e-biz
putting the 'e' into business
Friday 18 July 2008, 7:31 PM
Don’t Ride The ‘Doom & Gloom’ Bandwagon
Forget all the doom mongering about the credit crunch and turn these troubled times to your advantage, making this crisis your opportunity.
Though worry and uncertainty is normal at this time, it is important to remember that even if things do go wrong in the short-term, such crises can also mean massive opportunities for positive change. It could be the chance to finally take control of the future, plan a career change, or fulfil that dream of setting up a business and being top dog. And remember, redundancy can actually be the springboard to your success - I should know!
Online trading is an area of the economy that continues to rise. According to recent figures published by Verdict, online spending on retail purchases rose by 35% to 14.7 billion last year and with Internet shopping growing at its fastest rate in six years and more and more UK households getting broadband, the only way to go is up for online retailers.
Getting online is the only way to go now. Some retailers will even tell you that they wouldn’t have been able to afford to keep their shops open had they not set up a Web site for trading online in tandem. Some have even closed their shops after setting up their Web site and now sell purely online. The spirit of entrepreneurialism has never been stronger than it is now in the UK with programs such as The Apprentice and Dragons Den.
So all in all, let’s try to stay positive. Most things at the moment suck - like the price of food and petrol - but let’s not jump on the ‘doom and gloom’ bandwagon of despair, for all that will do will drag us down. We can create new businesses, we can weather the temporary economic storm and we can do better than just survive, we can grow our economy once again like we did over the last two decades. But more importantly, we can grow as people and come out the other side more experienced and rewarded.
Sunday 13 July 2008, 6:06 PM
Net Helps You Work Till You Drop
If you’re thinking of taking early retirement because you’ve been sensible and put away your money in ISAs, saving accounts and property, think again. You can forget about living off an adequate pension, too. Life may be too short to sit at the some desk day after day, but the way things are heading in this country you may be working through the night to make ends meet.
The credit crunch and the rising cost of living in the UK are forcing increasing numbers of retirees to supplement their income by sourcing ad-hoc jobs on online service marketplaces. A recent report said that many pensioners are drawing on their experience and expertise in a wide range of professions to bid for projects posted online by businesses.
Pensioner poverty increased by 300,000 in 2006 to 2007 to a total of 2.5 million, a Government report recently found. Research conducted by Scottish Widows this week found that one in three Britons cannot afford to put aside any savings for their retirement, which suggests the pensioner poverty problem is only likely to get worse.
Small-biz employers can look on the bright side: retirees make excellent freelancers and you can pay them in Aspirin tablets and Co-op vouchers. They also tend to be highly-experienced and reliable - which is rare these days - and you can save some cash on corporate gym memberships. But bathroom breaks can take two days and you don’t ever want to discuss employee health insurance.
Monday 7 July 2008, 8:42 AM
Slow Broadband Dampens Business Edge
On September 18th, 2007, the Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP (the then Minister of State for Competitiveness), said: ‘Before too long, the wider economy is going to need high speed broadband. The high speed broadband networks being deployed elsewhere for multi-channel TV will increasingly be used in other commercial applications.
‘The growing number of people working at home will require high speed connections to support them….all these trends are pushing up the bandwidths which are going to be required across the economy….services and applications coming onto the market will only be properly exploited and enjoyed if the bandwidth exists to deliver them to the end user….the infrastructure must be capable of delivering high speed broadband to all.’
Where did it all go wrong?
Britain’s comparatively slow broadband speeds are said to be threatening business efficiency, warns the Communications Management Association (CMA). This is because lack of provision to meet predicted demands will frustrate companies’ e-commerce operations.
Apparently, over a third of UK businesses predict they will need speeds of 100Mbps to be able to meet future demand for next generation Internet technology. Yet around a third say they currently do not receive satisfactory access to Internet technology - such as infrastructure, services and applications.
So what can be done? As businesses we should be banging on the door of Government to create a national broadband strategy that anticipates the massive rise in demand for next generation access (NGA) to the Internet over the next 12 to 24 months. Otherwise, the gap between Government spin and formulation of policy will grow wider than ever.
From Timms’ crowd-rousing speech to now there has been little sign of either a concerted or innovative approach to regulation and policy-making, which the Government acknowledged as recently as last September as being necessary.
Why can’t this Government get anything right?
Monday 30 June 2008, 1:45 PM
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
You’re caught up in the buzz about blogs and you want to make a quick buck or two in the digital world by becoming a niche blogger. Hold your horses, because things could go wrong in a hurry.
Let me explain. Let’s say a friend of mine called Mr Pink set up a small portfolio of blogs to make a little money each from Google AdSense advertisements. Nothing wrong with that. However, one day Mr Pink woke up, logged on, and all his blogs were gone. Vanished without a trace...
What happened? Well, Blogger.com (owned by Google), determined that Mr Pink was violating its terms of service. Google thought Mr Pink’s blogs were what are called ‘splogs’ or spam blogs.
Spam blogs, increasing being referred to as splogs, are artificially created Weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated Web sites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the Google PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate Web sites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.
Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from other Web sites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites. Basically, they’re a scourge on the Internet.
Mr Pink called Blogger.com and told support staff his sites weren’t spam, but they didn’t want to know. He never got his sites back and lost around £2K per month income - overnight. The moral of the story? Besides not using Blogger (WordPress is far better), get yourself your own domain names and Web hosting. There’s obviously cost involved, but the security and control you have makes it worthwhile. At least you’ll sleep well knowing your blogs will still be there in the morning.
Friday 27 June 2008, 10:23 PM
The Internet Is Doomed (& I feel Fine)
One of the world’s leading academics, Professor Jonathan Zittrain, has warned that the Internet may come to an end under the weight of malicious code. [end dramatic music] Zittrain has called for the Internet to be locked down by a solution that does not destroy the creativity and openness that made the Internet such an enormous success in the first place.
Let’s get this right. There are over 171 million Web hosts now in use. Think of each one of these as a distinct Web site (some Web sites do span multiple hosts, but some hosts deliver multiple sites). Each Web site has content within it.
Let’s say, for argument sake, that the average Web site has 100 pages of content. That would mean there are 171,000,000 sites x 100 pages content average = 17,100,000,000 or 17 billion Web pages of content out there. So Google and Inktomi would have each indexed little more that 10% of the Internet. Is this number realistic? I cannot confirm or deny this because my brain just doesn’t do numbers, but the number of pages out there is probably a little higher. What the heck, let’s just shut the whole lot down anyway...
While it may be a little over zealous to suggest the Internet is rapidly coming to an end, it is clear that we’re all in a continuous battle to combat the threats that emerge as a result of increased malicious activity on the Internet. The widespread nature of viruses, spam, worms, phishing and fraud has meant that fending off each new piece of malware as it emerges is next to impossible, putting an end to the reliance on reactive technologies like anti-virus software.
The problem is that we now run around like headless chickens, applying emergency security updates and patching everything except the kitchen sink in response to identified threats and vulnerabilities. This reactive approach to security (typified by anti-virus solutions) has highlighted many inadequacies, placing computers at risk of security breaches. Surely, only by turning security on its head to enforce a ‘known-good’ state, can cybercrime be addressed.
The public and businesses alike need to consider deploying technologies that monitor and only allow known good applications or devices to connect to their PC or network. While this ‘whitelisting’ approach has had a reputation for impacting productivity, the technology has progressed rapidly since it emerged on the market, not prohibiting the user entirely but allowing them to access data and execute programs that are needed to perform their daily tasks while keeping the malicious activities out. Isn’t that better than shutting the whole thing down?
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