Amazon now joins Walmart, Target, Best Buy and eBay which all give instant trade-in quotes for used electronics. Its new Electronics Trade-In Store offers customers a way to trade in things like tablets, cell phones, MP3 players, cameras, and GPS devices for an Amazon.com gift card, regardless of where the device was originally purchased. READ MORE
How did Amazon, which started by selling books online, morph into a diversified online giant boasting $34 billion in annual revenue? Erick Schonfeld with TechCrunch posted a fantastic slideshow created by global consulting boutique faberNovel that brings to light a myriad of fast facts you might not have known about Amazon, which is now responsible for one-third of e-commerce transactions in the United States. READ MORE
The success of today’s mobile worker largely depends on IT support. For anyone inclined to challenge this statement, consider the word choice that comes from your prototypical mobile worker when he or she can’t achieve an Internet connection. Exactly. My last column on the mobile workforce covered the importance of standardizing both hardware and software as well as establishing the rules of engagement. Now I’d like to delve into other issues – giving your mobile workers the tools and support they need while protecting your business and your business equipment and data. Work from home vs. on-the-go employees As you take a look at your employee base, it’s important to distinguish the true road warrior from the work-from-home (WFH) user — as if we need yet another acronym — scenario. The WFH user requires nothing more than an office environment in the home; i.e., a computer (laptop or desktop), printer, fax, phone, etc. This one is easy. The environment is static and controlled. On the other hand, mobile workers by definition are always on the go. Like the traveling salesman of yesteryear, they’re on the road, at home and on the customer’s site. They need the tools to be productive from a multitude of locations, whether it’s a Starbucks, library, or municipal hotspot. As my company, The Hoffman Agency, has evolved to embracing mobile working, my role has also evolved. The management team has not only turned to me to manage the flow of bits and bytes beyond our office corridors, but also for my perspective on what makes a successful mobile worker. They recognize that I’m the one on the front lines interacting with mobile employees. In short, I’ve found that four attributes characterize the person who successfully adjusts to an ever-moving office: Self Discipline: For some people, out-of-sight-out-of-mind brings out the worst of human procrastination. It takes a certain amount of mental toughness to maintain productive work habits in diverse settings without “the man” lurking. Organized: No question, working on the go puts a premium on organization skills. Resourcefulness: Mobile workers encounter the unexpected on a regular basis. If they call IT every single time something goes awry, you’ll need to add a call center in Bangalore. I’ve found that the person who can safely secure a cup of coffee while working on a laptop without a tabletop bodes well for this characteristic. Pack Mule: I know several people who carry so many laptop batteries that the weight exceeds that of the actual computer. If you can’t figure out an easy way to lug the stuff, you’re starting in a handicapped position. Tracking company-owned assets Related to this “stuff,” IT needs to track the assets of the company-owned equipment. And our employees sign a document of good faith that they’re responsible for the loss or damage of equipment from negligence or what we term lack of common sense. Checking a laptop computer as baggage, then discovering a cracked screen upon pickup is not normal wear and tear. There are a number of tools available that make the mobile worker’s life a lot easier. I’m a fan of a Web-based conferencing product called GoToMeeting that gives your mobile folks an easy way to pull together a virtual meeting. Attendees don’t need pro-loaded software on their computers in order to participate. They simply click on a URL address sent from the meeting host, and they’re up and running. I also find the unappreciated flash drive (or thumb drive) is a must-have tool for folks on the move. It plugs into your laptop via the USB port, becoming another storage drive and allows employees to carry electronic files from the office and home computer for easy access to their laptop. We can’t overlook the challenge of security. My last column touched on security between the home office and the outside world (via the Internet Service Provider). For flash drives, I strongly recommend using either an encryption and/or password-controlled program. The bigger security question lies in how you secure such a disparate “playground” associated with mobile computing. In the good old days — five years ago — users would dial into the corporate network via a modem. That made security easy, since it was controlled by our server in our office. Today, it’s much more cost-effective to let companies like Boingo, Dialer.net, or T-Mobile manage the connections. These come in a variety of flavors: dial-up, broadband or wireless, and the companies also handle the security issues. Because they require a login and password, they automatically encrypt all inbound and outbound Internet traffic (e-mail, Web, IM, VoIP call, etc.) on any access point you use in their services. It becomes more complicated when your users are connecting through hotels, Starbucks, etc. and you have no control over the “free” connection. This is a favorite vulnerability preyed upon by worms, viruses and hackers because they know it’s a potential back door to Nirvana. Here, you need to make sure you’ve installed personal mobile firewalls on all of your laptops. Windows XP and Vista include a basic firewall with the operating system at no extra cost. While it’s adequate, I recommend an industrial strength mobile firewall from companies such as ZoneAlarm, Comodo, and Symantec that protects you from both inbound and outbound traffic (the Windows product only addresses inbound traffic). Recently I was at the Denver airport and struck up a conversation with one of the security people who gave me a tour of the lost and found. At first glance, it seemed like Wal-Mart’s computer department. He told me they average roughly 100 laptops and 75 other mobile devices (cellphones, PDAs, etc.) every two to three weeks, with about half of these left when people go through security. It was a reminder to me that security for mobile users needs to come in two forms: technology and common sense. And if you come off as a nag in “nurturing” the common sense piece, so be it. Linda Wilson is the IT director of http://www.hoffman.com >The Hoffman Agency, a global public relations firm with 120 employees.
This is the time of year when all sorts of predictions appear on old media, new media and not so new media alike: from what’s going to happen in the Presidential elections to what energy sources will replace oil and how much closer mankind will actually be to getting to Mars. Not to disappoint all my wonderful readers, here are the technologies that will be hot for small businesses in 2008. Writing about the future of technology is actually a cozy tradition for me, and this year it is my privilege to do it on IncTechnology.com. 1. Web 2.0 collaborative applications Small businesses need better, low cost and easy to manage tools to work collaborate within the company and to pool together resources across multiple businesses to better tackle large jobs. In 2008 you will see a proliferation of online tools that will make things a lot easier. Web 2.0 based applications are software tools accessible via any internet browser and are natively well suited for collaborations. A new crop of developers is taking full advantage of this capability to create great things, sometimes even offered for free! Office productivity suites that allow multiple users to work together, share information and collaborate in real time such as ThinkFree and Zoho. Project management tools such as Basecamp Messaging, communications and collaboration environments such as Zimbra and HyperOffice Don’t you think for a minute that the big guns like Microsoft and Yahoo, that have steeply increased their attention for the needs of small businesses in the past few year (see Yahoo! acquisition of Zimbra and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Live Workspaces) will just sit there and watch. So expect a lot of competition for your attention and lots of low cost ways to leverage the web to collaborate. 2. Cached Web applications Ok, so what happens to all these wonderful Web tools if you cannot connect to the Web? Expect many of these applications to launch an offline “companion,” software that runs on your computer and replicates the online functionality. Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Software goes online and online applications go offline? Yes, that’s right. Traditional software is here to stay, but the new demands of the market are imposing more and more to make software available concurrently as a service and as a locally stored application, frequently with automatic synchronization of data files between the online and local storages. In a sense, Microsoft pioneered the concept at a Local Area Network and VPN levels with MS Small Business Server and Web Outlook . Now the concept is going mainstream and “on the Web cloud.” Expect tons of Web applications to come with offline companions or to work in “cached mode” without requiring Web connection; and expect more and more desktop software to become available as a complementary service, part of the software licensing fee. 3. Mashups Mashups are Web applications that derive data from different sources into one integrated tool. A popular example of a mashup, cited by Wikipedia, would be to combine the cartographic data from Google Maps with real-estate listing from Craigslist to get a new Web service that provides location information to those listings. Consumer mashups are becoming quickly popular, like iGoogle, mapmyrun.com or housingmaps.com. Expect the development of business applications that leverage this concept and bring you the best of all worlds. Currently the most common type of business mashup is the dashboard. There are tools like Serena that allow building mashup-based applications on the fly. Yahoo! has Pipes and Microsoft and Google are in beta testing with Popfly and Mashup Editor, respectively. Expect in 2008 many pre-developed mashup services bringing together your most commonly used business Web services. 4. 3g network connectivity Wireless operators are in full swing with the deployment of their 3G networks, offering data and voice connectivity almost anywhere at the sped of entry-level DSL. 3G data cards are almost free with contracts, all-you-can-use plans are as cheap as $30 per month and reliability has gone up to very acceptable levels. Watch for more and more laptops to come outfitted with wireless WAN cards. The technology is ready, the price point is affordable and the convenience is unparalleled for mobile workers. 5. Online data backup Internet connections are becoming faster everywhere and backup software is becoming smarter and cheaper. A new set of inexpensive online backup solutions that really work is emerging targeting small businesses. Some even have unlimited storage for a fixed fee. Online backup maybe a bit more cumbersome to setup and manage, but ensures a very high level of data protection. Check out some of these: Live.Skydrive.com, Xdrive, Carbonite, MediaMax, eVault, and Box.net. Surely one of them will meet your online backup needs. 6. Biometrically protected notebook computers Fingerprint readers and data encryption software will become very popular in 2008, as the technologies are mature and the costs have gone down. Look for tiny fingerprint readers on laptops and keyboards that unlock the computer instead of passwords. Also look for full hard disk encryption to become much more popular to safeguard the privacy of your data: Microsoft has made available BitLocker on Windows Vista Business and Premium versions. A good, easy to manage alternative is PGP. And what after that. Other technologies that in the next few years will land on the lap of American small business include: 4G mobile telephony Fully IP switched data/voice wireless networks that will deliver ultrafast connections to any mobile device. That is how small businesses will go online in a few years. Keep your eyes on Google. In-text advertising The new frontier of contextual advertising is in-text. Vibrant Media is the leader in the space, but look for more to start playing. RFID It is taking time for this new and initially costly technology to take foot, but the pressure of large supply chains, such as Wal-Mart Stores is forcing the adoption. Watch for RFID tags to appear on all sorts of retail goods. We’ll see at this time next year if I’m right! Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com..
For more than 30 years, Kevin Chuman has been monitoring the moisture content of soil for California vineyards, a crucial job for grape growers. Knowing when to irrigate, and when not to, can make the difference between a successful crop and a failed one. Up till now, his preferred tools have been “a shovel, a soil probe, and my eyes.” But he may be adding some new technology tools to that list. Now the pest control advisor for Bronco Winery, maker of various popular wines including Charles Shaw (better known as “Two-Buck Chuck” to Trader Joe’s bargain hunters), Chuman is deploying some very smart technology to stay current in a highly competitive market. Through the use of a network of soil sampling sensors, Chuman is able to monitor the moisture content in Bronco’s vast vineyards through the Internet, right from his desk. “We installed this system just last year, so this is the first full year it’s been functioning,” Chuman says. “We’re tweaking the system and making it more and more accurate.” Intelligent devices in your future If you aren’t using smart devices in your small or mid-size business yet, you soon might be. A study recently released by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) titled The Future of Small Business predicts a growing use of intelligent devices by small businesses. Among its several findings, the study states that “small businesses—traditionally late adopters of technology—will need to aggressively use new technologies to create, build, and market their products and services.” The study says that small businesses need to increasingly turn to intelligent devices for such purposes as gaining customer insight and improving delivery of goods and services. The group defines these devices as “machines and products … equipped with computing capabilities, digital storage, and sensors” and notes that sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) are some examples that are growing more popular among businesses. In fact this trend is already off to a big start. According to a January 2002 study conducted by Harbor Research, the number of intelligent devices networked for remote administration — excluding telephones and personal computers — is expected to exceed 500 million by 2010. One example is swimming pool companies that use sensor technology to alert them when a customers’ pool needs attention, in some cases even fixing the problem automatically. This reduces the time technicians need to spend on monitoring, leading to a reduction in service calls. Not all smart tech is ready for prime time The IFTF study also mentions the widening use of RFID tags in many situations and its importance in years to come, but some business advisors aren’t too keen on the use of RFID for smaller companies, at least at the moment. Patrick Cook, co-founder of the Small Business Technology Institute, who blogs about small business technology, feels that RFID is — for now anyway — a “non-event for small businesses.” “The industry is still struggling to develop standards,” Cook said. “Wal-Mart is pushing for compliance of its specs, while the U.S. is out of sync with both European and Japanese standards, all of which drives the cost out of reach for most small businesses.” In the meantime, Cook feels that small businesses can gain by looking to more affordable technologies, like biometrics, GPS, and remote sensors. Still, smart technology is turning up in unexpected places. As Chuman needs to monitor soil conditions across Bronco Winery’s 4,500 acres of grape vines scattered throughout Madeira County, a vast area to manage, he’s found that sensors help him do that from his desktop. “The sensors give me a heads-up on any potential problems,” he says, “and it helps me target problem spots, which is great considering how many acres we have to monitor.”
The dangers of laptop theft are all over the news. High-profile laptop losses involving Neiman-Marcus, CardSystems Solutions Inc., the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and even the FBI itself illustrate the need for companies to be vigilant in protecting company laptops — and the sensitive company data housed within. According to the FBI, a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and 97 percent of them are never recovered. And, according to Symantec, the computer security software giant, the average laptop — perhaps only a $1,000 machine — contains at least $800,000 worth of data. If that data is classified or proprietary, its worth could increase exponentially. Common sense has become increasingly important — don’t let your laptop out of your sight while commuting or traveling, beware of two-person theft scams in public places, and don’t leave it in plain view while not at your desk. But new technologies for securing and tracking laptops are giving companies a wide range of other security options. And many of them have versions that small- and medium-sized businesses can afford. Here are some of the latest offerings for protecting your company’s laptops: RFID Taken mainstream by Wal-Mart as an inventory-tracking method, radio-frequency identification (RFID) has had applications as a shoplifting/theft deterrent for some time. And as RFID tags continue to fall in price — with tags themselves costing between 50 cents and $10 each — they can now be used as a way to track laptops. Dallas-based Axcess International’s ActiveTag uses a small, long-acting battery to power the durable tag. The tag can trigger alarms or generate text messages and e-mails to alert businesses to a theft. However, the user must remember to activate and deactivate the tag. Tracking and asset recovery tools Computer Security Products’ XTool software suite includes a tracking feature that transmits a signal whenever the laptop connects to the Internet, allowing its location to be tracked if stolen. A one-year subscription for small businesses with less than 50 laptops, which includes encryption capabilities, is $70. Absolute’sLoJack for computers also offers tracking capabilities, along with additional asset recovery services that will work with local law enforcement to get a stolen laptop back. Using an optional data-delete feature, LoJack can delete the contents of a laptop so they don’t fall into the wrong hands. LoJack is available to smaller businesses for about $100 per laptop for a three-year contract, according to Les Jickling, Absolute’s director of corporate marketing. Encryption Although the Microsoft Vista operating system includes encryption technology, a number of vendors offer it as a separate product. The technology makes data virtually indecipherable to all but those with access. These include XTool, Pointsec, and PGP Corp. PGP’s offerings for small- to medium-sized businesses range from a yearly subscription at about $59 per laptop for a company with 500 laptops to a $119-per-laptop perpetual license, according to PGP’s Albert Fong. Biometrics Many new laptops are equipped with bioscanners — fingerprint readers that only let the user open documents. Experts recommend using these scanners — preferably with one’s thumbprint — along with a password to ensure optimal safety. While these technologies represent exciting possibilities, experts warn that there is no one solution to keeping laptops safe. “There’s no silver bullet,” notes Jimmy Alderson, co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based Intelguardians, an IT security firm. “Users can’t just use one methodology.” Alderson recommends using strong biopasswords and RFID with an alarm system, but suggests some low-tech precautions, too. Specifically, Alderson recommends: Registering laptops with the manufacturer upon purchase, so they can assist if they’re stolen; Physically etching a company name on the laptop, to aid in recovery; and Insuring the laptop — and its contents. Companies such as Safeware will ensure your hardware, while Aon’s Wired for Growth offer liability coverage for lost data. “All of these will help keep your laptop safe,” advises Alderson. “Just don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
If your company ships goods that are perishable or expensive or you’re interested in becoming a supplier to Wal-Mart, Target or the U.S. Department of Defense, you may have reason to consider deploying radio frequency identification (RFID). The truth is that many small businesses may be able to get by without implementing RFID for the next few years. But while you wait, your competitors may already be benefiting from early adoption by realizing return on investment from automating receipt and shipment of goods or by becoming a supplier for one of a growing number of big firms and organizations — Wal-Mart, Target and the DOD included — that have adopted RFID and required their suppliers to do the same. How RFID works RFID is a technology in which small, cheap tags are attached to items or cartons or pallets of goods and are automatically read and tracked by a computer system. Many regard RFID tags as the new bar-codes to help businesses track and trace goods through the supply chain. But there are already several examples of RFID now in use by a wide variety of people, including toll-collection systems like EZ Pass, the microchips veterinarians insert into pets and instant payment credit cards that no longer need to be swiped. For small businesses, the use of RFID is likely to be more along the lines of Grantex, a Grand Rapids, Mich. uniform rental company. In 2001, Grantex bought an RFID system for a little over $1 million. The company now sews the chips into uniforms. When the company washes the garments, an RFID system reads the chips and automatically sorts the uniforms so they go back to the right companies. Doug Singer, Grantex’s president, says that since he installed the system, there has been a 36 percent reduction in labor costs and a 21 percent decrease in uniform costs. Partially, that’s because uniforms can no longer be lost or stolen. Unless you rip the tag out, the uniforms are like a lost dog with a microchip — easy to locate. The company used to use bar codes for the sorting function, but the RFID tags are much tougher, Singer says. “Our goal is to attack grease, oil and dirt and we do a darn good job of it,” he says. “If we had bar codes, they would just come off.” Small firms can get big benefits Singer says RFID lets Grantex, which has about 50 employees, operate like a much bigger company because it can handle a large workload (the company regularly services about 10,000 uniforms). Other small- to medium-size businesses that need to track inventory are also adding RFID. A study by Gartner Dataquest found that 40 percent of such inventory-intensive businesses planned to install an RFID tracking system by the end of last year. But for most small businesses, RFID won’t be a big priority for a while, says Mark Johnson, president of RFID Tribe, a Dallas-based professional association for the RFID trade. “It’s very useful for any organization that has many, many objects to track,” says Johnson. “But if you’re a mom-and-pop, a clipboard and a No. 2 pencil does fine.” Johnson says that a bare-bones RFID system would probably start at $10,000-20,000, but it wouldn’t do enough to make a difference in operations. Realizing ROI from RFID Andy Nathanson, practice director for RFID for Venture Development, a Natick, Mass., market researcher, says most RFID systems will cost around $250,000, but the companies that use it realize ROI within 18 months. The good news is that the prices are coming down. Tags that used to go for 25 cents are “now approaching the 10-cent barrier,” he says. Still, unless you track items that are worth more than $25, are perishable or are easily copied, RFID shouldn’t be a top priority right now. The exception to that is if your firm does business with Wal-Mart or the Department of Defense, both of which require suppliers to use RFID. One way to approach this is what Johnson calls “slap and tag,” that is, just putting tags on merchandise without installing an RFID reading system. But even that can be expensive. “People say it’s only a quarter or so, but we’re talking about millions and millions of products,” he says. “It adds up.”
Fresh Inc., the Inc.com staff blog, has been nominated for its first Webby Awards — one of the top honors for online publications — by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The awards, created a decade ago, recognize outstanding websites that are setting the standards for the Internet, according to Webby founder Tiffany Shlain. This year, organizers received a record 5,500 entries from across the nation and around the world. Shlain called Fresh Inc.’s nomination, in the Best Business Blog category, a testament to the skill, ingenuity, and vision of its creators. Other nominees in the category include GM Fastlane, Gartner, NextBillion.net, and 5 Blogs Before Lunch. Frech Inc. was also nominated in the People’s Voice category, in which winners are chosen by popular vote. Inc.com’s blog, updated several times daily by Inc. columnists, editors, reporters, and guest contributors, was launched on Aug. 13, 2003, with a post on universal health care by Inc.com editor Carole Matthews. It has since grown into a wide-open forum for topics ranging from best business practices, to questionable federal contracting, immigrant labor, and the impact of Wal-Mart on smaller firms, among other issues. Regular contributors include Matthews, Inc. executive editor Mike Hofman, who covers a variety of entrepreneurship news and trends, and Inc. associate editor Nadine Heintz, who highlights real-world business lessons from “The Apprentice.” Yet much of the blog’s success stems from the dialogue it generates between Inc. staff and entrepreneurs across the country, according to Inc.com editorial director Laura Rich. “Entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for good places to discuss the issues they’re grappling with in their businesses every day,” Rich said. The 10th Annual Webby Awards will be held in New York on June 12. The winners in each category will be announced on May 9. Inc.com, which attracts some 700,000 unique visitors each month, is the daily online voice of Inc., billed as “The Handbook for American Entrepreneurs.”
Inc.com was nominated for several prestigious Internet awards this week. The website was named as a finalist for an EPpy award on Thursday in the category of Best Internet Business Service with fewer than one million visitors. The EPpy Awards, which were launched 11 years ago and focus on websites affiliated with the media industry, are presented by Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek. Past winners have included MarketWatch.com and the Wall Street Journal Online. Inc.com is joined by Crain’s Chicago Business and CFO.com in the business service category. Earlier in the week, Fresh Inc., the site’s staff blog, was shortlisted for its first Webby Awards by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The Webby Awards, created a decade ago, recognize outstanding websites that are setting the standards for the Internet, according to founder Tiffany Shlain. This year, organizers received a record 5,500 entries from around the world. Shlain called Fresh Inc.’s nomination, in the Best Business Blog category, a testament to the skill, ingenuity, and vision of its creators. Other nominees in the category include GM Fastlane, Gartner, NextBillion.net, and 5 Blogs Before Lunch. Frech Inc. was also nominated in the People’s Voice category, in which winners are chosen by popular vote. Inc.com’s blog, updated several times daily by Inc. columnists, editors, reporters, and guest contributors, was launched on Aug. 13, 2003, with a post on universal health care by Inc.com editor Carole Matthews. It has since grown into a wide-open forum for topics ranging from best business practices, to questionable federal contracting, immigrant labor, and the impact of Wal-Mart on smaller firms, among other issues. Regular contributors include Matthews, Inc. executive editor Mike Hofman, who covers a variety of entrepreneurship news and trends, and Inc. associate editor Nadine Heintz, who highlights real-world business lessons from “The Apprentice.” Yet much of the blog’s success stems from the dialogue it generates between Inc. staff and entrepreneurs across the country, according to Inc.com editorial director Laura Rich. “Entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for good places to discuss the issues they’re grappling with in their businesses every day,” Rich said. The 10th Annual Webby Awards will be held in New York on June 12. The winners in each category will be announced on May 9. Winners of the EPpy Awards will be announced in Las Vegas on May 19. Inc.com, which attracts some 700,000 unique visitors each month, is the daily online voice of Inc. magazine.
Imagine doing business with a company that compiled information about your political convictions, religious beliefs, health, and family. Now imagine that this company turned around and made such information, along with your name and hometown, freely available to the rest of the world. If you’ve purchased something on Amazon.com, you’ve dealt with just such a company. The culprit is Amazon’s Wish List, a tool that lets you build a list of books and other items you might be interested in checking out. Such lists can be viewed by anyone, unless you take an extra step to specify privacy. Indeed, it’s possible to use the Wish List information to create databases of apparent liberals, gun owners, teenage girls, and so forth, and even to map them by location. I’m not going to go off on privacy here. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who Web-surfs, gives out his or her name online, or buys things, and then still has an expectation of privacy is either clueless or a whiner. My point is that Amazon, a premium Internet brand and a much-admired company, hasn’t done anything obviously wrong. The Wish List is a great feature. Yet the company was splashed with a bit of digital mud a few months ago when the feature’s vulnerability to mass profiling was highlighted on Applefritter, a website aimed at Apple computer users. The item was then widely circulated around the Web, where it elicited a chorus of disapproval. One person called the Wish List “an invasion of privacy that could cast the shadow of suspicion onto ordinary, law-abiding people.” The simple fact is, figuring out what is ethical–a challenge under any circumstances–is getting trickier in the Internet age. As technology in general and the Internet in particular bring us more marvelous tools at an ever-increasing pace, companies are finding that moving toward the leading edge can earn them a black eye from some affronted segment of the online public. It’s not just sensitivity about privacy but also free speech, marketing tactics, and a range of other issues. “With new technology comes new exposures,” says Vivian Weil, a professor of ethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “There are new opportunities for companies to intrude one way or another on what people think is right, and these pitfalls are unfamiliar.” Just ask Sony BMG. In an effort to be proactive rather than just litigious in limiting illegal online music swapping, the label late last year tried something new: music CDs that when placed in a customer’s computer installed a program to prevent the copying of songs. Companies have been adding antipiracy features to products for years, so what’s wrong with that? Everything, according to an outraged mass of music fans. Installing software programs–even (or perhaps especially) one aimed at protecting intellectual property–without explicit user permission turned out be crossing the line. Even worse, the software made computers vulnerable to viruses. Sony quickly backed down and offered a program to remove the first one. But it just ended up making things worse when the new program was found to have similar security flaws. Other recent examples: Best Buy was flamed by customers angry that prices they had seen advertised on the company’s website–prices that can fluctuate hour to hour–didn’t always match those in stores. Wal-Mart was smeared when its online store started recommending that buyers of the DVD Planet of the Apes also consider movies with African American themes. Even Google, celebrated for its “Don’t be evil” motto, has taken some blows–for restricting the use of video clips it displays on its site, for example. You don’t have to be a big-name company to get bitten. B&H Photo-Video, a brick-and-mortar camera and electronics retailer based in New York City, has a solid reputation among online buyers. Henry Posner, B&H’s communications director, responds to nearly every negative comment about the store, apologizing for screwups and explaining the company’s side of the story when he feels a customer is being unfair. It sounds perfectly reasonable, but B&H has been blasted by online commenters who accuse the company of trying to dilute criticism inappropriately. “I aspire to be diplomatic,” says Posner. “But there are people who will yell and scream no matter what I post.” How do you avoid being cast as the villain in the Web community’s view of the world? Learn from others’ mistakes. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the ways you could run off-course in the blurry, dynamic, and sometimes no-win world of high-tech business practices. Note that in most of these cases, the companies could reasonably argue that they didn’t do anything wrong–but lots of angry people begged to differ and were not shy about spreading the word. Enabling evil You don’t have to do anything bad yourself to find yourself in trouble: It’s enough to inadvertently provide others with a means for shenanigans. Amazon’s Wish List vulnerability is a good example. Google got dragged into that one, too, because, as Applefritter noted pointedly, the search engine’s online mapping capabilities can be enlisted to create a map that shows the locations of, say, Wish Listers interested in books on Mao Zedong or Osama bin Laden. EBay gets into similar trouble. Buyers ripped off by unscrupulous sellers often blame eBay for their woes, even though the site has little way of policing the millions of transactions that take place on its pages and clearly states so. “It’s not enough to say caveat emptor, we’re just the bulletin board,” says David Gebler, president of Working Values, a business ethics strategy and training firm in Sharon, Massachusetts. “That’s just not acceptable anymore.” Problematic products Any company can release a product with problems, but technology is creating ever more ways to slip up, raising the stakes of errors. I-O Data, a Japanese maker of data-storage products, released a new external hard drive padded to prevent data loss if the drive is dropped. But the company unintentionally threw in a little bonus feature with the disk’s software: a worm written by malicious hackers that can infect a customer’s PC and force it to act as a spam distributor. Fortunately, the company caught the problem in time to avoid a widespread outbreak. LucasArts got dinged sharply when it performed a heavy makeover on its online game Star Wars Galaxies. The changes were intended to attract new players, but current gamers were enraged, claiming it invalidated their huge investments in playing time; one blog even noted that the new version excluded some disabled players because, unlike the old version, it can’t be played with one hand. Muzzling anything You have a right–nay, an obligation–to stop people from using your products and services to break laws, corrupt youth, and commit offensive acts, don’t you? Maybe, but try explaining that to Web users who are fanatical about free speech online, no exceptions abided. Thus the popular MySpace website has drawn heat for censoring references to a rival service. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia for which anyone can write and edit entries, drew criticism for some of the gross inaccuracies inserted by anonymous and occasionally malicious contributors. In response, the organization started to crack down on who could and couldn’t contribute–which then drew sharp criticism from those who felt Wikipedia was betraying its wide-open-to-the-community mission. No matter how careful you are, it may be impossible to avoid stumbling across some newly drawn ethical line. So be prepared to do some damage control when you get smacked down. You could get into a Talmudic discussion about right and wrong in these situations. But it seems to me there are two practical keys here. First, recognize how slippery technoethics has become, and give more thought to the implications of every move. Involving as many constituents as possible–customers, suppliers, even random representatives of the online community–in decision-making is one way to increase the chances of catching a potential perceived ethical breach. And second, accept that no matter how careful you are, it may be impossible to avoid stumbling across some newly drawn ethical line, and be prepared for damage control when you get smacked down. “If a company comes out and explains why it did what it did and describes its process for addressing the problem, people respect that,” says Gebler. “You can judge an organization by its first response to criticism.” David H. Freedman, a Boston-based writer and Inc. contributing editor, is the author of several books about business and technology. (whatsnext@inc.com)
