Fast Compant
We spend $16 billion a year on dodgy dietary supplements, so just imagine what we’d spend to be buff at 100 years old. By 2011, analysts expect that we’ll spend $6.5 billion on clinically approved gene therapies. In the next 20 years it may be possible to increase the body’s healing power, regenerate lost limbs or organs, or slow human aging. But what happens to our society when you can manipulate the color of your skin or dope your genes so you learn more quickly? Will only the rich get to be enhanced?
BusinessWeek
Mobile marketing is here
Last year, 12 percent of major US brands did some form of mobile marketing, and US spending on wireless marketing and ads may surge to $602.3 million in 2009, from $104.4 million last year. Why? Mobile ads work. A sweepstakes SMS code printed on
McDonald's Big Mac boxes increased sales by 3 percent. And 20 percent of cellphone users say they might be induced to receive promotions if they come with free air time, ringtones, games, or a free cellphone. Look for advertisers to try all kinds of ways to get the other 80 percent to convert.
Silicon Beat
Virtual goes mainstream
Linden Lab, the San Francisco creator of the virtual world game called Second Life, has just raised $11 million more in venture capital. Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, is an investor, which tells you that Second Life is going to become more mainstream. They want to help people make money by doing or selling whatever they want, virtually. Players currently spend $5 million on goods and services per month, on things like clothing and jewelry that they can buy from others. That's a $60 million annual economy.
A VC blog
Freemium
VC Fred Wilson's favorite business model goes like this: Give your service away for free, possibly ad-supported, but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium-priced, value-added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base. He asked readers of his blog to name this model. And Jarid Lukin of Alacra won for his moniker: Freemium.
ZDNet Software as Services blog
Mash-up or meltdown?
Microsoft has the ultimate mash-up challenge. Different parts of the company are progressing at different speeds and from different starting points. They have to rewrite everything to adopt a services-based architecture. They have to tie into all the other diverse Microsoft products, including new, next-generation mash-up services. That's in addition to the Windows operating system. And it has to be done without alienating enterprise customers, consumers, or channel partners. Will the planet's biggest software company pull it off or melt down trying?
Ad Age
Eurogoogle attack
France and Germany dislike the idea of Googling. That's why they have a plan to create and launch a search engine later this year to rival Google, in part because they fear the Americanization of all culture. Thus was born Quaero, Latin for ''I search." Since Google works in more than 100 languages, Quaero's differentiator is going to be adding images to the search query. When you search on Paris, France, you don't get Paris Hilton. But will Quaeroing take off like Googling?
Salon
Tech hurts middle class
Wage inequality has been growing since around 1980. But according to Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, the real inequity is not between the top and the bottom, but between the top and the middle. Low-income worker wages have been staying about the same, or even slightly rising. But technology has made it so that highly skilled workers are disproportionately productive and can demand higher wages, while at the same time lowering the demand for medium-skilled workers whose routine tasks like bookkeeping and clerical work have been replaced by computers.
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