Shameless Plug - I'm so proud of Ocarina Networks

My client Ocarina Networks has been named a finalist for Storage Magazine's 2008 Storage Products of the Year list. The company came out of stealth just two years ago, and its meteoric rise has been stunning to watch. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital, and other top tier investors, Ocarina is filling a niche in way that could not be more timely--it shrinks down the size of the types of files that are proliferating across the web, such as photos, video, Windows files, and so on. Its customers are major photo sharing sites, social networks, bioscience firms, and many others that need to reduce their overall storage footprint, which in many cases is growing by the terabyte week after week, month after month. I've written about them before on this blog, because I think they're a great example of a green business, reducing tenfold the immense power and cooling usage that is associated with our web-based lifestyles.Congrats, guys! I'm so proud to be working with you.

Aptonym Alert!

I could post on the latest updates on Steve Jobs' health, in which he admits that actually it is a little more complex than he originally thought. But instead, I thought, hey! More name fun! Especially since I just found out from that unassailable news source, NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" that Dennis Rodman's dad, a man who disappeared from his life when he was three, has been married four times and fathered 27 children. His name was ... Philander Rodman. Philander, who now runs a bar in the Phillipines, boasted of his "extracurricular activities" to the Washington Post. In other words, this Philander was one hell of a philanderer. Anyone out there about to name your baby? My advice to you is take some time making this all important decision.

Why is Steve Jobs Losing Weight?

Mystery solved. Steve Jobs has been looking more and more gaunt and unhealthy because of a "hormone imbalance" that has been robbing his system of vital nutrients. The full text of his letter to employees was reprinted in Forbes. But despite his candor, many journalists and bloggers found this explanation vague and unconvincing. What's wrong, people? Isn't it obvious that all the Apple chief needs are a few sophisticated blood tests and a special diet and he'll be fine by springtime. Why, think of the timing--he'll be able to greet the Easter Bunny looking just as robust as he did in 2005. What really surprised me is that with all the chatter about this on Twitter, no one once mentioned that Jobs has tried special diets before. This, NYT columnist Joe Nocera reported in a widely-cited piece in the NY Times last July (although mostly what people noted is that Jobs called Nocera and bawled him out). So, what's actually eating Jobs? I'm not a doctor, but I would hazard a guess that if this really is a hormone imbalance, it is linked to his vegetarian diet, which as Brian Caulfield reported in Forbes last summer, many think he took to an extreme, "...eating dark green vegetables such as broccoli and asparagus, grilled or steamed." Much as we would love to believe that a diet that entirely consists of vegetables is healthy, it is not. It is dangerous. And if Jobs is like most vegetarians, he is supplementing his diet with plenty of helpings of soy, which is a known hormone disruptor.

Here is the diet that I think will help him on the road to health: plenty of Grandma's chicken soup, made from a homemade broth that uses, yes, actual bones. Sally Fallon's recipe for broth on the Weston Price Foundation site is one of the best. Here you go, all--this is as low tech as you can get, in fact it's ancient. But sometimes even the most cutting edge of us need a little kitchen table wisdom:

Chicken Stock

1 whole free-range chicken or 2 to 3 pounds of bony chicken parts, such as necks, backs, breastbones and wings*
gizzards from one chicken (optional)
2-4 chicken feet (optional)
4 quarts cold filtered water
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
1 bunch parsley

*Note: Farm-raised, free-range chickens give the best results. Many battery-raised chickens will not produce stock that gels.

If you are using a whole chicken, cut off the wings and remove the neck, fat glands and the gizzards from the cavity. Cut chicken parts into several pieces. (If you are using a whole chicken, remove the neck and wings and cut them into several pieces.) Place chicken or chicken pieces in a large stainless steel pot with water, vinegar and all vegetables except parsley. Let stand 30 minutes to 1 hour. Bring to a boil, and remove scum that rises to the top. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 6 to 8 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavorful it will be. About 10 minutes before finishing the stock, add parsley. This will impart additional mineral ions to the broth.

Remove whole chicken or pieces with a slotted spoon. If you are using a whole chicken, let cool and remove chicken meat from the carcass. Reserve for other uses, such as chicken salads, enchiladas, sandwiches or curries. Strain the stock into a large bowl and reserve in your refrigerator until the fat rises to the top and congeals. Skim off this fat and reserve the stock in covered containers in your refrigerator or freezer.

The unbelievably accurately named Madoff

I have posted several times on the eerie syndrome the New Scientist has dubbed "nominative determinism," in which a person's name matches their profession or personality. With the name Sunshine, I can't help but be interested in this. I've seen so many of these so-called "aptonyms" that I've become rather used to them, but even I was floored by the news that a man named Madoff, which is pronounced "made off," was arrested for a giant Ponzi scheme in which he, yes, made off with $50 billion of other people's money. What can I say? I wish that my sunny, upbeat personality was all my own doing, just as Bernard Madoff must wish that he can throw all the guilt off himself by pleading nominative insanity. Whatever the answer to all this, it has already proven wonderful fodder for late night comedians. I think Jay Leno said it best: "Shouldn't the first clue have been the guy's name? Madoff, you know, as in 'made off with the money,' you know? I mean, who were his partners, Pilfered and Swindled?"

Crestor Study - What does it really mean?

The headlines are screaming that Crestor is the best when it comes to reducing heart disease. But before we all start buying AstraZeneca stock (not that this is a bad idea), maybe we should take a look at what the news actually is here. The study, named JUPITER, was designed to test Crestor's effect on those who have elevated levels of C-reactive proteins--or actually high sensitivity, or hsCRPs to be perfectly accurate. Researchers have begun to suspect that heart disease is not caused by a gunky build-up of cholesterol in the arteries, but rather is a far more dynamic process. Yet, when one reads the coverage of this study, it's clear that no one is actually getting this key point. And here's another issue--the results trumpeted from the rooftops are simply not as good as they first appear. One issue to consider is that the trial was stopped early, because of its favorable results. Thus, a trial that was expected to measure heart disease results over several years was stopped after less than two years. How much can we really garner from such a short term study? And, despite the impressive sounding reduction--50% overall, and 38 percent for those with normal cholesterol, the actual numbers are a lot less exciting.

As pointed out in a nice BusinessWeek story on the topic:

"Dr. Andrew Tonkin, head of cardiovascular research at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, cautioned that the actual number of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events was low, even in the study participants that were taking placebos. There were 83 cardiac events of all types in the Crestor group, an 0.9% actual risk, compared with 157, or 1.8%, in the placebo group. 'You would have to treat 180 people for two years to prevent one death," he said.'"

Ummm. Okay, sorry to be a party pooper here but ... are you telling me that they stopped the study based on a 74-person, .9% difference? What if the results were reversed in the second two years? There's no reason that couldn't happen, is there?

Believe me, I'm glad this study was done, because first of all it could save some lives, which is the most important thing. Secondly, it is yet another nail in the coffin of the cholesterol theory--though of course few people recognize this. And finally, it's important that statins be tested on wider populations. This was the first study that included a signficant number of women. But for pete's sake, can you at least finish a study before you declare victory? On such a short term, there's a good chance these were spurious. Don't you agree?

My Ironic Name

Back in January 2007, writer Nicholas Carr described me on his "Rough Type" blog as the "ironically named" Sunshine Mugrabi because, according to him, I was just one of several reporters falling into a trap he was calling "The Cassandra Meme." The silly idea I was floating back then? In light of early evidence that there were not enough exits to justify the mass investment in Web 2.0, there was a good chance that we could be heading for another fall--one not all that dissimilar to the dot com bubble.

As my Red Herring article at the time read: "Layoffs and debt-ridden companies abound in a dire sign of another dot-com bust." Well, here's hoping he was right to mock me, and further, here's hoping that I was wrong. Unfortunately, I don't think I was. TechCrunch has been posting a Layoff Tracker, with companies being added each day. Yahoo's 10 percent cut is the least of it--a lot of the companies that are hitting this list are the ones we were assured had rock solid business plans. In any case, Carr was wrong about my name being ironic--I'm as sunny and optimistic as you can get. The difference is, I don't see a correction as a bad thing. The dot com meltdown didn't hurt Amazon and it positively made Google. I have no doubt that this time around, the companies that will make it will be the ones that have something truly innovative to offer. I personally gained a great deal during the dot com crash--I got out of tech for a while and went to work for a daily paper in a small town. That was the best education I could've imagined, as I had editors who had been doing the same thing for decades. They'd seen enough stuff come and go that they were rarely if ever fooled by something that looked too good to be true.

Green IT - high tech greenwashing?

Now that my job is to help companies get the word out about what they have to offer, I'm finding that it's not as easy to dismiss them with a snarky line or two. Such is the case with a word that I used to let roll off my tongue on a regular basis: greenwashing. I still use it in regards to, say, BP's claims of ecosensitivity. But the latest eco-efforts in the information technology space are trickier to debunk. Some are highly suspect, of course--I've seen far too many broad claims from companies that, say, spin storage disks down, about how much they're doing for the planet. But the fact is that the IT sector needs to take steps to reduce its energy and materials usage, and there are some legitimate efforts in that arena, particularly among companies in the UK.

In representing a storage company with a green and cost-saving agenda, Ocarina Networks, I have gotten to know Doug Washburn, an analyst at Forrester Research who specializes in greening IT departments. Ocarina, we both agree, is a legitimate green business, in that its technology reduces the amount of space that's needed to store all the millions of photos, documents, videos and other data-intensive files being shared around the internet. And in talking to him, I've started taking a much closer look at the emerging category of Green IT. What I'm finding is that - first and foremost - there is a huge and growing need to take energy and materials usage into account when it comes to determining the resources allocated to IT for companies of all sizes. Cloud computing -- which for some looks like a panacea--actually raises even more questions. Just because someone else is handling some or all of your IT needs doesn't mean they're doing it in a way that is less wasteful. In looking into this emerging Green IT space, I've found some interesting sites:

Energy Matters - Green Storage Blog
Sustainable IT
Greener Computing

All food for thought, I'd say.