Tag Archives: Big Brother (TV Show)

About 650 days ago Hardware | Tablets and eReaders

Is Apple Using ‘Sneak Tactics’ to Defend Tablet Turf?

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Remember Apple’s 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh? Back then, Apple was about fighting conformity and subverting Big Brother. These days, though, Apple is effectively “The Man.” READ MORE »

About 1483 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Keeping Tabs on Mobile Workers

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If your business has mobile employees, you know the management challenges they pose. They head out in the morning, spend all day at customer sites, or delivering your goods or services, then clock out at the end of the day. If they go straight to the customer site, you may not see them at all. Wouldn’t it be nice to know precisely where they are throughout the course of the workday? You can. Mobile technology such as Xora uses mobile phones’ GPS system to track employees’ locations so that dispatchers and supervisors back at the office can see exactly where they are. The application includes a time clock, so employees can log in and out of work directly on the phone, instead of having to submit a paper time sheet or fill out an online form, and since the phone records their location when they clock in and out, you can tell if someone is trying to log in from home. Information about hours worked integrates directly into payroll software, saving a lot of administrative time, and also into billing software, for faster more accurate billing of customers. Tracking software can create a lot of efficiencies. “If a job comes up, and there are 30 people out in the field, the dispatcher can decide who to send based on who’s closest,” says Michael Berger, director of marketing at Xora. “You save on fuel, employees use their time most efficiently, and the customer gets faster service.” The software can also trigger an e-mail or other notification when an employee passes a certain point, which can also lead to efficiencies, for instance by warning the shipping manager at a customer location that a delivery is about to arrive. Big help or Big Brother How might employees feel about being tracked? “Some fraction of your employees will resent the system,” predicts Rick Brenner, principal of Chaco Canyon Consulting, an expert in teamwork, conflict, and workplace politics. “Employees who resent the tracking will probably be clever enough not to complain about it much. They’ll simply start looking for alternative employment. When that happens, the best employees are likeliest to find other jobs. Consequently, the tracking system has the effect of degrading the work force.” Though the technology is new and its legal ramifications are unclear, there are some steps you can take to protect your company’s legal standing if you decide to track employees, according to employment law firm Tarlow, Breed, Hart & Rodgers, P.C. For one thing, the company should supply the mobile phones to employees, not impose tracking on equipment they own. For another, employees should be clearly notified that they’re being tracked, and should give their consent for that tracking in writing. Finally, employees should be given the option to turn off tracking during their break times and off hours. Leveling the field Concerns about how employees would react led R&J Construction to proceed with caution when it introduced Xora in February 2007. For the first month, R&J construction workers had the choice to enter their time using Xora, or using paper forms as they always had, recalls Paula Wiens, controller at R&J. The firm had originally planned for a longer transition period, but “we didn’t need it,” she says. Though employees were initially concerned that managers back at the office might watch their every move, they soon learned that wasn’t the case. And then the unexpected happened: R&J discovered tracking employees was actually good for morale. “It leveled the playing field,” Wiens explains. “In the past, we’ve had some workers accuse other workers of leaving early or coming in late, but there was no easy way to evaluate these claims,” she says. “Once we had the GPS in hand, we could verify what had really happened.” It also protected employees in many situations. “If a customer called and said ‘Your plumber billed me for four hours, but he wasn’t here for hours,” we could use our GPS data to show that he had also made trips to the plumbing supply store to pick up materials,” Wiens says. And in one case, using Xora helped an employee defend against a lawsuit. “This employee was in a traffic accident,” she says. “The person he hit tried to claim that he had been speeding. Using our tracking data, we were able to tell that just a few minutes before the accident he’d been going only 15 miles an hour, because he was driving in heavy commuter traffic. And we were able to provide substantiation.”

About 2426 days ago E-Commerce

E-Mail Etiquette for the Entrepreneur

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In just over a decade since its mainstream debut, e-mail has become one of the most important communication tools for businesses everywhere, if not the most important communication tool. In fact, the number of person-to-person worldwide e-mail messages sent on an average day in 2005 was 33.3 billion or about 8.8 trillion annually, according to IDC, the Framingham, Mass. research firm. “Person-to-person” means these numbers do not include spammed messages or any other automated e-mails. Think you know all there is to e-mail etiquette? Think again. With so much virtual communication going on, here’s how to avoid the pitfalls: To, Cc and Bcc Many business e-mail users still make the mistake of including all recipients in the “To” or “Cc” fields. Not only may that upset those who want to keep their e-mail address private, but you’re showing your naiveté about three basic rules. The “To” field should be reserved for writing an e-mail to one person.  “Cc” stands for “carbon copy” and can be used when you want to include others and it’s okay for the recipient to see the others’ e-mail addresses. A “Bcc,” on the other hand, which stands for “blind carbon copy,” is when you don’t want the recipient to see you’ve also sent the same message to others — or when you don’t want all the recipients to see each other’s e-mail address for privacy reasons. “Employees who use the ‘To’ field instead of the ‘Bcc’ field aren’t properly trained by their employer or they don’t realize the risk of e-mail viruses picking up all those addresses in the ‘To’ field,” says Andy Wibbels, a computer expert and author who has worked with hundreds of small businesses. “System administrators should also consider flagging e-mails where people put a ton of folks in the ‘To’ field.” Be cautious when clicking “Reply to All” when only the original sender needs to read your reply. You don’t know if the sender has added Bccs and it’s amazing how many business people divulge sensitive information about products, customers and/or employees to unintended recipients this way. Keep it simple Brevity and directness are the key to business correspondence. That includes e-mail. With more than 100 e-mails in a typical inbox a day, no one wants to read a novel. Keep it simple. And this applies whether you’re the boss or the lowest rung on the corporate ladder. “E-mails should be under two paragraphs with formatting and bullets to illustrate key points and needed actions,” advises Wibbels. Be sure what you’re communicating is clear and near the top as our attention span tends to drift as our eyes scan down the page. ”If you can make your point in the subject line, all the better,” Wibbels says. Be a pro Writing e-mail to colleagues, clients, and coworkers needs to be professional. Don’t gossip about someone in the office. Don’t add five exclamation marks at the end of a sentence. Spell check. Go easy on the emoticons (e.g. ). “E-mails with subject lines of ‘Hey!’ or ‘OMG!’ or ‘Re: re: re: fwd: this.’ only annoy and waste time,” adds Wibbels. “And clean up e-mails when you forward them [as] nobody likes reading all the e-mail header junk and all the indenting over and over again.” When to send and e-mail Don’t write an e-mail when you’re upset or angry at someone (or at least don’t click “Send” until you’ve read it with a leveled head). Remember, you must be professional at all times. Anything you write and send can live forever and may come back to haunt you, maybe even in court. Big Brother could be watching If you’re not the boss, your e-mail and other Internet behavior may be monitored by your employer. Preston Gralla, author of How the Internet Works, says software, such as a keystroke loggers “can record every word of every document created on the computer.” Gralla says an estimated 36 percent of employers track the content employees view as well as monitor their keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. Attachments & threads While most of your e-mail correspondence with someone will likely be via a broadband connection, don’t attach a 10MB PowerPoint presentation. These days, they may be picking up e-mail via a cell phone or BlackBerry. Wibbels says that if you’re e-mailing inside your company, use an intranet network drive for file transfer instead. You might want to ask permission first before sending a large file to someone outside the firm. You can also use an online delivery service, such as YouSendIt.com, which allows the recipient to click a Web link to download the file outside of their e-mail program.

About 4860 days ago E-Commerce

Myth 6: Wild Ads Make Web Stars

REALITY CHECK: Just because an ad is brilliant doesn’t mean it works Click here for the word from the experts In 1998, when Cyberian Outpost Inc. set out to promote its Outpost.com computer-selling site, it was relatively unknown. What was called for, its managers thought, was a campaign loud and expensive enough to make it a big name. The company hired Cliff Freeman and Partners, an award-winning New York City agency with credits like the Little Caesars “Pizza! Pizza!” spots. Freeman more than lived up to its reputation for producing memorable ads. Its spots for Outpost.com featured gerbils being shot from cannons and wolves attacking a high school marching band. The $7-million campaign generated a lot of buzz. It won the Freeman agency a Grand Clio, the Oscar of the advertising industry. But it wasn’t so good for Outpost.com. Even though its name was all over the place, nobody knew what the company did. The ads mentioned “computer stuff,” but as Bob Bowman, Outpost.com’s new CEO, says, “the ads were so dominating that people missed that.” The ads increased site hits. “The second they ran, traffic would go up by 10,000 to 15,000,” Bowman says. “We had a lot of visitors — but no buyers.” The campaign had failed to go beyond name recognition and explain why customers should visit the site. “They didn’t know that we sold computers,” Bowman says. “They thought we sold clothes or didn’t sell anything.” Jay Chiat, dot-com CEO and the veteran ad guru who created the “Big Brother” commercial for Apple Computer, agrees that the ads were a waste. “I thought they were outrageously funny spots that never told me what they were doing,” he says. Today both Bowman and Chiat believe that a quick follow-up campaign would have helped, but it wasn’t in the plan. A year after the first ads ran, Outpost.com attacked the 1999 holidays with a new, $4-million campaign that was chock-full of information about the company. That included telling audiences that yes, Outpost.com did the gerbil ads and it’s kinda sorry for that, but it also sells computers and will ship them overnight free. The result: traffic went up 40%. But even more important, more of the people who were visiting the site were also buying. It’s not that the original gerbil ads were a total waste. Outpost.com gained name recognition. The company will need it, says Chiat, who believes the dot-com ads now flooding the airwaves will be quickly forgotten. “I don’t think that people are going to remember a lot of the companies, either,” he adds. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

About 4860 days ago Data Security

BigBrother.com: The Net War on Privacy

How dearly do you value your privacy? Are you willing to exchange it for a free computer? Or perhaps a discount on your groceries? A recent survey by the New Jersey-based Center for Social & Legal Research suggests that the majority of Americans, about 55%, are “privacy pragmatists” willing to give up some privacy in return for something of value. The rest of the population is split evenly between people who would not give up their privacy for anything and those who don’t feel strongly about the issue. Not that consumers are always given the chance to drive a bargain. Sophisticated new database software is giving the Internet industry an unprecedented ability to collect and analyze personal data without our knowledge. Alexa software, for instance, now used on Amazon.com, monitors which sites consumers visit while browsing the Net and stores data about the kinds of items that they search for or purchase. Alexa programs can also pass along personal information including names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned ethic, but shouldn’t we at least be asked whether we are willing to subject ourselves to such close scrutiny while merely shopping for a good book? On 60 Minutes, Jason Catlett, president of an antijunk mail company, gave Lesley Stahl a perfect analogy to appreciate the degree of scrutiny most Internet users unknowingly open themselves up to when going online: “Suppose every time you walked around the mall, somebody put a bar code on your shoulder … and scanned your shoulder … and went to a database, saying, ‘Ah, yes, that’s Lesley who visited the shop next door 15 minutes ago.” It’s not only Net companies that are keeping a close eye on our activities. Roughly 27,000 supermarkets in the United States provide cards that offer discounts or other promotions to customers who sign up; those customers’ personal information can then be linked to records of what they buy. Food markets typically use the data to get a better grasp on what’s selling and when to offer special promotions. But imagine a future when insurance companies could check shopping logs to determine their clients’ eating habits. In the not so distant past, banks wouldn’t even have considered exploiting the sensitive information in their customer databases. But in a desperate gambit to survive in a competitive financial market, banks now are slicing and dicing their data to profile customers by wealth, lifestyle events (births, deaths, inheritances), and personal habits. A sudden spike in an account balance, for example, may alert the bank to a pay raise that will make the customer open to buying a new home. Sudden declines may indicate the loss of a job, and the bank may be wary of extending a credit line. All a bit Orwellian, you say? No worries, advises Ray Everett Church, the “chief privacy officer” of AllAdvantage.com, which pays Web surfers for the right to monitor their online behavior and target advertising accordingly. AllAdvantage promises to safeguard the identity of its members, while still getting them better shopping deals. “We’re not Big Brother, we’re your big brother,” says Everett Church without the least bit of irony. What privacy means leads to wildly different interpretations in an information society. But at a minimal level, it should include the right of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. In this sense, privacy does not imply information quarantine, but personal choice. Privacy advocates thus far have failed to get the U.S. government to establish a code of fair information practices, which include an individual’s right to get access to personal information held by others and would require a person’s consent before such information could be disclosed to others. Direct marketing firms that make money buying, selling, and developing business strategies across huge databases of personal information have lobbied hard against stricter government regulation. Ironically, the best privacy protection may arise from the market itself. Several new Internet companies are offering Web users technology to have full control over their personal information. Zero-Knowledge, for instance, offers an online privacy tool that enables Web users to hide their IP address and their browsing activity. Lumeria.com is set to launch a similar product that its founder, Fred Hill, says will enable “identity commerce,” shopping while keeping your identity opaque to merchants and advertisers. The ability to make transactions online without sacrificing privacy represents a significant power shift between consumer and marketer. The pugnacious CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealey, advises us “to get over” our demands for privacy. Hey, Scott, the fight has only just begun. Copyright © 2000 Sojourners, March-April 2000, Vol. 29, No. 2.