The FDA is warning you to stop using Hydroxycut, now. The weight loss drug is associated with serious side effects.
In a press release issued today, the FDA stated that it "has received 23 reports of serious health problems ranging from jaundice and elevated liver enzymes, an indicator of potential liver injury, to liver damage requiring liver transplant. One death due to liver failure has been reported to the FDA. Other health problems reported include seizures; cardiovascular disorders; and rhabdomyolysis, a type of muscle damage that can lead to other serious health problems such as kidney failure."
The entire press release can be read on the FDA's web site.
Most supplements are not tested by the FDA, leaving consumers to trust that the manufacturers are creating safe products. There is often no way to know if the supplement is safe, or if there is any interference with other medicines or supplements.
In other words, every time you take a supplement, you are voluntarily making yourself a guinea pig. Tell your doctor and your pharmacist what supplements you are taking and what drugs you also take.
Or better yet, don't take supplements.
Need to lose weight? Eat more vegetables, keep a food journal and exercise. Not only are these effective, they are also much safer than taking an unknown supplement.
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Army Is Helping Recruits Slim Down
Too fat for the army? No problem, recruiters will help you lose weight.
As NPR reported last night, some army recruiters are holding fitness classes for would-be recruits. Their intent is to help those who don't meet the weight requirements become more fit. The participants lose weight and the army gets more soliders.
If sounds a bit like John Candy in Stripes, that's because the analogy is not so far fetched. (We immediately had visions of Ox - that lean, mean fighting machine - when we heard the report last night.) Except, the recruits have to lose the weight before showing up at boot camp.
It's win-win situation for those wanting to serve and the military. Potential recruits get a sense of the discipline required to make it through boot camp and the Army weeds out those who are less motivated. Not to mention it increases the number of people who are able to qualify based on weight.
On the other hand, this says a lot about the obesity problem in the U.S. Cuts to physical education, an overabundance of snack food and video games have resulted in many people entering adulthood with weight issues.
To all those serving in the military, thank you. And if you are serving abroad, come home quickly, and safely.
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The new economics of entrepreneurship? Nah
Is a recession a good time to be an entrepreneur? Has it changed the economics of starting a business?
Silicon Valley veteran Guy Kawasaki believes the answer to both is "yes".
In a post on Building43, he argues that there are new economics of entrepreneurship:
- Talent is free or cheap. Thanks to the ills of the recession, Kawasaki writes "If there was ever a time to get great people for free or cheap, this is it".
- Tools are free or cheap. Citing open source, Kawasaki says "You’d really have to work at it to spend a lot of money for the tools to build something these days".
- Storage, bandwidth and servers are free or cheap. Thanks to cloud hosting services, "you can get more storage, bandwidth, and servers for $1, 000 a month than you’ll be able to use".
- Marketing is free or cheap. Twitter is "the single best way to market your product or service" and Facebook "is a close second". Both, of course, are free.
Having started a number of online businesses over the years and being in the midst of starting a couple of news ones during this recession, I disagree with Kawasaki. Here's why.
Talent isn't free or cheap.
There are plenty of good people who are unemployed or under-employed right now but that doesn't mean that most of them are willing and able to work for a pittance. Furthermore, from what I see in my network, the best people don't have any shortage of work.
But whether or not you can find decent worker bees at little cost is besides the point in my opinion. Trying to use "free or cheap" labor is not a good long-term strategy for attracting and retaining talent. As they say, you get what you pay for, recession or no recession. When the people you hire feel like they're being taken advantage of and aren't invested in your success, don't be surprised when they fail to deliver what you expected. And don't be surprised when they drop you like a bad habit once they find an opportunity that compensates them fairly.
Tools are cheap but that doesn't mean building a skyscraper is.
Open source solutions are great and can significantly reduce your costs. But if they're not put in the hands of competent, talented developers, they're worthless. If you give a monkey a hammer, don't expect him to build you a house; if you give a novice developer PHP and MySQL, don't expect him to build you a scalable web application.
Open source, in my opinion, is a double-edged sword for this reason. While lots of people know how to build applications that seem to work with the free tools that exist, a much smaller number know how to build applications that work at scale. You can easily find someone who can build you a database-driven website with reasonably complex functionality; it's much harder to find someone who can build a database-driven website that won't go down for the count when you get slammed with a few hundred thousand visitors in a few hours.
Storage, bandwidth and servers can be cheap but true scalability requires investment.
When Kawasaki says "you can get more storage, bandwidth, and servers for $1, 000 a month than you’ll be able to use", he may be right. That's because most sites don't need $1, 000 worth of storage, bandwidth and servers. For a heavily trafficked site with hefty database interaction, trust me: you're not going to throw your web application onto a "cloud" VPS and survive.
A couple of observations:
- Many of the startups that tout the advantages of cloud hosting and its benefits don't have enough usage to speak credibly. Most would get along just fine with a dedicated server or two.
- To the extent that cloud hosting convinces startups that they don't need to worry about building scalable applications, this is folly. Any startup that thinks the cloud will solve the challenge of scalability is missing the point. Caching, database query optimization and the use of high-performance/lightweight HTTP servers, for instance, result in better applications and better architectures and are things that every startup should look at.
Real marketing isn't free.
Twitter and Facebook can be great marketing tools depending on the type of business you run. But how many highly-successful and profitable startups can you name that relied solely on Twitter and Facebook to market themselves?
If you limit your marketing efforts to services that are free, you're probably missing your greatest opportunities. Kawasaki himself notes that his startup, Alltop, isn't exactly taking over the world despite the fact that he's been "evangelizing" it on Twitter for 18 months. Clearly something is not working here and Kawasaki should probably consider that if Alltop is going to succeed, he needs to do more than tweet.
Conclusion
The message here is that there are no new economics of entrepreneurship. Starting a web-based business can be done cost-effectively but that doesn't mean that the most important components are free or "cheap".
Finally, Kawasaki neglects to note the single greatest cost an entrepreneur will incur: opportunity cost. The economics of that never change.
Photo credit: Robert Scoble via Flickr.
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Don King Boxing Is A Knockout
Wii Sports Boxing was the first game to show off the calorie-burning potential of the Nintendo Wii. Anybody who has ever played it can attest that the game is a workout.
The problem was that there has really not been any other good boxing game, until today. Don King Boxing
takes the Wii to a whole new level.The game incorporates the Remote, the Nunchuk and the Wii Balance Board into what appears to be a realistic version of boxing. Want to dodge left? Lean left. What to throw a jab? Punch. Need to duck? Bend your knees.
We've long been fans of boxing on the Wii, because it makes you constantly move your entire body. Not to mention that punching an avatar is great way to relieve some stress. Out of the 3 game released this week, Don King's Boxing is the one we recommended buying first.
Just remember to keep your hands up. :)
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Elderly and low-income homes drop phone and cable for broadband
In the midst of a severe recession, Americans are cutting their monthly bills to the bone. Landline phones and cable television are now nice-to-haves rather than must-have. But a broadband internet connection? Non-negotiable.
We've come a long way since the dial-up era, when usability best practices cautioned against using slow-to-load graphics on Web sites and in email. The Pew Internet & American Life project's Home Broadband Adoption 2009 report indicates home broadband penetration is holding steady at 54-57 percent of households, a healthy 63 percent of adult Americans. But adoption among senior citizens (65 and older) jumped from 19 percent last May to 30 percent in April of this year.
Similarly, 35 percent of low income Americans (household income of >$20, 000) now have high speed internet access, a 10 percent jump since last year. Households making between $20-30, 000 grew from 42 to 53 percent penetration.
While the study finds broadband is becoming more expensive, particularly in areas with few competiting providers, the sagging economy may at least in part account for consumers willingness to pay for the service, given the web's critical role in researching employment opportunities. Yet overall, factors that indicate a propensity to have home broadband are identical to those that profile the types of consumers advertisers hope to reach: high income, college degrees, children at home, and married or living with a partner. In contrast, non-broadband home indicators include lack of a high school degree, rural, and over 65 years of age.
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Bringing the reign of click-throughs to an end
Banner ads aren't going down without a fight. Marketers and publishers have been hearing for awhile that display ads are not nearly as effective as search. And in terms of click through rates, they aren't.
But just because people aren't clicking on banner ads, it doesn't mean they aren't working. That's long been the cry of display ad sellers, and now comScore has come out with a study that shows how display contributes to sales, even if consumers aren't immediately clicking through to purchase.
Partnering with the Online Publishers Association, comScore has published "The Silent Click: Building Brands Online." The news will be welcomed by companies like Microsoft, which in particular has been trying to pull its display business out of the strangle hold of click throughs with the launch of engagement ads.
It may be fashionable to disparage display — just last week Barry Diller was ringing the death knell of banner ads, saying: “We’re all at the earliest period of display advertising, which has been standardized into formats where people can say, ‘I know what to ignore.’"
But withholding clicks and ignoring ads are not the same thing. Display ads still make up 20% of the $32 billion online advertising spend. And according to ComScore, display ads contribute to the online ad spend, even if consumers aren't clicking on them.
The study looked at 80 of the biggest branding campaigns across 200 of the most trafficked sites over a month’s time, and found that of the people exposed to display ad campaigns:
- One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands' sites
- Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
- Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
- Higher income audiences visited the advertisers’ sites
According to Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association:
"To date, measuring a brand campaign meant relying on the click, a metric more appropriate for direct response advertising. In order to understand the value of the audiences that display advertising attracts, our study helps marketers think about real behavioral measures designed to move the needle."
The inherently measurable nature of the Internet has helped advertisers get more bang for their buck online, but in many cases, finding out what to measure is the most important metric. Getting advertisers and consumers to think outside the clickthrough box is a step toward rehabilitating display. But once you throw out the current metric for measurement, you get to the next question. How do you charge customers who are accustomed to paying for ads based on clicks when clicks don't matter?
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Get Ripped Abs with a Yoga Block
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