December 2012

The doctor won’t see you now. He’ll e-mail you.

There’s not much to enjoy about sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, leafing through old magazines and waiting for an eventual appointment. New research suggests there might be a new way to eliminate that experience entirely: Move doctors’ visits online.

University of Pittsburgh’s Ateev Mehrotra lead a team of researchers in comparing electronic and in-person visits to the doctor at four primary care clinics in Pittsburgh. They looked at two relatively simple conditions: sinus and urinary tract infections, where doctors either worked with patients face-to-face or via e-mail, with the patient filling out a series of questions about his or her condition and the doctor making a prognosis. Their results, published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that the outcomes are relatively similar.

Social media rankings: perceptive or pointless?

Companies are offering up social media and “web footprint” rankings on everything from celebrities to Supreme Court Justices. Some recent examples make one wonder if there’s a point to all this.

Content and commerce collide: is it harder for publishers or e-tailers?

Media companies are looking for new revenues through selling things. Meanwhile, more commerce sites are starting to publish. Is it easier for content to transform into commerce — or vice versa?

Online ed startup Coursera moves further along money-making path

With its new employer-matching service, Coursera has opened up a key revenue stream in which it receives payment from employers in exchange for information about students who may be good job candidates.

Matching students with employers is a revenue model, as well as charging students for certificates from partner universities. The company did not disclose how much it is charging employers or how it is splitting the revenue with its university partners, but a contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan obtained this summer by the Chronicle of Higher Education indicated that partners could get 6 to 15 percent of the revenue.

Research: Pay TV customers will cut existing bills before cutting cords

Get set for some disruption in the pay TV market in 2013.

The proportion of customers who change service is set to double over the next year, research says. Most of those who plan to change say they will simply remove paid channels from their existing package. Channel additions by consumers look set to shrink markedly next year. And the numbers who plan to switch down to Freeview terrestrial TV are rising. In all, this likely points to a consumer response to worsening economic times, with disposable income relative to many consumer goods shrinking, rather than the effect of new internet TV services.

Hachette enters into new e-book contracts with retailers post-DoJ settlement

Hachette’s new contracts with e-book retailers following the publisher’s September settlement with the Department of Justice are now in place. Amazon had begun discounting some Hachette e-books slightly; now, the discounts are larger, and Google and Barnes & Noble are discounting as well. Apple is not discounting the e-books yet.

Amazon’s all-you-can-eat kids’ Kindle content should scare competitors

Amazon’s new unlimited digital offering for kids, Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, is a very ambitious program.

For a set monthly price, families get unlimited access to e-books, movies, TV shows, educational apps and games aimed at 3-to-8-year-olds. Kindle FreeTime Unlimited works only on the newest Kindle Fires as an extension to Kindle FreeTime, the parental controls feature that lets parents set time limits on kids’ various uses of the tablet. Households that subscribe to Amazon Prime will pay $2.99 per child or $6.99 per family (up to six kids) per month; non-Prime members will pay $4.99 per child or $9.99 per family per month. Content is “pre-screened for age-appropriateness.” Unlike the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which lets Kindle-owning Prime members borrow one free e-book per month from a collection of largely self-published titles, the content partners here are brands that kids will actually recognize: Sesame Street, Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS. That means characters like Dora, Elmo, Thomas and Cinderella — the good stuff.

Internet Blackout in the U.S. Not Likely

With the recent Internet blackout in Syria, the prospect of a similar event happening in the U.S. became a subject of discussion in the tech community. While the Internet is typically viewed as being highly resilient to war, natural disasters and everything else, a country suddenly disconnecting, as Syria did, presented a captivating scenario to consider for world leaders meeting at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai to update international telecommunications agreements.

A recent story by the Huffington Post illustrated how such a blackout occurring in the U.S. is highly unlikely, despite several efforts over the past few years by Sen. Joseph Lieberman to create an Internet “kill-switch” that would give the federal government power to shut down or take control of American Internet access during a national emergency. The bill never passed, and with more than 40 Internet providers in the U.S., it would be extremely difficult for any one event to completely shut off American Internet access -- although the potential for a partial Internet blackout in the U.S. is possible.

More Consumers Churning, But They'd Rather Stay

More consumers than ever are switching the companies they buy products or services from (particularly if those products or services are wireless phone, Internet or retailing industries), but they aren’t necessarily happy about it.

According to Accenture’s eighth annual Global Consumer Survey, one out of every five people (20%) switched the companies they typically buy from, an increase of 5% over 2011. However, 85% of those people said the companies could have done something differently to prevent them from switching. According to the survey (which polled 12,000 people in 32 countries), among those who said they would have stayed if the provider had acted differently, two-thirds (67%) said having an issue resolved during their first customer-service contact would have changed their minds. More than half (54%) said they might have had a change of heart if they had been better rewarded for remaining loyal.

What’s a Twitter Follower Worth?

The mobile phone reviews site PhoneDog, which accused a former staffer of stealing its 17,000 Twitter followers and sought compensation of $2.50 per follower, has apparently settled its lawsuit. That means the world will have to wait a while longer to learn how much the court thinks a Twitter follower is worth.

One quick and easy response, of course, is that your number of followers is worth little or nothing. If you’re tweeting something compelling, people will find it -- perhaps through retweets. If you’re not, well then your followers wouldn’t care anyway. This is probably true in the long term. But in the short term -- where most businesses operate -- more followers means marginally more people will have their eyes on your coupon or your quip or your news story. And that can translate into revenue. And this is taking into account the chaotic nature of information sharing on Twitter where the people you follow and the people whose posts you see is rarely a one-to-one relationship.

Benton

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