Driven to Distraction - Distracted Driving in Ambulances and Police Cruisers

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By MATT RICHTEL

They are the most wired vehicles on the road, with dashboard computers, sophisticated radios, navigation systems and cellphones.

While such gadgets are widely seen as distractions to be avoided behind the wheel, there are hundreds of thousands of drivers — police officers and paramedics — who are required to use them, sometimes at high speeds, while weaving through traffic, sirens blaring.

The drivers say the technology is a huge boon for their jobs, saving valuable seconds and providing instant access to essential information. But it also presents a clear risk — even the potential to take a life while they are trying to save one.

Philip Macaluso, a New York paramedic, recalled a moment recently when he was rushing to the hospital while keying information into his dashboard computer. At the last second, he looked up from the control panel and slammed on his brakes to avoid a woman who stepped into the street.

“There is a potential for disaster here,” Mr. Macaluso said. Data does not exist about crashes caused by police officers or medics distracted by their devices. But there are tragic anecdotes.

In April 2008, an emergency medical technician in West Nyack, N.Y., looked at his GPS screen, swerved and hit a parked flatbed truck. The crash sheared off the side of the ambulance and left his partner, who was in the passenger seat, paralyzed.

In June 2007, a sheriff’s deputy in St. Clair County, Ill., was driving 35 miles per hour when a dispatcher radioed with an assignment. He entered the address into the mapping system and then looked up, too late to avoid hitting a sedan stopped in traffic. Its driver was seriously injured.

Ambulances and police cars are becoming increasingly wired. Some 75 percent of police cruisers have on-board computers, a figure that has doubled over the last decade, says David Krebs, an industry analyst with the VDC Research Group. He estimates about 30 percent of ambulances have such technology.

The use of such technology by so-called first responders comes as regulators, legislators and safety advocates seek to limit the use of gadgets by most drivers. Police officers, medics and others who study the field say they are searching to find the right balance between technology’s risks and benefits.

The computers allow police, for example, to check license plate data, find information about a suspect and exchange messages with dispatchers. Ambulances receive directions to accident scenes and can use the computers to send information about the patient before they arrive at hospitals.

“The technology is enormously beneficial,” said Jeffrey Lindsey, a retired fire chief in Florida who now is an executive at the Health and Safety Institute, which provides continuing education for emergency services workers.

But he said first responders generally did not have enough training to deal with diversions that could be “almost exponential” compared with those faced by most drivers.

The New York Fire Department, which coordinates the city’s largest ambulance system, said drivers were not supposed to use on-board computers in traffic. That is the role of the driver’s partner, and if the partner is in the back tending to a patient, the driver is supposed to use devices before speeding off.

“There’s no need for our drivers to get distracted, because the system has evolved to keep safety paramount,” said Jerry Gombo, assistant chief for emergency service operations at the Fire Department. Drivers do get into accidents, he said, but he couldn’t remember a single one caused by distraction from using a computer.

He also estimates the technology saves 20 to 30 seconds per call. “There’s no doubt we’re having quicker response time,” Mr. Gombo added.

But in interviews, medics and E.M.T.’s in New York and elsewhere say that although they are aware of the rules, they do use their on-board computers while driving because they can’t wait for certain information.

States that ban drivers from texting or using hand-held phones tend to exempt first responders. And in many places where even they are forbidden to use cellphones behind the wheel, the edict is often ignored.

“My partner was checking baseball scores as he was driving a patient to the hospital. I looked through the passageway and said, ‘You’ve got to stop that right now,’ ” recalls Greg Friese, a paramedic in central Wisconsin, who was treating a patient in the back. Mr. Friese also develops online training programs for medics, E.M.T.’s, police officers and firefighters.

“We’re dealing with the carnage, which ranges from the trivial to the tragic, of distracted driving,” he said. “We should know better.”

For police officers, there are reasons to constantly be checking a dashboard computer. They might check a license plate of a car they are tailing by using a keyboard to call up a screen, typing in the plate number, then reading more about the owner.

“There’s no way you could do this without eventually running into something,” said Officer Shawn Chase, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, as he demonstrated use of the Gateway computer in a cruiser. And yet, he said, he has tried it, and others have, too.

“The first time you almost rear-end something, you say, ‘Whoa, I better not do this,’ ” he said. “You learn quick.”

Researchers are working to reduce the risk. At the University of New Hampshire, backed by $34 million in federal financing, they have been developing hands-free technology for police cars.

The systems let officers use voice commands to operate the radio, lights and sirens and even speak a license-plate number into the on-board computer, which can then announce through a speaker basic information about the car. To activate voice commands, the officer must push a button on the steering wheel.

“I can literally drive down the road, speak without holding the microphone, and turn on the lights and sirens without ever looking at the equipment,” said Captain John G. LeLacheur of the New Hampshire State Police, who has driven one of the 1,000 police cruisers nationwide, mostly in New Hampshire and other Northeast states, equipped with the new technology.

Mr. LeLacheur said it sometimes failed to pick up his voice. “If it’s not doing what I want, I bypass it and do things the old-fashioned way,” he said.

Another system uses digital video systems that can automatically read license plates in front of and behind police cruisers, and then check for things like unregistered plates and stolen vehicles.

The solutions aren’t cheap, particularly for struggling state and local governments. A license-plate reader system from Panasonic can cost $8,000 for each car, including a $3,000 to $5,000 laptop.

“We can barely get patrol cars and motorcycles,” said Mr. Chase of the California Highway Patrol. Referring to the hands-free devices, he said, “We’ve love to get this technology, but there are trade-offs.”

Books of The Times - Demick, Hassig, Oh and Myers on Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea

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NOTHING TO ENVY

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

By Barbara Demick

Illustrated. 314 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $26.

THE HIDDEN PEOPLE OF NORTH KOREA

Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

By Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh

Illustrated. 300 pages. Rowman & Littlefield. $39.95.

THE CLEANEST RACE

How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters

By B. R. Myers

Illustrated. 200 pages. Melville House. $24.95.

By DWIGHT GARNER

Computers are rare in North Korea, and the Internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumor. It’s probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the Web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, that authoritarian regime’s supreme leader.

When he’s online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Mr. Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like, to the rest of the world, in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

You’ve probably seen them. The countries near North Korea — Japan, South Korea, China — are ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilization. But North Korea, a country nearly the size of England, home to some 23 million people, is a black hole, an ocean of dark. Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, begins her excellent new book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by poring over these satellite images. She’s shocked by them, and moved. “North Korea is not an undeveloped country,” she observes. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”

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“Nothing to Envy” is one of three provocative new books about North Korea, from writers who are committed to parsing the slivers of light that escape this enigmatic and often baffling place. The others are “The Hidden People of North Korea,” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers.

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries. To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.

If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. (Even the telephone book is a classified document marked “secret.”) Postal service is spotty. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

How are North Koreans taught to think about us? Well, here’s one indication. Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

(The truly poignant words here are “with my own hands.”)

Ms. Demick’s book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It’s a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.

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The people Ms. Demick observes lived, before their defections, in northeastern North Korea, far from the country’s tidy, Potemkin village-like capital, Pyongyang. The existences she describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Ms. Demick writes especially well about the difficult lives of those who do manage to defect. Not only are they bewildered by life outside of North Korea, and have to be taught to do things like use an A.T.M., but they also live with deep shame and guilt, knowing that relatives left behind have probably been sent to prison as punishment for their escape.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is wonkier than Ms. Demick’s and less reader-friendly, but it covers more ground. The authors are married (Ms. Oh’s parents were North Koreans who fled to South Korea); he is an independent consultant specializing in North Korean affairs, and she is on the research staff of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va.

Their book is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him.” North Koreans are too busy trying to survive, and too preoccupied by the tensions of the supposed mighty conflict with America, to be able to think about much else.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s portrait of Mr. Kim’s hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating. He may look like a man of the people, they write, with his tan slacks, zippered jackets and stout build that make him resemble Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners.” But they chronicle his obsession with the latest electronics, the “pleasure teams” of girls he keeps handy, the Bordeaux wine he has flown in. While many of his people starve, they write, Mr. Kim “is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape.”

The authors are aware that Mr. Kim’s anti-American paranoia isn’t baseless. The leader of a different country in George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” they note, was captured and later hanged.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book concludes with pointed policy recommendations. They think it is nearly hopeless to negotiate with Mr. Kim and suspect that “nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future.” Instead of fixating on Korea’s weapons, the authors suggest bypassing the regime and reaching out to North Korea’s people, who sorely need humanitarian aid and “a new way of thinking about their government and their society.”

Mr. Myers, the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters,” is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and famously the author of “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a controversial and humorless broadside against the literary writers (Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy among them) whom he finds pretentious or obscure. Mr. Myers directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea.

He is a crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. Mr. Myers has pored through mountains of North Korean propaganda — from nightly news reports and newspapers to war movies, comics, wall posters and dictionaries — and he argues that the West is misreading the country’s core beliefs.

He explains that North Korea’s dominant worldview is “far removed” from the Communism, Confucianism and official “show-window” ideologies that Westerners analyze. Instead, he argues, this worldview “can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.” His North Korea is guided by a “paranoid, race-based nationalism.”

Mr. Myers’s arguments are too wily and complex to be neatly summarized here, but he includes a fascinating analysis of Mr. Kim’s depiction as an essentially — and crucially — feminine military leader. His regime presents North Korea more as a motherland than a fatherland, Mr. Myers writes, and he cites official slogans about Mr. Kim like “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast.” The lack of a patriarchal authority figure, he says, “may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against.”

Mr. Myers also cautions against the idea that the West can persuade North Korea to shed its nuclear weapons. Mr. Kim “cannot disarm and hope to stay in power,” he writes. At the same time, he notes, “blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship.” Any signs of serious unrest, he observes, will encourage Mr. Kim to raise the level of the tension with the West, and possibly do something rash with his nuclear arsenal.

Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008 and has looked frail during his recent, and increasingly rare, public appearances. While the world speculates about his successor, almost certainly to be one of his sons, one of the lessons of these books is not to remove our eyes from the blinkered lives of the average North Korean.

“The Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage,” Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh write, and they are dismayed to note that “the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.”

North Koreans sometimes joke, Ms. Demick writes in “Nothing to Envy,” that they live like “frogs in the well.” It’s a line that sends you back to study those satellite images, and to contemplate those who dwell under Mr. Kim’s inky moral darkness.

More teens are choosing to wait to get driver's licenses

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By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 24, 2010; A01

The quest to get a driver's license at 16 -- long an American rite of passage -- is on the wane among the digital generation, which no longer sees the family car as the end-all of social life.

The holdouts include Kat Velkoff, who turned 17 in Chantilly without a license. Focused on tough classes, the debate team, dance and color guard, she turned 18 without taking the wheel. Then 19.

"It just wasn't a priority," said Velkoff, who got her license last year at 20. "It was just never the next thing that needed to get done in my life."

Federal data released Friday underscore a striking national shift: 30.7 percent of 16-year-olds got their licenses in 2008, compared with 44.7 percent in 1988. The difference is even sharper in Virginia and Maryland, state figures show. Numbers from the District, which go back to 2003, show a decline in the past two years.

"Driving is real important to a lot of the kids in the culture, but it is not the central focus like it was 25 years ago," said Tom Pecoraro, owner of I Drive Smart, a Washington area drivers' education program, who added that plenty of his students are older teens. "They have so many other things to do now," he said, and, with years of being shuttled to sports, lessons and play dates, "kids are used to being driven."

A generation consumed by Facebook and text-messaging, by Xbox Live and smartphones, no longer needs to climb into a car to connect with friends. And although many teens are still eager to drive, new laws make getting a license far more time-consuming, requiring as many as 60 supervised driving practice hours with an adult.

Rob Foss, director of the Center for the Study of Young Drivers at the University of North Carolina, and others suggest that these "graduated" state licensing systems -- which have created new requirements for learner's permits, supervised practice hours, night driving and passengers in the car -- are responsible for much of the decline in the number of licensed 16-year-olds. At the same time, drivers' education has been cut back in some public schools, so families must scrounge up money -- often $300 to $600 -- for private driving schools.

Then there is car insurance and gas, expenses that make driving too costly for some families and a stretch for others.

"In this economy, if my daughter were to drive, just the insurance would be $1,200 a year or more, and that's a lot of money," said Elizabeth Walker, the mother of a reluctant driver in Rockville.

Leaving it to parents

There have always been differences between the city and suburban mind-set when it comes to driving, because cities have more public transportation. In suburban and rural areas, it can be trickier to be a later-teen driver.

Not that this has stopped Wylie Conlon, 17.

The senior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring has a learner's permit, but the required 60 hours of practice driving toward a driver's license have taken a back seat to his Advanced Placement classes, the rowing team, the literary magazine and Web design projects. "It's hard to spend all that time on driving when I can get places without it," he said.

Conlon said this as his mother, Eva Sullivan Conlon, was driving him to the store to buy supplies for a school project; she ends up taking him places a few times a week. But he also finds his own way, boarding two buses and a train to see his girlfriend in Rockville, for example. In his circle, he adds, "most of my friends don't have driver's licenses, and the few who do end up giving rides to the rest of us."

Natalie Perez-Duel, a 16-year-old junior at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, has yet to take driving classes and does not know when she will. "It's one more thing to study for, and it's just a hassle," said Perez-Duel, who is already squeezing in AP and International Baccalaureate classes, dance, poms and a school play.

She does not mind rides from her parents. "They have always driven me, and they still do, so it's not that weird," she said.

For parents, the license lag brings mixed reaction. Some are relieved; some mystified.

Barry Johnson, 52, who grew up in Silver Spring, remembers the glory of turning 16 and heading to the Department of Motor Vehicles "on the day you were eligible."

"Not only did all of my friends have licenses," he said, "but most of us worked and had cars by the time we graduated high school." He and his friends worked on their cars in the evening, and on weekends they went out driving -- a mark of "freedom, independence, adulthood," he said.

Now a father of two, Johnson notes that his college-age children still don't have licenses. "Neither one has risen to the occasion," he said. "Both have decided that Washington, D.C., is a great place to use their 'BMW' -- bus, Metro, walk."

Susan Apter, 48, of Rockville said her eldest daughter delayed so long that Apter finally insisted that she get licensed when she was a senior. "I took the initiative to schedule the test, helicopter parent that I am," she joked. By contrast, Apter's 15-year-old son knows the precise day in May when he can get his permit.

Plenty of parents don't want their children driving at 16, given the congestion and peril of the Washington area's roads and the fact that car crashes are the leading cause of teen deaths.

Cindy Wei, 55, of Herndon was thankful that her daughter was in no hurry to get her license. "I wanted her safe as long as possible," Wei said. "If it means I have to give up watching TV for 15 minutes so she can get a ride across town, I'm happy to do it."

A rite of passage

But waiting too long also has its drawbacks. Teens might get the best chance at supervised practice, some parents and experts say, before they head off to college, the military or a job.

"Learning to drive is a fundamental part of adolescence," said psychologist Joseph Allen of the University of Virginia. "It gives teens a major responsibility they have to handle, and it also gives them the chance to move about on their own, to function independently of their families."

It has become harder for teens to grow up, Allen says in a recent book, "Escaping the Endless Adolescence," because parents too often try to eliminate risks and obstacles rather than teaching teens to manage them safely. "Parents are scared to death about their teens driving," he said. "But they won't grow up if we just lock them in a room to keep them safe."

Jack Gibala, 60, a father of three in Rockville, said he and his wife tackled the driving question one child at a time. Their daughter drove at 16. But their two sons had to wait until 18 or 19 because they were less mature. "We just felt it was crazy to put them behind the wheel of a two-ton killing machine," he said.

The downside: "It's a pain . . . hauling these kids around when they are 17 and 18 years old." But he said he is glad he did.

Jeanne Kahn, 49, a mother of two, did some extra driving, too, until her eldest son got his license at 18. But many days, he was content at home in North Potomac, using the computer, playing video games or watching sports on TV. "It may be they feel more entertained at home than my generation did," Kahn said.

Technology has clearly altered the social world for 16-year-olds.

Michelle Wei, 19, who got her license as a senior, was happy to walk to school and carpool to soccer games. Most of her friends lived within a few blocks. "If I couldn't get a ride to see my friend who lives a town over, I could talk on IM," she said. "Or Skype." The digital world, she said, "made it very easy not to drive."

And not driving can be a good thing in some families.

As for Kat Velkoff, who got her license at 20, she and her mother spent 30 minutes together every school day in the family Prius, as they went from their Chantilly home to Velkoff's IB high school program in Reston. "We could talk about everything, and we got to share music with each other," she said. "My mom and I became really close."

Database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds

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Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people’s media use. The report is based on a survey conducted between October 2008 and May 2009 among a nationally representative sample of 2,002 3rd-12th grade students ages 8-18, including a self-selected subsample of 702 respondents who completed seven-day media use diaries, which were used to calculate multitasking proportions.

Full Report (.pdf)

Toplines:

2009 (.pdf)

2004 (.pdf)

1999 (.pdf)

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Information provided by the Program for the Study of Media and Health
Publication Number: 8010
Publish Date: 2010-01-20

Apple vs. Google

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How the battle between Silicon Valley's superstars will shape the future of mobile computing

By Peter Burrows

On Jan. 5, Google (GOOG) did a very Apple-like thing. In a presentation at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., the 11-year-old search behemoth unveiled Nexus One, a stylish touchscreen smartphone that runs on the company's Android operating system, is sold through a Google-operated retail Web site, and greets the market with an advertising tagline ("Web meets phone") as simple and optimistic as the one Apple used in 2007 to introduce its iPhone ("The Internet in your pocket").

On the same day, Apple did a very Google-like thing. Steve Jobs, the king of splashy product launches and in-house development, announced a strategic acquisition. For $275 million, Apple purchased Quattro Wireless, an upstart advertising company that excels at targeting ads to mobile-phone users based on their behavior.

When companies start to imitate one another, it's usually either an extreme case of flattery—or war. In the case of Google and Apple, it's both. Separated by a mere 10 miles in Silicon Valley, the two have been on famously good terms for almost a decade. Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, both 54, spent years in separate battles against Microsoft (MSFT) while Schmidt was at Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and Novell (NOVL). Over time, they went from spiritual allies to strategic ones. When Apple had an opening on its board in 2006, Jobs tapped Schmidt. "Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google," Jobs said at the time. Schmidt, meanwhile, called Apple "one of the companies in the world that I most admire."

Tensions in Silicon Valley's special relationship began to emerge in late 2007, when Google announced plans to develop Android for mobile phones. Apple had unveiled its iPhone in January of that year, and it was clear that the two companies would spar in the smartphone business. Still, both were niche players, with more formidable rivals in companies like Nokia (NOK), Samsung, and Research In Motion (RIMM). Only after software developers began creating thousands of mobile apps, and it became clear that phones would become the computers of the future, did the conflicts begin to grow serious. Last summer, Apple refused to approve two Google apps for sale to iPhone users, raising questions about how much of a Google presence Apple would allow on its devices. In August, Schmidt gave up his board seat. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses," Jobs said at the time, "Eric's effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings."

Now the companies have entered a new, more adversarial phase. With Nexus One, Google, which had been content to power multiple phonemakers' devices with Android, enters the hardware game, becoming a direct threat to the iPhone. With its Quattro purchase, Apple aims to create completely new kinds of mobile ads, say three sources familiar with Apple's thinking. The goal isn't so much to compete with Google in search as to make search on mobile phones obsolete. "Apple and Google both want more," says Chris Cunningham, founder of the New York mobile advertising firm Appssavvy. "They're gearing up for the ultimate fight."

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Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton declined to comment on the company's advertising plans or its relationship with Google. Google spokeswoman Katie Watson said the company would not make executives available for this story. She did provide a statement, attributed to Vic Gundotra, Google's vice-president of engineering: "Apple is a valued partner of ours and we continue to work closely with them to help move the entire mobile ecosystem forward."

THE MOVE TO MOBILE

The tech industry has had its share of legendary rivalries: IBM (IBM) vs. Digital Equipment Corp., Microsoft vs. Netscape, America Online vs. Yahoo! (YHOO) Apple vs. Google could dwarf them all. Both companies are revered by consumers with a passion usually reserved for movie stars and pro athletes. They have multibillion-dollar war chests, visionary founders, and ambitions for smartphones, Web browsers, music, and tablet computers that set them on a collision course.

The key battleground in the near term is mobile computing. Analysts who once tingled when talking about the Internet are getting that same old feeling over mobile's potential. Morgan Stanley's (MS) Mary Meeker predicts that within five years more users will tap into the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs. Desktop Internet use led to the rise of Google, eBay (EBAY), and Yahoo, but the mobile winners are still emerging. "Now is the time to get going," says Doug Clinton, an analyst with Piper Jaffray (PJC). "It's about winning the battle today rather than getting into the fight tomorrow." Billions of dollars are up for grabs in selling phones, software, and services.

The money in mobile advertising is small—about $2 billion last year, according to researcher Gartner, compared with $60 billion for the overall Web. But figuring out how to make mobile advertising more profitable is a lot more important than merely getting in as the hockey-stick curve begins to move upward. A company that can nail mobile ads and share the wealth with the growing legion of app developers—freelance software writers who create all those sometimes-useful (Business Card Reader), sometimes time-killing (Flick Fishing) mobile programs—could pull in the best of the lot. Create the strongest ecosystem of apps and devices, and, the thinking goes, you leave rivals gasping to keep up. "The mobile platform that creates the most ways to make money wins," says David Hyman, chief executive of MOG, an Internet music service that's developing mobile apps.

Apple has a substantial lead in establishing this ecosystem. Developers have created more than 125,000 mobile applications for Apple devices—seven times as many as exist on Android—and the endless diversity of apps has helped the iPhone quickly pick up 14% of smartphone share, compared with 3.5% for all the Android-powered devices put together, according to estimates by the market research firm IDC. But in the past few months, an increasing number of app developers have complained that they couldn't make money on their work. Free apps have become the norm, and very few sell for more than 99 cents. Some developers have profited by embedding ads in their apps, but the payments tend to be insignificant since the ads are usually smaller, less effective versions of their Web banner forms. According to a source familiar with his thinking, Jobs has recognized that "mobile ads suck" and that improving that situation will make Apple even harder to beat.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, particularly when it offends his aesthetic sensibilities, Jobs and his lieutenants have discussed ways to overhaul mobile advertising in the same way they had revolutionized music players and phones, say two sources close to the company. The sources did not reveal specific plans at Apple but say there are several possible ad approaches. Apple could employ its user data and geo-location technology to make ads more relevant, so that a user cruising the mobile Web at lunchtime could receive an ad for specials at a nearby restaurant. It could also use the iPhone's capabilities in creative ways—say, having someone shake the device to win a rebate the same way they do to roll dice in games.

To pull any of this off, Apple realized that it needed a network of advertisers and the technology to target ads to customer behavior. In fall 2009, Apple entered the bidding for AdMob, the leader in the nascent mobile advertising industry. It was a target that made perfect sense; more than half of the AdMob ads served up on smartphones ended up on the iPhone or iPod Touch (which also run Apple's apps). But before Apple could close the deal, Google intervened, announcing on Nov. 8 that it would pay a staggering $750 million for the company.

Outbid on its first choice, Apple quickly turned to Waltham (Mass.)-based Quattro Wireless, AdMob's closest rival. Tellingly, when Apple announced the deal, Jobs gave Quattro CEO Andrew Miller the title of vice-president of mobile advertising. Vice-president is a rare title at Apple, and Miller is the first one ever assigned to online advertising. Apple has also hired an M&A specialist to better compete for deals (box).

For almost any company, taking on Google in search advertising would be folly. Google dominates traditional search with more than 65% of the market, and its share of search on mobile phones is even more imposing. More than a million businesses bid on keywords to show up alongside search results, and most experts have assumed a migration to mobile devices as more people use them for computing tasks.

Yet mobile search hasn't taken off. Gartner estimates that $924 million was spent on mobile search ads worldwide last year, less than 2% of overall Internet advertising. The problem is that user behavior isn't consistent between desktops and mobile devices. Many people shy away from calling up minuscule search bars on their phones and pecking out queries using cramped keyboards. Search ads tend to be less effective, too, since people are reluctant to give over the one browser screen they have on a phone to an ad. In many cases, apps are far more effective; it takes fewer steps to find the best local sushi joint using apps from Urbanspoon or Yelp than to type out "best local sushi" into a search bar and navigate the results. "Eric Schmidt has said that the search problem is 99% solved, but, boy, is that self-serving," says Jonathan Yarmis, research fellow with the consulting firm Ovum. "The fact that I have to go to a search bar at all is a sign of failure."

Apple has a vault of valuable data that can help drive an ad business. It knows precisely which apps, podcasts, videos, and songs people download from iTunes; in many cases it has detailed customer information such as credit-card numbers and home addresses. That gives Apple a chance to blend advertising and e-commerce in new ways, particularly after the acquisition of Quattro. The startup already works with advertisers, including Ford (F), Netflix (NFLX), and Procter & Gamble (PG), to help them figure out when and where to place ads on the sites of publishers, such as Sports Illustrated and CBS News. By tying Quattro's ad-serving technology into its own, Apple would be able to tell advertisers how often and under what circumstances a person clicked on particular ads. "Apple is one of the few brands that could actually go head to head with Google," says Kevin Lee, chief executive of search marketing firm Didit. The technology could also be used on the tablet computer that Apple is expected to introduce later this month.

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

When Google introduced Android in 2007, the company said it would concentrate on developing the operating system software and let traditional phone manufacturers, such as Motorola (MOT) and HTC, make the devices. The strategy was similar to Microsoft's in personal computers, aimed at working with dozens of partners to attack every product area, geography, and demographic. "One or two devices don't matter," said Andy Rubin, head of Google's Android business, after the Nexus One event. "Twenty or thirty or a hundred devices, all running the same software—that's what matters."

Yet the arrival of Nexus One suggests that Google is concerned Android isn't gaining market share fast enough. "The volume, quality, and variety of Android phones in the market today has exceeded our most optimistic expectations," said Google Product Management Vice-President Mario Queiroz at the January announcement. "But we want to do more." The mobile market is so important that Google can't afford to depend on other companies for access; the Nexus One offensive, Google hopes, will establish a foothold in smartphones so the company can control its own fate.

Nexus One isn't without risk. Android hardware makers may balk at having to compete with their supposed partner. "If the Nexus One is any good, why would you buy anything else?" says Edward J. Zander, Motorola's former CEO, who is surprised Google would go so far as to enter the hardware fray. "At least Microsoft never built PCs."

Meanwhile, Google is aware of its vulnerability in mobile advertising and is pushing to make improvements. Schmidt believes mobile ads will one day be more important than PC advertising, largely because of personalization and localization. Although Google declined to discuss its plans for this story, Schmidt has floated the idea that eventually some mobile phones could be free for consumers, with advertising paying the bills. "If Google could do that, they'd be untouchable," says tech consultant John Metcalfe, who has worked with Google on mobile projects. "Apple wouldn't be able to come up with an answer for that."

Of course, Apple and Google could both end up thriving as computing goes mobile. But there will be losers. Microsoft is fading fast in smartphones as device makers shift attention away from Windows Mobile, which doesn't have nearly as many apps or developers as Android and Apple. Nokia, the world's largest mobile-phone maker, is struggling too; its Ovi online store toils in near-anonymity compared with Apple's iTunes store. Even Samsung and LG Electronics, Korean phonemakers long hailed for their advanced technology, are losing ground. "The older cell-phone makers never had to deal with software or software developers," says Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Bros. "It's just not in their DNA. [But] the world is moving that way."

BING IN THE WINGS?

Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says. "I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search," he adds. "If there's all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?"

Whatever happens, it's clear that Apple and Google are headed for more conflict. Android is a threat to an iPhone business that has quickly come to represent more than 30% of Apple's sales. Meanwhile, nearly all the growth in search is expected to come from mobile devices, which Piper Jaffray predicts will account for 23.5% of all searches in 2016, up from less than 5% today. That sets the stage for a new main event in the tech sector. "This rivalry is going to accelerate innovation," says Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in Google. "Apple goes pretty fast, but having someone chasing you always makes you go faster. This is going to be good for consumers."

Still, in a battle over the future of computing, friendship will almost surely be a casualty of progress. "You can just feel the tension rising," says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. "Until the Nexus One, the competition was at arm's length. But the iPhone is Apple's darling. Now it's personal."

Google China cyberattack part of vast espionage campaign, experts say

Image via CrunchBase

By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Ellen Nakashima
Thursday, January 14, 2010; A01

Computer attacks on Google that the search giant said originated in China were part of a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States, security experts said.

At least 34 companies -- including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical -- were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources. Google, which disclosed on Tuesday that hackers had penetrated the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China, threatened to shutter its operations in the country as a result.

Human rights groups as well as Washington-based think tanks that have helped shape the debate in Congress about China were also hit.

Security experts say the attacks showed a new level of sophistication, exploiting multiple flaws in different software programs and underscoring what senior administration officials have said over the past year is an increasingly serious cyber threat to the nation's critical industries.

"Usually it's a group using one type of malicious code per target," said Eli Jellenc, head of international cyber-intelligence for VeriSign's iDefense Labs, a Silicon Valley company helping some firms investigate the attacks. "In this case, they're using multiple types against multiple targets -- but all in the same attack campaign. That's a marked leap in coordination."

Image by Steve Webel via Flickr

While it's difficult to say with certainty where a cyberattack originated because the Internet allows hackers to seemingly crisscross country borders and time zones in seconds, the issue is quickly turning into a source of diplomatic tension.

The standoff between Google and China touches on the most sensitive subjects in U.S.-China relations: human rights and censorship, trade, intellectual property disputes, and access to high-tech military technology.

"The recent cyber-intrusion that Google attributes to China is troubling, and the federal government is looking into it," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. He added that President Obama made Internet freedom "a central human rights issue" on his trip to China last fall.

Since it began operations in China five years ago, Google had agreed in theory to filter sensitive searches but clashed with the Chinese government on what material was covered, and the company regularly found its service blocked when it defied its hosts.

China's state media reported that the government is looking into Google's claims. In China, news about Tuesday's public rebuke by Google was heavily censored except for a stinging opinion piece in the official People's Daily that called the Silicon Valley tech giant a "spoiled child" and predicted that it would not follow through on its ultimatum.

The recent attacks seem to have targeted companies in strategic industries in which China is lagging, industry experts said. The attacks on defense companies were aimed at gaining information on weapons systems, experts said, while those on tech firms sought valuable source code that powers software applications -- the firms' bread and butter.

The attacks also focused on obtaining information about political dissidents.

"This is a big espionage program aimed at getting high-tech information and politically sensitive information -- the high-tech information to jump-start China's economy and the political information to ensure the survival of the regime," said James A. Lewis, a cyber and national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This is what China's leadership is after. This reflects China's national priorities."

Adobe, a software maker, confirmed on Wednesday that it learned of the attacks on Jan. 2 but said there was "no evidence to indicate that any sensitive information . . . has been compromised," while Symantec, which makes security software, said it is investigating to "ensure we are providing appropriate protection to our customers."

Dow Chemical said that it has "no reason to believe that the safety, security and intellectual property of our operations are in jeopardy." Yahoo and defense contractor Northrop Grumman declined to comment on the attack.

The attackers, experts said, followed the familiar "phishing" ruse: A recipient opens an e-mail that purports to be from someone he knows and, not suspecting malicious intent, opens an attachment containing a "sleeper" program that embeds in his computer. That program can be controlled remotely, allowing the attacker to access e-mail, send confidential documents to a specific address -- even turn on a Web camera or microphone to record what is going on in the room.

In many cases, a user does not know he has been the victim of an attack.

One type of attack exploits a flaw in Adobe Reader, a popular free program that allows e-mail users to read .pdf document files. The flaw was made public Dec. 15 but fixed only on Tuesday -- the day Google announced that its systems had been compromised.

Sara L.M. Davis, executive director of New York-based Asia Catalyst, which assists charities in developing countries, said she began to receive these fake e-mails shortly after the new year. The senders all appeared to be people with whom she regularly communicates. The subject lines contained topics -- "AIDS in China" or "Some photographs of you and Dr. Gao" -- that suggested familiarity with her and her organization.

"If I weren't already paranoid, I would have already opened one," Davis said.

Google declined to provide details on what exactly the attackers took and whether it included any information about super-secret search engine technology that drives the company's profits.

Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the University of Toronto, has analyzed attack e-mails sent to human rights groups over the past few months. Villeneuve, who works at Citizen Lab, which focuses on Internet and politics, helped research GhostNet, a vast cyberspying operation revealed last year that apparently originated in China and targeted the office of the Dalai Lama, foreign embassies and government offices.

He said the GhostNet attack resembles the strategy used against Google, other U.S. companies and human rights groups this time around. The attack e-mails to the human rights organizations could mostly be traced to "command and control" computers in mainland China. However, Jellenc said, the two attacks do not appear to have been carried out by the same group.

In August, someone obtained a list of 5,000 subscribers to the China Leadership Monitor, a respected quarterly publication from the Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

The subscribers received a fake e-mail from a Gmail account purportedly from the publication but with an attachment that would take over their computers. Alice Miller, a visiting professor at Stanford and the publication's editor, said she had worked with U.S. government investigators and said the attack originated in China.

Staff writers Cecilia Kang and John Pomfret contributed to this report.

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Google phone would break industry model

Image via CrunchBase

In challenge to Apple, plans call for it to operate on any network

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

With Google's disclosure over the weekend that it would launch its own cellphone, the online giant is staking claim to a piece of the fast-growing mobile marketplace and making a direct challenge to Apple's swift rise in the sector.

Google said in a corporate blog on Saturday that it has developed a phone based on its Android mobile operating system and distributed it to employees to try out. Soon after, pictures of the phone surfaced on the Twitter feeds of employees and outside bloggers with details that the device would be launched next month and sold directly to consumers. The new phone would be capable of operating on any network, according to a source close to the company who was not authorized to comment publicly.

Google's approach would run counter to the current practices of handset makers and carriers that partner up in exclusive deals to market and sell phones, and provide mobile service. AT&T, for instance, has been the sole provider of service for Apple's iPhone since the device was launched in 2007. Sprint tied up with Palm for its Pre smart phone earlier this year, and Verizon exclusively runs several versions of Research in Motion's BlackBerry.

In iPhone's case, the exclusivity agreement goes far beyond the choice of service provider. Apple tightly controls the applications that are available for the phone through its iTunes store, and its decision to block a voice application from Google sparked an inquiry by the Federal Communications Commission.

How Google's phone would connect to wireless networks was not clear Monday, and the company declined to comment on its plans beyond its Saturday blog posting. Apple also declined to comment.

But Google's latest plans appear to be aimed at countering that "closed loop" business model with a product that can run any application on any network -- a tactic that reminds experts of the battles between Microsoft and Apple over computer operating systems in the 1980s.

"This is a replica of the open-versus-closed war of the IBM mainframe versus the Macintosh for the mobile space," said Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University. "And Google is settling in for a long war here."

The diverging approaches of Google and Apple, however, touch upon several regulatory debates playing out at the FCC. The agency is reviewing wireless industry practices, including exclusive handset agreements, and examining roaming deals after rural carriers asked for help in forcing bigger providers to share their networks.

Industry experts say any attempt by a carrier to block Google's phone could raise questions about net neutrality in the wireless industry. The FCC is considering proposed new rules that would prevent Internet service providers from blocking content. Wireless carriers have argued that those rules shouldn't apply as strongly to them and that such rules shouldn't prevent carriers from blocking certain devices.

"It will be interesting to see if Google or other handset manufacturers raise concern that consumers might be blocked from using unlocked handsets," said Jason Oxman, senior vice president the Consumer Electronics Association, an Arlington-based trade group. "Whether that is the case today -- that carriers can block you -- is unclear."

Google's apparent approach is the standard practice in Europe, where customers typically pay higher upfront prices to buy phones but can carry them on any network at lower costs and without contract obligations. It's unclear how Google would price the phone, but industry experts say that if the company decides to charge more upfront for the phone, consumers may balk.

"We're not starting with a clean slate here," said Larry Downes, a non-resident fellow at Stanford University Law School. "The question is, who will pay the subsidy?"

Carriers subsidize a large portion of the cost of a phone to attract customers to buy new gadgets. The iPhone, for example, is estimated to cost AT&T about $350 in subsidies in order to offer the device to consumer for $199. In return, it asks consumers to sign one-to-two-year contracts to ensure it recoups the costs of those subsidies. Such exclusive contracts have come under fire recently, with the FCC asking Verizon to explain why it recently increased its penalty for customers who leave contracts early. Last month, Verizon began charging customers $350 instead of $150 for early-termination fees.

And even with the iPhone, its fastest version was initially priced at $599 in 2007 before AT&T began dropping the price. Thirty-three million iPhones have been sold worldwide.

"So this is a very, very different model, but if anyone can pull it off, it would be a Google, because of its brand awareness and ability to market it," Oxman said.

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Holiday sales could launch e-book readers as mass-market must-haves - washingtonpost.com

Cover via Amazon

As sales soar, digital works face season's crucial test

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 5, 2009

Technology is stalking your bookcase.

It has already taken over your photo albums and emptied your film canisters. It overwhelmed your music collection and flooded Goodwill with CD towers. It canceled your newspaper subscription. (Sniff, tear.)

And now, digital evangelicals believe technology is on the verge of supplanting those dusty, yellowed tomes that weigh three times more than an iPod and don't even come with any cool free apps.

Sales of electronic books jumped 68.4 percent last year and skyrocketed 177 percent to $96.6 million for the year through August, according to the Association of American Publishers. That's not counting the millions downloaded for free at public libraries, where e-books are fast becoming one of the most popular features. And Amazon has said that its e-book reader, the Kindle, has become the best-selling product on its Web site.

But despite the staggering growth, e-books remain just a sliver of the overall publishing industry, at 1.5 percent of the $6.8 billion in sales this year -- about on par with audiobooks. And some experts believe that the $200-plus price tag for e-book readers will keep the market from exploding the way MP3s did.

Holiday hopes

This holiday season will be a crucial test of whether e-books can cross over from geeky novelty to mass-market must-have. Major retailers are pushing the format -- and, of course, the gadgets they've developed to display it. Barnes & Noble unveiled its first electronic book reader last month, with access to all of the retailer's titles and then some. Amazon and Sony, which make the two best-selling e-readers in the country, have introduced new versions just in time to stuff your stocking. And this holiday, for the first time, Best Buy is devoting store space to educating shoppers about e-readers.

All told, about 1.2 million e-readers are expected to be sold in the last three months of the year -- roughly 40 percent of the entire year's stock. By the end of 2010, industry experts predict, 10 million people will be carrying e-readers. As for the number of e-books that people have read, they've lost track.

Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division, can hear his grandkids' grandkids now: You printed 1,000 pages and you made a million copies of those? Why did you do that?

"To me, it's just inevitable," says Haber, who knew printed books were goners when people told him they liked to touch and feel them. "I heard the same thing from LPs and CDs. The mass market, they want convenience and experience."

Already, we buy roughly as many printed books online as we do at chain bookstores. Each claims more than 20 percent of the market and alternates at the top spot, while independent sellers claim just 5 percent of the market, according to PubTrack, a survey conducted by publishing industry research firm Bowker. If it only takes one click to buy a book, why should we have to wait to read it?

The Amazon effect

Amazon executives have made near-instantaneous content a company goal. The latest Kindle, which began shipping last month, holds 1,500 titles and can wirelessly download books in 60 seconds. The company envisions a day when any book ever printed in any language can be downloaded in one minute.

Ginny Wolfe, 51, of Alexandria brought her Kindle to Afghanistan, where she is working for a few weeks as a private contractor; the device is loaded with 350 books, including "White Ghost Girls" by Alice Greenway and "The Invisible Mountain" by Carolina De Robertis. In the old days -- like, pre-2007, before the Kindle was released -- Wolfe would pack an extra suitcase on her work trips, just for books.

"I used to panic, thinking I might run out of things to read. That doesn't happen anymore," she writes in an e-mail, although she adds that she misplaced her Kindle for two days in Kabul, resulting in escalating drama until it turned up in a restaurant.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that Amazon has had on the publishing industry, both when Amazon began selling print books nearly 15 years ago and when it launched the Kindle two years ago. In both cases, the company struck fear in the hearts of publishers by lowering prices.

According to Bowker, the average price of an e-book this year is $8.30. The cost of a hardcover book -- the most profitable format for publishers -- is $14.55. The difference is particularly painful for publishers because e-book buyers tend to be readers who used to be hardcover buyers, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services for Bowker.

Worse, the industry can't raise prices on e-books to match those of hardcovers because Amazon established $9.99 pricing for e-books, and consumers expect virtual products to be cheaper than actual ones, he says. To fight back, publisher HarperCollins is delaying the e-book version of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's potentially best-selling memoir until after Christmas to help bolster hardcover sales.

"We've always kind of painted ourselves into a corner," Gallagher says.

Although the Association of American Publishers estimates that sales of e-books account for only 1.5 percent of all books, the medium's triple-digit growth has publishers on guard. Sales are outpacing most forecasts at a time when the book industry has seen sales declines. Adult paperbacks have dropped 9 percent to $908 million for the year through August, while hardcover sales plunged 12 percent to $738.6 million. Since it was launched last year, more than 2 million people have downloaded the free app Stanza to their iPhones to read e-books.

"The trend that the Kindle has started has grown far beyond Amazon," says Sarah Rotman Epps, senior analyst for consulting firm Forrester Research. "There are some companies that are on this for years and are finally seeing consumer demand building."

The e-reader market

Forrester's profile of the current e-reader enthusiast is a 47-year-old married man with a college degree and an average household income of $116,000. About 30 percent of e-reader owners use them on business trips, while about 17 percent rely on e-readers during commutes. They read about 3.5 books each month, more than the average Internet user. About 83 percent consider themselves "technology optimists."

The second wave that is emerging is composed of slightly younger men who may already be reading a few e-books on their iPhones or laptops and are graduating to e-readers. But to go truly mass-market, e-books will have to appeal to women, who tend to be warier of new technology and more price-conscious, Epps says. Harlequin, purveyor of those lusty supermarket bodice-rippers, has dipped into the market with an e-book subscription service for some series, like Silhouette Desire, "delivering the provocative passion you crave." And no one can see you put it in your shopping cart!

Can passion overcome the high price of e-readers? Epps performed an analysis of how much shoppers are willing to pay for an e-reader, and the point of mass appeal was $50 -- less than it costs to make the device.

Epps doesn't think that today's e-readers will do for e-books what the iPod did for MP3s. Even if 10 million people are toting an e-book reader at the end of next year, that's less than 1 percent of the 110 million people who have MP3 players. And at current prices, she believes the market for e-readers will top out at 25 million. Gallagher of Bowker says laptops still remain the primary mode for reading e-books.

Epps thinks the trend will look more like what happened to digital cameras, which took about a decade to catch on before exploding in popularity but are now taking a back seat to camera phones.

Book clubs and gadget geeks alike are buzzing about rumors that Apple is secretly developing a tablet-style device that combines an e-reader with other computing wizardry. An Apple spokeswoman did not respond to requests for information. But if the ubiquitous iPods and iPhones are yardsticks, an Apple e-reader could be the tipping point for digital books.

Sex appeal

Unless, of course, you are 40-something Hilton Henderson of Fairfax, who cannot fathom any reason why he would ever choose to read a book on a screen. Call him old-fashioned. Call him a Luddite. Or, Henderson helpfully suggests, call him a romantic.

A friend of his recently compared books to attractive women -- glorious to behold! -- and the comparison resonated with him. Reading an e-book, he says, is about as appealing to him as cybersex.

Yes, he went there.

"I prefer actually the experience, when reading a book, of using all my senses, like when I experience the world," Henderson says. "The touch of it, the feel of it, the scent of it."

All good points. But Sony's Haber argues that if it's women you're after, technology is man's best friend. Pull out a book in a bar and you look lonely. But whip out a Sony Reader and watch the magic happen.

"If you want to meet a girl," he says, "don't get a dog, get a reader."

Most College Students To Take Classes Online by 2014 -- Campus Technology

Nearly 12 million post-secondary students in the United States take some or all of their classes online right now. But this number will skyrocket to more than 22 million in the next five years, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight.

According to Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins, already some 1.25 million students in higher education programs take all of their classes online, while another 10.65 take some of their classes online. The two groups are still outnumbered by students who take all of their courses in physical classrooms, which Ambient Insight reckoned at 15.14 million as of 2009.

But this situation will change drastically by 2014, at which time, Adkins forecast, only 5.14 million students will take all of their courses in a physical classroom, while 3.55 million will take all of their classes online, and 18.65 million will take some of their classes online.

The information was presented in a Webinar that coincided with a new report from Ambient Insight focusing on the growth of the electronic learning market (in terms of dollars spent on products and services) from 2009 to 2014. Titled "US Self-paced eLearning Market," the new report highlighted some of the dominant segments in online learning. Of the individual segments spotlighted in the research, healthcare was projected to see the most growth over the next five years. But K-12 and higher education growth followed in second and third position, respectively, for a combined academic projected growth percentage greater than that of healthcare. K-12 was projected to grow about 18 percent by 2014; higher education was projected to grow more than 8 percent. Healthcare was projected to grow a little less than 20 percent over the next five years.

"The rate of growth in the academic segments," said Ambient CEO Tyson Greer, in a prepared statement, "is due in part to the success and proliferation of the for-profit online schools."

Across all segments, the market for electronic learning products and services, at present, is $16.7 billion. According to the report, this will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4 percent over the next five years to $23.8 billion in 2014.

"In the past two years, the rate of growth for online learning products has slowed," Adkins wrote in a statement. "Yet, despite the recession, and in many cases, because of it, the demand is positive in all the online learning buyer segments....."

An executive summary of Ambient Insight's report, "US Self-paced eLearning Market," can be found here. The full report runs $4,825. Ambient will also be releasing a worldwide report on electronic learning in November. We'll have more information about that when it becomes available.

About the Author

Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com. He can now be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/THEJournalDave (K-12) or http://twitter.com/CampusTechDave (higher education).

Can Obsessive Networking Make You a Good Employee? - WSJ.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JEFFREY ZASLOW

A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap.

He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.

"It was a subconscious act," says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. "Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive."

Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?

Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor.

"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."

That's far too harsh an assessment, says Ben Bajarin, 32, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in Campbell, Calif. He argues that because young people are so adept at multimedia socializing, their social skills are actually strengthened. They're good at "managing conversations" and getting to the pithy essence of an issue, he says, which will help them in the workplace.

While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. "They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it's needed. If not, they text." And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn't have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.

It's hard to quantify whether the abbreviated interchanges of text messaging are beneficial in the workplace, but this much is known: Young workers spend more time than older workers socializing via their devices or entertaining themselves online. In a 2008 survey for Salary.com, 53% of those under age 24 said this was their primary "time wasting" activity while at work, compared to just 34% for those between ages 41 and 65.

Online social networking while at work hampers business productivity, according to a new study by Nucleus Research. Almost two-thirds of those with Facebook accounts access them at their workplaces, the study found, which translates to a 1.5% loss of total employee productivity across an organization.

A study this year by psychology students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more gregarious, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile or depressed. (Doctors, meanwhile, are now blaming addictions to "night texting" for disturbing the sleep patterns of teens.)

Weaned From Facebook

Almost a quarter of today's teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors media's impact on families. Will these young people wean themselves of this habit once they enter the work force, or will employers come to see texting and "social-network checking" as accepted parts of the workday?

Think back. When today's older workers were in their 20s, they might have taken a break on the job to call friends and make after-work plans. In those earlier eras, companies discouraged non-business-related calls, and someone who made personal calls all day risked being fired. It was impossible to envision the constant back-and-forth texting that defines interactions among young people today.

However, now that these older workers are managers, they're being advised by consultants to accept the changed dynamics, so long as young employees are doing good work and meeting deadlines.

Educators are also being asked by parents, students and educational strategists to reconsider their rules. In past generations, students got in trouble for passing notes in class. Now students are adept at texting with their phones still in their pockets, says 40-year-old Mr. Gallagher, the vice principal, "and they're able to communicate with someone one floor down and three rows over. Students are just fundamentally different today. They will take suspensions rather than give up their phones."

It may feel like a strange new world, but Mr. Gallagher's wife, Holly, is among those who say it's time for educators and employers to embrace it. As a human-resources manager, she believes that as the generation now aged 15 to 24 enters the work force, managers must adjust to the new ways they socialize and communicate.

For instance, past generations accepted that corporations were hierarchical. There were supervisors, managers and senior managers, and you communicated your questions to your immediate superior. "Young people today want accessibility," says Ms. Gallagher, 41. "If they have a problem or suggestion, they'll email or text senior managers, or even the CEO. They don't have the old-school notion that there are appropriate communication models. They've grown up in a freedom-of-information era."

Preparing for Work

She thinks the constant text messaging among teens can serve as good preparation for workplace interactions. "In a lot of corporations, if something goes wrong, it's because so-and-so didn't talk to so-and-so," Ms. Gallagher says. "But with young people, simultaneous conversations are always happening. This reduces the chances of not reaching success because the right people didn't connect."

More schools are now allowing students to use their cellphones between classes, or even as a learning tool in the classroom. Some teachers are having students text their friends during classes to share feedback on what's being taught. The mantra among educators who try to be enlightened: It's no longer about attention span. It's about attention scope—being able to concentrate on many things at once.

Steve Gallagher is finding it futile to argue with his students that they should go a seven-hour school day without their texting devices. As he explains: "It's like talking to kids about why they don't need air."

—Email: Jeffrey.Zaslow@ wsj.com