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TECHNOLOGY B4 | CAREERS B7 | MANAGING B8 | WEATHER B9
Seafood Industry Laments
People Just Aren’t Biting
Twitter Bets Big on Data
And Hires a Product Chief
FOOD B9
SOCIAL MEDIA B2
© 2014 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved.
****
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | B1
Price War Erupts in Cloud Services
BY SHIRA OVIDE
“Nobody ever gives you a 40%
price break overnight,” Mr. Simonsen says. “Our direct benefit
is the opportunity to create more
products, faster.”
Amazon’s eight-year-old business, called Amazon Web Services, pioneered the notion of
leasing computing power, sparing companies the costs of building their own computing backbone. So far, it has primarily
appealed to small firms like Altos.
Microsoft and Google recently
bolstered their own offerings,
sparking a three-way price war.
Within days last month, each
Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft
Corp. and Google Inc. are warring over the future of corporate
computing, and executives like
Michael Simonsen are reaping
the benefits.
Mr. Simonsen, chief executive
of real-estate startup Altos Research, rents computing horsepower and data storage from
Amazon to crunch data on about
100 million U.S. home listings.
Three weeks ago, Amazon cut Altos’s bill nearly in half. That enabled Mr. Simonsen to add two
programmers.
company cut prices on various
services by up to 85%.
That is changing the math for
corporate executives who spend
roughly $140 billion a year to
buy computers, Internet cables,
software and other gear for corporate-technology nerve centers.
The tussle will determine how
companies orchestrate the computing that runs their businesses, and it threatens the makers of traditional computingcenter equipment such as
International Business Machines
Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and
EMC Corp. A spokesman said
IBM offers both outsourced
computing services and “highermargin software.” H-P executive
Bill Hilf said it is focused on
helping organizations modernize
their computing backbones to
own, rent or a mix. EMC president Jeremy Burton said its sales
are growing quickly to providers
of Web-friendly computing.The price war is already delaying the day of reckoning for
companies that thought they
would one day own their own
computing centers.
Marketing-technology firm
Krux Inc. has used Amazon’s
computers to personalize information or ads on customers’
websites since it started four
years ago. CEO Tom Chavez figured Krux would need its own
corporate-computing hubs once
750 million Web surfers encountered its technology each month.
But it’s now at more than double
that level, and Mr. Chavez says
he isn’t planning a move anytime
soon.
“These latest price wars
among the big guys are sure to
postpone it even further, which
is terrific for my business,” Mr.
Please turn to page B4
 Some firms turn to open-source
tool to build their cloud............ B4
New Shale Boom Problem: Radioactive Waste
In North Dakota, Officials Discover Improper Dumping of ‘Oil Socks’; No Storage Facility in the State
BY CHESTER DAWSON
North Dakota Health Department/Associated Press
200 miles
200 km
Rick Greenwood checked in
for an overnight stay at a Dallas
hospital two years ago to have a
spinal-cord stimulator implanted
in his back. The surgery was
meant to relieve the back pain
that had troubled him for more
than 40 years, but when he left
Radiation levels from these
oil socks are fairly low—North
Dakota state officials say a person could stand for a year by a
dumpster full of them and receive less skin radiation than
from a dental X-ray. But the discovery of the large quantities of
improperly stored and abandoned radioactive waste has
triggered a public outcry.
Last week, the state reacted
by passing new regulations—effective June 1—forcing the shaleoil industry to use leak-proof
containers to temporarily store
the hospital one month later, he
was pushed out in a wheelchair,
paralyzed from the waist down.
Mr. Greenwood, 66 years old, is
among more than 100 patients
who have experienced partial or
permanent paralysis in recent
years after having spinal-cord
stimulators inserted in their backs,
according to a Wall Street Journal
How the Implant Works
Spine
1. A small
external remote
signals the pulse
generator
implanted in the
lower back.
3
2. The pulse generator sends
low currents of electricity
through the extension wires
into the leads tunneled into
the spine.
Lead
2
Extension
wire
Pulse
generator
1
Composite
Source: Mayfield Clinic
The Wall Street Journal
Watford City
Trash bags full of radioactive oil filter socks were found in an abandoned building in Noonan, N.D.
Stimulation therapy helps manage
chronic pain by sending mild electrical
impulses to the spine that distract
the brain from recognizing pain signals.
3. The electrical current
from the leads creates a
tingling sensation that
masks the pain signals as
they travel to the brain.
CANADA
Noonan
the socks at well sites. “This is a
response to the ongoing problem
of illegal dumping of filter
socks,” said Lynn Helms, director
of the state department of mineral resources.
North Dakota already mandates the filters eventually be
transported by “licensed waste
haulers” to an authorized disposal facility.
The problem: North Dakota
doesn’t have a single storage facility capable of handling radioactive waste—and it now has between 500 and 600 injection
When Spine Implants Cause
Paralysis, Who Is to Blame?
BY JOSEPH WALKER
1Q 2014
5%
s1.7%
0
–5
–10
–15
2012
’13
Note: Excludes traffic acquisition costs
Source: the company
The Wall Street Journal
Yahoo
Ekes Out
Ad-Sales
Growth
BY DOUGLAS MACMILLAN
analysis of adverse-event reports
submitted to the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration, and a review
of medical malpractice lawsuits. In
many cases, the injuries occurred
after patients’ spinal cords were
punctured or compressed by the
stimulator electrodes, which are
implanted in a narrow cavity of
the spine called the epidural
space, according to experts who
reviewed the reports.
In all, the FDA’s database contains 58 unique reports of paralysis with report or event dates
from 2013, compared with 48 in
the prior year. The patients received spinal stimulators made by
a variety of companies, including
the three biggest: Medtronic Inc.,
St. Jude Medical Inc. and Boston
Scientific Corp.
Researchers at Duke University
Medical Center recently found that
nearly one in every 100 spinal
stimulator patients experienced
some degree of spinal-cord or spinal nerve-root damage, said Shivanand P. Lad, a Duke neurosurgeon and the study’s lead
researcher. The study, based on insurance claim records of 12,300
stimulator patients, has been submitted for presentation at an upcoming medical meeting.
A 2011 study based on adverse
Please turn to the next page
wells producing the socks.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the average
level of radium in soil is below
five picocuries per gram, which
is the maximum threshold for
waste disposal at standard
dumps in North Dakota and
many other states. The average
concentration of radium in
wastewater sludge from oil-andgas production is about 75 picocuries per gram, according to
the EPA.
Several states outside of
North Dakota—Idaho, Colorado,
M O N T.
N.D.
Bismarck
MINN.
94
S.D.
Utah, and to some extent, Montana—have designated dumps to
handle above-average levels of
radioactive waste. Facilities in
Montana accept materials under
30 picocuries per gram, while in
Idaho, they tolerate levels as
high as 1,500.
As a result, radioactive oil
Please turn to the next page
For the first time in more
than a year, Yahoo Inc. is growing, albeit barely.
Yahoo on Tuesday reported
its revenue, minus commissions
paid to partners for Web traffic,
rose 1% in the first quarter after
four straight quarters without
growth. Meanwhile, revenue
from display ads, excluding the
traffic costs, increased 2% to
$409 million.
Investor
optimism
was
buoyed by better-than-expected
results at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the fast-growing e-commerce giant in which Yahoo
owns a 24% stake. Yahoo said
Alibaba’s revenue jumped 66% in
the December quarter, the most
recent quarter available, faster
than the 51% increase reported
in the September period.
Alibaba’s results should allay
investor concerns that a slower
growth rate in the third quarter
was the start of an ominous
trend. The Alibaba results were
highly anticipated because the
company is preparing for an initial public offering in New York
later this year that could value it
at $100 billion or more.
Investors sent Yahoo’s stock
up more than 6% in after-hours
trading to $36.62, after a 2.3%
rise during market hours.
Yahoo’s growth, however
small, is a positive mark for
Chief Executive Marissa Mayer,
who has faced scrutiny over her
inability to jump-start the company’s ad revenue. Since taking
over as CEO nearly two years
ago, Ms. Mayer has updated popular sites like Flickr and Yahoo
Finance, created splashy new online magazines and slick mobile
apps, and acquired dozens of
small startups to inject new talent into the aging Internet giant.
It is still too early to say
Please turn to page B5
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P2JW106000-4-B00100-1--------XA
At a deserted gas station in a
remote North Dakotan town, local officials recently found an
unintended byproduct of the
shale-oil boom: hundreds of garbage bags filled with mildly radioactive waste.
These bags, which were discovered late February in Noonan, N.D., contained what are
known as “oil socks”: three-footlong, snake-like filters made of
absorbent fiber. The shale-oil industry uses the socks to capture
silt from waste water resulting
from hydraulic fracturing.
Days earlier, a similar trove
had been found on flatbed trailers near a landfill in Watford
City—which, like Noonan, is located in the state’s sparsely populated westernmost reaches
where the Bakken oil shale formation lies.
The two recent incidents
show that North Dakota’s regulators have been slow to address
repercussions from the surge in
crude output, ranging from
widespread flaring of natural gas
at oil wells to drill rigs popping
up on historic lands.
Most of the radioactive material in oil socks comes from silt
filtered in the process of pumping waste water down injection
wells. Radium, found in soil, rock
and water, accumulates in the
filtered silt.
“Before the Bakken oil boom
we didn’t have any of these materials being generated,” said
Scott Radig, the state’s director
of waste management. “So it
wasn’t really an issue.”
The trailers found in Watford
City that contained improperly
stored oil socks belonged to Riverton, Wyo.-based RP Services
LLC, state officials said. The investigation is still underway, and
RP Services didn’t respond to requests for comment. One of its
clients, oil giant Continental Resources Inc., has cut ties with
the company.
Rebound
Yahoo shows signs of growth in
its display revenue. Change from
previous year
SM
MAGENTA
BLACK
CYAN
YELLOW