Google your genes
B2 Day Blog
Google is teaming up with Craig Venter (of human genome mapping fame) to use Google’s vast computing power to help unlock biology’s mysteries, and maybe one day to help you search through your genes. That from the new book ‘‘The Google Story.’’ Says Venter: ‘‘Working with Google, we are trying to generate a gene catalog to characterize all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development.’’ Yikes. Somewhere a marketer is dreaming of an ad buy with genetic targeting . . . an actuary is working out a gene-insurance rate mash-up.
Burning Questions
Feed the web
RSS feeds chop information into bits and syndicate them across the Web. The bits that we identify as interesting come to us when we subscribe to feeds. This fundamentally changes how information is distributed, valued, and consumed. By following a bit of info around as it's ripped, mixed, and republished (as I'm doing here with this story), the bit is afforded the widest variety of distribution paths to reach the largest possible audience, which in turn creates the greatest opportunity for monetization. I never understood it until I started using FeedDemon to read the Web. This is a pivot point. We won't go back.
BusinessWeek
Ditch your e-mail
Are 85 percent of your e-mails totally not important? E-mail has hit a wall, creating conversations we don't need and delivering piles of information we can't possibly digest. Companies are ditching e-mail in favor of wikis, blogs, IM, and RSS. Gartner Group predicts wikis (searchable sites that allow a group to comment on and edit each other's work in real time) will be used by 50 percent of companies by 2009 to create budgets, reports, plans -- anything. Using wikis, Soar Technology completes projects in half the time, reducing e-mail by 75 percent. Wiki users say it's as if everyone can Google everyone else's brain.
MSNBC
Follow the cues
Amy Baylor of Florida State University is making computer-simulated professors with soulful human characteristics that teach classes online. Why? She's investigating how emotional cues affect learning. It appears friendly facial expressions, soothing hand gestures, and cool intelligent voices don't come premixed in all human professors. Shocking, isn't it? Turns out women who design their own teachers have more positive math- and science-related beliefs. Baylor figures, why not just start from scratch? It's learning, without that messy real people problem.
Wall Street Journal
$1,000,000 home page
A 21-year-old from the United Kingdom has made $630,600 selling ad space on his home page -- one pixel at a time. Alex Tew, who says his goal is to make a million dollars, landed on his online advertising innovation as a way to pay for college. His plan: to sell pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. The site was launched Aug. 26, beginning with a handful of ads from friends and family; within two weeks he had sold $40,000 in ads. His college tuition covered, Alex hopes that one day the site might be a piece of art in a museum. Line up to hire Alex.
Wired
Indiana, not India
Rural Sourcing is an IT company that outsources not to India or Mexico, but to rural America's untapped talent. The company charges $35 to $50 per hour for IT expertise. That's not as low as India, but the same labor could cost about $100 in Boston. Rural unemployment rates are 16.7 percent higher than in metro areas, and if you're a college grad in the back 40, you either move to find work or are underemployed. With 3.4 million white-collar jobs moving offshore by 2015, maybe some of them will stay in the United States -- off-coast, rather than offshore.
