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

A disturbing development in the very disturbing 1989 case of the gang rape of a New York investment banker who was out for a run in Central Park. According to this New York Times story (registration required), the five teenagers convicted of the crime may not have been responsible for the crime even though the kids had incriminated themselves with confessions.

Over the last decade, DNA testing has cleared 27 people nationwide who were convicted of crimes based on some form of confession, according to records kept by the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. In another category, Prof. Steven Drizin at the Northwestern University School of Law and Prof. Richard Leo at the University of California at Irvine have identified 130 people who falsely confessed but were cleared before trial.

One legal scholar, Paul Cassell, argues that most verified false confessions come from vulnerable segments of the population, such as people with mental disabilities.

The recently rechristened Weddings & Celebrations section of the New York Times (now that they've begun to include gay & lesbian commitment ceremonies to reflect the changing times) included the announcement of one of my closest friend's wedding (registration required) in Hong Kong this weekend (which I was unable to attend unfortunatley).

I had no idea Ming and Jel would be in the Times and was just following up on my New York Times email alerts for one of the keywords I've included ("nonprofits") when it brought up a wedding announcement for a couple...as I followed that link over to the section I suddenly found my friend's wedding. Pretty amazing how the Web has completely transformed the immediacy of events across the world. Truly is a global village now.

More on corporate philanthropy at shareholder cost as seen in the Jack Grubman-Sandy Weill Citicorp affair according to this New York Times story (registration required):

Gifts the size of Citigroup's to any institution typically involve a series of negotiations between the recipient and the donor, but neither Citigroup nor the Y will say who initiated the gift or when.

A spokeswoman for Citigroup said that the company regarded all of its philanthropy, which amounted to almost $69 million last year, as a whole, and that whether the money came from its foundation or the company itself depended on the terms of each gift.

"This is yet another example of why we need a significant investment in corporate oversight," said Rick Cohen, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group that is doing research on how corporations use philanthropy. "Who is going to call Citigroup on the carpet about this? Who is going to check to make sure it reflects its responsibility to Citigroup's shareholders? Nobody, that's who, and that's why they can get away with it."

With Yahoo Mail Plus, Yahoo continues its path down subscription services in an effort to convert its millions of free users into revenue generating customers. According to this Dow Jones story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mail Plus will allow users to maintain professional as well as personal relationships via their Yahoo email address:

Yahoo Inc. unveiled a premium paid e-mail service Thursday, marking its latest bid to boost recurring revenue with subscriptions and put some distance between it and competitors like Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail service.

...Though light users are unlike to give up free e-mail, "it's a great way for Yahoo to make money off of the most loyal users," she said. "The potential for this product, compared to others, is much greater. Not everybody plays games, but everybody uses e-mail."

...Mail Plus puts new mail features together with a la carte premium features and souped-up free ones. For $29.99 a year, users of Yahoo Mail Plus will get 25 megabytes of storage, be allowed to send photo- and media-clip laden messages as big as 10 megabytes and with up to 10 attachments, have POP and forwarding capability, block as many as 200 addresses and use 50 spam filters. POP allows users of Yahoo's service to use e-mail programs like Outlook and to retrieve messages from other e-mail accounts.

The new Internet-based telephones' voice quality is excellent according to Rafe Needleman in his latest Business 2.0 column:

Take Vonage. It offers a $40-a-month service that connects a regular telephone to a high-speed Internet connection via a small Cisco VoIP (voice-over-Internet Protocol) router. Vonage's value-add is the interconnection it provides between the Net and the global phone system. For the most part, the Vonage service doesn't require people to change the way they use the phone, and it offers some interesting advantages over the old systems. The monthly fee covers unlimited nationwide calls. And since Vonage phone numbers are assigned to routers, not buildings, if you move across the country and take your router with you, your phone number and area code come along too (just like with a cellular phone).

The first sign of sanity in the music industry according to this News.com story:

Record label EMI Group has significantly loosened the reins on how its music can be distributed on the Internet, striking a set of deals that expand what consumers can legally do with EMI tunes accessed via an online service.

The label announced Wednesday that it has signed new distribution agreements with nine Net music companies, giving them the right to let customers make permanent downloads of songs, transfer songs to portable devices such as MP3 players and burn CDs of songs downloaded from the services. The names of the nine services are expected to be announced later in the day.

Bulk emailers, despised everywhere and especially by me!, are sometimes nothing but a small operation such as the case of Laura Betterly working out of her five-bedroom house in Dunedin, Florida according to this interesting Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). Betterly hopes to make $200,000 this year, contributing to the over 2 billion email messages that hit inboxes each day, even though some campaigns have terrible results:

The response rate of 0.013% was "horrible," Ms. Betterly says. A great response rate for Ms. Betterly would be a disaster for a paper-junk mailer, which expects a typical response of about 2%. Depending on what she's pitching, Ms. Betterly says she can break even at a rate as low as 0.001%. It all depends on the commission she negotiates, and she's considering a few jobs that could pay off particularly well: $35 on each sale of a 3D-glasses package; $50 for a mortgage lead; $85 for a cellphone sale.

Ms. Betterly's database is her most precious asset. She bought and bartered its 100 million e-mail addresses from dozens of places, including companies such as Excite (excite.com), About.com (about.com) and Ms. Cleo's psychic Web site. She can fine-tune e-mail runs, hitting just small-business owners, say, or only golfers or music fans. She can cull out certain addresses, to narrow her geographic target. Like most spammers, she also makes money selling her list to other bulk e-mailers, and she keeps adding to her own list.

Thanks to strong growth in its discount stores Wal-Mart beat Wall Street expectaions according to this AP story in the New York Times (registration required):

The world's largest retailer said Wednesday it earned $1.82 billion, or 41 cents per share, in the three months ended Oct. 31 compared with $1.48 billion, or 33 cents per share, a year ago.

...Revenue rose to $59.33 billion from $53.19 billion in the year-ago period, which included the economic effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

...The company has 3,371 domestic stores, and 1,227 internationally. Wal-Mart has 1.3 million employees, in the United States and abroad.

The new enterprise product, MSN Messenger Connect, with security, archiving etc. will launch in the first quarter of 2003 according to this News.com story:

Among organizations that use instant messaging in an official capacity, Lotus Sametime captures 69 percent of the market, according to a report from Osterman Research. But the research firm found that result accounts for only a fraction of the at-work IM audience, where unauthorized IM services are rampant.

People in 82 percent of all organizations are using some sort of IM application, Osterman found. Of those IM users, 70 percent use AIM, while Microsoft's MSN Messenger is a distant second with 51 percent and Yahoo Messenger third with 44 percent. But IM use is officially sanctioned in only 34 percent of large organizations, 23 percent of medium-sized organizations, and 19 percent of small organizations; a full 23 percent of organizations surveyed blocked IM traffic at the firewall.

The corporate IM client will cost $24 per user, per year--much less than the $30 to $40 for IM products from Yahoo or AOL, according to Microsoft.

The retail corridor along Fifth Avenue from the Flatiron Building at 23rd Street to 15th Street several blocks to the south has turned into a hip, fashion destination thanks to lower rents compared to SoHo according to this New York Times story (registration required):

Annual rents in the Flatiron district, she said, "have been stable at $200 to $250 a square foot, which is a bargain compared to SoHo, where rents are $400 to $500 a square foot and traffic is reduced."

Ms. Consolo said the Flatiron area is a seven-day-a-week shopping district with weekday customers drawn from the people who work at advertising agencies and architects' and designers' offices. Restaurants and dance clubs on side streets attract visitors after business hours, and on weekends the Union Square Greenmarket also helps build traffic, she said.

There are several examples of huge successes because their founders or originators went with their gut feeling according to this Business 2.0 story:

Fred Smith brushed aside the C he received on the college economics paper in which he outlined his idea for an overnight delivery service. His gut told him it would work anyway. (Besides, the Federal Express (FDX) CEO later explained, "a C was a very good grade for me.") Howard Schultz had his eureka moment in Milan, Italy, when he realized that the leisurely caffeine-and-conversation caffe model would work in the United States too. Market research might have warned him that Americans would never pay $3 for a cup of coffee. But Schultz didn't need research. He just knew he could turn Starbucks (SBUX) into a bigger business, and he began, literally, shaking with excitement.

More driving customers are turning into anal, warranty hypochondriacs, bringing in their car at the sign of the first little squeak (which sometimes only they can hear) especially as car makers become more generous with warranties according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

On top of incentives like 0% financing, car makers are finding another way to sweeten the deals: longer and more comprehensive warranties. Hyundai launched the trend with a 10-year warranty, and rivals are now racing to follow suit. In July, DaimlerChrysler introduced seven-year, 70,000-mile powertrain warranties, four years longer than before. And Ford just lengthened the warranty for its new Ford Focus from three years to five years.

...Overall, the cost of providing warranties is actually declining for many car makers because of improvements in vehicle quality. For General Motors and Ford Motor, the average warranty cost per vehicle is roughly $1,000, down from $1,600 in the early 1990s, according to estimates by J&L Warranty Pros. But plush amenities like roadside assistance and free maintenance are undercutting those savings for car makers. Extending warranty length also raises the costs: Analysts estimate DaimlerChrysler will spend an additional $400 for each vehicle on its new seven-year warranty.

Hollywood studios are finally attempting to counter the big business of online movie-swapping thanks to services like Napster with the launch on Monday of Movielink according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). I, for one, would prefer to make sure I only get a song or movie that was official sot that I can be sure of the quality, for instance.

The venture will launch with about 175 feature-film titles, heavy on recent hits such as "Ocean's Eleven" and "A Beautiful Mind," which users will be able to rent for a 24-hour period. The company, Movielink LLC, is owned by five major movie studios: Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment; AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros.; Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Pictures; Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures; and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

...Movielink is set up to allow each member studio to set its own pricing. The service will charge a range of prices, depending on the movie. Customers will pay between $1.99 and $4.99 to download a movie. Consumers can pay by credit card. After a customer pays, he or she will have 30 days to watch the movie. Once the buyer activates it, he or she can keep it for 24 hours. The service will be available only in the U.S., partly as a way to avoid creating a tangle with overseas movie distributors.

Bill Gates continues to drop cash in India during his short visit, this time on software development, according to this Dow Jones story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates pledged to spend $400 million on software and business development in India over the next three years, in the company's largest investment in nonmanufacturing activities outside the U.S.

"We've been constantly increasing our activities in India," Mr. Gates said at a news conference here. "Leaving aside manufacturing, this is the largest set of investments done outside the U.S."

Microsoft, which operates in India through its wholly owned unit, Microsoft Corp. India Pvt. Ltd., sources software for its global customers from local technology-services companies.

William Webster's appointment to the new accounting-oversight board by Harvey Pitt finally caused Pitt to be forced out. Now Webster is thinking about withdrawing according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) that reports an amusing thought process on Webster's part.

Mr. Webster said he reached this conclusion over the weekend at a retreat near the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia. He hadn't been horseback riding for a couple of weeks, he said, and his horse, Brother Time, reared and threw him. "I hit my head and when the stars stopped, I said, 'Is someone trying to tell me something?' " he recalled.

"I got back on the horse, to prove something to the horse, and to myself." During the ride, he said he thought hard about his role on the board and decided, "I don't have to prove anything to myself. I just have to do what I think is right."

Regular conversation and repartee on TV shows is happening faster and faster ("turbo fast" as Aaron Sorkin puts it) according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required).

Interesting to see this article since a few days ago, when I happened to watch Dawson's Creek (Carolina's own Kevin Williamson's creation for the WB that's filmed in my old home town of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) for the first time in a year, I was struck by how fast and sophisticated the dialogue had become (or maybe I was just noticing it for the first time).

When "ER" premiered eight years ago on NBC, its dialogue was so rapid-fire that scripts ran 60 pages, about 10 pages longer than the typical one-hour drama. Viewers loved it, and the show was a huge hit.

Today, the show isn't a minute longer. But its scripts now run more than 80 pages.

...The chatter serves a deliberate purpose. Hollywood producers think people seem smarter if they talk faster, a strategy in use on "The West Wing." In "Gilmore Girls," a show about a mother and her teenage daughter, fast talk lends a hip feel to a small-town setting. In "American Dreams," a family drama set in the 1960s, characters talk quickly -- and over each other -- at the dinner table to appeal to teenagers whose own family lives are like that. Fast talk is also a way for broadcast networks to make shows seem edgy when they can't feature the sex, violence and bad language of HBO.

The use by Al Qaeda of technology has stirred fears and concerns in the West, and is detailed in this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required)  based on findings to date including the identifying of the Chinese technician who helped set up a site in South China:

All he could make out was the site's address: "maalemaljihad.com." Mr. Chen had no idea that meant "Milestones of Holy War." Nor that China, one of the world's most heavily policed societies, had just become a launchpad for the dot-com dreams -- and disappointments -- of Osama bin Laden's terror network.

...The Milestones of Holy War site signals much more modest cyber-skills. Al Qaeda operatives struggled with some of the same tech headaches as ordinary people: servers that crashed, outdated software and files that wouldn't open. Their Web venture followed a classic dot-com trajectory. It began with excitement, faced a cash crunch, had trouble with accountants and ultimately fizzled.

As fast food restaurants see anemic growth, other healthy food, smaller restaurant chains are seeing significant increases as American eating habits (and demographics?) shift significantly according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Meanwhile, the emerging category of "quick casual" restaurants, including chains such as Chipotle Mexican Grill (majority-owned by McDonald's), Cosi and Panera Bread -- are attracting more customers. As many as half of fast-food patrons eat at such chains, which generally have higher-quality food but still no table service, says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president at Chicago food-consulting firm Technomic Inc. Quick-casual customers spend about $6 to $8 per average check as opposed to fast food's $3 to $4 average check, Mr. Lombardi says.

NPD Group Inc., a Port Washington, N.Y., research firm, found a surprising trend among quick-casual consumers. Industry experts had assumed the category attracted aging baby boomers who could afford higher costs, but in fact, quick-casual concepts appeal largely to 18-to 34-year-olds. About 37% of fast-casual customers are in this age bracket -- a demographic that typically consumes the most fast-food.

"I'm spending more money to stay healthy," says Maggie Thaxton, 27, a Chicago teacher who frequents Quizno's Subs, a unit of Quizno's Corp., Denver. The closely held upscale sandwich chain has about 1,800 U.S. units where sandwich prices are between $4 to $7.

The current price wars mean that McDonald's (with about 22 million customers daily) is out to attack Burger King as lethally as possible since it is already struggling and the Texas Pacific Group is having second thoughts on buying it out at the earlier agreed to price. And,

The fast-food chains say they are also offering healthy options such as salads, baked potatoes or yogurt. In September McDonald's said it would use different oil to reduce the transfatty acid levels in its fried foods. Earlier this year, Burger King introduced a veggie burger. "Dumping the obesity issue on fast-food is completely missing the point," says Burger King spokesman Robert A. Doughty. "People don't only eat fast-food. They eat at home or white-table cloth dining. We as Americans tend to look at quick scapegoats."

In the post-Enron world it is looking more likely that a larger number of companies will choose to split the CEO role from that of Chairman of the Board. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

And Monday, a blue-ribbon commission of the National Association of Corporate Directors in Washington will strongly urge that other concerns bolster governance by considering the role split. "It is difficult for us to see how an active CEO, already responsible for the operations of the corporation, can give the time necessary to accept primary responsibility for the operations of the board," the panel's report says. The 21-member commission, which examined boards' risk oversight duties, included the retired heads of eight major companies.