Category Archives: news

Buffet and Gates News Conference

Posted on by
Reply

It's great to see CNN and FOX covering this story live at the press conference though unfortunate that commentators are more interested in the cash and personalities than what this means to global health.

37 Billion to Charity  = Thirty Seven Thousand … Million dollar donations.  This appears to be history's greatest act of philanthropy. CNN suggests this is true even if you look at Carnagie and Rockerfeller's huge giving and adjust for inflation. Also important is that those early foundations did not focus on third world problems where the money can be far more effective.

Buffett and the Gates' may prove to be the most powerful global welfare partnerships in history as Buffett, with his remarkable ability to evaluate companies, joins the Gates on the board. For the many who see corporate America as a threat to the welfare of humanity this should also be a wake up call. Gates and Buffett are redistributing wealth from the richest to the poorest far more effectively than any Government progressive tax scheme could ever dream to do, and they are applying their substantial abilities to solving the world's most significant problems.

I'd suggest that Governments and taxation plans tend to redistribute from wealthy and moderatly weathly to the middle and lower middle classes – ie it shifts wealth a few notches down, rather than the far more desirable type of redistribution which moves money from the richest to the poorest as this type of philanthropy tends to do.

Melinda Gates explains that the gift is "unprecedented" and that the new funding will allow the foundation to expand their priority list of diseases so they can fight more than just the "big three diseases" Malaria, Tuberculosis, and HIV / AIDS.

Buffett said he's always expected his billions to go to charity but originally thought it would be his wife who would distribute his wealth after he died. However his wife died first, and his friendship with and respect for Bill and Melinda Gates has inspired him to start giving away his money during his lifetime, feeling that they, and a few other foundations his money will support, have created great mechanisms for distributing his wealth where it will do huge social good.

Bravo Warren Buffett, Bravo!

Warren Buffett gives away almost all he has to charity. Bravo!

Posted on by
4

Warren Buffett will give almost all of his fortune – one of the greatest in history – to charity.  Most most will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to accelerate its fantastic efforts towards global health and education.   Buffett, the Sage of Omaha and arguably one of the world's sharpest businessmen, will join the Gates' on the board of a foundation already credited with saving over a *million* lives.

I'd guess that this amazing convergence of wealth and entrepreneurial style development will go down as a pivotal moment in history, and it is wonderful and inspiring to see the mega rich turn to mega philanthropy.

Bill Gates to become full time philanthropist and leave Microsoft management over next 2 years

Posted on by
Reply

Bill Gates' passion has become his outstanding philanthropic work, mostly relating to global health initiatives, and today he said he'd leave his day to day management of MS over the next two years.

Although the future of Microsoft may be in question thanks to the rapidly changing online, open source and competitor environments, this is a great day for international development efforts.  

In addition to saving over a *million* people from tragic deaths due to disease, the Gates Foundation has brought an entrepreneurial, innovative approach to the development of global health solutions.   I'm thrilled that Gates – still a young whippersnapper – will devote his substantial intellectual and monetary resources to the world's greatest challenges.  Bravo Bill!

Online vs Offline Advertising – an epidemic of irrationality.

Posted on by
Reply

Matt McAlister is unimpressed with online advertising.

OK, but take a look at OFFLINE dude! I replied to him over at his blog:

I think you may be overestimating the abysmal stats behind conventional advertising. Online, the 1% of people clicking into an advertiser's site at a cost of perhaps .15-.25 is very good. For example if you advertise a website prominently in a print publication you should expect perhaps 1/10th to 1/100th that level of performance (1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 readers) clicking to the site. I've tested this result using unique URLs and large print ads and the results were…underwhelming. I've seen no study to contradict my own results though I've noted many ad buyers tend to evaluate ad effectiveness in very questionable ways, such as when a $20,000 print campaign results in a few thousand leads and the conclusion is that it was a huge success.

Context ads have redefined the relationship between content and advertising in a positive way for both advertisers and publishers, and until a LOT more money flows from absurdly overpriced offline media to online, and thus starts to close the ROI gap, I think it is unreasonable to expect online ad models to change much, although do see them moving away from PPC and towards pay per action models which make performance measures somewhat more straightforward and PPC fraud almost impossible.
I think many online folks simply have no idea about the incredibly poor performance of offline advertising. My working hypothesis is that most advertising buys have negative ROI but that media companies and sales reps have done a very good job of convincing ad buyers that their advertising is working.

This article suggets that Google's failure to get high bids for print ads was an anomoly.  On the contrary I think this is a glimpse of the future of advertising, which will continue to move online until relative ROIs balance out.

Google selling print failed because print advertising is *dramatically* inferior to online and Google customers know this. Even online campaigns generally have negative ROI, but I suggest that most large, image driven print campaigns have negative ROI unless flimsy methodologies are used to measure ROI.

Few clients measure print effects well if at all, allowing advertising reps and companies to BS their way to keeping TV and print in play which is the main funding source for large media companies.

Based on my observations and experiments with print and online advertising in the travel sector It's an epidemic of irrationality, where few bother to measure ad effectiveness and those few who do measure it, and find print generally fails to deliver positive ROI, simply turn to subjective justifications for continuing failed campaigns.

The Internet Open = news at the speed of enthusiasm

Posted on by
Reply

The French Open ended moments ago, and already the Wikipedia biography of winner  Rafael Nadal – aka "Raffy Boy" for those of us who don't know him – has been revised to reflect the win against Roger Federer.

This news items, like the big tech news items of today Scoble leaves microsoft which was accurately posted extensively at many blogs before conventional news outlets could even have hoped to find out, strongly indicates that the internet has the potential to react to breaking news more quickly, more accurately, and perhaps most importantly, *VERY CHEAPLY*.    Millions of potential reporters are out there, enthusiastically posting blog items or revising websites in response to what interests them.
Can all that info and energy come together in BBC style global network fashion?   Certainly it has not happened yet and BBC remains the best global news distribution network by far.  However it should not take long for news mashups to leverage the millions of online reporters who daily post tens of millions of online reports into a simply spectacular news resource.  

Although it may be too far ahead of it's time to succeed, I sure like like Newsvine, which I think gives us a good glimpse of the future of news, which dovetails nicely with the future of the internet, which dovetails nicely with … our future.

Almost 5000 dead and counting

Posted on by
2

No, not from the Indonesian earthquake – indeed a terrible tragedy. Global warming? Ha – not even the most alarmist proponents make this claim. Nope, not from terrorism, which tragically took perhaps 5 or even 10 lives today despite *trillions* of dollars spent fighting wars and providing security across thousands of first world venues.

Malaria killed the 5000. Today. And yesterday. And tomorrow. 1-3 Million per year with some indications the count has been historically too low on this disease.

But let's not worry about Malaria because the cost to dramatically reduce transmission is …. $2.50 for nets that protect people while they sleep. $5.50 for the really good nets that can protect people for 5 years.

More death news you won't see on CNN or FOX. Yet today (nor yesterday or the days before) I didn't see anything on CNN or FOX about this ongoing life and death battle with parasitic diseases where the death toll eclipses that of *all wars ever fought for all time*.

CNN did, however, have a long report lamenting the fact that that about 100 people per week die waiting for organ transplants. We better get to work on that, because why spend $2.50 for a net to save a kid's life when you can spend $250,000.00 giving a rich guy a extra few years?

Save the world, ignore global warming

Posted on by
3

As I noted before I actually admire and respect Al Gore for his passion regarding the environment and his sincerity about creating a better world. However I wonder if his global warming alarmism is misguided.

Here is a short and articulate summary by the controversial "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg of the view that Global warming is happening but that those suggesting dramatic measures are proposing we waste time and innovation better spent on problems we *can* solve.

Personally, I'm incredibly frustrated by how *every source I've read* suggesting global warming remedies fails to even attempt a cost benefit analysis when this should be a key concern due to the overwhelming costs associated with, for example, Kyoto Protocol implementation.

Lomborg suggests:
… in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming, and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do most good first and quickest.

Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" suggests that many of the sacred cows of the environmental movement, including Global Warming, are supported more by political and ideological rather than scientific and mathematical motivations.

Lomborg has been villified in some scientific circles and if I can get permission I'll post some very interesting correspondence I had with the editor of Scientific American, which challenges Lomborg in what I feel are more personal rather than scientific ways. Lomborg's critics are notoriously vicious with ad hominem attacks on Lomborg rather than attacking his math and scientific assumptions. I'd suggest this is a strong indication that we should be paying more attention to Lomborg's analyses of pressing global concerns and that we should be careful to review the motivations of ALL of those involved in the global environmental debate.

Wikipedia on Global Warming – an excellent summary

EPA's Global Warming Site
Cooler Heads Coalition – industry funded I think. Note the paper about Terraforming Mars using injected greenhouse gasses! These guys seem to LIKE global warming!

Global Warming, or Global Alarming?

Posted on by
3

Tim O'Reilly's looking forward to the upcoming film by Al Gore about Global Warming.
It's called "An Inconvenient Truth" and premiers very soon.

I respect Al Gore for many reasons, but I'm concerned by what appears to be a "propagandistic" rather than "scientific" lean to this film (this is based on clips and comments by those who have seen the film). I do not think Gore is a clear thinker on this topic and sees himself more as a "prophet".

If we focus on addressing the many global problems like health and economies of the developing world we can get a spectacular return on the investment of mental and monetary capital. Collateral advantages will be reductions in terrorism and a huge boost in good will and personal satisfaction.

Investing in alleviating human causes of global warming has no clear path to success, yet the costs are simply staggering.

Tim replied to my concerns, which I posted over at his blog. I love the internet for letting little old me, and thousands of others, actively engage with some of the world's best and brightest. Whatever one's views on the *most* pressing problems, certainly the collective application of innovation has the power to bring us the solutions.

Joe —
I see you've read The Skeptical Environmentalist. And I certainly agree with Bjorn Lomborg that there are other pressing problems where there is a great return on investment. But it also seems to me that many of the things that would be required to help with global warming could have enormous payoff. Critics talk about enormous costs, but it seems to me that the costs of the current way of doing things are always hidden.

A great example of this is railroads vs. automobiles. There's always been a huge debate about rail from the north bay down to San Francisco, with critics talking about the $150 million projected cost as a subsidy. But no one talks about the tens of billions of dollars of subsidy represented by the creation and maintenance of the highway system. Railroads are expected to carry their costs and described as uneconomic because they need subsidies, but the automobile industry managed to get much larger subsidies baked into the economy and hidden so that they no longer even appear as subsidies.

——-
I agree with Tim that some hidden economic subsidies are not always identified in discussions, but Economists do talk about and study these relationships. Unfortunately these observations are almost always buried in the politically/emotionally motivated budgeting processes. Political budgeting is not rational budgeting.

He's also right that greenhouse alleviation *might* have a big payoff, especially from things like alternative energy innovations that we might not explore unless we tackle global warming more aggressively. Still, the benefits seem so very unclear that I'd rather have the government spend my money on alleviating the abundant clear, present, and (most importantly) CHEAP-to-fix dangers like global health and poor education. (I'm against much of the excessive military and security spending as well as potential global warming big spending.)

I'd even suggest that the positive technology spinoffs from $250,000,000,000 towards global health and development would simply dwarf those from that investment in Greenhouse gas alleviation (or military or first world health care, etc, etc).

Mr. Web 2.0 addresses rights to Web 2.0 service mark

Posted on by
1

Tim O'Reilly returned from vacation to a firestorm of concern and penned this thoughtful reply

I thought it was a nicely reasoned, rational reply to the brushfire of angry commentary, but unfortunately did not really address the key concern of many which is that enforcing rights to "Web 2.0" *appears* to be outside of the spirit of Web 2.0 as representing open, freewheeling, new age business models. He seems to say this is only a conference thing but that does not jive with the more sweeping claims to "Web 2.0" that the staff replies seem to be addressing.

I think this may be especially true of those in the EU who are not as familiar with the O'Reilly name and sterling reputation.

It's easy for me to say but I think there is more to be gained from the positive publicity that will follow dropping the claim on the mark than from fighting to own it.

I think I've spent enough time worrying over this one – O'Reilly is a fine company and will handle this reasonably.

Web 2.0 is brought to you by …..

Posted on by
Reply

Wow, O'Reilly sure pissed off a bunch of Web 2.0 people fast!

My take on the controversy which has become a top Web debate this afternoon, posted at O'Reilly's blog:

I've defended O'Reilly's corporate action since clearly Tim coined the term and Tim has done more to foster Web 2.0 notions than anybody else.

But you need to throw in the towel here as I'm confident Tim will do when he returns to this firestorm of protest.

Right or wrong the "Web 2.0" mark is not worth this level of hostility to the idea of "owning" a term celebrating the collective sharing of networked intelligence. Many rights are worth fighting for. Owning "Web 2.0" clearly is not.