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This weekend I received a LinkedIn query from an alumni group I belong to asking if anyone wanted some freelance work ghost blogging for some executives. The more I thought about it, the less annoyed I was at the concept.

Then I found this well argued post by Mark Schaefer about other corporate ghost writing examples and all my reservations faded.

“The chairman does not pen his own speech, yet nobody questions that they own it. They don’t write the shareholder’s letter in the annual report, yet this is deemed as authentic. Do you think Former GE Chairman Jack Welch sat there and pecked out his own book? And yet it is seen as his.”

via Why it’s ridiculous to argue about ghost blogging »» Blogging best practices, corporate communications, ethics »» Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Row2K points to this awesome video shot from the Princeton Heavyweight Men’s eight during the Championship Eight event at this fall’s Head of the Charles Regatta. This gives a great sense of what it is like to row at full speed in an elite boat — and the crash with the U. Penn eight is pretty awesome to watch too. You can hear the Princeton coxswain warn the Penn boat out of the way, call for a sprint to pass, and then blam! Chaos.  I miss big boat rowing, sculling alone doesn’t have anything close to the exhilaration of rowing with eight other people at full speed. Maybe next year, I just got off the water here in Cotuit, rowing solo around the bay in my single, trying to get into fighting shape and work through a shoulder injury.

Tip of the hat to Jimmy C.

Om Malik reports SecondLife founder Philip Rosedale is moseying on.

I am so glad I steered clear of virtual world marketing when it was all abuzz in 2006.

“Four months after CEO Mark Kingdon left the San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the company behind erstwhile hot virtual world, Second Life, interim CEO and founder Philip Rosedale is getting real too. He is leaving the company he started in 1999 in order to pursue his new idea – LoveMachine, a collaboration software company.

via Oh! Oh! Even Linden Lab Founder Is Leaving: Tech News «.

Peter Kafka at AllThingsD reports on the New York Times’ earnings as a bellwether for digital advertising trends. Taken as a barometer for display revenues — I assume paid search is a minor contributor to the Time’s revenue stream as the channel is dominated by Google, et al — it indicates that display is holding its own during a period of general economic malaise and the old prevailing wisdom that display was dead as CPMs trended lower and click-throughs continued to deteriorate. The Times is fairly innovative without being obtrusive with its display inventory, so my take is they are seeing strong demand for their supply.

“Here’s the full breakout for the Times’ digital properties NYT.com About.com, etc, which appear to be doing pretty well:

Total Internet revenues increased 13.3 percent to $89.4 million from $78.9 million.

Internet advertising revenues increased 14.6 percent to $78.3 million from $68.3 million.

Internet advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 21.6 percent to $47.4 million from $39.0 million mainly due to strong growth in national display advertising.

Internet businesses accounted for 16.1 percent of the Company’s revenues for the third quarter of 2010 versus 13.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009.”

via Ad Dollars Shrink at the New York Times, Again | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

Interesting fact – The Times has more Twitter followers than paid subscribers according to Journalistics:

“When it comes to Twitter followers, The New York Times is the top bird with more than 2.6 million followers. To illustrate how impressive this follower number is, The Wall Street Journal only has 464,591 followers in the #2 spot. The New York Times is the ONLY newspaper from the Top 25 with more Twitter followers than print circulation.”

While walking the outer beach on Cotuit’s Sampson Island on Sunday I came across the carcass of a leatherback sea turtle. It had come ashore at some point in the last week since my wife and I walked that same stretch of sand last weekend.

Leatherback’s are the largest sea turtles (fourth largest of all reptiles after crocodiles) and this one was huge — the shell was at least six feet long — and according to the literature they can weigh over 1,500 pounds. The carapace, or shell, had been split in half, either because of a propeller strike or just decomposition. My guess is it died in the water and drifted ashore where it came to rest above the high water line. It looked, from a distance, like a dinghy sitting bottom up on the sand.

Leatherbacks can tolerate cold water and range across most of the world’s oceans — so I doubt this one was stunned by the rapid drop in water temperatures over the last two weeks. Right now the water is about 54 degrees, two weeks ago it was in the low 60s. They are endangered, so it is a shame to see such a magnificent animal lying dead and beached.  They are reported to live as long as 150 years. That would mean this dead specimen could have been born as long ago as the beginning of the Civil War.

I’ve seen turtles in the water off of Craigville Beach in August, but never have come across any on the beach before. The stranding network swings into action this time of year to help the Kemp’s Ridley turtles that get cold shocked and stunned.

This is pretty interesting — a backbone transmission system for connecting a string of wind farms along the mid-Atlantic coast. With the Cape Wind project moving forward — and projects like this being funded, it would appear this country is making some serious steps forward on infrastructure and non-fossil fuel energy.

“When built out, the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone will stretch 350 miles off the coast from New Jersey to Virginia and will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines. That’s equivalent to 60% of the wind energy that was installed in the entire country last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.”

via Official Google Blog: The wind cries transmission.

I thought The Social Network was a great movie. I loved it and thought the casting, acting, writing and directing were superb. I especially thought the movie nailed the sport of rowing — as personified by the Winklevoss brothers, the 2008 Beijing Olympic oarsmen who thought they had hired Mark Zuckerberg to code their concept for a social network, only to sue him for going off on his own with their idea to launch Facebook.

I’d seen the Winklevoss’ row under assumed names at the C.R.A.S.H.-B sprints, the world indoor rowing championship, when they were still undergraduates at Harvard — probably 20o3-2005.  College rowers entered the competition under bogus names and club affiliations I think because of some NCAA/Ivy League rules against formal team competition. Whatever. They are big names in contemporary rowing, mainly because of their Olympic participation and Harvard’s position in the rowing world.

Row2K is running a great series by Dan Boyne, author and director of recreational sculling at Harvard’s Weld Boathouse. He staged the rowing scenes for the film and has a good insiders account of how he tried to make the point that the average elite rower cannot deliver a witty line penned by Aaron Sorkin while rowing full power in a race, let alone a word as they struggle to get their next gasp of oxygen.  The initial scene depicting a race in pairs (two-man shells which the Winklevii competed in at Shunyi, during the 2008 Olympic Games) is well rowed, but again, you can’t talk in a boat. Not while racing.

The Henley scene where the twins row in the Harvard eight and lose to the Dutch is very well done.

Rowing has a long history of appearing and being massacred in the movies. From the title sequence of the old George Peppard detective series Banachek, to some bizarre depictions such as Rob Lowe proving that you can perform boat repairs in the middle of a race and still win or various green screen weirdness that shows some hapless actor trying to ape a motion that takes years to perfect.

Two good lists of rowing and film are Rabbit’s Rowing in Film and Row2K’s feature.

My favorite rowing/film story was told to me by people who will go unnamed who rowed at the University of Washington in the late 197os. A director arrived seeking to film an after-school special about a rower who falls in love with his handicapped coxswain.  The director wanted to capture “the true essence” of the sport, and hired my two friends to help stage the rowing scenes, including any post-race festivities they might traditionally indulge in. My friend suggested that a local Seattle tavern be rented — a total dive — and convinced the director to film the “EMFBO” cheer — Every Man For Better Oarsmanship — when indeed the acronym stood for two utterly obscene phrases which I will not repeat here.

The director liked the noble sound of EMFBO and had big banners made to hang around the tavern. I cannot find the title of the film, but take it on good faith that it exists, somewhere.

Tip of the hat to John Bell for sharing this insightful presentation by Paul Adams at Google, on the Real Life of Social Networks. Very germane today in the wake of Facebook’s “group” announcement yesterday.

Video-teleconferencing may have finally found s reason to exist.

Poker.

According to a friend who is deep into a business plan than leverages video teleconferencing as an enabling technology, one vendor tells him that online poker is pushing the popularity of video calls; not team meetings, not holiday calls to the in-laws, not porn, but a new form of online poker where the players agree to use their webcams to come closer to the smoke-filled backrooms of poker lore. You’ve doubtlessly seen online poker players on ESPN playing against the old-school guys like Doyle Brunson. The online players are so unaccustomed to showing their faces and playing behind the anonymity of a virtual poker table that they resort to sunglasses and hoodies to mask the tells that a classic player use to read whether or not an opponent is bluffing. Now, in so-called “live dealer games,” a sub-culture of video teleconferencing poker players is emerging, a trend predicted last year  in Poker News, when player Barry Greenstein said:

“You’ll use “video conferencing” situations where when you play online. People will be able to look at you, they will be able to see that you’re playing it. They will be able to see that you’re not in a conference with someone else and that it’s the same guy playing the whole time. As least maybe as we get to the final table or the final few tables, and you will not only, onscreen, be able to see your eight other opponents as you get to the final table, but so will everyone else have kind of this video room of people playing online, and it will look like live poker that will be played online.”

Having spent the past two months in discussions with a video teleconferencing company about a possible position (they passed on me), I’ve spent some time getting more familiar with the landscape, having last dug in on video teleconferencing in the early 90s when I was still reporting on technology for Forbes and the first PC based solutions were beginning to emerge thanks to the H.234 video standard, and some early efforts by Intel to move videoconferencing onto the PC and out of the dedicated ISDN systems such as PictureTels.

The results were less than satisfactory, and for most of the past 20 years anyone with a  PC and the will to buy a web cam could experience video calling thanks to CUSeeMe, iChat, and eventually any two-bit chat client worth its salt from Microsoft NetMeeting to MSN to Yahoo and Google Talk.

As a kid the phone book had a picture of the first AT&T Picturephone — rolled out for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. This struck me, a six year-old, as very interesting and in synch with what George Jetson was concurrently using on his cartoon and Dick Tracy on his wrist in the Sunday funnies. A few years later Stanley Kubrick revived the concept in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by the time I was a young adult when the first video-teleconferencing systems made their commercial debut, I was primed to be a user. The future of the phone was TV.

The reality, after two decades of video telephony, is a lot less compelling. Video calls are intrusive, contrived, and an imposition where everyone loses the ability to multitask, have to worry about whether or not the sun is shining too brightly over my shoulder or my hair is combed. Once a call is arranged — and they seem to always need to be arranged ( impromptu calls are not appreciated in my personal experience) the dread begins and because the action is taking place down here, on the screen, where the caller’s face appears, not up on top of the laptop’s bezel where the camera is, eye contact is rarely ever made. In the end, seeing the person I am speaking to has never substantially enhanced the conversation — in fact it usually impedes it due to pixellation, dropped audio, and the host of other technical glitches associated with a VOIP connection over tenuous bandwidth. I’ve seen efforts to promote the technology internally at businesses, but in my experience a great deal of the in-room systems — the expensive stuff sold by Tandberg, etc. — gathers dust in the long term or is turned on for  board meetings and the like

PC to PC or device-based videotelephony is having a bit of a renaissance after a choppy decade. First, Skype’s IPO filing has put the market back on the radar — but I would hazard that most of Skype’s traffic is audio only, with video initiated in only a rare few circumstances. Then there is the iPhone 4G with a forward facing camera and Apple’s Facetime application, followed a few months later by the HTC EVO which comes preloaded with Qik, another app that takes advantage of the device’s dual cameras. Two months on the EVO and I have yet to make or receive a Qik video call and I highly doubt I ever will.

Last night two developments changed mobile teleconferencing from a dedicated/wi-fi, same-phone-to-asame-phone model to a cross platform paradigm that could finally see mobile video take off.

Tango, a Palo Alto start-up featured at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, unveiled its iPhone and Android app which permits decent anywhere video calls over 3G and 4G as well as wifi. I downloaded it onto my Evo, asked my son to put it on his iPhone, our names and numbers were matched from our existing contact lists by Tango, and we were having a video call twenty feet from each other. “Come here Mr. Watson, I need you,” was not the historic first words, but after two months we both were using the front-facing cameras of our app phones for the first time.

Today (Oct. 5), Skype finally rolled out its Android app, but it carries some restrictions and is very underwhelming. First, it’s wifi only on Android for everyone except Verizon Wireless customers; and two: it doesn’t support video. WTF Skype? Getting a VOIP app onto a carrier network has been very taboo in the carriers eyes, who have declared full Skype on their network a “toxic” application that threatens their network security, capacity (and business model.) Eventually, as the carriers wean themselves from the landline-voice cash cow and begin to embrace the “internet of things,” Skype and other video teleconferencing players will have an easier time enabling any devices across any network. For now — don’t hold your breath.

Mobile video has much more potential, particularly in the more dynamic youth/netgen market, than desktop video teleconferencing has had for the past twenty years. Maybe Tweens will climb all over it the way they did with the Blackberry Messenger service. On the desk top and enterprise front there will be a lot of disruption, especially for the dedicated room system vendors as a host of desktop solutions ranging from the browser based TokBox, to Skype and ooVoo move upstream seeking the SMB market (see GigaOm’s case for a Skype-Cisco partnership).

For all of this movement and maneuvering, video telephony seems to be a technology in search of an application. Here are some obvious ones:

1. Executive Search and recruiter interviews. I’ve done a few of these the past two months, both desktop, and in one case, at a local business center where I sat in a room by myself and spoke to a recruiter for an hour. The recruiter who did it via a PC told me he rarely used his dedicated system any longer and was pushing his entire firm to the desktop solution.
2. The deaf. Sign language. Need I say more?
3. Therapy. Think about it. You need to talk to a therapist about your eating disorder or post-partum depression or attention deficit disorder. Why do it in person when you could do it from the privacy of your PC (disclosure: I am an advisor to Abilto, a startup that delivers therapy services via video).

And of course, poker.

My former colleague in marketing and current partner at Inventive Branding, Craig Merrigan, used to bemoan the use of the “ninety-nines” in pricing as an affront to intelligent customers. “If we think ThinkPad users are the most technically sophisticated PC users, then why do we insult their intelligence with RONCO pricing,” was his argument, a compelling one that would probably fail in testing as “just-below” pricing has existed for over a century, allegedly back to the invention of the first cash register. It has to work, right?

It’s kind of weird, from a psychological perspective, to look at the shopping impulse that would lead someone to chose a 99 dollar or 99 cent option over a round $100 or $1. Of course anyone would take the less expensive option when looking at identical items — a penny is a penny, a dollar is a dollar. Who wouldn’t? But what if the two options were dissimilar but close in value? Would a $39,999 Audi A3 be more attractive than a $40,000 BMW 3 series.  The more complex the item, be it a consumer durable like a refrigerator, or a non-durable like a steak, and the customer has to do some research to determine the specs and sorts the apples from the oranges. Is the $50 ribeye grass fed versus the $49.99 corn fed version? I’ll pay the penny and spare myself the cow’s antibiotics.

But standing alone, without an option, let’s say an Apple iPad (there really are no viable tablets yet on the market), is a $499 price point for the 16 GB WiFi model going to unleash my credit card from my wallet versus a $500 price that eeps it locked sanely away for the sake of my bank balance? One would assume Apple, a brand that prides itself on perfection in its details would shy away from just-below-pricing, but no, they too indulge. Could a competitor come out with a marketing campaign that said, “Let’s cut the bullshit. You’re intelligent. The  machine costs $500, screw the dollar”? I suppose so. But I suspect just-below-pricing is reflexive at this point, and coming out with rounded pricing would need to be baked into an overall campaign that presented the brand as one for thinking people not lulled or duped by stupid marketing jedi-mind tricks.

Now if say there was a viable competitor, and that competitor decided to market their device as a head-to-head competitor with identical specifications — let’s say a clone — then the differentiation needs to be part of the selling claim; as in either “Cheaper, ours is $499, you save a buck” or “Ours is better, you get 17 gigabytes for an extra dollar at $500″

Pricing theory is doubtlessly a dreary science that MBAs are tormented with, but what interests me is the human nature to round stuff up.

The New York Times has an interesting story on how some Wharton professors studied the batting averages of major league hitters and saw a remarkable jump in the population of .300 hitters — men who hit the ball successfully at least 30% of the time they came to bat. The study showed statistically that hitters put an extra effort into the waning days of the season to get those crucial hits that make the difference between being a .299 hitter and a .300 hitter. I suppose if I exercised my Society of American Baseball Research membership I could make the obvious point that .300 hitters have better leverage in their future contract negotiations, and with Sabermetrics putting a lot of value on VORP and PECOTA – (Value Over Replacement Player and Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) crucial metrics that bench marks the value of a player against the population of other playes and gives owners and management a much better benchmark for assigning value in making salary offers.

The Times article said:

“Two economists at the Wharton Schoolof the University of Pennsylvania, while investigating how round numbers influence goals, examined the behavior of major league hitters from 1975 to 2008 who entered what became their final plate appearance of the season with a batting average of .299 or .300 (in at least 200 at-bats).

They found that the 127 hitters at .299 or .300 batted a whopping .463 in that final at-bat, demonstrating a motivation to succeed well beyond normal (and in what was usually an otherwise meaningless game).

Most deliciously, not one of the 61 hitters who entered at .299 drew a walk — which would have fired those ugly 9s into permanence because batting average considers bases on balls neither hit nor at-bat.

Martinez said that “.299 doesn’t look as good as that 3 in front.”

When I am rowing on my ergometer I receive constant numeric feedback about my progress, along with a forecast of my final score for any particular piece of work — if I am rowing a pace of 500 meters ever two minutes, the machine will predict a 30-minute of score of 7500 meters. Obviously the incentive is huge to break certain round number milestones. An 8,000 meter half hour requires an inordinate effort of maintaining a 1:52 split throughout the 30 minutes. The point is that hitting or breaking round number milestones is a big incentive, no one wants to row a 7,499 meter piece over 30 minutes when a little extra effort will break the 7,500 barrier.

So if athletes put in an extra effort to avoid the “ninety-nines” why do marketers flock to it? There is something unfinished, oh-so-close-and-yet-so-far about being less than perfect, from being odd and not even, yet just-below pricing will never go away, even for sophisticated products aimed at sophisticated consumers.

I think it would be interesting for a brand to set itself apart from the herd by eschewing just-below and moving to round-number pricing — as long as it explicitly points out the irrationality of the nines and the insult to the intelligence of its customers.  In technology especially, where consumers have been hit with clock speeds of microprocessors and capacity of harddrives, the insistence on specifications as the primary claim, and not results is astonishing. Does a consumer know what the hell an Intel i7 processor does versus an i5 or an i3? One has to cite that genius of numerology, Nigel Tufnel, and just throw up their hands and say, “Mine goes to Eleven”