Jeff Bezos invests in reinventing the Physics of the newspaper business buying Washington Post

Jeff Bezos has spent $250 mil of his own money to buy the Washington Post.

The LA Times discusses the possibility of Jeff Bezos creating a new business model for newspapers.

Washington Post buy: Can Jeff Bezos fix newspapers' business model?

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, buyer of the Washington Post, has shown success at experimentation and great patience about turning a profit.

I've worked on Publishing technologies way too long, starting in 1987 on displays, printers, fonts at Apple, then continued working on the publishing technologies at Microsoft.  Back in 1997 Bill Gates was focused on winning the battle for publishing vs. Apple.  Microsoft didn't win that battle.  Google changed the game sucking the air out of print advertising model.

Jeff Bezos in 1994 started Amazon.com and has seen the transition of Books and DVDs to digital. While this all going on Jeff has got an insider's look at the business models of media companies.  Jeff Bezos started college as a physicists and switched to computer science.

Bezos often showed intense scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.^{[citation needed]} The family moved toMiami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982.^[9] He was high school valedictorian.^[10] He attended Princeton University, with an intention to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science. While at Princeton, he was elected to the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He also served as the President of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.^[11]

Jeff's love to understand how things work and make them better is what he did to retail.  Why can't he do the same with newspapers.  Once he figures out newspapers he can move on to other things that shape human perception.

Here is a progressive view of journalism.

So then what the hell is journalism?

It is a service. It is a service whose end, again, is an informed public. For my entrepreneurial journalism students, I give them a broad umbrella of a definition: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves.

Thus anything that reliably serves the end of an informed community is journalism. Anyone can help do that. The true journalist should want anyone to join the task. That, in the end, is why I wrote Public Parts: because I celebrate the value that rises from publicness, from the ability of anyone to share what he or she knows with everyone and the ethic that says sharing is a generous and social act and transparency should be the default for our institutions.

Is there a role for people to help in that process? Absolutely. I say that organizations can first help enable the flow and collection of information, which can now occur without them, by offering platforms for communities to share what they know. Next, I say that someone is often needed to add value to that process by:
* asking the questions that are not answered in the flow,
* verifying facts,
* debunking rumors,
* adding context, explanation, and background,
* providing functionality that enables sharing,
* organizing efforts to collaborate by communities, witnesses, experts.

40 Days of Dating goes Viral, Could 40 Weeks of a Data Center work too?

I was reading Om Malik's post on 40 days of dating.

40daysofdating: An awesome new kind of long-form story telling

by Om Malik

AUG. 4, 2013 - 12:16 PM PDT

3 Comments

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SUMMARY:

40daysofdating is a website that combines text, photos and video to tell the story of two friends Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman who after failing at finding love, are dating each other and sharing the experience. It is like reality television, except for the web.

I've been waiting for when someone would have an interesting web site that tells a story.

Needless to say, we have barely scratched the surface. At some level, 40daysofdating is like reality television — reality web if you will — and a good signpost for what could be a more episodic approach to content and story telling. In the past, it was comic books and stories in noir magazines that kept you hooked. So why not web-based episodic story telling?

In the data center world, there could be 40 weeks of a data center.  But, it could be 40 years before the data center world would adopt story telling as a way to share its ideas. :-)

Getting some good laughs from the Federal Data Center Consolidation

I  don't know about you, but from the beginning when the US Fed Gov't announced they were going to close data centers, I was getting some good laughs.  Really you think the way to close a data center is tell the staff that their data center will be shut down?  IT staff has learned to ignore the strategic projects from the CIO as he/she will be gone in 2 years. 

Vivek Kundra who announced the Federal data center consolidation lasted 2 1/2 years.

Vivek| Kundra (Hindi: विवेक कुंद्रा; born October 9, 1974) is an Indian American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama.

Network computing has a post on the three lessons learned from the Fed's data center consolidation.  Jumping to the last two paragraphs.

To understand just how wrong a data center consolidation can go, consider the findings of MeriTalk’s recent survey of 200 federal data center operators. Not only did 56 percent give their agencies’ consolidation efforts a grade of C or below -- a clear sign of a project headed south -- a whopping 45 percent believe that it’s more likely they’ll win the lottery, the Washington Redskins will win the next Super Bowl, or another large meteor will hit the Earth than agencies will meet FDCCI objectives.

Far from a glowing endorsement, but it serves as a third lesson -- an important reminder to IT execs that they’d be well advised to consider their data center teams’ perspectives before going full steam with consolidation mandates.

The IT staff is getting a good laugh as they continue to do same job they did yesterday, the month before, the year before, and last decade. :-)

Can you see the Media Bias? Rush Limbaugh says Apple is Republican, Google/Samsung are Democrats

The whole idea of unbiased media works when you want to be the one source of news.  When it comes down to it though very few people want to hear both sides of the story without any bias.  Even when people read both sides, they are looking for information to support their views.  

CNET focuses on the battle between Apple and Google.

Rush Limbaugh: Apple is Republicans, Google is Democrats

In a scholarly analysis of tech blogging, the great Republican commentator offers that 9 out of 10 blogs hate Apple. Because Apple is like the Republican Party. Oddly, though, Limbaugh last year was himself mad at Apple.

Rush Limbaugh blog post focuses Tech Blogs starting to notice media bias.  I agree it is entertaining to watch the bias influence coverage.

It's a teachable moment out there.  Fascinating.  Study of the media is fascinating.  To watch the sports media, folks.  Because they're all liberal, they're all formulaic. They're all liberal by default.  They don't know anything else.  And you can predict, if you become familiar with it, with them, you read their stuff often enough, you can predict when something happens in the NFL, you can predict how 95% of the reporters are gonna take it and how they're gonna report on it.  You can predict, just like you can in news media.  It's incredible.  It's a fascinating study to me. 

What I find interesting is Rush Limbaugh doesn't want to point to who the biased tech blogs are because it would drive more traffic to them.

RUSH: An e-mail: "Rush, why don't you name some of these left-wing tech blogs you're talking about?"  Folks, I've thought about it, and there's nothing to be gained by it.  If I call 'em out, all they're gonna do is get happy that I'm giving them attention and elevating attention.  It's not gonna change them.  If I start naming people, the same thing.  It's one of these unfortunate things.  This program is so big that certain things I can't talk about because, believe me, these people do not need -- I know I'm making this all sound interesting, but they don't need to be bigger.  They don't need more readers.  The more readers they have, the more damage they would do.  And all I would do, if I mention them by name or by name of author is make 'em bigger and it would not accomplish here what I'm -- I know it's frustrating.  If this were just a local show in Podunk state, I could tell you everything, but it's the biggest show in media.  And put these little chumps on the map and they'd never be bigger, but it wouldn't change, just make 'em snarkier and ruder.  Just the way things work.

Problems with adding Supply Chain people, thinking like procurement instead of spatial intelligence

How many of you are frustrated with your purchasing department?  I had a short stint at Apple in the Purchasing group.  The purchasing group had a staff of technical project managers who would work with the product development teams on peripherals for Apple products.  During this time is when I got a peak into mindset, the way people approach the task of purchasing/procurement, but this is anecdotal.  Harvard Business Review has a post on "The Problem with Procurement" with a sample survey.

If this sample is representative, then we can hardly be surprised if many c-suiters think that procurement is a backwater. And we can hardly expect young high-flyers in most industries to see it as a career path of choice.

Looking ahead, procurement managers will have to change the way they approach suppliers and business peers; being a strategic business partner means so much more than negotiating a discount.

One comment in the post tries to target the problem.

My admittedly limited experience with corporate and governmental procurement functions is that they focus on compliance and price, as opposed to effectiveness and value.

The focus on compliance and price makes sense as most of the time procurement is part of a finance function, not engineering.

Many of the things that Procurement buys are physical things.  To an engineer the physical things have meaning in spatial terms, not just price and compliance.

Spatial thinking “finds meaning in the shape, size, orientation, location, direction or trajectory, of objects,” and their relative positions, and “uses the properties of space as a vehicle for structuring problems, for finding answers, and for expressing solutions.”

And it is hard for non-spatial oriented people to understand spatial people as most of the systems ignores them.

Nearly every standardized test given to students today is heavily verbal and mathematical.  Students who have the high spatial and lower math/verbal profile are therefore missed in nearly every school test and their talent likely goes missed, and thus under-developed. What’s more,spatially talented people are often less verbally fluent, and unlikely to be very vocal. Finally, teachers are unlikely to have a high spatial profile themselves (and typically have the inverted profile of high verbal and lower math/spatial), and although they probably do not intend to, they’re more likely to miss seeing talent in students who are not very much like themselves.

There is a point that being spatial is not idolized in society.

Today we idolize creative actors, dancers, artists, musicians, and writers. But when was the last time someone raved to you about a creative engineer or mathematician? Why isn’t STEM considered creative or cool? Longitudinal research has made a solid link between early spatial talent and later creativity. Yet for whatever reason, we don’t appreciate the highly creative nature of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

In the technology world though, the spatial thinkers are idolized.  Having young kids are you driving your kids to be actors, dancers, artists, musicians or writers? STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) may not be cool, but it is creative and you can get paid really well.  You may not be idolized by the paparazzi.  But you can be idolized by your peers.