23andMe, Phase 2: The Results Are In
A few weeks ago I posted about my decision to partake in personal genotyping courtesy of a the new start-up 23andMe, and my brother-in-law. Only two weeks after mailing my spit-kit back to the lab, I opened my email and (behold!) my results were in. My heart started pounding as I logged into the website to get a glimpse of my fate. All of a sudden, I started to feel ill and wondered…is there a gene for nausea? As I clicked and read, my anxiety subsided. Here are the highlights of what I learned:
Part 1: The Gene Journal: I am categorized as European (not a big surprise), so as compared to the “average” European, my risks for a heart attack, pulmonary embolism, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, obesity, restless leg syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis are a bit lower than when compared to the average European. I was psyched about that, especially the obesity part! I also found out that I am part of the select few who have the sprinter’s gene! My earwax is wet instead of dry (yuck, either way), I cannot taste certain bitter flavors (so brussel sprouts taste good to me) and I am lactose intolerant and have a “normal” reaction to alcohol.
Part 2: Ancestry: So, my largest marker was in the Far East with Northern and Eastern European areas coming in at a close tie for second. There are sprinklings of my ancestry in Africa, Asia, Russia and North America, and I share the same haplogroup as Jesse James, Marie Antionette, Warren & Jimmy Buffett and Bono.
Part 3: Genome Labs: This is where I can compare myself to my family and other participants. I need to wait a little while to take advantage of this.
So, that’s about it for now. All 23 pairs of chromosomes were sequenced, and I can sift through the hundreds of thousands of pages of information that they have for me if I want to learn more, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense at this point. I need a good genetics refresher to take full advantage of all of the information, I guess. And with that, I wish everyone a happy and healthy 2008!
Baby Jesus Gets A GPS for Christmas
GPS And Jesus; did you think the two would ever be mentioned in the same sentence?
I never thought that would happen, but I guess I was wrong.
Recently a baby Jesus was stolen from a nativity scene in Bal Harbour, a south Florida community, just north of Miami.
For over six years, local resident Dina Cellini has put up a nativity display complete with a baby Jesus in Bal Harbour’s Founders Circle. The baby Jesus was stolen just three days after Cellini put the nativity scene up this year.
After the baby Jesus was stolen, Cellini went on a local radio show and pleaded for the return of the statue. The thief did not respond.
However, a Cincinnati resident named Jeffrey Harris read about the crime on-line, and came to the rescue by offering to replace the baby Jesus. Harris commented on his donation saying, “Even though I am Jewish, I like the Christmas spirit. I felt bad. How can someone steal a baby Jesus?”
The new baby Jesus arrived last Tuesday, just in time for the Christmas holiday. The baby Jesus was placed into the nativity scene, although not without some new company.
A four-foot plexiglass screen was installed in front of the display that is impossible to reach across. And just to make sure the statue doesn’t turn up missing again, Jesus, Mary and Joseph will all be equipped with GPS tracking devices.
Ultimately I can’t believe someone would want to steal a baby Jesus. Its a very sad state of affairs when you have to embed GPS tracking devices in a nativity scene. But I guess that’s the world we live in. However if someone steals the baby Jesus in the future, officials should be able to locate the thief and the figure relatively quickly.
Once again this story is a great reminder, that technology is becoming more and more a part of our lives; even if it’s being used to track figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Cellini may of said it best by commenting, “I don’t anticipate this will ever happen again, but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior.”
What’s The Value Of An Ad?
I’ve always been pretty anti-advertising. Being suspicious, as I am by nature, of big business and its motives, I’m generally against the ever-rising tide of advertising that constantly creeps into our lives. I had an epiphany of sorts, however, over the weekend. I went to see “Juno” on Sunday at the Kabuki Theater here in San Francisco.
(Not to veer totally off course for a moment, but “Juno” is fantastic – the best movie of 2007, and likely the best of 2008. Sweet, funny, deep, well written and well acted. If Ellen Page doesn’t at least get nominated for an Oscar, it’s a crime.)
The Kabuki is owned by Robert Redford’s Sundance Cinemas group, and as such, prides itself on providing upscale, progressive venues for it customers. This includes amenities like restaurants, a bar, food at less horrific prices and, most importantly for our purposes, no advertising before the movies. Nice, right? Well, there is a catch … you have to pay a $2 “convenience fee” added on to the ticket price because of the lack of advertising. Now, your $10 movie just became a $12 movie. It was a bit cheesy and made me think: “Um, I’d rather sit through an ad or two that I’ll just ignore and have my $2, please.”
It made me think, though, about how my views on advertising have changed since working in technology. First off, I think I’m much more ad resistant because I operate eight to ten hours a day in the advertising-saturated environment of the Internet, and, secondly, there is a place for advertising – especially if consumers and companies benefit mutually from it. I’ll gladly watch or click through an ad if it gets me a service or content that I would have otherwise not gotten. For example, want me to sign up and fill out a form before I read an article? I’ll pass. Click on an article or watch a 15-second pre-roll ad? Sure, sounds good.
Advertising isn’t a totally insidious beast aiming always to brainwash the masses with a corporate agenda, but it’s also not wholly appropriate in plenty of situations – schools, parks, monuments and historic landmarks should never, ever be associated with a company or brand, or even money and profit. On the Internet, though, it’s a perfect economic gatekeeper between consumers and companies trying to make money.
How Social Media Saves Lives: An Interview With Sundeep Ahuja
It was an all-too-familiar story to me; a young person, Sameer Bhatia, is diagnosed with AML (acute myelogenous leukemia). The same thing happened to one of my students three years ago, back when I was a high school English teacher by day (social media guru by night).
It’s a life-and-death situation, and if you’re member of a minority ethnic group (African-American, Indian-American), it’s a hell of a lot harder to find bone marrow donors.
When I heard Sundeep Ahuja (also a Kiva board member) talking about his efforts to save the lives of his friends Sameer and Vinay at the >Play Conference at UC-Berkeley back in November, I knew I had to get an interview to see how he used social media as part of the effort to find bone marrow donors for his friends.
Ahuja’s not taking all of the credit here; he gives an huge hats-off to Vinay’s best friend, Priti Radhakrishnan, the driving force behind Team Vinay, and her partner-in-philanthropy, Robert Chatwani (Sameer’s best friend). The team’s actions in creating these two life-saving campaigns are sure to have a ripple effect throughout the entire Indian-American community, as thousands more people are registered in bone marrow registries.
Hopefully, this interview can serve as a social media and PR template for people looking to emulate their efforts, and start saving lives on a low budget.
Is there a strategic document for persons wanting to emulate you in doing
non-profit (life-saving) type outreach?
Great question. Though I haven’t looked, I have to imagine that a document like this is somewhere out there on the web. The Team did develop a short playbook on how to launch and manage corporate bone marrow registration drives, and this guide has been very helpful in getting programs launched within companies (particularly in Silicon Valley). More generally speaking, I wrote a small post some time ago on the power of "empowerment marketing" and how we leveraged that at Kiva.org as well as for this campaign; it can be read here.
In your work with Priti Radhakrishnan, Robert Chatwani and others to find marrow donors for Sameer and Vinay, do you feel that social media really enabled your outreach, or that this could have been done as well in a Web 1.0 (circa 1997) kind of environment?
First off, I have to give credit where credit is due: Team Vinay and Team Sameer were both sizable operations of family and friends that mobilized their friends and eventually a whole community to drive bone marrow donor registrations to save the lives of Vinay Chakravarthy and Sameer Bhatia, both of whom had been diagnosed with Leukemia. Vinay and Sameer, as South Asians, each had a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a donor match given the relatively small number of registered bone marrow donors in the community. The amazing efforts of Teams Vinay and Sameer have driven over 25,000 registrations since the summer — one of which was a match for Vinay, and another for Sameer, and they are both doing well post-transplant (and at least three other patients have found matches as well!)
As one of the folks working specifically on the communications side through the summer, I can say that the "social media" effort played a sizable (though fragmented, as much of it was decentralized) role in driving these registrations, largely because social pressure from friends (implicit and explicit) was a strong motivator. Interestingly, though, given that the action was an off-line event (a cheek swab) usually held at specific times/places (registration drives), the helpvinay.org website, eVites, and emails drove more registrations than "Web 2.0" social networking groups and profiles. The one unique "Web 2.0" contributor worth mentioning was a collaborative video application powered by RapOuts which was used to distribute messages from celebrities and community supporters alike encouraging registration and participation (disclaimer: I’ve since become an Advisor to RapOuts). I guess the best way to summarize is that "Web 1.0" (and pre-web technologies like the phone!) drove action, and "Web 2.0" supported with awareness.
How much did conventional press releases help in the outreach?
I don’t believe there were any conventional press releases, per se, but we did engage a couple of individuals at PR agencies to help us get radio announcements, local televsion coverage, newspaper mentions, and the like. Again, given the off-line nature of the action it’s tough to quantify how much the PR actually motivated people to type in HelpVinay.org or HelpSameer.org, find a drive, and get registered — but as a motivator for the Teams and the community, and as a method of raising general awareness, PR was quite helpful.
Do you feel that these PR efforts had a direct link to people of South Asian descent joining the bone marrow registry?
Though the outreach efforts described above were more broad stroke across neighborhoods and cities of varying ethnic makeup (even if targeted at neighborhoods and cities with large South Asian populations), there were also more focused outreach efforts to the South Asian community through community blogs, newsletters, and popular South Asian websites. It’s probably worth noting here that the biggest source of registrations were drives set up at community events, religious establishments, and workplaces; on location at these places with large South Asian populations, drive teams were able to tell people as they walked by about Vinay and Sameer, and then get them registered right there.
Was YouTube central in your project’s outreach, or was it merely parenthetical?
Though a few of the videos were uploaded to YouTube and somewhat promoted, the Teams primarily leveraged the RapOuts platform for its video efforts, largely because it’s built to power campaigns such as ours.
Have any similar drives been organized in your wake?
Though there are several patients I’m aware of currently in need of transplants–and so if you’re reading this, are South Asian and are still not registered, please visit samarinfo.org/drives to find a drive near you–I’m only aware of one other team that’s coming together in a Team Vinay/Team Sameer type fashion; you can learn more at swab4bevin.com .
In the last week, some of the core folks involved with Team Vinay and Team Sameer soft-launched a campaign called "I-Believe". At its core, the message of the campaign is that everyone has the power to save a life–the question is do you believe, and the answer is of course "I-Believe".
The campaign is primarily targeted at college students and there are representatives on several campuses raising awareness for the campaign in an effort to drive Bone Marrow Donor registrations. Core to the campaign is a video featuring several prominent and relevant South Asians, viewable at helpvinay.org and on Facebook as part of the "Help Vinay" application. Earlier this week Sameer blogged about the need to continue the campaign for Bone Marrow Donor registrations in the South Asian community; you can read his post at helpsameer.org.
Thanks for this opportunity, Adam!
I recognize that this is a "social media" blog; according to Wikipedia, " social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other."
That definition encompasses Web 1.0 tools such as the helpvinay.org website, making it very safe to say that social media played a PIVOTAL role in the Help Vinay and Help Sameer campaigns–and so in saving lives. As Web 2.0 tools come into maturity over the next couple of years I hope they’ll help in not only spreading awareness but in driving action, making similar campaigns in the future that much more effective!
For the Love of Whoppers
There is no shortage of ad campaigns that focus on the relationship people have with certain products. Whether it’s a mom and her paper towels or Tiger Woods and his razor, we usually see an image of how happy people are WITH these products.
Burger King recently launched a campaign, call Whopper Freakout, that takes the opposite approach — taking people’s favorite things away from them to see how unhappy they are without them. In this case, it’s the Whopper, and boy do they freak out. It’s an interesting twist on the traditional bite-and-huge-smile-of-satisfaction we see in many food ads and other food programming (see, Giada De Laurentiis).
It’s like breaking up with a girlfriend or losing you favorite jacket — you just don’t know how much you like it and need it until it’s gone. In this case, it’s clear, people NEED their Whoppers (maybe it’s because they are as addictive as heroin?).
Word-of-mouth and customer influence are a couple of the most powerful forms of marketing, and Burger King has taken an interesting approach to packaging their customer testimonials, in the form of freakouts, to spread the word about how great people think Whoppers are.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder — so if watching other people’s hearts grow fonder has the same affect, then Burger King may be onto something. Of course, if we’re talking hearts here, the absence of Whoppers could probably do wonders for the cardiovascular health of our country…
MySpace Major Label Music Artists Seeing Solid Traction on Facebook; Indies – Not So Much
Facebook’s Pages feature, which debuted only five weeks ago, is beginning to gain significant traction on MySpace’s four-year-old music platform, with some interesting results.
Based on a sample of MySpace artist Top Tens in three categories (Unsigned, Indie and Major-Label),major-label bands that have engaged fans in Facebook are seeing the greatest success in building a Facebook fan base, followed by independent label bands and unsigned bands.
For example, even though Alicia Keys and Nine Inch Nails (currently an unsigned artist) have similar-sized MySpace fan bases (Keys’ 400k to Nails’ 528K), Nine Inch Nails are only able to cultivate a fan base half the size of Keys’ on Facebook, proportionately speaking. Tila Tequila, another MySpace phenomenon (#1 in the Unsigned category with 2.4M fans) is also only about half as able, proportionately, as #1 MySpace major-label artist Chris Brown to build out a Facebook fan base.
The trend is fairly clear across the categories: mainstream, major-label artists are, proportionately, 2.75 times more able to draw fans on Facebook, proportionate to their MySpace fan bases.
50% of the current MySpace Top Ten artists in each category now have a Facebook Artist Page. A few artists, like Hawthorne Heights,
invented pages posing as people on Facebook, to get their bands on
Facebook before the Facebook Pages feature debuted last month. I was
unable to assess those numbers because Facebook won’t reveal them
unless you’re the artist’s "friend". Even if I were to use those stats,
the fan metric would have been unequal to how the other artists were
measured.
I was initially interested in investigating Facebook’s traction in the
music space because my new band, Reds, lacks a MySpace page. Even back
in 2003, when I first joined MySpace, I was very ambivalent about the
platform, mainly because I wasn’t wild about the look of the musician web pages – the bric-a-brac HTML was a little much for me. I can’t see a huge advantage, personally, to creating a MySpace page currently, but my 21-year-old drummer disagrees with me. Probably because a lot of his buddies are still using MySpace.
If my own Myspace Vs. Facebook musical orientation is in question, I wrote this post listening to Styx, Rush and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on Pandora.
[One note about methodology, I had to estimate MySpace fan amounts for Kanye West and Yo Gotti (which I pencilled in at 1M and 100K, respectively) because they did not post this number on their MySpace pages. I estimated this based on the comment/fans ratio that held constant for similar Top Ten artists (same genre, same silo).]
‘Tis the Season to Give Worms (and Maybe the Grey’s Anatomy Board Game Too)
If the mere thought of holiday shopping has already begun to devour your sanity, how about channeling the true spirit of giving this season and donating to a charitable organization?
Like most everything, charity is now customizable thanks to a slew of new philanthropic sites that allow you to give both to your loved ones and those truly in need of your gifts this season.
Does your niece love animals? How about donating a dozen baby chickens in her name to help generate income for a family living with HIV? Oxfam America Unwrapped sends witty cards to your friends and family letting them know you have put money towards a good cause for them. You can pick gifts by gift or price, and even though the money won’t always be put into the item you chose to buy, you can be assured it will always be going to a good cause.
If you like more insight and control over how your charitable donations are spent, log onto GlobalGiving.com. This is my personal favorite as it allows you to select projects by subject and region, and then sends you updates on the communities you have chosen to help out.
Even more interesting is the fact that charity now has a social network. Razoo.com is now up in beta and is described on its site as “a place to learn about causes, share your passion, connect with other people with similar interests, and find tangible ways to make a difference”. I haven’t joined yet, but I intend to do so soon — and think it will provide a whole new group of great online opportunities.
Until then, I’ll probably be sticking to these sites to send donations through this year. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll also be buying my sister the Grey’s Anatomy board game for Christmas, but her gift may be supplemented by a can of worms.
Has Home Security Really Changed Much In The Last Decade?
I ran into a guy at the DEMO conference back in September that worked with an interesting-looking home security company called InGrid. The product lets you pretty much control your home’s security system from a telephone-looking console. It also has a bunch of cool redundant features, too. After I checked out their snazzy-looking website, I had two thoughts: (1) Why does my $400 GE Home Security system look so sucky in comparison and (2) does this technology actually change all that often?
I took a look at some of the major brands using my handy-dandy Consumer Reports login, and the most basic aspects of home security (high security deadbolts and surface mount deadbolts) haven’t changed much in the last hundred years, but aside from locks and deadbolts, there have been some pretty significant jumps recently.
As far as monitoring alone goes, Sony, Toshiba and Samsung have released camera systems (some of which are motion-activated) aimed at consumer price-points. They’re built to work with DVRs, but you can’t just hook them up to the DirectTV box in your living room; they need a separate DVR connection. Most of these solutions are some kind of IP network camera, but wireless solutions are becoming cheaper and cheaper. They could be useful if you wanted Fort Knox-type home security in your temporary dwelling.
These monitoring systems are meant to work in tandem with a home security system, not in place of one it. The difference between, say, 1997, and now, is that a couple of cameras and a DVR now only runs $1000.
The systems themselves have changed really in one aspect in the last decade that’s fairly noticeable – almost every major brand (GE, Honeywell’s Ademco brand, DSC) now makes a wireless option. Ease-of-use varies across the spectrum. It’s actually a little difficult to shop for these products, because some of the websites are fairly poorly designed. Maybe it’s just me – I might be too hard to please, as far as user interface goes, after working with so many cool Web 2.0 companies!
After all of the browsing around, ease-of-use is really what it all comes down to. I’m still pretty pumped up about the InGrid system, and I think it might be because their website makes it look so darn easy to use. And when it comes to keeping an eye on your family, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Thanks very much to local home security maven Eyal Kaufmann at Protection Now in Oakland for all of the security tips and background information.
Holiday Cards Go Green (And I Couldn’t Be Happier)
As a child, my least favorite day of the year was always the day after Thanksgiving. Before the lingering scent of turkey grease and mulled wine had fully dissipated from the far corners of the house, before the winter snow even had a chance to settle on the ground, my brother and I were stuffed into our most offensive, uncomfortable outfits and led to various picturesque locations throughout the state of Rhode Island for the most dreaded few hours of the year: the holiday card photo shoot.
My parents, faithful servants to longstanding family traditions, insist on sending family photo holiday cards each and every year to hundreds of their closest friends and family, even though my brother and I have been out of the house for nearly a decade. Sweater chafe, curling iron burns, turtleneck strangulation, and smile strain are only a few of the many injuries sustained over the years of torment that led holiday cards to be one of my least favorite parts of the winter months. But don’t worry, children of the 21st century. Relief is in sight.
The first ever print run of Christmas cards was a mere 1,000, commissioned by Englishman Henry Cole who simply didn’t have the time to make enough personalized cards. Things have certainly changed since those days of Queen Victoria, but recent stats are showing that card production is back on the decline. This means your local drug stores are selling fewer boxes of prepackaged Ruldolph prints, while less and less children are being shoehorned into last year’s loafers as they say ‘cheese’ beneath the glare of flashbulbs and bubble lights. The reason? Green technology.
One of this season’s usurpers of the traditional Christmas card is clean, green, and begging users to walk all over them. ReProduct has created greeting cards and envelopes made from earth-friendly, people-friendly materials. They come to recipients in a 2-way envelope, much like Netflix, along with a pre-paid return postage provided by Shaw Industries. Once the recipient is done with the card, they put it in the prepaid envelope, mail it back to Shaw, who then uses both card and envelope to create carpet backing for carpet tiles. These cards are just starting to gain tread in the industry, and what better way to hold onto the memories of loved ones at the holidays than to turn them into a nice berber?
Vidigreet is another company taking the holidays by storm this year with the introduction of a video greeting card service. Vidigreet combines professionally created content with your own personalized greeting, allowing users to send quick videos for all those special occasions. In addition to eliminating paper waste, creator Jeff Gorman combines actors, fancy camera work, and sharp creativity to achieve the ultimate purpose of the greeting card to begin with: social connectivity. He just does it on a much higher level than my poor mother, who has spent the better half of her adult life addressing Christmas cards by hand in her tidy, elementary school teacher script. So if you’re looking to avoid the carpal tunnel, Vidigreet is one of several video card services available this holiday season.
Though not everyone is quick to embrace the greener side of the Christmas spectrum, us tree lovers won’t be seeing red this year. Technology isn’t killing the Christmas card, but offering countless ways to personalize and send them inexpensively and with ease, without the overwhelming paper waste. There’s also the matter of ink toxins, card production pollutions, added mail weight which adds to annual fuel-consumption, and un-earth-friendly card disposal. Certainly these factors weight in with nearly every manufactured product, but relief is in sight as video-cards, E-cards, and re-cards are making a splash this season. While at least a hundred of my parents nearest and dearest will be receiving a neatly signed photo card featuring the Savageau family in all of their holiday splendor this Christmas, overall holiday card production has dropped substantially. Knowing my family, however, even if we convert to an e-card by 2008, there will still be itchy sweaters and Christmas lights waiting right around the corner.
No Plans Friday Night? Brave SF Singles Turn to CrazyBlindDate.com
In the interest of full disclosure, I will begin by saying I am not a big blind dater.
Maybe I’m not adventurous enough but I find the idea of forced mingling with a complete stranger seriously anxiety-inducing. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the recent birth of various blind dating websites– and when I heard that a friend had given CrazyBlindDate.com a try I immediately tracked her down to get the details.
“Ok, I admit, it’s a little scary,” she prefaced her account of the evening’s events. “But I was feeling gutsy so I thought ‘why not?’”
Gutsy indeed.
CrazyBlindDate.com coordinates dates for users on “extremely short notice” in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Austin. Users log into the site, create a profile and are given a description of their “match”– that description being a blurry picture and summary of their interests. Users are then given a place and time for their meeting and in the case that they can’t find each other amongst the anxious throngs CrazyBlindDate provides an anonymous number through which to text message.
The site makes it very clear that a “Yes” response to a date is absolutely binding, going so far as to say that “being late is mean.” CrazyBlindDate also instructs users to “stick around for at least 20 minutes (less is rude) and be nice.” The site even allows the most skittish customers to go on double dates with a friend and assures safety by only allowing dates to take place in public settings ie. a local coffee shop or bar.
Clearly the site is generating interest among lonely/bored/excitement-craving urban dwellers and coverage of the site’s launch in November has appeared in publications and blogs including TechCrunch, WebWare, the Stanford Daily, Cnet News and KillerStartups.com.
My guinea pig friend ended up enjoying the experience– a quick after-work drink at a bar in Cow Hollow– although she was disappointed that her date wasn’t quite as magical as she might have hoped. She even admitted she might use the site again the next time her social calendar was looking glaringly open– certainly a positive review and one that led me to create a profile on the site though I have yet to schedule an actual “meeting.”
One week later I haven’t yet felt the need to “go out immediately, with reckless abandon”, but hey, you never know.