Compliantly

Several major technology companies are notably absent from the EHR Stimulus Alliance, a newly formed group that aims to educate U.S. doctors about the benefits of electronic health records.

The alliance, which promises to educate 500,000 physicians about EHR in 200 days, includes companies such as Nuance, Intel, Dell and Microsoft. Missing from the list are major EHR players such as Cerner, Google and GE, which recently launched "Healthymagination," a long-term, $6-billion commitment to improve health information technology. Also missing is Medsphere, a promising start-up trying to help hospitals implement VistA, an open-source EHR system. The alliance did not respond to a question about the group's membership.

The EHR Stimulus Alliance has planned briefings, roundtables, presentations and webcasts on the benefits of EHR. The group also hopes to inform medical professionals about government incentives available to doctors who adopt electronic health records.

The massive effort is a sign of how anxious companies are to get a slice of the EHR pie. President Barack Obama is making a push to digitize all health records by 2014 and has allotted $20 billion dollars in the stimulus bill that will go toward transitioning to EHR. 

The FCC adopted rules to prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to wireless devices in the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. However, the ban does not cover SMS messages.

Now, a new act has been proposed. The "Stop M-Spam Abuse as a Sales industry Habit Act of 2008" (H.R. 5769, also known as the SMASH Act of 2008) would require the Federal Trade Commission to "issue regulations to revise the Telemarketing Sales Rule to explicitly prohibit, as an abusive telemarketing act or practice, the sending of any electronic commercial message containing an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone number that is assigned to a commercial mobile service and listed on the FTC's do-not-call registry."

The act already has some early bipartisan support and the Obama administration has shown its willingness to quickly target commercial practices which hurt consumers, such as its call to reform the credit card industry. On the other hand, marketers and the telecommunications industry may push back against any regulation of SMS messaging, and may enlist sympathetic members of Congress to scuttle the bill, water down its provision, or delay its enactment.

Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is leaving the company, a move that signals the company is positioning itself to go public.

The social networking site, which recently passed the 200 million user mark, reported that it is on track to increase revenues by 70 percent this year. Could an IPO be around the corner? 

It’s only a small change to AdSense, but if you’re using Google’s ads on a lot of sites even small changes may make a difference: Google on Monday announced they’ve increased the default font size for AdSense units. However, since last week you can now also change the font size for AdSense ad units yourself. The font size dialog allows default, small, medium, and large. (The old default size equaled “small”, and the new one equals “medium”, Google says).

Some observers have reacted with dismay to parts of yesterday's subcommittee meeting of the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) expressed concern that online media may not maintain the same high standards of journalism that he believes print media has.

Players in the online media world have hammered newspapers and magazines for years, saying that they are too large and dinosaur-like. Yesterday's meeting brought out a new wave of criticism.

Gabe Rivera, the founder of Techmeme and several other niche news aggregators, hinted that the current rounds of layoffs that many newspapers are going through are necessary.

"Kerry's premise is false. They weren't competitive. There was redundancy. Trimming the fat yields a competitive organization," he wrote on Twitter.

In his testimony, Sen. Kerry also said steps need to be taken to make sure news media stays diverse and independent.

Implying that the Internet already lets consumers access diverse sources of news, Mike Steib, director of TV Ads at Google tweeted, "There are 90 feeds in my Google Reader."

The hearing was prompted by the crisis facing traditional media outlets, especially newspapers and magazines, as advertisers and readers have migrated to the Web. Close to 9,000 layoffs and buyouts have occurred in 2009 alone at U.S. newspapers, according to Paper Cuts, a blog about the news industry. 

But some see opportunities in the disruption of the news industry. 

Journalist David Cohn, founder of community journalism website Spot.Us, believes that this is an exciting time for news media.

"I think what journalism needs is 10,000 different start-ups," he told CNN.

TechCrunch has been teasing readers with pictures and video of a prototype touchscreen Web tablet (also known as the "CrunchPad" or "Crunch Tablet") for several months. The most recent photos, released in April, show a slim, Atom-powered device that has an on-screen keyboard and even packaging.

The CrunchGear post brags that "it's real and it's spectacular," but a new hardware launch in a market crowded with sub-$400 netbooks, iPod touches, and the Kindle 2 will be a challenge. Manufacturing, distribution, and sales all have to be worked out before launch can occur.   

Recently, Sun Microsystems (makers of Solaris, big purple servers and pony tailed CEO’s) have unleashed a new virtualization product on the world: VirtualBox, and while it lacks many of the features of the other two it’s free, easy to use and works reasonably well.

Step 1: Download

Download the latest version of VirtualBox for OS X from the support Wiki.

Step 2: Install VirtualBox

Mount the Downloaded Disk Image and run the VirtualBox.mpkg file. This should place a VirtualBox.app in your /Applications Directory

Step 3: Create a Virtual Machine

Helpful wizards jump up to walk you through creating a new Virtual Machine, but in case you miss them, click the blue “New” button in the upper left of the main VirtualBox window and follow the directions.

You will need to make 2 decisions:

1. How much RAM to allocate. I found that 512 was adequate for a stock Windows XP installation. This will vary greatly with what you are attempting to use the virtual machine for, but for cross browser testing and basic usage was fine.
2. How much HardDrive space to use. The wizard will strongly encourage you to set this “dynamically”, meaning that although you may specify that the virtual machine can use up to 25 GB of space it won’t use that much right away. Instead, it will slowly increase the amount of space taken as you use the virtual machine.

Step 4: Install Windows

At the conclusion of the Virtual Machine creation wizard, you will be prompted to begin the Windows installation process. Push F8, partition the hard drive with NTFS, enter your code, choose your TimeZone and an hour of tediousness later you’ll be dumped at the Windows Desktop.

Step 5: Setup Networking

By default, the VirtualBox networking was set to Network Address Translation (NAT), where the VirtualBox pretends that it’s in its own separate network from the network that your Mac is actually running on. While this can be useful in some specialized cases, to just get up and running it’s not necessary.

1. Shutdown the Windows virtual machine
2. With the Virtual machine selected. Click “Settings” and choose “Network”.
3. Set the Attached value to “Host Interface”
4. Make sure that the correct host interface is set in the bottom of the screen. i.e. if you’re using wireless select AirPort. If you’re plugged in, select Ethernet.
5. Restart the Windows virtual machine and you should be good to go. The machine should pickup an address automatically off of your home network. *

"More than anything, let's give this company some friggin' breathing room," newly-arrived Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told reporters on a conference call in January. "It's been too crazy, everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do, what's best for them. That's gonna stop."

But last week, Bartz made the decision to cut staff at Flickr, the widely used photo-sharing site. GigaOm editor Om Malik listed five Flickr engineers who had left the company. Some, he said, were laid off, while others resigned. Most notable is Cal Henderson, chief architect of Flickr.

Bartz' decision to fire Flickr engineers caused Seeking Alpha blogger Joel West, a business professor at San Jose State University, to turn from Bartz booster to Bartz basher: 

Yahoo is now cutting heavily at Flickr, including its top development talent.

This reminds me of how CEO Ed Zander closed Motorola’s talent-laden software lab near UIUC two years ago. Ironically, Yahoo created a new office to hire that talent.

West's post won't start a backlash by itself. But it seems like an early example of how Web 2.0 boosters will view Bartz' move. Her decision to shut down GeoCities was an acknowledgement that GeoCities' build-it-yourself Web 1.0 homesteads have been replaced by simple, turnkey Facebook profiles and no-brain-required Twitter streams.

Flick, by contrast, is a successful product, at least in terms of mass-market adoption. Bartz cut technical staff at Flickr in the same week that President Obama's administration began using it to distribute official photos as part of its WhiteHouse 2.0 strategy to establish a high-profile presence on top social networks.

Financially, Bartz' decision probably makes perfect sense. Millions of mainstream Flickr users may not even learn of the staff reduction, let alone become upset by it. Layoffs are now business as usual in America. But Bartz has hurt Flickr, a prized brand and daily destination for many Internet users. The lesson for Web 2.0 boosters: As the world's economy continues to slide, no one is safe.

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