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8948603fa9999ff77343eee8b3f7ecdf | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2012/07/15/ecb-makes-crucial-policy-change-on-bank-bailouts/ | ECB Makes Crucial Policy Change on Bank Bailouts | ECB Makes Crucial Policy Change on Bank Bailouts
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi
Last week, I wrote here about how the EU appeared determined to stick to its policy of making taxpayers cover the losses of privately-owned banks by protecting all senior bond-holders. Afterwards I spoke with the Wall Street Journal's Gabriele Steinhauser about my criticisms of this policy and her story reported how small investors were likely to be hit by Spain's bank restructurings but that senior creditors were safe "for now".
Maybe Gabriele knew more than she had revealed in that report because today, in a hugely important story, Gabriele and Brian Blackstone have reported that the ECB dissented from the position on senior bank bonds adopted by the European finance ministers.
The European Central Bank, in a sharp turnaround, has advocated imposing losses on holders of senior bonds issued by the most severely damaged Spanish savings banks, though finance ministers have for now rejected the approach, according to people familiar with discussions. The ECB's new position was made clear by its president, Mario Draghi, to a meeting of euro-zone finance ministers discussing a euro-zone rescue for Spain's struggling local lenders in Brussels the evening of July 9. It marks a contrast from the position the central bank adopted during the 2010 bailout of Irish banks—which, like Spain's, were victims of a property meltdown—when it prevailed in its insistence that senior bondholders in bailed-out banks shouldn't suffer losses.
A European Commission's spokesperson is quoted in the Wall Street Journal story as rejecting this position saying "It is clear that senior bondholders won't be involved in burden sharing." However, it is not really so clear. Spain is receiving its first €30 billion tranche in assistance from its banks from the EFSF. As FT Alphaville's ace reporter Joseph Cotterill pointed out to me, EFSF's existing guidelines state that conditionality for its investment
could draw from the future EU bank crisis resolution framework, which will be proposed by the Commission after summer. In particular, such a conditionality could include requirements to enhance the supervisory toolbox in the three crucial phases of crisis management identified (preparation, early intervention and resolution) such as recovery and resolution plans, early intervention tools for supervisory authorities, asset separation tools, bail-in tools.
The crucial words here are the last ones -- "bail-in tools". If you don't know what a bail-in tool is, check out the now-released European Commission's proposals for bank resolution: The bail-in tool is a method for seeing that senior bond-holders have their claims reduced or converted to equity. The European Commission has said that these "bail-in" proposals will not be used until 2018 but if EFSF says that it may only supply funds if bail-ins are a condition of its investment, then that means this tool could be applied in the coming months.
The WSJ story supplies a really depressing explanation for why the Eurogroup of finance ministers disagreed with Mario Draghi's assessment that bail-in tools needed to be used when resolving the Spanish banks.
a chief reason ministers decided not to make more privileged bondholders take losses was the Irish precedent, two people said. Dublin has had to pump more than €60 billion, equivalent to around 40% of its annual gross domestic product, into several struggling lenders, forcing it to request a €67.5 billion bailout from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund in 2010. Forcing senior creditors to take losses in Spain would have raised more questions in Ireland about why taxpayers were forced by the EU to take on the huge burden of repaying high-ranked bondholders.
Yep, you read that correctly. Because Irish taxpayers were forced to pay off all the losses of bondholders in private banks, Spanish taxpayers need to do the same, so that Irish people don't complain about being treated unfairly. Because we made a mistake before, we need to make it again to avoid admitting we were wrong.
Unfortunately, this type of unwillingness to admit to past mistakes is a regular feature of the EU policy making. What makes things different now is that Mario Draghi now apparently disagrees with a key policy of the EU finance ministers. And Mario Draghi is perhaps Europe's most powerful man because he controls the Euro area's printing presses.
This is an important moment in the euro crisis. Mario Draghi has done what many other refuse to do: He has admitted his organization's policy on a crucial issue needs to be changed. Europe's leaders need to listen to him instead of refusing to admit to past mistakes.
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0246f1a47d14f9d6caa12b432e8e43a3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2012/08/28/note-to-republicans-the-us-cant-do-a-gold-standard-on-its-own/ | Note To Republicans: The U.S. Can't Run A Gold Standard On Its Own | Note To Republicans: The U.S. Can't Run A Gold Standard On Its Own
The Republican proposal for a commission to consider “restoring a link between the U.S. dollar and gold” has generated a lot of excitement among the internet’s many goldbugs. Forbes.com has provided some enthusiastic examples of this excitement, featuring promises that the gold proposal will do everything short of making your breakfast each morning.
I hate to rain on this party but I think one simple point is worth explaining: Restoring the link between the U.S. dollar and gold will not bring back the gold standard or any of its supposed advantages.
The gold standard was a system in which all the world’s major currencies had their values fixed against gold. For this reason, the world supply of gold dictated the global supply of money. Now this isn’t necessarily a sensible idea. Periods when gold supplies were fixed meant that a stable stock of money had to finance increasing amounts of transactions as the economy grew, so prices fell. In contrast, periods with major gold discoveries lead to global inflation.
Still, what one could say about this system was that it took the global supply of money out of the hands of central bankers and politicians (as long as the system stayed in place). The current Republican proposal would not do this. With no other country fixing their currency against the price of gold, decisions about the global supply of money would remain in the hands of the world’s central bankers.
What would determine the supply of dollars and inflation under the Republican proposal? Like all commodities, the price of gold is determined by supply and demand. Suppose there was a decline in the demand for gold or perhaps a large increase in its supply. Around the world, the price of gold would decline. In the UK, for example, with no commitment to keep sterling linked to gold, the price of gold might fall from £1000 per ounce to £900 per ounce.
In the U.S., however, the situation would be different. To maintain the commitment to keep the price of gold fixed against the dollar, the U.S. would have to print more dollars so that the dollar depreciated against other currencies (something that couldn’t happen under a proper gold standard). This additional money printing would lead to an increase in inflation in America. In general, the Republican proposal would see the value of the dollar swinging randomly based on global patterns of supply and demand in a volatile commodity market that tends to follow its own mysterious logic.
While its advocates may view this proposal as “fixing the value of the dollar,” the truth is that the dollar’s real value is measured by how many goods and services it can buy you, not by how many ounces of an arbitrary precious metal it can acquire. Indeed, all this proposal really does is fix the price of a particular commodity quoted in a particular currency.
Republicans are generally skeptical of government intervention in markets and there are good grounds for this skepticism. People should ask themselves why gold should be an exception to this general principle and whether this price-fixing exercise is a good way to determine the supply of dollars.
Whatever you think about the merits of the classical gold standard (and I think this article by Barry Eichengreen has it about right) and however dissatisfied people may be with the economic performance delivered by the Federal Reserve, there are no grounds for believing this proposal would provide the U.S. with sound money and economic stability.
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27d87b94556929a966966997b4200925 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2012/09/05/did-bill-clintons-budgets-really-destroy-the-american-economy/ | Did Bill Clinton's Budgets Really Destroy the American Economy? | Did Bill Clinton's Budgets Really Destroy the American Economy?
That’s the claim made today by influential commentator Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider. Weisenthal's claim is based on the basic macroeconomic identity that income equals spending. As advocates of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) school of thought (such as Stephanie Kelton of University of Missouri Kansas City) have emphasized, this simple identity has profound implications. It means that if one sector of the economy is saving (spending less than it's earning) then the other sectors of the economy must be accumulating debt or running down savings (spending more than they are earning).
For a closed economy, this identity means that government deficits must imply private sector saving (with the private sector buying government bonds) while governments can only save (run budget surpluses) if the private sector runs up debts or runs down its savings.
In an open economy, government deficits don't have to imply private saving as it may be the rest of the world that saves by accumulating the government's debt; in this case, it is the rest of the world that is spending less than it's earning in income. Conversely, in an open economy, a budget surplus doesn't have to mean the private sector is reducing its stock of assets or running up debt but that the rest of the world is reducing its stock of assets that it is owed by the surplus-running country.
Weisenthal's argument is that Bill Clinton brought about the financial crisis by running surpluses. Based on the income-spending identity, he concludes it was Clinton's surpluses that lead to the accumulation of private debts that subsequently triggered the financial crisis. I think the "sectoral balances" viewpoint is extremely important for understanding macroeconomics and MMT contributors such as Kelton are doing a great job of promoting its implications. But I think Weisenthal's interpretation of the data is off base.
For starters, here's the chart showing the US federal budget deficit as a share of GDP. Clinton's surpluses began to erode during George W Bush's first year in office and the US was back to running large deficits again in 2003.
And why does 2003 matter? Well, that's when US house prices, which had already been increasing at a decent clip, went into overdrive. So it wasn't budget surpluses that drove the unsustainable asset price bubble that brought about the crash.
And contrary to Weisenthal's story in which the US private sector was "forced" to live beyond its means by a government insistent on running budget surplus, the years prior to the global financial crisis saw both the public and private sectors in the US living beyond their means, with this accumulation of debt financed by current account deficits run with the rest of the world. These deficits, which had been large under Clinton, doubled under George W. Bush.
Weisenthal mentions the role of Fannie and Freddie in stoking up the mortgage crisis. There is little doubt that the federal housing agencies played a role in attempting to extend home ownership rates higher than was perhaps sensible. However, a look at the data shows that the push towards high rates of home ownership that began under Clinton was continued under the Bush administration right up to the eve of the crisis. So you could argue that both administrations deserve equal blame for these developments.
Weisenthal is right to be skeptical of the simplistic view that it is always good for the government to run surpluses or even balanced budgets; the right budget balance for an economy will change over time depending on underlying conditions in the private sector. But using sectoral balances to reach back in time to blame Bill Clinton for the financial crisis is an argument that doesn't fit the facts.
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b27166bef730f63366aabd2a11ddeb13 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2012/09/05/trichet-tells-cnn-dont-publish-the-ecb-secret-letter/ | Trichet Tells CNN: Don't Publish the ECB's Secret Letter | Trichet Tells CNN: Don't Publish the ECB's Secret Letter
Readers may recall that I've been writing in recent weeks about the secret letter the ECB sent to Ireland that apparently hastened that country into an EU-IMF bailout. A sign that some progress has been made in getting the letter released was the agreement of Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, that the letter should be published, though apparently not until some point in the future.
Jean-Claude Trichet
Now, the author of the secret letter, former ECB president, Jean-Claude Trichet, has been asked directly by CNN about this issue. Trichet responded that the letters should not be released on the grounds that "These were messages that were confidential at the time."
This strikes me as inadequate grounds to prevent publication of the letter. It may have been the case that the letter contained sensitive material about the state of the Irish banks in November 2010 but these historical problems are now well known.
While there is a need for public officials to be able to communicate with each other during crises in ways that don't destabilize financial markets, this does not give them carte blanche to say and do as they wish without their actions ever being explained to the public. At this point, there is a strong public interest in the letters being released.
Hopefully, other journalists will continue to ask questions about this issue (perhaps it could be raised with Mario Draghi at his press conference on Thursday?) If so, I would encourage them to also ask about the mysterious discrepancy that I discussed here between the November 12 date on which former Irish finance minister Lenihan recalls receiving a crucial letter from the ECB and the November 19 date associated with the letter that the ECB refuses to release.
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9f302a10d37a32c0ecce2fe176234338 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2013/03/26/cyprus-europe-rolls-the-dice-on-its-banks/ | Cyprus: Europe Rolls the Dice on its Banks | Cyprus: Europe Rolls the Dice on its Banks
Dutch Finance Minister and President of the Eurogroup Council Jeroen Dijsselbloem (Image credit:... [+] AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
The Cyprus bailout deal represents a complete change in Europe’s strategy toward banks from the approach used with Ireland. (See my op-ed on the topic in the Irish Times) The precedents the EU is setting are of profound import.
A couple of years ago, when Ireland was being shut out of the sovereign debt markets because of its attempts to repay all the creditors of its insolvent banks, the Eurozone’s leaders fully supported this policy. Indeed, once Ireland began negotiating with the “troika” and raised the issue of defaulting on senior bank bonds in insolvent banks, the European Commission and ECB insisted that this option was not on.
The European thinking at the time appeared to reflect the lesson they believed they had learned from the Lehman episode. Sick of bailing out banks and worried about setting further precedents, Paulson rolled the dice and bet that the short-term disruptions to financial markets from letting banks fail and creditors take the hit would be offset by the longer-term gains. The result was financial chaos, a quick U-turn and the biggest bailout in U.S. financial history.
After years of adopting the position that no banks should fail, suddenly the European position sounds very like that adopted by Hank Paulson in 2008. The head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, yesterday talked about how the Cyprus decision sets a precedent for future bank failures. Reuters reported him as follow
If we want to have a healthy, sound financial sector, the only way is to say, 'Look, there where you take on the risks, you must deal with them, and if you can't deal with them, then you shouldn't have taken them on,'
The message is clear. European political tensions have produced a more extreme version of bail-out fatigue than that experienced by Hank Paulson in 2008. As a result, Europe now too wishes to roll the dice and hope the short-term damage of creditor write-offs isn’t too damaging.
The immediate reaction to the Cyprus decision hasn’t looked anything like the reaction to the Lehman decision but then the Cypriot banks are very small relative to the European economy. It could be that investors and depositors don’t yet believe Mr. Dijsselbloem that they will take the hit if a big bank fails.
Alternatively, the next few weeks may see a silent movement of money away from Europe’s weaker banks requiring further ECB support and inevitably leading to the by-now-familiar pattern in which the ECB intervenes to trigger a bailout and resolution.
One pattern you’re certainly like to see in the coming weeks is large depositors reallocating their funds so they don’t keep more than €100,000 in any one bank. If this is the case, then the cost of honouring deposit guarantees in future bank resolutions is probably rising.
Economically, there is a strong case for a systemic resolution of Europe’s banking problems: A consistent assessment of bank assets followed by a consistent resolution leading to a safer recapitalized banking sector. Politically, that can’t happen so we’re likely instead to lurch from crisis to crisis. Even by its own recent standards, I suspect the next few months will be an interesting one for the European banking sector.
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216920bc45e8d8dbd73b11c5bedd46a3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlwhelan/2013/04/24/when-nassim-taleb-attacks/ | When Nassim Taleb Attacks | When Nassim Taleb Attacks
Nassim Taleb (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You might have heard of Nassim Taleb. He writes books about how unexpected things happen sometimes and how he’s much smarter than everyone else. I appear to have upset Mr. Taleb by being less than deferential to him after he insulted a friend of mine on Twitter.
Anyway, thanks to Matthew Boesler at Business Insider for putting the tweets in one place, so you can find out lots of bad things about me by clicking here. According to Taleb, my many failings include
“not being a real person”
Being “clueless about risk”
Leaving Taleb to “have to do cleanup for the Irish taxpayers”
Being “the perfect profile of the person supported by the taxpayer against the taxpayer’s own interests”
And best of all “part of the system of intellectual fraudsters that blew up the economy, and you are still there. Sophist”
Matthew wasn’t able to include the Tweet where Taleb opined darkly that I was “following orders” (from whom, one wonders) because it seems to have disappeared (presumably deleted by Taleb.)
Anyway, it turns out the next step in my punishment is that my research papers are to be subjected to “severe mathematical scrutiny” via what Taleb describes as
a mathematical toolkit to detect anything that is bullshit in economic modeling (particularly macroeconomics), figure out which papers are flawed from a scientific standpoint, etc. When I mean flawed, it is on the basis that the math used impresses nonmathematicians but does not support the stated policy conclusions.
I fear poor Taleb may be sadly disappointed by the lack of supposedly impressive mathematics in my work.
Lately, I’ve been too busy trying to document how the Eurosystem of central banks operates and how the Irish taxpayer has been burdened with massive debts due to bailouts for private creditors to focus much on testing mathematical economic models.
And most of my papers that examined sophisticated mathematical models have come to the conclusion that they’re not very good (something that hasn’t exactly endeared me to many of my colleagues).
Were he not so convinced of my evilness, Taleb might even have allowed himself to like this paper which shows that evidence that some economists are better at forecasting than others is largely due to random sampling error (so yes, people are fooled by randomness …)
I will report back on the severe mathematical scrutiny as soon as I hear anything.
For now, I'm off to get ready for teaching, including discussing this paper by Ricardo Caballero with my MA class. Titled "Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome" it critiques the fake precision of modern mathematical macroeconomic models. It's one of my favorite papers.
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7fc71491ee7dd62d399da3ec4639c302 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2019/01/04/ten-things-new-managers-need-to-know/ | Ten Things New Managers Need To Know | Ten Things New Managers Need To Know
You've finally done it. After years of hard work, you've been promoted to a position managing a team of people and can call the shots. Your first job as a manager can be exciting, and also a bit overwhelming. And it's important to do it well. Managers are the cultural linchpin in the organization - they set the tone for the work experience. The rest of the organization could be fantastic, but if your boss isn't up to snuff that will cloud all of the good things happening. There's a reason people say "you don't quit your job...you quit your boss."
To get off on the right foot, here are ten tips to help you get the most out of your team and create a work experience they will thrive in.
1. Being a manager is not an elevated version of being an individual contributor.
I was once coaching a new manager who told me "well, I've got to play the game that brought me here." And I replied, "you were playing basketball before, but you're playing football now." It's a fundamentally different game. Playing by the rules of the old game instead of adapting to the rules of the new game just sets you and your team up for failure.
You likely made it into a manager position because you proved you could be successful at the job you were doing as an individual contributor, but not because you proved your ability to manage a group of individual contributors. Those are two very different things! Just like you can't wake up one day and play a concerto on the piano if you've never played before, you probably won't wake up and automatically know what to do to be the world's best manager. It's a skill that must develop in its own right, just like any other skill.
So, consider yourself an apprentice. This is a time to learn how to step into the leadership role your team needs you to take, how to delegate effectively, and how to inspire your team to put in their best every day. If you make a mistake or two along the way, own it and then promise to do better.
2. Adaptation is your magic bullet.
Want your people to be highly productive? Motivated? Creative? Innovative? Then you need to learn how to adapt your work style to theirs.
Everyone you're managing will bring a different natural work style to the office, which means they all have different things that are going to inspire and motivate them, or hold them back from doing their best work. Sometimes you get lucky have employees who have a very similar working style as you and you gel immediately without much fuss. More often, the opposite is true and you end up with employees who just approach work differently. You must keep in mind that "different" is not necessarily bad or wrong. Each work style has its own set of strengths and challenges, and no work style is fundamentally better or worse than any other.
In an ideal world, we would all understand the work styles of our colleagues, and proactively adapt to meet somewhere in the middle. However, most of the time someone needs to take the first step. As a manager, that's your job. You are the one in the power position, and if your goal is to support your team in performing at their highest level, you have to work to understand their needs and adapt your work style to them. Remember, when they are successful, that means you've been successful.
3. People like structure and guidance.
Zappos made headlines several years ago when they restructured to a holacracy and effectively eliminated manager positions. The result? 18% of their workforce left the company, a huge turnover rate by any standard.
The idea of getting rid of managers and allowing lower-level employees to be more entrepreneurial sounds great, but rarely works in practice because from a psychological perspective, most people seek out structure and guidance. We've been trained to do this from the time we're small children - we look to our parents, our teachers, our extended family, and our friends to know what to do and what not to do. When you enter the workforce, you can't turn off 20+ years of programming - people want ongoing feedback.
Someone has to be in charge of providing that guidance and saying it's everyone's responsibility isn't good enough. When something is everyone's responsibility, it's really no one's responsibility. So, it rests on managers to do it. In fact, 65% of people say they want more feedback from their boss than they are currently getting, even in traditional structures. As a manager, your job is to provide the structure and guidance your team members need to do their best work on an ongoing basis.
4. But people will sink under too much structure and guidance.
All that said from the last point, it's important to know that managers need to walk the tightrope between providing guidance and micromanagement. Here are some critical differences between effective managers and micromanagers:
Effective managers lead through influence. Miromanagers lead through control. Effective managers know that experience (and the occasional failure) is the only way to learn, grow, and push beyond business as usual. Micromanagers fear failure of any kind, no matter how small or insignificant. Effective managers ask questions that guide their team members to a solution. Micromanagers dictate a solution without exploring different options or opportunities. Effective managers empower their team members to do their work on their own, as long as they provide updates and ask for help when needed. Micromanagers need to be involved in every meeting and CCed on every email. Effective managers keep their cards face up at all times. They share information openly and transparently. Micromanagers keep their cards very close to their chest as if they are in competition with everyone they work with. Effective managers remain open to new ideas, willing to explore them if they seem reasonable. Micromanagers default to doing the things the way they've always done them before.
Managers get a bad reputation because of all the micromanagers out there who refuse to let go of the control and empower their employees to succeed on their own. But remember that it is your job to delegate because that is the only way for your team members to learn and grow in their own right.
5. Let your people lead in their area, even if you don't always agree with where they are going.
If you want your employees to be empowered to do their best work, that requires taking a step back. Remember, your role is to provide guidance, you can do this by asking questions to make sure your team member has fully considered their approach. But if their ideas are different than the way you would have done it, most of the time the best way to go is to let them go try what they want to do and see what happens. There's always more than one way to meet a goal, and very few of us work in jobs that are truly life and death. If they fail, it's a teaching moment and an opportunity to iterative f. And if they succeed using a strategy that you wouldn't have picked, that's still a win for you!
6. Schedule regular, consistent, frequent one-on-one meetings.
Very few people want more meetings in their lives, but for managers, a weekly one-on-one meeting with every direct report is an absolute must. Yes, I said weekly. Think about it: If you can't give each of your direct reports 30 minutes of your time every week, then you either have too many people reporting to you (and need to add more hierarchy), or you haven't fully embraced your role as a manager rather than an individual contributor.
In those one-on-one meetings, you want to hit on three things:
Their update of the things they've been working on, and what they need from you to help them succeed. Your update for them of all the information they need to know to do their job well. A quick brainstorm of future goals, ideas they have and development they might need. This is also a great place to integrate coaching.
Frequently, one-on-one meetings are the first meeting to be canceled with the excuse of "I have nothing to talk about." What have you been doing all week - twiddling your thumbs? Let me be blunt: Unless you have fallen down the stairs and have a bone sticking out of your leg, you should not cancel your one-on-one meetings. This face time is a critical component of building a relationship with each of your employees that is grounded in trust. It's one of the most important things you can do to drive their success.
7. Listen actively, and default to trust.
When you have your sacrosanct weekly one-on-one meetings, the most critical component is not what you have to say - it's what your team members are contributing to it. You're going to hear the good and the bad because that's what happens when you have open communication. It's essential that you hear your employees out and always assume they are coming to you with positive intent - they are complaining about the problems because they want your help in solving them. If your boss approaches you from the vein of distrust when you're making a good faith effort to do the right thing, that can be incredibly demotivating.
Your goal should always be to have them leave that one-on-one meeting in a better, more empowered place than when they arrive. Listen carefully to what they're asking for, read between the lines to get to the core of what's going on, and then do your best to provide the support they are looking for.
8. Never give critical feedback on people's emotions. Instead, focus on behavior and impact.
Here's an actual conversation I had with a former boss:
Her: "You’re obviously angry."
Me: "No I’m not. I’m frustrated with a few things, but I'm not angry."
Her: "No, you’re obviously angry."
Me: "I’m really not."
Her: "I disagree."
Me: "Look, I wasn’t angry before, but now you’re actually starting to piss me off."
Needless to say, she didn't follow many of these tips! You'll never eliminate the role of emotions in the workplace, but that doesn't mean you need to provide commentary on them. Ultimately, people can think or feel anything they like if they are showing up and doing what they need to in order to achieve their goals. That's why it's critical to focus on things you can see when you are giving out critical feedback. Your goal is to change someone's behavior - get them to stop doing something that isn't effective and to go down a different path. To do that, you have to be crystal clear about what they are doing, and why it's important to change.
A good rule of thumb to follow is this: Behavior + Impact + Expectation. You state the problematic behavior, explain why it's a problem, and set the expectation for future behavior. For example: "When you come late to the staff meeting (behavior), you throw off our agenda and it takes 10 minutes longer than it needs to (impact). Please make it on time in the future (expectation). And then, to the next point, thank them and provide positive feedback when they meet the expectation!
9. Be unapologetically optimistic.
The above example explains how to give critical feedback well, but the reality is that you should give out much more positive feedback than you are negative feedback for one simple reason: Positive feedback is significantly more motivating than critical feedback. In fact, every single business outcome that can be tested for rises when your brain is in a state of positivity.
And the fact is that most employees are doing most things right on any day, but they only get feedback when they are doing wrong. The way you give feedback with set the tone for your management style. If you're consistently looking for reasons to offer praise, even with the little things, that will keep your team in the right headspace to give it their best.
10. Your job is to make your people successful.
At the end of the day, you will be judged based on the success of your team. That means that they are your first priority. The minute you start deviating from that path is the minute you wander into "bad boss" territory.
It might be helpful to do quick exercise at the end of every day and make a list of the ways you set your employees up for success that day. It will help you to take stock, hold yourself accountable, and make sure you are focusing on the things that matter most.
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1e7441011e1b1b409dc6dcb85b6c5478 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2019/02/18/when-leadership-turns-toxic-the-fine-line-between-being-tough-and-being-a-bully-at-work/ | When Leadership Turns Toxic: The Fine Line Between Being Tough And Being A Bully At Work | When Leadership Turns Toxic: The Fine Line Between Being Tough And Being A Bully At Work
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.. (AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz)
Shortly after Senator Amy Klobuchar announced her bid to become the next Democratic nominee for president, horror stories began popping up detailing years of consistent abusive treatment of her staff. The reports contended that her reputation made it difficult to recruit someone to manage her presidential campaign. In response, Klobuchar's supporters argued that she was being targeted due to her gender and that a man in her position would be considered "tough" instead of toxic.
While it certainly is true that assertive women are much more likely to be viewed as bossy or unlikable than their male counterparts who engage in exactly the same behaviors, we can't assume that just because someone is a woman, it means that her behaviors towards her staff are being wrongly characterized when charges of toxicity are made. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, 30% of workplace bullies are women, and according to a recent study more than two-thirds of women have reported being a target of workplace bullying by a female boss.
So, how can you tell the difference between when your boss is being tough and when they've crossed the line into workplace bullying, regardless of the gender they identify with? Where is the line? Here are some differentiators to consider.
Tough bosses have bad days. Bullies are consistently bad.
According to Bartlett and Bartlett, workplace bullying is defined as "the experience of repeated and unwelcomed negative acts such as criticism and humiliation, occurring at a place of employment, that are intended to cause fear, distress, and harm to the target from one or more individuals in any source of power over the target, where the target has difficulties defending him or herself."
There's a lot to break down in that definition, but a keyword to consider is repeated. Workplace bullying is rarely a one-off experience. Rather, it is the experience of a combination of harmful behaviors over time. Those behaviors may have to do with work, such as constantly being expected to meet unreasonable deadlines, maintaining an unmanageable workload, having information withheld that impacts performance, and being pressured not to take advantage of benefits to which you're entitled, such as vacation days or reimbursements for expenses. The behaviors may be personal attacks, such as being regularly humiliated or ridiculed, having gossip and rumors spread, being purposefully ignored or excluded from the group, or being the target of excessive teasing or sarcasm. And the behaviors could be more severe, such as being shouted as the target of spontaneous anger, or experiencing behaviors with the specific intention of intimidation. Though the range of behaviors that you might experience as a target of workplace bullying might seem confusingly broad, the thing that brings the experience together is that the toxic behaviors occur consistently over an extended period of time.
A tough boss can have a bad day. They can be stressed out, have an outburst in a meeting, forget to give you something you need to do your job, snap at you when you're trying to explain why you're not getting the results they want, make an unreasonable request that requires you to work long hours or make an off-handed remark that might not have been their finest hour in retrospect. It crosses the line into bullying when these behaviors become standard operating procedure - when they occur every day rather than once in a while.
Tough bosses drive you to produce your best work. Bullies rule through fear.
A former aide to ex-Senator Al Franken recalled an incident in which Klobuchar sent a young staffer to explain the Senator's lateness, reportedly saying, "I'm supposed to tell you Senator Klobuchar is late today because I am bad at my job." Who benefits from forcing an employee to make a statement like this? Does this teach the employee a harsh lesson that will prompt them to be better next time, or will it make them feel like nothing they do will ever be good enough? The motivation behind the action matters.
There's nothing wrong with a boss expecting high-quality work from their team members. In fact, it's often being held accountable to a high expectation that will drive employees to go the extra mile, and perhaps even surpassing what they thought was possible to achieve. But one can be held accountable to great expectations without being humiliated, ostracized, being made the butt of a cruel joke, or verbally abused. Part of what defines a workplace bully is that the target has difficulty defending themselves from consistent psychological attacks. If the expectation is that you must keep your mouth shut and take whatever your boss gives you unquestioningly without standing up and defending yourself, particularly if it reaches the point where you dread coming into work each day, then you might be working for a bully.
Tough bosses are strategic. Bullies are irrational.
Tough bosses are tough because they are focused on achieving results, with the performance of the team taking priority over how people feel. But that doesn't always translate into negative behaviors - a tough boss will go to bat for their team when it means the difference between success or failure, will roll up their sleeves when they need to dig in and get their hands dirty, and will even play the role of the cheerleader when they think it will push the team across the finish line. Their actions are strategic and they get results.
On the other hand, bullies care about power more than anything else. Sometimes that might go hand-in-hand with driving towards results, and other times their efforts will be directly counterproductive to achieving the goal. For instance, they may force their targets to work on trivial tasks rather than to focus on the core responsibilities of their job or pile on the work to a level that would be unachievable for even the most skilled employee. And they disrupt the cohesion of the team by specifically pitting some employees against others based on who their favorites are, and who they're targeting.
Tough bosses are tough on everyone. Bullies have specific targets and play favorites.
When you work for a tough boss, they don't just have high standards for you - they have high standards for everyone, regardless of their rank, experience, tenure or title. There are no favorites and there are no targets. That means that everyone is on the same level. It may not be the easiest environment to work in, but you know you're not alone.
Bullies are different - they don't target everyone with their difficult behaviors. Bullying is a power play, and they tend to target employees who are more vulnerable and are less likely to retaliate or confront the problem. But that doesn't mean their targets are underperformers. In fact, they can be very strong performers who may intimidate their boss, presenting a threat to their power. That's why there is a special focus on keeping them in their place.
Of course, that means that there are some employees who will have a completely different experience with the bully in question - they may even love working for them because they don't experience the same bullying behaviors! If you find a range of experiences with the boss in question, that can mean they've crossed the line from tough to toxicity.
What should you do if you work for a bully?
When workplace bullying is reported, less than 20% of employers will provide help to the target, leaving them to fend for themselves. That means that if you find yourself working for a bully rather than a tough boss, your best bet is to find greener pastures. Go somewhere that you will be valued and appreciated.
Not for nothing, but that's exactly what Klobuchar's staff has done. Between 2001 and 2016, she boasted the highest turnover rate in the Senate at 36% a year. Of course, we can't know for sure if she's tough or if she's toxic because only those close to her have witnessed what's occurring. But if the existing reporting is accurate, she's walking a fine line at best.
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1dbcddf969b178cdd72cf099b6a3820f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/16/five-ways-to-work-mindfully-in-the-era-of-coronavirus/?utm_source=LINKEDIN_COMPANY&utm_medium=social&utm_content=3203516383&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainLI | Five Ways To Work Mindfully In The Era Of Coronavirus | Five Ways To Work Mindfully In The Era Of Coronavirus
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Perhaps coronavirus forced your hand, but there is no doubt that we are all in a time of significant evolution when it comes to the world of work. But just because the world is changing rapidly around you does not mean that you should lose your cool. In times like this, it's even more important to be mindful of how you are contributing to your experience. Through this crisis, life will still go on. And work will still need to be done.
Here are five ways to make your work mindful as we all figure out ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus. These strategies may seem deceptively simple, but don't be fooled! Sometimes, it's the simple things that make the most difference.
Stay calm.
While getting ready to hunker down and possibly work at home for an extended period to avoid spreading the coronavirus is quite serious, that does not mean that you should panic. Panic rarely does anyone any good in crisis situations because it directs all of your energy towards survival. That means you will lose the ability to look around you at what is happening and address it from a detached, clear-headed perspective.
If you find yourself getting stressed, go back to basics, and focus on your breathing. Think about it: We can survive for weeks without food and days without water, but we can't go more than a few minutes without breathing. No matter where you are, you can almost always come back to taking a few deep breathes to calm your anxieties.
Sit in a chair with a straight back, your feet planted firmly on the floor, and your arms uncrossed and relaxed. Inhale slowly through your nose. Follow the breathe all the way down your throat, through your chest, and into your belly. When it hits your belly, hold it for a few moments. Release the breath slowly through your mouth. Repeat as many times as you need to until you feel calmer.
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Focus on your purpose.
Having a clear purpose that you can focus on your energy and attention on has been shown to help in times of stress by reducing negative emotions like nervousness, hopelessness, loneliness, irritability, and general daily stress.
Consider thinking of your job as your purpose. Focus your attention on showing up (even if it's just to your home office), giving your all and doing your best. Remind yourself of the bigger picture and how you're helping your organization succeed through your efforts by placing sticky notes in your workspace with your goals or affirmational messages that keep you on point.
Perhaps you don't have your dream job - that's OK. Then focus on the people you are helping to support when you show up and give your all. No matter what type of work you do, you will impact real people will your efforts. Make it your mission to improve the lives of everyone you come into contact with, even if the only connection is virtual.
Stick to a routine.
Working from home can be a challenge if you're new to it. One way to navigate it is to come up with a routine and stick to it. This will help you be more productive when you're in work mode, and will also help you to detach when it's time to clock out for the day. Here are some basic must-haves:
Create a home office space, and try to keep it strictly for work. That means no working from your bed or the couch - those are personal spaces. Set up a desk in a spare room, or in a corner that you can use specifically for focused work time and then leave when you're done for the day. Get dressed. Rolling out of bed and heading right to your desk is great, but make sure you're getting up, showering, and getting ready for the day just like you would if you were heading to the office. And remember to look good from the waist up if you have to be on video! Keep your office hours. It might seem counter-intuitive, but your work/life balance can take an incredible hit when you work from home because it is very easy to ignore the clock. If you usually start work at 9am in the office, then do that at home. If you end work at 5pm in the office, do that at home. Be disciplined and stick to it.
Be kind.
In a time when so many people are on edge and scared about what tomorrow might hold, it's essential to exercise kindness in your human interactions. Remember, stress can make us behave in ways that are less than ideal, but it is rarely with harmful intent in mind. If there was ever a time to go out of your way with a kind word or two, or to respond to anger or frustration with love and support, it's now.
Practice gratitude.
Even in times of high stress, practicing gratitude has shown to reduce stress and depressive symptoms. If you've never utilized a gratitude journal, now is the perfect time to start. At the end of every day, simply write down what you appreciated about your day. It could be anything from a peaceful work-at-home environment where you spent all day in your PJs to colleagues who were extra responsive and friendly over Slack. Anything that makes your life more comfortable or better is fair game. When you take the time to write it down, you're consciously focusing your energy and attention on the good, rather than letting your brain default to things that might be more scary or stressful.
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36fbfc70b898db3e4582277e931a1096 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/05/18/facebook-and-the-china-problem/ | Facebook And The China Problem | Facebook And The China Problem
"The Great Firewall of China" represents a challenge for Facebook.
Facebook has been in a nonstop spotlight for weeks, months even, and that light has not shown more brightly than today, as the company begins trading on the NASDAQ. But what of the issues and strategies Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook will have to face after all of the fireworks have faded? Namely China?
As the top social network on the planet, there are few nooks and crannies Facebook has been unable to wedge itself into in the world. China is one of them and what makes it such a big issue is the scope of the potential customer base should the country open its doors. China is not afraid to be stubborn about which websites it allows its citizens to access. According to Wikipedia, over 2,600 websites are banned in the nation, including certain Google products, YouTube, Twitter and WordPress. Google, in particular, tried to play nice with the censorship-happy nation and wound up facing so much resistance and hardship – as well as criticism in the west for its willingness to censor search results – that it was forced to abandon the adventure.
While Facebook is being kept out of Chinese markets, two social networks operating within the “Great Firewall of China” have impressive chunks of market share: Renren (154 million users) and Sina Weibo (300 million users).
In his interview with Charlie Rose late last year, Zuckerberg said that Facebook will incorporate a strategy of surround and conquer, so to speak. Focusing on spreading Facebook in all other markets and worrying about China later.
“…the way that we look at it now is there's so many other places in the world where we can connect more people more easily without having to face those hard questions that I think a simple rule in business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.”
At the same time, Facebook has also been sniffing around Chinese programmers in order to add talent to its roster, and is registering a number of trademarks in China. If Facebook can essentially surround China with its influence as a social network, would Beijing give in to pressure to allow the company – and probably a handful of other social sites – to operate within its boarders? Would Facebook’s ubiquity shame China or move its tech sphere to scream for its acceptance? Would this change happen gradually? And if it doesn’t happen at all, would Zuckerberg sign off on the censorship of its content to break into the Chinese market? In the long run, does Facebook really even need China?
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dfa217a46788679a7085c4c65873c4a5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/05/googles-focus-a-nod-to-steve-jobs-advice/ | Google's 'Focus' A Nod to Steve Jobs' Advice? | Google's 'Focus' A Nod to Steve Jobs' Advice?
Google CEO Larry Page holds a press annoucement at Google headquarters in New York on May 21, 2012.... [+] (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
Google recently announced it would be sending some of its products to the dumpster. This willingness to let go of its babies not only shows an adherence to better-product-practices that make great consumer companies what they are, it may also be a ripple of influence from advice the late Steve Jobs gave to Google CEO, Larry Page.
Despite well-reported fury over Google’s Android – which Jobs felt had been stolen from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) – Jobs was receptive to Page’s request to meet with him and speak about whatever it is iconic technology moguls speak about when alone together.
According to an interview with Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, on 60 Minutes last fall, Jobs told Page that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) needed to figure out exactly what the company was good at and focus. Jobs also told Page not to be too nice, as a CEO—search for A-Players while turning away those who do not make the cut or bring value to the company.
Jobs, according to Isaacson, had warned Page against letting his company become like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)—trying to develop products for many different categories of consumer services and products and while losing focus on core strengths.
Is Google Really Getting Focused?
Google’s decision to get rid of such products as Google Talk and Google Video is probably not a major slimming down of its offerings or an indication of a refocusing initiative, but keep in mind that those kinds of strategies are anything but simple for the search giant. Despite giving a handful of services and products the axe, the company has started others and reorganized itself into seven sectors: advertising, social networking, Android, Chrome, YouTube, and local mobile commerce.
Further complicating the possibility of simplifying is Google’s recent foray into tablet computing – the Nexus 7 by Asus – which puts it up against Apple in that space. Its Nexus Q product puts it in the ring with Microsoft and Apple . Additionally, the rumor – espoused by former Google engineer, James Whittaker – that Page is preoccupied with an ongoing battle with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), if true, could push the company to develop more products with a greater focus on social.
It would seem that a slimmed down, refocused Google – as per Steve Jobs’ advice – might not be a simplified version. Maybe the spaces Google wants to compete in won’t let the search company zero in on small number of products. Perhaps we have yet to see what the company wants to become and the metamorphosis is ongoing, with Page’s restructuring scheme an effort to focus not on key products but key spaces—seven of them.
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42271f8757896427b0a6053088fbc738 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/02/19/a-startup-to-take-the-sting-out-of-moving/ | A Startup to Take the Sting Out of Moving | A Startup to Take the Sting Out of Moving
Moving day.
Even under the most trouble free circumstances, it is a drag. Packing up all one’s earthly belongings in boxes, deciding what goes and what goes in the trash, finding a trustworthy mover and shouldering their fees. It’s hard to imagine a way of turning a move into a pleasurable experience, but a new startup spun out of a company already established in the moving business seeks to take the edge off.
Sharone ben-Harosh founded Unpakt.com as a tool to allow clients the opportunity to shop around for the best prices offered by movers in their area while giving movers a much more accurate account of what needs to go where. ben-Harosh knows a thing or two about moving. He founded FlatRate Moving in 1991, a company that sought to find out as much as possible about its clients requirements in order to submit an accurate price and cut down on inefficiencies that irritated clients and cut into his profits.
Unpakt is a further step in that direction, offering the additional benefits of mover ratings and price comparisons of different companies that supply bids for a client’s move. “I started to see the possibility about five years ago when I saw that the moving industry became even more complicated than it used to be,” ben-Harosh said. That complication sprung from the proliferation of moving companies – some not so great – that could build an online presence and jump into the moving game. “It’s so hard to verify who is a good mover,” he said. “If I’m a client I wouldn’t know where to start.”
How It Works
Clients can audit the amount of things they want to move by themselves – counting boxes, listing every chair or sofa or picture – or choose to rely on a typical belongings estimate based on what an apartment or house of a certain size generally contains, according to the company’s experience.
Once that is established and plugged into the Unpakt site, various moving companies in the area that are part of the site’s network will submit estimates on a price for the move. Moving companies in the network are rated based on online reviews gathered from the web, reviews submitted by Unpakt clients and confirmation that a mover has the proper licensing requirements.
Once a client decides on a mover, the order is executed and the move takes place whenever the client wishes. As far as payment is concerned, clients pay Unpakt, which then passes the money on to the moving company after taking a 13 percent cut.
“It’s based on the fact that every mover spends about 25 percent on getting the client, paying for planning their move and following up and doing everything that Unpakt is doing,” said ben-Harosh.
Challenges
Getting other moving companies to join the network was a tough sell at first, ben-Harosh said, and required them to think differently about the guidelines of the industry. “No mover works with guaranteed pricing,” he explained. “They all work with hourly estimation.”
Ultimately, Unpakt built a second platform with a customizable algorithm so that moving companies could create their own checklists they would be comfortable using to guarantee prices. “We teach them how to use the platform if it’s their first time using guaranteed pricing methods.”
Growing the Business
Right now the business has about 120 companies in its network in about 16 states, including California, New York, Texas, Florida and others, focusing primarily on metropolitan areas. The 15-employee company’s sales team is working to grow the network and an algorithm to offer services for international movers is in the works.
Unpakt.com will be looking to raise capital from venture capital to the tune of $10 million by selling a minority share. Meetings with investors will be taking place within the next month or so, ben-Harosh said. “One of the reasons I want to work with VCs is to use more strategic partnerships that everyone can see are available for us.”
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cece35991a1c8518a62d855a8f6380e6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/03/26/billionaire-banks-on-the-advertising-apocalypse-video/ | Billionaire Banks On The Advertising Apocalypse (VIDEO) | Billionaire Banks On The Advertising Apocalypse (VIDEO)
Zee Entertainment founder Subhash Chandra recently invested in a company perfecting the art of... [+] television and film product placement.
Indian billionaire Subhash Chandra – worth about $2.4 billion on the Forbes billionaires list out earlier this month – made an interesting investment recently in a firm that could be suggestive of the direction advertising and product placement are heading. Where might that be? A weird, malleable world wherein film and television become inescapable vehicles for brands and product promotion.
It’s quite ingenious really. Chandra, whose wealth is derived largely from his ownership of Indian TV broadcaster Zee Entertainment, invested about $4.5 million in MirriAd—a UK-based company that is working to perfect the art of placing billboards, advertisements and even truck-sized products in your favorite television shows and the films you watch. Watch the video below and prepare to feel some discomfort.
The degree or realism that MirriAd is able to achieve makes possible a new realty of advertising and promotion that could be hard to get used to. Remember from the video the Coca-Cola logo that appears behind Tom Hanks in one of the bench scenes in Forest Gump. Did that not seem a tad grotesque? Was the Special K cereal box a little bit too front and center in the Cosby family’s eat-in kitchen?
This is not a cutting edge concept, of course. Sporting events have used this type of technology for a while now, we see billboards and ads on almost every avenue of any city, and we’re surrounded by marketing almost all the time. Just walk through the main thoroughfares of New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong or anywhere people congregate. What makes MirriAd’s technology so scary is that it’s quite possible that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Where digital, onscreen product placement and brand advertising will most benefit ad buyers and sellers is in the international markets. Audiences in Chicago love to see Hollywood blockbusters just as much as audiences in Singapore do. The difference is that the two markets are wooed by different advertisers and brands. MirriAd’s technology will allow different brands, logos and product placement to be shown to different audiences in the same movie. Product placement can be done after filming and content owners will be able to sell placement in every market, probably to different clients, for a potentially more lucrative overall take of ad sales.
Should it prove profitable, producers may feel more and more pressure to fill as much space in film and television scenes with brands, ads and digitally rendered products, cluttering screens with logos and primary colors. Speaking of which, might politics get into the act as well?
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a4fd2b9308e13376822662388f544012 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/05/03/growing-an-empire-on-low-testosterone/ | Growing An Empire On Low Testosterone | Growing An Empire On Low Testosterone
Snacks, refreshments, Sports on TV--a waiting room made for men. The Low T Center seeks to create a... [+] male-friendly clinical environment.
Mike Sisk’s dissatisfaction with his own experience treating a medical condition led him to startup a fast-growing empire of clinics that's generating about $4 million per month in revenue throughout seven states.
Sisk was one of the 13 million men in the United States that suffer from lower than average testosterone, or low T (see video below) and found the treatment of the condition – buying testosterone and injecting it at home – led him to feel that more could be done for him and patients like him. He began the first of his clinics – Low T Center – in 2010 in his home state of Texas. Sisk reached profitability 11 months later.
“The first year we opened two centers, the next year we opened three and then last year we opened 13,” Sisk said. So far in 2013 he’s added another seven clinics to the company and expects to hit 65 locations by year’s end.
Sisk acted as his own angel, using about $500,000 of savings he and wife’s, co-founder Mickala Sisk, had in cash to fund Low T Center (Sisk’s previous jobs include a sales manager at FedEx , an account executive at Ernst & Young , PricewaterhouseCoopers ). He has since been funding growth by investing profits back into the company. Though growth may seem swift, Sisk is not satisfied and, for the first time, plans to raise about $15 million within the next 18 months.
Low T Center's Mike Sisk plans to take his company public by 2015.
“I can take it to the 100 largest cities in the U.S., coast to coast, just using the model that I’m going on but what about the smaller towns? The Wacos, the Temples—those would be successful operating units,” Sisk says with the confidence of an entrepreneur who feels he’s really onto something and has yet to experience a serious setback. “You couldn’t fund that out of this model that I’m using. You’re either going to have to take on venture capital or private equity capital or you’re going to have to take it public.”
So far Sisk has been approached twice by private equity firms looking to invest but has so far deflected offers as he refuses to sell a majority state. He could be willing to part with about 1/3 of company ownership at this time, he said. While an account executive with Ernst & Young during the dot-com boom, Sisk said he saw tech founders go a bit mad chasing funding only to lose control of their own companies. “I was like, ‘if I ever have a good idea, I’m not going to do that,’” he says now, chuckling.
Sisk is not just looking for capital, he wants an investor to provide leverage, such as an angle to market to a 40 to 60-year-old male customer base or access to resources that would allow for faster growth, like access to medical staff. His ultimate goal is to go public and will start to contemplate making the move once the company hits about $100 million annual, which could be 2014 or 2015, when the company establishes 100 clinics. Given his growth trajectory, he might putt it off.
Sisk's goal has been to create a truly men-oriented clinic where small wait times for treatment are the norm. Patients arrive, blood is drawn and within 15 minutes testosterone levels are gauged and records are kept. If pronounced a treatable patient, a series of other tests are run, Sisk explained. With test records accumulated from its 6,000 active patients – meaning a visit every 7 to 10 days – as well as non active, he thinks Low T Center maintains more data points on 40 to 60-year-old men taking testosterone, than any other clinic in the world. Since its founding it’s completed about 250,000 appointments.
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4f77a189b65bed488a37094b09a20aa7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/05/10/dreamits-super-startups-2013/ | DreamIt's Super-Startups Of 2013 | DreamIt's Super-Startups Of 2013
Image via CrunchBase
DreamIt Ventures, an accelerator program that operates programs in New York and Philadelphia, announced the list of startups that will be plowing through its three-month NYC summer initiative. The startups will enjoy seed funding (up to $25K per company), mentors, office space, and contacts to potential investors and partners.
The list of lucky (well, not exactly lucky) startups gearing up for an exhausting and hopefully successful summer is below.
Callida Energy: A software company that helps reduce the environmental impact of buildings.
CreatorUp: An online web seminar that instructs users on creating video content online and form businesses around it.
GamePress: GamePress lets you create, and play mobile games on your iPad.
Glassboard: A collaboration network for research and development.
HeyKiki: Aggregation platform for educational classes.
Instrumagic: Mobile devices-based musical instrument creator.
License Buddy: a free tracking tool for licensed professionals to manage continuing education credits (CE, CLE, CPE, CEU, CME) and requirements.
Mimoona: Lets users create and integrate crowdfunding platforms into their website site in less than 30 minutes.
Miner: A mobile content delivery system.
Perkle: A social connector of consumers, businesses and charities, with a rewardsplatform.
Serviceful: The product Maids Radar searches for House Cleaning Companies.
Stylr Inc.: Finds clothing in stores using an iPhone so users can peruse inventory before shopping.
TouchBase: Business cards you can tap on any smartphone to download their content.
Trippin' In: An "Engagement meter" for places and sites, measures the social pulse of local businesses through its recommendation engine.
WeDidIt: A web platform and mobile app for nonprofit fundraising.
wireLawyer: LinkedIn for lawyers; a virtual law practice where legal eagles can connect and find resources.
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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9831d10008da01dc7f4fa38d23272ff4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/05/28/why-coworking-spaces-are-here-to-stay/?sh=458b22e6e0ed | Why Coworking Spaces Are Here To Stay | Why Coworking Spaces Are Here To Stay
Regus's New York coworking space at 747 Third Avenue.
Given the intense interest in startups these day, more and more young entrepreneurs are looking to coworking facilities to grab relatively inexpensive office space. In addition to WiFi, fax, conference rooms, kitchen and snack-prep areas; these ‘rental’ business studios also offer new companies the opportunity to rub elbows with others in their world. The coworking space industry has seen growth in recent years and that swell is only going to continue.
“It’s a natural evolution of technology,” said Sande Golgart, western regional vice president with flexible workspace provider Regus. “It’s a blend of technology and people getting smarter about getting efficient use out of their space. Nowadays people don’t necessarily need a landline all the time that’s plugged into a wall that they have to go to and sit in front of every single day.” Nowadays an office worker can be mobile and an on-the-go entrepreneur would simply be wasting money by paying for a full time office, Golgart explained.
The social aspect of coworking has become a draw as well. “Some even prefer to work around other people,” says Golgart. “They find it inspiring, they find it more cost effective and they find that they’re able to be very productive in that environment because of technology.”
Regus, which generated about $610 million revenue from its U.S. business in 2012, saw about 30%. So far this year, the company has established over 40 new locations in the United States, upping its office count to about 600. U.S. growth has been strongest in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. The company also plans to spread to accommodate workers that want to operate closer to their homes, in areas like Maryland, New Jersey and the Chicago suburbs. On the global stage, Regus plans to grow to 2,000 office spaces worldwide from its current number of about 1,500.
“From a basic economic standpoint, the largest pool of demand for office space is the small customer or small group,” Golgart explained. “You have a much larger pool looking for small office solutions than you do large groups looking for an entire building or an entire floor.” As large corporations downsize and entrepreneurs become more bold, that trend will pick up pace, he added.
“The world of entrepreneurs and small businesses is growing exponentially and, frankly, we’re just trying to keep up with that growing demand,” said Golgart.
Riding the same trend but in a slightly different fashion is Gangplank, a low-cost coworking and collaborative workspace operating in Virginia, Ontario, Canada; and various locations in Arizona. “We like to say Gangplank is infrastructure for creative people to define the new economy,” says co-founder Derek Neighbors.
Gangplank's Tuscon, Arizona location.
Acting as a coworking area and informal, organic incubator; Gangplank sees itself, in part, as a community center. The locations are publicly funded (through philanthropy or municipal partnership) and offer programs in health, studio arts, and classes taught by educators from local institutions. Gangplank workers don’t pay with money, rather a pay-it-forward model that asks users to spearhead a class or seminar, mentor others, or assist with social contracts made with the local municipality. To put it simply, Gangplank doesn’t accept money, just time and talent.
“We believe that the 21st century economy will be largely fueled by capital other than monetary capital,” says Neighbors. “Meaning influence capital or social capital, human capital—we believe that those are going to be much more powerful as we shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy.”
The first of the Gangplank locations opened in 2008 and the organization now runs five facilities. Neighbors said the trend to coworking is very real. There are a growing number of independent workers – toiling at home or remotely – that see coworking spaces as an opportunity to avoid working alone. Also, young entrepreneurs with new companies that require very little office area are starting out in such facilities to save money and meet others to collaborate with.
Gangplank receives up to five calls per week from people wanting to start a new coworking location under the organization’s banner. “Currently we’re getting a lot of interest from both Northern and Southern California as well as Florida,” said Neighbors. Gangplank has yet to decide exactly where its new spot will sprout.
“I think that this movement is teaching not only individual freelancers a lot but is teaching corporate America a lot about how people interact, what makes them effective at creation and is really defining the future of how companies interact with each other on a deeper level,” says Neighbors.
Follow Me On Twitter @KarstenStrauss
Gallery: Cool Office Spaces 44 images View gallery
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d12c00dd16c0c721281c8bb96c5f3b38 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/09/06/500000-for-love-the-story-of-a-champion-matchmaker/ | $500,000 For Love? The Story Of A Champion Matchmaker | $500,000 For Love? The Story Of A Champion Matchmaker
Janis Spindel, an entrepreneur in the business of love. (image: ©2013 www.kristenjensen.com)
Janis Spindel is a nonstop force of nature in her field. In the emotional, delicate business of helping others find love, few can match the longevity – and prices – of her matchmaking business, which has counted wealthy business magnates, Wall Street players and even a former senator as customers.
For the past 21 years Spindel has aimed her laser-like focus on finding mates for well-to-do clients, taking on between 200 and 250 per year. By her rough count her matches have led to about 1,000 marriages and even more relationships. Last year the company generated over $5 million.
Spindel feels she has an innate sixth sense about those around her which gives her a knack for figuring out who would work with whom. “They’ve been calling me clairvoyant and I guess I am because I just get these weird ‘flashes,’ I call them, or premonitions at the oddest times and in the oddest places,” she told me in our first phone conversation.
Not to completely discount the possibility of clairvoyance, but Spindel’s sense about people could be attributed to her high-energy, inquisitive personality, which seems to plow through you, collecting snippets of data to be filed away for future reference. “I am a people person from the get-go,” she said. “I can talk to anyone, anywhere, any time and in five minutes I can find out more than you could in dating somebody for six months. It’s mind-boggling. I ask the questions, I fire them away, and they just answer them.”
Prior to becoming a matchmaker, Spindel worked in fashion as a sportswear manufacturer rep, overseeing a staff of 11. In her on-the-job travels she’d meet a bevy of single people and couldn’t help but orchestrate introductions for her male friends, many of whom were rich, picky and looking for love in all the wrong places.
“I was there to help because I was always the one at the beauty salon getting her hair washed next to this drop dead blond who was perfect for my friend Ricky and then on the tennis court or in a nail salon or in a store or wherever, next to a beautiful brunette who was perfect for my friend Lenny.”
After the fourteenth couple she’d introduced called her to tell her they were getting married, Spindel decided it was time to get into the love business. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘I can do this.’”
That was 1993. Her first major push to establish herself in the matchmaking business involved a 51-guest networking party at Ovo Café in New York City. “34 people connected which then turned into a huge advertisement for her matchmaking business,” said Spindel’s husband Allen, who acts as the company’s COO. “From the next day on, the phones were ringing off the hook.”
(image credit: Brian Marcus)
Back then Janis Spindel Matchmaker was a solo operation and charged $500 for men and women. Today the company has 17 employees and a yearlong contract with her (that’s 12 introductions) will run a New York City client $50,000 upfront plus another $50,000 on the backend if that client is successfully matched and stays with that person for a year. Out of state contracts cost $100,000 plus another $50,000 on the backend. Elite services – where Spindel and select staff personally travel to a client and conduct an expansive search – are $250,000, plus another quarter million on the backend if successful.
But there are other options for those with less disposable income, she said. Limited access to some of Spindel’s database is available for $5,000 and service through one of Spindel’s employees – or cupids – costs between $15,000 and $25,000. There’s also a $1,000 networking dinner where four men and four women are placed together to see if sparks fly.
Ladies pay a smaller fee – up to $1,000+ -- for the more economic options. “It totally has them vested even though it’s a small amount,” Spindel explained. “My grueling process weeds out the riff raft, gold diggers and women who are not commitment minded.” Below, Spindel explains her 3-Date Rule.
In the business world it’s largely accepted that if you are not growing, you are shrinking. That may be why Spindel is placing emphasis on expansion. The company is about to setup a presence in India and catering to Asian clients in general will be a focus in the future. “Nineteen percent of the hits on my website come from Beijing and Shanghai,” Spindel said.
In the summer of 2012 Spindel opened up a gay division, in which the matchmaking regiment she’s used to match men and women is employed to put together same-sex couples. Not discounting the trend towards online dating – and the success of sites like Match.com, eHarmony and OK Cupid – the company has started its own free dating site, 2LoveToday. Spindel says her staff does matching work for those members that pay for premium service.
Spindel’s foray into online dating seems more a hedge than a serious direction—an angle to bringing people together that she hadn’t tried yet but couldn’t stand to ignore. Though it could yield future dividends if it takes off, it’s easy to see that her passion is with the old fashioned business of pairing potential lovers. Offering a platform for singles to meet each other independently is easy. Proactively matching them with one another is difficult, but Spindel makes it look easy. Maybe that’s because it is for her.
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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b4ad107857dafc2786cc69a8513d971d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/09/08/7-ways-to-keep-your-employees-happy-and-working-really-hard/ | 7 Ways To Keep Your Employees Happy (And Working Really Hard) | 7 Ways To Keep Your Employees Happy (And Working Really Hard)
(image: Jessicahtam on Flickr)
It doesn’t matter what you build, invent or sell; your organization can’t move forward without people. CEOs, company founders and managers the world over know that keeping the teams beneath them moving forward together in harmony means the difference between winning and dying.
Prof. Leonard J. Glick, Professor of management and organizational development at Boston’s Northeastern University, teaches the art of motivating employees for a living. He let FORBES in on a few tips for entrepreneurs and managers looking to keep their people smiling and producing.
Build Ownership Among Your Crew
You’ve got to get employees to feel that they own the place, not just work there. “One of the principles of self-managed teams is to organize around a whole service or product,” Glick explained. In other words, make sure company personnel feel responsible for what the customer is buying.
One way to inspire that feeling is to have each member of a team become familiar with what other team members are doing, allowing them to bring their ideas for improvement to the table and have input in the whole process. If the roles are not too specialized, have your people rotate responsibilities from time to time. “It all contributes to a feeling of ‘it’s mine,’ and most people, when it’s theirs, don’t want to fail, don’t want to build poor quality and don’t want to dissatisfy the customer,” said Glick.
Trust Employees To Leave Their Comfort Zones
Few employees want to do one specific task over and over again until they quit or retire or die. Don’t be afraid to grant them new responsibilities—it will allow them to grow and become more confident in their abilities while making them feel more valuable to the organization.
Though managers might feel allowing their people to try new things presents a risk to productivity or places workers outside of their established place, it heads off other issues. “To me the bigger risk is having people get burnt out or bored,” explained Glick.
Keep Your Team Informed
Business leaders have a clearer perspective on the bigger picture than their employees do. It pays to tell those under you what’s going on. “Things that managers take for common knowledge about how things are going or what challenges are down the road or what new products are coming… they often don’t take the time to share that with their employees,” Glick said. Spreading the intel lets everyone in on the lay of theland and at the same time strengthens the feeling among workers that they are an important part of the organization.
Your Employees Are Adults—Treat Them Like It
In any business there is going to be bad news. Whether it’s to do with the company as a whole or an individual within the organization, employees need to be dealt with in a straightforward and respectable manner. “They can handle it, usually,” said Glick. If you choose to keep your people in the dark about trying times or issues, the fallout could be a serious pain in the neck. “The rumors are typically worse than reality. In the absence of knowledge people make things up.”
Leonard J. Glick, Northeastern University's senior academic specialist and executive professor of... [+] management and organizational development
You’re The Boss. You May Have To Act Like It Sometimes (but be consistent)
Though this issue is affected by an organization’s overall culture, there are going to be times when you have to make a decision as a leader, despite whatever efforts you may have made to put yourself on equal footing with your personnel. “Ideally they have an open relationship but not necessarily are peers,” Glick said of the manager-employee relationship. “I think the worst thing is to pretend you’re peer… it’s the inconsistency, I think, which is the bigger problem.”
Money Matters (But Not As Much As You Think)
Compensation packages are a big deal when employees are hired, but once a deal has been struck the source of motivation tends to shift. “The motivation comes from the things I’ve been talking about—the challenge of the work, the purpose of the work, the opportunity to learn, the opportunity to contribute,” Glick explained.
When it comes to finding a salary that will allow your employees to feel they’re being paid fairly, don’t bend over backwards to lowball them. If you do, they will eventually find out and not be happy. “If the salary were open, is it defensible?”
Perks Matter (But Not As Much As You Think)
Some companies (we’re looking at you Google ) have received attention for offering lavish perks to their personnel – massages, free gourmet lunches, ping pong tables, childcare facilities – but, like money, these things tend to be less powerful motivators for workers than in-job challenges and the feeling of being a valuable part of a quality team that will recognize their contribution. A manager needs to understand that though those perks are great and release burdens from employees’ shoulders, they are not a substitute for prime sources of professional inspiration.
“I don’t think people work harder, work better because of those things,” said Glick. “It may make it easier for them to come to work, I understand that.”
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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3a864e5c671f3e8bd5136a0eaa05eaf3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/09/25/7-apps-that-help-you-beat-stress-in-the-workplace/ | 7 Apps To Beat Stress In The Workplace | 7 Apps To Beat Stress In The Workplace
Work, kids, in-laws, spouses, mass transit systems—life in general can cause a heck of a lot of stress for the average thinking human. Pressure come from all angles in the fast-moving, modern world.
It’s only right that we have various oases that we can escape to when the going gets rough. As you’d probably guessed, there’s an app for that. A bunch of them, in fact. Here are a few…
Serenity
Massage Sim allows you to learn massage techniques through a virtual hands-on experience.
Developed by Tap Tap Tap, Serenity transports you to magical worlds of relaxation by showing you calming moving pictures. Some are rolling shorelines at sundown, others flowers, grass and leaves waving lazily in the wind, puppies and some more abstract moving images designed to elicit relaxation. Cost: $1.99 on iPhone or iPad.
Hypnosis – Relaxation
This program, made for Android, comes from Nimue, developer of a handful of apps that claim to be able to hypnotize you into a mindset where you can accomplish things like quit smoking, stop drinking, stop being obsessive compulsive or jailbreak your inner skinny person. Cost: FREE on Android
Deep Relaxation
Over 6 million people have tried the relaxation and sleep systems upon which Deep Relaxation app is based, according to developer Mindvalley Creations Inc. Called The Silva Method, the self-help philosophy has been calming people down for about 60 years. Cost: Free on iTunes
Massage Sim
Destressing is important in our busy modern lives. Like anything else, there's an app for that.... [+] (image credit: RelaxingMusic on Flickr)
This app may not transport you to a calm and flowery place where your troubles are instantly slain. It may, however, teach you valuable lessons on how to comfort that special someone in your life through learned massage techniques. Who knows, perhaps you’ll find relaxation by massaging a digital person on an iPad app. Cost: Free
Qi Gong Meditation Relaxation
This app, available on Google Play for Android, claims to not only calm you down through meditation, but also teach you a thing or two about the techniques that you’re using. That could come in handy when you’re forced to explain to your coworkers why you’re camped out on the floor of your cubicle in the lotus position saying “ommm, ommm.” Cost: FREE
Thunderspace
Developed by Franz Bruckhoff, this iPhone, iPad and iPod app promises to send you headlong into a stormy tunnel of relaxation through audio. The relatively simple interface allows you to hear several different types of rain storms, complete with thunder and the sound of water drops falling all around you. If thunder bothers you, steer clear if this one. Cost: $1.99
Dead Trigger
Dead Trigger is a zombie-killing experience, which some find quite relaxing. (image: Mad Finger... [+] Games)
Available on iOS and Android, Dead Trigger offers relaxation for a different type of individual—those that can only find calm while running around a virtual world laying waste to a horde of flesh-hungry zombies. The app, developed by Madfinger Games, latches firmly onto the undead zombie craze sparked by popular AMC show The Walking Dead. For some, a weapon, ammo and a never-ending supply of video game targets is all that’s required to attain a sense of inner calm. Cost: Free
Want to destress on a business trip? See ten tips below...
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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7b3b29996636f08cc8a1264d5c6caebd | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/10/09/best-small-companies-the-dropout-class/ | Best Small Companies: The Dropout Class | Best Small Companies: The Dropout Class
This year’s FORBES list of America’s Best Small Companies has its share of climbers and sinkers, but some enterprises highlighted last year fell off the roster completely because they either had a less than stellar year or were elbowed out by other high performing players.
Gallery: Best Small Companies 2013: Drop-offs 33 images View gallery
IEC Electronics
Last year IEC Electronics reach number 6 on our list but troubles abound for the New Jersey-based manufacturer. An error in accounting for 2012 work-in-process inventory at one of the Company's subsidiaries, resulted in an aggregate understatement of cost of sales and gross profit of about $2.2 million. The company is being investigated for possible disclosure issues and share prices have fallen 47% in the past 12 months.
Rick’s Cabaret Int’l
The New York-based nightclub company has seen some success these past 12 months—share prices have risen over 50%. But, overall company return fell and earnings per share growth dropped 21 points.
The company’s operations have traditionally classified its exotic dancers as independent contractors – the ladies receive a “facilities use fee” at the beginning of each shift and keep performance fees, or tips – but have lost a class action suit filed by former New York employees that demanded minimum wage.
America’s Car-Mart Inc.
Stocks have spent the last 12 months generating a smidge of sound and a tad of fury but, really, signifying very little. Shares rose less than 1% and Car-Mart was edged out of the FORBES list.
CEO William Henderson sold 2,500 shares of America’s Car-Mart stock on the open market in mid-September. The company has almost 130 dealerships under its umbrella.
Other companies that didn’t make the cut this year include…
Strayer Education: The education company has seen stocks sink 36% in the past year. In 2012 FORBES ranked Strayer No. 19 in its annual listing of America’s Best Small Businesses.
Wright Express: The payment solutions company held the 20th spot on last year’s roster. This year earnings per share growth is down 29 points and Wright Express has been muscled out of the list.
Gordmans Stores: Shares of the Omaha, Nebraska-based department store chain have sunk 26% this year. Last year’s No. 29 has also seen its net income take a nose dive, though it generating $621 million revenue on 2.6% margins.
Quality Systems: The California-based company seeks to profit from healthcare data’s transitions from file cabinets to hard drives and clouds. Quality experienced a drop in revenue and income over the past fiscal year.
Volterra Semiconductor: Experienced a relative decline over the past year and slips off the list for 2013. Luckily, Maxim Integrated stepped in to buy Volterra for $23-per-share in a deal announced Oct. 1.
NetScout: 2012 was a decent year for the network application monitoring company and share prices rose. This year, despite a jump in revenue, investors saw less than one percent stock change over the past 12 months.
Royal Gold: The Colorado-based gold exploration company saw a steady decline this year. Investors had to endure watching share prices sink over 50%. Ouch!
Dolby Labs: The audio company generated almost a billion dollars last year but growth slowed and earnings per share growth fell 11 points.
Riverbed Technology: The WAN optimization company has seen share price drop 37% over the past 12 months.
OSI Systems: Provides specialized electronic systems and for components that meet the critical needs in the homeland security, healthcare, defense, and aerospace industries. Shares have dropped 1.3% in the last 12 months.
Tessco Technologies: The Baltimore-based tech firm operates in a multiple spaces, providing solutions in broadband, wireless infrastructure and even mobile accessories. Company return fell 41%.
GP Strategies: The performance improvement provider in sales and technical training fell off the list this year despite a 30% share price increase. Company return dropped 82%.
U.S. Physical Therapy: The Houston based firm operates approximately 350 outpatient physical and occupational therapy clinics nationwide. Earnings per share growth fell 14 points.
Landauer: The 60-year-old firm provides radiation dosimetry & other radiation products and services. Its shares have fallen almost 17% this year and earnings per share growth sunk 22 points.
CARBO Ceramics: Oilfield services provider, CARBO, saw its earnings per share growth drop 18 points this year.
Raven Industries: Earnings per share and sales were both down in 2013. Stock also has trailed the market considerably over past year.
Impax Laboratories: The California-based pharmaceutical company saw earnings per share growth fall 17 points.
Orchids Paper Products: Sales growth has slow for the Oklahoma-based tissue industry player: 2.8% on the year and 5% over 5 years.
LSB Industries: The manufacturing and engineering company saw its share lose 27% value this year. Earnings per share growth went down 31 points.
Altra Holdings: The transmission and motion control products supplier experienced a 36 point decrease in its earnings per share over the past year.
Ameresco: The Massachusetts-based independent energy services firm saw a 14% drop in share value over the past 12 months and earnings per share growth fell 48 points and sales growth 13.
Great Northern Iron Ore Properties: The Minnesota mining trust saw share prices shrink 10% this pat year and sales growth dropped 10 points. Last year’s No. 78 on the best small companies list falls off completely in 2013.
Hawkins: The chemical manufacturer and distributor dropped off this year, it’s earnings per share growth slowing down by 22 points. Shares are down almost 7% over the past 12 months.
Thoratec Corp.: The medical services firms saw share prices increases slightly this year, though its earnings per share growth hit a road bump and dropped 22 points.
Team Inc.: The specialty industrial services firm saw its company returns sink by 33% this year. It’s earnings per share growth also slowed.
Ensign Group: Offering nursing an rehab care in multiple states, Ensign held the 89th spot on last years list of America’s Best Small Companies. This year company return is down and EPS slowed by 17 points.
Hittite Microwave: Stocks are up over 17% this year. Still, company return fell, as did earnings per share.
KMG Chemicals: The chemical producer and distributor had some successes this past year—upping its earnings per share and stock price. Overall company return, however, was down.
Luminex: Biological testing and life sciences company, Luminex, saw its earnings per share growth fall by 14 points.
Exponent: The internationally active engineering and scientific consulting services company’s returns shrunk 7%. It has been bumped off the list by faster movers.
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deffc40a1e4022fd5738612eff8671ae | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/10/09/can-invensense-make-microchips-sexy/ | Can InvenSense Make Microchips Sexy? | Can InvenSense Make Microchips Sexy?
A year after a management shakeup this microsensor company is chugging ahead. Now, if it could only get some of Apple’s business.
Ten-year-old InvenSense rarely causes a ripple on anyone's radar. But on Sept. 20, as Apple's iPhone 5s hit retail shelves, industry players speculated that the San Jose, Calif. components maker had hit pay dirt, muscling out larger rival STMicroelectronics . Weeks before the release, anticipating that long-awaited debut, investors bid up the stock 15%.
Behrooz Abdi was named InvenSense CEO almost a year ago. His mandate: growth. (image credit: Eric... [+] Millette)
InvenSense plays in the $9 billion niche of the semiconductor market called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), sensors with moving parts so small they can be seen only through a microscope. The components tell your smartphone or tablet if it's being tilted, twisted, shaken, turned left or right and how fast; compass sensors indicate which way is north and help power onboard GPS.
As tech bloggers ripped open the latest iPhone to anatomize its guts, a ritual known as a "teardown," you could sense deflation. Inside: an STMicro gyroscope, a compass made by Asahi Kasei Microdevices and a Bosch Sensortec accelerometer. InvenSense shares opened 3% lower. No matter. The stock more than recovered within a week--it's up 60% this year--as investors recovered their senses. The company has shipped 120 million or so units this year to Samsung, Motorola, BlackBerry, HTC , Acer , LG and the Nintendo Wii--70% of multi-motion-sensor Android phones and 80% of sensing tablets. Over the most recent 12 months it netted $54 million on revenue of $208 million.
Another tumultuous, if little noticed, week in the life of InvenSense. Hardly anyone seemed to register the seismic change last October, either, when the board ousted founder and CEO Steve Nasiri and replaced him with tech veteran Behrooz Abdi. It was a classic entrepreneurial putsch: Get rid of the visionary, do-it-all-yourself guy and bring on the management expert who can scale the company--an event that long predates John Sculley's upending Steve Jobs.
"Some board members wanted to influence day-to-day direction of the company," says Nasiri, 58, who now consults to startups. "I disagreed." Abdi, 51, who did time at NetLogic Microsystems, RMI Corp. and Qualcomm, sees it differently. "As we get bigger, it really gets more complex," he says. "People felt it needed a new phase of leadership." Abdi consults with nine vice presidents before making most decisions.
Steve Nasiri founded InvenSense in 2003 and now heads Nasiri Ventures.
For a long time InvenSense was Nasiri. The Iranian-born engineer started it with $500,000 of his own in 2003, developing an ingenious MEMS fabrication process that bonded all chip components into one package, simplifying manufacture and improving quality. Rivals were making bulky, high-cost products, mainly for carmakers. "I looked at that and said, 'Ah, I can do that better and keep it under $5,'" Nasiri recalls.
He also bet early on the consumer end, persuading Artiman Ventures and Partech International to kick in $8 million. In 2006 Nasiri started shipping gyroscopic image-stabilization components to Sanyo, Minolta and Fujitsu for their digital cameras. Two years later its gyroscope sensors were embraced by the Nintendo Wii game console, adding $50 million to the top line.
Nasiri also had his eye on mobile devices. The arrival of the iPhone, which had an accelerometer sensor, opened up a market for MEMS chips, but Nasiri found it hard to strike deals with handsetmakers. "They weren't willing to take any bets on any new functions unless Apple had embraced it," he says. That happened in 2010, when the iPhone 4 included an STMicro gyroscope. By then every smartphone producer had to have one, and Nasiri found work among Android devicemakers.
A 2011 IPO, raising $75 million or so, gave a payout to VCs and employees, who then owned 37% of the company, and a booster shot to R&D and the sales force. InvenSense then controlled 10% of the consumer MEMS market; today it's nearly 40%, according to Abdi. And drawing excellent reviews. "Their device is superior," says Andrew Uerkwitz, an analyst at Oppenheimer.
What's next? Expansion. "Steve brought the company from the kitchen table to a billion-dollar valuation," says Joe Seeger, director of MEMS development and an early hire. Rapidly growing along with worldwide smartphone sales, sensors should account for almost half of the $12 billion in MEMS chips by 2017.
Over the past year InvenSense has doubled capacity and added 42 engineers. It's investing heavily in software that sits on a miniprocessor attached to sensors that handle simple computations that otherwise fall to a phone's or tablet's main processor. "The sensor should be smart enough to do at least some lower-level activities and save the battery," says Abdi.
Sensor technology will push into new areas, like air pressure and accelerometer devices that augment GPS and indoor navigation, pedometers that serve as activity monitors, and image stabilizers for cameras in smartphones. "The cloud is getting smarter," says Abdi. "It's going to sense where you are, what you're doing and how you're doing." It's easy to see how sensors could play a role monitoring the elderly, along with other health care applications.
"You will see a very marked difference in the future of the company," he says. Maybe even in the next teardown of an Apple device.
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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a78aee5fb19305c15ef7356109d706ac | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/10/18/5-tips-for-boosting-your-brand/ | 5 Tips For Boosting Your Brand | 5 Tips For Boosting Your Brand
There are more angles to building (and destroying) your company’s brand these days than ever. With various social media outlets in play – as well as the traditional means of getting customers’ attention – businesses have to be more tuned in to the image they’re projecting in order to be successful.
Get customers, keep customers, make a profit. With social media, brand building has never been... [+] easier, harder and more important. (image: DeanMeyersNet)
To find out how to maximize impact, FORBES spoke with Taylor King, an associate account manager with Inward Strategic Consulting—a Boston-based consulting firm that has advised such brands as Walmart, HP and Campbell’s. According to King, companies have to maintain social media strengths in a handful of areas and gave us some examples of some companies that are doing it right.
Here’s what he had to say:
Authenticity
Traditionally, brands look to sweepstakes, contests and other hokey strategies to grab consumers’ attention. This may draw a bump in interest but ultimately does nothing to set them apart from the pack. A company’s marketing plows have to grow from its established identity. One winning idea, according to Mr. King, is AMC’s The Walking Dead and its “Dead Yourself” app, which turns pictures of fans into depictions of flesh-hungry zombies. “It was such an authentic strategy to say, ‘I want all my customers to be able to make themselves into zombies,’ and then you can upload it as a profile picture on your Facebook .”
The subsequent buzz generates publicity for the television show and the brand while creating a novelty app that even those who’ve never heard of the show can find appealing and funny.
Reputation
Gone are the days when companies, brands and even people can strongly control their image. With so many social media outlets and a myriad of voices being projected and heard in real time, being aware of what people are saying has never been more important (or more time consuming). One way of leveraging that output is to use it. In the case of Tripadvisor.com – which is a brand Inward Strategic has worked with – hotel reviews use photos taken by users. “You trust what your friends are saying about a person, you’re assessing what your peers are saying about a brand,” King said. “It’s everywhere: it’s in a review, it’s in blogs, and it’s on Facebook.” The first step to using customer feedback is knowing what it is and that means monitoring your social media reputation.
Response
Not only is it easier for consumers to sound off on a product or company, its easier for brands to respond. Maybe that’s the reason why customers are starting to expect that they will. Brands that address a negative comment or situation with an explanation and solution have the potential to recover a relationship with that customer, King explained. There are other advantages too. “This is an opportunity to crowdsource great ideas from a customer and put it back into the brand.” One brand that’s doing it right is Starbucks , says King, particularly the “My Starbucks Idea’ initiative, which allows customers to give the company their two cents. “They create this feedback loop where you submit ideas so people can like and comment on those ideas and it aggregates on a leader board,” he said. “But then Starbucks notifies you when they’ve reviewed it. Then they notify you when they’ve implemented it.”
Romance
Taylor King of Inward Strategic Consulting
Taking in feedback from the masses and collecting metadata on customers is fine but for a closer relationship with individuals, companies and brands have to go the extra mile and offer tailored experiences, says King. Gamification is a good way to do that, he added, and Nike does a good job with its Nike+, a service that lets customers track their own exercise data via a link to their activity monitoring devices. “It’s very easy for the customer to digest and they create a competition and community around it.”
This idea of building a hub of services for customers based on their purchased products and allowing them to interact as they wish is more than going the extra mile to achieve consumer connection. “People are getting into the romance of creating personal experiences.”
Availability
The customer is royalty, or have said many of the prime movers in retail over the centuries, and the decision to place emphasis on customer service is a no-brainer for most companies and brands. A richer, more aware customer service experience, though, is not something that every brand embraces. Well, every brand should. “Nothing is worse than having to repeat the details of a problem again and again,” says King. “Whether you have a mobile service app, call center or live chat feature, the ultimate focus should always be on what works best for the customer.” One winner in the customer service and availability column is Apple , he says. “You can access somebody at will with Apple. If I have a problem, it’s not a call-in number, I’m not on hold—it’s online, through various outlets. There are just so many touch points that Apple has and everyone is knowledgeable and positioned as an expert. I think Apple does it right.”
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
Gallery: 10 Crazy Brand Names at Growing Chains 10 images View gallery
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d15cca4ce8bd33554befa21140bce238 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/10/22/250-million-for-a-14-year-olds-big-idea-origami-owl/ | $250 Million For A 14-Year-Old's Big Idea: Origami Owl | $250 Million For A 14-Year-Old's Big Idea: Origami Owl
All Isabella “Bella” Weems really wanted was a used car. That desire set in motion a chain of events that led to the Arizona teenager spearheading what is now a multi-million dollar enterprise that she may someday control. When she finishes school, that is.
Bella Weems cofounded Origami Owl at age 14. It's set to make $250 million this year.
Weems, now 17, is founder of Origami Owl, a custom jewelry company whose direct sales business model turns would-be entrepreneurs into salespeople and evangelists. The company, which she founded in 2010 at age 14, generated $24 million in revenue in 2012 and this year expects to reach $250 million, according to the company.
Origami Owl takes on independent associates – known as “designers” – who buy products at a discount and then peddle them to others for a marked up price. One of the favorite points of sale are “jewelry bars,” or private parties at someone’s home or another venue operated by a “hostess” (the hostesses get discounts and some free products too). The company has about 50,887 designers.
In a sense, what Origami Owl is offering is a canned small business that could appeal to would-be entrepreneurs interested in making a few extra dollars. That motivation is really what got Weems herself started in the first place.
At 14 Weems announced that she felt a car would be an appropriate gift for her 16th birthday, but was told by her parents, Chrissy and Warren, that she should earn her own wheels instead of relying on their funding. They suggested she start a business.
“I started researching and looking for ideas,” she told FORBES. “The locket’s been around for a long time and I thought, ‘well, what if you could make a locket with charms?’” Weems asked her parents to match the $350 she’d earned for babysitting, which she then spent on wholesale components to make her lockets. She quickly leveraged her network of friends to find buyers. “We started selling our product at house parties and boutiques and selling at any jewelry show we could. The product started selling itself.” In 2010 Weems opened a kiosk at the Chandler, Arizona mall in time for Black Friday shoppers.
The company adopted the direct sales platform in 2011 and generated about $280,000. The following year revenue took off like a rocket, multiplying 86 times.
The growth for Origami Owl is dramatic and its revenues impressive but those figures are tempered by the company’s need for components and a large personnel roster to keep business flowing. Though the firm won’t disclose profit margins, as of this writing there about 373 employees, the majority of which work in warehousing (the firm just set up an 80,000 square foot facility in Chandler where components from China are assembled before shipping). According to CEO Robin Crossman, employee numbers fluctuate tend to fluctuate.
On the sellers end, it’s possible for designers to find that it more difficult to make money selling the jewelry after they’ve depleted their list of personal contacts and local boutiques. Continuing to maximize profits takes serious hustle.
Speaking of hustle, Weems is not alone in her jewelry business and has a cast of close family and business minds behind her. The Origami Owl executive team includes Weems’ mother, Chrissy, who is co-founder and worked with her on the company’s product design team. Nowadays she plays a supporting role.
(Christian “Chrissy” Weems, has a touch of notoriety to her past: in 2011 she pleaded guilty to computer tampering for hiding evidence in the case of Susan Brock, an Arizona woman convicted of three counts of sexual conduct with a minor who Chrissy Weems had then mistakenly felt was innocent of the charges, a spokesperson for Origami Owl confirmed. She was sentenced to one year of supervised probation).
Other family members helping Bella Weems build her business are uncle, John Weems, who is vice president of IT; and also an aunt, Jessica Reinhart, who has helped out in marketing. Her other uncle, Jeff Reinhart, was COO. The family owns the company but the company will not disclose equity percentages.
Crossman, who had previously acted as a consultant with the company for several months early this year before becoming CEO in May, boasts a resume that includes Amway Global, Home Interiors, Suzanne.com and The Longaberger Company. The direct sales veteran seems to be building Origami Owl to scale. In her short tenure she’s hired several key people, including COO Kevin Raulston, an operations man with experience in direct sales, fast-growing companies and family businesses looking to go pro.
Other hires include vice president of creative, Tom Rascati, whose past includes stints at Avon, Cutex, Ultra Beauty and Bond No.9. Other additions also hold backgrounds in direct sales—Origami Owl’s bread and butter. Further strengthening its machine is a new IT platform that will give the company’s indepdendent “designers” more tools to run their own business (rather, sell Origami Owl’s products). “This is where they’ll order their supplies,” Crossman said. “They have all their training, we have webinars, we have videos, we have product sheets that tell what the specifications are, what the selling points are.” The platform will also remember a jewelry bar guest list, track sales and maintain records. A mobile app is on the way.
Weems herself is taking a practical, measured approach to assuming control of her business. So important is it that she learns about her company from the ground up that she’s taken on the role of intern at her own enterprise. After school she visits the company HQ and helps out and, in the summer, spends time in each department. “She’s definitely hands-on but we want her to have as normal a life as she can and to have the opportunity of college,” Crossman explained.
How did Weems’ dream of getting a car work out? The founder that started it all is the proud owner of a white Jeep which she acquired in 2012 and named Alice.
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
Gallery: Teenage Millionaire Entrepreneurs 5 images View gallery
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42f776c63262476b3089472c33156a54 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2014/07/30/your-unwanted-gift-cards-are-worth-millions-these-guys-are-building-an-empire-with-them/ | Your Unwanted Gift Cards Are Worth Millions--These Guys Are Building An Empire With Them | Your Unwanted Gift Cards Are Worth Millions--These Guys Are Building An Empire With Them
Inside a dim office secured by a sensor lock, eight young men in yarmulkes sit before computer screens sifting through tens of thousands of dollars' worth of gift cards. Toiling under a latticed ceiling, the workers (some in their late teens) field orders to buy preowned cards online, fetching each meticulously catalogued item from the company's man-size vault, where at least $3 million worth wait for new owners at any given time.
Once assembled, orders are carried to a shipping and receiving room beneath the vault chamber, where another group of skullcapped employees mails them out. Newly acquired gift cards are scanned to check their value, catalogued and bar-coded for easy search. "You've got to find that exact card, and you've got to find it quickly," says Elliot Bohm, CEO and cofounder of CardCash.com , a company in Lakewood, N.J. that grossed $56 million last year buying and reselling the gift cards that nobody wanted.
"Gift cards are the new gold," says Bohm, 33. "It's bigger than gold," insists his cofounder and lifelong pal, Marc Ackerman, 31. But, like all gold, it must be mined and processed. This largely electronic operation still requires lots of elbow grease--just as Amazon does.
The two Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn launched their enterprise in 2008, during the sinkhole of the recession, buying other people's cards online for a few dollars less than their value, reasoning many people would rather have $89 in cash than $100 worth of stuff from Annie Sez. They then sell cards for a few dollars more than they paid for them, but less than face value. Today, netting an estimated 8% profit, CardCash is on track to gross $120 million by year-end.
With plenty of room to grow. This year consumers will spend $79 billion on e-gifts and so-called closed-loop gift cards (issued by stores and restaurants, not banks), reports CEB Tower Group . Use of digital cards and e-gifts should double over the next three years, but they're still far outnumbered by their physical brethren, which require workers to sort, sell and ship.
Before entering the card game, Bohm eked out a living reselling discounted electronics. "I'm a deal-hunter by nature," he says. Ackerman was working in a Brooklyn real estate office, trading stocks on the side. His experience with markets and price fluctuations has been invaluable to CardCash. Says Bohm: "The pricing algorithm is a combination of technology and Marc's brain."
One holiday season the two childhood friends found themselves with handfuls of unwanted gift cards. Looking to sell them, they discovered only meager and untrustworthy secondary card markets online--and decided to build their own. "Our family was like, 'You'd have to sell $60,000 worth of gift cards, and all you're making is $3,000 or $4,000,' " Ackerman recalls. Nowadays they can sell that in minutes.
Pooling Bohm's wedding money and Ackerman's stock market spoils--about $24,000 total--they built a website, then blew the rest on buying gift cards from Internet sources. They worked 18-hour days in Bohm's basement.
Money was a constant headache. CardCash couldn't turn down any new cards without denying income. "We had to run coupons, sometimes not making a profit, to move inventory a little bit quicker so we could have the cash to buy new inventory," Bohm says. To keep the wheels turning, they sold off a domain name to a European car rental agency, pocketing $110,000. (They later turned to family and friends for loans eventually totaling $3 million.)
Fraud was a daily concern. Over two months one scamster in Florida bought cards using credit cards from different addresses, claiming to his credit card issuers that CardCash failed to deliver his items. Ackerman nailed the thief using purchase data, given names and claimed addresses--and recouped his money. "We got a phone call from the guy saying, 'I know you guys are behind this investigation. I have three young kids at home. I don't want to go to jail.' "
To look bigger than it was, CardCash vectored its mail to a separate address and hired a 40-operator Utah call center for customer inquiries. The first year it grossed $1 million. Year Two saw revenue triple, plus the first hires. Today there are 100 employees, including 80 in Lakewood and roughly a dozen coders spread out among Tel Aviv, Israel; Gurgaon, India; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
In May CardCash swapped some of its equity to buy one of its chief rivals, Plastic Jungle, from InComm, which offers prepaid products and services--acquiring the domain name, the customer base and bits of technology but no employees. It was uniquely satisfying, says Bohm. "Plastic Jungle was our biggest fear in the early days."
For good reason. Silicon Valley-based Plastic Jungle raised some $26 million from the likes of First Round Capital, Citi Ventures and Bay Partners. It also got media attention--all important for attracting customers. "How are the small guys based out of Jersey gonna take over that big flashy Silicon Valley company that has so much money backing them?" asks Bohm.
The answer was a better business model and way better security. Plastic Jungle initially operated like eBay , never taking possession of the cards. CardCash, by contrast, was an active middleman, buying inventory, vetting stock and verifying card values. "People have no way of knowing how that gift card was acquired--legally or fraudulently?" Bohm explains.
"When fraudsters steal credit cards, the first thing they do is try to monetize them," says former Plastic Jungle CEO Daniel Rogers, who concedes theft hurt his company. These days CardCash uses fraud-recognition programs and device fingerprinting technology to recognize suspect users. It also collects transaction data, reviewed each day by an Ackerman-led team that investigates spikes in activity from certain buyers, sellers or retailers, or any irregularity.
CardCash takes in bad cards in 1.5% of transactions. Once it notifies credit card issuers, the gift card is deactivated, making it worthless. CardCash refunds customers and recovers its money from the source--pawnshops, check cashers, gift card kiosks--claiming a 90% success rate.
The deal with InComm could bring other benefits. Because it builds prepaid tech for Office Depot , Wal-Mart and Target , InComm could link CardCash to other retailers. Ackerman and Bohm already have deals with CVS and Amazon, letting customers trade any gift cards for one of theirs. (CardCash also taps into United's miles program and several charities.)
Last November CardCash received a $6 million injection from Guggenheim Partners, valuing the company then at an estimated $40 million (it has since appreciated). A good chunk is being spent on digital marketing, Google video ads and TV and radio promotions. A fine use of cash, the backers think. "The more it grows, the more it feeds on itself," explains Guggenheim portfolio manager Doug Atkin.
On the drawing board is a one-click buying platform that lets customers use mobile devices to buy, say, Starbucks gift cards while they're in line for a latte. As for the fellows who sort the cards and package the orders? By this time next year their jobs will be automated with a bespoke electronic-search-and-conveyor-belt system.
The founders still own 70%-plus. They don't plan on holding forever. Bohm compares their model with the likes of StubHub, snapped up by eBay for $310 million in 2007. "We would love an exit like that."
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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a932b936f68f20b65d58fc927402812f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2014/09/14/8-books-every-new-entrepreneur-should-read/ | 8 Books Every New Entrepreneur Should Read | 8 Books Every New Entrepreneur Should Read
In this, perhaps, Golden Age of technology entrepreneurship, Peter Thiel can rest assured he will find an eager audience for his new book, ZERO TO ONE: Notes on startups, Or How to Build the Future (apparently he couldn’t decide).
Thiel, who turns 47 next month, was a co-founder of PayPal, and a co-founder of the somewhat scary data firm Palantir. He’s well-known as the first outside investor in Facebook and oversees a hedge fund and his own venture capital firm, Founders Fund. Our crack team of wealth analysts here at Forbes have Thiel’s net worth pegged at $2.2 billion, as of Sept 12, 2014.
Will Thiel’s contribution to the long list of books focused on entrepreneurship prove itself an essential read for would-be business pros and founders? Well, time will tell. His collection of ruminations will have to nudge aside some strong titles. Here are a few stellar examples of books full of wisdom and tools for entrepreneurs that are new to the game:
Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
As one of the first steps in the startup game, it’s probably better to set down your business plan right. With ideas assembled from 470 business model practitioners from 45 countries, the title offers insights into the simple and basic, and advanced complex models used by entrepreneurs and companies throughout the world. A respected tool.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
We’re going old-school here. First published in 1936, this was a self-help book before the genre was even taken seriously. Why is it still relevant? Because learning the pulls and sways, motivations and tendencies of other people is all-important to the entrepreneur. Whether negotiating with partners or inspiring employees, people-skills are essential. Carnegie also gets a plus for choosing such a great title.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
Duhigg’s foray into the tendencies of companies, leaders and individuals is all about insight. By understanding the patterns of human behavior – and the power of the human mind to form patterns or recalibrate old ones – predictions can be made that an entrepreneur can take advantage of.
(Image credit: Cotaro70s on Flickr)
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
It’s a buzzword by now, the “lean startup,” but only because it makes sense for so many young companies and first-time founders. Technology has made it possible for companies to be started quickly and cheaply, with an internet market of billions. A lean model does away with wasteful operations and anything a customer is not willing to pay extra for.
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
According to Warren Buffet, this is the best book on investing, ever. Markets have changed since Graham published his work in 1949 but his allegorical style, which humanizes the ups and downs of indexes, is probably how generations of new investment students ever since have been explained the basics of the stock markets for the first time. Graham’s Mr. Market – as both a lovable and confounding character – is still worth a look to anyone wishing to understand the trading game.
Cold Calling Techniques (That Really Work) by Stephen Schiffman
It might seem a tad archaic to those whose minds are permanently plugged into the latest communication technology but, like it or not, as an entrepreneur you are going to have to pick up the phone and convince someone you don’t know well to do something that benefits you greatly. Imagine the power of developing a skill like that—that’s what this book is for.
The Founder’s Dilemma by Noam Wasserman
More information on managing the people-resources in your enterprise. Wasserman’s work focuses on circumnavigating disaster through preparation. In a sense, it’s a map of the minefield that the startup world can be. Ever wondered why it’s risky to go into business with your friends? Why startup teams that share a lot of common interests are a bad match? How to divide the rewards without getting into a screaming contest? This book could answer those questions.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Why should an aspiring entrepreneur read the Jobs biography? There are several reasons, the least of which being that it is an inspiring tale of creativity, struggle, success and redemption. It is also a story of caution: new business minds and inventors can learn from Jobs’ foibles in dealing with friends and colleagues. They will also be forced to ponder the question of what success actually means and whether the prices we pay to realize our visions are too high (or even necessary).
In closing:
In no way am I suggesting that these titles are the be-all and end-all of entrepreneurial literature, or that these are the absolute best--there are just too many titles of worth to name here in one post (for instance, here’s a FORBES review of Reid Hoffman’s startup book). If you’ve read a book that inspired you in business, startup or entrepreneurship; let us know by commenting below. If you are in PR and have a client that is looking to plug a book, no thanks.
Follow me on Twitter @KarstenStrauss
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010e0c8ba7ea87593fbcb0059ac8f395 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2014/09/30/hong-kong-protests-beating-the-media-crackdown/ | Hong Kong Protests: Beating The Media Crackdown | Hong Kong Protests: Beating The Media Crackdown
As Hong Kong protestors band together in opposition to Beijing’s move to wrest political power from the metropolis, the government has pulled the plug on some social media and news.
According to reports, Instagram has been blocked by China’s communist party, and other types of communication – articles, photos, social media posts – have been heavily censored.
This is not a surprising strategy for China’s information-fearing government—indeed, Facebook and Twitter has been blocked for a while. China has also blocked the hashtag ‘Occupy Central’ on micro-blogging platform Weibo. But protestors and tech-savvy users have found other ways of getting through to the rest of the connected world.
According to a report, right now in Hong Kong, users are anticipating a network shutdown and are signing up for FireChat, an anonymous, free Bluetooth-powered messenger application. User numbers for the app spiked as the protests intensified with reports of over 100,000 downloads over the weekend. Even better news is that the company is adding encryption to the program for anonymity.
David Gorodyansky, CEO of Silicon Valley-based firm AnchorFree , says he’s seen usage numbers for his company’s virtual private network – called Hotspot Shield – rise over 1,000% in mobile on both Android and iOS since unrest in Hong Kong began. “It went from hundreds of downloads per day to tens of thousands.”
Riot police fire several tear bombs to the Pro-Democracy Protesters at midnight in 28th September... [+] 2014, in Admiralty. (image credit: Lamuel Chung on Flickr)
Though Hotspot Shield’s website has been blocked in China for years, users can get the app for free by emailing win@anchorfree.com or mac@anchorfree.com . The virtual private network allows users to browse the web and share information and pictures by sidestepping government control. Here’s how it works:
When you download and activate the program on desktop, tablet or mobile, you visit websites via the company’s servers in the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, which scrub any information (including IP addresses) that could determine your location or identity. After you log off, your data are deleted.
Looking at the app’s real-time numbers gives the impression that Hotspot Shield acts as a type of alarm system for social strife. It rises in popularity whenever repressive regimes crack down. In 2010, after Chinese authorities blocked the site, AnchorFree figured out a bypass: It sent e-mails to its entire user base with links to download Mac and Windows versions of Hotspot Shield; because Web surfers rode Gorodyansky’s servers, they steered clear of the censors. “That helped us quadruple traffic,” he says.
During the 2011 Arab Spring, when governments shut down websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, protesters flocked to Hotspot Shield and downloads in Egypt jumped literally tenfold overnight to 1 million. In 2013, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to raze a park in Istanbul, thousands of people discovered the AnchorFree loophole, boosting usage 1,000% nationwide.
In February, when protestors in Venezuela massed against their government due to inflation and food shortages, rape and violence; Anchorfree saw an uptick in usage of its free apps and allowed users in the embattled nation have the for-pay iphone app free of charge in response to the Venezuelan government’s decision to block Twitter.
Says Gorodyansky: “People want secure and private communications regardless of where they are in the world and I think it’s becoming a megatrend more than ever now. It’s really universal.”
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56bcc60a975d9da0ca3813f2ac132eb5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2014/12/17/relayrides-wants-you-to-rent-out-your-car-in-2015/ | RelayRides Wants You To Rent Out Your Car In 2015 | RelayRides Wants You To Rent Out Your Car In 2015
2014 was a decent year for RelayRides, the San Francisco-based car sharing platform. The firm raised $35 million to help further grow its presence in the peer-to-peer car-sharing/rental space and will look to spend that capital to up its exposure and tweak its customer experience in 2015.
RelayRides essentially turns anyone with a set of wheels into a rental service—like the Airbnb of auto-rental. Members can rent their cars for several days at the price of their choosing. Their listings (complete with photos and vehicle info) are scanned by customers who decide on a deal and book it online while RelayRides gets 25% of each transaction. Car owners manage to make a few bucks too, says CEO Andre Haddad. “On average they make around $200 per active owner per month—more than offsetting the cost of your vehicle.”
Haddad – formerly head of eBay ’s Shopping.com – says the company wants to carve out a piece of the $60 billion world car rental market. Taking a stab at that space hasn’t been easy. Early rival Zipcar hit a roadblock sticking to a business model based on short term rentals. The result? It couldn’t make a profit. Learning from its competitors’ mistake, RelayRides saw growth reach 14x by switching to a longer term rental model.
Today RelayRides conducts business in 49 states (not New York, though, as the company was smacked for false advertising, unlicensed insurance activity and other violations), has booked transactions in 2,500 cities in the U.S. and has a car-sharing and airport parking presence at over 300 airports nationally.
That’s an impressive spread but Haddad, who won’t disclose when he thinks RelayRides will make a profit, underscores growth as the company’s strategy in 2015. To date the firm has raised a total $52.5 million and its latest cash injection will be spent on keeping old customers happy and attracting the attention of new ones. “We think about this concept that we’ve coined internally as the ‘return on hassle,’” says Haddad.
To alleviate hassle, the company plans to show recommended pricing for vehicles being rentals, so car owners don’t have to think about it. RelayRides will also connect its community of car owners with local photographers who can help capture attractive vehicle pics for online listings. “If you make it super, super, super easy for people to rent out their cars, more and more people will do it,” says Haddad.
On the renter side, RelayRides just announced it is offering car-delivery. In other words, car owners will drive their vehicles directly to the renter. “It’s going to be a big part of how we’re going to make the renter experience easier and better next year.” To snag more customers, 2015 will see a marketing and advertising push and, as Haddad coyly suggests, RelayRides will expand internationally, though the CEO won’t disclose where (Canada, possibly?).
Haddad is convinced RelayRides’ model of having car owners interact with renters is preferable to the more sterile protocols offered by established agencies. “It’s a very different and a much more human and warm experience.” A human and warm experience? Perhaps that’s what auto-rental has been missing all this time.
Gallery: The Hottest Startups of 2014 30 images View gallery
More from The Hottest Startups of 2014
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c5908c0c58c6c0094f5075fa54a1e097 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/01/27/cardcash-inks-wal-mart-deal-to-grab-a-bigger-chunk-of-the-used-gift-card-market/ | CardCash Inks Wal-Mart Deal To Grab A Bigger Chunk Of The Used Gift Card Market | CardCash Inks Wal-Mart Deal To Grab A Bigger Chunk Of The Used Gift Card Market
Back in July of 2014 FORBES magazine put a piece of the spotlight onto a New Jersey company called CardCash.com . Founded and helmed by childhood friends from Brooklyn, CEO Elliot Bohm and COO Marc Ackerman, CardCash.com allows customers to buy, sell and exchange unwanted gift cards. In 2014 the eight year-old company pulled in about $95 million and scored the #19 spot on FORBES 2015 list of America’s Most Promising Companies.
Now, it seems, CardCash is continuing its march to greater market share, having just inked a deal to have its gift card market plastered prominently upon the Walmart behemoth. Here’s how it works: from a top-screen link on Walmart.com, customers can be transferred the retail giant’s gift card site where (if they wait a few moments) they’ll be shown a rotating promo banner plugging another website – powered by CardCash – that allows them to exchange gift cards they already have for Walmart gift cards.
CardCash.com operates as any other market value trading and sales platform would, with prices fluctuating in accordance with how popular a retailer’s gift cards are. The company buys other people’s cards online for a few dollars less than their value, reasoning many people would rather have $89 in cash than $100 worth of stuff from Annie Sez. They then sell cards for a few dollars more than they paid for them, but less than face value. The Walmart deal promises up to 97% of the value of an unwanted card.
The partnership with mega-retailer promises to alert a lot of new consumers to CardCash’s services. In fact that’s what the company has been banking on. In mid December CardCash secured $6 million in debt financing from Sterling National Bank in order to pay for more gift card inventory in anticipation of an explosion in demand in the wake of both the holiday season and its Walmart deal.
Numbers hearten Bohm and Ackerman, who say that 27% of consumers still own gift cards they received last year, with 51% of them owning two or more. The company says almost $1 billion worth of unwanted or forgotten gift cards will be lost or expire. Gift card exchanges that can grab a piece of that squandered money will have a good 2015 indeed.
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b931c7afdc659a5cb4d28800127c4848 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/06/18/need-a-shave-meet-the-new-entrepreneurs-of-grooming/ | Need A Shave? Meet The New Entrepreneurs Of Grooming | Need A Shave? Meet The New Entrepreneurs Of Grooming
Grooming is an essential part of existence, even for those of us with beards or mustaches. Companies like Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s and Dorco are offering men and women discounts on much needed grooming tools, offering a way to mitigate costs; and men’s grooming in particular is seeing an uptick. Even old-style ‘wet-shaving’ is reentering the spotlight these days among some enthusiasts.
Gallery: "8 Entrepreneurs Of The Grooming World" 14 images View gallery
As the world of shearing hair and smelling good becomes richer, some industrious entrepreneurs are designing products and launching enterprises to meet the needs of consumers, both in tools and supplies.
Here are a few:
Above The Tie
Not everyone is satisfied to get a few dollars knocked off the cost of the cartridge blades for their razors. Some reach to designs that harken back to what our grandparents and great grandparents used to scrape the hair from their bodies—tools that use blades that can be purchased for less than 20 cents apiece. They’re called safety razors: metal shaving implements that come in various forms and tend to last for generations, if cared for.
Among the upper echelon of safety razor producers is Above The Tie, a small Tennessee-based company founded by Stan Hickam in 2011. Hickam's customers better keep reminding themselves that, in the long run, they're saving money, because his personal designs command $185 each – several times the average cost of his competition. Regardless, he moves about 500 units per month. “It’s hard to make a cheap Lamborghini,” quips Hickam, who also works in the radiology department of a medical center in Tennessee.
Stan Hickam, razor designer extraordinaire (and no, his razors are not that big).
Hickam, 55, began his journey in the shave world buying antique Gillette razors built earlier in the past century, restoring them and flipping them on Ebay for a profit. Along the way he tried them, discovered what he thought were winning design features and set out to design his own.
What he came up with was a rock-solid stainless steel shaving tool (most razors are made of cheaper chromed pot metals) that offers several lengths of handle and several levels of ‘aggression,’ or blade exposure. The mix and match system allows customers to choose what best suits them. “I wanted to make something more flexible,” says Hickam.
After connecting with a machine shop that used CNC-based computer technology to help him produce his design, Hickam launched Above The Tie. His son-in-law, Matt Cole, built him a website from which, today, most of his wares are sold. Hickam also moves product through several wholesalers in the U.S., Canada and one in Europe. “Our gross sales are basically doubling each year.” Those increases don’t come from any marketing push as Hickam doesn’t invest in such things, instead relying on word of mouth. “I get a lot of comments from people who say, ‘I want something made in America, I want something that’s going to last.’”
Catie's Bubbles
For most, shaving cream is a utilitarian concoction, found in a can, used to keep the irritation associated with hair removal to a minimum. For others it’s a luxurious, fragrant treat to be enjoyed on a regular basis; an uncomplicated regimen of self-pampering.
Chris Cullen, 37, has built a business catering to that latter cross section of shavers with his small company, Catie’s Bubbles; producing soaps, men’s fragrances and shaving creams that have been well received by barbers and tonsorial aficionados, i.e. ‘shave nerds’ (my phrase, not his). He produces between 2,200 and 2,500 8-ounce jars of his shaving cream per month – priced at $20 a jar – and sells out just about every new batch. That’s at least $44,000 a month in top line sales.
Catie's Bubbles shaving products' various scents are created by founder Chris Cullen.
Cullen’s livelihood started out as a soap-making hobby he began in late 2011, and became an obsession with mixing the best recipe of raw materials to create unique products in the kitchen of his Forked River, New Jersey home. “I’ve always been a bit of a geek,” says Cullen, chuckling. “Chemistry was always the fun class in high school.” To fund his hobby he founded Caties’s Bubbles (named after his 7 year-old daughter) to sell his creations and pay for the manufacture of new ones.
Cullen’s side project became his main focus in late 2013, when he was laid off from his position as a retail manager with Sears, after a decade-long stint with the company. “My job disappeared and in a matter of two weeks I went from being recognized as one of the best in the company to applying for unemployment.”
So he decided he had to make Caties Bubbles work as his main source of income; turning his kitchen and home into a sort of factory, and setting up his online shop in early 2014. “I decided at that point that I didn’t want to put my family’s future in anybody else’s hands.” Cullen began to focus on his shaving creams, as they were products he knew would sell and pay the bills.
He was also very, very good at making them, combining just the right amounts of steric acid, coconut oil, water, glycerin and other materials. “I had been researching how to make shaving soap because there’s nothing out there that tells you how to pull that process off,” says Cullen. “Any soap maker that has figured it out, has figured it out on their own because it’s a closely guarded secret.”
Cullen with daughter Catie, after whom he named his company.
Cullen’s shaving creams are very slick, reasonably priced and lather up extraordinarily quickly. They’re available in unique fragrances like Irish Coffee, Saturday Morning (smells like Fruit Loops), and Quatre Cent Vingt (supposedly smells like cannabis), as well as some more traditional scents. His most popular cream is Le Piment de la Vie, which means ‘the spice of life,’ and he’s also released a line of post-shave balms (alcohol-free aftershaves).
Cullen’s most ardent fans consist of a community of men who make a hobby of shaving; trying out different razors, soaps and fragrances and discussing them with one another online. Catie’s Bubbles’ popularity among these consumers makes the possibility of advertising a touchy affair. “The gentlemen that make up this community do not like being sold to,” says Cullen. “…They know what they like, they know what they want and they’re capable of making their own decisions.”
These days Cullen is looking to ramp up production to meet increasing demand, having converted his dining room into a lab and his garage into a production and storage area. “I’ve been looking at finding a retail or commercial location nearby.” He’s also adopting a snazzier new package design and creating new scents. “Once I’m able to get a larger facility, I plan to work with the ATF to get my specialty alcohol license so I can do alcohol-based after shaves and some small, niche-style perfumes.”
Beluga Shave Company
Zac Wertz is technically an out of work lawyer. He’s also a 29 year-old entrepreneur who is in the process of launching a company to sell a unique razor of his own design that combines the function of modern shaving tools and the low cost of blades used in the old-timey safety razors many of our grandfathers used.
New products start to matter when they’re embraced by customers or investors, preferably both. Wertz and his one-man enterprise, Beluga Shave Co., managed to raise capital on Kickstarter, raking in over $195,000 on a $100,000 campaign this past November.
Shaped much like modern, multi-bladed razors, the Beluga uses traditional, inexpensive (and... [+] recyclable) blades.
Wertz, an Ohio native, developed the concept that would become the centerpiece for his company while studying for his bar exam. Having converted from a regular cartridge razor with their expensive blades to an archaic safety razor and its double-edged blades that cost pennies, it dawned on him that the only real difference was the way the razor head tilts to the contours of the face. “Why doesn’t somebody make this easy?” he said. “Just add a pivoting neck and I wouldn’t have to have the same kind of concentration and precision that’s required for a double-edge.”
Wertz sketched some designs for a newfangled razor that could accommodate the ultra-cheap blades then banged out a wooden prototype at the woodshop of his old high school. “I figured I couldn’t really develop this by myself, I needed to bring on someone with design experience to really finalize what this design will be like.”
Wertz hooked up with several design firms, each one providing a prototype that allowed him, over the course of a year, to get closer to his final product, which he hashed out with Priority Designs, in Columbus, Ohio. The final version is undoubtedly modern, but its solid stainless steel construction and old fashioned blades evoke a bygone generation. “I want to make products the way they used to be made; make them built to last,” says Wertz. He also wants to show shavers that his grooming tool can provide savings on blades that would make the Dollar Shave Club envious. It will have to—Wertz plans to charge $150 apiece for his creation.
Beluga’s Kickstarter campaign has allowed Wertz to make final tweaks to his design and tool up to produce a first batch to be sent to supporters. The search is underway to source components for production and Wertz is optimistically predicting he’ll have tooling set up this summer, and a first shipment in the winter. “We’ve spent the past six months in the dark, really trying to perfect this razor and give it the best presentation,” says Wertz. “So that when people finally get to try this they can really see that a single edge is superior to multiple blades.”
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4322103ab4093d017841111a93dfcf40 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/08/02/how-a-shaving-mascot-and-uncommon-scents-lifted-phoenix-artisan-accoutrements-in-the-grooming-world/ | How A Shaving Mascot And Uncommon Scents Lifted Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements In The Grooming World | How A Shaving Mascot And Uncommon Scents Lifted Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements In The Grooming World
Douglas Smythe, the cartoonish mascot and spokesperson of Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements, purveyor of... [+] men's grooming products.
Douglas Smythe is a busy bee. When not exploring the world of men’s grooming on his blog, HowToGrowAMoustache.com, or hosting two podcasts and a YouTube channel on the subject, the ever-enthusiastic Smythe is creating aftershaves, shaving soaps and razors to help gentlemen smell fresh and look debonair—a mission to which he has devoted his life.
Here’s the catch: Douglas Smythe – with his seaman’s cap, pipe, anchor-beard and coiffed moustache – does not really exist. He is a created persona; a Colonel Sanders-type character, but for shaving—a bon vivant philosopher of shaving and scent, invented by Erik Hodges and Frances Towle, founders of the slightly eccentric men’s grooming company, Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements. “It was this playful thing,” says Hodges, 39. “I’m running a business as a character.”
The Smythe character appears on the label of some of the company’s products but he is not merely a mascot; he’s also Hodges’ alter ego, though likely not too far from Hodges himself. The entrepreneur assumes the role whenever he presents himself to the public while blogging, attending industry events or doing anything grooming related—which is almost all of the time. “It’s my legal trade name,” says Hodges. Smythe (née Hodges) even has his own YouTube channel, where he provides grooming tips and posts podcasts and amusing videos.
Erik Hodges (aka Douglas Smythe) and Frances Towle, of Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements.
Based in Casa Grande, Ariz., Towle and Hodges – who are romantically linked – have earned fans by taking a quirky approach to grooming products; nothing is out of bounds, if it smells good. Their 40+ scents include Hawaiian punch, fir trees, gin & tonic, dirt (yes, dirt), as well as strangely copacetic combos like mojitos and cigars, or chocolate and bourbon.
Phoenix Artisan ships about 1,100 orders of grooming tools, aftershaves and shaving soaps per month (products cost between $8 and $35), on top of over 30 shipments to wholesale channels. It expect to bring in north of $500,000 in top line sales this year (mostly through its online store), though most profits are reinvested in the business. “We’ve gone from a small kitchen sink operation to a 2,200 square foot warehouse with staff in a three-year span of time,” says Towle, who is 37.
The two are now launching a new company – Crown King – to offer a smaller number of products they feel they can make and ship quickly, potentially to big box retail chains like Whole Foods. The new enterprise will feature synthetic shaving brushes, five different shaving soaps, and other grooming items. Ultimately, the hope is that customers will be curious enough to discover their flagship brand. Says Hodges: “It’s more of an experience than just a product—it’s a lifestyle.”
Gallery: "8 Entrepreneurs Of The Grooming World" 14 images View gallery
Hodges began concocting scented liquids five years ago while the Massachusetts native was living on a beach in Costa Rica, surfing, playing the pandeiro and working as a graphic designer. He invented a solution he dubbed Itch No Mas to keep the sand fleas at bay, as well as a mini-deodorant called Stink No Mas. The products caught on with locals and when Hodges moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2011 he continued shipping bottles of the stuff to his Costa Rican customers.
Towle and Hodges – who’d dated in college – reconnected when Towle moved back east after spending several years as an acupuncturist in Idaho and Oregon. Having grown up on a horse farm with a father who liked to devise his own equine poultices, she was adept at making personal care products and launched a company called Petal Pusher Fancies to sell them. Hodges provided graphic design skills to the business, as well as deodorants and organic moustache wax of his own creation. “We started this whole thing on about $500 and kept pouring it back in.”
To market his moustache wax, Hodges began his HowToGrowAMoustache.com blog. He formulated a new product – a shaving soap – and launched a company to sell it, which he named (wait for it…) How To Grow A Moustache. “I sold a product just to lead people back to the blog for traffic.”
The soap, however, caught on with a community of wet shavers—mostly men, who lather their own shaving cream and use straight razors and safety razors with their inexpensive blades. This niche group of consumers was eager for small-batch, artisanal products, having grown bored with traditional market leaders like Italy’s Proraso, London brands Truefitt & Hill, D.R. Harris and Taylor of Old Bond Street, as well as the pricey Castle Forbes, from Scotland.
The Douglas Smythe character emerged as Hodges began blogging, talking to customers and writing reviews of products put out by fellow grooming artisans. His public persona has confused some customers, and even created some controversy: Hodges admits to having used the fictitious persona to tout Towle’s wares in an online article – without disclosing he was affiliated with Towle – which brought attention to the couple’s brand. He also conducted an interview with Towle while assuming the Douglas Smythe character. Hodges is sheepish but ultimately doesn't feel too bad about it. “Everything I said in the article was true, in how I feel about it,” Hodges says. “I think it’s the best soap out there.”
Hodges taping his podcast as Douglas Smythe.
With an increase in visibility came a jump in sales, and soon Towle and Hodges faced expansion. They moved production from their kitchen to their garage. Late last year they moved to Phoenix for affordable live-work space and the dry heat, which is perfect for soap making.
They also consolidated, combining their two companies under the singular Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements banner, which was largely a practical decision, says Towle. “You had these two businesses and you’re buying 55 pounds of ingredients and they’re going here and there—from a back-end logistical standpoint it becomes a nightmare trying to keep things separate. It made more sense to have them both be under one roof.” Says Hodges, chuckling: “I kind of enjoyed not having us combined because I’ve always wanted to compete with myself.”
On growth potential, Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements is banking that wet shaving is a trend that will continue. It may well be a smaller slice of the market that contains players like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s that is disrupting the cartridge razor space owned by giants like Gillette and Schick. “(Gillette) refuses to mention wet shaving cutting into their profits because once they mention it people will start taking more notice of it, and they don’t want that,” says Hodges. But, Procter & Gamble, he added, owns both Gillette and wet shaving retailer Art of Shaving. “So they do have a horse in the game.”
Nowadays the couple still sells its share of moustache wax but newer stuff, like its razors and its various scents of cologne, soap and aftershave, are outpacing older offerings. Though Towle and Hodges are seeking a wider audience with Crown King, Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements, overall, seems more than simply a livelihood for the couple. It’s more a sort of playground where they – and their creation, Douglas Smythe – can have fun experimenting with fragrances and exploring wherever their imaginations take them. Says Hodges: “I’ve combined all my different passions – theater, artwork, design, soap making, chemistry – into one thing. It feels so natural to me. It doesn’t feel like work.”
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aea83e3370537e1d2fd55c4d894dfbee | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/08/24/george-zimmer-tries-uber-for-clothing-alterations-youre-going-to-like-the-way-tailors-come-to-you/?linkId=16515418&utm_campaign=Forbes&utm_channel=Entrepreneurs&utm_medium=social&utm_source=TWITTER | George Zimmer Tries Uber For Clothing Alterations: You're Going To Like The Way Tailors Come to You | George Zimmer Tries Uber For Clothing Alterations: You're Going To Like The Way Tailors Come to You
George Zimmer -- the man who brought you the Men's Wearhouse -- wants to bring a tailor to your door... [+] with his new startup, zTailors. (image credit zTailors)
You may not think you know George Zimmer but, chances are, his catchphrase has found a place somewhere in your declarative memory. He’s the founder and former CEO of the Men’s Wearhouse, and the dapper gentleman in the company’s commercials who assures you, “You’re going to like the way you look.” In fact, he guaranteed it.
These days – two years after a tiff with the Men’s Wearhouse board led to his ouster from the company – Zimmer is active in the clothiers business yet again, having launched a startup at age 66. Called zTailors, the new company allows users to order a home-visit by a tailor, suggesting an increasingly hackneyed comparison: the Uber of… clothing alterations. “I’m creating an on demand, nationwide tailor network,” Zimmer told FORBES.
Here’s how it works: through its website, zTailors.com (an app is on the way), users punch in where and when they would like a tailor to arrive. Once on site, the tailor takes measurements while the client models the clothing. The tailor then leaves with the apparel, does the work off-site and returns with the altered garments several days later.
zTailors, which is based in Oakland, takes a third of the payment (usually about $20 per hem, $30 per sleeve) leaving the rest for the tailor. So far the company claims to have built a roster of more than 600 independent tailors, each of whom has at least five years of experience and has been vetted by the company. A third operate in the New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco metropolitan regions, though tailors can sign up anywhere.
The tailor army has been in operation since June 1 and averages about 100 jobs per day. Zimmer says zTailors needs to hit critical mass before it starts making real money, and he’s not sure when that might be. “I think we would have to have close to 1,000 tailors working every day for it to be profitable.”
zTailors is meant to offer professional tailors a second job, a way to supplement their full- or part-time income with freelance work. “It’s predicated on the idea that by reducing the amount of downtime that artisans have – i.e. tailors – you can dramatically improve their earning capacity,” says Zimmer. “It is our hope that over a period of years we can develop a model which will approximately double the earnings of the tailor from today’s approximately $50,000 a year.”
Upon the zTailors splash page are the words “A George Zimmer Company,” set just below the startup’s logo, pitching his name as a brand of quality—Zimmer has never been shy about serving as the public face of a business. Zimmer founded Men’s Wearhouse back in 1973 and, as its CEO, grew the chain to over 1,200 stores, acting as its spokesman since 1986. The company went public in 1992 and, last year, generated over $3.2 billion in revenue.
But Zimmer was jettisoned from the Men’s Wearhouse board in 2013, voted out after members complained that he refused to accept a lesser role within the company after stepping down as CEO in 2011. “We all get knocked down in life, so you can’t really control that,” he says. “What you have some control over is how you get back up.”
Newly unemployed, Zimmer could have retired to the life of his choosing. He’d founded and built a billion dollar company—so who cares if he didn’t get the sendoff he’d anticipated? But the sour taste of his departure would not dissipate and Zimmer decided he wouldn’t bid farewell to the business world under less-than-victorious circumstances. That determination, in part, fueled his search for a new project.
Another strong motivator for Zimmer was the allegiance he felt to the fraternity of the needle and thread, and he wanted to lend a hand to tailors as a workforce. Zimmer has been working with them for most of his life and, in his office, on the wall, hangs a portrait of Zimmer made of fabric with the slogan “Tailors Rule” beneath it. It was made by Men’s Wearhouse tailors in Roseville, California, as a token of appreciation. “I’ve come to see the tailors as the underdogs of the apparel industry,” he says. “They make relatively little money, their schedules are uncertain, their benefits are threatened.”
The zTailors concept emerged after Zimmer became an Uber customer in 2014. He had a hunch that tailors were generally underserved by technology that was revolutionizing the service industry. With $20 million of startup capital from friends, family and his own war chest, he put together a 50-employee team to recruit tailors, build a website and begin marketing the product.
One avenue for growth, Zimmer says, is partnership with retailers. In June the company announced it had begun a program to handle alterations for Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s online customers in Los Angeles and New York. For Zimmer, zTailors is a crash course in tech-based modern business and he’s had to delegate in a space where he is not totally comfortable.
“I was not a technophile and that definitely has been a learning lesson,” he says. But the job is indeed a full-time affair and Zimmer is taking a big risk on a fledgling company whose ultimate survival is not assured. Meanwhile others at his age and in his tax bracket are relaxing in retirement—but Zimmer doesn’t feel he’s missing out: “I wasn’t ready to play golf and tennis on a regular basis.”
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aca63eb79211e9b67e01e0f3d376afb7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2015/10/09/international-fintech-techstars-blooms-in-tel-aviv-and-cape-town/ | International FinTech: Techstars Blooms In Tel Aviv And Cape Town | International FinTech: Techstars Blooms In Tel Aviv And Cape Town
Colorado-based startup accelerator, Techstars, has been a stalwart supporter of U.S. entrepreneurship over the years, but at the moment its focus is overseas. The organization plans to build up its international startup footprint in 2016 with the creation of two new locations to assemble and develop entrepreneurs and young companies. Teaming up with Barclays , the organization will be looking for about a dozen promising enterprises in Cape Town, South Africa, and Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Techstars’ focus in these locations will be startups zeroing in on financial technology, as it has been for the past three years working for Barclays to operate the financial institution’s accelerator programs in London and New York, says Techstars founder and CEO David G. Cohen. “We’ve had three classes through those programs of ten companies each.”
While Techstars will provide its network of mentors, its accelerator curriculum and its funding connections, Barclays will provide its expertise in the financial technology space—plus some other resources. Says Cohen: “Barclays can literally make a company by providing access to its business partners, its network, and its own financial services products.” Those tools have benefited other FinTech firms that have emerged from the accelerator, like payroll management firm, DoPay, and invoice finance company, NoviCap. Those companies, from Techstars-Barclays’ London Chapter, have both used the relationship to connect with potential customers and NoviCap welcomed investment from Barclays.
Startups chosen to be part of Techstars’ new chapters will receive investment from the accelerator. But those funds will not be coming from Barclays and the financial firm has no special rights to invest in or acquire any of the young firms. “It’s not about take, take, take,” Cohen told FORBES. “It’s about being helpful and you can get something later if you’re helpful.”
Still, the upside for Barclays is that forging relationships with young firms early can also open the door to all of those things, says Cohen. “There might be an opportunity to invest further, there might be an opportunity to buy the company, there might be an opportunity to do business with the company, but none of that is pre-arranged.”
Planting a flag in Israel makes sense for Techstars, as the country has a reported 3,000 plus startups in a country of 8 million. There are over 200 accelerators already operating in the tiny country.
With Cape Town, the location was determined largely by Barclays existing presence in the city and need for a partner to operate Barclay’s accelerator. That suited Cohen just fine. “We think there are incredible opportunities emerging in Africa in general and South Africa, for us, is a logical first place to go,” he said.
Also on Forbes:
Gallery: Top 20 Startup Ecosystems 20 images View gallery
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ab8a533ac103bf912e720cb4fa250bd2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/01/31/report-franchise-businesses-will-continue-to-see-steady-growth-of-1-7-in-2016-but-is-that-too-optimistic/ | Report: Franchise Businesses Will See Steady Growth Of 1.7 % In 2016 (But Is That Too Optimistic?) | Report: Franchise Businesses Will See Steady Growth Of 1.7 % In 2016 (But Is That Too Optimistic?)
A new report by the International Franchise Association claims that the franchise industry is... [+] expected to experience steady growth this year--but is it a bit optimistic? (image credit: Ken Teegardin www.SeniorLiving.Org)
For small business hopefuls thinking of buying into a franchise – or franchise entrepreneurs looking to expand their holdings – there are no glaring reasons not to pull the trigger this year. So says the International Franchise Association’s (IFA) latest report on what to expect from the US franchise space in 2016. The predication: growth across the board.
According to the report, compiled with IHS Economics, the number of franchise establishments in the United States will increase at the same pace it did in 2015—about 1.7%. Employment will increase over 3%. The overall economic output of the franchise industry is expected to jump 5.8% to $944 billion—the fastest pace since before the Great Recession.
Notable hot spots include the food service space: the restaurant franchise sectors – both quick service and full service establishments – are expected each to experience a 6.3% jump in economic output. Business service franchises and lodging sector franchises are also expected to see a boost.
“I don’t think there’s anything too shocking in (the report),” says IFA spokesman Matthew Haller. “It reinforces what a lot of people tend to think about when they think about franchising: the restaurant sector is continuing to grow and strong, and I think the other service-related franchises are also doing very well.”
One reason for steady growth in the business and retail services space in recent years us that many businesses that were never associated with franchising before have decided to give that model a try, says Haller. “Whether its doggy daycare or after-school continuing education for children in art or music or institutional learning, or in the home care and senior care areas—these are sectors that have really grown significantly in the last decade.”
Why are these service businesses turning to franchising? According to Haller, it’s because it offers a way of scaling quickly while relying on motivated small business owners who have skin in the game.
All categories of franchise business analyzed by the IFA are expected to experience at least 1.5% growth in the number of establishments in operation – which is good news – but, to a certain extent, the industry is still coming back from the Great Recession, before which growth jumps of 4% were common. Says Haller: “1% to 2% has been the norm since ‘09.”
“I think we’re seeing continued uncertainty in the regulatory environment, so that’s part of it,” says Haller. “Capital is out there, but it’s more difficult for somebody that hasn’t been in franchising to get a small business loan than for an established operator.” The downside for established operators, though, comes in the form of higher labor costs due to the Affordable Care Act, labor regulations and new overtime laws coming online in 2016. The National Labor Relations Board’s recent decision to hold franchises responsible for violations committed by contractors could move companies to exert more control over their franchisees, which could make the franchise model less attractive to would-be small business owners.
Another X-factor at play this year is the presidential election, says Joel Libava, an industry watcher, franchise consultant and SBA columnist known by his trademark moniker, ‘The Franchise King.’ “People are a lot more nervous when there’s a presidential election and I think that’s going to reflect in the sales,” he explained. “I’ve been feeling it with folks that I’m working with as an advisor for the past six months. People are really excited to be their own bosses but they’re really gun-shy; they’re not all the way there when it comes to signing the check.”
That political uncertainty leads Libava to believe the IFA’s forecast increase of 1.7% to the number of franchise establishments may be optimistic. “Interest rates have been so low for so long I think people are starting to get a little nervous about the possibility of those going up and what a new president will do.”
One person who doesn’t believe the presidential elections will have an impact on unit sales is Don Sniegowski, editor and founder ofBlueMauMau.com, an online franchise industry news source and watchdog. But there is a section of the IFA’s report that concerns Sniegowski; he preaches caution when reading into employment growth forecasts within the franchise space. Employers, he says, can hire part-time employees to avoid costs associated with full-timers. “Where you had a full-timer, now you have one-and-a-half part-timers.”
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6b50d68923d803cfa0b33914e65ededa | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/03/01/10-great-companies-for-women-in-2016/ | 10 Great Companies For Women In 2016 | 10 Great Companies For Women In 2016
Gallery: The Top 10 Companies For Women Executives In 2016 11 images View gallery
Are you looking to forge a career within a company known for offering great opportunities for women in leadership roles? We’ve found a researched list of firms that do just that.
The National Association for Females Executives (NAFE), a division of Working Mother magazine publisher Working Mother Media, has released its annual compilation of 60 firms that have proven themselves fantastic environments for female leaders. Each offers a great environment for women to advance to top positions and has a history of success to prove it. Check out our slideshow above to see the best of them.
NAFE’s listing was compiled by putting more than 200 questions to top companies regarding female representation at all levels, tracking access and usage of programs and policies that promote the advancement of women, and the training and accountability of managers in relation to the number of women who advance. Companies in the top 60 had to have more than 1,000 employees and have at least two women on the board of directors
More than half of NAFE’s Top 60 has at least four women on their boards of directors. An average of 28% of board of director members are women, compared with 19% at S&P Companies. NAFE discovered that only 8% of companies on its list were headed by a female CEO—that’s 2% less than last year. Women at NAFE’s Top Companies list last year received 44% of promotions to the manager level and above, most at the managerial level. However, men still receive the majority of promotions at all levels.
Some of the bright spots on NAFE’s 2016 compilation include Missouri-based public relations agency FleishmanHillard, whose 1,600 plus employees are 65% female. Of the firm’s corporate executives, 47% are women. A majority Massachusetts-based insurance firm MassMutual’s 7,000 employees are women, as are 33% of its board of directors. About 65% of L’Oreal’s 8,700 workers are female, and so is over half of its senior managers.
NAFE president Betty Spence says companies that made the list are worthy of praise for their efforts but the advancement of women in the business world leaves much to be desired. One area where female representation is lacking, she insists, is the realm of ‘profit & loss’ executive leadership—positions that include the authority to spend company money as they see fit, without prior approval. “23% of the P&L jobs in our NAFE top 60 are in the hands of women,” says Spence. “We do have companies that are doing really fabulously at it: FleishmanHillard has more than half, MassMutual has 50%, Target is at 39%.” Still, among top companies in the world, P&L positions are largely in the hands of men.
In fact, overall female advancement in upper echelon positions in corporations has stalled. “If you look at the Fortune 500 and S&P 500, we’ve seen no measurable change in women on boards or in executive leadership for four years,” says Spence. “Even at our NAFE top companies we have not seen a measurable change. The only place we’ve really seen a marked change is in companies that are moving more women onto the boards.”
The payout for firms that embrace females in leadership roles could be lucrative, as a recent study shows that companies with 30% women executives average better returns. That in itself should be enough to sway corporations on the fence about installing female advancement programs and incentives into their organizations. Whether it will remains to be seen.
But those types of programs are just part of the fix. Further advancement will likely require a cultural and psychological shift within the minds of employees of all levels and, perhaps, in all of our minds. Gender inequality stems from a slew of assumptions, prejudices and learned behaviors that take time to be undone. “People tune women out and why do they do that?” posits Spence. “That’s a cultural thing and it’s probably a universal thing.” If true, such a tendency would mean a swath of input and human capital – both for the benefit of corporate profit and not – is going unrecognized.
Watch on Forbes:
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a5981801121bf5625a9fb0993ced66ab | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/03/10/big-tech-companies-that-pay-inexperienced-employees-the-most/ | Big Tech Companies That Pay Inexperienced Employees The Most | Big Tech Companies That Pay Inexperienced Employees The Most
Gallery: 18 Big Tech Companies That Pay Inexperienced Employees The Most 19 images View gallery
If you only have a couple of years of experience working in the tech realm, some companies will pay you more than others. One of those would be LinkedIn, whose median salary for early career hires is a whopping $110,800.
But that’s not even the most generous company to employees with little to no on-the-job experience, according to a recently released analysis from career info company, PayScale. According to the company’s side-by-side comparison report of top tech companies -- using data obtained from 33,500 non-retail or sales workers in the tech industry over the past two years -- some big tech firms pay out big bucks to employees who have zero to five years experience.
We compiled a ranked slideshow (see above) of large, household-name technology companies and what their median salary packages are for workers who only have a couple of years of experience. Besides LinkedIn, another big payer is Google, whose inexperienced staff’s median income clocks in at $106,900.
On the other end of the spectrum is Hewlett Packard, whose less experienced folks take home a median income of $65,400. Flip through the slideshow to see who pays out the most. Also, find out which companies hand their workers the most stress in our look at The Most Stressful Big Tech Companies To Work For.
The larger report PayScale compiled unveiled other things too, like the various ways these firms treat and inspire their people, giving insight on salary, diversity, stress and job satisfaction. (Read More: Top Tech Companies Compared On Salary, Stress, Gender And World Impact.)
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804ef7f29e2dd06558700f7ecfcd6ed4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/03/23/americas-best-midsize-employers-2016/ | America's Best Midsize Employers 2016 | America's Best Midsize Employers 2016
Gallery: America's Best Midsize Employers 2016 22 images View gallery
It’s that time of year again, when FORBES reaches out to workers in established companies throughout the nation to ascertain which among them make their employees feel secure, understood, needed and inspired. The result is a vast list of 500 large companies ranked by their own people (read more: America’s Best Employers of 2016) plus an additional list of 250 midsize companies, with 1,000 to 5,000 employees.
Topping our list of America’s Best Midsize Employers is clothier L.L. Bean. The 104 year-old company drew high marks from its employees, receiving an overall score of 9.50 out of 10 in our survey—signifying that they would recommend L.L. Bean as an exceptionally good place to work. Last year the company came in in 5th place in our overall list, which combined both large and midsize companies. (Count down the top 20 midsize employers in America in our slideshow above.)
The companies on the FORBES lists of best midsize and large employers were chosen based on an independent survey conducted by statistics portal Statista from a sample of 30,000 American employees working for large or midsize firms or institutions. The was conducted on companies from all industry sectors employing more than 1,000 workers in the United States.
More On Forbes: Ongoing Coverage of Best Employers 2016 Employees across the U.S. are in the best position to say which companies and organizations are offering the strongest opportunities—so we asked them.
In compiling the FORBES lists, willingness to recommend one’s own employer was the most important metric of our assessment, and employees were required to rate their employers on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means "I wouldn’t recommend my employer under any circumstances" and 10 means "I would definitely recommend my employer". A secondary dimension to the assessment involved asking employees to mention good or bad employers in sectors and industries besides their own.
Another top employer this year is The Container Store . The Texas-based retailer of storage and home organization products was rated 9.44 by its workers. Last year the company reached the #4 spot in our overall list.
Third on the list of Best Midsize Employers is Novo Nordisk , a Denmark-based healthcare and pharmaceutical firm with a global network of offices. The company set up shop in the United States, adopting a headquarters in Plainsboro, New Jersey, and establishing an insulin plant in North Carolina, a research Center in Seattle and a bio-pharmaceutical facility in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Novo Nordisk’s employees gave their company a 9.22 rating.
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0b00e3020f258576203263d2d95dde45 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/10/top-companies-most-beloved-by-their-employees-in-2016/ | Top Companies Most Beloved By Their Employees In 2016 | Top Companies Most Beloved By Their Employees In 2016
When you’re searching for a job, it’s smart to identify companies you might like to work for and look into what employees there are saying.
That can be done several ways: connect on LinkedIn, reach out to your own personal network, scan the company blogs, etc. You can also read reviews on job boards.
Indeed.com – an online job search platform based in Austin, Texas, that attracts 180 million monthly visitors in more than 60 countries – recently released data on which large companies seem the most loved by their employees. Indeed went about this by parsing out all the biggest firms on their platform with over 25 employee reviews and sorting through which had the most positive feedback. (See our gallery of the Top 12 below).
Gallery: 12 Top Companies Beloved By Their Employees In 2016 13 images View gallery
Indeed.com senior vice president, Paul D’Arcy, took a few moments to chat with Forbes about what exactly the top companies on the platform are doing to make them so popular among their staffs. One thing he noted was that not all of the firms in the top 50 are in high-margin spaces—Publix is at #29, Costco is at #14, for example. “Having happy loyal employees is a choice that organizations make and it feels like a choice that’s available to any company that really focuses on the right culture, a special environment for employees and a real purpose that motivates employees when they come to work every day,” says D’Arcy.
Taking the top positions on Indeed.com’s list are Salesforce, Southwest Airlines and Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, in that order. “When you look at the comments, (Salesforce’s) employee talk about the great work environment—that its fun and engaging,” D’Arcy said. “There are some particular things that Salesforce does that are unique. For example, they give six volunteer days off to every employee every year, so there’s a real focus on community engagement.”
More broadly, says D’Arcy, companies on the top section of Indeed.com’s list tend to be successful in their attempts to inspire their people and treat them well. Tech giants Google(#6) and Apple(#9) are well known for creating successful business cultures while making their people feel pampered and free to be creative.
Says D’Arcy: “Occasionally things come up around benefits or workplace flexibility, but those don’t seem to be the biggest determinants of what makes an organization great. Having fun, feeling like you’re having an impact and having that impact extend beyond the company to the world—those are the things that make the workplace really special.”
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ca3e8f8736bc39e1790bf8092a0121f4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/06/29/college-degrees-that-report-higher-underemployment/ | College Degrees That Report High Underemployment | College Degrees That Report High Underemployment
According to salary and career info site, PayScale, those with certain bachelors degrees report... [+] higher levels of underemployment. (image: Shutterstock)
Really, it can happen to anyone. Despite a great education, regardless of which industry we work in, it’s possible to go through periods of being underemployed and unsatisfied with how our careers are faring.
When we talk about being ‘underemployed,’ we’re talking about workers that are skilled but working in low paying or low-skill jobs, as well as part-time workers that would prefer to be full-time. Essentially, the definition per Investopedia. Most of us go through this at one point or another.
According to a recently released survey from salary, jobs and career information database, PayScale, some holders of certain bachelor’s degrees can be more prone to underemployment than others. The organization looked through data collected from 962,956 workers over the course of two years between March 2014 and March 2016 and asked whether those workers felt they were underemployed and correlated the answers to which bachelor’s degrees they held. We wrapped up PayScale’s results into a gallery. Check it out below!
Gallery: 17 College Majors That Report High Underemployment 18 images View gallery
Looking at PayScale’s entire study shows that 46% of respondents considered themselves underemployed—so it’s not uncommon and you shouldn’t feel down if you classify yourself among them. In general, the underemployed in all levels of education (about 74.6%) feel they are not using the tools at their disposal in their current positions. The rest are stuck in part time work and eager to snag a full-time position.
Read More: These Jobs Report High Underemployment
More women, it turns out, feel underemployed than men—49% versus 43%. The majority of those women (73%) said that they felt that way because they were not using the education and training that they’d accrued.
Education has a big impact on whether we become underemployed, according to PayScale’s data. Those with a doctorate in medicine tend to report feeling underemployed the least (30%) while PhD-holders are only slightly more afflicted, at 34%.
Those with a bachelor’s degree only showed a 43% rate and those with master ’s degrees slightly better at 39%. Workers who have taken college courses but did not receive a diploma reported the highest rate, at 57%, followed by GED holders and high school graduates (52%).
For a look at which Masters degrees reported the highest rates of underemployment, see our chart on the next page...
Masters Degrees And Reported Underemployment
Criminal Justice 54.3% Master of Human Services (MHS) 51.6% Public Administration 49.1% Business Management 48.6% Mental Health Counseling 48.0% Organizational Leadership 47.2% Theology 47.2% History 47.1% Education 47.0% Human Resources Management (HRM) 46.9% Project Management 46.8% Counseling 46.4% International Relations 45.7% Master of Fine Arts (MFA) 45.6% Psychology 45.3%
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aff4142856729871daefbe49a2902386 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/09/15/the-companies-with-the-best-csr-reputations-in-the-world-in-2016/ | The Companies With The Best CSR Reputations In The World In 2016 | The Companies With The Best CSR Reputations In The World In 2016
For internationally operating companies, it’s difficult to build a great reputation for social responsibility. It takes more than just commitment to community, building a solid workplace for your people and honest governance—it takes the ability to communicate your positive deeds to others lest they go unnoticed.
The Reputation Institute (RI), a reputation-management consulting firm based in Boston that launched in 1997, has annually gauged the way people feel about large companies, brands, countries and institutions. Its latest survey – based on 240,000 respondents in 15 countries – sheds light on which companies are seen by consumers as the most socially responsible. The results this year, for the most part, show the same conglomerates at the top of the roster, though there a couple of notable movements.
For a closer look at the Top-20 companies with the best Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reputations, check out our slideshow below.
Gallery: The Companies With The Best CSR Reputations In The World In 2016 21 images View gallery
RI tracks social responsibility reputations among companies by zeroing in on consumers’ perceptions of their governance, positive influence on society and treatment of employees—three of the seven categories it tracks when gauging an organization’s overall reputation. (Read More: The World's Most Reputable Countries 2016: U.S. Ranks 28th)
For the third consecutive year, Google tops the list of companies seen as the most socially responsible. The last time the Mountain View, California-based search firm was not placed atop the ranking was in 2013 when it placed third. Following Google was Microsoft, which took the two-spot after climbing two positions from number four last year (the company was number one in 2013). In third place was The Walt Disney Company, which has held that position since 2014.
The company that dropped the farthest this year was Volkswagon, which saw its CSR score fall 13.2 points and did not manage to crack the top 100. The Germany-based automobile manufacturer has been in damage control since it was discovered in September of last year that the company fitted its vehicles with software designed to keep emissions to a permissible levels during testing, essentially lying about its vehicles’ capabilities. The public, as RI’s survey shows, was paying attention and the firm has much work ahead of it to paste back together its shattered image.
Reputation Institute managing partner Fernando Prado stressed to FORBES that the CSR ranking is largely about perception and the results of its annual surveys are merely an indicator of which firms consumers believe are socially responsible. “When we talk about corporate social responsibilities, we are talking about realities,” he said. “When we are talking about reputation, we are talking about perception.”
Case in point, says Prado, is a comparison between Unilever and BMW. Both companies are industry leaders in terms of social responsibility, yet BMW – which placed fourth and earned 73.9 points in the CSR survey – scored 8.1 points higher than Unilever, which placed 88th. That result is due, says Prado, to a lack of knowledge on the part of consumers about Unilever’s culture of responsibility. That knowledge gap, he says, is one Unilever would do well to address.
“Companies are not communicating what they do, their good deeds,” said Prado. “A lot of times we see that companies have a lot of people who do not know a lot about what they’re actually doing or people that have a very neutral opinion. If they are able to communicate, they can build their reputations and reputations build business.”
Companies may find it more difficult to communicate their CSR activity than to tout their products, which are advertised and marketed to consumers openly. Respondents to the RI survey claimed to be less knowledgeable about companies’ governance, citizenship and workplace than other categories they were asked about. Being transparent can be difficult and it’s hard to know how to blow your own horn with class or boast effectively.
So how do corporations communicate their positives on those fronts? Says Prado: “Companies that are transparent, provide information, appear genuine, that stand out from the crowd, that are truthful—if their communication is perceived to be like that, that tends to have a greater impact on the perception of CSR.”
Medium matters too. Companies that have a weaker reputation tend to be more effective at changing the public’s perception about them by communicating through third-party channels like television or radio news, social media postings or blogs. Firms with stronger reputations can reinforce consumers’ positive sentiments about them by themselves, through their websites, newsletters, advertisements or sponsored or direct social media campaigns.
Building a strong reputation for social responsibility can be tough, complex and even costly. But the rewards -- the prestige among consumers -- is likely worth the effort.
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af769076d8c0e2f05b3545d21d016561 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/12/13/where-the-jobs-will-and-wont-be-in-2017/ | Where The Jobs Will (And Won't) Be In 2017 | Where The Jobs Will (And Won't) Be In 2017
Looking to start 2017 with a new job in a new location? You might want to think about making a move to Oregon, or even sunny Hawaii or Florida. According to a newly released study, those states have very positive employment outlooks going into the new year.
The study, from ManpowerGroup, a human resources consulting firm based in Wisconsin, shows which cities and states are home to employers looking to hire more people in the first quarter of 2017.
In conducting its employment outlook studies, ManpowerGroup surveys some 11,000 employers in the United States on whether they intend to hire more personnel in the coming quarter—or not. It then takes the percentage of employers looking to hire, subtracts the percentage intending not to and then factors in a seasonal adjustment factor. The result is an employment outlook percentage that shows hiring probability in various cities and states.
We took the list of cities with the highest – and lowest – employment outlooks and folded them into an easy-to-read slideshow, which you can view below.
Gallery: Where The Jobs Will (And Won't) Be In 2017, Q1 14 images View gallery
Overall, in the first quarter of 2017, ManpowerGroup found that employers in the U.S. are looking at a 16% net increase in employment. This time last year, that figure was 17%, and in the end of 2016 was clocked at 18%. So, no dramatic shifts.
The top five states, in terms of positive employment outlook, were Oregon (25%), Hawaii (23%), Florida (21%), Iowa (20%) and California and Oklahoma tied for fifth place with 18%. On the low end – states where employers intend to tap the breaks on hiring – are Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. Some of those, says Manpower North America senior vice president, Kip Wright, are probably related to mining and energy-related jobs. “Some of the pullbacks associated with what had been staffing increases and growth in prior years seems to have moderated.”
A new study shows where employers are planning to hire new personnel in the first quarter of 2017... [+] (image credit: ManpowerGroup)
Getting more granular into the geographical data shows the cities and towns where the employment outlook is highest and lowest. The municipality with the highest figure is Deltona, Florida, with a 31% employment outlook. Number two is Cape Coral, with 29%, also in Florida.
Wright says it’s possible that Florida’s optimistic results could be due to certain industries there. “You find leisure and hospitality is growing at a 27% outlook and it leads all sectors,” he explained. “Florida may be benefiting from some increases in leisure and hospitality.”
Other industries showing positive hiring outlooks include wholesale and retail trade (20%), transportation and utilities (19%) and professional services (17%).
The cities with the lowest employment outlook results include Youngstown, Akron and Dayton, in Ohio, which are all looking at only 5% increases in hiring, as is New Orleans. Chicago is slightly worse, at 4%, and the city with the lowest employment outlook – at 0% -- is Cleveland.
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Some of the hiring slowdown being experienced by the cities in Ohio could be due to manufacturing woes, says Wright. “Generally speaking we’ve seen manufacturing as a sector kind of on the bottom end of jobs creation,” he explained, noting that there have been minor improvements to the sector despite slow hiring growth now.
Wright says employers are interested in hiring personnel with ever more specific competencies, which can be frustrating. “We are seeing a shift where talent and talent shortage continues to plague many of these employers,” he told FORBES.
Jobs are changing, said Wright, and 15 years from now, many in the workforce will be doing jobs that do not exist today. “Employers that are aggressive about looking at their workforce and finding different ways to recruit talent are finding different barriers to find that talent and perhaps even going back to a broader recruiting approach of looking at talent from a capability perspective versus a specific competency perspective. They’re likely to be more competitive over time because they’re likely to find better talent that they can develop to meet their changing job needs.”
Making a workforce ready for employers of the future – and to those of today, to some extent – means that training programs will likely become more numerous and popular.
As far as changes due to the recent presidential elections are concerned, the numbers don’t point to any dramatic shift. Wright says the employers ManpowerGroup deals with may have been watching the election and wondering how it all might play out. “But what we’re now seeing are signs, like a 16% net employment outlook, that certainly indicate that they are a bit more cautiously optimistic than maybe pre-election,” said Wright. “Having said that, look at pre-election—we were at 18% in the fourth quarter of 2016. They still felt like the economy was booming, moving through continued growth.”
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834afe46fb0406c70bb5c7e660f2da9a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/03/22/12-great-jobs-in-the-u-s-in-2017/ | 12 Great Jobs In The U.S. In 2017 | 12 Great Jobs In The U.S. In 2017
From time to time we take a look at great jobs on offer out there in the U.S. jobs market—ones that offer good salary and career track, and are seeing growth in the number of employers and recruiters looking to fill them.
Recently we saw a new report on some of these great positions available, compiled by Indeed.com, a massive online job search platform operating on a global scale. The jobs on the list, however, are U.S.-based only.
For a full rundown of the top-12 best jobs according to Indeed, check out our slideshow below, complete with growth figures and base salary information.
Gallery: 12 Great Jobs In The U.S. In 2017 13 images View gallery
Topping this latest roster of top-jobs from Indeed is the position of Full Stack Developer. This is a very important position and its practitioners take on a good amount of responsibility because they must be proficient in a wide-ranging set of expertise. Handling the full stack requires a developer to be able to build out or maintain the front-end of a system, i.e. the user experience, as well as the back-end of an organization’s computer system. The average base salary for a Full Stack Developer is more than $111,000 a year and the position has seen a 122% increase in postings every year on Indeed’s platform between 2013 and 2016.
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In second place on Indeed’s roster is Data Scientist, a role that requires its practitioners sift through loads of data collected by an organization – info on, for instance, customers, sales, demographics, etc. – and make sense of it all for their employers. The base salary for a Data Scientist is nearly $130,000 and the role has seen year-over-year growth to the tune of 108% since 2013.
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Also in demand – with annual growth of 106% between 2013 and 2016 – is the role of Development Operations Engineer, or DevOps Engineer. Earning an average base salary of more than $123,000 a year, such a professional must collaborate and communicate with both software developers and IT professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It’s kind of like being a technician/engineer and a team expediter at the same time.
Overall, seven of the professions that found their ways into the top-10 are types of software engineer or developers. “Software engineers and other technical roles continue to dominate many of the top positions for employer demand and competitive pay,” said Indeed Senior Vice President Paul D’Arcy. “But there are certainly opportunities in other sectors, with roles in management, engineering and healthcare in high demand.”
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6466da416e026b6efe4f0da6fec39365 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/03/28/americas-most-reputable-companies-in-2017-amazon-knocked-out-of-the-top-spot/ | America's Most Reputable Companies In 2017: Amazon Knocked Out Of The Top Spot | America's Most Reputable Companies In 2017: Amazon Knocked Out Of The Top Spot
In an annual study of the companies people in the U.S. perceive as the most reputable, online retailer Amazon.com has held the number one position for the past three years. That run came to an end with the announcement of 2017’s results.
The most recent survey by The Reputation Institute gauges which companies people in the U.S. find... [+] the most reputable. Forbes Media
The study, compiled by The Reputation Institute (RI) – a 20 year-old reputation management consultancy based in Boston – is the product of a survey that measured about 800 companies by gauging the perceptions of nearly 43,000 respondents familiar with them. The result saw the Swiss luxury timepiece producer Rolex oust Amazon from its top spot berth.
For a rundown of the Top-10 most reputable companies on this year’s roster, check out our slideshow below. Check out the full list at the bottom of this article.
Gallery: America’s 10 Most Reputable Companies In 2017 11 images View gallery
In unseating Amazon, Rolex jumped several positions from its seventh place showing last year. The company also topped the list of the most reputable companies in the world, which we reported on last month.
This year Amazon itself dropped to second place, followed in the Top-10 by a number of “nostalgia brands.” Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, the Managing Director for RI North America, explains: “Barnes & Noble, Fruit of the Loom, Hershey, Kimberly-Clark, Hallmark, LEGO to some degree—these are all brands that harken back to a legacy of , in some cases, hundreds if not scores of years of having built historical equity but also a very strong association with American values. That nostalgia is a warm positive reflection of the past and not as aligned with the anticipation of what might be ahead in the future.”
Winners
LEGO, which placed fourth, and Hershey, eighth, had dropped off the Top-10 last year but returned. Kimberly-Clark – maker of Huggies, Kleenex, Kotex and an assorted list of paper towel brands – makes its first appearance in RI’s Top-10, appearing in seventh place after leaping from 87th place last year. “Kimberly-Clark strategically prioritized reputation as a key barometer of its success,” said Hahn-Griffiths. “It put a huge amount of time and energy and effort around its corporate social responsibility platform.”
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Hershey, which ranked 33rd last year, recently overcame the shadow of layoffs and a possible acquisition by Kraft. “We can look at Hershey as the comeback kid,” said Hahn-Griffiths. “…Essentially it was a brand that was somewhat under duress in 2016 but it’s gone through a mode of recovery in 2017 by repositioning the entire purpose around the company around this platform of happiness.” Product offerings have also expanded into the healthy snacks category and efforts have also been made to improve the relationship between management and workforce.
Losers
Last year American Express scored a 77.1 in RI’s annual reputation assessment. This year, the company notched 72.7, and did not crack the top 100 most reputable countries list. It saw losses on six of the seven categories RI tracks. “For many years American Express had been the poster child for reputation strength in the financial services community. It’s really led the way with a commitment to diversity in the workplace, innovation of new products, and empowerment of small businesses.” But most recently, the company suffered as it ended an exclusive contract with Costco and lost credit card co-branding with Jetblue & Fidelity. Also, the company has not been active in releasing innovative new products and its small-business program has lost steam. Transparency issues have also emerged.
Yahoo! in 2017 went from ‘not great’ to ‘quite bad’ in RI’s reputation scoring, dropping from a RepTrak score of 71.4 in 2016 to 60.8. The delay in closing its acquisition by Verizon has affected perception, the strength of company governance is in question and a series of data breaches have been a public embarrassment and professional liability. “The very relevance of what is left of Yahoo! is really the question the general public is asking themselves: ‘what do I need you for?’ And in most cases the general public would say, ‘not very much.’”
Trends Of Trust
Respondents to the survey, in gauging reputation, were much more positive toward some industries than others. Industries that garnered the most respect came from companies in the consumer goods, food & beverage, transport and automotive spaces. Meanwhile, firms that operate in the financial, healthcare, telecom and energy sectors were viewed in a more dubious light.
In the case of financial services, says Hahn-Griffiths, the public is waiting to be won over by institutions they do not entirely trust. “People are looking for and asking for a reason to believe that you are making the world a better place to live,” he explained. “In the realm of financial services – post Great Recession – there’s an accent on governance, and governance is a proxy for honesty, openness and integrity.”
The Most Important Element Of Reputation
Honesty and integrity are essential for a great corporate reputation. So much so that those attributes are the bare minimum required of companies looking to make a real impact on the public’s perception. The firms in RI’s top ten excel at building a reputation for being, imaginative, creative, charming and friendly, says Hahn-Griffiths, much more so than all the other companies on the list.
In teasing out those elements, everything matters. “They eke a persona that’s highly inspiring and highly palatable, and one that I want to identify with as a human being. Other companies, by comparison, are not as able to deliver on those,” said Hahn-Griffiths. “That really is the byproduct of the tone and manner with which these companies communicate, but also a manifestation of how they visually represent themselves to the world through their brand logo, their corporate offices, through the color palettes and the things that visually represent their company.”
America's Most Reputable Companies, 2017
Rank Company 2017 RepTrak® Pulse 1 Rolex 84.03 2 Amazon.com 83.71 3 Sony 83.17 4 LEGO Group 82.78 5 Hallmark 82.45 6 Netflix 82.23 7 Kimberly-Clark Corporation 82.12 8 Hershey Company 81.76 9 Fruit of the Loom 81.75 10 Barnes & Noble 81.67 11 Publix Super Markets Inc. 81.60 12 Tupperware 81.24 13 Bosch 81.20 14 Canon 80.95 15 Kellogg's 80.88 16 L.L.Bean 80.83 17 Google 80.63 18 Dole Foods Company 80.61 19 Bass Pro Shops 80.60 20 Bose 80.57 21 Heineken 80.48 22 Michelin 80.45 23 The Walt Disney Company 80.37 24 Colgate-Palmolive 80.36 25 Levi Strauss & Co. 80.23
26 Caterpillar 80.21 27 Chiquita 80.17 28 Home Depot 80.00 29 Goodyear 79.96 30 Williams-Sonoma 79.91 31 Campbell Soup Company 79.90 32 McCormick & Co 79.88 33 Intel 79.78 34 Whirlpool 79.73 35 Hanesbrands 79.68 36 Del Monte Foods 79.68 37 Johnson & Johnson 79.56 38 IBM 79.52 39 Microsoft 79.51 40 Nike, Inc. 79.43 41 Pirelli 79.41 42 Marriott International 79.34 43 PayPal 79.25 44 FedEx 79.16 45 UPS 79.13 46 BMW Group 79.11 47 British Airways 79.11 48 Columbia Sportswear Co. 79.08 49 The Kraft Heinz Company 79.05 50 Kohler 79.00
51 Under Armour 78.96 52 Nikon 78.87 53 Fujifilm 78.72 54 Kroger 78.65 55 Keurig Green Mountain 78.56 56 Nintendo 78.39 57 J.M. Smucker Company 78.32 58 adidas 78.30 59 Benjamin Moore 78.04 60 Rolls-Royce Aerospace 78.01 61 3M 77.87 62 The Estée Lauder Companies 77.86 63 Samsung Electronics 77.84 64 Panasonic 77.76 65 US Postal Service 77.70 66 Sharp 77.69 67 Ralph Lauren Corporation 77.68 68 Hilton Worldwide 77.58 69 General Mills 77.50 70 Newell Rubbermaid 77.48 71 Procter & Gamble 77.42 72 Apple 77.40 73 Tesla Motors 77.40 74 Barilla 77.34 75 Siemens 77.30
76 Visa 77.29 77 O'Reilly Auto Parts 77.26 78 Giorgio Armani 77.23 79 Sheraton Hotels 77.18 80 Sherwin-Williams 77.07 81 Air Canada 77.07 82 Honda Motor 77.06 83 Kohl's 77.03 84 Philips Electronics 76.95 85 Hyatt Hotels 76.94 86 Cracker Barrel Old Country Store 76.87 87 Deere & Co. 76.85 88 InterContinental Hotels 76.83 89 BIC 76.78 90 Foot Locker 76.78 91 Clorox 76.74 92 Garmin International 76.69 93 Bayer 76.68 94 Bed Bath & Beyond 76.66 95 Boeing 76.61 96 CostCo Wholesale 76.54 97 Harley-Davidson 76.54 98 Tiffany & Co. 76.44 99 Wrigley 76.43 100 Land O’Lakes 76.42
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d14da64e00e289ef879d32559f0eb893 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/05/25/which-jobs-take-the-longest-and-shortest-time-to-fill/ | Which Jobs Take The Longest (And Shortest) Time To Fill? | Which Jobs Take The Longest (And Shortest) Time To Fill?
When employers post ads for jobs within their organizations, some of them are jumped on and snapped up quickly by eager job-seekers. Others, however, linger for months on job-boards.
Why is that? For a look at the jobs that remain posted for the longest (and the shortest) amount of time, check out our slideshow below, made up of a list of the most fleeting and longest-lingering positions, according to SmartRecruiters—a San Francisco-based hiring company that connected 9 million candidates with 600,000 jobs last year and handles recruiting for customers like Visa, Equinox and Alcoa.
Gallery: The Jobs That Take The Longest (And Shortest) Time To Fill 12 images View gallery
The first thing to remember when contemplating the length of time employment postings remain in place is that one posting is not always designed to attract a single candidate—companies that require, say, three Data Engineers (#1 on SmartRecruiters’ list) will sometimes put up a single posting and leave it in place until they fill all of those vacancies.
Additionally, there are some positions for which companies are constantly advertising openings—not because they actually have available jobs, but because those roles are so important that they want to receive as many resumes as possible to either find better talent to add to the existing team, or be ready for when one of their current employees leaves; or if a position experiences high turnover. That is what is known as “evergreen requisition.”
We asked SmartRecruiters which jobs remain posted for the longest - and shortest - amounts of time.... [+] Here's what we found out. (Shutterstock)
Data Engineers, which tops the list, is a job whose postings tend to linger, on average, for 154.5 days, says SmartRecruiters. Folks in that role build massive databases and data processing systems.
In second place we find the role of Sales Engineer, whose positions stay listed for an average of 119.7 days. Sales Engineers are not ordinary sales staff—they are tasked with selling complex scientific and tech products and they have to know their stuff.
The high level of skill and experience required for jobs like these is part of the reason postings for them remain standing for so long. SmartRecruiters told FORBES that “hard to fill positions are those that take the longest time to fill. The reason why they take so long is that these positions are high impact positions that require very specific skills. Employees in these roles directly affect the bottom line of the company. Hence, companies are willing to wait longer to find the best possible fit for these jobs.”
But what of the positions that spend very little time on job boards? According the data we were given by SmartRecruiters, the one that spends the least amount of time advertised is Housekeeper, whose postings last an average 29.1 days. In second place, Accounting Clerk, at 30 days; and after that we see Operations Manager at 35.1 days. According to SmartRecruiters, positions that take a short time to fill are ones are usually seen “in retail, manufacturing where a large portion of the workforce is seasonal with high turnover. Employers aren't looking for specific skill sets in these roles as the skills are easily transferable. That's why these positions take a shorter time to fill.”
When we look at the data provided to FORBES on how long jobs in certain industries remain posted, there are some dramatic differences, as one might expect. Positions in the utilities (99.42 days), biotechnology (91.91 days) and agricultural spaces (88.86 days) are posted for the longest average periods of time.
On the other side of the spectrum, industries with the shortest average job postings times are Transportation (33.37 days), Media (41.45 days) and Chemicals (45.38 days).
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7d6867110301548a71b9a048174ddc4e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/06/14/the-worlds-most-reputable-universities-in-2017/ | The World's Most Reputable Universities In 2017 | The World's Most Reputable Universities In 2017
A new report highlights the schools in the world that scholars perceive as the most reputable.... [+] (Shutterstock)
Harvard University can claim more than a few distinctions in the world of education: it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (founded in 1636), it has produced 47 Nobel Laureates, 32 heads of state and 48 Pulitzer Prize winners; and, eight of the school’s alumni went on to serve as president of the United States.
Harvard can, as of this month, claim another distinction: the most reputable institution of higher learning on Earth—an honor it has enjoyed for the past six years.
This according to an annual ranking of the world’s most reputable universities, compiled by Times Higher Education (THE), a UK-based publication that focuses on colleges and universities. For a look at the top-12 universities on THE’s list, check out our slideshow below.
Gallery: The World's Most Reputable Universities In 2017 13 images View gallery
Overall, among the top universities, there is little change from last year’s results. The second and third positions are held by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University, as they were last year. The only minor shakeup among the upper echelon was the introduction of the University of Chicago to the top-10, which claimed ninth place, up from eleventh last year. That is due, says THE, to the improved perception of the school’s teaching and research.
Overall, schools in the United States were the most prevalent within the top-100.
“Claiming 42 places in the top 100 list (one fewer than last year), the US is the most-represented country in the table,” wrote THE rankings editor, Phil Baty, as part of the release of the annual report. “But it will have to watch out for the rise of Asia as several of the continent’s higher education stars overtake well-established American powerhouses. For example, China’s Tsinghua University and Peking University both leapfrogged the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University in the table this year while the University of Tokyo now has a stronger reputation than Columbia University. Meanwhile Seoul National University is now considered more prestigious than the University of California, Davis. Overall 20 of the U.S.’s 42 representatives have declined since last year and only eight have improved; the rest are stagnant.”
According to the numbers, China’s Tsinghua University and Peking University have seen marked improvement in recent years. Tsinghua University rose 21 spots since 2011 to reach 14th place this year, while Peking University improved 26 positions during this same period, claiming the 17th position in the latest results.
Method
In compiling the ranking, THE partners with Elsevier, an information analytics company based in Netherlands. According to THE, “the 2017 rankings are based on a survey carried out between January 2017 and March 2017, which received a total of 10,566 responses from 137 countries.” The respondents are all experienced, published scholars who are questioned based on their specific disciplines, and asked to name 15 institutions they feel are the best in the specific discipline that they (the respondent) are familiar with.
For more detail on THE’s reputation ranking methodology, visit the organization’s in-depth description here.
Quality Versus Perception
It’s important to note that THE’s ranking of the most reputable universities is a different animal from its ranking of the overall quality of universities (which we cover each fall). Though Harvard tops the list of most reputable institutions of higher learning, it ranks only sixth on the overall list of best schools in the world, which is based on performance in teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
The top-ranked schools on THE’s overall list are Oxford University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Stanford University, in that order. On the Reputation ranking, Oxford places fourth; Caltech is tenth, and Stanford is third.
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433d85c8191a2561e0838d49e27a67b1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/07/26/how-volkswagen-rallied-its-employees-after-its-emissions-scandal-at-least-for-now/ | How Volkswagen Rallied Its Employees After Its Emissions Scandal (At Least For Now) | How Volkswagen Rallied Its Employees After Its Emissions Scandal (At Least For Now)
Volkswagen's bounced back from its 2015 emissions scandal by embracing a strategy of transparency... [+] and the public consumption of crow. Its workers, once shamed, have regained confidence and morale--but for how long? (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)
When German car manufacturer Volkswagen AG was discovered in 2015 to have cheated on emissions test, the company’s reputation took a long, slow, face-first slide through the muck. Internally, too, the company’s employees reported a drop in trust for the auto giant.
But those feelings have changed as VW worked to win back the respect of its personnel. So says a report from Kununu, a Vienna-based employer reviews platform with more than 1.5 million critiques on 320 plus companies in Europe, as well as nearly 500,000 reviews for about 60,000 companies in the U.S.
Overall, Kununu has 514 reviews from VW employees—269 of which were logged following the 2015 scandal in which the company was discovered to have outfitted millions of its vehicles with software designed to allow them to beat emissions tests. The reviews show an unsurprisingly dramatic downturn in the wake of the ordeal, says Johannes Prüller, head of global communications for Kununu. “The company culture of Volkswagen was always about trust, integrity, reliability maybe,” says Prüller. “With the scandal they somehow managed to put all of that at risk.”
VW workers felt there company had taken a serious hit to its public image in the wake of its... [+] emissions scandal. Kununu
“Before the scandal broke,” Prüller explained, “if you compared the data we have for Volkswagen with BMW, Mercedes and also its own subsidiary, Audi, Volkswagen was rated best in almost every dimension of workplace satisfaction that we measure on Kununu.” When news of its emissions testing misconduct emerged, those positive numbers tanked. “They were rated worst in 12 out of 13 (dimensions).”
The fallout from the emissions scandal brought scorching consequences for VW: billions of dollars in fines, years of probation and oversight by an independent monitor to prevent future misconduct, the resignation of VW chairman Martin Winterkorn, and a hefty portion of disgrace. To regain the favor of its demoralized staff, VW employed a strategy of openness and outreach.
“They made sure that everyone knew what had happened and also what would happen next,” says Prüller. “Just as they publicly admitted guilt in external communications… they had the same direct, face-to-face communication internally as well, as the first step in rebuilding trust.” VW encouraged employees to express their feelings and concerns, Prüller says, and sought to provide information on the ongoing ordeal.
On Kununu’s platform, each employee review can be responded to by the employer. Of the 500 reviews logged by VW workers, management has addressed 170 of them—a high percentage for any company, says Prüller. “Not that many employers engage in this process of reacting to feedback.”
Management made itself visible and ready to talk to lower-level employees about the scandal. “If there is an element of mistrust in the company, being approachable is key,” says Prüller. “VW understood the power of talking face to face because this is the first step in rebuilding trust.”
The company’s internal morale-boosting efforts were meant to have an outward effect as well, according to Prüller. “One has to keep in mind we re talking about VW, where employees are often referred to as VW-ianer because of their high commitment to the brand. So most of them wanted to collectively turn the situation around. VW knew about those brand ambassadors and made smart use of them equipping them with a narrative that everyone could use - communicating from the inside out.”
Gallery: Volkswagen I.D. Buzz Concept 52 images View gallery
VW’s efforts seem to have paid off. In the past year the firm’s employee ratings have ticked up in categories like teamwork, company culture, working conditions, compensation and benefits, autonomy and social awareness. Its image to among the general public also seems to have recovered and on the business front VW’s earnings have outpaced forecasts and the company has supplanted Toyota as the world’s largest car manufacturer.
But now, however, VW finds itself, as do Daimler and BMW, facing new charges that the country’s auto giants may have colluded for years on technology, costs, suppliers and strategy. Whatever facts shake out in this current investigation, VW has shown itself to be astute at rekindling the confidence of its workforce, Says Prüller: “At least from an internal view, if you see it from a point of company culture and recommitting the employees, they have done so before.“
German autoworkers have begun to clamor for transparency from their employers in the face of these most recent allegations. They have to be disheartened by the prospect of yet another scandal and the shame that comes with it.
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174ee7eb334cb085756f9a1c4cb850d8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/08/07/when-millennials-switch-jobs-where-do-they-go/ | When Millennials Switch Jobs, Where Do They Go? | When Millennials Switch Jobs, Where Do They Go?
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Different generations always seem to eye each other suspiciously, noting similarities and (perhaps more often) otherness. Looking at the Millennial set – those born between 1980 and 1996 – as well as Generation Z, there is one unsimilarity that is beyond debate: younger generations are willing to make big professional changes to be happy.
According to stats compiled by LinkedIn – an online social media and networking site for professionals with a job search platform – Millennials were 50% more likely to relocate and 16% more likely to switch industries for a new job than non-Millennials.
Looking at which industries Millennials switched to is interesting, as are the data on which spaces they are leaving. For a rundown of the top sectors they are finding jobs – and the top five they are leaving jobs – check out our slideshow below, basked on LinkedIn’s stats.
Gallery: The Top Industries Gaining (And Losing) Millennial Job-Switchers 11 images View gallery
But why do Millennials change jobs? According to a LinkedIn survey conducted last year, the number one reason is that they do not see paths to advancement and are not satisfied with the opportunities offered. As opposed to toiling in a company for a career, Millennials are always scanning for another opportunity and tend to jump on it when it appears. Another reason they jump ship is dissatisfaction with compensation and benefits.
Of all the industries job-hopping Millennials landed in 2016, the one that received the highest percentage was the technology realm, with 9%, according to LinkedIn. This includes roles in various aspects of tech, not just developers and systems architects, though there are those.
LinkedIn reports that the tech industry is growing and tends to offer attractive perks, but there are other reasons Millennials gravitate to the space: they are more likely to have tech skills. According to LinkedIn, when compared with Non-Millennials, they are 349% more likely to have social media skills, 121% more likely to be skilled in C/C++ programming language, and 117% more likely to have chops in statistical analysis and data mining.
The industry where the second largest grouping of Millennials wound up after switching over from another sector was healthcare and pharmaceuticals, to the tune of 7%. Now, the healthcare space is growing – what with Baby Boomers enjoying longer lives than previous generations and advances in technology – but healthcare also tends to offer regular benefits and steady work those are things Millennials appreciate, LinkedIn says.
Which industries are Millennials leaving the fastest? The retail and consumer products space tops that list, with 11% of those switching jobs doing so to exit that sector. The second most-exited industries were government, education and non-profits. LinkedIn’s Deanne Tockey writes: “It might not be surprising that millennials are leaving roles in retail as they advance in their careers, since the industry tends to be bottom-heavy with entry-level positions. The decline in millennials in government roles may be less obvious. According to the Washington Post, the loss of young workers in government jobs is related to more difficult realities of the industry, like federal shutdowns, furloughs, pay freezes, and a frustrating hiring process.”
Government and non-profits also tend to offer lower wages, and if there’s one thing all generations can agree on it is that getting paid is a good thing.
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feef6c46ff3774156a6c77077a6f1372 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/09/20/the-worlds-top-universities-in-2017/ | The World's Top Universities In 2017 | The World's Top Universities In 2017
Times Higher Education released its latest ranking of top universities this month. See which... [+] institutions made the list. Times Higher Education site
This month, U.K.-based education magazine, Times Higher Education, released its 14th annual list of the world's best universities, based on an evaluation of... Teaching (the learning environment) Research (volume, income and reputation) Citations (research influence) International Outlook (staff, students and research) Industry Income (knowledge transfer) The top schools of 2017 are...
College Hall on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Beth J. Harpaz) 10. The University of Pennsylvania (tied), Overall Score: 87.7 Teaching: 83.7 Research: 90.1 Citations: 98.5 Industry Income: 56.9 Int'l Outlook: 61.3
ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (image: Shutterstock) 10. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (tied), Overall Score: 87.7 Teaching: 76.4 Research: 92.0 Citations: 94.3 Industry Income: 60.3 Int'l Outlook: 98.1
University of Chicago in Hyde Park, Illinois. (image: Shutterstock) 9. University of Chicago Overall Score: 88.6 Teaching: 85.3 Research: 90.1 Citations: 99.4 Industry Income: 39.8 Int'l Outlook: 69.6
Imperial College, London(Shutterstock 8. Imperial College London Overall Score: 89.2 Teaching: 81.7 Research: 88.7 Citations: 96.7 Industry Income: 71.6 Int'l Outlook: 96.6
Princeton University (image: Shutterstock) 7. Princeton University Overall Score: 91.1 Teaching: 85.7 Research: 93.9 Citations: 99.6 Industry Income: 58.0 Int'l Outlook: 78.7
Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.(image: Shutterstock) 6. Harvard University Overall Score: 91.8 Teaching: 84.2 Research: 84.2 Citations: 99.7 Industry Income: 46.4 Int'l Outlook: 79.7
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (image: Shutterstock) 5. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Overall Score: 92.5 Teaching: 87.3 Research:91.9 Citations: 100.0 Industry Income: 88.4 Int'l Outlook: 87.6
Stanford University, near Palo Alto, California (image: Shutterstock) 3. Stanford University (Tied) Overall Score: 93.0 Teaching: 89.1 Research: 96.7 Citations: 99.9 Industry Income: 60.5 Int'l Outlook: 77.6
The California Institute of Technology biological sciences building. (image: Shutterstock) 3. The California Institute of Technology (Tied) Overall Score: 93.0 Teaching: 90.3 Research: 97.5 Citations: 99.5 Industry Income: 92.6 Int'l Outlook: 59.7
University of Cambridge (image: Shutterstock) 2. University of Cambridge Overall Score: 93.2 Teaching: 87.8 Research: 97.8 Citations: 97.5 Industry Income: 51.5 Int'l Outlook: 93.0
University of Oxford (image: Shutterstock) 1. The University of Oxford Overall Score: 94.3 Teaching: 86.7 Research: 99.5 Citations: 99.1 Industry Income: 63.7 Int'l Outlook: 95.0
Summation As it did last year, Oxford retains the top spot, followed by Cambridge, which took fourth place last year. Of the 62 U.S.-based schools in the top 200, 29 have dropped in the ranking since 2016. Half of the top 200 are European schools, with the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. the most-represented countries. China landed two universities in the top 30 and almost all Chinese universities have improved. For a look at the Times Higher Education list in its entirety, visit the organization's website, here.
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286cf136ac3e46b357412c106a45eea6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/09/26/the-100-best-companies-for-women-and-working-families-in-2017/ | The 100 Best Companies For Women And Working Families In 2017 | The 100 Best Companies For Women And Working Families In 2017
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The breadwinners in families – those who work hard to pay the bills while carrying loved ones day in and day out – do not want to live a constant struggle. But these heroes – most of them women – must deal with schedules, expenses, the needs of children, the needs of aging parents and kin, work responsibilities, healthcare for themselves and others—a multitude of responsibilities, in between which they must find personal happiness, fulfillment and sleep.
There are companies out there that realize this about the women in their ranks, and take steps to support them. Highlighting some of the best is a new report from Working Mother Media, a women and family-focused media firm which publishes Working Mother Magazine and has called out the 100 Best Companies in the U.S. for women for the past 32 years. This year’s ranking emerged today. For a look at the Top-10, check out our slideshow below.
Gallery: The 10 Best Companies For Women And Working Families In 2017 11 images View gallery
A firm making its first trip to the Top-10 is Unilever U.S., which has only appeared in the top-100 five times. President of Unilever North America, Kees Kruythoff, who heads diversity efforts for the organization, says one of his goals has been to spread a culture of diversity throughout the company. Among Unilever’s executives and managers , women make up about half of the workforce, and its policies on childcare, eldercare subsidies, as well as coverage of in vitro, egg freezing and other family planning services are enlightened.
Professional services firm, Deloitte, has made the 100 Best Companies list 24 times, and this year is among the ten best—as it was in 2016 and 2015. The key is focusing on workers’ needs, says CEO Cathy Engelbert. “It’s evolved into looking at the life cycle of an employee, whether they’re 22, 32, 52, or 62; looking at the different benefits you can give them across that life cycle.”
Younger employees, says Engelbert, are interested in fitness subsidies; while mid-career workers are moved by parental benefits. Older professionals have an eye on policies that affect retirement and eldercare for parents. Giving employees what they want, Engelbert insists, benefits the company as a business. “We view our investment in our people as our research and development expense,” she says.
A new feature is the organization’s “inclusion council” campaign, which allow employees of any stripe to find groups of others within the organization with whom they identify; all with a focus on creating a culture of diversity and comfort, and enacting change from within.
Moms And Dads
Parental leave is one category that has been embraced strongly by companies looking to make their organizations more attractive to women and family-oriented employees, says Subha Barry, managing director with Working Mother Media. “All of these top ten companies are literally going off the chart as it relates to offering paid time off.”
In the U.S. in 2016, U.S. companies offered an average maximum of 14.5 weeks of paid leave for women who had a baby. Among the most generous with parental leave on Working Mother Media’s list this year is Adobe, which offers new moms 26 weeks of paid time off, four weeks to new dads and 16 weeks for adoptive parents. Lenovo offers 22 weeks paid maternity leave; and Deloitte offers 22 weeks to new moms, and 16 to new dads and adoptive parents. Overall, the top-100 companies offer mothers an average 10 weeks paid time off to welcome a new child, plus four weeks to dads. But the top-10 companies offered 15 weeks to moms and nine to dads.
Many new moms and dads return to work without having taken their maximum allotted parental leave.... [+] (Shutterstock)
“Offering that is one thing and how much people are taking is something different,” says Barry. On average, companies have found that their workers do not take their full allotment of paid leave, which could mean that they feel pressure to return to work or are thinking strategically about their careers when they could be focusing on family.
To convince parents to take the maximum time off allowed, companies need to reassure them that their jobs are safe and avoid applying pressure on them to return early. Leadership also needs to set an example, Barry says. “If women who are successful are taking the full maternity leave, that sends a message to the organization that ‘hey, it must be okay.’”
Another facet of parental leave that Barry foresees being embraced more heartily by companies is that of phase-back programs—allowing new mothers to work part time for full pay after their maternity leave has expired. It’s a perk offered by 86 of the 100 companies on the Working Mother Best Company’s list and all of those in the top-10. “That’s when you engender loyalty,” says Barry. “When you look at where the companies are starting to lose their working moms, it’s usually after the birth of the second child.”
New Benefits On The Rise
Barry says companies are developing new tools in their arsenal to keep employees happy. One on the rise is subsidization of eldercare. Many workers have parents whom they must care for and companies can help. “A generation of people has to take care of the elderly and many of them are still working as they do that.”A majority of the firms in the top-100 offer subsidies in that arena.
Student loan reimbursement is not a new concept for many companies. Now, says Barry, some are offering loan refinancing to get better rates for their employees. Among the top 10 companies on Working Mother’s list, four offer such benefits.
Mental well being, too, is an area where employing companies can be of assistance and programs to subsidize or address mental health needs will become more commonplace. Says Barry: “You’re going to start to see more programs, more awareness, more openness.”
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227c204c632d31c129734cf4331d375a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/09/28/the-10-u-s-tech-hubs-where-salaries-stretch-the-furthest/ | The 10 U.S. Tech Hubs Where Salaries Stretch The Furthest | The 10 U.S. Tech Hubs Where Salaries Stretch The Furthest
A recent report by Indeed.com's Hiring Lab highlights tech hubs in the U.S. where cost of living... [+] allows salaries to stretch. (image: Shutterstock)
With the right skills and experience, its possible to secure a great salary in the tech world. But if the city you live in has a high cost of living, that money might not go as far as you think it should. To get a sense of which U.S. tech hubs offer a great balance of salary and cost, we looked to a recently released report from Indeed.com--a massive online job search platform. Salary data is from job postings in 158 tech-related occupations listed on Indeed between August 2016 and July 2017. Cost of living figures come from the Bureau of Econ. Analysis.
Shutterstock 10. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Arizona Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $97,113 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $99,910
Shutterstock 9. Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, Michigan Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $97,289 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $100,713
Shutterstock 8. Raleigh, North Carolina Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $96,516 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $100,748
Shutterstock 7. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $101,649 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $101,649
Shutterstock 6. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $126,937 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $102,286
Shutterstock 5. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Washington Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $112,387 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $102,730
Shutterstock 4. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $125,233 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $102,734
Shutterstock 3. Austin-Round Rock, Texas Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $103,394 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $103,914
Shutterstock 2. Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Georgia Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $100,380 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $104,454
Shutterstock 1. Charlotte-Condord-Gastonia, North Carolina/South Carolina Average Unadjusted Tech Salary: $101,147 Salary Adjusted For Cost of Living: $108,178
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fefdff85d561d2a476689464ccd9baf6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/12/07/the-fastest-growing-jobs-and-the-skills-needed-to-do-them/ | The Fastest Growing Jobs (And The Skills Needed To Do Them) | The Fastest Growing Jobs (And The Skills Needed To Do Them)
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One reality of the working life is this: job markets change. As technology develops and people’s needs change, the types of work—and skills—needed from the workforce either shift slowly or morph dramatically at pace. Very few professions go unchanged, and many new ones are created over time.
With that in mind, we look to a report on the jobs that grew leaps and bounds over the past five years. These fast-growing jobs—as tracked by LinkedIn, a jobs and careers-focused media platform—give us an indication of what the future may hold for our workforce. An important topic, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the U.S. economy will add 11.5 million jobs by 2026.
LinkedIn, whose platform has data on more than 143 million U.S. workers, tracked the types of positions that have seen major increases in the number of people who hold them in last five years. The one that saw the biggest leap was machine-learning engineer—the number of professionals who hold the position blew up 980% in that timeframe.
Gallery: 5 Fast-Growing Jobs (And The Skills You Need To Do Them) 6 images View gallery
Teaching Machines
According to Glassdoor—a salary and career information site— machine learning engineers earn $128,549 in annual base pay.
When LinkedIn looked at the skill sets that the machine-learning engineers its platform had, it noticed that some were more prevalent than others. The most prevelent skills listed were, in order of prevalence: machine-learning , research, algorithms, software, and deep learning.
When LinkedIn took a look back into the past to find out what positions machine-learning engineers on its platform held five years ago, some roles, too, popped up more often. They were (in order): software engineers, research assistants, teaching assistants, data scientists, and system engineer. So if you hold one of those positions, and you have a few of the common skills listed above, you are well on your way to becoming a machine learning engineer, if that is indeed your interest.
Sifting Through Data
On the salary front, data scientists—who came in second on LinkedIn’s list—make about the same amount of money in annual salary as machine-learning engineers, according to Glassdoor, and the number of people in the past five years who claim to be data scientists on LinkedIn has grown about 650%.
When LinkedIn perused the profiles of those who say they are data scientists, a number of skills appeared most often, and those were data science, machine learning, analytics, data mining, and the programming language Python. Going back five years to find out what positions current data scientist held in the past yields these five roles: research assistant, teaching assistant, software engineer, data analyst and business analyst.
Sales Dev Reps
Among the positions that have seen the largest increase in practitioners on LinkedIn, sales development representative takes third place, having grown 570% in the past five years. The job, according to Glassdoor, generates $51,724 in average annual pay, but that’s before any bonus or commission money is taken into account.
The skills that most often appear on the LinkedIn profiles of sales development representative are sales, sales management, business development, account planning and startups. Looking back five years, the most prevalent jobs that development reps held were server (at a restaurant, most likely; they weren’t pieces of computing equipment), sales associate, account manager, administrative assistant, customer service representative
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cbe48e259db7a946ddfc7c7f932d016d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/01/05/the-best-and-worst-cities-for-finding-jobs-in-2018/ | The Best And Worst Cities For Finding Jobs In 2018 | The Best And Worst Cities For Finding Jobs In 2018
(Photo: Shutterstock)
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to find a new job, you may first want to think about where the opportunities are.
According to a recently released report from WalletHub, a credit score and financial advice company, Arizona is a safe bet for those looking for work, as that state has four cities near Phoenix in the top-ten of a ranking of the best cities for finding jobs this year, based on the state of job markets and the cost and quality of life.
For a look at the top-ten cities for job seekers in 2018, check out our slideshow below. To see the worst cities for finding work, scroll to the end of this article.
Gallery: The 10 Best U.S. Cities For Finding Jobs In 2018 11 images View gallery
WalletHub’s analysis—which ranked 182 U.S. cities, including the 150 largest ones, plus the most populace cities in each state—focuses on two major areas in its scope: Job Market, which accounts for 80% of the weight of the ranking and includes factors like job opportunities, satisfaction, employment growth and salary; and Socio-Economics, which includes factors like income, cost of living and quality of life. For more about WalletHub’s methodology, click here.
Topping the overall list for 2018 is Chandler, Arizona, which ranked third in the Job Market category and ninth in Socio-Economics, for a score of 67.66 out of 100. Chandler is one of the several cities in the top ten of WalletHub’s roster, all of which are located just outside of Phoenix. Chandler tied Peoria, Arizona, for the highest employment growth of all cities.
Scottsdale, Arizona—which sits just north of Chandler—is second on the ranking. Scottsdale ranked fifth overall in the Job Market category, and third in the Socio-Economic column, for a total score of 66.29. Scottsdale placed fifth overall on the ranking of cities with the highest median annual income, adjusted for cost of living.
In third place we find a Northern California city well known for its tech-based opportunities: San Francisco. The city by the bay ranked second in the Job Market category (Peoria, Arizona ranked first in that column, but came in fourth overall on WalletHub’s list) but placed 43rd in Socio-Economics. Why? Cost of living in San Francisco is notoriously high. In fact, among all cities on the list, it ranked last in housing affordability, and clocked one of the longest average commute times of all locations in the analysis.
The 10 Worst Cities For Finding Jobs In 2018
Mobile, AL (Score: 41.55) Montgomery, AL (41.48) Fresno, CA (41.45) Hialeah, FL (41.38) New Orleans, LA (40.64) Birmingham, AL (40.62) Columbus, GA (39.97) Newark, NJ (39.61) Detroit, MI (38.85) Shreveport, LA (37.49)
Shreveport ranks at the very bottom of WalletHub’s 182-city ranking, placing dead last in the Job Market category and 175th in the Socio-Economic category. Detroit, which came in at 181 overall, had the highest unemployment rate and was shown to have few job opportunities. Only Fresno, California, scored worse in that category.
Detroit also ranked as having one of the lowest median annual incomes, as did Newark, New Jersey, which came in third from the bottom of WalletHub’s overall ranking of the best cities for finding jobs in 2018.
To complete its analysis, WalletHub used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, Council for Community and Economic Research, Indeed, Center for Neighborhood Technology, The Pew Charitable Trusts, National Conference of State Legislatures, Glassdoor, ManpowerGroup, Chmura Economics & Analytics, Chegg and WalletHub research.
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e8e30fef58fc8374224c9276d6603ab6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/01/19/10-great-job-markets-in-2018-and-their-best-industries/ | 10 Great Job Markets In 2018, And Their Best Industries | 10 Great Job Markets In 2018, And Their Best Industries
(photo credit: Shutterstock)
Many Americans come away from the start of a new year with plans for the future. On the career front, those plans can often include looking for new jobs. Identifying opportunity-rich job markets is a good way to start your search.
ZipRecruiter, an online job search engine with more than eight million active listings, conducted a detailed analysis of which towns and cities show the most promise and published the results, including the industries strongest in those markets. The top ten markets, according to the firm’s results, can be see in the slideshow below.
Gallery: 10 Great Job Markets For 2018 11 images View gallery
To figure out which job markets hold the most promise, ZipRecruiter used its own jobs data to gauge opportunity in various places, as well as the resilience of retail positions, the size of companies in each of 24 industries, and industry diversity. Population, income and commute times—all factors in the analysis—were taken from U.S. census data, and unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rent indexes and doctors per capita in given areas were gleaned from Zillow. Obesity, walkability and transit scores were also tabulated. For more insight into ZipRecruiter’s methodology, visit its site here.
Which city’s jobs market shows the most opportunity for job hunters looking for work and a comfortable quality of life? According to ZipRecruiter, the answer is Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo topped the list this year on very low unemployment figures. The city’s unemployment stands at a mere 1.6%, which is impressive given the average metropolitan region in the country clocks in at 3.9% in that category. ZipRectuiter found that in Fargo the scores for well-paying jobs that do not necessarily require a four-year degree (so-called “new collar jobs”), short commute times, retail resilience and its array of industries are better than 80% of other cities. Industries strong in the area are physical therapy, construction, HR, finance and health care.
Columbia, Missouri, holds the second position on ZipRecruiter’s ranking. The region of roughly 170,000 people has a number of institutions of higher learning and has experienced steady job growth over the years, according to ZipRecruiter. Columbia has, in recent years, experienced a rise in sales and business industry jobs, and is now seeing growth in the tech sector. Top industries include sales, desktop support, government and tech.
One of the major selling points of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, according to ZipRecruiter’s results, is how easy it is to get to wherever you are going, as commute times are lower than most. The cost of living is quite low, as well. The strongest industries in the area are trucking, transportation and storage, health care, and business.
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4222ef6bf3fc64408673821639f908b2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/02/01/the-most-and-least-educated-states-in-the-u-s-in-2018/ | The Most -- And Least -- Educated States In The U.S. In 2018 | The Most -- And Least -- Educated States In The U.S. In 2018
Shutterstock
Different states in the U.S. have varying levels of educational options available, and different levels of educational achievement among their populations. To see which states are the best and worst when it comes to education, we looked to a recently released study by WalletHub, a credit score and financial information site that publishes reports on jobs, the economy and financial matters.
The company ranked each state on educational attainment and quality of education, based on 15 metrics.* Factors that come into play in the attainment category include the percentage of adults with a high school diploma, a bachelors’ degree or higher. Within the realm of education quality, Wallethub gauged the quality of schools, graduation rates, test scores, and racial and gender gaps in education.
For a look at the top ten most-educated states in the U.S.A., along with their scores in each category, check out our slideshow below. For more insight into how states matched up against one another, and a list of the least educated states, read on.
Gallery: The 10 Most Educated States In The U.S. In 2018 11 images View gallery
Topping the list of most educated states is Massachusetts, home to various colleges and universities, including Harvard, MIT and Smith College. The state ranked number one in both the educational attainment and quality of education categories, and has the highest percentage of bachelors and graduate degree holders, as well as the highest average university quality.
In second place overall, Maryland ranked third in the educational attainment category and second in quality of education. It also has the second-highest percentage of graduate degree holders (it came third in % of bachelors’ degree holders).
In third place, Connecticut—which is home to Yale University—ranked fourth in educational attainment and ninth in quality of education.
As for the U.S. states that ranked at the bottom of the list—the least educated ones—see the list of the lowest-five below.
Alabama (Attainment Rank: 45; Quality Rank: 40) Arkansas (Attainment Rank: 47; Quality Rank: 34) Louisiana (Attainment Rank: 48; Quality Rank: 47) West Virginia (Attainment Rank: 50; Quality Rank: 42) Mississippi (Attainment Rank: 49; Quality Rank: 50)
Among the bottom-ranked states, Mississippi has the third-lowest percentage of high school diploma holders, behind Texas and California. It also has the lowest percentage of bachelors degree holders.
West Virginia has the lowest percentage of associates degree holders, or those with college experience. Meanwhile, Arkansas has the lowest percentage of holders of graduate degrees, compared to all other states.
South Dakota, which ranked 34th overall, has the lowest average university quality, and the biggest gender gap in educational attainment is in Rhode Island. The largest racial gap exists in Alaska.
*Data used to create WalletHub’s ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, National Center for Education Statistics, The Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, U.S. Department of Education, The College Board and WalletHub research.
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b3872fab527b3f215c48043482b21676 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/02/08/the-worlds-best-corporate-websites-2018/ | The World's Best Corporate Websites 2018 | The World's Best Corporate Websites 2018
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In the digital realm, a company’s website is often its first point of contact with the world. Consumers interested in seeing the organization behind products they love, potential partners researching a firm that arouses their interest, or investors doing their due diligence—all make a beeline for a company’s online home.
As they did in 2016, Bowen Craggs & Co., a corporate communication consultancy, recently published a critique of the websites of the world’s largest companies, ranking them on their effectiveness. For a closer look at the top ten of that roster, complete with scores and a quick analysis, check out our slideshow below.
Gallery: The World's 10 Best Corporate Websites In 2018 11 images View gallery
In compiling its report, Bowen Craggs started by taking a list of the world’s 200 largest firms, based on market capitalization, and rate the website of each in various categories that make up a score out of 280. Factors that come into play include construction, message, contact, as well as how well they serve users like investors, the media, jobseekers, customers and society in general.
Topping this latest ranking—Bowen Craggs’ last such study was published in 2016—is GSK, or GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical company based in London which generated nearly $34.5 billion in 2016. In the last ranking of corporate websites, GSK came in fifth, with 206 points. This year, in first place, it earned 216. In assessing its website this time around, Bowen Craggs touted GSK’s intuitive links to its regional sites and contact pages, its use of its website to promote its responsible activities, and simple navigation. According to the report: “Careers sections should lead the innovation charge online, and gsk.com does just that with video blogs from employees in the field, as well as powerful use of interactivity and social media.”
In second place, three companies were tied with scores of 213 points each: Bayer, a German pharmaceutical and life sciences company; British oil and gas company, BP; and Swiss food and beverage company, Nestle.
For Nestle, Bowen Craggs was impressed by its site’s large amount of information on various aspects of the company and its activity, even if the site is not cutting edge. Other positives were its clean aesthetic, strong headlines and well-chosen of hyperlinks. All-in-all, it broadcasts the company’s international reach.
BP’s site was highlighted for its ease of use and self promotion as an organization interested in the transition to lower carbon energy sources. Like all the top sites, it informs visitors of its various activities and does that well. Other high points include cohesion between the company’s regional sites and the information services for investors.
Bayer has many different websites, because of its international scope, and according to Bowen Craggs, does a good job of maintaining a theme by using common templates. It uses its online platforms to effectively paint itself as an innovator. Also impressive is Bayer’s dynamic landing page, a careers app and large amount of information for investment analysts.
To read the full list of the best corporate websites, look to Bowen Craggs official report here.
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d4005b5b584ab47e97944e2ff5efd31f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/12/21/how-burn-boot-camp-is-building-a-fitness-culture-on-the-backs-of-women/ | How Burn Boot Camp Is Building A Fitness Culture On The Backs Of Women | How Burn Boot Camp Is Building A Fitness Culture On The Backs Of Women
Devan and Morgan Kline's women-centric fitness franchise is growing, and growing fast. Michael Sati
Back in the spring of 2012, less than two years after being cut from minor league baseball—his dream of pitching in the majors all but forgotten—Devan Kline, now 30, stood in a parking lot in Huntersville, North Carolina, with music blaring from his parked Dodge Challenger and led a small crowd of women through a rigorous workout regimen of his own design. It was the birth of his women-centric gym, Burn Boot Camp, founded with his childhood sweetheart, lifeline and now wife, Morgan.
The couple couldn’t afford proper gym space and used fences for wall sits, a cement ledge for tricep dips and a grassy hill nearby for bear crawls. “They believed in him,” says Morgan Kline, 30, the company’s COO and co-owner. “They tried us out, and they stuck with it. There are several women that are clients of ours today that started out with Devan in the parking lot.”
Burn Boot Camp has come a long way from parking lots. On average, new gym franchises in the U.S. grow to 44 locations in their first four years, according to research firm FRANdata. Burn Boot Camp has opened 177 locations in 35 states since it went franchise in 2015, with another 177 sold and waiting to come online. “Based on almost 150 emerging fitness center concepts that entered the market since 2010, Burn Boot Camp is in the 99th percentile of franchised system growth in its first four years franchising,” says FRANdata senior analyst Anya Nowakowski.
As an investment compared to its peers in the space, the company scored top marks from industry intel firm Franchise Grade for low turnover, competitive royalty rates and super-fast expansion, says Franchise Grade CEO Jeff Lefler. “It has strong brand recognition and has done a good job of building a passionate client base that helps grow unit revenues for its franchisees.”
Burn Boot Camp has opened 177 locations in 35 states since it went franchise in 2015, with another ... [+] 177 sold and waiting to come online. Courtesy of Burn Boot Camp
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Each Burn Boot Camp franchise, which the Klines sell for the industry-average price of $40,000 apiece—largely to clients or their friends, most of them women—averages $36,000 per month in sales and pays 6% royalties to the company. The network should surpass 300 by the end of 2019, says Devan, round about the time the company moves into its new $3.2 million, 22,000 square-foot HQ in Cornelius, North Carolina.
This year the system will generate about $60 million in sales, while other revenue is derived from supplier rebates and two company-owned locations, bringing $6 million to the home office, half of that net profit. Selling supplements and apparel adds another $500,000 to earnings.
In February, Burn Boot Camp was runner-up in the International Franchise Association’s NextGen competition, a contest between 900 young franchise upstarts from around the globe, impressing a panel of finals judges led by Shark Tank star Daymond John.
“One thing I think gyms in America are lacking is a community element,” says Devan, who describes the average big box gym as a sterile place where a collection of “meatheads” ogle women. “I wanted to make something that people could walk into and not feel judged.”
courtesy of Burn Boot Camp
“A lot of women and moms put themselves last,” says Morgan, whose sales analyst gig with Kelloggs supported them both during the parking lot days. “He wanted to focus on women because he noticed the difference that families felt when the mom was happy and feeling healthy.”
The $30 billion U.S. fitness industry has grown by more than 5% annually since 2009 and is expected to continue as health-conscious Millennials enter their 30s and 40s. Last year there were more than 18,000 franchised gyms operating in the space and, by and large, the big name chains like Planet Fitness, at $10 per month, lead on low prices and ubiquity. Smaller ones, like Burn Boot Camp, are considered boutique—more expensive and offering niche workouts in a smaller space.
Burn Boot Camp, which charges clients about $150 per month for unlimited group sessions, is comparable to other boutiques, but pricier than larger gyms. “We’ve always had pride in competing on value,” Devan says. “Our goal isn’t to have a customer, client, or member base, but rather to create a culture of raving fan clients who would do anything to see our brand succeed.”
Creating a community of women from the start–90% of its clientele–Burn Boot Camp offers free childcare, plus healthy food recipes and personal fitness consultations. Men are barred from all but the early morning, evening and Saturday workout time slots, to provide a comfortable, ogling-free environment. “It’s a different dynamic when half the room is women and half the room is men,” says Devan.
Burn Boot Camp can get away with excluding 50% of the potential market, he explains, because women represent more than 70% of membership at boutique gyms. “So why not triple down on that statistic alone?”
Others have proven the concept. Brands like Shapes, Kaia Fit and Barre Code focus on female clients, and Curves managed 10,000 locations worldwide before seeing its numbers plummet as swift growth led to inadequate oversight.
Burn Boot Camp uses Facebook Live, Instagram and its BurnTV channel on YouTube to keep clients abreast of promotions and the fitness challenges it thinks up, along with fun videos of workouts from across its network—a social media echo chamber that fuels a sense of community and word-of-mouth marketing. The Klines reject TV ads. “I can get a lot more attention for a lot cheaper on Instagram and Facebook,” says Devan.
Devan’s 90-plus podcast episodes offer workout advice and, in August, taking a stab at thought-leadership, he self-published his first book, Stop Starting Over:Transform Your Fitness by Mastering Your Psychology,on Amazon. He intends to pen another. “Our philosophy is two words,” he declares, “be everywhere.”
Devan and Morgan met when they were 12, growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, and early on Morgan’s household provided sanctuary for Devan from a home life marred by physical and emotional abuse. His mother left Battle Creek and dropped out of his life when he was 13 years old. His father—a harsh man when he drank, with a tendency toward violence—was in and out of jail for various crimes. “He was loving and kind and generous, and loved seeing us excel,” Devan says, “until he got the bottle to his lips.”
Devan and Morgan Kline, at age 15, in Battle Creek, Michigan. courtesy of Burn Boot Camp
Morgan, by contrast, grew up in a close and supportive household. “I had unconditional love from my stepdad and mom.” Her parents would let Devan stay with them for holidays, family get-togethers or on occasions when Devan’s father kicked him out. “Devan started to see what it was like to have family that loves you,” says Morgan.
The two attended college in Michigan, two hours apart, maintaining an on-again-off-again relationship. Devan’s schedule of academics and sports—he’d earned a baseball scholarship—kept him too busy to hold a job, and he’d donate blood for extra cash, while Morgan would sometimes transfer him money. “He had no one else to turn to,” she explains.
Athletics paid off when, at 21, Devan was drafted by the San Francisco Giants and moved to Arizona to pitch for the club’s farm team there. Meanwhile, Morgan turned an internship at Kelloggs into a field rep position in Naples, Florida, and Devan would live with her in the off-season.
The minors spit Devan out in 2010—too many walks, not enough strikeouts. “I cried my eyes out,” he recalls. “My dreams were crushed.”
Back in Florida with Morgan, he worked as a trainer and put together a small women-only group workout–a precursor to Burn Boot Camp called Lightning 900–vowing to earn his keep. “I refused to have my wife pay my cellphone bill for the rest of my life.”
Kelly Hill
When Morgan was offered a promotion and a move to Huntersville, North Carolina, Devan followed. He launched Burn Boot Camp in April of 2012, in the rear parking lot of a children’s gym, sublet for about $200 a month. To start up, they attracted clients with 30 days of free workouts. Most stayed.
Within a year the couple had three more locations in nearby towns, and a thousand clients, each paying $150 per month. Morgan quit her job at Kelloggs to run one of them. “I no longer had a passion to work for somebody else and climb this corporate ladder.” The Klines spent $30,000 to franchise in early 2015, figuring they could grow quickly while retaining full ownership of the brand, rather than seek growth investment by taking on a partner.
In the first two years Burn Boot Camp opened 39 locations but had sold the rights to 80 more, with further leads coming in. The 21-person home office was overwhelmed by the pace, unable to keep up with franchisees’ real estate searches, lease signings and local marketing strategy needs. Meanwhile, the company’s IT staff was overburdened maintaining websites for each location. “There was a period of time when there were franchise partners that were not happy with us at headquarters,” says Morgan. Luckily, none jumped ship.
As a fix, the Klines added 15 new employees, adding $880,000 to the payroll, including vice presidents of operations and development to manage the organization. “I love to motivate people,” says Devan. “But I am not a manager of people.” They invested in enterprise software, too, and developed lead generation funnels for new client and franchisee prospects.
That’s freed Devan and Morgan to attract potential franchisees that have the $100,000 in cash needed just to be considered, on top of the $142,000 to $350,000 it takes to open a gym—reasonable costs by industry standards. So far the Klines have sold franchises mainly to people who are already hyped on the brand—one, two or a three-pack at a time. But that strategy has yielded franchisees who, on average, own only two locations. “A lot of fitness concepts market their investment to the passionate first-time investor,” says Jeff Lefler, CEO of Franchise Grade. In franchising, real growth happens when brands can convince well-heeled franchisors to buy them in bulk.
Kelly Hill
The Klines tried that before, selling eight units to a franchisee in Orlando who bowed out after opening a single gym. Luckily the location was taken over by another franchisee. Morgan and Devan haven’t closed the door on entertaining future multi-unit deals but insist selling franchises to raving fans of Burn Boot Camp—who have business experience and the capital—assures franchisees care about creating a community among clients. Says Morgan: “That goes back to having that passion to impact people’s lives and a commitment to the brand versus ‘Hey, I’m a successful business owner, I have a lot of money—give me ten gyms.’”
Building a client community loyal to the brand is also meant to provide longevity. Gym memberships took a dip during the Great Recession, and Devan feels the boutique fitness space is vulnerable to an economic downturn—“which is coming!” he insists—one he fears could cut into the sales of brands that haven’t turned their clients into raving fans. “Only the strong are going to survive,” says Devan.
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0013cd110fd8f72df5c93a65a1e2aded | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2019/01/22/the-most-sustainable-companies-in-2019/ | The Most Sustainable Companies In 2019 | The Most Sustainable Companies In 2019
The Global 100 ranks large corporations across the world on their performance reducing carbon and... [+] waste, their gender diversity among leadership, revenues derived from clean products, and overall sustainability. (photo credit: Getty) Getty
As political and business leaders gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, a roster of the most sustainable companies is also enjoying a moment in the spotlight.
The list, the Global 100, ranks large corporations across the globe on their performance reducing carbon and waste, their gender diversity among leadership, revenues derived from clean products, and overall sustainability. In its 15th year, the ranking is compiled by a Canada-based sustainability-focused financial information company and magazine, Corporate Knights, beginning with a list of about 7,500 companies, all of which generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
To see the full list, scroll to the bottom of this article.
Ranking number one this year on the Global 100 is Chr. Hansen Holding, a Danish bioscience firm that derives over 80% of its revenue developing natural solutions for preserving foods like yogurt and milk, protecting crops using natural bacteria instead of pesticides, and alternatives to antibiotics for animals.
Corporate Knights cofounder and president Toby Heaps told Forbes that Chr. Hansen’s first-place standing was a bit of a surprise and that the company, founded in 1874, is a relative unknown to many. “It’s not a consumer-facing company,” he says. “But it probably impacts a lot of the calories of hundreds of millions of people every day and makes the food that they’re consuming safer.”
Nearly 30% of the Danish billion-dollar-business’ board is made up of women, according to the Corporate Knights study, and its CEO salaries are about 24 times those of an average worker with the firm—a relatively low ratio for the ranking.
In second place on the roster is Kering SA, a French firm better known for the consumer-facing brands it owns: fashion houses Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, among others. The brand has shown it takes sustainability seriously by sourcing more than 40% of its products from certified sustainable sources, says Heaps, and is always scanning for ways to improve that percentage.
Also noteworthy is that more than 60% of Kering’s board of directors is composed of women—the gender makeup of most large corporations shows less than 20%. The glass ceiling at Kering, says Heaps, has “been completely shattered.”
Third in the Global 100 ranking is Neste Corporation, which held second place last year. Based in Finland, Neste is a petroleum refinery and marketing company with annual revenue of more than $10 billion.
“Until very recently it was a fossil fuel company refining oil to be burned and creating greenhouse gas emissions in the process,” says Heaps. But the firm shifted, and now more than 50% of Neste’s investments are into the development of products like renewable biofuels. As it stands, 25% of the company’s revenue comes from biofuel refining, and it’s aiming to increase that figure in the coming years. Also noteworthy is that Neste’s biofuel business represents 50% of its profits, says Heaps. “So they’re earning a higher margin on their biofuels business—even though it’s only a quarter of their revenue, it’s half their profits.”
Neste shareholders aren’t bemoaning the company’s shift, as share prices have risen 300% in the past five years, says Heaps. But shareholder satisfaction is, according to Corporate Knights’ calculations, more likely with companies that place emphasis on sustainability. Tracked between 2005 and 2018, Global 100 companies made a net investment return of 127.35%, compared with 118.27% in returns from companies on the MSCI All Country World Index.
This is the second year that Corporate Knights’ Global 100 has used “clean revenue” as a performance indicator—measuring the percentage of revenue a company generates through sustainable products. This is the first year that clean revenue has carried so much weight in the ranking; accounting for 50% of a company’s score.
To compile its Global 100 ranking, Corporate Knights uses a 10-person in-house team of researchers and data scientists—as well as 50 outside data collectors—to plow through financial and ecological information from Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters and other sources. They then verify some of that information with the companies they’re researching and internally vet incoming data. The entire research process requires sifting through 3.7 million data points and takes about 5,000 hours of work, says Heaps.
For more information on the methodology behind the ranking, click here.
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a953c7155b0a131161c6830de71e9c61 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2019/02/01/the-franchise-news-briefs-mcdonalds-ceo-not-worried-about-franchisee-relationship/ | The Franchise News Briefs: McDonald’s CEO Not Worried About Franchisee Relationship | The Franchise News Briefs: McDonald’s CEO Not Worried About Franchisee Relationship
McDonald's unconcerned with pushback from franchisees. Getty Images
On a recent earnings call, McDonald’s CEO Steven Easterbrook said he was unconcerned over pushback from many newly unified franchisees within the restaurant chain’s system.
Last October, a group of franchisees within the McDonald’s network banded together to form what they’ve dubbed the National Owner’s Association (NOA) to speak with a single voice to the home office. Today the group claims it represents more than 400 owners of the famous brand’s restaurants—about 25% of U.S. franchisees.
The group’s first order of business was to voice concern over the company’s pricing mandates and decreasing profits, and to push back against McDonald’s plans to remodel 14,000 U.S. locations by 2020, a project that will see locations decked out with new furniture, kiosks, curbside pickup and other upgrades. The home office said it would shoulder 55% of the costs.
The NOA’s discussions with the home office led to the franchisor’s decision to move the remodeling deadline to 2022, though franchisees that take longer to comply will see a reduction in financial support from the company.
Easterbrook’s view is that franchisee gripes are not unusual, and he doesn’t see the organization’s concerns as a threat to future growth and development. Says Easterbrook: “Am I fundamentally concerned that it will derail us from the shared vision that we have? No, not at all.”
NBA Forward Becomes A Franchise Owner
San Antonio Spurs forward Rudy Gay announced he will open several locations of a basketball-themed ... [+] fitness franchise. Getty Images
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For a prospective franchisee, knowing a thing or two about the industry in which you’re looking to buy a franchise provides an edge. As a professional athlete, San Antonio Spurs forward, Rudy Gay, is well-versed in the art of fitness and basketball, which makes it unsurprising that he would choose to buy into a system built on those two pillars.
Gay announced late last month that he has signed a multi-unit deal with PickUp USA Fitness, a basketball-themed fitness franchise based in California that was founded in 2011 and went franchise in 2016. It currently has five locations.
Gay will be opening shops in his hometown of Baltimore, as well as in South Florida where he has a home, according to an Instagram post in which he made his announcement. “I like the fact that it gives people the chance to do what I do—have organized basketball, and organized training, and weight training,” Gay said as part of a company release. “All things I do on a daily basis.”
Another Subway Executive Walks Away From The Brand
Subway saw another executive resign in January. picture alliance via Getty Images
This past month the massive sandwich shop franchisor bid farewell to another company leader. James Walker, president of the Connecticut-based brand’s North American operations, left the company in mid January, according to the company. Subway’s chief marketing office, Joe Tripodi, resigned in late December.
Subway has seen its location numbers decline since 2015, when it boasted more than 27,000 locations worldwide. Today the tally stands at under 25,000 shops after having shed more than 1,100 last year.
The shrinking network has gone hand in hand with a decrease in sales, ongoing for several years, and there’s been talk of a possible sale. CEO Suzanne Greco—sister of founder Fred DeLuca—stepped down last year and was replaced by Trevor Haynes on an interim basis.
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fe49055d54f01f3cf5dbc603950a102c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2019/08/20/a-landmark-new-york-falafel-joint-looks-to-grow-through-franchising/ | A Landmark New York Falafel Joint Looks To Grow Through Franchising | A Landmark New York Falafel Joint Looks To Grow Through Franchising
Mamoun's Falafel first opened in New York City in 1971. Today, after three years of franchising, its ... [+] opened ten shops. image courtesy of Mamoun's Falafel
For nearly 40 years, nighttime carousers ambling out of bars and nightclubs in New York City’s famous West Village neighborhood have had a stalwart option for their post-cocktail snack attacks. Founded in 1971 by Syrian immigrant Mamoun Chater, Mamoun’s Falafel has achieved almost cult status as it churned out Middle Eastern fare from its 200-square-foot shop for daytime shoppers, tourists, students on a budget and late-night party-goers. Now the operation is in the fourth year of its play to branch out through franchising, and has 10 shops up and running, with more on the way.
The story of Mamoun’s is a typical immigrant tale of family and hard work, says the founder’s youngest son Hussam Chater, a former lawyer who is a part owner and acts as the brand’s CEO. Chater’s three brothers—Nedal, Galal and Kinan—are equal part-owners and, because they are older, have greater clout within the organization. “I’m the CEO because of my skill set, but for all intents and purposes my brothers are my boss.”
The original Mamoun arrived from Damascus on U.S. soil in the late 1960s. “He was very poor,” says Chater. “He started the business after working all of these different odd jobs.”
Mamoun Chater, in the early days, in front of his West Village eatery in Manhattan. image courtest of Mamoun's Falafel
Mamoun’s work ethic was considerable, and it was not unheard of for him to work all night and on into the lunch shift the following day. Over the years the restaurant gained a reputation as a great place for late-night eats, as Mamoun’s would sometimes stay open until 5 a.m. if there were customers to be served.
The shop was known to have celebrity sightings due its close proximity to hip music and comedy clubs, though the family remains mum about which celebs have graced their doorway. “We never called out musicians or actors because they like us to be low-key about it,” says Chater.
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Mamoun’s has always been a family affair, and Mamoun, his wife Maria and their children lived on the same street as the restaurant, and everyone pitched in to run the business. “My mom made pastries in our kitchen in our apartment.” says Chater. The four brothers would help out in small ways, eventually taking on full shift responsibilities. According to their father, there always had to be a family member working at the restaurant. “If you weren’t there you had to be in school, and that was it.”
Hussam and Galal Chater eventually went in to become lawyers, but returned to the business when father Mamoun’s health began to deteriorate. He passed on in 2015, around about the time the four brothers began contemplating a jump to franchise.
Mamoun's Falafel shop in Syosset, New York. image courtesy of Mamoun's Falafel
Franchising seemed the obvious choice to grow the operation: ˆt was less expensive than spending capital to open new shops, and there seemed to be an awareness of Mamoun’s Falafel in other markets through word of mouth. “Any time we traveled everyone always knew about this business, our brand,” explained Chater.
The four brothers wrote a manual, incorporating their recipes and processes, and in 2016 began selling franchises, using franchise broker and developer FranSmart to help vet potential franchisees. Other brands that have employed FranSmart include Five Guys, The Halal Guys, The Hummus & Pita Co. and Qdoba Mexican Grill.
As of this report, Mamoun’s has ten locations in operation—four run by franchisees and the remainder owned by the company—in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Connecticut. The brand has signed franchise deals to open more shops in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Though the organization began selling franchises in 2016, it first turned a profit last year, reporting $27,777 in net income—a welcome financial change from its 2017 figures, which showed a $206,000 loss.
A franchised Mamoun's Falafel kitchen. image courtesy of Mamoun's Falafel
According to its Franchise Disclosure Document, Mamouns estimates that it costs about $800,000 to start a single new location, on the low end, including leasehold improvements, furniture and equipment, the initial franchise fee of $40,000, plus other fees. On the higher end, that estimate stands at more than $1.4 million. Once in operation, franchisees pay 6% of gross sales in royalty payments and an additional 2% of the gross to contribute to advertising, marketing and other brand development costs.
Making money is important to the four Chater brothers—as it is for every business owner—but Hussam Chater says he and his siblings feel additional pressures to succeed, given the hard work their father put into establishing the brand in the first place. “If we can take our father’s name and make it synonymous with a commitment to excellence and have it become part of the conversation with any national fast-casual brand—that’s’ what drives me and my brothers, and that’s what we’re working towards.”
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b444669c023b4d9d2ecc534a61a02013 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2009/07/02/ass-lobster-in-urban-dictionary/ | How my ass lobster got into the Urban Dictionary | How my ass lobster got into the Urban Dictionary
What's an ass lobster? Well, it's something I've had for about six months now, according to some of the readers/commenters at Above The Law, the legal tabloid site of which I am the associate editor.
More accurately, it's a comment meme that came into existence in December of 2008, thanks to our Legal Eagle Wedding Watch columnist. It was inspired by this great lede on her post:
Christopher Hitchens has famously declared that "the four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics." via Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 12.14: Penn Hate - Above the Law
A small minority of the hundreds of thousands of legal types who go to Above The Law for their legal news actually take the time to comment on our posts. When they do, they sometimes provide valuable information, suggest a different angle on the story, or make jokes. They also love using and creating memes. "First!" is a popular one on the site. My personal favorites are "This ship be sinking" (inspired by the quotable former Knicks' player Sugar Ray Richardson) and Frat Stud ("Guys at my high school used to blog about their ass lobsters all the time. It was no big deal.")
Sometimes, commenters like to write about the site's editors. The Hitchens quote inspired a series of comments about me: wanting to go on a picnic with me; wanting to drink champagne and eat lobster on a picnic with me followed by, um, other things; wanting to drink champagne off of me; and wanting to eat lobster from, um, my various body parts. Thus, the "ass lobster" was born.
I've been hoping that the meme would die but it appears to have crustacean-like survival skills. And I learned from the Above The Law comments earlier this week that someone has created an entry for it in the Urban Dictionary. Oy.
Ass lobster ( 36 up, 12 down) An unknown object that protrudes from the rectum of female law blog editors, often resembling a lobster's claw. "Damn, if Kash is so hot, why does she have an ass lobster?" by Elie SotomayOR Jun 29, 2009 via Urban Dictionary: asslobster.
I'm not on a crusade to have the definition removed from the dictionary. I certainly dish out the personal snark in the course of providing legal gossip. I'm a supporter of an open and free internet. Though feel free to vote the definition down on Urban Dictionary!
If commenters want to talk about us, that's okay with me. They often remark on my co-editor Elie's race (as does he on these pages), his love of donuts (though he actually doesn't care for donuts) and his wake-up time. Female bloggers get slightly different treatment. When readers -- who I assume are male -- talk about me personally, they seem to focus on my gender. Over the last year and a half that I've been writing there, there has been endless speculation about how hot, or not, I am. For the record, I did rate just a little lower than Angelina Jolie in a facial beauty analysis. This doesn't just happen to female legal bloggers. Figure skaters deal with it too.
What I love about blogs and online news sites is that, unlike with a traditional newspaper, magazine, or a radio/tv broadcast, bloggers have a direct relationship with the readers. We write. They respond. It brings down the barriers that usually put journalists up on some omniscient pedestal. Oftentimes, I find the commenters informative, thought-provoking or hilarious. Sometimes, they're just bizarre.
When they veer away from the news and into our personal lives, I feel thankful that I'm not the sensitive type. I have a nice thick skin. Maybe even as hard as a lobster's shell. Though, for the record, when it comes to sea creatures, I prefer the squid.
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7253e51a26b2d07c4b7235dbee7071fa | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2009/09/18/google-alerts/?sh=7f2336a622a5 | Please, I beg you, put a Google alert on your name. | Please, I beg you, put a Google alert on your name.
Image via CrunchBase
Buried in a post last month on Five Easy Ways to Protect Your Identity Online was this nugget:
Free free to be vain! ... Set up a Google Alert for your name.
I have a Google Alert on "Kashmir Hill" mainly to tell me when other journalists mention my work. (Both Gawker's Jezebel and the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog name-checked me this week -- Woot woot.)
But it's a good idea for everybody -- non-journalists included -- so you'll be notified if someone starts a blog dedicated to calling you a skank (as happened to model Liskula Cohen), or if a company makes a spreadsheet available online that has your social security number (as happened to a family member of mine), or if someone puts you in the Urban Dictionary (as happened to me).
There's no excuse not to have a Google alert set up. It's easy. It's free. It's a simple way to protect your online identity. Please do it. (You don't need to have a gmail account, but it makes this a little easier.)
***
1. Go here.
2. Enter your name in quotation marks (e.g., "Kashmir Hill") as the search term.
3. Decide how often you want alerts. Mine are daily, but you can also get them weekly or as soon as your name appears somewhere.
4. Click "Create an Alert".
***
And you're done! So what happens now?
In case you're too lazy to visit Google Alert's FAQ page. Here are the answers to the questions I (and Google) imagine you might have:
1. What are Google Alerts? Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page). We currently offer alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups. 2. What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for? Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'. A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search. A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search. A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search. A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice. A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search. A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search. via Alerts Help.
You may get stray results if you have a common name. That's not a big problem for me. Thanks for naming me after a Led Zeppelin song, and optimizing my Google search results, Mom and Dad.
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69bdeaf654cbd6de79be018b5083f20f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2009/09/29/workers-at-the-national-science-foundation-love-porn/ | Workers at the National Science Foundation love porn | Workers at the National Science Foundation love porn
I'll start this post with a public service announcement: Don't get your porn fix at work.
It seems like an obvious rule to live by, but it seems to get people into trouble again and again. I will never see the NSFW (Not Safe for Work) acronym again without thinking of the NSF (National Science Foundation). The Washington Times has an exclusive report on the rampant porn surfing of workers at the Foundation.
The NSF is a federal agency which chooses scientific projects to receive government funds. Its budget is over $6 billion dollars according to its website. According to the Times, a good portion of that budget has gone to support study of the human anatomy:
The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars....[R]ecords obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act laid bare the extent of the well-publicized porn problem inside the government-backed foundation. For instance, one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected, the records show.... Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official's porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000. via Washington Times - EXCLUSIVE: Porn surfing rampant at U.S. science foundation.
He had quite a creative excuse for his extensive pornographic "work" for the Foundation. A round-up of the worst offenders and their excuses, after the jump.
-- The senior executive mentioned above claimed "that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women... 'He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that,' investigators wrote in a memo." This guy will have to continue to support the needy & lusty from home. He retired after being investigated.
-- But porn surfing won't always lead to a forced retirement: "One foundation employee paid an unspecified sum last year after investigators found that during a three-week period in June 2008, the worker perused hundreds of pornographic Web sites during work hours. That employee received a 10-day suspension."
-- Another employee was also suspended for ten days, a ruling he unsuccessfully appealed as being "too harsh": "Another employee in a different case was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography. Asked by an investigator whether he had completed any government work on a day when a significant amount of pornography was downloaded, the employee responded, "Um, I can't remember," according to records."
-- Men were not the only ones with pornographic photos on their hard drives: "Another employee who stored nude images of herself on her computer told investigators she mistakenly had downloaded the pictures. She received counseling and was told to adhere to the foundation's policies on computer use."
Please remember that your use of computers is far from private. At work, your employer probably does keep track of the sites you visit and may even monitor your e-mail. When I worked at a law firm, we would often go through lots of company files during litigation discovery. I was always shocked by the personal conversations people would have via work e-mail and intra-office chat, apparently oblivious to the fact that it would be stored on servers for years to come.
In this case though, I'm grateful to a colleague for sending me pornographic material. Thanks for the NSF tip, Michael.
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65c678cf79394103273f85ee67fc8775 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2009/12/10/either-mark-zuckerberg-got-a-whole-lot-less-private-or-facebooks-ceo-doesnt-understand-the-companys-new-privacy-settings/ | Either Mark Zuckerberg Got A Whole Lot Less Private Or Facebook's CEO Doesn't Understand The Company's New Privacy Settings. | Either Mark Zuckerberg Got A Whole Lot Less Private Or Facebook's CEO Doesn't Understand The Company's New Privacy Settings.
When Facebook's new privacy settings were rolled out yesterday, many privacy gurus complained that the default setting was for "Everyone" to have access to your Facebook profile, meaning users had to be proactive about limiting access to their accounts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the "new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg either missed that article or doesn't care. Back in October, I checked the Facebook profiles of the Facebook executive team, and found their privacy settings to be quite high. I wrote of Zuckerberg's profile at that time:
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO - You can see his photo, his networks (Facebook and Harvard alum), and a list of his 889 friends, but that’s it. You can’t add him as a friend, but you can send him a message. via How much privacy does the Facebook executive team have?
Well, that's changed. His profile is now on uber-public settings. I can see his wall, his photo albums, and his events calendar. Zuckerberg recently became a fan of Taylor Swift, uploaded graphic photos of "The Great Goat Roast of 2009" three months ago, and plans to attend the Facebook holiday party on Friday night. I can even tell you where it's going to be held.
You can check out his profile here. Here are some screen grabs:
Zuckerberg's profile to a non-friend. It looks like most of his activity is public:
Here's Zuckerberg's event calendar. He's RSVPed yes for the Facebook holiday party, Cirque Fantastique, at the SF Design Center Galleria in San Francisco Friday night:
And Zuckerberg's photo albums. I was able to access them all, as I assume you will be able to if he leaves his privacy settings as is. Did he really intend for the world to see him eating goat in someone's backyard?
Is Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to privacy complaints to lead by example and let 350 million Facebook users peruse his Facebook activity? Or is the company's own CEO confused by the changes, and exposing more to the world than he intended?
Gallery: Mark Zuckerberg 43 images View gallery
Hat tip: To a friend I won't identify for fear of his being subjected to the wrath of Facebook. Thanks, n!
P.S. I have a rule against publishing Facebook photos... but Gawker doesn't. Ryan Tate gives you his favorite picks from Zuckerberg's gallery here. Or you can just browse yourself. Zuck's gallery is still public as of 10 a.m. EST on December 11.
UPDATE: Mark Zuckerberg claims he did this on purpose. His profile remains public, but only to "friends of friends."
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2e6a85001a42468469afe79702c85adb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/05/25/the-privacy-storm-facebook-capitulates-with-simplified-privacy-control-settings/ | The privacy storm: Facebook capitulates with simplified privacy control settings | The privacy storm: Facebook capitulates with simplified privacy control settings
Growing up in Florida, I learned how to recognize when there was a summer storm coming. The sky would go gray, with dark clouds building on the horizon. The humidity would build up, sending people inside to escape the wet heat.
Covering privacy over the last year has reminded me of those summer afternoons. The pressure has been building for months, and the dark clouds around online privacy are finally releasing their rain.
Facebook and Google have become the most visible standard bearers for privacy problems. We have handed over vast amounts of information to both companies, because of the, frankly, incredible services and products they offer us.
The costs of this have come not in the form of money -- if Facebook charged a $10 monthly fee to hold our online profiles, it could theoretically be collecting $4,000,000,000 a month given its current number of users -- instead, it's that these companies have the opportunity to monetize our loyalty and the data we've happily stored with them.
Facebook, of late, has surpassed Google as the privacy villain. Google likely knows a lot more about us, but how much Facebook knows is more evident. A quick glance at someone's Facebook profile is more superficially revealing than the more private interactions we have with Google (through e-mail, search, Analytics checking, etc.).
And so Facebook is currently the Darth Vader in the media story about privacy, in great part because of the company's frequent and confusing changes to its privacy settings. Each time privacy settings have changed, the default has been to make our photos and profile information more public. The company has sent out mixed messages about this: while spokespeople would say there was no devious plot to force the increased exposure of its users' information, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would make claims that social norms had changed around privacy, making it seem that the company just expected users to adjust to its new less-private network.
This made people very angry. It made privacy groups angry. It made Congressmen (such as Al Franken and Chuck Schumer) angry. It made tech bloggers angry. It made my Facebook friends angry, judging from their status updates, deletion of data, and the organization of Boycott Facebook days (via Facebook groups, of course). It made danah boyd suggest that the site requires regulatory oversight. In reaction, tons of sites have sprung up to help people see and address privacy problems on the site, from ReclaimPrivacy.org to OpenBook.org.
Facebook got the message.
Over the past few weeks, the company has tried to change its ways and to become more transparent. Its VP of Communications Elliot Schrage took questions from New York Times readers. This Monday, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post admitting that the company "missed the mark" on privacy. And tomorrow, Facebook is rolling out new, simplified Facebook privacy controls.
It's unclear exactly how these will look. I imagine they'll take a page from the ReclaimPrivacy.org book, a quick scan to let you know who can see what information, and what information developers and advertisers have access to.
But it's hard to imagine that anything Facebook rolls out tomorrow will satisfy the company's critics. The skies have opened, and the rain of criticism will not cease anytime soon. Still, a simpler privacy dashboard is a step in the right direction.
Beyond forcing Facebook to act, all of the controversy has made people more reflective about what they post to Facebook and how much information about them is available online. That's a good thing.
The Web is a relatively new place. We're still figuring out the rules there and how our lives online affect our lives offline. As annoying as Facebook has been with its laxness when it comes to our privacy, we still have a lot of control on the site. We post the information that is there, and we have the power to delete and untag at will.
In the wider Web world, that power does not exist. A simple Google search or a search on a site like Spokeo.com may turn up information more damaging (or, at least more inaccurate) than anything on your Facebook profile.
Facebook has over 400 million users because it's a cool service and has moved from a luxury to a utility for many. Its simplification of settings tomorrow addresses the current storm.
But when it comes to the larger issue of our online privacy --outside of Facebook -- there are many more storms on the horizon.
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74a56f6be31b11a73db25bedda18e14d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/09/01/maryland-woman-sues-after-being-banned-by-facebook/ | Maryland Woman Sues After Being Banned by Facebook | Maryland Woman Sues After Being Banned by Facebook
Karen Beth Young's Facebook profile photo pre-exile
Update (Sept. 8): The judge appears skeptical of Karen Beth Young's complaint.
I've quipped before that "nowadays, if you’re not on Facebook, it’s possible you don’t actually exist." It's become a (nearly worldwide) directory -- instead of exchanging contact information these days, most people just friend each other. It's an essential forum for professional and social interactions. And for playing Lexulous and Farmville.
If Facebook signifies existence, then being banned by the network can feel like a death sentence. When my friend and Above the Law colleague David Lat was expunged from the network in 2008, he penned a column for The Observer calling it one of the worst weeks of his life. Lat was eventually reinstated after appealing his case through "Facebook's Kafkaesque justice system."
After being banned in July, Karen Beth Young of Maryland also tried to appeal her case to Facebook. After not getting any responses to her emails to the company, and not being able to talk to anyone on the phone, she went so far as to drive her 10-year-old station wagon across country to Facebook's headquarters in California. After a brief two-day reinstatement, her account was disabled again. Now she's taking her case to state court...
Young filed a complaint against Facebook in California (Hattip: tech law professor Eric Goldman for sending my way). In the August complaint, she alleges breach of contract, violation of her constitutional rights, and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act -- Young has bipolar disorder. Since it's a pro se complaint -- Young does not have a lawyer -- it's a bit messy, but according to Goldman, there's been "a groundswell of ADA litigation against websites and a court could have sympathy for the plaintiff." Young wants her account reinstated and appropriate damages.
What did Young do to get banned? Part of her frustration with Facebook stems from its opacity on the issue. Typically, Facebook disables people's accounts when they violate site policies and almost always after complaints from other users. Lat got kicked off the site after a law-student-beauty-queen-turned criminal complained that he used her Facebook photos in a blog post on Above the Law. Other violations might include sending messages that others deem "spammy," harassing, or otherwise offensive, especially if sent to non-friends. (Luckily, using Facebook to obsessively monitor the pages of exes is not a violation, or many, many users would be banned.)
Young joined Facebook in February 2010 and accumulated friends quickly. Just a few months later, at the time her account was disabled, the Shepherd University student says she had over 4,000 friends. She used the site to help promote her cancer awareness efforts and freely admits that she friended people she did not know in real life but who she thought would be interested in the cancer awareness cause. When her account was disabled, she reached out to Facebook and got this response from "The Facebook Team":
Your account was disabled because your behavior on the site was identified as harassing or threatening to other people on Facebook. Prohibited behavior includes, but is not limited to: • Sending friend requests to people you don't know • Regularly contacting strangers through unsolicited Inbox messages • Soliciting others for dating or business purposes After reviewing your situation, we have determined that your behavior violated Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. You will no longer be able to use Facebook. This decision is final and cannot be appealed.
Young did appeal though, in person. She drove cross country to Facebook's offices, where a receptionist was unimpressed. "She told me, 'Oh, people have driven farther than you, from Canada,'" said Young. Young filled out a form, and soon discovered her account was reinstated. But when she got back to Maryland, she tried to sign in and was banned again. "I just started crying," Young said.
A Facebook spokesperson says that the company "take[s] the privacy of the people who use Facebook very seriously, including those whose accounts we've acted on in some way" and so would not comment on why Young's account was disabled.
"This lawsuit is without merit, and we will fight it vigorously," said the spokesperson. Facebook's lawyers at Orrick have filed a motion to dismiss the case.
I asked Young why she doesn't just start a new account. "That's violating Facebook law," she said. (Facebook rule: "If we disable your account, you will not create another one without our permission.") Plus, she wants all the friends and profile information back from her old account, along with the cancer awareness groups that she had set up.
With 500 million users, Facebook is increasingly a country of its own. But its legal system is a murky one, so be careful of running afoul of its laws -- by, for example, exporting your data or using the site to sleep around.
If banning does happen to you, this Facebook help page is where you go to plead your case. Hopefully, Facebook won't ignore your friend request.
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6648ff898e1489d7c78c8799bc0dfd29 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/09/30/tyler-clementi-turned-to-a-gay-message-forum-for-help-before-his-suicide/ | Tyler Clementi Turned To A Gay Message Forum For Help Before His Suicide | Tyler Clementi Turned To A Gay Message Forum For Help Before His Suicide
Post on JustUsBoys.com
It's a tragic technological story heard round the world -- a college freshman's Webcam spying leading to a suicidal jump from the George Washington Bridge. Dharun Ravi, a freshman at Rutgers University, used his Macbook to stream video of his gay roommate having "a sexual encounter" in their room on September 19. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, did not know that he was being watched or taped. Sadly, he apparently did not notice the green light on Ravi's laptop camera turn on when Ravi activated it from another computer in friend Molly Wei's room across the hall.
Ravi invited other friends to watch the stream on iChat, and planned a second viewing on September 21st when Clementi again indicated he'd like the room to himself for a few hours, tweeting that day, "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again." It appears from a gay message forum that Clementi was already on to his roommate by that time.
The New Jersey police have charged Ravi (and Wei) with criminal invasion of privacy, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison according to the New York Times, and a possible $30,000 fine according to the New Jersey criminal code. As my colleague Andy Greenberg points out, some of the same technologies that facilitated Ravi's invasion of Clementi's privacy will now help prove his guilt in the case -- Ravi's Twitter feed. Ravi deleted it, but police can get it from Twitter, or Google cache, or one of the Twitter tracking sites like Topsy. As I've said before, deletion on the Internet is futile.
[daylifegallery id="1286165472127" height="375" width="500"]
Clementi also has a digital trail on the Internet, and it appears that he knew his roommate had filmed him after the first September 19th incident.
A month-old tweet from Ravi indicates he discovered his roommate's sexuality based on comments Clementi made on a gay message forum. Ravi tweeted on August 22, "Found out my roommate is gay," and linked to a post he said was Clementi's on JustUsBoys. It's the same forum that Clementi appears to have turned to after discovering he'd been spied on. As Gawker noted, a user on the forum by the name of "cit2mo" posted a thread "college roommate spying....." on September 21 at 7:22 a.m.
so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else's room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy. given the angle of the webcam I can be confident that that was all he could have seen. so my question is what next? I could just be more careful next time...make sure to turn the cam away... buttt... I'm kinda pissed at him (rightfully so I think, no?) and idk...if I could...it would be nice to get him in trouble but idk if I have enough to get him in trouble, i mean...he never saw anything pornographic...he never recorded anything... I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out...and i'd probably just end up with somebody worse than him....I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, he's a pretty decent roommate... the other thing is I that don't wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me....
Other users advised him to report it to the school and make sure his roommate's computer was closed during future encounters. Cit2mo replied:
I feel like it was "look at what a fag my roommate is" --other people have commented on his profile with things like "how did you manage to go back in there?" "are you ok?" and the fact that the people he was with saw my making out with a guy as the scandal whereas i mean come on...he was SPYING ON ME....do they see nothing wrong with this? unsettling to say the least.... so I decided to fill out the room change request form....its not guaranteed that you get a change...and i don't have to switch if I change my mind or work things out over the next week (they won't start filling requests until next week)...but I figure I might as well as see what they can offer me....
More users advised him of the illegality of this video voyeurism. A famous case of this, of course, is that of Erin Andrews. The man who made peephole videos of her undressing was ultimately sentenced to 30 months in prison. Cit2mo responds:
oh yah, on the school website it says recording people where there is an expectation of privacy (bathroom bedroom etc) without the consent of everyone involved could....COULD.....result in being expelled the only things is...there are too many 'could's ....the fact that he didn't ACTUALLY record me (to my knowledge) and the fact that the school really prolly won't do much of anything.... but anyway, i'll be talking to my RA later today for sure..... and yah, revenge never ends well for me, as much as I would love to pour pink paint all over his stuff.....that would just let him win.....
Cit2mo did end up going to the RA after Ravi's tweet on September 21st:
so I wanted to have the guy over again. I texted roomie around 7 asking for the room later tonight and he said it was fine. when I got back to the room I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed. And he had posted online again....saying...."anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight"...or something similar to that.... soooo after that..... I ran to the nearest RA and set this thing in motion..... we'll see what happens...... I haven't even seen my roommate since sunday when i was asking for the room the first time...and him doing it again just set me off....so talking to him just didn't seem like an option.... meanwhile I turned off and unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams....and then had a great time.
Cit2mo's last posting to the site on the morning of September 22nd indicates that he emailed an RA a paragraph about what had happened. Though he seemed calm and collected in his postings to JustUsBoys, that night, he posted "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry" to his Facebook, and committed suicide.
These digital trails may answer questions that could not be answered otherwise. A big question now is why Clementi's resident advisor did not get Clementi moved out of that room immediately.
In addition to the criminal charges arising from this, there will be civil lawsuits. Rutgers University may find itself the target of a civil lawsuit. And Clementi's family and perhaps Clementi's unnamed romantic partner of September 19 will surely sue Ravi, and perhaps Wei, for invasion of privacy. In a similar case in Kansas, a man was ordered to pay $55,000 after distributing naked photos of his ex-girlfriend via email. The claims were invasion of privacy and infliction of severe emotional distress.
Another case that comes to mind involving Webcam spying and schools is the famous case out of Philadelphia, where a high school handed out laptops and then activated cameras remotely without informing the students using them. In that case, prosecutors dropped the criminal charges, finding no criminal intent in the "spying." Ravi will not likely be so lucky.
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1c3822431eee69ae3c61c35878f0d7c0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/10/27/upskirt-filmer-terrorizes-canadian-university/ | Upskirt Filmer Terrorizes Canadian University | Upskirt Filmer Terrorizes Canadian University
Leggings attracted a voyeur in Canada
Just when you thought it was safe to wear jeggings... It's not Halloween yet, but a creepy YouTube villain has women with a penchant for stretchy pants terrified at a university in Halifax, Canada.
One of my favorite privacy news aggregators, PogoWasRight, linked yesterday to a torrent of news stories out of the Great White North this week about a dastardly videographer "stalking" women at Dalhousie University with a hidden "kitbag camera."
Dalhousie University security staff say someone is secretly filming women on the Studley Campus and posting the videos to an online sharing site. In an email sent to students Monday afternoon, Mike Burns, director of security, said women were "surreptitiously captured on video." "The videos were taken without consent of the subjects and appear to have been taken in a manner where the subjects would have been unaware that they were being recorded," said the email. via CBC News - Nova Scotia - Women secretly filmed on Dalhousie campus.
My interest was piqued. What was this video stalker filming? And why did none of the news reports describe the footage? Was it so horrible?
The now-closed LeggingSpy channel
CBC News quenched my prurient thirst by revealing the culprit as YouTube user "LeggingSpy." As the name suggests, he or she likes to surreptitiously film women in leggings.
Due to the media and police attention, LeggingSpy has closed the account (screenshot at right, from before account was closed). The Halifax police will now try to get Google to turn over any information they have for the YouTube user. It's a lot easier to do that in a criminal case than a civil case, though Google's transparency map indicates that law enforcement in Canada don't ask for this kind of information very often -- they made less than 10 requests in the first half of this year.
So, assuming the Halifax fuzz catch LeggingSpy, what happens? The legality of "filming upskirt" varies in the U.S. The Supreme Court in Washington state gave it a thumbs up, for example, deciding the state's voyeurism law doesn't apply to actions in purely public places. Update: Though Gawker points out that if there's nudity or undergarment-clad nudity involved, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004 kicks in. (If leggings are worn as pants, do they count as an undergarment?) The invasion of privacy is uniformly illegal in the Maple Leaf country (Oh, Canada), as spelled out in the "voyeurism" statute in Canada's criminal code.
(More on the rampant practice of upskirting -- and the laws that apply to it around the world -- can be found in this article from last year in the Guardian)
A final note: One way LeggingSpy did respect privacy is not to film any of the women's faces.
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fa6ff75fcc015895fdb7fe7b126e7fa0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/11/04/the-place-race-where-we-are-on-location-sharing-services-adoption/ | The Place Race: Where We Are on Location-Sharing Services Adoption | The Place Race: Where We Are on Location-Sharing Services Adoption
Location competition heats up even though adoption numbers are still small
Among tech folks, location-based-services like Foursquare are all the rage. But not many folks on Main Street are checking in, according to the latest report out of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Pew's first survey of location-based service usage found that just 4% of Internet-using adults are "geosocial" savvy, using services like Foursquare or Gowalla to check in. That doesn't come as a huge surprise -- both services have been fairly transparent about their number of users. Foursquare just surpassed the 4 million user mark, while Gowalla hasn't hit one million yet.
Something telling the report does reveal is that just 1% of users are using the services on any given day. That means this population of location-sharers aren't all that hooked at this point. That could certainly change if the services reach greater population penetration. Part of the reason people check Facebook multiple times a day is that their friends are adding more material all the time.
These are what Pew calls its key findings:
There's greater adoption -- 7% of those surveyed -- by those of us who use our phones for Web browsing. People using status-updating apps like Twitter are even more likely to check in. The breakdown: 24% of online adults are status-updaters. Ten percent of those peeps are "geosocial"; that's twice the rate of the general online population. In other words, Twitter is the gateway drug to Foursquare. The young (18-29) are more engaged than other age groups, with 8% of those surveyed doing location. Surprise, surprise. More men (6%) than women (3%) are checking in (That's why an app called WhereTheLadies.at is offering help to find the XX factor). Should it be Cuatrosquare? Latinos are the dominant ethnic group using the services. "10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%)," says Pew.
Obviously these numbers reveal that we're still in a nascent period of location-sharing. But businesses are excited about it. Advertisers in the U.S. will spend $1.8 billion on location-aware marketing in 2015, according to a recent report by market research firm ABI Research. That means tech companies are competing fiercely to become the go-to place for location sharing...
Foursquare's approach is to make location-sharing game-like
"Detailed real-time information about customers’ habits is very attractive to businesses, who may share special deals with users, or reward 'mayors' and other frequent users with free or discounted services," writes Pew in its report.
Social networking giant Facebook is starting to encourage location sharing among its 500 million users with "Places." That could bump these numbers up considerably the next time Pew does a survey. Oliver Chiang reported yesterday that Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook Places is “multiples bigger than any other location service.”
Fan Appz, a Facebook application taking advantage of location data sharing is running a campaign for Westfield Mall in California to encourage customers to check in for store discounts. "It's a new and interesting way to attract customers," says CEO Jon Siegal. "We're not at the point where we're running in the background, and interrupting you everywhere you go. Not to say that isn't something we might do in the future."
Facebook announced yesterday that it will start helping to incentivize location sharing with 'Deals.' Gap (NYSE:GPS), for one, will soon be tapping into the services promised in its ticker symbol:
Gap is giving away 10,000 free pairs of blue jeans. And when they run out of those, they’re giving 40 percent off of any product when someone checks-in to any of their nationwide stores. A smaller cinema chain, Alamo Draft House, is giving away a free pint glass when you check-in. And they’ll have offers for special events for friends. The Golden State Warriors are giving away access to a free event with players if you check-in to a game. via The Other Location Shoe Drops: Facebook Deals. Will It Discount Rivals?.
Does Google Latitude languish?
Many tech companies are excited about the possibilities of location-sharing. Businesses knowing where customers are, being able to track that data, and coming up with reasons to get them to come in and buy something when they're nearby has great monetization value. Google (with Latitude and Places), Yelp (adding Check-In abilities), Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook are all incorporating location-sharing into what they do and each one hopes to become the go-to service for businesses capitalizing on the data.
Welcome to the great Place Race of the 21st Century.
Full Pew Report here.
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39d50b137aa585dc60c9a17cc4532cca | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/11/09/dont-overreact-to-case-over-employee-being-fired-for-badmouthing-her-boss-on-facebook/ | Don't Overreact To Case Over Employee Being Fired for Badmouthing her Boss on Facebook | Don't Overreact To Case Over Employee Being Fired for Badmouthing her Boss on Facebook
Image via Wikipedia
In almost every "social media tips" list compiled is the warning not to say nasty things about your workplace or your boss. That advice has become so ingrained that people assume the axe is going to fall as soon as you Tweet something critical about your manager or write a Facebook status update chronicling the ten reasons you hate your boss.
Which is basically what appears to have happened to Dawnmarie Souza. As recounted by the New York Times this morning and the Blog of the Legal Times last week, she claims to have been fired after writing a nasty Facebook comment on her wall about her boss -- including a few vulgarities -- that garnered supportive responses from colleagues. Late last month, the National Labor Relations Board announced [PDF] that it was filing a complaint against the American Medical Response of Connecticut on Souza's behalf. Fellow Forbesian Jim Nichols sums up what's at stake at Media Mixer:
The case involves a company with an overly broad social media policy that bars employees from discussing nearly anything about the company in social media. This case could have a tremendous impact on how social media policies must be drafted. A blanket “you can’t say anything” policy is simply too broad and can arguably violate our free speech laws.
I spoke with Betty Graumlich, an employment law partner at Reed Smith. She cautioned against immediately going home and lighting up your boss on Facebook based on the hyperbolic headlines that have been used to describe the case today...
Image via CrunchBase One important thing to remember is that this is a press release announcing an investigation. There's been no hearing over the case yet. Assuming the company was in the wrong at this point is a little like assuming someone who will be tried for murder is guilty of the crime. Innocent until proven guilty applies at the National Labor Relations Board, too. (Well, not exactly, as pointed out by Jeff Lowrot on Twitter. Please excuse my rhetorical flourish, o' lawyerly ones.) If the Board does decide in Souza's favor after the hearing in January, it would actually be overturning a prior decision in a similar case, says Graumlich. She pointed me back to a NLRB decision in December issued in response to a complaint over a similar social media policy at Sears/Kmart. Sears's policy is designed to "maintain the company's reputation and legal standing." On a list of topics that associates can't discuss on social media was, "Disparagement of company's or competitors' products, services, executive leadership, employees, strategy, and business prospects." It also advised employees not to talk about drugs or to use profanity. Employees discussed the policy at length in a Yahoo group, though no one posted about it to Facebook (as detailed in the NLRB decision). After a complaint was filed saying the policy curtailed employees' free speech, the NLRB determined that the active discussion in the Yahoo group (limited to employees only) meant that the employees' speech was not being chilled by the social media policy. Essentially, it blessed Sears' desire not to have employee complaints broadcast to the world (as could possibly happen in a public Facebook posting). "Griping about your supervisor is generally considered to be protected under the Board, so you can't fire employees for standing around the water cooler complaining about their supervisor," said Graumlich, but the NLRB could still decide that it's inappropriate to broadcast those complaints on a social network, which is the decision it reached in the Sears case.
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f9df52f465f0953c3383f19cdff264c0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/11/11/did-google-violate-the-wiretap-act-with-its-wifi-snooping/ | Did Google Violate the Wiretap Act with its WiFi Snooping? | Did Google Violate the Wiretap Act with its WiFi Snooping?
One of the Street View cars that got Google into this mess
The Federal Communications Commission announced yesterday that it is investigating Google over its Street View cars' downloading 'payload data' from open WiFi networks.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the FCC's investigation follows a complaint by EPIC that Google's snooping on unencrypted wireless networks violated the Wiretap Act, a federal law that protects against electronic eavesdropping. The law provides for a $50,000 fine per violation.
Right now, you may be thinking, "The FCC? Isn't that the agency that protects me from hearing Nicole Richie throw the f-word around on live television?" The FCC is in charge of regulating the public airwaves -- from television to phone to Internet communications. As noted by the WSJ, the FCC does not usually go public with announcements of investigations. Last time it did so, though, was in October when it confirmed its investigation of Verizon Wireless's mystery fees. Within a month of that confirmation, the FCC announced a "record settlement" with Verizon, including a $25-million payout to the U.S. Treasury.
That perhaps doesn't bode well for Google, though FCC enforcement bureau chief Michele Ellison said that the agency is confirming the investigation now because of Google's "public disclosure" a few weeks back in admitting to what exactly was captured by its cars, including emails and passwords. The FCC's investigation follows on the heels of the Federal Trade Commission closing its non-investigation into the matter.
So back to that Wiretap Act, which prohibits the interception of phone and electronic communications. The ease of "snooping on public WiFi networks" has been getting a lot of attention these days because of Firesheep, a tool that makes it easy for any fairly naive Internet user to do what Google's Street View cars did and see what someone browsing on an unsecured site is doing.
As Marc Rotenberg of EPIC told the Washington Post, "Intercepting communications traffic is a serious crime in the United States." Firesheep may also violate the Wiretap Act, so don't play around with it unless you have $50K to spare.
Whereas Firesheep just downloads cookies from unsecured computers to allow snoops to spy on fellow WiFi surfers' Facebook and Twitter sessions, Google's cars downloaded significant private data, including urls, emails, and passwords. It has said the collection was inadvertent and that it didn't realize that it had the data until privacy-wary Germany initiated a serious investigation of exactly what information Google Street View cars were gathering.
This is fairly new territory for the FCC. Previously, when weighing in on the Wiretap Act, it was to clear the way for law enforcement to intercept communications as needed.
Obviously, the Google Street View WiFi collection fall-out is far from over. In addition to the FCC investigation, a class-action lawsuit based in Oregon is ongoing. One thing Google Maps can't offer right now is directions out of this mess.
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be7368541fd1004de1ed3ffa3a0c5a0d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2010/12/05/facebook-goes-after-linkedin-with-new-profile-pages/ | Facebook Goes After LinkedIn with New Profile Pages | Facebook Goes After LinkedIn with New Profile Pages
Watch out LinkedIn. Here comes Facebook.
Facebook rolled out a new version of its profile pages today, as noted by my colleague Oliver Chiang. What strikes me most about the redesign is that it highlights your professional resumé at the top of the page. Facebook is even prompting me to add the other languages that I speak:
For the record: Italian, but not well enough these days to add to my resumé.
For more on the pages, check out Facebook's blog post. Further proof that Facebook is breathing down LinkedIn's neck with the redesign: in explaining how it will allow users to build richer profiles, Facebook engineer Josh Wiseman emphasizes the potential for detailed work histories and educational background. "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school," writes Wiseman. "Personally, I opted to add this profile project to my work history at Facebook, and I tagged the people who worked on it with me."
Facebook was originally primarily a place for fun and play, but it's quickly evolving into an essential place on the Web to conduct business and establish professional connections. The new redesign, allowing users to flesh out their resumés, is definitely a threat to LinkedIn's business.
As always, critics have surveyed the redesign for privacy flaws. Jason Keath notes that you can now tag friends in the interest area of your profile, though only in the "Sports" category, (and in the Work category, as noted by Wiseman). So if you're looking to have some fun tonight, feel free to add "Competitive Porn" to your sports interests, and tag friends who won't hate you in the morning. Or make it something even more embarrassing:
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3f26bd662d0f5e24b81569464e0ec7e3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/02/04/cmon-congressmen-facebook-should-be-our-phonebook/ | C'mon, Congressmen, Facebook <i>Should</i> Be Our Phonebook | C'mon, Congressmen, Facebook <i>Should</i> Be Our Phonebook
Image via CrunchBase
Congress has found a new Facebook feature it doesn't like. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it was going to start allowing applications to access users' phone numbers and home addresses. It made clear that applications would need permission from users to get to that information, but the fact that Farmville might start blowing up players' cell phones still caused some controversy around the Web.
It caused so much controversy that Facebook decided to suspend the feature for now. That didn't stop Congressman Ed Markey and Joe Barton from sending Mark Zuckerberg a letter [PDF] this week, demanding to know more about the company's plans for its users' contact deets.
“Facebook needs to protect the personal information of its users to ensure that Facebook doesn’t become Phonebook," said Markey in a statement. Um. My question is, "Why not?"
If users want to be able to hand out their phone number and address, for whatever reason, then they can give applications permission to access it. If they don't want to, then they can not give permission. Why do the Yellow Pages get a monopoly on that?
Maybe I'm sanguine about Facebook's plans, because I, for one, wouldn't be affected by it. I don't keep my phone number and address in my Facebook profile. If Facebook WERE the phonebook, that would essentially allow me to be unlisted. A nice option.
One day, we may just skip the digits all together. An interesting post on TechCrunch a few months back argues that Facebook may soon enough be our phonebook, as we move away from cellular networks and onto VOIP calling, like that offered by Skype and Voice on Gmail. That might give us much greater control over our right to be contacted:
Anyone can dial your 10 digits, including your ex-girlfriend, a political campaign worker, or a solicitor. Unlisted numbers, Caller ID and do-not-call lists all tried to solve this problem, but these solutions still don’t prevent unwanted calls.... Compare this to your social networks. You have control over who accesses your information; you have one username and profile that you use at all times; and applications fill in the holes and extend the network’s capabilities to communicate, play games and meet people on your own terms. On any Facebook page, I can “send a message”, even if we aren’t friends. And I can choose to receive messages from non-friends. The key thing is the network sets up a policy, and I as a user can change this. We don’t have this choice on the phone network today. Anyone can dial my number, and I can’t control it—but I do control my interaction on a social network. via Phone Numbers Are Dead, They Just Don’t Know It Yet.
If the Congressmen are really worried about their constituents' phone numbers winding up in the hands of sleazebags, their efforts might be better expended patrolling local bars.
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043ae6e11d5d99083a097a27a7ec1b7a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/02/10/how-not-to-end-up-like-congressman-chris-lee-or-a-guide-for-private-online-dating/ | How Not To End Up Like Congressman Chris Lee (Or: A Guide for Private Online Dating) | How Not To End Up Like Congressman Chris Lee (Or: A Guide for Private Online Dating)
Rep. Chris Lee 'exposed' by Gawker
New York representative Christopher Lee's adventures in online dating led to scandalous headlines across the country and his resignation from Congress. Don't let this happen to you!
He did many things wrong along the way; here are some lessons to be learned in case you're on the digital market in the lead-up to Valentine's Day...
Chris Lee emailed a stranger on Craigslist using a Gmail account that included his real name. Email addresses come free, folks. Many people who use Craigslist regularly -- for anything from dating to furniture shopping -- have a designated spam-type address for that. Lee should check to see whether "ShirtlessOnCraigslist@gmail.com" is already taken. Lee was doing his dating through Craigslist. That is so early aughts. Most kids these days have moved on to designated dating sites like Match.com (if you like to pay for that sort of thing) or OkCupid (if you don't like to pay for that sort of thing). OkCupid even offers certain privacy measures, letting users hide their profiles from categories of other users. It sent emails to gay users, for example, suggesting they might want to prohibit heteros from seeing their profiles. Lee could have set up a profile there and chosen to hide it from Democrats and journalists. Lee lied about his age, marital status, and profession -- saying he was a lobbyist rather than a congressional representative and saying he was younger and less married than he truly was. (That's not unusual. IdentityTheft911 says to beware of scammers on online dating sites looking to swindle you.) For those not looking to commit adultery or break into someone's bank account, it's best to be honest in your digital courting. The lies will almost certainly unravel eventually, thanks to Facebook profiles, Google searches, and Congressional bio pages. Lee sent a full-on, shirtless photo of himself to a random stranger. Any teenager could tell you that you should never include your face in sexting photos. The metadata in the photo helped Gawker confirm that it came from Lee. It included location info and device information. Conveniently, Gawker sister site Lifehacker has a feature today on how to protect your privacy by removing metadata from photos before posting them on websites or sending them out to strangers on the Internet. Strip that info before distributing stripped-down pics. When letting the libido loose digitally, consider switching from email to a service like TigerText, which lets you put an expiration date on your messages. Strangely, the name was actually not inspired by Tiger Woods (though he certainly would have benefited from the product).
I welcome other suggestions for online daters in the comments. In general, be careful on the Internet, folks! It can be a dangerous place. Here's some advice from Lee himself in a 2009 op-ed about teen Internet safety, unearthed by Gawker:
Through the Internet, with a few keystrokes and the click of a button, a young person can call up information for a research project, make new friends or discover new hobbies. At the same time, responding to what may seem like a friendly e-mail or an appealing marketing offer can have serious consequences. Private information and images can so easily be transmitted to friends and strangers alike.
... and then so easily transmitted to gossip blogs.
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f816c764e21143818b50d3c0f8c29856 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/03/09/google-privacy-lawyers-fascinating-and-unofficial-thoughts-on-the-right-to-be-forgotten/ | Google Privacy Lawyer's Fascinating (and Unofficial) Thoughts on the 'Right to be Forgotten' | Google Privacy Lawyer's Fascinating (and Unofficial) Thoughts on the 'Right to be Forgotten'
Easier said than done on the Internetz
Here, in the U.S., many of us have accepted that "the Web means the end of forgetting." But Europeans are resisting this digital development, and talking of passing a privacy directive that would give citizens the "right to oblivion" or "right to be forgotten" -- meaning they could slash and burn information about them on the Web or in various databases.
The "right" has been affirmed by Spanish's chief privacy regulator, which has ordered Google to allow over 80 people to delete inaccurate or out-of-date links from the results that come up in searches of their names, including a plastic surgeon whose search results include a news article that details a malpractice charge against him of which he was later acquitted. Google is challenging that order. When I wrote about this earlier this week, I noted that there was no mention of the search giant's legal problems in this area on its official European Public Policy blog.
That's still the case, but Google's global privacy counsel has now tackled the issue on his personal blog: Peter Fleischer: Privacy...?
He makes it clear that the ruminations there are his, and not Google's official stance on these things. Regardless, it's a fascinating take on the state of privacy in the digital age, breaking down what's at stake in a pro-privacy movement that advocates for giving people a Staples-like "Easy Delete" button:
More and more, privacy is being used to justify censorship. In a sense, privacy depends on keeping some things private, in other words, hidden, restricted, or deleted. And in a world where ever more content is coming online, and where ever more content is find-able and share-able, it's also natural that the privacy counter-movement is gathering strength. Privacy is the new black in censorship fashions. It used to be that people would invoke libel or defamation to justify censorship about things that hurt their reputations. But invoking libel or defamation requires that the speech not be true. Privacy is far more elastic, because privacy claims can be made on speech that is true. via Peter Fleischer: Privacy...?: Foggy thinking about the Right to Oblivion.
(Calls for greater privacy leading to censorship are not limited to the digital realm, of course. This week, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick uses the Supreme Court's recent decision about protesters at a gay soldier's funeral to suggest that the Justices' sympathies for privacy may undermine the First Amendment; even though the right to free speech trumped privacy in that particular case, it was based on the public nature of the protest spot not the inherent right to the speech.)
Fleischer talks about what's at stake in Europe's plans to legislate privacy and the "right to be forgotten," breaking it down into 8 bulletpoints. He tackles three big concepts: getting something about yourself on the Internet deleted, how much about your activity online tech giants retain -- and for how long, and the data-expiration movement -- that would mean some information would be set to disappear after a set amount of time.
Fleischer asks important questions -- and doesn't answer many of them. Understandably, given where he works, he appears to be in favor of a more liberal flow of information. One of his last points -- on who gets to decide what should be remembered or forgotten -- is particularly poignant as he ties it to his legal troubles in Italy, where he and a few other Google executives face a criminal conviction for invasion of privacy due to the actions of YouTube users:
[T]he web is littered with references to my criminal conviction in Italy, but I respect the right of journalists and others to write about it, with no illusion that I should I have a "right" to delete all references to it at some point in the future. But all of my empathy for wanting to let people edit-out some of the bad things of their past doesn't change my conviction that history should be remembered, not forgotten, even if it's painful. Culture is memory.
Read it. His post breaks down a difficult concept into some easier-to-digest chunks.
Though if the European Commission actually decides to make the "right to be forgotten" a reality, it's not going to be easy for Google and the other tech giants to digest at all.
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f0c04973a3a06b9f1264e9f25c326688 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/03/22/to-catch-a-computer-predator/ | To Catch a Computer Predator | To Catch a Computer Predator
Do not steal Mark Bao's laptop
When 18-year-old entrepreneur Mark Bao had his MacBook Air stolen from a college dorm lounge in February, he assumed it was gone for good and bought a new one. But a month later, he got the chance to recover his laptop and publicly shame the guy who stole it -- by posting a video of the thief's dance moves to YouTube. How'd he do it?
Bao, who recently sold the navel-gazing site ThreeWords.me, had installed an online cloud back-up program on his laptop called BackBlaze. He logged into the service this weekend for the first time in a few months and realized that his stolen computer was still being backed up.
"I looked around the files and found that the thief a) didn't remove the backup service and b) created his own user account on the system," says Bao.
Notably, he could see the thief's Safari browsing history. The computer's new owner had visited a webmail site that contained his email address in the site's url, which revealed his name. When Bao looked the name up on Facebook, he discovered they had mutual friends at Bentley University. Bao reported the friend-of-a-friend to the police, but also decided to have a little fun at the culprit's expense. Bao was able to get access to the photos and videos on the computer, including a video of the thief breaking out some snazzy dance moves.
Bao posted that to YouTube with the title, "“Don’t steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers.” It was soon picked up at Reddit, reports Courtney Boyd Meyers at The Next Web, and racked up over 20,000 views. Within hours of the Reddit posting, the outed thief had returned the laptop to campus police and sent Bao a Facebook message with an apology and a plea that he take down the YouTube video. Bao was not very sympathetic. The video remains up.
Though Bao publicly shamed the culprit, he didn't include the guy's name, granting him some anonymity. Other tech savants who have had their computers stolen and done similar snooping have not been as kind. (A tip for laptop thieves: don't put self-portraits you've taken in your shower on a stolen computer.)
Bao plans to sell the returned Apple and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross Japan fund. The new owner would be wise to wipe BackBlaze from the system.
*Another piece of software that helps people track down stolen computers and Android phones is Prey. Instructions on use can be found on Lifehacker.
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9e672c37b0cb0f20d62369245ac18390 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/03/24/new-photo-sharing-app-color-has-no-shades-of-privacy/ | New Photo-Sharing App Color Has No Shades of Privacy | New Photo-Sharing App Color Has No Shades of Privacy
Color, a new photo-sharing app for iPhones and Android, is generating lots of buzz because of its revolutionary approach to social networking. The app automatically shares your photos with anyone in your geographical vicinity, and vice versa, with no permission asked.
Forbes staff got a special preview of the app earlier this month. We joined the Color team, including CEO Bill Nguyen at the Museum of Modern Art [MOMA], snapping and sharing photos of modern art with one another. The team described situations in which the app would be awesome -- for example, a Color user at a concert would have their phone inundated with photos from everyone else there using the app. That would, of course, be most interesting if someone backstage were taking and sharing photos, so you could see band members prepping themselves for the set. This reminded me of James Franco bringing Oscars viewers backstage by tweeting whenever his hosting duties allowed.
But the photo-sharing is not limited to the moment you're sharing with the people around you. The app automatically connects you to those people from that moment on out -- meaning you can see future photos they take as well as their entire history of photo-taking, as well as that of their social network. After our MOMA excursion, I was able to tap into Nguyen's wife's photo stream and see photos she had taken of their children, as well as a video from a recent skiing trip.
Nguyen was unperturbed, beaming in response. “I know. Isn’t it cool?”
Color's Home Screen. Recognize anyone?
Automatically connecting users in geographic proximity to one another and to their friends is a revolutionary approach to social networking, but will take some getting used to. You have to assume that all photos you feed into the app are public. (Incidentally, the photo that Color Labs is currently using on its homepage was taken in a MOMA elevator during the excursion with Forbes. Featured in the homepage photo -- that's now being used by most media writing about the app -- are Andy Greenberg and myself. Ironically, we were the only two Forbes reporters on that field trip who cover the privacy beat.)
Unlike with most photo-sharing applications, you can't mark any of your photos private. (Though you can block fellow users from looking at your stream -- that is, if you know they're looking. The app doesn't tell you who has access to your photos.) I can imagine scenarios involving snoopers hanging out outside celebrities' homes in the hope of getting geographically close enough to get access to their Color streams, or law enforcement types wanting access to all the photos from an event where something nefarious occurs. As PCWorld says, the app isn't for private types.
Meanwhile, Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic dismisses privacy concerns, writing, "Really, what private person is using public photosharing apps?" Madrigal's concern is not all the interesting stalking that could be done on the Color network, but how boring his Washington, D.C. neighbors' photos might turn out to be -- assuming a good number of them actually download it. I'll hope for his sake that the Obamas get turned onto the app, and then he can hang out outside the White House fence and wait for the news fodder to stream in.
To see the photos that we Forbsers took at the MOMA, and read our pooled reflections on the app, check out the magazine feature about the experience.
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5ec0e749f07dc3c528e65c6b0492665e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/03/28/the-tracking-device-weve-all-embraced-our-phones/ | The Tracking Device We've All Embraced: Our Phones | The Tracking Device We've All Embraced: Our Phones
Your personal homing beacon
I thought it was safe to say that everyone knows by now that one thing their smartphones are smart about is their location. But the New York Times doesn't agree. A piece this weekend on what our GPS-enabled smartphones know about us was headlined, "It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know."
The piece recounts a legal case by 26-year-old German politician Malte Spitz to find out exactly what tracking data Deutsche Telekom had on him based on his T-Mobile phone activity:
In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. via Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know - NYTimes.com.
Zeit Online fed those 35,000 data points into a cool, interactive map so that you too can track Spitz's movements. Though concerned about privacy issues, Spitz didn't actually seem that bothered about what the location information uncovered about him. “I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he told the Times, when asked what was revealed about him. “I am not really walking that much around.”
No matter your provider, your phone probably reveals how sedentary you are as well, though Verizon and AT&T declined to elaborate for the New York Times exactly how much data they keep and for how long.
Of course, location information can be a lot more interesting depending on what you're up to. In 2009, after a string of bank robberies in Texas by the "Scarecrow Bandits," the FBI got call log information from mobile phone companies that revealed two phones that had made calls during 12 of the heists. Those phones led the FBI to identify two of the Bandits, who were later convicted for the robberies and on weapons charges.
Privacy advocates are pushing for greater clarity as to how feds get access to location data. CNet reports on Senator Ron Wyden's push for a "GPS Act" -- GPS stands for "Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance" instead of Global Positioning System in this case -- that would require law enforcement get a warrant for cell phone location information.
Meanwhile, smart bank robbers will leave their smartphones at home during bank robberies. And Verizon, if you're looking at my location history and judging me for being sedentary, please know that I don't take my phone with me when I go running.
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14f09e89388d52be286e8a9a55aaaacb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/05/19/google-patents-a-celebrity-facial-recognition-database-the-same-week-it-declares-such-a-thing-creepy/ | Google Patents A Celebrity Facial Recognition Database | Google Patents A Celebrity Facial Recognition Database
Google puts Sarah Palin's face into a facial recognition database along with her less-notable... [+] daughter
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who has described his company's strategy as "get[ting] right up to the creepy line and not cross[ing] it," was asked this week what would cross that line. He responded by expressing discomfort with the potential for a facial recognition database, reports the Telegraph.
In a bit of bad timing for Schmidt, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Google patent today for a celebrity facial recognition database. The database would pull the names of "celebrities" out of news articles, scour the Internet for photos in which they've been identified, apply recognition algorithms to their faces to build a biometric model of their face, and then search for more images based on the facial recognition technology.
When Google first launched image searching app Goggles in 2009, it could have incorporated facial recognition allowing users to search for anyone's identity after taking a photo of them, but decided it was too invasive a feature. The company has repeatedly made clear that it considers facial recognition to be too creepy. But apparently, only for the hoi polloi.
The patent for "Automatically Mining Person Models of Celebrities for Visual Search Applications" presents an awfully nice product for news services as they would no longer have to label the photos they take. And when you went to search for your favorite celebrity, you would find everything out there, not just photos they had been captioned in.
The database is already 1,000-people strong and includes Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Prince Harry, Sarah Palin, Bristol Palin, and a few fashion designers. "For a test, over 1000 names were picked from the list [of 30,000 famous people] and face images were acquired for each corresponding name," wrote the Google engineers in their patent application. Google said there were problems with a few of their samples. "For example, the model for Sarah Palin is clean, containing 78 images without mistakes, the model for her less-notable daughter Bristol Palin contains 7 images of her mother," write the engineers.
Google's technology had no problems distinguishing the faces of this famous duo
The same problem happened with fashion designers who are often included in captions of photos that they are not in, as when models, actors and actresses are wearing their designs. It did not happen (thankfully!) with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt -- though the two are often in photos together, the crawling software did not get them confused, probably because there are so many photos of them individually, wrote the Google patent seekers.
A celebrity facial recognition database may not seem incredibly troubling. We do recognize these people's faces without Google's help. When I saw Book of Mormon on Broadway Sunday night, I didn't need to whip out my smartphone and snap photos to recognize Drew Barrymore, Robin Williams, and Jimmy Fallon sitting three rows ahead of me.
But I wonder about the "creep" -- not creepiness -- when it comes to defining "celebrities." In the patent, the Google engineers define celebrities as anyone mentioned in one of more articles. Given that definition, this database will grow very, very quickly -- and possibly scare normal people even more from wanting to talk to journalists.
Notably, the initial search is still based on people's names not on their faces. The capability to search "by face" is out there, but Google doesn't want to be the company that explicitly crosses that line.
Hat tip: Slashdot
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5fd61ddf78ade322e42eaddd669dbd3f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/05/20/he-who-cannot-be-named-in-the-uk-sues-twitter-over-a-user-naming-him/ | He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named (In The UK) Sues Twitter Over A User Naming Him | He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named (In The UK) Sues Twitter Over A User Naming Him
The tweet behind the legal action
Earlier this month, a random Twitter user wreaked havoc on the lives of a bunch of British celebrities by publishing a series of tweets claiming they had affairs, were into prostitutes, and harassed their employees. The tweep claimed that the news had been suppressed by "super injunctions," legal gag orders that British citizens can get to prevent news agencies from mentioning their names or that an incident happened at all. It's a privacy protection measure that's increasingly hard to enforce in the social media age when news giants are not the only ones with publishing powers.
Now one of those celebs is suing Twitter for letting the user violate the super injunction. The Guardian reports on the lawsuit, but still can't include the name of the celeb, thanks to that super injunction, though it can name the woman with whom he is accused of having an affair, model Imogen Thomas. (She apparently doesn't have a super injunction.) Though he-who-cannot-be-named filed the suit as "CTB," the American press, which is not subject to the power of the super injunction, have pointed the finger at footballer (or soccer player to folks on this side of the pond), Ryan Giggs who plays for Manchester United.
Update (May 21): The footballer's lawyers tell the Metro that they have launched legal action against Twitter only to find out the identities of the anonymous tweeps who published info about their client. Those familiar with the Skanks in NYC case -- where a blogger used anonymity to defame a model -- know that anonymity on the web is fleeting. In that case, Google, which hosted the blog, was ordered by a judge to hand over the blogger's IP and email address to the model.
Ryan Giggs discovers that privacy is hard to maintain in the social media age
Apparently, though, CTB's lawyers have not heard of the "Streisand effect." Filing lawsuits has a nasty effect of bringing even more attention to that thing that you're filing the lawsuit over. The Guardian published a graph making fun of he-who-shall-not-be-named, not including his name, but showing how many times his name had been mentioned on social media channels since filing the lawsuit. (A lot.) The graph shows Twitter mentions "of said footballer's surname... after it emerged that his legal team had launched an action against Twitter to try and restrain mentions of his name online. You can decide if it worked," writes Dan Sabbagh at the Guardian.
Twitter hasn't commented on the lawsuit, but as an American company, it's probably protected from the legal action. Here in the U.S., we have a law (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) that protects sites from liability from things said by their users. If a reader decides to defame someone in the Forbes comments, the reader could get in trouble for defamation but Forbes wouldn't. The same thing applies to Twitter. Scoring a goal for the free flow of conversation on the Internet.
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a546aad6ca6726799f65cac7fd46fbdc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/06/09/estranged-husband-wasnt-actually-duped-by-fake-teenage-facebook-account/ | Estranged Husband Wasn't Actually Duped By Fake Teenage Facebook Account | Estranged Husband Wasn't Actually Duped By Fake Teenage Facebook Account
Fake Facebook account plan backfires.
A 38-year-old Indiana man faced felony charges for telling a pretty 17-year-old stranger who friended him on Facebook about tracking his wife's movements with a GPS device placed on her car. He also revealed plans to have his wife killed and then flee the state with their children. It turned out that his new nubile friend was actually his soon-to-be ex-wife, trying to gather evidence against him for their divorce and custody hearings.
Federal prosecutors arrested David Voelkert on Friday, but then dropped the charges today. In a domestic dispute version of Spy vs. Spy, it turns out that Voelkert knew that his wife, Angela Voelkert, 29, was behind the sexy teen account the whole time. He was messing with her, in the hopes of proving that she was "still tampering with his life," reports the Smoking Gun. He got a notarized sworn affidavit on May 25 explaining his plan right after he received the friend request from "Jessica Studebaker."
Oh, how I wish Law & Order were still in existence to dramatize this. Even with the affidavit to back up his story, he spent 4 days in custody before being released. "It was a joke-y death threat," doesn't always go over so well with the feds.
It turns out that the only person killed off in the course of this is "Jessica Studebaker." The StudeFaker account has been deleted as of this afternoon.
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e40f92a76d0d1cf658f7061e6dc6c27e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/06/22/journalist-jose-antonio-vargas-outs-himself-as-illegal-immigrant/ | Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas Outs Himself as Illegal Immigrant | Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas Outs Himself as Illegal Immigrant
Jose Antonio Vargas at a conference in April
This weekend's New York Times Magazine has an incredible first-person account of being an undocumented worker in the United States. The author's name may be a familiar one to consumers of tech news. Jose Antonio Vargas (who shared a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter at the Washington Post) covered technology for the Huffington Post and penned a widely-read profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker.
Vargas writes that his mother sent him to the States from the Philippines when he was 12. He didn't realize he was in the country illegally until he tried to get a driver's license when he turned 16, and the woman at the DMV told him his green card was fake.
I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it. I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream. But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me. via My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant - NYTimes.com.
Vargas takes a risk in "coming out" now. The New York Times reports that the story was originally set to run in the Washington Post Outlook section, but that it decided to kill the story. The Huffington Post suggests this was because the paper was nervous about the fact that one of its editors knew about Vargas's illegal alien status when he worked for the paper, a fact that Vargas reveals in his story.
Why is Vargas revealing his secret now? For one, he hopes that it will influence the future of the DREAM Act, "a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country." And also because keeping the secret private has been so wearing:
I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore. So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bossesand employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.
Vargas's sharing his private and secret tale with the world made me look back at the profile Vargas wrote about Mark Zuckerberg, which I riffed on at the time based on his thoughts on privacy and the Facebook culture of oversharing. Vargas wrote:
Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with... Zuckerberg’s critics argue that his interpretation and understanding of transparency and openness are simplistic, if not downright naïve... Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, “This is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place—and more honest, you’ll hear that word over and over again—if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it’s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.” Zuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September, 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they’re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I’m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources—some of whom might not approve of homosexuality—would see it. “So what did you end up doing?” Zuckerberg asked. “I put men.” “That’s interesting. No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out,” he said. “We didn’t create that—society was generally ready for that.” He went on, “I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.” Then I told Zuckerberg that, two weeks later, I removed the check, and left the boxes blank. A couple of relatives who were Facebook friends had asked about my sexuality and, at that time, at least, I didn’t want all my professional sources to know that I am gay. via Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg opens up : The New Yorker.
Apparently, Vargas has come around to Zuckerberg's perspective on privacy and transparency. He hopes that bringing his tale into the public spotlight will benefit the people with no voice in the debate over what to do about undocumented workers. And this time there's no changing his mind. Now that Vargas has 'fessed up to being an undocumented worker in the New York Times, there's no changing his privacy settings and unchecking that box.
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307ec53eaffffd4646f75da24eee0a59 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/07/05/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-is-the-most-popular-user-on-google-plus/ | Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is The Most Popular User On Google Plus | Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is The Most Popular User On Google Plus
A profile photo for those subtracting themselves from Facebook in favor of Google Plus
Last week, I noticed that Mark Zuckerberg scored an early invite to join Google Plus -- but that he doesn't necessarily look happy about it. He has a rather somber profile photo. The post picked up steam and launched many other news stories, in great part because it fed into the narrative of Google Plus being a potential "Facebook killer."
Zuckerberg himself was nonchalant, telling Robert Scoble via text, "Why are people so surprised that I'd have a Google account?" Certainly, there's little reason not to use a competitor's product (even if there is some precedent in the Google v. Facebook history book) -- knowing how a competitor's product works and what its best features are can offer up competitive advantages.
Regardless, Zuck must certainly have concerns about losing Facebook users to Google's new social networking tool. There are some big pluses to Google +, including the opportunity to, in Ezra Klein's words, "build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind." That's why I'm not surprised to see Facebook profile photos like the one at right pop up around the site. When Google Plus exits the "invitation only" stage, many more users will be signing up for accounts. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll close their Facebook accounts, but it may mean they spend less time there.
As much as that may be eating at Zuckerberg, there's a bit of news today to assuage his ego (if it's hurting)...
You're welcome, Mark Zuckerberg
Thanks to all the news stories about his Google Plus profile, Zuck's currently the most followed user on the site, according to Google+ Statistics. As of the writing of this post, 29,543 people had added Zuck to their circles. Runners-up in the "most followed category" are Google executives Larry Page, Vic Gundotra and Sergey Brin, none of whom have yet topped 20K.
Google statistics also confirms Quentin Hardy's suspicion that Plus is a sausage-fest. Only 10% of the site's users are female, while 88% are male, and 2% are "other." Given that initial invites were distributed primarily to those in tech circles, the gender disparity isn't hugely surprising.
That 2% of the tech circle identifies as "other" is a lil' surprising.
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316be8592e13999c822a6f532d388c81 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/07/07/news-of-the-world-proves-privacy-violations-can-result-in-death-penalty/ | News of the World Proves Privacy Violations Can Result in Death Penalty | News of the World Proves Privacy Violations Can Result in Death Penalty
Privacy violations can kill a company
It is the job of journalists to tread on people's privacy and to make hidden things public, but the UK tabloid News of the World took this too far. As Jeff Bercovici reports, News Corp. is shuttering the tabloid because of new and continuing revelations about the extent to which the paper's journalists were hacking into the voice mail boxes of people in the media spotlight.
As the WSJ notes, the phone hacking has been known about for years now, but recently, it was revealed that the journos weren't hacking just the phones of celebs and the royal family, but those of "normal folk" too -- such as a murdered teenage girl. There's a higher threshold for invasion of public figures' privacy; in the sphere of public opinion, it seems that hacking the voicemail of a 13-year-old girl -- a private citizen who became a public only because she went missing -- crossed a line, becoming an abuse of journalistic privilege sufficient to demand a sacrifice. (It also helped that high-wattage star Hugh Grant decided to go all undercover-journo to help expose the extent of the hacking. See: "How I Exposed Hacking" via the BBC.)
"If recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company," Rupert Murdoch tells the Wall Street Journal.
Bercovici notes that News of the World is News Corp.'s most profitable U.K. paper. It's closing is proof that privacy is not just a buzzword, but important to a business's survival. The shuttering of News of the World is probably the most visible death of a business based on privacy violations but it's not the first. As Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy and Technology points out, getting privacy wrong was also a death sentence for spyware company Claria and online advertising company NebuAd.
Seeing Google's privacy speed bumps with Buzz and StreetView may lead some to think that privacy is just a branding issue, but it can also be a wall to crash into and end one's journey.
Related: Hugh Grant explains his role in the undoing of News of the World to the BBC:
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826c2bcb15ff4e5b02a16988d0447c33 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/07/08/judges-say-its-okay-to-use-gps-to-track-a-cheating-spouse/ | Judges Say It's Okay To Use GPS To Track a Cheating Spouse | Judges Say It's Okay To Use GPS To Track a Cheating Spouse
Image via Wikipedia
Next year, the Supreme Court will be deciding whether it's okay for law enforcement to put a GPS tracking device on someone's car without a warrant. Some courts say yes and some courts say no. If it's not the po-po tracking you, though, but a spouse who suspects you might be cheating, a New Jersey court says, "Go for it."
A New Jersey woman hired a private investigator to follow her husband to find out whether he was straying. Her husband, Kenneth Villanova, a Gloucester County sheriff’s officer, kept managing to lose the investigator [*insert high speed car chases here*]. So the investigator, Richard Leonard, advised his client to put a tracking device in her husband's car, reports the Star-Ledger. She put it in the glove compartment of their jointly-owned GMC Yukon. Within two weeks, it revealed Villanova's car sitting in the driveway of a woman who was not his wife. Oh, the bittersweet pleasure of catching a partner in the act.
Villanova was not pleased. He sued his wife and Leonard for invasion of privacy. My married colleague Matt Herper has (jokingly) remarked to me before that there is no privacy in marriage. Asked to clarify, Herper says: "There’s no presumption of privacy, or right to it. If invading a spouse’s privacy is an offense, it’s probably a smaller one than expecting to keep very many secrets."
The judges came to the same conclusion, but with slightly different reasoning:
Villanova claimed the tracking device invaded his privacy and caused him ”substantial and permanent emotional distress,” though the appellate judges noted he sought no medical treatment or advice. Appellate Judge [sic] Joseph Lisa, Jack Sabatino and Carmen Alvarez said Villanova had no right to expect privacy because the GPS tracked his movements on public streets. “There is no direct evidence in this record to establish that during the approximately 40 days the GPS was in the ... glove compartment the device captured a movement of plaintiff into a secluded location that was not in public view, and, if so, that such information was passed along by Mrs. Villanova to (Leonard),” Lisa wrote. via Judge rules use of GPS to track a cheating spouse is not an invasion of privacy | NJ.com.
In a substantive legal dissection of the opinion on the Law and Technology blog, Venkat Balasubramani expresses surprise that "the court does not discuss the diminished expectation of privacy for the husband vis a vis his wife."
The Star-Ledger says this opens the door for private investigators to use trackers in all kinds of cases: "GPS doesn’t just track cheating spouses. Private investigators use it to keep tabs on the subjects of insurance fraud investigations, background checks and child custody cases."
But a significant part of this case is that Villanova's wife put the tracker in the car, not the private investigator. That means your privacy in the context of strangers tracking you might still be safe -- just not from friends and family. But does that really come as a surprise?
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9eb33ff6209b9f3c35d264cc37a0f553 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/08/09/will-london-riots-be-the-turning-point-for-facial-recognition-as-crime-fighting-tool/ | Will The London Riots Be The Turning Point For Facial Recognition As A Crime-Fighting Tool? | Will The London Riots Be The Turning Point For Facial Recognition As A Crime-Fighting Tool?
Digital vigilantes discuss legal issues around identifying rioters using facial recognition... [+] technology
If you riot, social media will be used to track you down. That is no longer a surprise to anyone. A new twist in social media surveillance work following the London riots, though, may be the use of facial recognition technology to identify those involved.
After the riots in Vancouver earlier this year, following a Stanley Cup loss, a Canadian insurance corporation volunteered the use of its drivers' photos database should authorities wish to use facial recognition technology to identify and charge rioters. A spokesperson from the Vancouver Police Department tells me that the agency, while aware of the technology, ultimately decided not to use it.
"We are aware of the technology but have not used it in the investigation that is currently underway. We have many investigative avenues and tools that we are putting into use currently that are working well to advance the investigation," Constable Lindsey Houghton tells me.
Web vigilantes are doing their best to make sure facial recognition technology gets a fair shake in the London riots, though. Just last week, researchers established that off-the-shelf facial recognition technology mixed with Facebook's vast database of photos linked to people's real identities can lead to fairly reliable identification of complete strangers. Digital crime-fighters plan to use the same techniques the researchers used to identify students at Carnegie Mellon University to identify English rioters. On a Google group called London Riots Facial Recognition, a bunch of technophiles are discussing using Face.com's facial recognition API to create a Facebook app that will identify ne'er-do-wells in London.
After getting media attention, the Google Group members have made their group private, but here's a screenshot (above at right) of the members discussing the legal issues around identifying those involved...
As Jerry Brito notes at Techland, they're far from the only digital vigilantes (digilantes?) trying to identify law-breakers involved in rioting in London following the shooting of a 29-year-old man. (Note to Jimmy Wales: Judging from the number of vigilantes working for free on post-riot criminal identification, I suspect Wikipedia may be losing contributors because those who like to work for free on the Internet are starting to prefer digital superhero work to encyclopedia entries.) But this group's proposal to use facial recognition tools to do their work is a new twist in crowdsourced criminal identification. And it raises the question of whether London authorities, unlike Vancouver's, will harness the power of facial recognition technology in their investigations of the weekend's looting and rioting.
The London police have already started posting stills from surveillance cameras on their Flickr account, asking for help in identifying suspects. Relying on technology instead of community tips seems like the next logical step for the surveillance-friendly city famed for its Ring of Steel security system. Of course, that depends on a reliable source of photos linked to identity. Like, say, that in the hands of the English variant of the Department of Motor Vehicles (The Department of Bangers?).
Advice for rioters: "Do think about changing your appearance"
As the Google Group planning to apply facial recognition to photos from the riot notes, the technology is not foolproof. One Massachusetts driver's face caused him a serious headache because anti-fraud facial recognition technology thought he was someone else, leading to his driver's license being automatically suspended.
Rioters are preparing themselves for the coming social-media-assisted who-dun-it. A flyer being distributed in London offers advice to rioters, including telling them to get rid of any clothes or distinctive jewelry they wore to make it harder to confirm their identities based on riot photos. Good luck with that, rioters. While 'jumpers' are easily discarded, faces are not.
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f99d594d3508121a997665d6c82d1b7c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/09/23/what-the-people-want-abolishment-of-the-tsa-and-marijuana-legalization/ | What The People Want: Abolishment of the TSA and Marijuana Legalization | What The People Want: Abolishment of the TSA and Marijuana Legalization
Petitions on the TSA, the Pledge of the Allegiance, and drugs have proved most popular thus far
Earlier this month, the White House launched "We The People", a website for submitting petitions to the prez (a right guaranteed by the First Amendment). Per Obama's pledge to make the government more open and accountable, the site will provide "a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country," according to Whitehouse.gov. "If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response."
At this point, "enough support" = 5,000 signatures in 30 days. If you have a petition that gets the attention of a community like Reddit, that's pretty easy to achieve, meaning the White House is going to need to tell people why marijuana hasn't been legalized and why the TSA hasn't been abolished.
Days into its launch, there are already eight petitions that will warrant a response from the White House per its own rules. The site appears to have attracted civil libertarians, pro-marijuana advocates, and atheists. The most popular petition with almost 20,000 signatures petitions the gov to "Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol." The petitioner writes: "Marijuana prohibition has resulted in the arrest of over 20 million Americans since 1965, countless lives ruined and hundreds of billions of tax dollars squandered and yet this policy has still failed to achieve its stated goals of lowering use rates, limiting the drug's access, and creating safer communities. Isn't it time to legalize and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol?"
Update (April 20, 2012): The White House's response to this petition cited public health concerns as the main reason for marijuana legalization not being high on its priority list:
According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health- the world's largest source of drug abuse research - marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease, and cognitive impairment. We know from an array of treatment admission information and Federal data that marijuana use is a significant source for voluntary drug treatment admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled over the past 20 years, raising serious concerns about what this means for public health – especially among young people who use the drug because research shows their brains continue to develop well into their 20's. Simply put, it is not a benign drug. via What We Have to Say About Legalizing Marijuana | The White House.
A petition created yesterday calling for the abolition of the TSA has already garnered over 7,000 signatures:
The Transportation Security Administration has been one of the largest, most expensive and most visible blunders of the post-9-11 homeland security reformation. It has violated countless constitutional rights of average Americans, caused miserable and expensive delays in an already-overburdened air travel system, and allowed multiple known instances of harassment, theft, extortion and sexual abuse by its employees. It has failed approximately 70% of undercover efficacy tests, and for all its excesses, has been unable to catch even a single terrorist since its creation. In our current economic situation, we can no longer afford to continue wasting taxpayer dollars on this kafkaesque embarrassment. Let us instead invest in saner, more effective solutions. via Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence. | The White House.
According to the White House, they will respond to petitions in a "timely manner," which it defines here as a "few weeks."
Other petitioners would like "Under God" excised from the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" removed from U.S. money, and to have a fraud conviction re-examined. Alex Howard has an excellent backgrounder on the new e-petitions, wondering whether they will lead the feds to take real action in response, or if it's just "gov 2.0 theater." It's nice to see that "Internet people" now have their own way to lobby the government. And the way that it's been set up means that it will be much harder for the administration to evade questions it's uncomfortable answering.
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4e43670673cf4426196f9a8a92744411 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/09/27/facebook-keeps-a-history-of-everyone-who-has-ever-poked-you-along-with-a-lot-of-other-data/?partner=obsecurity | Facebook Keeps A History Of Everyone Who Has Ever Poked You, Along With A Lot Of Other Data | Facebook Keeps A History Of Everyone Who Has Ever Poked You, Along With A Lot Of Other Data
Across the pond, European law grants citizens a "right to access," meaning that companies have to provide a person with all of the personal data they have on them if they request it. An Austrian-based group called Europe v. Facebook has posted a couple of the reports compiled by the social networking giant everyone loves (and loves to hate).
Most of you probably know that Facebook knows a lot about you. But did you know that if you were to print it out, it might take up about 880 pages? I went through one of the lengthy dossiers from Europe v. Facebook. Here are the juicy bits for a female Facebook user with the initials 'L.B.' who has been a member of the site since 2007:
Facebook keeps track of every person who has ever poked you. Facebook user L.B. has been poked over 50 times from 2008 through 2011 (K.D. was a frequent poker in 2008, though a user by the initials T.V. is currently the pokiest of L.B.'s friends). The report includes a list of the machines that L.B. has used Facebook from, how often she has signed in from the machine, as well as a list of all the other Facebookers who have logged in on that machine. As pointed out recently by blogger Nik Cubrilovic, Facebook leaves cookies on computers that have the ability to track users even when they're logged out of Facebook. Facebook now plans to scale back that cookie use, but it still will want information about who's signing in on which machines to thwart hackers, block spammers, and know which computers are in Internet cafes, for example. Given the hundreds of millions of users the company has, "Facebook is pretty much indexing all computers worldwide," says Max Schrems of Europe v. Facebook. Facebook keeps track of every event you've ever been invited to, and how you responded to the invitation. L.B. has attended about 29 events since 2009, has declined nine invitations since 2010, and has failed to RSVP at all to about 75 events dating back to 2007 (how rude!). The inviter, location and name of the events have been blacked out on the report posted to Europe v. Facebook's site for privacy reasons. Facebook keeps track of everyone you defriended and when. As some have pointed out, the Facebook Timeline will also expose this information to anyone who's interested. L.B. has removed over a dozen of her friends over the years. The Facebook report also includes a list of friend requests that L.B. rejected. Facebook includes a history of messages and chats in the report. Europe v. Facebook says that some users say their reports include messages they've deleted.
If you want to see all 880 glorious pages yourself, you can download the file here [pdf]. It also includes things you'd expect, like a list of all of L.B.'s friends and personal information from her profile page.
(What I was surprised not to see here was a list of the things that L.B. had looked at and/or clicked, such as other peoples' profile pages, photos, or status updates. As we have seen before, that is something Facebook knows about its users. Update, Sept. 28: While "real-time activities" are missing from L.B.'s report, you will see them in another report on the site, for M.S.)
So, just keep this in mind next time you're on Facebook. All your pokes are going into a permanent record.
European users can request their information with this Facebook form (instructions here). Max Schrems of Europe v. Facebook put his request in to Facebook's Ireland office and says it took the company about 30 days to send his report, and that it arrived on a C.D. from California.
One thing that I found a bit concerning about the process is that it only requires a photo of your government i.d., your name, and birthdate to confirm your identity. Given how easy it is to get one's hands on someone else's ID (say if you're dating someone and s/he leaves a wallet about your house), I could imagine some scenarios in which this process could be abused.
Hat tip: Pogo Was Right
More: Europe v. Facebook
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1e6c635eb5bfbfb625c3997a7e75270c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/14/scarlett-johannson-hacker-says-he-was-addicted-to-invading-celebs-privacy/ | Scarlett Johansson Hacker 'Addicted' To Invading Celebs' Privacy | Scarlett Johansson Hacker 'Addicted' To Invading Celebs' Privacy
Hackers use the same simple tricks over and over again to steal the e-mail of celebs and non-celebs... [+] alike.
This week, as part of "Operation Hackerazzi," the FBI arrested Florida man, Chris Chaney, 35, for hacking into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera, and dozens of other celebs. In a revealing interview with a local news station, Chaney says he didn't do it for monetary gain; he claims not to have been the one who circulated the nude photos of Scarlett Johannson and others. Instead, he did it because he was "addicted" to violating the privacy of the rich and the famous.
"It started as curiosity and it turned into just being, you know, addicted to seeing the behind-the-scenes of what's going on with these people you see on the big screen every day," says Chaney. "I was almost relieved months ago when [the authorities] came in and took the computers... because I didn't know how to stop doing it myself."
Aren't are all consumers of celebrity news similarly addicted, with their 'fix' being a new issue of Us Weekly instead of a stroll through Mila Kunis's inbox? Finding new ways to invade privacy is thrilling, potentially lucrative (had he decided to sell any of those photos), and shockingly easy. Hackers use the same simple tricks over and over again to steal the e-mail of celebs and non-celebs alike.
Christopher Chaney, of Jacksonville, Florida
As with the hack of Sarah Palin's e-mail years ago, Chaney broke into celebs' accounts using Yahoo's, Gmail's, and Apple's password recovery feature, coming up with the right answers by mining news stories, Twitter, and Facebook, for the names of their favorite pets, movies, old addresses or family nicknames. (Fun fact from the indictment [pdf]: Johansson uses Yahoo! for email while Kunis and Aguilera use Apple.) Once he broke in, he used the same trick described in James Fallows' incredible, must-read Atlantic story on his wife's Gmail being hacked, he set up forwarding in the celebs' account so that a copy of their every email was also sent to him at aliases such as "trainreqsuckswhat," "anonygrrl" and "jaxjaguar911." That meant he got to keep reading their email even when they changed their passwords. Law enforcement was eventually able to trace those aliases back to Chaney.
"I deeply apologize (to the victims)," says Chaney. "I know what I did was probably one of the worst invasions of privacy someone could experience, and these people don't have privacy to begin with. I was in that sliver of privacy that they do have."
Yeah, that's what he says now. But at the time he was doing it, getting to consume that little sliver of privacy was intoxicating. Privacy is the new nudity, after all. Before you decide to break into the e-mail diary of your favorite celeb, know that the penalties are severe. Chaney is charged with a host of computer crimes and faces up to 121 years in prison.
Celebs are not the only attractive targets for e-mail spying. In a recent poll, 30% of 14-24-year-olds surveyed said their accounts had been hacked, usually by someone they knew well. And many hackers want to get into e-mails, not for the thrill of it or for the LOLZ, but to make serious cash. In this Atlantic story about a Nigerian hacker who tried to get all of his wife's Gmail contacts (including chairman Eric Schmidt) to wire money to him via Western Union, James Fallows writes:
[A]s a predictable part of a hacking attack on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or any other e‑mail service, an attacker will change the settings so that all incoming mail is forwarded to a new, similar-seeming address—and then deleted from the real account, to make it harder for the real user to know, later on, who had responded to the scam.
I immediately checked my own forwarding feature to make sure I'm not supplying a copy of my inbox to anyone. Hey tech companies, given the potential for harm, perhaps this feature should be harder to activate in a person's account.
The bigger problem, though, is how easy it is to hack into people's accounts. Security questions don't work in the age of Facebook. At the end of his piece, Fallows makes simple suggestions: use strong passwords and sign up for Gmail's 2-step verification process that won't allow someone access to your account unless they have your mobile phone in hand -- not a sure-fire way to protect yourself should your phone be stolen, but more protection than the simple, increasingly-scalable wall that is your e-mail log-in page.
Read these:
Hacked [The Atlantic]
Accused celebrity hacker: 'I deeply apologize... it eats at me' [CNN]
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8c86ea2d4fe0e9d0f33512cff68a4cc5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/11/08/supreme-court-justices-concerned-about-pervasive-technology-enabled-government-surveillance/ | Supreme Court Justices Concerned About Pervasive, Technology-Enabled Government Surveillance | Supreme Court Justices Concerned About Pervasive, Technology-Enabled Government Surveillance
The Supreme Court Justices don't want the government attaching GPS trackers to their cars.
The Supreme Court justices were decked out in their usual black robes today for a case involving the question of whether police need to get a warrant in order to attach a GPS tracker to someone's car. But given their paranoia about possible technology-enabled government intrusions on privacy, it might not have been surprising if they had also been wearing tin foil hats.
The case at hand was U.S. vs Jones, involving Antoine Jones, a D.C. nightclub owner, who was busted for running a massive cocaine ring after police placed a GPS tracker on his Jeep Cherokee that tracked his movements for a month and showed him regularly driving to a stash house in Maryland. The police got a warrant to do this, but put a tracker on Mr. Jones's Jeep the day after the warrant expired (and while it was in a parking lot in Maryland, rather than in D.C. where the warrant was issued) -- D'oh. The government argued that the tracker only followed Jones's movements on public streets where he could otherwise be readily observed, so said it didn't violate his privacy (and thus argued that the government doesn't ever need a warrant to track people this way). Jones's side argued that tracking someone's every move for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for four weeks becomes an unreasonable search and a violation of privacy because of the pervasiveness of the tracking. Jones's lawyer was also quite hung up on the idea that the government shouldn't have the right to stick stuff on your property, and thus trespass against you.
Last year, the Supreme Court made a very narrow ruling in a case involving technology and privacy, deciding that a California SWAT officer was not entitled to privacy when it came to steamy text messages he sent on a work-owned (and thus government-owned) pager. They avoided making any larger pronouncements about whether employees generally have any kind of privacy when it comes to what they do on work-owned computers and smartphones. I assumed that the Justices might be similarly reserved in making big pronouncements about privacy and technology in this case, but I was wrong. The Justices came out swinging with big theoretical questions about the potential for vast government surveillance using smartphones and tracking technologies that are getting cheaper and cheaper; the Justices were ready for a big privacy rumble.
One of the most recent Supreme Court cases to deal with electronic surveillance of people's movements was 1983's U.S. vs Knotts, in which the Court said it was okay for the po-po to put a beeper in a can of chloroform, get someone to put it in Knotts's car, and then use the beeper to track the car from a short distance. (This made it harder for a suspect to lose his tail by driving down an alley or making a sharp U-turn; the beeper beeped slower when the car was far away and faster when it was close.) Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben tried to argue that the current case is basically the same thing, but Chief Justice John Roberts smacked that argument down, saying the beeper still involved a lot of work for police to tail a suspect, and even involved someone in a helicopter tracking the car. "That was 30 years ago. You get a lot more information from the device now," said Roberts. "Now, law enforcement just sit back while a device is collecting tons of information."
Justice Anthony Scalia, meanwhile, who is known as a privacy skeptic, focused on the "trespass" (pronounced "tress-pess" at One First Street) involved in the cops actually going up to a car and attaching a device to it. He argued it was okay, though "sneaky," for cops to get someone to put a beeper in Knotts's car surreptitiously, but that by doing this themselves in the Jones case, that they had violated the Fourth Amendment protection of his "house, papers and effects." Sticking to that line of reasoning would likely not be very reassuring to those people who are worried about the applicability of this case to tracking people using the GPS device we all hold near and dear to our hearts, literally: our cell phones.
Justice Anthony Kennedy started pushing in that direction, asking Dreeben whether it would be okay for the Gov to put a tracking device on someone's coat to follow their movements. Dreeben demured at that, saying that would track someone in a private residence, not just their public movements on a road, so that would be a violation of privacy.
Chief Justice Roberts then posed a hypothetical: "Would it be okay for the government to put GPS trackers on the cars of all of us without a warrant, and track our movements?" he asked, gesturing at his fellow justices. The government's attorney replied that it would be, since their movements would only be tracked on public streets. They looked understandably put off by this line of reasoning. Note to self: Telling the Justices that it's totally legal to stalk them may not be the best argument to make your case.
"If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States," said Justice Stephen Breyer. "If you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984."
Dreeben argued that the government isn't doing this universally (and doesn't plan to ). In response to a question from Justice Elena Kagan, he said the federal use of GPS trackers annually numbers in the low thousands (but said he didn't know how often the devices are used by state law enforcement).
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the most adamant in asking about the larger repercussions of how the government is interpreting what constitutes a "reasonable search" using tracking devices. "By your theory, you could track everyone using their cell phones. Your theory is that as long as you're monitoring someone in public, it's reasonable for you to use their possessions to track them," she said.
When Jones's lawyer came up to argue, it was a little like watching 9 cats play with an injured mouse that they felt pity for. A criminal defense attorney who has never argued before the Supreme Court before, Stephen Leckar focused solely on the unreasonableness of the police putting a tracking device on his client's property without a warrant and refused to indulge the Supreme Court's questions about the pervasiveness of the monitoring itself. When one justice asked whether this would have been a reasonable act by police if they put the tracker on the license plate of the car (which is owned by the State) rather than the underbelly of the Jeep, Leckar actually said yes. Justice Scalia jumped in to help him out, saying that a driver gives the government the right to put a license plate on a car, not a tracking device on their car.
Justice Kennedy asked whether it would be acceptable if the DC police had tracked Jones for a month with a team of agents following him rather than doing it with a tracking device. "We're not asking for the police to be less effective," he replied. "But GPS trackers greatly expand what they can do."
The Justices asked how this was different from London where ubiquitous cameras throughout allow police to track people's journeys throughout the city. Justice Sotomayor talked about the possibility of the government using cameras in satellites. "I don't think it's too far in the future when police can look down from satellite cameras and track people from place to place," she said. The Justices seemed eager to tackle the question of rampant government surveillance aided by new technological tools, but Leckar's insistence on sticking to the idea of tracking with a device attached to a car limited the scope of the discussion (which surely left many a privacy wonk in the audience disappointed).
The government's attorney tried to narrow the Justices' focus to their particular case. "Don't use this case to prevent 1984 from coming to pass," he said. He suggested that the extent to which the government should be allowed to surveil people without a warrant is something that Congress should weigh in on. Justice Scalia, for one, was receptive to that argument saying it wasn't for the Court to set limits on what length of time is okay to monitor someone, i.e. whether it's okay to put a GPS tracker on someone's car for one trip or for one day but not for 30 days. If the Court goes that way in its opinion in this case, which will come down later this term, we may end up with yet another opinion from the Supreme Court pleading with Congress to update privacy laws for the modern age.
*Transcript from the Supreme Court can be found here [pdf].
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9e24a84a8d1ccdea24a57d40cc9b2b80 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/11/14/phonedog-sues-ex-employee-for-his-twitter-account-valuing-his-followers-at-2-50-each/ | Phonedog Sues Ex-Employee For His Twitter Account, Valuing His Followers At $2.50 Each | Phonedog Sues Ex-Employee For His Twitter Account, Valuing His Followers At $2.50 Each
Phonedog wants to lay claim to 17,000 of Noah Kravitz's over 21,000 followers
Noah Kravitz worked as a mobile phone reviewer for a tech website called Phonedog for four and a half years. He had been part of a "virtual office," so when he left the site in October 2010, the only thing he really 'packed up' was his Twitter account. He had started it in 2007 and chose the Twitter handle @PhoneDog_Noah. When he left Phonedog, he had approximately 17,000 followers and changed his Twitter handle to @noahkravitz.
This summer, Phonedog started barking that it wanted the Twitter account back, and sued Kravitz, valuing the account at $340,000 (!), or $2.50 per follower per month.
(Ca-ching! That means my account is worth around $13,000 this month, if anyone's interested...)
Among the claims in its lawsuit, Phonedog says that the followers, as well as Kravitz's Twitter password, were its "trade secrets." A judge ruled last week that the lawsuit is legitimate enough to survive Kravitz's motion to dismiss, notes Venkat Balasubramani, a tech lawyer and blogger who voices some skepticism about public lists of followers constituting a trade secret.
Sometimes it's clear that a social networking account belongs to a company (A useful clue: the Twitter account has the company's name.) In that case, the account is kind of like a company car; you'll have to hand it over, along with the keys/password, when you leave the company. (Hopefully, a company won't have to actually go to court to get those keys, as Ardis Health did. ) But a personal social networking account is like your own car which you expect to use to get to work in your next job.
I spoke with Kravitz, who says that Phonedog never knew the password for his account. "No one asked me to create the account. No one told me what to tweet there," says Kravitz, who originally created the account because that what's everyone in the tech world was doing. "I had no inkling then that [having a Twitter account] would become an essential part of being a so-called journalist."
Kravitz says the account has always been a mix of work and personal -- "my content, other people's content, sports, music, food." Kravitz has continued to attract followers since leaving Phonedog and joining another tech news site, called Technobuffalo. He now has over 21,000 followers. (Perhaps if Phonedog does win, and gets control of his account, he can charge them in perpetuity $2.50 per follower per month for the extra 4,000 he accumulated after leaving.)
Stephen Riden, a partner at Beck Reed Riden LLP, who specializes in employment law, says the case is "murky," in part because Kravitz included "Phonedog" in his Twitter handle. "Employers usually address this in their employee manuals -- whether an employee can include their name or brand in social networking accounts, and whether accounts are being set up for the company or the employee," says Riden. "It's much cheaper to spell this out ahead of time than to litigate it after the fact."
While this may be the first lawsuit over Twitter followers, it's not the first time the issue of who "owns" someone's Twitter contacts has come up, notes Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who asked the question last year when a popular CNN reporter was fired and walked away with 150,000 Twitter followers. Working at a particular company can certainly help Tweeps accumulate followers (thanks, Forbes and Above the Law!), but that shouldn't mean that those companies should claim to own those followers, in this blogger's humble opinion.
The issue of whether employers or employees owns social networking contacts is starting to pop up in courts in the U.S. and around the world. Last month In 2008, a U.K. court ruled that Mark Ions, a former recruitment firm employee, had to hand over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer.
"[B]oth employers and employees need to start considering ownership of social media contacts," wrote Deb McAlister here at Forbes in a post, Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts?. "Paying attention to the documents you sign when you are hired – or reviewing them after the fact if need be – is becoming more important for all employees."
Kravitz has learned that lesson: "[With an employer] in the future, I would make it clear that a social networking account is mine and that I own it and its contacts."
Meanwhile, he's continuing to tweet from his account (and attract new followers) while the litigation is ongoing.
As for the $2.50 per follower valuation, someone should tell this Twitter-followers-for-sale site that it's severely undercharging at "500 followers for $29.99".
*Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Phonedog's lawsuit against Kravitz overlaps with a contractual lawsuit Kravitz has filed against the site laying claim on advertising revenue.
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0f019aa6896a5d0cfb6d3df7f99bca38 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/12/15/as-facebook-timeline-rolls-out-find-out-how-well-you-know-your-friends/ | As Facebook Timeline Rolls Out, Find Out How Well You Know Your Friends | As Facebook Timeline Rolls Out, Find Out How Well You Know Your Friends
Facebook rolled out Timeline with celebs (who are used to having their lives dissected)
Facebook is finally rolling out Timeline globally, meaning you can join Britney Spears, Tim Tebow, and Mark Zuckerberg in creating a curated look at the span of your life from birth to the present day. You may not have such exciting landmarks as "my first Rolling Stone cover," "my first NFL touchdown," or "my first million," but it is a way to showcase your greatest party pics of all time. Timeline is intended to shift your Facebook profile page from the current “snapshot of you” to something akin to a scrapbook of your entire life. It will surface what it perceives to be your most important Facebook activity (based on likes and comments) from the entirety of your time on the site. That means your account is about to be mined for the juiciest stuff.
Once users activate Timeline, Facebook is giving them at least seven days to curate their Timeline before it goes live. "As you explore your timeline, you may see stories that you want to feature, like your graduation or the day you bought your first car. There might also be stuff that you want to remove or hide from your timeline," writes Facebook engineer Paul McDonald in a blog post explaining how.
This is going to force users to do some privacy housekeeping. Every item on the Timeline will have a little "privacy dropdown box" so you can decide who you want to see it: the world, just friends, just me, etc. Limiting items to just your friends seems like a good privacy control, but that depends on how liberal you've been in friending people. Students in a technology class at Yale have created a nifty little quiz, called What's Her Face-book, to help Facebook users figure out how well they know the people they're connected to on the site. The quiz requests permission to access photos from Facebook and then shows you pictures of a handful of your friends and asks you to identify them, giving you a sense of the percentage of your friends are recognizable ones. I have over 1,200 friends on the site; I took the quiz and got an abysmal score...
I don't feel badly about not being able to identify this dog's owner
I was able to identify just 5 of the 14 photos they showed me. Sometimes, it was a simple memory lapse on someone's name (which I then skipped, since the quiz is timed), and sometimes it was because I had no idea who a person was. I did not do well in comparison to others who have taken the quiz; the 720 people who have played "Guess Who?" so far have been able to identify just over 70% of their friends on average. (Preliminary results suggest men recognize fewer of their friends on average, and are more likely to have female friends they don't recognize.)
The quiz purveyors suggest that I "get unfriendin'," noting that people I apparently don't know have the right to share my information with third party apps. Of course, this is not the first time it's been pointed out that many Facebook users play fast and loose with their 'Friend Request' confirmations; there have been previous studies that have shown that people have a tendency to friend people they don't know, especially if they're good looking or if you share mutual friends (allowing "hotbots" to infiltrate networks and gather 250 GB worth of data about Facebook users in one research study).
If nothing else, the quiz is a fun way to find out how good you are at remembering people's names on the spot.
Facebook wants to know how well you know your friends.
Facebook is aware of the problem of people being friends with some folks they know, some they don't, and some they don't really care about. Inside Facebook recently reported that the social network is going to start asking users how well they know friends. This will allow them to better curate what appears in users' news feeds (and allows them to collect even more valuable data about people's friend networks).
Many people, when building their networks, weren't thinking about the information that would be exposed years after.
"Make sure whenever you share something, you understand the group you are sharing with, and who comprises that group," say Bay Gross and Charlie Croom, the Yale students who created the quiz.
Facebook continues to change and evolve, and because those changes involve how our personal information is shared with friends and the world, it requires us to change along with it. That means a certain amount of care-taking as the site introduces new features. The Timelines are pretty breath-taking, but will take some of your time to groom. Alternately, you can join the exodus. The New York Times suggests it's not so bad to be a "Facebook resister."
Take the quiz here
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7ebaed17d0faa24c9b8db9dbe39f4b35 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-co-founder-alexis-ohanians-rosy-outlook-on-the-future-of-politics/ | Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics | Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics
By now, the tale of how Reddit and the forces of the Internet virtually killed proposed anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA is a familiar one. A boycott of GoDaddy led the one Internet company in support of the bill to reverse its position. Then a decision by Redditors to stage a one-day blackout inspired a number of other websites to follow suit, attracted mainstream media attention to the bills for the first time, and led supporters of the bill to recant. Now that the digital world has awoken to its ability to dramatically change the tide of the legislative process, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian thinks we can expect not only to see it happen again but for it to change the world of politics for the better.
From WTF To Politics
There's lots of fun, purely entertaining content on Reddit. Trust me. But Reddit, more than other social submission sites, such as Digg or Stumbleupon, has distinct political leanings. Anyone who spends much time there will discover a strong libertarian bent in the comments and phrasing of headlines by the site's 35 million users.
"Reddit has attracted a lefty, libertarian audience since the beginning," says Ohanian, 28. When he and Steve Huffman first created the site in 2005, they were submitting all the links -- under different user names -- for the first weeks of the site's existence to give it the appearance of a vibrant community. Ohanian thinks that his political leanings may have helped plant the seed for what was to come; the very first post on Reddit was an article he submitted about the Downing Street memo and the massaging of info to encourage the war in Iraq.
Their first big influx of traffic came from being linked by tech thinker Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame. "So we got all of Paul Graham’s early users which were basically geeks like us. They were the perfect early adopters. They were smart and really into technology," says Ohanian. "He wrote long form, tech-related stuff that attracted a certain kind of user who had the patience to read through many, many paragraphs on the Internet. So that fertilized the community with people with good ideas who upvoted good content."
"Maybe libertarians especially like Reddit because it is a perfect marketplace of content," Ohanian says. "Every Redditor is created equal, whether you’re the highest karma Redditor or a brand-new Redditor with 10 karma points. No submissions or votes are more equal than others."
The submission and comment system relies heavily on "upvoting" and "downvoting," meaning that stories and comments that are judged to be the most worthy by the most people float to the top while bad ideas and inferior content gets downvoted into oblivion. "The voting and the sorting – there’s nothing else like it on the Internet that has been able to, at this scale, still have comments that don’t look like YouTube and make you lose your faith in humanity."
The site has to work hard to combat those who try to manipulate it to get their stories to rise. Reddit came up with creative ways to catch and prevent manipulation, such as "ring voting" where users send out a link to a mailing list asking them to upvote a story. Reddit can be a draconian place when it comes to keeping its playing field level. They freely ban users who appear to abuse the system. "The reason why I think Reddit is still around and some of our competitors are not is because we were really adamant about maintaining the integrity of the site."
The SOPA Spark
"We’ve never seen anything like the SOPA/PIPA mobilization and I hope it’s not the last time we see it," says Ohanian. "I used to call it a leaderless movement but I now call it a leaderful movement because so many people stepped up to do things."
Ohanian first learned about the anti-privacy bill in November, after reading about it, appropriately, on Reddit. A week later, he was in Washington, D.C. talking to to Congressional staffers about the bill. On the train back, an XKCD colleague suggested that they block Reddit for IP addresses from D.C. and L.A.
"I mentioned it to the Reddit team," says Ohanian. "But taking a site like Reddit down wouldn’t feel right coming from the top down. They didn’t start thinking about it seriously until it started bubbling up from the Reddit community."
Reddit moderators -- who are not employees, but trusted users -- discussed the idea of blacking out some subreddits. That's when the Reddit team decided to take down the whole site.
"I, like so many other Redditors, emailed the folks at Google, Facebook and Wikipedia to try to get them to join," says Ohanian. Wikipedia did join in the black-out. Google censored its logo for a day. Facebook did not officially join, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a Facebook post voicing opposition and tweeted for the first time in three years to promote it.
The Internet has become so ubiquitous and necessary in our day-to-day lives that people are attuned to its regulation now than they have been in the past. "The Internet in the average American’s life is just vastly more than it was even six years ago – Facebook is everywhere, Twitter, there are so many more Internet tools people depend on now," says Ohanian. "There was an issue here, unlike when the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] was being talked about -- and I was in grade school -- that really effected the future of the Internet and we had all these tools at our disposal to actually get the word out and build an opposition."
Ohanian warns that the Internet "is paying attention to legislation that could screw things up."
"Until we actually get legislation that protects our rights online, we will continue to fight against stupid, lobbyist-bought legislation," he says. "We want bills that protect us, not ones that destroy us."
The Political Future
"This was the first time the Internet showed that it could make something an issue on a national stage, but mainstream media channels are still the most effective way to bring the mainstream into awareness," says Ohanian. But that's changing, a point that Mark Zuckerberg made in his letter to investors included in Facebook's IPO filing with the SEC this week.
"[W]e hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information," wrote Zuckerberg. "We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date."
The means through which we learn about the world are changing -- control of information is being displaced. That gives platforms like Reddit and Facebook more influence in the spread of information and the pressure put on the media to cover and dig into certain topics. And increasingly, politicians are dependent on these tools to spread messages and connect with voters directly.
"I didn’t miss the irony of [SOPA sponsor] Lamar Smith tweeting updates about his legislation that might have made Twitter impossible to create," says Ohanian. "As the Internet continues to get more clout, we have a very different value proposition to politicians. Unfortunately, for many politicians running for office, money dictates so much. And what do they use it for? Advertising, campaigns, TV commercials. As that medium loses its value, and as things like YouTube, Reddit and Facebook gain value, you get this wonderful leveling of the playing field in the political world as well."
As the Internet becomes a more powerful tool for connecting with voters and generating support, is it possible that campaign finance and lobbying money might have less of an influence (as happened ultimately with SOPA)? Ohanian is hoping so. And so is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg calls it "The Hacker Way" in his SEC letter to investors.
"Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people," he writes. "We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions. We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time... Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few."
Ohanian is excited by the prospect of an elected official with no money who has the exact same access to his or her constituents, , thanks to the Internet, as someone with millions. He raises as an proto power-user politician 2010 Kansas congressional candidate Sean Tevis who announced his campaign via an xkcd comic posted to Twitter and raised over $100K in campaign funds solely from small donors. (He lost to the incumbent; apparently, there weren't enough Internet-type voters in his district.)
"I think we’ll look back at him as someone who was one of the first to do something that will become the norm in America," says Ohanian. "I hope this is the way our elected officials get into office because that means they’ll be beholden to the people who got them into office not the people who paid for their political campaigns."
Since Ohanian is a graduate of UVA, he jokingly claims a direct line to Thomas Jefferson. "I have a feeling the founding fathers would give a big look of disapproval at the effect of lobbying dollars on our elected officials," he says.
Speaking of the founding fathers, I ask him what he thinks they would have thought of Reddit.
"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. It's the digital form of political pamplets.
"Yes, with much wider distribution and without the inky fingers," he says. "I would love to imagine that Common Sense would have been a self-post on Reddit, by Thomas Paine, or actually a Redditor named T_Paine."
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7d6755db60afe2658b9522a46d835dd5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/10/this-week-in-horrible-journalism-jezebels-rape-photos/ | This Week In Horrible Journalism: Jezebel's Rape Photos | This Week In Horrible Journalism: Jezebel's Rape Photos
On Wednesday night, Gawker's Jezebel blog (for the ladies) reported on a YouTube video posted by a user who claims to be based in Libya that depicts, by its own description, a foreign journalist being sexually assaulted by three men. By the time Jezebel posted its story, the video had been taken down. Writer Anna North, who had captured the video before its removal, decided it was not enough to simply describe the contents of the video. Instead, she posted screenshots of the recorded assault, including images of the "mostly naked" woman's body and the faces of her alleged rapists.
North's purpose in posting this was to ask the questions: "Who raped her, who posted it on the internet, and will she ever get justice?" While shaming and identifying the perpetrators -- part of North's purpose here -- required posting their images, it's unclear why North needed to include two images of the victim's body. It came across as "rape porn" to many shocked readers.
"The photos add nothing to the article. They only exploit the victim. I don't care that you don't see her face," wrote one. "As far as I am concerned they have raped her a second time," added another.
After getting complaints, Jezebel went back and obscured the images somewhat.
"We have since added additional pixelation to all of the images, including those of the attackers," wrote editor Jessica Coen in an update to the post. "This post is ultimately about the existence of a video, thus the images ARE the story — without them, there's nothing. To remove them would be, in effect, to un-report the story. Which is not going to happen."
While it's certainly a worthy news story -- that a rape occurred (if it did and this isn't some kind of horrible hoax) and that it was recorded and blatantly posted to YouTube publicly -- I disagree with Coen that the images of the woman being raped were necessary to report the story. One can convey atrocity without showing it -- using words, a common and handy tool employed by many a blogger and journalist. (When faced with this problem in the film Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog chose not to play the horrific audio of a couple being mauled by a bear, but instead shot footage of himself listening to the audio -- conveying the horror without exposing his audience to it.)
In this case, succumbing to the Internet command, "pics or it didn't happen," was classic exploitation, disturbing especially coming from a blog that entertains notion of feminism -- where I would expect to find a post lacerating a news organization for behavior like this. (Last year, North criticized journalists who remarked on CBS correspondent Lara Logan's "hotness" in reports about her assault in Egypt.)
Daily Dot writer Fruzsina Eordogh first brought the article to my attention on Twitter, where many shared their outrage about the piece:
This: I'm pretty sure you can write an article about a journalist's rape without posting screenshots of it. WTF, Jezebel? This: "As a media critic, journalist and feminist, I call bullshit on @Jezebel's "news" judgment re publishing images from a video of a rape." This: Dear Jezebel, posting pictures of a woman's rape in order to generate page views is reprehensible. As though you needed to be told. This: Note to @Jezebel: you can report on images of rape w/out reposting those images, much like you can report on murder without stabbing someone
North ended her post with this: "If anything good comes of the recording and posting of this disgusting crime, maybe it will be that the criminals actually get prosecuted." Thus far, there's been no follow-up on Jezebel as to whether the post has led to the identification of the woman or her assailants, or whether it has prompted a criminal investigation. Instead, North has moved on to reporting on "buppets" -- the transformation of one woman's breasts into puppet characters.
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7655e6f21648ade4939d37cf61049e53 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/27/how-the-true-patriot-network-tested-its-political-messages-on-the-99-via-email/ | How The 'True Patriot Network' Tested Its Political Messages On The 99% Via Email | How The 'True Patriot Network' Tested Its Political Messages On The 99% Via Email
Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu used digital advertising techniques to test out political messaging on... [+] different types of voters.
When two members of the 1% wanted to figure out how to get the 99% riled up (back in early 2011, in a pre-Occupy Wall Street time), they turned to e-mail marketing. Seattle-based duo Nick Hanauer, a tech entrepreneur who sold his advertising company aQuantive to Microsoft for $6.4 billion in 2007, and Eric Liu, a former presidential speechwriter turned media exec, wanted voters across the political spectrum to unite behind the concept of rebuilding the middle class. To figure out which political arguments would appeal to different ideological groups, they hired digital marketing company Marketfish to send eight different versions of an email from their non-partisan think tank, the True Patriot Network, to two million voters in the under $100,000/year income range. Then they studied how their Republican, Democratic, and Independent guinea pigs responded to the messaging.
Some of the e-mails talked about joblessness, others about foreclosures. Some were fact-based while others were emotional and angry. As happens with many e-mails that land in your inbox, information was collected as to whether the e-mail was opened or deleted, whether those targeted clicked on any of the content and visited the True Patriot Network website, and whether they then went on to share TPN content on social media sites, or acted on the site's prompt to e-mail their Congressman. Little did those emailed realize that the actions they took in response to the particular e-mail they received were being studied to reveal their "political persuasion profile."
Doing it this way was better (and cheaper) than testing messages by hiring a consultant to run focus groups, says Nick Hanauer. He and Liu were actually able to see which arguments worked on specific types of people to get them to (digitally) act.
"People on the left and right respond to inequality differently," says Hanauer. "People on the left think of it as unfair. People on the right think inequality is a sign of prosperity. But both respond to the idea that it’s a rigged game. Marketfish taught us that. "
The True Patriot Network went on to use these arguments in a recently-released book and in various editorials and appearances speaking about inequality issues.
"I'm not a bleeding heart liberal," says Hanauer. "I value you [in the 99%] because you’re a future customer."
What intrigued me about their information gathering was that it was predicted, in rather fearful tones, last year in the Filter Bubble. In the book, Eli Pariser voiced concerns about advances the advertising industry has made in the art of "persuasion profiling," or figuring out which methods of persuasion/pitches work best on specific people.
"In the wrong hands, persuasion profiling gives companies the abilities to circumvent your rational decision making, tap into your psychology, and draw out your compulsions," he wrote ominously. Pariser was less concerned about marketers using the technique to get you to load up on clothes and CDs than he was about political campaigns using the method to influence how people vote.
Pariser's concerns are a bit paternalistic. He worries that, once voters' psychologies are figured out, they'll be easily manipulated using online targeting. Whether or not voters are that manipulable, it is true that political campaigns are getting much better at online targeting.
Last week, the New York Times detailed how campaigns, including Romney's and Obama's, are increasingly using techniques honed by the online advertising industry to "put specific messages in front of specific voters." By dropping cookies on voters' computers, campaigns can send two different ads to the same household, so that a liberal-minded eighteen-year-old might be targeted with a different campaign video than his conservative-minded middle-aged mother.
As to Pariser's concerns about voter psychology mining and the 'persuasion profiling' techniques utilized by the True Patriot Network, Nick Hanauer seemed mostly unconcerned. His group, after all, wasn't trying to match psychologies with specific individuals. They were more interested in the psychologies of wider ideological groups.
The True Patriot Network and Marketfish say they don't plan to reuse the "persuasion profiles" they developed during this campaign. To select the two million voters targeted, Marketfish drew from its e-mail database of over 200 million people (consisting mainly of lists rented to the company by various organizations). When the company works with a group like Hanauer's, it doesn't actually hand any data over from their database, but sends e-mails on the organization's behalf. While Marketfish does buy, collect and store additional demographic information (such as voting records) for the people in its database to make its lists more valuable, the company says it's not adding the "persuasion metrics" to its files.
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81b1fd6c8d6e210a69a6df548bc0b7c3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/03/28/why-its-not-completely-ridiculous-for-a-high-school-to-monitor-students-tweets/ | Why It's Not Completely Ridiculous For A High School To Monitor Students' Tweets | Why It's Not Completely Ridiculous For A High School To Monitor Students' Tweets
What are they tweeting?
This week, many bloggers are up in arms over the expulsion of an Indiana high school senior for a profanity-laden tweet that was flagged by his school's social media monitoring system. After employing the "f word" generously in a late night tweet, Austin Carroll was expelled from Garrett High School and has been forced to enroll at an alternate school to get his diploma, reports The Journal-Gazette (via TechDirt). The school's principal has told media that his school has a system that "tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in."
Those criticizing the censor-happy principal's decision to expel someone based on profane speech (unleashed outside of the school setting, no less) are completely on target. But many critics are also questioning the school's monitoring of social media at all, which Mike Masnick at TechDirt characterized as "spying on how students use Twitter." Chris Danzig at Above The Law called it "creepy," while Mario Aguilar at Gizmodo asked, "[H]ow the hell did tweets become the school's business anyway?"
I could, in fact, imagine scenarios in which tweets would be the school's business. Last month, the Washington Post pointed out that Ohio school shooter, T.J. Lane, who killed three classmates and wounded others, had tweeted the morning of the shooting that he was bringing a gun to school. The Post includes a few other examples of students who used social media to broadcast cries for help, some of which were spotted by someone who answered them and some which were not.
Beyond threats of that proportion, many schools now have to deal with the question of how far they should go in monitoring cyberbullying and conflicts between students that move fluidly from the classroom to Facebook or Twitter. Other schools just want to make sure their students aren't making stupid decisions online. When I talked to an administrator at New York City's The School, which specializes in teaching kids "digital literacy," she told me that the school had come across disturbing online behavior after Googling the names of its students, such as girls discussing their sexual activity publicly on Formspring using their real names and a group of boys who had posted a questionable video involving race humor to YouTube. They confronted the students, not to punish them, but to warn them about the long-term consequences of such postings in the age of the permanent Google footprint. (Predictably, the students complained that the teacher who had stumbled upon their public postings had "invaded their privacy.")
For schools that are tasked with both keeping students safe and preparing them to succeed in their future endeavors, I can see the rationale behind social media monitoring. But, whether justified or not, the idea of authorities constantly monitoring our public streams of information is troubling to us, and not only when it concerns teachers and students. Recent reports about the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI monitoring sites like Facebook and Twitter raised many a public outcry about the social media version of Big Brother.
If schools are going to monitor public streams, they might be wise to use word-based alert systems to flag particular posts rather than having administrators looking at ever single public tweet. I've asked Garrett High School which software program they used to monitor their students but have not heard back yet. The principal's description of the program working when kids log into Twitter at school means there could be some questions about the school monitoring private as well as public accounts, which presents a whole different set of issues.
While they could improve their methods of monitoring to be more respective of students' privacy, unfortunately, there's no algorithm for improving school administrators' judgment calls. If monitoring does become more rampant, there will likely be more bad decisions, like that made by Garrett High School's principal, to punish students for out-of-school activity that really shouldn't f***ing fall within the school's jurisdiction.
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f6041356df69f5975802461c75a49325 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/04/02/ugly-new-reputation-smearing-tactic-going-after-a-toddlers-internet-footprint/ | Ugly New Reputation-Smearing Tactic: Going After A Toddler's Internet Footprint | Ugly New Reputation-Smearing Tactic: Going After A Toddler's Internet Footprint
Natalia Randazza, 3, already has to worry about her online reputation thanks to a blogger targeting... [+] her father
These days, you shouldn't worry just about your own online reputation but that of your children should you get on the bad side of a person who is willing to resort to ugly tactics in digital battles.
Crystal Cox, a Montana woman who calls herself an "investigative journalist," was slapped with a $2.5-million judgment last year for defaming an investment firm and one of its lead partners. Cox had taken control of the Google footprint of Obsidian Finance and its principal Kevin Padrick by writing hundreds of posts about them on dozens of websites she owned, inter-linking them in ways that made them rise up in Google search results. It ruined Obsidian's business due to prospective clients being put off by the firm's seemingly terrible online reputation. After Obsidian sued Cox, she contacted them offering her "reputation services;" for $2,500 a month she could "fix" the firm's reputation and help promote its business. (In some circles, we call that "extortion.")
Nonetheless, when the outrageously high judgment came down, some bloggers rushed to Cox's defense, in great part because the judge declared Cox not to be a member of the media in a poorly-written opinion that some interpreted to mean that bloggers generally couldn't claim legal protections for members of the press. So First Amendment-loving lawyers, including Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy and Matthew Zimmerman at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered Cox their services in appealing the case and attempting to get a new trial. (They were denied this week, with the judge clarifying that bloggers can be journalists, but that Cox is a serial harasser, not a journalist.) Another lawyer, Marc Randazza, had also spoken with Cox about her case; after deciding not to work with him, Cox sent him an email letting him know that she "needed to make money" and was willing to offer him her reputation management services. In fact, she had already bought his domain name (marcrandazza.com). Randazza writes on his blog:
Apparently I was not sufficiently threatened by this tactic, so Cox went on to register: fuckmarcrandazza.com, marcrandazzasucks.com, marcjrandazza.com, marcjohnrandazza.com She also registered a great many Blogger accounts bearing my name, including markrandazza.blogger.com. via Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN’T a journalist. « The Legal Satyricon.
(For disclosure's sake, I should mention that Cox also began blogging about me repeatedly around this time using the same tactics she used on Obsidian and Padrick, because I was the first to write a critical article about her tactics. When David Carr of the New York Times followed suit he also attracted her ire. In addition to frequent blog posts about Carr she bought the url 'davidcarrsucks.com'.)
Because Randazza (like David Carr and myself) writes frequently online he had a pretty solid handle on his online reputation (unlike bankruptcy lawyer Kevin Padrick), so Cox was unable to make much headway in ruining his Google search results with her domain-name buying and blogging. So she moved on to Randazza's family members who did not have much online content associated with their names. She bought the domain name for Marc's wife, Jennifer Randazza (and has already started dominating her first page of Google results with her hyperbolic posts). When Randazza still wouldn't buy her services Cox moved on to a younger member of the family:
When this didn’t get the desired response, Cox turned to a place where even the lowest of the low would not stoop — she focused her stalkerish attention on my three-year-old daughter and registered NataliaRandazza.com. via Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN’T a journalist. « The Legal Satyricon.
The search engine results for three-year-old Natalia Randazza are at this time dominated by content from her father, including a 'the baby has arrived' blog post with accompanying wrinkly newborn photo and a few YouTube baby videos (classics like "Natalia's first bath"). There's also a page by some confused data grabber that suggests Natalia and Marc Randazza are business associates. Perhaps due to the negative attention Cox took down the content she had started publishing on the nataliarandazza.com site.
Randazza's struggle with Cox is representative of a much larger battle being waged on the Internet pitting free speech against our rights to protect our reputations. Randazza, a lawyer who has in his career fought to protect lots of troubling speech, understands this tension more than most. Yet he writes:
Fortunately, I had a large enough public reputation and the Google juice to withstand her attacks. Kevin Padrick didn’t have that luxury. Other people won’t have that luxury. My three year old daughter doesn’t have that luxury... There is no doubt that the blogging community needs as many protections as it can get, and I believe many bloggers who I read, talk to and work with would qualify for protection under Oregon’s shield statute. Crystal Cox did not, does not, and cannot advance this goal. If the blogging community wishes to stand among those with the title of “journalist,” then it must reject people like Crystal Cox, and relegate them to their own bizarre, obsessive and child-targeting corner of the Internet. She is not one of us. She harms us. via Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN’T a journalist. « The Legal Satyricon.
Cox is an outlier. Her tactics are extreme ones. But we do now live in a world where money can be made from ruining reputations and then offering to fix them. In the business world there is RipOffReport.com, a site that hosts negative reviews of businesses and offers a paid "ambassador program" to those businesses to help them improve the reviews on the site. There's also a series of sites that dig up people's mug shots from public records and post them so that they appear in those people's search results; they then offer to take them down for a fee.
How do we draw the line between speech rights and digital forms of extortion? It is not a new question for us in the Internet age, but it remains an unanswered one.
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cc53346ddebbd60eadb7e49db27670e7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/04/05/hunter-moore-of-isanyoneup-wouldnt-mind-making-some-money-off-of-a-suicide/ | Why We Find Hunter Moore And His 'Identity Porn' Site, IsAnyoneUp, So Fascinating | Why We Find Hunter Moore And His 'Identity Porn' Site, IsAnyoneUp, So Fascinating
Hunter Moore of Is Anyone Up
Hunter Moore has created an apparently thriving business from posting amateurs' nude photos alongside screenshots of their Facebook or Twitter profiles. It’s not the only porn website where those featured get “poked,” but the only one where visitors get to do the poking. Many of those featured on the site are unwilling porn stars, their photos submitted by vengeful exes happy to share once-cherished tokens of intimacy with the world or hackers who broke into email or social networking accounts where the revealing photos were unwisely stored. Some people voluntarily bare all on IsAnyoneUp, seeking to gain Internet fame and a bigger online following. "People will do anything for the extra couple followers on Twitter," says Moore in the Village Voice in the most recent of a growing series of profiles of a man who has come to represent the dark side of radical transparency.
In a profile in The New Inquiry, also out this month, Matt Pearce calls the fare on Moore's site "identity porn." "It’s no longer enough of a turn-on to merely see someone naked; late capitalism’s porn industry has taken revealing our bodies as far as it can go," writes Pearce. "In the social-media era, the kinkiest thing you can do is turn a porn site into a phone book."
Part of the appeal, with the shots of those there unwillingly at least, is the privacy violation: the fact that you are gazing at a photo meant for someone else, intruding on an intimate moment not meant for you. And the appeal with all of the photos is that a person's identity is exposed along with their body parts.
I think of Moore as Mark Zuckerberg's dark alter-ego; both twenty-somethings have figured out how to capitalize on social networking, people exposing themselves online, and photo sharing (though the Zuck is not a fan of Moore's site). Moore is not making Zuck-level money, but he's doing fairly well for himself: When I first interviewed Moore last summer, he was making $8,000 a month from the advertising on his site. In an Awl interview a few months later, he said revenue was up to $13,000 a month, thanks to increased traffic -- likely generated in great part by media attention, as journalist after journalist has flocked to Moore, each equally astounded by his unapologetic attitude toward the unwilling models on the site who complain of humiliation, harassment and lost jobs. In addition to advertising, the Village Voice reports that Moore is now being booked to do paying DJ gigs and party appearances around the country.
Moore realizes that his "f***ing people over" brand is sale-able, so he is going to keep trolling the Internet, the media, and those who take nude photos to build his traffic and profit from it. Gawker points out the latest jaw-dropping example of Moore's cutthroat business savvy in the Voice profile. Moore says that, while he'd hate to be the cause of someone's suicide, it would be good for business:
"I'm gonna sound like the most evil motherf***er-let's be real for a second: If somebody killed themselves over [being on the site]? Do you know how much money I'd make? At the end of the day, I do not want anybody to hurt themselves. But if they do? Thank you for the money." ... "The more traffic I'd have that day, I'm going to get paid for. So if someone f***ing killed themselves? Do you know how much hate I'd get? All the Googling, all the redirects, all, like, the press"—here he sounds like he's stifling a yawn; it is morning—"I'd get paid for, for that day. And whatever." via Hunter Moore Makes a Living Screwing You - Page 5 - News - New York - Village Voice.
Moore is as willing to shed pretense and expose his capitalistic motives as the subjects on his site are willing to shed their clothes and expose their bodies. That's why journalists love to interview him and people love to read about him (even as it makes their skin crawl).
Moore is making the most of his site and the controversy it inspires. But the legality of his creation has yet to be tested. If the right court case comes along, IsAnyoneUp may well be taken down.
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f5cb0a88fc1203283376082442843ff4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/04/23/why-google-and-facebook-are-spending-record-amounts-on-lobbying/ | Why Google and Facebook Are Spending Record Amounts On Lobbying | Why Google and Facebook Are Spending Record Amounts On Lobbying
TechCrunch reports that 2012 marks record spending in D.C. for both Google and Facebook. In the first quarter of 2012, Google dropped over $5 million in lobbying dollars, while Facebook spent $650,000 (which is measly by comparison, but is already almost half of what it spent in all of 2011). Google tripled the amount it spent last year in the same time period, while Facebook came close to doing the same. This means this year will continue the upward trend lines on their respective D.C. budget charts.
The simple explanation for why these two companies are going gangbusters with their D.C. spending is that D.C. is going gangbusters with potential Internet legislation. Here's the laundry list of Internet bills that are or recently have been on the table in D.C.:
1. This week is Cyber Week in Washington, because Congress is considering a slew of potential cybersecurity bills. The one that's gotten the most attention is CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. This one would encourage private companies to hand over information to the government about cyber attacks and network insecurities. Supported by Facebook and reportedly by Google, it includes incentives for companies including liability limitations, the information not being used for regulatory purposes, and the promise that government will share information in return. Civil liberties groups are concerned about the bill's vagueness, and the fact that companies will be able to bypass existing privacy laws when they hand data over. They'd like narrower definition of what can be turned over, when it can be turned over, who gets access to it and how it can be used against users.
2. CISPA is far from the only cybersecurity bill that has attracted lobbying attention from Google and Facebook. There's the PRECISE Act, which is supposed to protect that nation's critical infrastructure by requiring players like power companies to meet government-set standards to protect themselves from hackers; and the SECURE IT Act... The list goes on. We could combine them all into one big "Hackers Please Go Away And Stop Messing With Us" Act.
3. Privacy initiatives, such as Do Not Track. There's been lots of talk about giving consumers the right not to be tracked online. Representatives Ed Markey and Joe Barton are pushing the Do Not Track Kids Act, "prohibiting Internet companies from sending targeted advertising to children and teens and collecting personal and location information without parental or individual consent." Meanwhile the Commerce Department has punted on Do Not Track for adults, saying in a recent white paper that it's content with private industry coming up with an option for consumers to signal they don't want to have online tracking darts shot into them by advertisers, browsers, and websites.
4. The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act. Aw. Remember this collaborative effort by Senators John McCain and John Kerry that would spell out how our personal data could be used? All is quiet on that front for now.
5. SOPA/PIPA. The Stop Online Privacy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Acts were anti-piracy bills that attracted the ire of Internet companies and the masses for the limits they would set on free speech. Both died very horrible and painful deaths after lobbying by Google, Facebook and others and coordinated online protests by Wikipedia, Reddit, and others.
6. The Video Privacy Protection Act. Netflix and Facebook have been pushing hard for Congress to revisit the law that forbids video providers from disclosing what we've rented/watched. Netflix says the law is preventing it from jumping on the Facebook frictionless sharing bandwagon, though Hulu's lawyers came to a different conclusion. (Netflix's spending for the first quarter of 2012 is not in the Lobbying Disclosure database yet.)
7. Data Breach bills. Right now, data breach notification requirements vary across the country depending on which state a company is based in (or which states its newly-exposed customers reside in). Congress has been considering a couple of Data Breach Notification acts that would standardize the process for when, why, and how companies have to let you know that your data has gone viral, has gone missing, or has fallen into the hands of hackers. Also on the table is the SAFE Data Act, requiring companies to better protect the data they have.
This non-exhaustive list of the many Internet-related bills floating about in D.C. should give you a taste of why two huge players in tech are opening their wallets wider in the nation's capital. The Internet is increasingly the place where we live, work, play, and commit crimes, so it's getting much more attention from lawmakers. That means Silicon Valley has to pay close attention (and lobbyists) in hopes of avoiding negative legislative outcomes.
Beyond pending legislation, both companies are on D.C.'s radar for other reasons. Both companies are going to have to make biannual privacy reports to the FTC. Facebook's IPO looms large. And Google has been dealing with antitrust allegations.
Both companies have beefed up their lobbying operations in the past year, replacing Internet policy specialists (Alan Davidson at Google and Tim Sparapani at Facebook) with D.C. insiders, such as Joel Kaplan and Susan Molinari, who know how to work with the administration and Congress because they used to work in the administration and in Congress, respectively.
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6971de3763155255730eeb8b14f44dc4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/03/are-parents-becoming-addicted-to-spying-on-their-kids/ | Are Parents Addicted To Spying On Their Kids? | Are Parents Addicted To Spying On Their Kids?
Kids are desperate to flee from their parents' spying, reports the Wall Street Journal. In a piece about "Tweens' Secret Lives Online," the Journal tracks the online lengths kids are going to in order to get away from their stalkerish parents.
Digital anthropologist danah boyd told me last year that teens then were fleeing from Facebook to Twitter to escape the prying eyes of adults. WSJ journo Katherine Rosman says that Instagram is now one of the tools kids use to exchange messages in a semi-public way (where the public doesn't include nosy adults).
In cataloging all of the sites out there where the kids go these days, Rosman writes: "It's harder than ever to keep an eye on the children." Um, what?
The digital age does offer a plethora of new digital spaces for kids to hang out, but it has also offered up a ridiculous number of tech tools for parents to watch kids as they hang out. I think Rosman is absolutely wrong. It's easier than ever to keep multiple eyes on children. In fact, I suspect parents are growing addicted to spying on kids given the ease of monitoring what they're doing, who they're talking to, and where they are.
You can give your child a phone and then monitor their text messages with Mobile Watchdog and track their whereabouts using Location Labs technology. You can put a monitoring box in your teen driver's car that sends you information about how they're driving and where they are. You can put spyware on their computers to monitor their Internet use or simply use your computer's built-in tools. You can force them to download Facebook apps that will alert you if they're talking to strangers or using questionable language. Or you can friend them on Facebook so you know exactly who's in their friend group and how they talk to each other. Or you can join the creepy 61% of parents who have secretly logged into their kids' accounts without their permission. One day soon, helicopter parents may be able to buy a drone that just follows their children 24 hours a day.
Safely, a company that provides monitoring software that parents can put on their kids' phones, did an analysis of how often parents using their product around the country check their children's whereabouts. Most parents using their software geolocate their kids about 100 times a month. But in a small town in Missouri, extreme users check their kids' location 7500 times per month. Maybe it's time to change the motto there from The Show Me State to the Show Me Where You Are State.
That is mind-blowing. Those parents are tracking their kids 250 times per day. Given that kids are probably out of their parents' sight for 10 hours at most per day, that's 25 times an hour.
Safely characterizes its heaviest users as "Power Users." Those top 1% check their kids' whereabouts 16 times per day. My own parents certainly didn't have that luxury. I would disappear with my bike on a Saturday and be completely out of touch, my whereabouts unknown for hours at a time.
Let's hope that digitally enabled overparenting doesn't completely crush kids' freedom of exploration. Let tweens actually have a little bit of a secret life.
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655d33f9b32130ae64e72a9e233fbf14 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/06/07/snake-on-a-plane-or-how-twitter-outed-a-married-actor-making-moves-on-a-model/ | Snake On A Plane, Or How Twitter Outed A Married Actor Making Moves On A Model Mid-Flight | Snake On A Plane, Or How Twitter Outed A Married Actor Making Moves On A Model Mid-Flight
On Wednesday, two people sat next to each other on a plane. One was an actor. The other was a model. By the end of that flight, the model may have ruined the actor's life. The Twitter stream below is an amazing example of the new Little Brother world that we live in, in which encounters that we think are private can become public unexpectedly and dramatically.
The actor attempted to flirt with the model. The model, Melissa Stetten, live-tweeted the encounter to her thousands of followers (Thank you, Virgin America wi-fi!). The actor provided enough details about his career that Stetten's Twitter followers were able to Google him, find him on IMDB, and provide Stetten with details about his life, including the fact that he's a devoted family man (at least in news interviews).
By the time that red-eye flight landed, Brian Presley's misdeeds had already gone viral. (He has not returned a call from this reporter, left Wednesday.) Here's the Twitter stream in all of its crowd-sourced facts and bad-deed exposing glory:
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acf3f9ee601ea09264e17776c38b60d3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/06/25/facebooks-lame-attempt-to-force-its-email-service-on-you/ | Facebook's Lame Attempt To Force Its Email Service On You | Facebook's Lame Attempt To Force Its Email Service On You
Please don't email me here.
You may or may not realize that you have a Facebook email address. It's an @facebook.com address you can use to correspond with people on external email accounts from your Facebook inbox. Though it was called a "Gmail killer" when it first came out in 2010, it seems instead to have been D.O.A. As far as I can tell, no one really uses it. No one seems to want the Facebook inbox to be their main email account (with good reason). Facebook is trying to change that with a new little nudge. On your profile page, Facebook has taken the liberty of making your Facebook email your default contact address. (See right, and check your own profile.)
For me, this contact email was previously either my Forbes account or my Gmail account -- both of which I prefer to be emailed at. While I appreciate Facebook as a "White Pages" that allows me to reach out to just about anyone, I'm not a fan of the social network's screwy messaging system and the way it auto-sorts your email for you, putting emails from 'strangers' in a shadow inbox that's easy to miss. As a result, I barely check my Facebook inbox.
Cue The Prisoner: 'I am not a number! I'm a free emailer!'
Whether you opted for one or not, you do have a Facebook email address. If you have created a Facebook vanity url (such as "https://www.facebook.com/kashmir.hill") then your FB email address is that vain phrase at the end plus @Facebook.com. If you haven't customized your Facebook url, then your email address consists of the random number Facebook has assigned to your profile -- which makes for a pretty lame email account. (See right.)
The presumptuous change to your contact preference was first noted by Gervase Markham on his blog. He objects strenuously to Facebook auto-creating email addresses for users and then trying to force those contacting them to use it. It's an interception of user communications under the light Markham shines on it:
In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at? via Facebook MITMed My Email | Hacking for Christ.
Security researcher Ashkan Soltani meanwhile calls it "slightly fishy to auto-replace your default email address with 'facebook.com' without any user consent." After all, it should be up to Facebook users to determine the information in their profile about how they want to be contacted, not Facebook. I hope they don't start taking other liberties with my profile page, changing my interests, hobbies, and "in a relationship with" to "Facebook. Only Facebook." I realize that there's research out there suggesting that oversharing on Facebook is as pleasurable as sex and eating delicious things, but I'm not that into it.
A Facebook spokesperson says the company has been updating Facebook addresses for users since April. Without specifying when exactly the company made this the default contract address for its users, the spokesperson says the site is "rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines."
"Ever since the launch of timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address," says spokesperson Andrew Noyes via email.
This is another in a long line of 'nudges' Facebook gives users to try to get them to spend more time on the site, and to make it users' sole destination when they go online. Facebook would love to be the all-inclusive resort of the Web, replete with complimentary digital daiquiris (that you're forced to chug) upon entry. But this change is more a shove than a nudge, potentially circumventing emails you'd like to go elsewhere.
To assert your actual contact preference, you have to go to your profile page, hide the Facebook.com address from your Timeline, and replace it with another address, assuming you want to be contacted at all.
Read more:
What Employers Are Thinking When They Look At Your Facebook Page
Facebook Plans To End The 'No Kids Under 13' Farce
Here's A Completely Different Reason To Be Skeptical About Facebook
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