Think Tank World

• New website: “Think Tanked is a blog specializing in original reporting and analysis on the influence of think tanks in the politics of Washington and beyond.” Ah, we love to be told how important we are, and we love even more for everyone else to be told.
• Heartland Institute, via Jeff Judson, provides  21 Reasons Why Free‐Market Think Tanks Are More Effective than Anyone Else in Changing Public Policy (and one reason why they are not)(April 12): More of the kind of thinking we like, except when he explains why tanks actually don’t much change the world: “Think tanks are chronically underfunded . . .  The funds they need are almost trivial when compared with the billions spent on political campaigns, lobbying, advertising, litigation, government relations, and other public relations activities. While liberal advocacy groups often have enormous budgets, barely a dozen free‐market think tanks have budgets of more than $5 million.”

Content & Copyright

• Ars technica, Rightsholders tire of takedown Whac-A-Mole, seek gov’t help (May 4): “rightsholders are increasingly arguing that the safe harbors make it not just onerous but downright impossible to control their material.”
• Musicfirst, Performance Rights Campaign Update (May 3).
• NewTeeVee, You Tube Store Still Tanks, Despite Oscar Fare (May 1):  “Consumers still aren’t warming up to YouTube’s video rentals, even with the site offering critically acclaimed movies.” GigaOm says Netflix is going strong: “[The] presence [of these embedded devices] will help create something no Netflix competitor will be able to touch: a de facto interoperability standard across multiple devices and platforms.”

Software

• eWeek, Microsoft’s HTC Android Agreement May Be the First of Many (April 29): “The move could indicate that Microsoft plans to port its philosophical position on open source into the smartphone operating-system realm.”
• NewTeeVee,  Apple May Be Gunning for Open Source Codecs (April 30):  Important news for those in the FOSS vs Open Standards vs Pure Proprietary wars. Steve Jobs makes the crucial point that an Open Standard is by no means an Open Source Standard – a distinction the FOSS crowd keeps trying to blur.  See also ZDNet, Microsoft fires back at critics of its HTML5 strategy (May 3): “Apple and Microsoft . . . find themselves on the same side (more or less) of a tremendously contentious issue: Which video format will be adopted as the standard for the Internet over the next five (or more) years?”

The Net

• at&t Public Policy Blog, The ‘Satanic Flashbulbs’ of Net Neutrality (April 30):  Just imagine thousands of free culturists wearing white robes, waiting on a hillside for the opening of the seventh seal and the end of the Internet.
• Precursor, Why deregulated broadband is in the public interest (May 3).
• Connected Plant,  What is the ‘Internet of things’? (April 23):  smart vehicles, appliances, industrial devices and other machines (ie, not persons) talking to one another and exchanging information to perform better and in a more “aware” fashion.
• Lots on Search Neutrality –

Connected Planet, Careful what you wish for Google: Here comes ’search neutrality (April 30):  “In the ‘what goes around comes around’ category, the idea of ‘search neutrality’ — or the need for government intervention or regulation to ensure that search results from the likes of Google and other search engines aren’t discriminatory — is starting to gain some traction.”

ars technica, Search neutrality? How Google became a “neutrality” target (April 30): “[N]et neutrality is just the latest attempt to answer some ancient questions concerning fairness, monopolies, and infrastructure. In 2008, University of Colorado law prof Phil Weiser (now in the Obama Department of Justice) wrote a paper of his own that offered this pithy summary of the basic issue.

See also: The American, Avoiding a Tech Train Wreck (May/June 2008)(by moi): “These battles may seem novel, a result of the frictions of the technological revolution worked by Moore’s Law and its progeny. In fact, while the context is new, the underlying structure of the disputes is similar to the issues that roiled American politics a century and more ago, when the great infrastructures of transportation, utilities, telecommunications, and finance were laid down.“

• Connected Plant, Why the D-block gets little respect (April 27): The FCC wants public and private operators to share, but “the only one enthusiastic about this idea is the FCC, which frankly is getting a bit greedy: It wants to raise billions for federal coffers, meet a nationwide security priority and expand access to mobile broadband services.”
• eWeek, HP to Buy Struggling Palm as Ticket into Smartphone Market (April 28).
• GigaOm, Does the FCC Plan to Give Up on Broadband Regulation? (May 3): The hills are alive with the sound of dueling leaks.
• Precursor, The Multi-Billion Dollar Impact of FCC Title II Broadband — for Google & entire Internet ecosystem (April 30)
• ZDNet, HP’s purchase of Palm: Minimal impact on the mobile field (for now) (April 30).

Digital Commerce & Cybersecurity

• OnLine Media Daily, Double Digits: Visa Strengthens Online Transaction Security (April 27): Consumers must now re-enter credit card numbers before buying from ‘post-transaction’ sites to which they are referred after making an initial purchase. Good.
• TechCrunch, Ooyala Testing Pay per View with ABC (April 27); newTeeVee, Ooyala Tests Out Its Micropayments System (April 27).
• Connected Planet, PayPal in-app purchasing a carrier payment route-around (April26):  “A major opportunity for wireless operators is to position mobile devices as “payment engines” — especially in areas of the world where credit cards are not widely used.”
• Juniper Research, Checkout the Mobile Payment Opportunity (April): Actually, this is just the brochure for the real report, which is on sale for $3832.
• eSecurity Planet, Collaboration Seen as Missing Link in Cybersecurity (May 3): “Just 4 percent of government officials and 1 percent of business leaders rated the cybersecurity coordination efforts in their countries ‘excellent.’”

Open Government

• Last week saw the launch of World Bank Data, which for the first time makes World Bank data freely available to the public.
• For sale: Charts of the governments of the PRC and of the Provincial Governments, including pictures and contact information. 500 RMN for the package. (Of course, they are in Chinese.) Am I right to think this is a major step in accountability?

Health, Medical Innovation, Genetics, Agriculture

• International Policy Network., Fake Drugs Roundup (April 1)
• The American, Something Old, Something New: Biotech’s Enormous Potential (April 30), by John Calfee: “Medical breakthroughs from using existing drugs in new ways await discovery—if manufacturers have an incentive to pursue them.”
• FiercePharma, E&Y: Biotech business model crumbles as crisis hit (May 5): “The accounting firm concludes that the biotech business model is ‘unsustainable’ in a crisis like this. . . . Altogether 162 publicly traded biotech companies–a whopping 44 percent of the total–have less than a year’s worth of operating capital in the bank at the end of last year.”
• Boingboing, Antibiotic-resistant bacteria (now on your junk) (April 29): “Speaking of Superbugs, it looks like we’re on our way to incurable, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. This article also brings up a point I didn’t mention in the book review yesterday: Part of the problem is that nobody is developing new antibiotics. Once an old drug becomes ineffective, there’s nothing to replace it with. New drugs could be made, but the work (as with any brand new drug development) is expensive, and pharmaceutical companies aren’t inclined to invest in products with a limited effective life, that patients only use for short periods of time.”
• FiercePharma, Generics association scrambles to win back Teva (April 26):  The “generics behemoth–with 16.3 percent of all U.S. prescriptions, branded and generic” is leaving GPhA and launching its own lobbying efforts. There must be a good story here. Last year, Roche pulled out of Phrma and joined BIO, so a lot of reshuffling is going on in the industry.
• FiercePharma, The pharma trifecta: Generics, new markets, and personalization (April 27): The big three issues for Pharma, says a Harvard Business Review blog post. One good point relates to the counterfeiting problem: Perhaps the most promising approach is drug companies getting into “branded generics” themselves. These branded versions of their original drugs sell for higher prices than unbranded generic equivalents but are less expensive than the true branded product. Why would consumers pay more for a branded generic than a cheaper version? We need only look at the consumer packaged goods industry to understand the power of branding — be it a bar of Dove soap or an Apple computer. Moreover, in emerging markets where fake products are common, branded generics provide a level of assurance that makes them worth the premium they charge.

Innovation Miscellany

• The head of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley depicts evolution in action:  ”[A]llowing the VC community to decide which startups survive is an imperfect science, but overall, we find eDarwinism at work here. The thinning of the herd makes the herd stronger; and in a dynamic place like Silicon Valley, a dead start-up only means that a bunch of entrepreneurs just got released back to the primordial HR tide pool, certain not to make the same mistakes the next time.”
• ChicagoBoyz, The Myth of “Natural” Resources (April 30), by Shannon Love: “Here’s the important truth: Since human action creates all resources, we never run out of resources as long as we remain free to create.” Amen, bro, and somewhere Julian Simon is smiling.
• Blogging Innovation, Innovation Perspsectives April Wrapup  -  “What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)” (May 3).

China

• Sacramento Bee, The Frame, Shanghai World Expo set to open (April 26): Lots of great pix, at least for those who prefer the gaudy and spectacular over the subtle and nuanced.
• SIPO of the PRC, ASEAN-China Intellectual Property Cooperation Conference Held in Beijing (April 13):  “WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry expressed that in the 21st century world economic power and growth momentum lies in Southeast Asia. The meeting was of great significance for China and ASEAN member countries to share experience in intellectual property field and promote economic development through innovation. Francis Gurry stressed that although China’s patent system only had a history of as short as 25 years, China’s achievements in intellectual property was remarkable. China’s PCT international patent applications had ranked fifth in the world. SIPO had become the world’s third largest patent office. All these successful experiences could provide invaluable insights for ASEAN member countries for their development of intellectual property right.”
• SIPO of the PRC, From Jan – Mar 2010, China granted 188,919 patents.
• China Daily, Websites in China mushroomed to over 3 million (May 4): And growing at an annual rate of 12.3%.
• See above, under “Open Government.”

Events

• PFF, What Should the Next Communications Act Look Like? (May 7; DC).  Background reading:  The PFF DACA report.
• Broadband Breakfast Club, The Google Book Search Case and E-Book Licensing (May 11, DC). Inaugural of a new series on intellectual property events.
• George Washington Law School, Second Annual Law Symposium on Intellectual Property (May 11; DC).
• OMMA Mobile, The Road to Appi-Ness (May 12; NYC). “At 7 billion downloads last year alone and counting, the mobile app market is just getting started as Google, Apple, RIM and now Microsoft engage in an escalating platform war.”
• PFF, Can Government Help Save the Press? (May 20; DC).
• GIPC Speaker Series: The Global Trade of Counterfeit Medicines and the Developing World (May 27; DC).
• USTelecom & Connected Planet, Building a Better Internet (June 22; DC):    “In-depth looks at consumer expectations for the Internet, domestic and International efforts to expand broadband, and ways of creating a more efficient Internet for delivering a broad range of current and new services to consumers and businesses.”
• The ninth Supernova Forum 2010: Perestroika (July 30; Philadelphia).  Three key themes: Evolving Digital Infrastructure: Everything is a Platform? / Networked Business Innovation: Models and Vision / Crossing the Abyss: Transforming (or Replacing) Established Institutions

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[The explanation of the title Firehose is here.]