that will reinforce your brand and a great experience. This leads to trust. When you’ve been authenticated and validated by your community that can rightly influence the message of your market about your products and services. You’ll find yourself in a cooperative position where consumer involvement becomes a vital contribution to your success and word-of-mouth marketing is lifting your business profile in a positive manner that helps you acquire new business.

Check out Lee’s comments by clicking the link below:

SMO: What is Social Media Optimization?: Technology Evangelist.

To read the Lee Odden’s comments in full, visit him at the Online Marketing Blog: New Rules for Social Media Optimization.