Help Key: Watch Netflix From Outside The U.S.
You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know.
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New Market Research: Social Media Sites as Annoying to U.S. Customers as Cable Providers, Airlines
A new study by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds that U.S. consumers regard social media sites Facebook and Myspace as lowly as they regard cable providers, airlines and the I.R.S.
The Annual E-Business Report for the A.C.S.I. study encompassed thirty online media brands in the categories of: portals and search engines, news and information sites and for the first time in July 2010, social media sites.
On a 0-100 point scale, Facebook scored just 64 points but Wikipedia scored 77.
ForeSee Results chief executive Larry Freed says, regarding Facebook’s astoundingly low score and Wikiepedia’s high score:
“Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works [elsewhere] in technology, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”
Wikipedia, Freed reasons, has adhered to a nonprofit business model where “It’s about the content more than anything else. The key driver for Wikipedia is that they haven’t brought monetization strategy into it, haven’t had to add features where it becomes troubling for people to access and utilize an ever-changing site.”
Privacy issues and promotional content — including everything from display ads to promotional information posted by “Facebook friends” about Mafia Wars or Farmville — all frustrated Facebook customers.
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U.S. Open Golf Site Draws 518 Percent Increase In Mobile Visitors
Mobile Web usage continues to grow by leaps and bounds as smartphones with large touch screens become the new normal. One quick data point comes from the United States Golf Association and IBM, which runs its Websites. During the 2010 U.S. Open golf tournament last week, 1.7 million people visited the U.S. Open’s mobile site, a 518 percent increase from last year. In contrast, the regular site saw only 4.2 million visitors, during the week, up 8 percent.
In other words, nearly 30 percent of traffic to the U.S. Open site was from mobile devices. The fact that golf fans didn’t need to fire up their laptops or turn on their TVs to find the latest scores and keep up with the play was enough to make the mobile site take off. And the mobile site was pretty stripped down—there was an all-text news feed, scores, tee times, and some video.
Really, that is all you need. Mobile sites should still be built for delivering quick bursts of information. When you are on the go, you probably don’t have time to wait for a busy page to load with graphics you can barely see anyway. But before touch-screen phones, the mobile Web was too difficult to navigate. Remove the friction of getting on the Web, and people will come in droves.
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U.S. Leading Charge on Synthetic Biology Funding
Synthetic biology received about $430 million in U.S. government funding from 2005 to 2010, far outpacing European governments, which gave their synthetic biologists $160 million over the same period. The emerging field received nearly no funding before 2005, according to a new Woodrow Wilson Center report.
The numbers are the latest indication that synthetic biology has become a buzzword at the highest-levels of politics and policy. Last month, President Obama convened a special commission to study synthetic biology and the House held a special hearing on the topic. Both events were apparently prodded by the J. Craig Venter Institute’s announcement that they implanted a genome that was once a text document filled with letters into a living cell.
Though synthetic biology support is growing, it’s far from a major research area for any government. The U.S. government alone spends almost $150 billion on R&D, the majority of which goes to “defense,” broadly construed. The largest part of the civilian science budget, about $30 billion, goes to “health,” which includes biomedical research.
The new numbers on synthetic biology, while interesting, are not definitive, said Todd Kuiken, a research associate on the Synthetic Biology Project at the Wilson Center. Government agencies don’t specifically track synthetic biology projects as a line-item, and even the definition of the field is squishy. For example, Stanford synthetic biologist Drew Endy says the field’s long-term goal is to “help make biology easy to engineer.” No government process exists that sorts out projects fitting Endy’s definition, especially from the genetic engineering that scientists have long done.
Because of the difficulty categorizing what is and isn’t synthetic biology as well as extracting the information from the agencies, Kuiken said he thinks the real amount of money being spent on synthetic biology is higher than the number in the initial research brief. But he hopes that putting a provisional number on it will cause the government to start tracking their investments.
“If you at least get a number out there that is public, it forces the agencies to look deeper at it,” Kuiken said.
One interesting twist to the numbers is the lack of funds dedicated to evaluating any peculiar risks posed by synthetic biology techniques.
“There is no project that we’ve seen looking at the risk,” Kuiken said.
That said, about 4 percent of the research money is going to study the “ethical, legal and social implications” of the technology, which is comparable to how much nanotechnology money is spent on those issues.
The Synthetic Biology Project also assembled a map of all the institutions working on synthetic biology problems, which you can see above.
See Also:
- Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life
- Congress, Obama Take Sudden Interest in Synthetic Biology
- Synthetic Biology: It’s Not What You Learned, But What You Made
- Synthetic Biology Under Government Surveillance … and Liking It
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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