Last year about this time of year I wrote a parody of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas about the coming of healthcare IT and meaningful use. I decided to make these holiday parody songs an annual event. I figure I have years of material, as there are so many ways of ruining an otherwise joyous holiday gem by mixing it with healthcare and public policy.

This year’s victim, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, was written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie in 1934. The original lyrics to the song can be found here. The song is a little weird because it lets kids know that Santa Claus is watching them all the time like some sort of red velvet-clad big brother machine. If the children aren’t good they won’t get any presents for Christmas, so the song has the extra-added attraction of veiled threat. Kind of reminded me of what’s happening with health reform and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). For those in the healthcare industry, there is definitely a feeling the eyes of government are upon them. Insurers, employers, medical device and drug manufacturers had all better watch out or the best thing PPACA is going to leave them come 2014 is a lump of coal.

Note: for purposes of this song, PPACA is pronounced PEE-Packa

PPACA Is Coming To Town

Oh,
The doctors will pout
The Demos whine
The health plans will shout
I’m telling you why
PPACA is coming to town

Hospitals get dissed
By patients checking-in twice
Payers won’t find the profit caps nice
PPACA is coming to town

And all the states are freaking
’bout the individual mandate
Here’s hoping an exchange is good
For the ones health plans forsake

Consumers scream out
“You can’t force me to buy”
Republicans shout
“We’re all gonna die!”
PPACA is coming to town

New taxes mount
On drugs and new knees
Everyone pays
In two thousand fourteen
PPACA is coming to town

Court-watchers doubt
The Supremes can soon find
A way to uphold
And not to unwind
PPACA is coming to town

And CMS is hoping
ACOs will light the way
But CFOs are choking
Bundled payments make them pray

We all better hope
What we get from D.C.
Will drive quality up
And get costs to decrease

PPACA is coming to town!

And in case you forgot the tune, here is a version of the original song sung by the great Frank Sinatra

Happy Holidays everyone! And to all my Jewish friends, sorry about the Christmas song bias…not much you can do with Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.

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A new online retailer of toys, YoYo.com, goes live today, out to grab its share of the coming holiday gift buying season. YoYo is the latest addition to Jersey City-based Quidsi’s gallery of online specialty shops, which also includes Wag.com, Diapers.com, Soap.com, and BeautyBar.com. Quidsi is part of the Seattle giant Amazon.com.

“There was a huge opportunity for us to apply the model we’ve proved out with our existing sites to the toy space,” says Galyn Bernard, site director of YoYo.

She says YoYo was designed to make gift buying less overwhelming for customers while offering an assortment of 20,000 different toys, books, and games. For example, YoYo’s staff curates lists of toy ideas appropriate for different ages from infants through 13-year-olds to ease some of the decision-making burden that shoppers face. “In some instances, customers know exactly what they want, and sometimes they are looking for guidance,” Bernard says.

Visitors to YoYo will find features such as a toy finder that can be set by age, gender, and price. There are also filters to sort toys by such parameters as not requiring batteries or assembly. YoYo shares its online shopping cart with Quidsi’s other sites, which allows customers to gather purchases for different needs into one order. YoYo offers free two-day deliver for orders of $49 and up, though that threshold is reduced to $39 when purchases are combined from more than one of Quidsi’s sites.

Though YoYo does not currently have exclusive toys, Olivia Marks, director of merchandising for the website, says some niche brands plan to provide select items in the future. “One exclusive [agreement] we have for later in the year is with Wentworth Wooden Puzzles, a high-end British puzzle maker,” Marks says. YoYo will offer … Next Page »

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Like many news operations, Xconomy is going into hibernation for a well-deserved week off, starting December 24. We’ll fire up WordPress, Tweetdeck, and all of our other tools again on Monday, January 3 (which happens to be my birthday).

The only exception: a series of guests posts that we’ll be publishing in our Xconomist Forum section over the holiday break. These pieces, contributed by leading members of the technology and investment communities in each of Xconomy’s home cities, will take a look back at some of the most important and surprising developments of 2010, and hazard a few guesses about what’s coming in 2011. Keep an eye out for them starting Monday, December 27.

Before I sign off, I wanted to send out a personal thank-you to everyone who has shared their time, stories, and advice with me and my colleagues since we opened our Bay Area bureau in June. When we decided to expand our coverage of high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, we knew that we’d face stiff competition from all of the existing new organizations covering the technology scene—great publications like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and others. But again and again, entrepreneurs and investors around the Bay Area have told us that they need and want Xconomy’s brand of in-depth, long-form journalism about both technology and life sciences.

As my colleague Luke Timmerman and I wrote on June 15, the day after we launched Xconomy San Francisco:

The Silicon Valley/San Francisco/Berkeley axis is arguably the only place on Earth that’s already oversaturated with technology bloggers. Every curt e-mail from Steve Jobs, every bead of sweat from Mark Zuckerberg, every hot gadget of the day is given ad nauseum coverage on the Web. Why would Bay Area readers want to add Xconomy to their mix of news sources? Well, the truth is that other technology publications are doing a great job of covering the constant stream of product releases, venture financings, and industry conferences (not to mention the rumors, gossip, and controversy) coming out of the Bay Area. What’s missing, we think, is a publication that puts entrepreneurs and innovators first: that looks underneath the daily news stream for original stories about the nuts-and-bolts challenges of turning great ideas into successful businesses.

That’s what we’ve been trying to build, with stories highlighting the most innovative companies across consumer and business software, cleantech and energy, and the life sciences, from pharmaceuticals to medical devices.

As we establish our presence here, we’re grateful to have the support of the Xconomists and of local underwriters and partners like Alexandria Real Estate Equities, ARCH Venture Partners, Avalon Ventures, BayBio, Fenwick & West, Goodwin Procter, HP Startup Central, Invest Northern Ireland, J. Robert Scott Executive Search, Jennifer Jones & Partners, the Kauffman Foundation, Latham & Watkins, Morrison Foerster Cleantech Group, Schwartz Communications, the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security, and SRI International.

We’re also excited to be working with syndication partners like the Bay Citizen. And we are extremely grateful to everyone who helped with our inaugural Bay Area networking event, the November 30 fireside chat event with venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. The event was a huge success, thanks to the support of KickLabs San Francisco, Neuro Drinks, Goodwin Procter, Silicon Valley Bank, HP Startup Central, media partner GigaOm, and Sequoia .

Happy holidays to all Xconomy readers—we’ll see you in 2011. (Oh, hey: If you’re looking for last-minute holiday gift ideas, check out The Xconomy 2010 Gadget Gift Guide and iStocking Stuffers: The Best Apps for that Pad Under the Tree.)

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The big event dominating Xconomy San Francisco’s calendar last week was our on-stage conversation with Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, which was enlightening and well-attended, filling San Francisco’s KickLabs to capacity. I’m working on bringing you video highlights from the talk, which ranged from Moritz’s tricks for identifying great entrepreneurs to the funding options for early-stage startups his experiences as a journalist. Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the other news we covered last week.

—Google bought Seattle, WA-based Widevine Technologies, a maker of streaming, digital rights management, and copy-protection software for on-demand Internet video, as Greg reported. The purchase could help Google fill a hole in its competition with Apple on the Internet TV front.

—I profiled Blinkx, a six-year-old San Francisco company that trades on the London Stock Exchange and specializes in online video search. The company has quietly built the world’s largest index of online video.

—In my holiday gadget gift guide, I looked at eight devices (and associated accessories) that would make great presents for any technology lover, including the Roku Streaming Player, Apple TV, the Amazon Kindle, the Flip Ultra HD video camera, the Canon Vixia HF R100 camcorder, the Vizit digital photo frame, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the Apple iPad.

—Famous Menlo Park, CA, venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers hired longtime Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as its newest partner.

—In acquisitions news, Redwood City, CA-based Makara, which makes software for managing cloud applications, was purchased by Red Hat (NYSE: RHT); San Mateo, CA-based social media startup Ludic Labs was bought by Chicago-based Groupon; San Jose, CA-based Ketera Technologies was bought by Rearden Commerce; San Jose-based Cisco bought LineSider Technologies of Danvers, MA; and Sunnyvale, CA-based 4Home was acquired by Motorola Mobility of Libertyville, IL.

—In funding news, Yammer raised $25 million, Payvment raised $6 million, and Rackitivity raised $8 million.

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Posting will be light today as Xconomy is closed for Presidents Day. We’ll be back tomorrow full force.  Meanwhile, enjoy the holiday!

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Posting will be light between now and Tuesday as we’ll be observing Monday’s King Day of Service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would have turned 80 yesterday.

If you’d like to do some volunteering to mark the occasion, or if you’re hosting a service event and need volunteers, President-elect Obama has provided a handy-dandy database of service opportunities at the recently launched USAservice.org. The database is searchable by location and date, and includes events this weekend as well as ones on Monday. And MLKday.gov is hosting a similar database as well, although you have to do a little digging to find the advanced search option that lets you refine your query by zip code, interest, and so forth.

So have a great long weekend, however you spend it. We’ll be up to our usual tricks starting Tuesday morning.

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Seattle-based Amazon announced its sales for the 2008 holiday season were its best ever, peaking with 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on December 15. Best-selling items included the “Wall-E” DVD, Nintendo Wii video-game platform, Microsoft Office software, and, of course, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

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Another year is coming to an end, and for us at Xconomy it has been an action-packed 12 months. Not only has our flagship Boston site grown beyond our expectations, we have also launched Xconomy Seattle and Xconomy San Diego, building our own small, but rapidly growing, network. We’d like to take this occasion to thank all of our readers, underwriters, venture members, partners, and event sponsors for your support, as you have helped make this an incredible year.

Now, we’re taking a slight break. Posting will be light through the new year, although we’ve got a few fun things planned next week for your holiday reading pleasure. And we’ll be back at full throttle starting on January 5th to bring you all the innovation news—up close and personal—as it’s happening.

So thank you for a fantastic year, and Happy Holidays!

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In the shopping spirit of the season, I thought it might be useful to give a quick update on what the year’s best-selling tech gadgets have been on Amazon.com, and how Amazon’s own foray into gadgets is going. Probably too late to help with your own shopping list, but nevertheless here are a couple notable items from the blogosphere:

—Forget Blu-ray players and iPhones. Wired’s blog notes that four of the top 10 best-selling electronic gadgets on Amazon this year are GPS devices from Garmin. That includes the #1 item of 2008, the Garmin nüvi 350 GPS navigator. Who needs maps anymore? (OK, I do.)

—Amazon’s own gadget, the Kindle e-book reader, is apparently sold out for Christmas, and its stock as a search term on Google spiked in October to nearly triple its level during the summer, according to TechCrunch. Google searches for the term “Kindle” have since fallen off somewhat, but remain high. The Kindle faces competition from Apple and Sony, and it will be very interesting to see what all this means for the future of books.

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Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to get their deals announced before the holidays, but it was a busy week in the Northwest, with plenty of activity in mobile software, online media, and medical devices.

—Bellevue, WA-based BlueKai, an Internet marketing firm, raised $10.5 million in Series B funding, led by Waltham, MA-based Battery Ventures. Existing investor Redpoint Ventures also contributed to the round. BlueKai is creating a marketplace for online consumer data.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based Uptake Medical, a maker of medical devices, raised $3 million to carry out a pair of clinical trials for a technique to treat emphysema and other deadly lung-obstructing diseases. The capital was raised from all of Uptake’s previous investors, including Prism VentureWorks, Onset Ventures, and WRF Capital.

—Seattle-based mobile startup Zumobi teamed up with outdoor retailer REI to release a free software application, called the REI Snow Report, for getting instant … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Melodeo, a digital-music startup, is powering the Salvation Army’s holiday music iPhone application, which was announced yesterday. The software, available from the iPhone Application Store for $2.99, streams a selection of holiday tunes to your phone, with unlimited listening. Proceeds will benefit the Salvation Army charity.

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It’s a holiday for us here at Xconomy, as we join banks, schools, state and federal offices, and the rest of the nation in commemorating those who’ve served in the military. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a new bundle of stories.

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