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March 28, 2006

On the Internet, no-one knows you're live

When a company organises a press conference, there is always a danger that none of the press will actually turn up. What you don't expect is for none of the people at the company organising the event to attend it. At least I didn't until last Monday as I sat through the slow-motion car crash that was Luminary Micro's big splash launch.

It must have seemed like a great idea on paper. You are a small Texas startup with a potentially global market in the technology sector. What better than a virtual press conference done entirely online? No need to get on planes or get people to one or two locations. What could possibly go wrong, click, go wrong, click, go wrong...

The warning signs started early. A package arrived in the post: it was a dollar bill encased in some puzzle, designed as a teaser for the launch. Then it was a set of repeated invitations to sign up for a press conference webcast at one of three times - effectively was the second warning - on Monday the 27th March. There was the option to organise a "personal briefing" at this stage. In hindsight, that would have been the simplest and, as it turned out, the most practical option. But, despite expressing reservations to the PR trying to organise the UK side of things - on the basis that some of the webcast systems only play nice with IE6 - I thought I would give the press conference option a go just to see if it was workable.. Some companies have tried audio-conferences for launches - and they are commonplace for financial results - so the jump to a webcast was not that difficult to see.

Then the details arrived. A chat system would be used to ask and answer questions. But only the 'best' or 'most popular' questions would get answered. Not so good. But as this only turned up Monday and given the time zone difference - the European slot would start at about 7am Texas time - I decided to stick with it and then get anything answered by phone straight after the session was over.

I logged into Vcall - which was hosting the webcast - at about 12:50pm and did some transcribing while I waited. That the next window to open was titled "Luminary Micro Luanch Presentation" throughout kind of summed up how the rest of this little experiment would go.

I don't know why - as it was obvious what was going to happen next - but the penny only dropped about ten seconds into the webcast. There was nobody from Luminary actually on the webcast. At least not at the same time that any of the hacks were expected to be there. The chief marketing officer, Jean Anne Booth, came on and started presenting, describing what was going to turn up on the screen. Then there was a crossfade to her again. Yes, the whole thing was prerecorded video. The launch was so interesting that the executives could not be arsed to turn up and do it live.

Now, you could argue that, as this bit was just presentation, it should not matter that it was prerecorded. I'd say that was a fair argument but there is something about recorded, scripted events that makes me forget to take any notes. What's the point? there's going to be a recording. At a live event, even with a script in front of them, people do drop extra bits in. With prerecorded video, there is no surprise. Monday was no exception: the crossfades indicated that people were sticking rigidly to a wooden script. And I was beginning to wonder whether I had fallen prey to some sort of Situationist stunt.

Even if I felt like taking notes, it's tough to get enough for a few decent quotes if the thing is sitting there buffering away rather than actually playing. Then really strange things started to happen. Segments of video would come to a screeching halt to be replaced by completely different bits of video. Given that the entire "press conference" little more than an extended Windows Media stream cooked up days before, you would have expected the company to do it as one stream. Not in this case: the software was running to some kind of schedule and just cutting segments off when it felt like it. And sometimes it just...stopped. Bryn Parry, GM of ARM's development systems division got as far as: "My name's Bry..."

After about 40 minutes of Fabulous Fuzzivision, the proceedings drew to a close and it was time to ask questions. Now, I'd by lying if I said any confidence in this part of the proceedings, and I had mostly tuned out while preparing some copy for production. But, in the spirit of experiment and to find out if anyone really was there, I fired off a couple of questions through the chat system. And yes, there really was no-one there. I left the window up for about half an hour while I phoned the UK PR to find out whether there was a living breathing human working at Luminary that would answer questions. To be fair to them, that call was organised within 30 minutes, which was a lot faster than I expected. Then again, I guess no-one was actually tied up presenting to hacks.

But it remains a mystery as to why anyone thought doing a press conference this way was a good idea. Especially when your client is a minnow with no track record going up against 40 or so well-funded, longstanding incumbents in a market that moves very slowly. Luminary is a microcontroller supplier - that is a business that demands long-term involvement: there are no quick hits in that market. And I'll certainly be treating any future invitations from Luminary with extreme suspicion.

Posted by Chris at 9:56 PM | Comments (3)

March 23, 2006

FreedomPods

Those perfidious French have done it again. Apparently, they have had the temerity to tell Apple it should open up its FairPlay digital restriction management system to consumers. In effect, give consumers the means to circumvent the mechanism used to prevent songs downloaded from its iTunes store from being copied.

Well, almost.

Some people posting about how Apple should quit the French market have got a little ahead of themselves. I'm half expecting someone to demand that Apple's music players should be hardwired to reject Johnny Halliday and Jacques Brel* songs in retaliation. Anyone want to listen to a FreedomPod while they munch their freedom fries? Wired struck a more balanced note.

In reality, all that has happened so far is that the French parliament decided to pass a law that demands that digital content - of any type - bought online should be playable on any type of music player. This decision seems to affect Apple the most because the company has refused to license its FairPlay system to any other manufacturer. Microsoft will also be affected but, because it licenses its system to hardware makers, the problem looks less serious. Apple has, for some strange reason that is actually alienating consumers, decided to overreact.

Somehow, Apple has managed to paint the French move as tantamount to legalised piracy. That is stretching the truth to breaking point. The position taken by the French seems entirely reasonable to me. The consumer has bought the music; the consumer should not be restricted in what computer or portable device that music is played back on. Nobody wants to be in the situation ten years from now where they find they cannot listen to a song just because they don't want to pony up for a new iPod - maybe Creative finally got around to making a player that looks good and works better. The French government is not asking for DRM to be removed; simply for decoding software that understands the format to be able to run on any computer. Apple has no real justification for maintaining a lock over iTunes songs. It is not as if cross-subsidies are involved, although the company might regret having cut a deal so friendly to record companies in the hope of driving iPod sales if FairPlay does have to be licensed out.

Om Malik's presentation of the lock-in as being a good thing is simply bizarre. Having Fairplay run on another machine will not suddenly stop iPods from working (unless there is some very strange code inside it). Nothing in the French law says the DRM has to work well on another platform, just that it works.

I'm curious as to whether Apple would even fall foul of this new law. To be fair to the company, its copy-prevention system is more flexible than most of the alternatives. Backing up songs from iTunes actually involves turning them into CD tracks that you can then rip to move the songs to just about anything you like. Should France target Apple, this might prove to be the company's defence for keeping FairPlay to itself: everything needed for interoperability is already in place. It's not seamless. But it would allow you to play the music on anything you like (assuming you did the backup before you tossed iTunes). Try doing that with a Windows Media file that has been given the DRM once-over. And I can imagine the chagrin at Microsoft when somebody realises this law may mean having to provide source code for Linux distros.

Having said that, I have yet to buy a single DRM-locked music file from anybody. CDs work for me just fine - the lack of fair-use rights in the UK notwithstanding - and I like the selection of regular MP3s from the likes of Emusic and Wippit (if only they would make the site just a bit more stable). AllofMP3? Sorry, never heard of it mate.

* Well, Belgium's in that part of Yoorp too. And the songs sounded kind of French.

Posted by Chris at 6:16 PM

Candy for everybody. OK not everybody, just the popular kids

Just in case you were in any doubt about the use of social media and similar things were just plans to separate people and companies from their money, Steve Rubel finds the silver lining in a study by ANA and Forrester into advertisers' attitudes to TV advertising as reported by Clickz. The 30-second slot is so-1990s it seems.

The argument is that dollars spent on 'traditional' advertising will go into the various forms of online media as promoted by Rubel:

Reading this study is like standing under a giant pinata that just exploded with enough candy to go around for all of us.

I'm sure the people paying for the experimentation in new media will be only too pleased to know that's how Rubel feels: they would be in the pinata getting caned by Web 2.0 types I take it (and TV companies are the kids standing to the side because they're not allowed any more sweets).

Posted by Chris at 2:46 PM

March 17, 2006

The self-imposed straitjacket

Seth Godin kicked off a round of blogger introspection (of which this post is a part, I admit it) on how things can go wrong when a blogger posts too often. This rapidly turned into a discussion in one part on the coming attention deficit crisis, which remains something of a myth - most people are ignored most of the time right now, blogging does not change that. For the other part, it became a question of how often a blogger should post, as Problogger posed it. And that is not a Zen question by the way.

Problogger Darren Rowse gave several answers. None of which were: "When you've got something to say." Which seemed the most obvious answer. But, then again, I'm not a pro-blogger: I don't have an AdSense beast to feed.

It seems that, for many people, regularity is the secret of blogging, not content. This argument is, at one level, satisfying for someone who has worked in old media for quite a while - it's all about coming out on time, everytime at the same time. Yet, it seems crazy to impose daily posting limits on a medium that is geared up to irregular posting intervals. RSS aggregators make it easy to keep up with blogs - or any form of website - that spits out stuff intermittently.

I can see how high daily post-count blogs get more hits than those that post at irregular intervals. One is simply statistical - throw enough stuff at the wall and some of it will stick there and get noticed. The other is that the one rare post from a low-frequency blog is easy to miss in a barrage of new gadgets from Engadgets or the random thoughts of a machine-gun blogger such as Robert Scoble.

I had to move the comments feeds out of one NetNewsWire group into their own group because they were overwhelming the posts. I can see the same thing happening for some of the bloggers I have currently listed in my main groups of interest because I'm always skipping past their posts - for me raising a Yogi Berra-style thought: "There's nothing to read here, there's too many posts." The comments at Problogger echoed those concerns, as kicked off by Godin. Like a lot of people, I'm culling the prodigious and staying with the selective.

Some of the blogs that came in for the most criticism were targeted blogs that have set themselves up to be comprehensive. As a result, they are trapped by their own success. Everyone with a gadget wants to be on Engadget - and so that's where they wind up. I have never known attempts to be comprehensive in media such as magazines to be successful - that is what directories are for. I cannot see the world of the blog being any different. This is where sites like Engadget maybe have to look at their publishing model and start to sweep the stuff that is dull, but useful to have around into a wiki - and keep the blog for the real news and gossip. When all you've got all the flexibility of web protocols and languages to play with, why stick with just one format - especially when that format goes a bit stale?

Posted by Chris at 6:34 PM | Comments (0)

March 3, 2006

A few good releases

Amid all the complaints of the appalling quality of most press releases - and the weary sighs of those who have heard the call for the death of the release once too often - it is easy to forget that, in some sectors, the information content of releases has remained pretty good. These rare beasts are written tightly and plainly enough for journalists work out their relevance with a skim through instead of having to work out what each phrase might mean. Some releases are still written as though they are news stories; the problem is that, in other sectors, this good style of release has been squashed by the corporate Nuspeak nightmare that always starts: "BigCo, Inc, the leader in high-mass total solutions, announces the availability of..."

The science research sector is one of the best examples of how the release can remain useful. So much so, that after lumping AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert into the main PR feed in NetNewsWire, I realised the error of my ways and put them in their own group so I can find them without wading through the other stuff - this is despite the fact that the feeds I use are not that precise in terms of the areas that I normally cover. The signal-ton-noise ratio is plenty good enough to inspect that group regularly. The rest of the releases can flounder in the main feed.

Science releases are not all paragons of good release style but, for the most part, I have no complaints about the way information is presented by the institutions that use services such as AlphaGalileo and Eurekalert to tell journalists (and anybody else) about their research work. One important factor in this is that a good number of universities employ specialist science writers to produce the releases, which are often formatted as stories that appear on the institution's own research-news pages. Those writers can often be the named first point of contact for journalists, or at least have their details provided alongside those of the lead researcher.

I picked out after a quick trawl through the feed something that would serve as an example. I won't pretend this is a random selection but I didn't cherrypick this one to back up my points. I just wanted one that I wasn't going to follow up (although, on reflection, it is something that could fit one of the mags I write for). It actually breaks a few news-style rules, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is that it gets its point across, fast:

Computer scientist sorts out confusable drug names

Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal.

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac arrest.

A few years ago, the FDA turned to Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a U.S. software company, to ensure they don't approve the names of new drugs that may easily be confused with any one of the more than 4,400 drugs that have already been approved.

PPC looked at the problem and then, based on a tip from a professor at the University of Maryland, turned to Dr. Greg Kondrak, a professor in the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science.

"During my PhD research, I wrote a program called ALINE for identifying similar-sounding words in the world's languages. The program incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and bioinformatics," Kondrak said. "At the time some people criticized it because they felt it wouldn't ever have a practical application."

PPC analyzed Kondrak's program and felt it might help with their project. Kondrak gave them ALINE and then created a new program for them, BI SIM, which analyzes and compares the spelling of words.

PPC combined Kondrak's programs into a system that the FDA has been using for the past two years to analyze proposed drug names and rank them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and orthographically, with existing drugs...

Now, if you were feeling lazy, that is pretty much a fully formed story. There are some issues that would need following up, in reality. The number of people injured through medication errors is unsourced. It also sounds a little high for prescription drugs. However, there are a number of studies that contain that information. A medical journalist would have no problem identifying a suitable replacement figure, or to find the source for the 1.3 million (outside of checking with the author). Also, you would need to check with the FDA what stage this project is at: have drugs actually been renamed through the use of this program? However, that is not the point.

What is important is that the headline gets you in. If you are writing about IT or medicine, you know just from the headline as it appears in the list in your feed or email inbox, that this story could be for you. The first para neatly sums up the problem - you don't have to be a doctor to work out that confusable names are a problem in prescriptions. OK, you have to go to the third paragraph to get the 'what' and the 'who' of the story but, by this time, I've got an idea that this release is going somewhere.

The first quote is not wasted. It's not some guy saying how pleased he is that he is able to announce a world-leading solution. It tells you something. In this case, it gives you some history and a nice bit of colour - people thought the research had no application. Suddenly, there is a second possible angle on this story if the current top does not quite fit the bill for my magazine or newspaper. It could potentially fit into a wider feature about the demand for all technology research to have an identified application. Or collaboration: who was that professor at Maryland?

Now consider how it could have been:

Pharmaceutical naming solution helps FDA approval process

The University of Alberta is pleased to announce its collaboration with Project Performance Corporation (PPC), a leading consulting firm focusing on computer and internet e-Solutions and project delivery, in the successful delivery of a pharmaceutical naming solution for the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

Based on technology developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, PPC's solution is now in use at the FDA as part of a program to streamline the drug-approval process. The PPC solution analyses the names of pharmaceuticals for their differentiability from those of 4,400 compounds already available on the market.

"We are pleased to have played a key role in the FDA's program to improve the differentiability of pharmaceutical names," said (please fill in name and job title of made-up quote guy). "It demonstrates the power of collaboration between academic institutions and corporations. We look forward to other applications with regulatory agencies around the world."

PPC worked with the university for three years...

As Rolf Harris used to say as he sketched out something that always started off looking like a potato in the process of recreating some animal: "Can you see what it is yet?" Luckily, with the real version, we don't have to play guessing games. It's set out in plain English, using sentences that convey information rather than different ways of using the word 'solution'. You don't need tags, you don't need XML formatting, you just need content. But that does involve whoever is writing the release, asking the client - in this case a researcher - the kinds of questions that hacks will ask: "Who will this help?", "What's it do?", "What were the problems?" etc.

Posted by Chris at 7:07 PM | Comments (3)

March 2, 2006

Shareholder rights or management rights?

A few days late, I noticed that Analog Devices has got around to rescinding its anti-takeover plan, first established in 1998 under one of my (least) favourite business euphemisms: the "shareholder rights plan". Otherwise known as poison pills - a much more descriptive term - these plans effectively prevent any attempt to buy a controlling stake in the company and dump its management.

I was always curious where the term "shareholder rights plan" came from, as it was clearly enhancing the rights of the management rather than the shareholders, who would get to cash in on the ambitions of a purchaser. However, timing is important in how these things swing in and out of fashion. 1998 was a surprisingly bad year for electronics companies relative to other stocks. After the technology mini-boom of 1995 crashed and burned, the chipmakers ended up with the third-degree scars. While Internet stocks coughed and continued skyward toward the much bigger collapse of 2001, chipmakers bounced in and out of recession. Looking cheaply valued, a number of electronics stocks decided to fend off being eaten up by deals financed with overvalued paper using these poison pills. The argument generally promulgated at the time was that shareholders would not be sold short by a temporary imbalance in stock-market valuations.

Now it's the era of corporate governance and the idea of a shareholders rights plan, which makes it notionally more difficult for shareholders to sell up, is most definitely unfashionable. I really need to look at how many other companies in the sector are throwing out these late-1990s rules. It's not all that tricky to do: the deal looks to cost ADI about $180,000 by my calculations, given that the rights were worth $0.0005 per share. But is corporate-governance chic the only motivator to toss out these rules?

Posted by Chris at 11:36 AM