Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog

You don't have to be rich to buy George W., who has raised $40M+ in campaign contributions, according to this Washington Post story:

For just $39.99, you get a plastic model of Bush wearing flight suit, survival vest and parachute harness, jauntily carrying helmet and oxygen mask - - just as Bush did on May 1 after climbing out of his S-3B Viking aircraft. The Bush doll joins many other Navy SEALs, Blue Angels and World War II aviators in Blue Box's "Elite Force" series.

...The company recommends that only those 14 and older use the Bush doll, which it says is an "adult collectible item" and emphatically not a toy. It may, in fact, pose a choking hazard for the president's Democratic opponents.

In other news, it appears that George Soros, the well-known international financier, is raising money to defeat George W.

Soros is helping to raise a $75 million kitty designed to defeat the U.S. president, George Walker Bush, in next year's presidential election. The Hungarian businessman believes this administration's policy, nationally and globally, is dangerous for the Americans and the world.

He has already put $10 million of his own money behind a newly formed group of well-wishing, good-thinking people, including liberals, unionists and environmentalists. The group's aim to help the Democrat candidate in 2004 to offset Bush's huge advantage in election spending, estimated at $200 million, to fund his re-election drive.

The annual physical may be obsolete according to this New York Times story (registration required):

Checkups for people with no medical complaint remain the single most common reason for visiting a doctor, according to surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2000, they accounted for about 64 million office visits, out of 823.5 million visits over all. At $120 to $150 per visit (and $2,000 or so for the gold-plated "executive physical" that many companies offer to top executives), that adds up to more than $7 billion a year.

Yet in a series of reports that began in 1989 and is still continuing, an expert committee sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, found little support for many of the tests commonly included in a typical physical exam for symptomless people.

I believe this is one of the main reasons why blogging took off. People were tired of monitoring all the news all day and all week. I know I got over having CNN turned on as background noise every day (once I got over the Weather Channel serving the same purpose). Many people would rather have a trusted blogger pointing them to the more interesting things happening in their field of interest. According to this New York Times story (registration required):

According to Nielsen Media Research, about 24.1 million people watched the three evening newscasts each night, on average, in June and July, compared with 25.2 million during the two-month period last year and 24.3 million during June and July 2001.

As for cable, CNN's daily audience during June and July was, on average, 413,000 people, down from 502,000 last summer, according to Nielsen Media Research, and much smaller than its audience of 2.5 million during the thick of the war. The daily average audience for MSNBC, which is owned by the Microsoft Corporation and G.E., fell from 254,000 last summer to 197,000 this one — which is down from 1.3 million during the war.

And while the average daily audience at Fox News grew to 753,000, compared with 612,000 during last summer's two-month period, the audience was nowhere the average of 3.2 million people who watched Fox News each evening during the thick of the Iraq fighting.

According to this New York Times article advance copies of a new book, There Must Be A Pony In Here Somewhere, by San Francisco writer Kara Swisher who was on hiatus from the Wall Street Journal reveals that:

America Online, in a self-effacing role reversal, is petitioning AOL Time Warner to remove the "AOL" from the parent company's name.

The request means that AOL has now come full circle. When AOL, as America Online is commonly known, acquired Time Warner to create the company two and a half years ago, its executives insisted on putting the "AOL" at the front of the name, one executive involved said last week.

The name of the new book comes from a famous joke told often by President Reagan:

Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his out look, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this manure," the little boy replied, beaming, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

"Reagan told the joke so often," Meese said, chuckling, "that it got to be kind of a joke with the rest of us. Whenever something would go wrong, somebody on the staff would be sure to say, 'There must be a pony in here somewhere.'"

This is going to be a increasingly problematic issue as market leaders skip advertising deals unless the portals can guarantee new revenue. In this case, Monster decided to forgo its relationship with AOL and MSN when CareerBuilder came in with much sweeter deals for the two portals and, conceivably, less emphasis on ROI since they're behind already and want more traffic and some of Monster's customers according to this San Francisco Chronicle story. This is not a good time for Monster to be giving up these prominent channels and they may regret losing these deals.

In an interview last week, Monster founder Jeffrey Taylor said Monster had some interest in renewing its portal deals, but not on the terms AOL and MSN expected. As the established leader in Internet recruiting, Monster wanted pay- for-performance terms that would have required Monster to pay mainly for new customers who actually used its services. But AOL wanted a large guaranteed payment up front for touting Monster to AOL members, he said. Moreover, the two couldn't agree on how to measure performance.

...CareerBuilder agreed to pay AOL as much as $115 million over four years, more than the $100 million Monster committed to AOL during the dot-com mania of 1999. At the same time, CareerBuilder agreed to pay Microsoft as much as $150 million over five years.

Flash mob in London causes chaos in the West End and almost doesn't occur when then the store owner closes the store early and heads for a pub!

Around 200 people descended on the sofa shop, bringing the manager, who had already locked up for the evening, running out of a local boozer, thinking he was about to do some serious business. Derrick Robinson told Reuters: "My first reaction was I thought there was a fight. Then I thought it was a celebrity..."

Here's the site that's monitoring the so-called Flashmobbers!

The hottest new trend thanks to technology -- email, Yahoo! group (groups.yahoo. com/group/the_mob_project), Craigslist, social networking sites like Friendster and blogs -- is called Flash Mobs, a high-tech version of performance art put together by a few folks and hundreds of strangers who hear about it and decide to participate. It first began thanks to "Bill" in Manhattan in May who emailed friends and friends of friends to congregate at a Macy's and ask the staff there for their help in purchasing a "love rug" for their commune. This San Francisco Chronicle story describes the second such occurrence of a Flash mob in San Francisco this past Saturday:

Chaos erupts at exactly 2:07 p.m. Sun-bathers suddenly leap to their feet and friends break formation. Strangers begin grabbing one another's hands and running toward a central point in the park. Pedestrians on Dolores Street and patrons of a sidewalk cafe charge up the hill to join them.

...Flash mobs are a distinctly 21st century phenomenon, the latest and most flamboyant example of how Internet connectivity is inspiring do-it-yourself communities in the offline world. These can range from a political action (Seattle's WTO demonstrations and the recent ousting of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, both of which relied on mobile technology) to organizing parties-with-a-purpose (the Guerrilla Queer Bar Web site periodically organizes takeovers of Bay Area straight bars for a night).

...While he applauds the fun aspects of flash mobs, Howard Rheingold, the Mill Valley author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," says the mobs are also reflective of a larger movement toward self-organizing social networks created through interconnected, real-time technologies such as cell phone text messaging, PDAs and the Internet.

Congress is going to see a new bipartisan bill that provides incentives and penalties to states that lag in implementing an updated wireless 911 system that can easily help pinpoint the location of a cellphone user when he/she calls in an emergency according to this San Francisco Chronicle story. Some 30-50% of all 911 calls nationwide originate on a cellphone.

Equipping all cell phones with so-called enhanced 911 capabilities and making sure that all of the estimated 7,000 jurisdictions across the country that answer 911 calls can pinpoint cell callers' locations is a multibillion- dollar proposition. So far, only about 10 percent of the country's 911 centers can trace cell calls.

...In California, the state 911 Emergency Communications Office estimates that 7 million of the 20 million calls made annually to 911 come from cell phones.

I responded to a discussion going on at Ryze.com about the number of blogs each person has, and whether that number reflects the number of email addresses that person has. For instance, a school-related blog that is based on your school email address vs a personal bare-it-all blog that's associated with your free hotmail account.

I've been going back and forth on the issue of how many blogs is the right number to have. I started out with several blogs but then narrowed it to two...one on nonprofits (called Net Present Value) and the other on business/technology...this one called Ready Fire Aim. But it is hard enough to blog each day on one blog let alone multiple blogs...and so I decided that I was going to focus my attention on one blog.

And since my opinion and interests color all my blogging, I think Ready Fire Aim can be broad enough to include the kinds of nonprofit stories I wanted to highlight in my second blog...usually about the management or strategies of nonprofits etc. 

On Blogging Network I've found that some of the more prolific and popular writers have several blogs in many of the 19 categories. But that takes dedication and time to come up with interesting things to blog about regularly on multiple blogs. And may result in more abandoned blogs than if each person had just one blog they were focused on.

I think we'll see the majority of people settling into having 2 blogs (if at all) in the long run -- a personal, fun blog with photos and rants and all -- and a professional one that builds their brand and promotes their expertise or knowledge in a certain field.

Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp, formerly USA Interactive sans its entertainment businesses that it sold to Vivendi, lost $3.02 on its shares even though it continued to do well with increased revenues and profits. Investors had hoped for more aggressive growth. What was surprising, according to this New York Times story (registration required), was the loss in membership at Match.com, InterActiveCorp's star business in the hot online personals category.

One sour spot in the company's portfolio of companies was Match.com, which had been the leading service in online dating, a rapidly growing and profitable market. Its paid membership base — excluding members of uDate which it acquired in the quarter — fell by 44,300 in the second quarter to 722,300, its first decline.

In an interview, Mr. Diller said that the growth in the service had resumed with improvements made to the Match.com site in June. Compared with a year ago, revenue from personals increased 62 percent, to $48.2 million. Its operating income rose 14 percent, to $7.6 million.

Young adults are saying enough is enough and not getting yet another high-stress, intense summer job according to this New York Times story (registration required):

After spending their summers accumulating the experiences deemed necessary for admission to the right college or graduate school or for an early jump on a career, Ms. Phillips-Patrick and some of her peers are mounting a rebellion. They are getting off the résumé-building track this summer.

...These are the organization kids, as David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There," calls them, describing their sleep-deprived, goal-oriented, résumé-building lives. College, he says, is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement.

While many people on the two coasts have benefited from the increase in home prices over the last 20 years, other people living in the rest of the country have barely seen their home prices keep up with inflation according to this interesting New York Times story (registration required):

Homes in the areas that were already the most expensive — California and the Boston-to-Washington corridor — have often doubled or tripled in value, even after adjusting for inflation. The increases have created nest eggs for longtime owners and allowed them to borrow billions of dollars against their equity, financing new kitchens and college educations and keeping the current economic malaise from being far worse than it might have been.

But while the boom has become the subject of daily conversations among the middle class and affluent in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, people in much of the country have little housing bounty to tap for home improvements, retirement or other needs. From Fort Wayne to Rochester to Salt Lake City, the prices of typical homes across most of the country's vast middle have risen just ahead of inflation — and more slowly than incomes. The cost of homes in the most expensive cities is now about six times that in the least expensive, up from a ratio of three to one two decades ago.

The reason why AOL's subscriber numbers have fallen so drastically is not because a large number of subscribers have been bailing on the Internet Service Provider but because AOL may have hyped up its numbers the last few years, and the new management is simply going in and cleaning the subscriber lists so that accurate subscriber numbers can be determined according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required).

People familiar with the situation say part of the cleanup involves the termination of subscribers generated by a little-known America Online initiative. Starting in 2000, AOL began selling limited-usage online accounts in bulk for as little as $1 to $3 a month to its marketing partners such as Target Corp., J.C. Penney Co. and Sears, Roebuck & Co. A regular limited-usage subscription at that time cost about $10 a month, while a regular subscription was slightly more than $20. The retailers then could offer the online service to their employees for a discount and pocket the difference.

...In total, people familiar with the situation say America Online generated at least 830,000 subscribers through these bulk sales, mostly during 2001 and 2002. That would have accounted for 16.7% of the total subscriber growth, which was just under five million, during that period. Currently, AOL has 25.4 million U.S. subscribers, down from a peak of 26.7 million on Sept. 30, 2002.

 

eBay, who's shares are up 71% for the year, announced a 2-for-1 stock split and continued strong showing according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

EBay said net income jumped to $109.7 million, or 33 cents a share, from $54.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year ago. That exceeds the 30 cents a share the company had told Wall Street to expect. Revenue rose to $509.3 million from $266.3 million a year ago, slightly better than the $500 million eBay had forecast for the period.

...The company said its merchants sold $1.58 billion of vehicles through eBay, $500 million in consumer electronics and $500 million in computers. EBay receives a cut off those sales. EBay said it reached a settlement with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who had alleged that the company's PayPal business violated part of the USA Patriot Act by facilitating illegal online gambling. EBay said it paid $10 million to settle the matter. EBay discontinued PayPal's business serving gambling sites after it acquired PayPal.

eBay, who's shares are up 71% for the year, announced a 2-for-1 stock split and continued strong showing according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

EBay said net income jumped to $109.7 million, or 33 cents a share, from $54.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year ago. That exceeds the 30 cents a share the company had told Wall Street to expect. Revenue rose to $509.3 million from $266.3 million a year ago, slightly better than the $500 million eBay had forecast for the period.

...The company said its merchants sold $1.58 billion of vehicles through eBay, $500 million in consumer electronics and $500 million in computers. EBay receives a cut off those sales. EBay said it reached a settlement with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who had alleged that the company's PayPal business violated part of the USA Patriot Act by facilitating illegal online gambling. EBay said it paid $10 million to settle the matter. EBay discontinued PayPal's business serving gambling sites after it acquired PayPal.

While many of the higher-end hotels charge $9.95 per day for broadband service, Marriott is trying to differentiate its mid-priced hotels by offering free broadband Internet connections in order to court business travelers 75% of whom now travel with a laptop. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

The Washington, D.C., hotelier said its Courtyard, Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites and SpringHill Suites will offer the free service by year end. That amounts to more than 1,200 hotels in the U.S. Its Fairfield Inns will offer the free Internet service by year-end 2004, the company says. There are more than 500 Fairfield Inns in the U.S. About a third of the hotels in all of these chains currently offer the service, but charge guests to use it....

"We see this as an opportunity to increase market share," said Gordon Lambourne, a Marriott spokesman. "We have research that shows that it's definitely something that travelers are looking for.... Guests tell us that they look for high-speed Internet access when they make their decision on where to stay."

How much worse can it get when you're single and trying to meet someone...and you have to head to online dating sites (consumer spending on online dating sites tripled to $302M last year) but you get rejected? Not by an individual you were interested in but by the online dating site itself...since now certain sites force you to answer various questions and only let you join if you pass the test according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

After completing a mandatory 40-minute personality test on the match-making site eHarmony.com, Mr. Bosyk experienced the latest -- and arguably most extreme -- form of courtship humiliation: He was rejected by an online dating service.

...An estimated 40 million Americans visited online dating sites in June, according to comScore Networks, which ranks online dating the most lucrative industry on the Web in terms of consumer spending (with the possible exception of pornography, a business in which revenue figures are difficult to track).

I grew up with Madonna. I love her music. But the new Gap ads overseen by a friend who heads up their brand and marketing leaves much to be desired. They hardly appeal to Gap's main customer base, the same customer base that left in droves when the Gap became too trendy.

Now, the Gap thinks Madonna's interpretation of gangsta style with the help of Missy Elliott (Missy who?) is going to keep us there, or bring new converts to the Gap? Hmm, not a good move. May be time to sell all your Gap stock. Her last album, Music, was good. She reinvented herself and it worked. This time it sure as heck is not working. Not the music. Not the new ads (for which she made $10M and will get distribution of her children's book). Maybe the children's book will do well. Here's the related New York Times story:

For some the Gap ad is risky business. "It screams, I'm not old, I'm not old," said David Wolfe, creative director at the Doneger Group, which tracks fashion trends. "I don't think Madonna has the mass appeal she had when she was truly the age that she is trying to look," Mr. Wolfe maintained.

The digital decade is obviously here, from cameras to DVDs to TV. Acording to this New York Times story:

Since 1999, just before the technology boom collapsed, the percentage of households in the United States with personal computers — which many experts thought was leveling off — has in fact increased to 64 percent from 50 percent. At the same time, the share of households online has risen to 59 percent from 33 percent, and the use of digital cameras has climbed to 17 percent of households from less than 3 percent, according to Odyssey's research.

Some digital products are rapidly overtaking the conventional ones. Digital cameras are expected to outsell film-based cameras this year in the United States, the Photo Marketing Association International says. Just two years ago, more than twice as many film cameras were sold as digital cameras. And in the first six months of 2003, the value of DVD rentals at video stores outpaced VHS tape rentals for the first time, according to the Video Software Dealers Association.

Yep, it is what has kept the economy from totally tanking while George W. spends billions waging war in distant lands rather than focusing on creating new jobs. According to this New York Times story:

In 2002, homeowners in the United States spent $173 billion remodeling their homes — 10 percent more than in 2001, according to the National Association of Home Builders. But only an estimated 14 percent of that work involved an architect or designer, said Gopal Ahluwalia, the association's vice president for research.