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Google to release own browser, “Chrome”

Published by Eric September 1st, 2008 in Google, Technology and Web/Internet. 0 Comments

Google’s throwing a wrench into the IE vs. Firefox vs. Safari vs. Opera browser dynamic with it’s own offering, Google Chrome. They explain their reasoning behind the project in a very slick comic drawn by “Understanding Comics” creator Scott McCloud, in which they state they’re looking to create a browser for the way people use the Web today - watching videos, chatting, playing games, etc. - uses that weren’t possible in the early days of the Web.

Google has made great strides in creating applications that live on the Web, but the chief problem with that concept is that if your browser crashes (a not-infrequent occurance), you risk losing your work. It looks like Chrome will address this issue by minimizing memory leaks and allowing users to kill processes that hog memory via a task manager.

Of course, the project will be open source. I wasn’t able to find a release date for the beta, but if you know anything, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Google released Chrome about a day after I put this up. Walt Mossberg has the definitive review.

Metallica invites bloggers to listen to new album, won’t let them write about it

Published by Eric June 10th, 2008 in Blogs, Music, PR Disasters, Social Media and Web 2.0. 2 Comments

Usually, when a company invites the media or bloggers to an event to offer an exclusive early look at a product, the goal is to encourage said media or bloggers to write about that product. When Metallica invited bloggers to listen to its upcoming album, reviews inevitably popped up on the Web; reviews which Metallica’s management promptly “forced” bloggers to take down.

“The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no non-disclosure agreement had been signed, [was] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica’s management,” Turner continued. “We only eventually removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned (the piece was written anonymously).”

Metallica has a long history of alienating their biggest fans, and clearly fears digital media, but this feels clumsy and ham-fisted even for them. If the album mix wasn’t final, they shouldn’t have invited writers to listen to it and then act shocked when they, you know, wrote about it.

Office survival kit: PortableApps

Published by Eric May 26th, 2008 in PR Practice, Personal Productivity, Technology and Workplace. 0 Comments

You probably have one or two USB drives floating around. Although these were fairly expensive little gadgets in the recent past, now they’ve become common promotional giveaways and one or two GB drives can be had for less than the cost of a few drinks at the bar.

Most people use these to transfer files home from work and back again, but the USB drive can also be used to run small open source applications from PortableApps.com. These programs can be used as a digital Swiss Army Knife and can come in extremely handy, especially for work computers that don’t allow you to install software. My favorites have helped me out many, many times, and include:

GIMP Portable - GIMP is an open source graphics/photo editor, similar in many ways to Photoshop. While it isn’t quite as slick as its inspiration, it works great for resizing and cropping images, and if you take the time to learn it you’ll discover it’s extremely powerful in its own right.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - When I browse the Internet, I typically have about 8-10 tabs open in Firefox. In fact, browsing without tabs drives me nuts. If your work computer has an old version of IE, this portable version of Firefox can be a godsend.

PDFTK Builder Portable - One of the strengths of the PDF format is that documents look the same across systems and platforms and they can’t be easily edited by others. One of the downsides is that they can’t be easily edited by you, unless you have Adobe Acrobat. Fortunately this program is around to help you split up and recombine pages from PDF files. This is one of those programs that you might not realize you need until you actually need it, and by that time it can help you avoid some very frustrating situations.

Each of these programs are small in size, so you can fit several of them on any modern USB drive. They’re a great way to put an extra drive to use, and in the right circumstances can honestly save the day.

Going with the gut

Published by Eric April 21st, 2008 in General and Workplace. 0 Comments

On occasion, I have to make a decision that I’ve struggled with my entire life – do I go with my brain, or do I go with my gut?

For most people, the brain is their rational, analytical side. It tells people to be cautious, to take in all of the factors before making a decision. The gut has a more spontaneous, reckless influence. People who work on logic work with their brain. People who work on feeling work with their gut. Right?

Not for me. My gut is, and always has been, my “voice of reason.” In fact, I’m pretty sure my conscience dwells somewhere in my abdomen. My brain causes me to think too much, and by over-thinking, I end up procrastinating or trusting my brain to remember important details that my gut tells me I should double-check. Then when I realize I’ve made a mistake and it’s too late to do anything about it, I feel it right there in the pit of my stomach. It’s my gut’s way of saying, “I told you to listen to me, and since you didn’t, I’m going to make you feel terrible for the rest of the day.”

The problem is, my brain is much louder than my gut, and tends to overpower it. Sometimes I’ve got to listen really hard to what it’s trying to say, and when I do, I almost always realize it’s right. It’s truly subconscious – almost an instinct – and my instincts are normally pretty spot-on.

From now on, if I’m ever caught in a situation where my gut is telling me something that my brain disagrees with, I’m taking a moment to listen closely. It’s always worked for me in the past, it’s just taken me a while to realize where my loyalties should lie.

Insurance companies = the mafia?

Published by Eric April 14th, 2008 in Healthcare. 0 Comments

An opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal alleges that health insurance companies are like a mafia protection racket. It’s quite an accusation - one that’s nearly guaranteed to get a lot of discussion started.

In a perfect world, I’d like to see most people paying for routine health expenses out-of-pocket from a health savings account, while keeping a catastrophic high-deductible insurance policy to cover accidents and major health crises. Consumers do have this option, but in the U.S., where most people get their health insurance through their employers, the traditional system isn’t going anywhere soon. Anything that gets people talking about possible solutions to our health care problems, however, is a good thing.

(The article comes via the WSJ Health Blog, which is one of my favorite reads on the Web. Not only are the posts themselves gold, but the comments sections bring in remarkably insightful comments from very intelligent people. It’s truly the blog that keeps on giving.)

iPhone competitors trump Apple’s features, but it won’t matter

Published by Eric April 2nd, 2008 in Apple and Technology. 0 Comments

Samsung announced a new phone called the “Instinct” at CITA (wireless industry) show going on in Las Vegas. It’s a nice looking device with some impressive features – large, sharp screen, 3G capabilities, haptic feedback (so you can feel when the device registers your touch), built-in GPS and microSD slot, among others. On paper, people in the market for a touch-screen smartphone would compare the Instinct to the iPhone and say, “No contest. Come to me, Instinct!”

As good a game as the Instinct talks, it won’t matter for two reasons. First, Apple has won the PR war. It’s become the Kleenex or the Xerox of touch-screen smartphones. Any phone with similar features will be compared to the iPhone, and knockoffs, no matter how well made, will still be seen as knockoffs, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s like the Gamera to the iPhone’s Godzilla. Yeah, they’re both giant, bipedal reptiles that emit flames and trash cities, but if you were to describe Gamera to people on the street, they’d say, “Oh, he’s like Godzilla?” (Answer: Pretty much, but he’s a turtle.)

How did Apple capture the hearts and minds of so many with the iPhone? They made an awesome product and it was the first of its kind. As we know, first counts for a lot in marketing. A whole lot.

Second, Apple has made a habit of unveiling updated products that blow the doors off of the competition – and when the competition comes close to catching up, Steve Jobs yawns, calls for a keynote, and unveils new versions that leave competitors scrambling to incorporate similar features into their products. They’ve been so consistent that people are willing to wait out competing products with (temporarily) superior features in order to get their hands on Apple’s latest and greatest a short time later.

It’s a simple mission that may be difficult to implement, but will always lead to success: Be first or be dramatically better than the others right off the bat, and then never let up on the competition. In doing so, you’ll own your niche, and that’s where the money is.

Look at a company like Palm. They created the PDA space with the Palm Pilot, and were primed to take the smartphone market with the Treo. Unfortunately the software couldn’t keep up with the evolution of the hardware, other products like Windows Mobile and BlackBerry passed them up, and even Palm loyalists decided they simply couldn’t wait for Palm to release a product that compared to what else was out there. Palm sold its software division to a Chinese company and now puts out Treos that run Microsoft Software and use BlackBerry Connect. Although they created their niche, they didn’t work to keep it filled, and other companies were happy to fill it for them.

I wouldn’t worry about a similar fate befalling Apple anytime soon.

If (traditional) media companies saw the writing on the wall…

Published by Eric April 1st, 2008 in Blogs, Mass Media, New Media, Social Media, Web/Internet, Weblogs and Workplace. 0 Comments

Imagine if, 25 years ago, a time traveler from the present day appeared to newspaper, television and radio executives to outline the media landscape in 2008. He’d tell them about how the Internet has dramatically increased the number of media outlets and how it’s enabled everyone to opine or present news via text, audio or video for virtually no cost at all. That it’s decimated the newspaper classified ad market with free, wide-reaching alternatives. That people no longer have to wait for the evening news or the next morning’s paper, but can follow along with up-to-the-minute updates of breaking events that are pushed directly to them, wherever they are in the world.

Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive - It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!

The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)

Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)

After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?

I wonder sometimes.

In defense of “big pharma”

Published by Eric March 2nd, 2008 in Healthcare. 0 Comments

Pharmaceutical companies have become vilified by the American public and politicians, on par with “big oil” and companies like Wal-Mart. Although they sell products that literally save lives and have enabled humans to live to ripe old ages, they are thought of as the bad guys.

This reputation comes, presumably, because drugs are expensive to create and manufacture, and those costs are passed along to the consumer - costs that can be prohibitively expensive if a patient is under-insured. However, getting a new drug to market costs nearly a billion dollars. The approval process almost requires every new product to be a blockbuster before it goes generic, and for every Viagra there are more products like Exubera (inhaled insulin) that fail to catch on and end up as major losses.

Pharma companies are also criticized for their marketing tactics, including employing reps that interact with physicians. Of course, politicians are getting in on the act by seeking to regulate these interactions between companies and physicians. As Paul H. Rubin points out, the authors of this proposed legislation seem to assume that there is something wrong with pharma companies marketing their products to the individuals charged with prescribing them. They also seem to think very little of physicians, who of course realize reps are selling a product, but also know they are an important resource:

Drug company reps offer overworked doctors useful, lifesaving information in an efficient manner. The drug companies are of course motivated by profit, but economists have known since Adam Smith that the profit motive is the best way to induce someone to do something useful.

I should offer a disclaimer: I currently do work for pharmaceutical companies. In the past I’ve worked at a non-profit organization dedicated to advocacy and education, and sponsorships from pharma companies enabled us to provide important health education and programs to individuals at no charge. I’ve worked at a hospital where physicians and educators relied on pharma reps to inform them about developments in the treatment of diseases.

No industry is completely free of problems, and the pharmaceutical industry has them. However, for an industry that has done as much to improve the human condition as pharma, the amount and scope of criticism they have received of late is undeserved.

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