Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

Apple Loses Court Bid Against Bloggers
Apple’s attempt to identify the sources of leaked product information that appeared on Mac enthusiast websites has fallen flat on its face after a Californian court ruled that on-line reporters and bloggers are entitled to the same protections as traditional journalists.
Apple filed the lawsuit in December 2004 in Santa Clara County after ‘trade secrets’ related to GarageBand, their recording and editing music software, were passed on to bloggers at PowerPage.org, AppleInsider.com, and MacNN.com.
Looking to strip the bloggers of the protection afforded to journalists under California’s shield law, Apple claimed that by reposting “verbatim copies” of Apple’s internal information while exercising “no editorial oversight at all,” the bloggers were not ‘legitimate’ journalists.
The court was having none of it, with a unanimous ruling giving the three online publications protection under the shield law, as well as the constitutional privilege against disclosure of confidential sources.
Writing in a 69-page ruling, Justice Conrad Rushing of the 6th District Court of Appeal underlined the legitimacy of bloggers as bona-fide news-gatherers: “In no relevant respect do they appear to differ from a reporter or editor for a traditional business-oriented periodical who solicits or otherwise comes into possession of confidential internal information about a company”
“We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate journalism,” he continued.
“The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here,” added Justice Rushing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, who filed the petition on behalf of the journalists, declared the decision a “victory for the rights of journalists, whether online or offline, and for the public at large.”
“The court has upheld the strong protections for the free flow of information to the press, and from the press to the public,” said EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl in a statement.
EFF
30 May, 2006
Vodafone Make Record £14.9bn Loss
In the normal world, if you’d just discovered that your business had lost £14.9bn ($27.9bn) in a single year, you’d be blubbering into your laptop or heading to the pub to down a vat of Old Scrote’s Badger ale.
But in the crazy world of uber-corporate business, such a loss – the biggest ever recorded for a UK firm – has been spun around to be grrrreat news, with Reuters reporting that Vodafone has gleefully, “unveiled plans to return an extra 3 billion pounds to shareholders.”
So how does the “the biggest annual loss in European corporate history on write-downs” turn out to be a cash feast for shareholders – who are already looking forward to a slice of the £6bn earmarked after the sale of its Japanese venture?
Well, it’s all down to corporate assets not matching their buying price – in this case, German business Mannesmann, which Vodafone bought for £112bn ($183bn) six years ago.
With the actual income generated by the company not living up to its mighty price tag, Vodafone has shunted the value of the Mannesmann subsidiary downwards on its books – a process known in the hip’n’exciting world of accounting as a write-down.
Conversely, Vodafone has been raking it in recently, scooping in monster £8.8bn operating profits last year, while adding 21 million new customers.
In the white-hot mobile phone segment, Vodafone continues to create growth in key markets such as Germany, Spain and the United States, despite being forced to scuttle out of Japan – selling the business for £8.9bn – after failing to make much of a mark in the country.
Vodafone insists that its business remains fundamentally healthy, despite the whopping losses, with CEO Arun Sarin purring, “Vodafone has met or exceeded expectations, outperforming its competitors in an increasingly challenging marketplace.”
“Vodafone is well positioned to deliver on its strategy,” he continued, thumping the table in a positively aligned, upbeat manner.
Vodafone
30 May, 2006
Ripped Off On eBay? Start A Blog
A number of people that we know who have at one time or another had very serious eBay habits have, at one time or another have been ripped off on eBay. Some see it as a right of passage, one that makes you pay that little bit more attention the next time.
Clearly problems on eBay are the exception rather than the rule. We’ve also had some really great experiences with people who have been more than generous, going above and beyond what was required.
One of our bad ones was bidding for and winning the chance to send someone some money for a train simulator (it was for a friend, honest). The bit that we missed was that the money went to someone who had no intention of giving us the software for the money we’d sent.
When you realise this is the case you then get angry; contact eBay; they tell you about the scheme they have in place to provide financial recompense; you find out it’s actually not worth doing because the difference between what you paid and the admin charge makes it not worthwhile. You put it down to experience.
laptopguy , take it into your own hands
We live in a world of user-generated content, where the individual can have a voice as loud as the wealthiest newspaper owners. All they’ve got to do is get a blog.
One enterprising fellow, who goes under the moniker ‘laptopguy’, who claims to have been ripped off by buying an incorrectly described and broken laptop on eBay has taken matters into his own hands.
Warning: Given this is the Internet, we’ve really have no idea if any of this is true or not.
The story goes that after extracting the hard disk from the laptop, laptopguy proceeded to find all of the information that had been left on there when it was sold. In the process he says that he found out much more about Amir Massoud Tofangsazan (the seller we’re told) than he would probably want shared with the general public.
Some of this collected information (details of passport, bank account details, hotmail accounts, etc) and photos (friends, porn, foot fetish, secret photos of women in tights on the underground, etc) were then loaded on to a blog with blow-by-blow details of the alleged unhappy transaction.
This isn’t the first time a hard-drive has caused some embarasment to its seller on eBay. Back in April 2005, Brandenburg police in Germany made the same mistake.
True or not, in this recent case, the blog appears to be attracting the attention of the world with 117 comments posted as we write. We can see this story blowing up globally.
Direct action appears to have got laptopguy his redress, if not his £375.
Take care with the comments, some of them are NWS, and other just plain offensive.
The broken laptop I sold on ebay
26 May, 2006
CEO Carter To Leave Ofcom: UPDATED
This just in, Steven Carter, Chief Executive Officer of UK communication uber-regulator Ofcom will be standing down with effect from 15 October 2006.
Luke Gibbs of OfcomWatch covered Carter possible departure this back in January this year.
At the time of writing this article, Ofcom hasn’t given an official explanation of why Carter is leaving, just that he is.
As to the process of him leaving, the official Ofcom line is a little bewildering, “He will continue to lead on all operational and financial matters until that date (15 October 2006), but from 1 August 2006 will not be party to Ofcom’s economic, competition and policy decisions.”
What’s special about 1 Aug 2006? Given Carter’s contract prevents him from securing future employment whilst at Ofcom, is this perhaps someway for him to hasten taking up another role with another organisation? Carter’s contract also contains “appropriate gardening leave restrictions” up to a maximum of 12 months at the discretion of the Chairman.
The next role for Carter has been the matter of some conjecture, nay gossip. Given Ofcom is seen by a lot of the world as a leader in communications regulation, there are many possible roles. Amoung those mentioned so far have been BSkyB, and with James Murdoch rumoured to be shifting upstairs the position may be open. Hey … how about the FCC?
From 1 August, David Currie will act as Executive Chairman and will chair the Policy Executive, until a permanent replacement can be found.
Prior to joining Ofcom in 2003, Carter was at UK cable company NTL during its time of financial troubles.
More details on the story when we have them.
OfcomWatch
Ofcom
26 May, 2006
PayPal Exclusive Wallet On Yahoo: Wide-ranging Deal
PayPal is to be the exclusive online wallet across Yahoo’s product and services. In a wide-ranging, four component, business arrangement announced today, eBay and Yahoo will be stroking each other commercial departments.
In their words, PayPal will be “deeply integrated on the Yahoo! site and will receive prominent positioning when users purchase Yahoo! services.” Beyond this PayPal will also be offered to Yahoo’s merchants and publishers, including the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other small business services.
Yahoo exclusive graphics ad provider to eBay
Additional details of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” big dollar deal include Yahoo being the exclusive provider of graphical advertising on eBay.
Interestingly Yahoo will also be offering sponsored search for complementary products on some eBay.com search results pages in the U.S.
Click-to-Call Advertising “being explored”
As we’re sure you know, Click-to-Call will let the user click on an icon on an advert and speak directly to the advertiser, without touching the phone.
For us, this part of the announcement is a bit of a strange one. Yahoo has Yahoo Messenger with Voice and eBay has Skype, so who would provide the voice services in which circumstances is pretty unclear, and we would have though, an area for friction.
What they’re saying about it is, “Yahoo and eBay do not expect this relationship to have a material impact on their financial results in 2006. Both companies will incorporate any financial impact for 2007 and beyond when they deliver their business outlook for those periods.” Make of that what you will.
25 May, 2006
Over A Third Of All PC Software Pirated
Over a third of all packaged software installed on PCs worldwide in 2005 was pirated, according to a study released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade group charged with fighting the use of unauthorised software.
Although the percentage of dodgy software in use remained the same as last year, global losses from software piracy rose by US$1.6 billion to $34 billion, according to BSA’s figures.
Exaggerated figures?
Not everyone buys into the hefty figures though, with some economists questioning the estimated losses in the annual study.
The total is based on the price users would have paid for legitimate versions of the pirated software, but, as BSA president and CEO Robert Holleyman recently commented himself, some users would have decided not to use the software if they had to fork out for it.
In fact, some have claimed that BSA’s accounting methods are so inaccurate that it amounts to scaremongering, especially when extrapolating figures from third world countries where just a few programs at full price would cost more than a citizen’s average annual income.
More notably, IDC, the company that produces the reports, has already stated publicly that the BSA is misrepresenting the numbers, pointing out that the US$34 billion claimed “losses” aren’t actually “losses” at all – it’s just the estimated retail value of the pirated software.
Instead, IDC estimates that only one out of every ten pirated programs should be counted as an actual loss, which makes for much less of a headline-grabbing story.
Piracy league tables
Back to the BSA, Holleyman noted the anti-piracy progress being made in some countries, but insisted that, “much more needs to be done.”
Of all the countries studied, the US came out with the lowest piracy rate of all at 21 percent, but the massive size of the software market there meant that it recorded the highest claimed loss of $6.9 billion.
In second place was China with recorded losses of $3.9 billion and a piracy rate so high that anyone actually buying a registered copy of software must be seen as a bit of a weirdo – 86 percent.
In third place was France which notched up losses of $3.2 billion, accompanied by a piracy rate of 47 percent, while in Brit-land, 27 per cent of PC software used in the UK was claimed to be illegal.
In terms of outright piracy, Vietnam and Zimbabwe led the purloining world with piracy rates approaching 90 percent, followed by Indonesia at 87 and China and Pakistan at 86 percent.
Although the amount of global piracy has remained constant, the study found that some traditional piracy hotspots have decreased, with Ukraine registering the biggest drop in piracy rates last year, down 6 percentage points, with China, Russia and Morocco also managing a 4 percentage points decrease.
Next to the US, countries with the lowest piracy rates included New Zealand, Austria and Finland.
Business Software Alliance (BSA)
24 May, 2006
IT Staff Top Stressed-Out League
IT workers who spend all day battling with clueless idiots who have just deleted critical OS files because they looked ‘messy’ already know it, but now it’s official: people who work in IT are the most stressed folks on the planet.
Surging ahead of traditional stress leaders like medicine, engineering and education, a survey conducted by research firm SWNS for online learning provider SkillSoft found that a staggering 97% of IT workers claim to find their life at work “stressful on a daily basis”.
The poll – involving more than 3,000 people – also discovered that four-fifths of IT consultants felt stressed “before they even enter the workplace”, while around a quarter were so crushed by the “enormous pressure to perform at work” that they’d taken time off suffering with stress.
One poor techie sod who responded to the survey blubbered into his Coke can, “I spend most of my day fielding calls from people who don’t even have a basic knowledge of computers and printers. It is amazing the amount of time I spend teaching people where the on-off button is. And when I do actually find a technical problem to solve, I have my manager breathing down my neck wondering why I have a backlog of complaints.”
Meddlin’ managers
Interfering managers were also found to be a source of extra stress, with a third of IT professionals saying that pesky meddling managers made it difficult for them to get their jobs done.
The survey unearthed the main stress factors for people at work (why not see how many you can tick off?!) and these include deadlines, workload, feeling undervalued, having to take on other people’s work, lack of job satisfaction, lack of control over the working day and having to work long hours.
The survey insists that employers should take the problem of stress seriously, citing the Health & Safety Executive’s research that puts stress as the biggest cause of working days lost through injury or ill health [an estimated 12.8 million lost days each year].”
In case you’re wondering about the other stressful jobs, here’s SkillSoft’s top ten stressful jobs
IT
Medicine/Caring Profession
Engineering
Sales and Marketing
Education
Finance
Human Resources
Operations
Production
Clerical
Skillsoft
Top tips to avoid office frazzle Elsewhere, an “office stress” study conducted by CareerBuilder.com found that more than three quarters of respondents felt “job burnout”, while over half felt under a “great deal of stress.”
Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder.com‘s vice president of human resources insisted that “high-pressure work environments are taking their toll on workers’ morale,” adding that the stress “can be detrimental to both workers, whose health and career progress may suffer, and employers, who pick up the tab in higher insurance costs and lost productivity.”
Happily, ol’ Rosie babe kindly offered some four top tips to help reduce office stress:
– Organize and prioritize by taking care of the more difficult and important tasks early in the day.
– Manage expectations so that you can achieve your goals and deliver on promises to others.
– Set aside a period of time dedicated to responding to e-mail and voicemails.
– Lastly, take care of yourself. A healthier you is more productive and happier.
We’d give that a go ourselves, but we’re busy with some idiot on the line and he’s… making…us…. chuffing…crazy… grrr…..
18 May, 2006
Spammers 1 Internet 0 As Blue Security Surrender
A promising anti-spam service by Israeli company Blue Security has been brought to its knees by a renegade spammer hell-bent on protecting his spamming industry
Created by Eran Reshef, Blue Security came up with what looked like a cunningly simple plan to mash up the mass mailers: fight spam with spam.
The company set up a ‘Do Not Intrude Registry’ (similar to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing) and invited members to download a small application called Blue Frog, which automatically sent out requests to spammers to stop sending junk e-mail.
Of course, spammers aren’t renowned for paying attention to opt-out requests, so Blue Frog came with a rather nasty bite to make sure they paid attention: the software bombarded spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
It seemed to work too – Blue Security claimed that “six out of the top ten spammers” had complied with their opt-out requests and after signing up to the free service, we found our spam dropping dramatically. But not for long.
Spammers fight back
Not surprisingly, spammers don’t like it up ’em and soon started fighting back with a counter attack, launching a campaign of extortion e-mail messages threatening to flood users with nonsensical spam and viruses unless they removed their name from the Do Not Intrude registry.
This was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack using tens of thousands of hijacked computers which managed to knock Blue Security’s Website off the Web.
According to Reshef, a shady Russian-speaking spammer known as PharmaMaster then managed to bribe a staff member at a top-tier ISP into ‘black holing’ Blue Security’s former IP address (194.90.8.20) at Internet backbone routers – effectively rendering Blue’s main Website invisible to anyone outside of Israel.
Rather sinisterly, PharmaMaster told Blue Security in an ICQ conversation, that if he can’t send spam, there will be “no Internet.”
With Blue Security reduced to communicating through their secondary TypePad-hosted Weblog at bluesecurity.blogs.com, the spammer moved in for the kill, launching a ferocious denial of service attack that closed down the TypePad and Live Journal servers owned by Six Apart.
This resulted in thousands of blogs disappearing off the Web for a few hours, with the net operations of five top-tier hosting providers in the US and Canada also being disrupted.
The attack also shut down operations for around 12 hours at Tucows Inc., a Canadian Internet services company who helped manage Blue Security’s site.
Surrender
Faced with this endless aggro, Reshef has pulled the plug on his anti-spam operations, commenting, “It’s clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don’t have the authority to start.”
“Our users never signed up for this kind of thing,” he wearily added, admitting that in retrospect he’d made the mistake of not anticipating that PharmaMaster would go “beserk.”
Commenting on the DoS attack on his server, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss declared it to be “by far the largest the company had ever seen,” adding that very few companies currently have the infrastructure in place to withstand similar full-on assaults.
“This attack really was like trying to take out a mosquito with an atomic bomb,” Noss added.
According to Six Apart, the FBI is investigating the attacks, but we won’t be holding our breath on seeing anyone behind bars.
Told You So
Speaking to the Washington Post, Todd Underwood, chief of operations and security for Renesys Corp, tried hard to stop himself from saying, “I told you so”:
“When the company’s founders first approached the broader anti-spam community and asked them what they thought of the idea, everyone said this was a terrible idea and that they would eventually cause a lot of collateral damage,” Underwood commented.
“But it’s also extremely unfortunate, because it shows how much the spammers are winning this battle,” he added.
Where this leaves the venture capitalists who invested more than $4 million in Blue Security in 2004 is anyone’s guess, but we’re saddened to see the outcome.
The fate of Blue Security’s initiative proves that steeenkin’ spammers still rule the Internet and until governments take a unified and global approach to prosecuting junk mailers, they’re free to do whatever they like.
17 May, 2006
UK e-Shoppers To Spend £26bn In 2006
UK shoppers are set to spend an average £1,000 each online in 2006, according to the yearly report by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).
The ‘industry body for e-retailing’ has forecast that mouse-clicking Brits will shell out £26bn online in the UK in 2006, as online shopping goes stratospheric.
According to IMRG’s figures, online shopping has grown by 2,600 percent over the last five years, with the £2bn sales notched up in November and December 2005 representing a hefty 50 percent rise the same period in 2004.
Moreover, IMRG predicts that 2006 will see ten percent of all purchases being made online.
The explosive rise in Internet shopping is seen as a result of more consumers having broadband and retailers making better use of the Internet, but the report warned of online retailers still facing challenges.
According to IMRG’s own research, usability, customer retention, and interactive marketing were cited as the biggest concerns by over half of their members, with e-crime and delivery fulfilment seen as high-priority issues by around a third.
IMRG
Why-aye Big Spender!
Elsewhere, web testing firm SciVisum’s recent research on regional e-commerce spending found that consumers in the north east of the UK spent the most online, and were also the most likely to fork out for high-value goods.
The survey found that a third of consumers in the NE spent between £50 and £100 per month and had no qualms about dishing out sums as large as £5,000 for a single online purchase.
Compare that to stingy shoppers in the south who said that they’d spend no more than £50 per month online, and wouldn’t dream of shelling out sums as high as £5,000.
Not surprisingly, the most popular online purchases were books and CDs, purchased by three quarters of shoppers.
Around fifty per cent of shoppers said they would buy holidays and electrical goods online, while a quarter do their grocery shopping and finances online.
SciVisum
10 May, 2006

Ofcom GSM Guard Bands License Awards Explained

The frequencies 1781.7-1785MHz paired with 1876.7-1880MHz known as the GSM Guard bands have been made available to 12 licensees under the Wireless Telegraphy Act. They are national UK licenses, though the operators of the licenses will have to cooperate amongst themselves so that interference between themselves doesn’t occur. Ofcom expect the licensees to form an industry body that will self-regulate. Operators will also be required to register all radio equipment in the “Sitefinder” database (currently populated by the GSM and 3G operators).

Even though the licenses are only low power (sub 200mW compared to 10’s of Watts for traditional GSM systems), they are suitable for services such as in-building GSM, local area GSM (such as in a theme-park) or other constrained areas. There are 15 GSM channels available, each one being able to carry 8 voice calls i.e. 120 voice calls in total. Having a reasonable number of channels will allow multiple operators to co-exist in an area and also allow single operators to cover larger areas (in such a way that multiple GSM basestations won’t interfere with each other).

Though it is expected the main use will be low power GSM, Ofcom have not specified what the licenses should be used for and as such, can be utilised for any service, such as localised wireless broadband, as long as the GSM spectral masks are adhered to (which will ensure interference doesn’t occur with the existing GSM operators).

Winning Licensees
The 12 companies winning licenses and the prices they paid were: – (note all bids in GB pounds £)

British Telecommunications PLC	275,112
Cable & Wireless UK ( England)	51,002
COLT Mobile Telecommunications Ltd	1,513,218
Cyberpress Ltd	151,999
FMS Solutions Ltd	113,000
Mapesbury Communications Ltd	76,660
O2 ( UK) Ltd	209,888
Opal Telecom Ltd	155,555
PLDT ( UK) Ltd	88,889
Shyam Telecom UK Ltd	101,011
Spring Mobil AB	50,110
Teleware PLC	1,001,880

Ofcom published the complete matrix of bids as the award was for between 7 and 12 licenses. It was a close thing at 8 licenses as a few bidders put in high entries for low numbers of licenses and dropped the amount as the license numbers increased.

Ofcom arranged the auction in a sealed bid process in a “what you bid is what you pay” arrangement, which lead to the lowest price paid as £50,110 by Spring Mobil and the highest £1,513,218 by COLT (30x as much). Some have argued that the highest bidders paid over the odds, but they are putting a good spin on it saying that it’s in-line with their mobile strategy. The total amount of the licence fees paid was £3.8million, not bad for Ofcom’s first spectrum auction.

Of course, compared to the license fees paid for 3G spectrum (around £6bn per license) it’s peanuts.

A license, but what to do with it?
Having a license is all very well, but now licensees must be wondering what they’ve got themselves into. Just because they can run a GSM service doesn’t mean anyone will use it, in fact it may well be difficult to get people onto your network.

It’s extremely unlikely the existing mobile operators are going to want to have anything to do with these new upstarts, they’ve invested millions (err, billions) to get to where they are today. The last thing they want is new entrants poaching customers or moving users off their networks when they move into, say, an office environment. They especially don’t want their customers doing it with equipment (i.e. handsets) that they’ve heavily subsidised.

Unfortunately, what this means is that the new players are going to have to issue new SIMs (Subscriber Identity Modules) and they won’t work on existing GSM networks, or users will manually have to select the new network when they’re in range. This makes it all very difficult, and users won’t bother if it’s hard.

New entrants could enter into roaming agreements with the current operators, but unless Ofcom mandates this (which is unlikely) there’s likely to be strong opposition. Since some of the license winners already have GSM networks, they can offer localised services knowing there’s no interference problems with existing infrastructure.

Deals with foreign GSM operators?
One way ahead is for a licensee to make an agreement with a foreign operator and the localised network just becomes an extension of their foreign network, but then when users roam on to the network they’ll be subject to roaming charges which, as both Ofcom and the EU Government know too well, can mean very high charges for the end-user. If roaming charges do decline then this may well be a way forward.

There’s also a big potential opportunity for the Channel Islands GSM networks here, as they abide by UK numbering plans, so though they are considered “foreign”, their numbers look like UK numbers, including mobile ranges. They could offer roaming agreements and even offer SIMs which would still look like UK numbers.

So the future’s bright, but it will be an interesting few years to see if any of the new entrants can really pull anything off.

10 May, 2006