Don’t Fear, Doctor Twitter is Here: Sickcity.org, an open source project created as part of DIYcity.org – which pegs itself as “realtime disease detection for your city” – tracks the number of tweets containing specific sickness related words (e.g. flu, chicken pox) by location. A cool idea, but unfortunately in its first test, swine flu, the site faired poorly according to this article from the Wall Street Journal. The tool was unable to distinguish between those few tweeting about actual flu systems versus the masses tweeting about concerns or media coverage of the malady. Without figuring out how to make this distinction, which might require some sick algorithms, sickcity.org could still serve as an early detection tool before the media storm sets in.
TimeWarner to Undiddle the AOL Doodle: They say that those that make the baby love the baby, unless that infant is responsible for $75B in lost market capitalization. This week it was announced that AOL TimeWarner (NYSE: TWX) will spin off America Online to shareholders after failing to find a buyer for the once-dominant ISP. This news might merit a shrug until remembering the original merger; in 2000 this was the largest deal in history with TimeWarner offering $168 billion for the internet company. To put this in context, TW had a market capitalization of $100 billion in the months before the announcement, with a share price hovering around $220. Today the combined company has a market cap of $27B and a stock trading at $23 a share. The spinoff, approved this week by the Board of Directors, now values AOL at $5.5B, a jaw dropping 97% drop from the purchase price in just nine years. While shareholders have certainly taken a beating the real victims were the 68,000 employees of TW, many of whom were primarily holding TimeWarner stock in there 401ks. Bad baby.
