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Medical gadgets

Health Blog : Medtronic Exec: Medical Devices 'Finished'

Would-be medical-device entrepreneurs got a sobering message Wednesday at a Boston conference of academic researchers and medical-device companies.

“You can’t keep stuffing gizmos into people to treat end-stage disease,” the keynote speaker said. “When biotechnology gets right, we’re finished. Because it’s restorative, not palliative as devices are.”

The seemingly pessimistic speaker? Device giant Medtronic’s senior vice president for medicine and technology, Stephen Oesterle (pictured).

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CSM dies. But print can't.

Christian Science Paper to End Daily Print Edition - NYTimes.com

Still, said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at Outsell Inc., most newspapers cannot give up paper. Print editions still bring in 92 percent of the overall revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Goodbye, Senator Stevens

I can truly say I met the man. Or at least, was questioned by him. On arcane topics of rural cellular spectrum allocation. He's far more famous for his explanation of the Internet ("series of tubes") than asking me if spectrum should be big blocks or small blocks. Wasn't nice about it though, was he?

Alaska Senator Is Convicted of Ethics Breach in Gift Scheme - NYTimes.com

Mr. Stevens has long been tied to the rough-and-tumble history of his home state and wields outsized influence over federal spending....

Credit immobilier

The line below is about as close to a smoking gun as anybody needs.

Talking Business - So When Will Banks Give Loans? - NYTimes.com

We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit to fully reflect the high cost of pricing on the loan side.

Profiles in unhappiness 3

Profiles: The Oracle: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

One afternoon last spring, Huffington, who lives in Los Angeles, was in Seattle, having agreed to serve as the key-note speaker at an annual Planned Parenthood benefit luncheon. (A fan of the cause, she waived her fee, and even, when a collection plate went around, got out her checkbook.) Long a regular on the conference circuit, she is often found in the sorts of places that require lanyards. Her vocabulary is full of business-book terms—“aha moment,” “meme.” When she hangs up the phone, she some-times says, “I’m jumping off.” At night, she hides her BlackBerrys (she has three) in the bathroom.

These are tough times.

New York Times (NYT) Running On Fumes

This story is very sad to read. The carmakers, the banks, Yahoo, even the New York Times on the ropes. It's really a shame all this carnage.

Peek is so easy

Blackberry alternative

Look no further than here for a Blackberry alternative

Your beliefs are your genes

I love the passion that people feel about political beliefs; and I love the following idea even more: that much of it is determined by parents -- nature and nurture.

There are few beliefs you'd like to to think come from your parents as dogma or genetics! Gravity and 2+2, who cares? But left or right...

The TV Watch - On ‘Saturday Night Live,’ the Real Sarah Palin Looks Like a Real Entertainer - NYTimes.com

Louis Menand: Peek to beat sms

Thumbspeak: Books: The New Yorker

Context on text

Thumbspeak: Books: The New Yorker

@(------ is something that E. E. Cummings might have come up with.

Pascale notes

1. Current phase - fitting keys into locks, buckles together, etc.

2. Today's puke - my fault. Left the milk unrefrigerated a little too long. Whoops! Good thing she rejects things so readily.

Posted by email from Amol's posterous

Profiles in unhappiness 2

The Lightning Rod - The Atlantic (November 2008)

Michelle Rhee is always on message and always on call. If she’s not speaking, she’s thumbing away on her BlackBerry, or working a cell phone, or flipping open a laptop. When I met with her recently, she sat at her desk clasping a BlackBerry and a cell phone in her right hand; in front of her was a sleek Sony Vaio laptop, which she monitored incessantly during our conversation, while off to her right was yet another computer, a desktop PC. Apparently there is a second BlackBerry somewhere. And it’s not for show. “Every e-mail a parent sends me, I answer,” she said, a boast that even her critics grudgingly concede.

Michelle Rhee

BlackBerry-wielding type-A personalities out to shake up the system are a common sight in Washington. Until recently, their habitat consisted almost exclusively of the halls of Congress and the K Street corridor—the think tanks, lobby shops, and congressional staffs most of us talk about when we talk about the capital.

Profiles in unhappiness

Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F---- You - News Blog - Daily Brief - Portfolio.com

Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

Fellow Stuyvesant alum Bram Cohen

BitTorrent's Bram Cohen Isn't Limited by Asperger's - BusinessWeek

Apparently a "nerd". Hmm, there might have been others at Stuy...

SNL vs. the candidates

Catching up tonight on the SNL from this week. I have to say the Al Smith dinner roasts are way funnier.

The Paperless Office

IT BECAME a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy gone awry. The notion of the “paperless office”, which dates back to the 1960s, sounded plausible enough. As computers began to spread and display technology improved, it seemed obvious that more and more documents would be written, distributed and read in electronic form, rather than on paper. Filing cabinets would give way to hard disks, memos and reports would be distributed electronically and paper invoices and purchase orders would be replaced by electronic messages whizzing between accounts departments.

It's here.

Admob sucks. Did some experimenting. Totally wasted money. Admob. Blech. WAP sucks.

Posted by email from Amol's posterous

Street teaming - it can really work if buzz is what your after

We spent 20 minutes at the corner of 42nd and Madison at rush hour today, in silly yellow aprons with Peeks in hand. It worked. We got probably 40 people engaged, 10 people 'tried it', had 3 pictures taken, 2 kisses, and a bunch of "wow that's neats"

If only this were a Target parking lot on a shopping day....

Posted by email from Amol's posterous

Street teaming - it can really work if buzz is what your after

We spent 20 minutes at the corner of 42nd and Madison at rush hour today, in silly yellow aprons with Peeks in hand. It worked. We got probably 40 people engaged, 10 people 'tried it', had 3 pictures taken, 2 kisses, and a bunch of "wow that's neats"

If only this were a Target parking lot on a shopping day....

Posted by email from Amol's posterous

Nailing it, but failing a lot first

Winners write history -- as is Taleb warns in his Black Swan books (well, he says you always hear the genius behind people who just got lucky 10 times in a row...) And as I often remark myself -- nothing is easy. It looks easy because that's how it's told. For example, becoming a famous writer sucks. As do many things....Though apparently if you are the right type, it does not suck. The question is which type are you - fun or sucky.

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

Dems vs Repblicans. Stock market edition.

Op-Chart - Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

Connect. Easily. Give Peek.

Friends,

Now that Peek is launched and gaining steam, we are hearing people tell us that mobile email is a must-have -- even while bells-and-whistles smartphones are looking way extravagant.

Beautiful, thin, and so easy it sets up in less than 2 minutes -- Peek is the perfect gift for that person you know who needs to get more done and be more connected, but without the fuss of a smartphone contract that will end up costing $1,000 more than Peek. Think mom. Think your better half. Think your sister the teacher.

So here's a reminder of that super secret friends and family deal: buy it at Target or www.getpeek.com, tell me what email address you set up, and you'll get half off the service for three months. And if you are a Peek user, well there is a surprise in it for you too.

The special discount ends this coming week. So time to pull the trigger!

Want to give it as a gift? Today you can leave the service fee on your credit card, or you can tell me and we'll get you a discount for a one-shot purchase of a year of service.

www.getpeek.com is where the action is -- or if you have questions just ask me.

And in case you missed the all the ink being spilled about Peek....The New York Times raved "simple" and "elegant", while comparing it to the iPod. The Wall Street Journal thought it was a "stylish and simple" and perfect for technophobes like mom. Wired called it "a breeze". Check out the CNET and BusinessWeek and CNBC and ABC News coverage at http://blog.getpeek.com