The two-week jaunt through India for eight state senators was sponsored by the California International Relations Foundation, a nonprofit tied to the state Senate. The goal of the trip is to promote cultural, economic and political relations. Among other things, the senators were scheduled to observe India’s education system and its burgeoning high-tech industry.

[From State lawmakers overseas during budget crisis]

Second story, the 3 CEOs of Detroit automakers flew to Washington D.C. this week with hat in hand asking for zero and low interest loans to help them stay alive. While hemorrhaging billions of dollars each month these executives never thought twice about flying on luxurious private jets… keep in mind that business jets of this size run about $6k an hour to fly.

Normally I don’t get flustered about executive perks but this example is beyond the pale and neatly encapsulates much of what is wrong with these businesses, a desire to change everything except the things that affect the people calling for change.

I saw the video and didn’t see what the big deal was, which actually underscored the primary point of the critics who said the ad must have been created by a bunch of men who not only didn’t talk to any pregnant women or women with newborns, but apparently didn’t know they existed. Me, being a man, am therefore unqualified to offer any critique of the video… how’s that for sexism.

I did ask my wife about it, and to fully disclose her bona fides, she is indeed a woman, has been pregnant 3 times and is currently in possession of a newborn. She laughed, thought the video was good satire… further added “that Motrin is good stuff”.

Motrin took notice of the angry mob and did what most consumer facing brand companies do, someone fell on their sword. Impressively, their apology, offered by a woman VP of Marketing I will note, has been running on their Motrin site for 2 days now.

So kudos to J&J for quickly acting on this issue. I’ll sidestep the whole “up to the moment the video was released” part of the story, which would have offered J&J an opportunity to avoid controversy in the first place, focus instead on the importance of disaggregated social media channels for consumer brand companies.

Despite how critical this is becoming, few companies have really figured this out and that means there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for a second wave to attack the beach. Companies like Buzzlogic Buzzmetrics and Umbria (now part of Nielsen and JD Power respectively) attempted to monitor brands programmatically, and it proved to be a complex problem, something a hell of a lot more complex than setting up a bunch of Google News Alerts.

At it’s heart, brand monitoring is a collection of problems that attempt to differentiate signal to noise, assign authority, and determine sentiment and other language attributes important to context. There are also additional opportunities around compilation of demographic data as represented by the people who are talking about your brand.

The amount of content and number of sources has grown exponentially in recent years, making traditional “clipping services” obsolete and relatively useless in today’s world. Further challenging the people focusing on this part of the marketing services industry, the content that is being generated often lacks context in that it is either a comment on a blog, a link to an unrelated source, or worse, 140 character twitter messages. You don’t get a lot of context in 140 characters.

All things considered, this is hard stuff that relies on a lot of data inputs in the form of content and some not insignificant technology to process the content once you have it, but the representation of that relevant content in a form that is actionable is perhaps the most vexing part of the challenge. You can present a lot of data about a brand to a client, and perhaps even tell them what it means, but doing so in a way that is efficient and conducive to taking action upon that information is a challenge all consumer brands are struggling with.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Motrin angered mothers and underestimated the Twitter response
• Motrin learns about Twitter
• The Measures of Engagement meme (Convincing the disconnected)
• Finding the right signal to noise ratio

Nonetheless, the post on Prof Bainbridge’s site provides an extraordinarily clear and concise explanation of what the case is all about, the kind of explanation that has thus far not been seen in media’s coverage.

In Cuban’s case, however, I suspect it was not greed but rather his legendary temper that did him in. The PIPE transaction Mamma.com planned would have involved the issuance of new shares at a below market price. It would have diluted the economic value and voting rights of Cuban and the other pre-PIPE investors. The complaint makes clear that Cuban was furious about the planned sale. His anger led him to a rash act, which now could result in serious civil fines. Whether the Justice Department will pursue criminal charges, as well, remains to be seen.

[From Law & Business | Professor Bainbridge]

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.

[From TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program]

TweetDeck (and Thwirl before it) accelerated my twitter usage. Yammer’s desktop AIR client is universally regarded as compelling within our company, contributing to our usage rates.

The Evernote iPhone app is not only handy for putting my notes on my mobile device, but it also serves as notetaker itself when nothing else is available. My connection to Evernote is stronger than just with web and desktop experiences.

For all of the benefits that web-based applications provide, user experience alone is generally not one of them. Small, high performance, persistent desktop apps can intensify usage which can then lead to broader adoption and with mobile apps, specifically the iPhone but eventually more mobile platforms, this goes to a whole new level.

When I talk with companies, big and small, I am struck by the “we’ll do that eventually” attitude that the majority have. The view that these satellite interfaces are somehow optional or just extra is a miscalculation.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Netflix Releases New API
• iFlix Manages Your Netflix Queue from Your iPhone [Apps Worth Jailbreaking For]

The number of pedestrians and bicyclists injured on the streets of San Francisco spiked in 2007, and overall traffic-related deaths jumped more than 40 percent from the year before, according to new data from the California Highway Patrol.

[From Spike in S.F. traffic deaths, injuries]

Reading this reminded me of another example that effectively demonstrates how our world is formed not out of individual entities but rather systems that interact. Change one variable and something over there that you didn’t anticipate flares up.

In the 1980’s a move was started in the construction industry to use materials like Tyvek to wrap new houses during construction in order to achieve air tightness for insulation value (R value) and to contain moisture penetration that causes dry rot (ironic that dry rot is caused by wetness).

House wraps and other new technology insulation are widely used today and considered good building practice, indeed required by building codes. However, there was one unintended consequence of house wraps that we have paid a very high cost to deal with, mold.

As builders wrapped houses tightly and combined them with other energy saving features, such as 2×6 walls, they not only decreased the potential for moisture to enter a structure, the made it difficult of moisture inside the structure (like moisture contained in the air) to leave the structure and the result is that the multi-billion dollar explosion of mold claims correlates strongly to new building techniques adopted in the last 25 years.

Now we see that Pickens’ appetite for alternative energy at any cost actually has limits, namely cheap oil and tight global credit markets are causing Pickens to suddenly get tight fisted. What was lost in Pickens’ folksy southern drawl laden pitch was the notion that creating public policy conditions favorable to him would allow him to expand these companies with debt rather than his own capital, which was a departure from what he was telling everyone in the many interviews he was giving.

Boone in July launched a public campaign, said to be funded with $57 million of Boone’s money, to wean the U.S. off oil imports through a massive investment in wind energy and conversion to natural gas for vehicles. … Speaking at a Forbes Energy Conference on Wednesday, Boone said he has had to delay financing the project. But he characterized it as a temporary setback. [From T. Boone Pickens may stall wind farm plans | Green Tech - CNET News]

None of this is inherently dishonest, and at no point did Pickens ever suggest he wasn’t trying to take advantage of the public policy court of popular opinion to achieve his goals. It is duplicitous nonetheless because he is attempting to circumvent economic markets through buying of public policy markets. This is just more of the same when it comes to energy, and in many ways is no different than corn farmers in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska using the energy debate as a way of ensuring a business for biofuel while at the same time penalizing sugar cane based ethanol being imported in from South America.

Related articles by Zemanta

• T. Boone Pickens Trying to Pick Californians’ Pockets
• Pickens’ wind plan hits a snag