PA311-2011

Mobile Beacon (www.mobilebeacon.org), a leading provider of low-cost 4G mobile broadband service exclusively to the education and nonprofit sectors

With the recent news that more e-books were brought than paperbacks in February, its no surprise that Amazon is allowing the Kindle to borrow e-books from more than 11,000 libraries across the U.S. in working with OverDrive, a huge supplier of e-books for public schools and libraries. Students and non-profits will now have greater access to e-books, but the limit on checking out books is a concern with HaperCollins announcing a new policy that requires e-books to expire after being check out only 26 times.

In getting ready to fully utilize social media and online tools for his upcoming campaign, Obama is holding a town hall meeting at Silicon Valley. Facebook users have been sending in their questions for the President and more than 36,000 users have said they will virtually attend the meeting held today that will include Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg. Obama will surely utilize social media tools alike Facebook and twitter to get his message out there for next years campaign. This is a great example of participatory government in the context of online social media.

The Coachella music festival was broadcasted live through youtube last weekend, representing a momentous change in the collaboration of music and online tools. With few glitches and little advertising, the concert was broadcasted over three days through youtube where people got the chance to pick between the three stages to watch their favorite artists. Free and easy to access is becoming more and more prevalent everyday with online tools. The streaming video was viewed over four million times. Nonprofits that are concentrated on promoting and advocating the arts and music can look at this as an innovative way to connect to an audience.

"The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by Buddy Media, Power Tools for Facebook. Unsure how to respond on Facebook? Download Buddy Media's free whitepaper, "The Definitive Guide to Social Media Moderation and Publishing." With more than 700 status updates posted on Facebook per second, you need a game plan."

Forbes reports: "Someone has hijacked the tax identity of more than 2,300 tiny or defunct nonprofits, apparently taking advantage of a hole in a new electronic Internal Revenue Service filing system to list the same person as a charitable official at the same mail box drop in Las Vegas."

"Yesterday, we told you how someone was able to steal the tax identity of 2,300-plus small nonprofits due to a hole in a new electronic filing system implemented by the Internal Revenue Service. Every nonprofit in this group, most with religiously themed names, now lists as a principal officer one William Alexander and its address as the same mail-box drop on N. Rainbow Blvd. in Las Vegas. This happened due to a glitch that essentially allows a nonprofit's contact information to be changed online by anyone who registers on an IRS-designated site with a name-which is not verified-and an email address."

- "MedAssurant, Inc., a leading provider of data-driven healthcare solutions, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM), one of the nation's top health care plans, today announced an expansion of their partnership to achieve an industry-leading capability to improve delivery of care to its Medicare Advantage members. The partnership centers around integrated quality outcomes, utilization improvement, financial performance, and business intelligence.  With a focus on highly coordinated analytics and interventions, BCBSM has partnered with MedAssurant to implement a suite of eight solutions spanning CMS 5 Star Complete Quality Management (CQM™), NCQA HEDIS management, Prospective Advantage™, Capitated Risk Adjustment (CARA™), Claims Aggregation Analysis and Submission (CAAS™), CareSync Advantage™, Business Intelligence, and Distributed Analytics™."

Computerworld - "The federal government's "meaningful use" attestation (PDF document) period begins today, allowing data collected on electronic health record systems (EHRs) by hospitals and physician practices to be submitted in order to receive thousands to millions of dollars in reimbursement payments...."

Clarification - the description is an excerpt beginning with the 4th paragraph of the article. Not my words. "My problem is that for as long as I have tried to figure out, Dropbox made some bold claims about how your files were encrypted and how nobody had access to them, with statements like: All transmission of file data occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL). All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files, and when troubleshooting an account they only have access to file metadata (filenames, file sizes, etc., not the file contents)."