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Thursday, October 1, 2009

MSN Debuts Online Health Service

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MSN, Microsoft’s online portal, released a beta version of a service to let users manage their health information on the Web.

Called My Health Info, the Microsoft offering, which includes a range of widgets and other Web tools, wades into an area that many are attempting to crack, including Google.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Maybe the Feds Can Diagnose What Ails Apple and Steve Jobs (and Whether It Matters or Not)

Early this morning, Bloomberg reported that regulators are looking into Apple’s disclosures about the health–or lack thereof–of its iconic CEO Steve Jobs.

And while BoomTown has railed against the creepy obsession the media have had with Jobs’s health and the publishing of rumors and innuendos about it as fact without a whole lot of reporting, I hope it is true.

It is also entirely appropriate that the government agency charged with keeping an eye on public companies does investigate–at the very least, to get the story right.

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish

The restless frenzy is what is perhaps most disturbing of all about the never-ending obsessive death watch that has centered on Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

What doesn’t make your skin crawl about it?

That’s why BoomTown thinks it is time to listen to the wise words Jobs delivered at a now legendary Stanford Commencement address in 2005.

The last words of the speech came from the back of “The Whole Earth Catalog”: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

I think right about now, that foolish part has gone way too far for Jobs and the rest of us.

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

To Err Is Human, to Live Divine: How Exactly No One Got It Right About Steve Jobs’s Health

You knew it was coming, of course.

Since the blogosphere couldn’t actually kill him off–deeply lazy and incredibly wrong in insinuating that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was dying imminently–it turned around yesterday and declared him a liar for not saying he had a “hormonal imbalance” sooner.

Of course, Apple has also played along in this bizarre game, along with its defenders, who have all tried to pretend nothing is wrong with a man who clearly looks like he has had the stuffing knocked out of him because of his long-running health issues.

Since the facts of the matter seem dead on arrival, get Marcus Welby, M.D., stat!

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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Memo to All Crepe-Hangers: It Still Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

Now, it’s getting flat-out macabre.

That would be the continuing swirl of attention the health of Apple icon Steve Jobs has been getting.

Rumors of his impending demise have been popping up periodically since the too-thin crisis of the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and look like they won’t stop until it actually comes true.

My grandmother used to have a perfect rejoinder for this kind of funeral-chasing behavior, which was prevalent among her gang of Italian sisters, who–whenever anyone caught a cold–predicted the worst outcome: “Don’t be a crepe-hanger.”

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Monday, July 28, 2008

Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

So, I have been standing by, trying to make sense of the debate that has swirled around Apple CEO, Co-
Founder and font-of-all Steve Jobs with regard to his health or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

And after listening to all of the debate about it–mostly indignant declarations by the media, making their case mostly by wheedling milder indignant declarations out of stock analysts and corporate tsk-tsk outfits–I have concluded that what is ailing Jobs is exactly no one’s business.

Even if his every breath is critical to the ongoing operations of Apple, the reason most use as their main argument for Jobs to tell all, it goes double.

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The Entire D6 Interview With the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates (1 of 4)

We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

In this video, Melinda Gates talks about her early days as a Microsoft product manager, how to take technology to the developing world, the politics of vaccines and how the Gates Foundation can be “catalytic” wedge.

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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