URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1043 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 25, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

On the Internet, Everyone Can Hear You Complain
BYLINE: By DAN FOST
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 732 words
A San Francisco start-up called Get Satisfaction is the latest online ombudsman to try to mediate customer service complaints.

Get Satisfaction allows people to post feedback about their experiences with any company they choose, and it encourages companies to visit its site, www.getsatisfaction.com, to respond publicly. Since September, when the site began, people have posted complaints or comments regarding 2,000 companies, and 40 percent of the companies have answered, at no charge to either side.

The Internet is rife with sounding boards for the disgruntled, who have their choice of blogs, sound-off sites like Yelp and Epinions, and dedicated customer service sites like Get Satisfaction, PlanetFeedback and Complaints.com.

All this venting can bring about some productive results -- happier customers, resolved disputes -- but it remains to be seen whether the sites that serve as intermediaries can actually turn a decent profit.

Complaints.com and PlanetFeedback make money from advertisements; the founder of PlanetFeedback, Pete Blackshaw, said in an interview that he made little money from the site but ran it mainly as a hobby. Matthew Smith, the founder of Complaints.com, said his site was profitable, but would not offer specifics.

Get Satisfaction, which is backed by venture capital and aims one day to be financially stable, has little if any revenue and has not decided if it will sell ads; rather, its goal is to persuade companies to buy the software it has developed. The software helps companies communicate with customers. It also organizes data about the people talking about their products and what they are saying.

For now, companies that want to use Get Satisfaction can grab a free application, or widget, from its Web site and put it on their own sites. The software code in the widget then directs customers to the dialogue on Get Satisfaction. As with many start-ups, Get Satisfaction hopes to build an audience first and make money later.

The company asserts that the Internet can lead to better customer service dialogue -- if people make reasonable complaints, customers can help one another solve problems. It can also make companies more open to acknowledging their mistakes and to fixing them.

''We want to create a Switzerland for companies and customers, with specific tools that allow people to get answers to their questions,'' said Thor Muller, Get Satisfaction's chief executive. ''We want the best answers to rise to the top, and not get buried in online discussion forums.''

Mr. Muller is a serial entrepreneur who had run a Web design company, Rubyred Labs, with his wife, Amy, as a partner. They started Get Satisfaction last year with $1.3 million in venture capital from First Round Capital and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company was originally named Satisfaction Unlimited but is changing the name to match the Web address.

The first companies to respond to customers on the site are typically tech-oriented -- like Twitter, the instant messaging service, and PBwiki, a collaborative software maker -- but the site aims to serve a broad realm of consumer products. One early user is Timbuk2 Designs, which makes bags and briefcases.

''There were a lot of conversations going on outside of Timbuk2, on student blogs and other sites,'' said Patti Roll, director for marketing at Timbuk2. ''Get Satisfaction is a way for us to aggregate that into a format that's easy to utilize.''

One Timbuk2 customer went to Get Satisfaction to complain about his effort to cancel an order for a custom-made bag. By the time he canceled, the bag had already been made.

''Another person, not an employee, responded first,'' Ms. Roll said. ''They said, 'You're complaining that the service was so fast that they made your custom bag so quickly?' It's exactly what we were hoping to see -- customers communicating with customers. That's really rich.'' Ultimately, she said, Timbuk2 waived its policy and returned the customer's money, giving the bag to charity.

Many people who study the business world say that companies need to be responsive to the new freewheeling discussions that consumers generate online. The risk, said Priya Raghubir, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was that ''by not engaging consumers in this environment, the mere fact you haven't engaged them becomes public knowledge.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CUSTOMER SERVICE (90%); INTERNET & WWW (90%); VENTURE CAPITAL (89%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (78%); INTERVIEWS (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); WEB SITES (77%); WEB DEVELOPMENT (72%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (89%)
LOAD-DATE: February 25, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Thor Muller, left, chief executive and a co-founder of the start-up company Get Satisfaction, and Lane Becker, a co-founder. (PHOTOGRAPH BY THOR SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1044 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 25, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

RISING INFLATION PROMPTS UNEASE IN MIDDLE EAST
BYLINE: By ROBERT F. WORTH; Nawara Mahfoud contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1413 words
DATELINE: AMMAN, Jordan
Even as it enriches Arab rulers, the recent oil-price boom is helping to fuel an extraordinary rise in the cost of food and other basic goods that is squeezing this region's middle class and setting off strikes, demonstrations and occasional riots from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.

Here in Jordan, the cost of maintaining fuel subsidies amid the surge in prices forced the government to remove almost all the subsidies this month, sending the price of some fuels up 76 percent overnight. In a devastating domino effect, the cost of basic foods like eggs, potatoes and cucumbers doubled or more.

In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause ''theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.''

The inflation has many causes, from rising global demand for commodities to the monetary constraints of currencies pegged to the weakening American dollar. But one cause is the skyrocketing price of oil itself, which has quadrupled since 2002. It is helping push many ordinary people toward poverty even as it stimulates a new surge of economic growth in the gulf.

''Now we have to choose: we either eat or stay warm. We can't do both,'' said Abdul Rahman Abdul Raheem, who works at a clothing shop in a mall in Amman and once dreamed of sending his children to private school. ''We're not really middle class anymore; we're at the poverty level.''

Some governments have tried to soften the impact of high prices by increasing wages or subsidies on foods. Jordan, for instance, has raised the wages of public-sector employees earning less than 300 dinars ($423) a month by 50 dinars ($70). For those earning more than 300 dinars, the raise was 45 dinars, or $64. But that compensates for only a fraction of the price increases, and most people who work in the private sector get no such relief.

The fact that the inflation is coinciding with new oil wealth has fed perceptions of corruption and economic injustice, some analysts say.

''About two-thirds of Jordanians now believe there is widespread corruption in the public and private sector,'' said Mohammed al-Masri, the public opinion director at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. ''The middle class is less and less able to afford what they used to, and more and more suspicious.''

In a few places the price increases have led to violence. In Yemen, prices for bread and other foods have nearly doubled in the past four months, setting off a string of demonstrations and riots in which at least a dozen people were killed. In Morocco, 34 people were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for participating in riots over food prices, the Moroccan state news service reported. Even tightly controlled Jordan has had nonviolent demonstrations and strikes.

Inflation was also a factor -- often overlooked -- in some recent clashes that were seen as political or sectarian. A confrontation in Beirut between Lebanese Army soldiers and a group of Shiite protesters that left seven people dead started with demonstrations over power cuts and rising bread prices.

In Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, inflation is in the double digits, and foreign workers, who constitute a vast majority of the work force, have gone on strike in recent months because of the declining purchasing power of the money they send home. The workers are paid in currencies that are pegged to the dollar, and the value of their salaries -- translated into Indian rupees and other currencies -- has dropped significantly.

The Middle East's heavy reliance on food imports has made it especially vulnerable to the global rise in commodity prices over the past year, said George T. Abed, the former governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority and a director at the Institute of International Finance, an organization based in Washington.

Corruption, inefficiency and monopolistic economies worsen the impact, as government officials or business owners artificially inflate prices or take a cut of such increases.

''For many basic products, we don't have free market prices, we have monopoly prices,'' said Samer Tawil, a former minister of national economy in Jordan. ''Oil, cement, rice, meat, sugar: these are all imported almost exclusively by one importer each here. Corruption is one thing when it's about building a road, but when it affects my food, that's different.''

In the oil-producing gulf countries, governments that are flush with oil money can soften the blow by spending more. The United Arab Emirates increased the salaries of public sector employees by 70 percent this month; Oman raised them 43 percent. Saudi Arabia also raised wages and increased subsidies on some foods. Bahrain set up a $100 million fund to be distributed this year to people most affected by rising prices. But all this government spending has the unfortunate side effect of worsening inflation, economists say.

Countries with less oil to sell do not have the same options.

In Syria, where oil production is drying up, prices have also risen sharply. Although it has begun to liberalize its rigid socialist economy, the government has repeatedly put off plans to eliminate the subsidies that keep prices artificially low for its citizens, fearing domestic reprisals.

Even so, the inflation of the past few months has taken a toll on all but the rich.

Thou al-Fakar Hammad, an employee in the contracts office of the Syrian state oil company, has a law degree and earns just less than 15,000 Syrian pounds, or $293, a month, twice the average national wage. His salary was once more than adequate, and until recently he sent half of it to his parents.

But rising prices have changed all that, he said. Now he has taken a second job teaching Arabic on weekends to help support his wife and young child. Unable to buy a car, he takes public buses from his two-room apartment just outside Damascus to work. He can afford the better quality diapers for his son to wear only at night and resorts to cheaper ones during the day. He cannot send anything to his parents.

''I have to live day to day,'' he said. ''I can't budget for everything because, should my child get sick, I'd spend a lot of what I earn on medication for him.''

At the same time, a new class of entrepreneurs, most of them with links to the government, has built gaudy mansions and helped transform Damascus, the Syrian capital, with glamorous new restaurants and cafes. That has helped fuel a perception of corruption and unfairness, analysts say. On Wednesday the state-owned newspaper Al Thawra published a poll that found that 450 of 452 Syrians believed that their state institutions were riddled with corruption.

''Many people believe that most of the government's economic policies are adopted to suit the interests of the newly emerging Syrian aristocracy, while disregarding the interests of the poor and lower middle class,'' said Marwan al-Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University.

The same attitudes are visible in Jordan. Even before the subsidies on fuel were removed this month, inflation had badly eroded the average family's earning power over the past five years, said Mr. Tawil, the former economic minister. Although the official inflation rate for 2007 was 5.4 percent, government studies have shown that middle-income families are spending far more on food and consuming less, he added. Last year a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that Amman was the most expensive Arab capital in cost of living.

Mr. Abdul Raheem, the clothing store employee in Amman, said, ''No one can be in the government now and be clean.''

Meanwhile, his own life has been transformed, Mr. Abdul Raheem said. He ticked off a list of prices: potatoes have jumped to about 76 cents a pound from 32 cents. A carton of 30 eggs went to nearly $4.25 from just above $2; cucumbers rose to 58 cents a pound from about 22. All this in a matter of weeks.

''These were always the basics,'' he said. ''Now they're luxuries.''

With a salary equivalent to $423 and rent at $176, paying for food and fuel exhausts his income, he said. ''But we are much better off than others,'' he added. ''We are the average.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INFLATION (92%); ECONOMIC NEWS (92%); FOOD PRICES (90%); OIL & GAS PRICES (90%); PRICE INCREASES (90%); PRICE CHANGES (89%); WAGES & SALARIES (85%); ECONOMIC GROWTH (78%); EMERGING MARKETS (77%); BOYCOTTS (77%); PROTESTS & DEMONSTRATIONS (77%); ROBBERY (76%); POOR POPULATION (76%); RIOTS (72%); CURRENCIES (66%); ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (65%); PRIVATE SCHOOLS (64%); RESEARCH INSTITUTES (60%); CLOTHING & ACCESSORIES STORES (50%); POVERTY RATES (75%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (66%)
GEOGRAPHIC: AMMAN, JORDAN (91%) INDIAN OCEAN (92%) JORDAN (93%); GULF STATES (92%); MOROCCO (92%); MIDDLE EAST (92%); YEMEN (79%); SAUDI ARABIA (79%)
LOAD-DATE: February 25, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Many in Jordan are feeling the squeeze of higher prices. At a mall in Amman, the empty aisles reflect people's inability to spend.

The cost of many basic foods, like at this market in Amman, has doubled. Some in the middle class are tilting toward poverty.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. A8)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1045 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 25, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

A Tale of Race and Family And a $10,000 Question
BYLINE: By GINIA BELLAFANTE
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; TELEVISION REVIEW 'A RAISIN IN THE SUN'; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 565 words
''A Raisin in the Sun,'' which plays Monday night on ABC, is a cleanser for selves soiled by a thousand ''Millionaire Matchmakers.'' It is a noble enterprise never dulled by its good intentions. Starring core members of the cast of the 2004 Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, the television adaptation offers polish and feeling, grievance and gut. It moves and it sings, even if the gifted Broadway musical star Audra McDonald, who appears as Ruth Younger, doesn't ever actually get to hit a note.

Ms. Hansberry's play, the subject of many revivals over the years, never belonged to the literary category James Baldwin once derided as ''protest fiction.'' It is a race play that exists as a quiet treatise on the economies of loss, asking us to think less about the broad offenses of prejudice and more about the value of familial identity and obligation.

The best plays of the 1950s turned the concept of family into a tragic affair. Individuality and rebellion were expressions of courage. ''A Raisin in the Sun'' instead made a novel case for a certain kind of conformity that transcends its racial theme. Our bloodlines make us stronger, it says; they don't tear us apart.

''A Raisin in the Sun'' revolves around the anticipation of a $10,000 check. The Younger family, struggling and cramped into a tiny apartment on the South Side of Chicago, is expecting an insurance annuity from the death of its patriarch. Its divergent dreams hinge on the cash. Walter Lee (Sean Combs) wants to use it to join the entrepreneurial classes and open a liquor store. His mother, Lena (Phylicia Rashad), seeks to put her life as a domestic behind her and provide the means to send her daughter, Beneatha (Sanaa Lathan), a sophisticate in training, to medical school.

There are no mediocre performances here. Ms. Lathan is terrific at conveying the snobbery that comes from cultural self-loathing. Beneatha doesn't simply want better things; she wants to be part of a world of bigger and better ideas. Walter, a chauffeur to a wealthy white businessman, wants to live well and be seen. That Mr. Combs makes his desires seem like more than empty materialism must come in some part from the fact that he has been hungry at the same table.

The play's most poignant speech is his, and he delivers it with all of the dignified vengeance it demands, showing us that one of the great advantages of money is the power it provides to tell the wrong people off. The Youngers have bought a house in a white working-class neighborhood whose community leader, a race baiter with a briefcase (played by a perfectly smarmy John Stamos) seeks to buy them out and retain the demographics. Walter is commendable and Mr. Combs commanding and fierce.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

ABC, Monday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Directed by Kenny Leon; John M. Eckert, producer; Craig Zadan, Neil Meron, Sean Combs, Carl Rumbaugh, Susan Batson and David Binder, executive producers; teleplay by Paris Qualles; music by Mervyn Warren; edited by Melissa Kent. Based on the play by Lorraine Hansberry.

WITH: Sean Combs (Walter Lee Jr.), Phylicia Rashad (Lena Younger), Audra McDonald (Ruth), Sanaa Lathan (Beneatha), John Stamos (Mr. Lindner), Justin Martin (Travis), Sean Patrick Thomas (George Murchison), David Oyelowo (Joseph Asagai), Bill Nunn (Bobo) and Ron Cephas Jones (Willy Harris).

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: THEATER & DRAMA (90%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (89%); MUSICAL THEATER (72%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (72%); BEER WINE & LIQUOR STORES (50%)
PERSON: SEAN (DIDDY) COMBS (53%)
TITLE: Raisin in the Sun, A (TV Program)>; Raisin in the Sun, A (TV Program)>
LOAD-DATE: February 25, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Sean Combs and Phylicia Rashad in ''A Raisin in the Sun.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER STRANKS/ABC)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1046 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 25, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

He Stomps Like Godzilla, Stings Like a... Don't Ask
BYLINE: By JANET MASLIN
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 964 words
In ''Monster, 1959'' David Maine invites readers into the pea-sized brain of a 40-foot ''monstrous smorgasbord'' known as K. Described as ''something to cause Darwin to burn his notebooks and run shrieking to the nearest monastery,'' K. lacks lips but is a kissing cousin to Godzilla. He is a hapless, guileless, rampaging creature straight out of B-movie science fiction. In light of Mr. Maine's flair for domesticating larger-than-life subject matter, his new book's premise seems hard to resist.

Mr. Maine's three previous novels, particularly his dazzling ''Fallen,'' (a reverse-chronological account of Cain, Abel, Adam and Eve), were extrapolated from Bible stories. This time, with reference points like the 1958 film ''The Wild Women of Wongo,'' he appears to be working in a lighter vein. He has concocted a sly, minimalist pastiche of monster-movie cliches, rendering them with perfect mimickry. (''That thing's got Betty!'') But ''Monster, 1959'' sometimes switches directions and stumbles toward the political allegory that is part of even the campiest ''Godzilla''-era monster tales. At these moments it stomps with the heavy, seven-toed tread of its title character.

For the record, K. is a visual wonder: huge, antennaed, partly furry, partly red-feathered and equipped with black-veined yellow butterfly wings. He lives on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. ''Around K. the jungle scampers with life,'' writes Mr. Maine, nicely setting this scene. ''Most of it is engaged in a single activity: running away from him.'' Like the local mole people, he is a by-product of American nuclear tests conducted in this remote region.

Enter the humans. They are all stock characters, starting with blond, white Betty, who becomes one of the book's running jokes. ''Where the hell's Betty?'' the book's other little people have a way of asking, because Betty often seems to be in K.'s gigantic clutches. And K., of course, is in Betty's thrall. ''He calms down when you sing to him,'' Betty confides, once she and the monster have developed a rapport.

Betty is accompanied by her new husband, the stalwart Johnny, a safari leader who exudes manly reassurance. (''Trust me, Betty. The nightmare's over.'') Their party also includes a crass entrepreneurial type named Billy, who will eventually provide the book with its most crude display of American capitalism run amok. And the group includes Cooke, the guide who is on the receiving end of the other characters' condescension and racism. (''Nobody's blaming you, Coco. You're different, you're -- civilized. Not like these -- these -- savages.'') Sometimes such touches in ''Monster, 1959'' are deft, since they are indigenous to K.'s native movie genre.

After plot complications involving a native tribe, a big banquet and drugged wine, the visiting adventurers find themselves in peril. So does K. Despite conflicts with an enemy like ''K.'s rival, the flying-reptile-dragon-dinosaur-eagle,'' the embattled creature has never had to give much thought to strategy. ''His conscious mind, such as it is, is taken up with the more pressing demands of Existence 101,'' Mr. Maine writes, adding a parenthetical illustration: ''(Broken bones take longer to heal when the patient is starving to death. Discuss.'') Meanwhile, off the island's coast, a boat called the Ocean Princess stands ready to transport the captured behemoth to his new life. He will be turned into an American circus attraction.

In a book that begins in 1955 and delineates each separate year's section as a film reel, the narrative lumbers toward a dramatic climax in 1959. At the end of that year, in New York City, K.'s story takes a cataclysmic turn. ''The lame don't walk and the blind don't see, but it's close, it's close,'' Mr. Maine writes about the way a huge, destructive beast affects the city's civilian population. Yet something positive awaits K., even in the midst of this meltdown. Out in New York Harbor stands a huge green female to catch his eye.

It's not hard to grasp Mr. Maine's meaning when he gets to the Statue of Liberty. ''In the black night she glows green, like something irradiated or unhealthy, like one of Marie Curie's nightmares,'' he writes. ''Like a refugee from Bikini Atoll, or White Sands, or Nagasaki.'' And K., unlike the ''Godzilla''-era monsters who ravaged Japan, is in Manhattan to meet her.

Instead of leaving his readers to connect allegorical dots, Mr. Maine finally spells out his story's specific implications. In the course of the story he connects the captive K. to political prisoners, including Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister deposed in a C.I.A.-backed coup in 1953, and Nelson Mandela, imprisoned a decade later in South Africa. But ''Monster, 1959'' saves its greatest venom for Zionism. It equates K.'s ouster from his homeland with the creation of Israel and the plight of Palestinian refugees, using statements from Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion and Winston Churchill to bolster its argument.

For a writer who, in earlier books, took on Biblical subjects with such temerity, Mr. Maine works much less confidently this time. His equation of lovably cheap cinema with political outrage is, even at the simplest stylistic level, glaringly imbalanced. Shifting its tone from K.'s benighted obliviousness to omniscient sarcasm, the book burdens a fragile, satirical structure with the weight of serious grievances on many subjects.

A campy 1950s sensibility becomes an umbrella excuse for folding racism, imperialism, the Cold War and Israeli-Palestinian strife into a book that roams confusedly all over the map. And Mr. Maine, ordinarily so much subtler a writer, creates a monster in more ways than one.

MONSTER, 1959

By David Maine

244 pp. St. Martin's Press. $23.95.

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