Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Friday 24 November 2006, 3:14 PM
A motley crew indeed
A bit belated, but I thought I should link over to Andrew Lim's piece for Crave on the 3 X-series launch last week. We did of course cover it ourselves, but it's worth it for the photograph, which shows senior representatives of (deep breath) Microsoft, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Skype, Sling Media and Orb, all standing in a smiley line and not hitting each other. Bravo. Oh, and that's Hutchison's cunningly named Canning Fok there, fourth from left...
Thursday 23 November 2006, 2:18 PM
FM transmitters go legal
Well, we knew this already but the update is that your iTrip or whatever will be genuinely legit as of December 8. As promised.
Thursday 23 November 2006, 12:50 PM
Orange call-centre fiasco
According to an ex-employee, an unspecified number of staff at Orange's North Tyneside call-centre have been using the same login details and password! Not a terribly good security practice, I'm sure you'll agree, especially where scads of customer details are floating about.
We rang Orange for a comment, but they are staying tight-lipped while they complete their own internal investigation into the matter. No idea yet how many employees were involved or, for that matter, whether this might be standard practice across their sweatshops, sorry, centres of customer service excellence (I jest, of course - Orange's customer service is far from the worst).
UPDATE: Just got Orange's response to this story, which assures us that all staff are issued with individuals log-ins and passwords, and states: "It is Orange policy that no member of staff should log in using any user name other than their own. If a member of staff was found to be using a colleagues' details to log into the system, we would take this matter very seriously, and it could result in disciplinary action". Apparently the investigation's results will come out in the next few days.
Tuesday 21 November 2006, 5:16 PM
So THAT's what makes a good business!
Those of you who enjoy silly corporate-sponsored formulae (read the Guardian's Ben Goldacre enthusiastically sounding off on the subject here) should have fun with this one, released by... can't tell you yet actually, as it's under embargo until Thursday (but I couldn't wait).
OK, so here goes. Apparently, the formula for a successful small business is: S = (c√ P + L/150 + 2.3F) / [1 + (Y-1)2 ]. "c" is the percentage of the business that's under your control, "P" is the percentage of people whose lives can potentially be improved by your service or product, "L" is the number of miles your business is north of London (I promise I'm not making this up), "F" is the gender adjustment figure (not a transgender thing, but 1 if female, 0 if male - cheers), "Y" is the number of years mulling the project over before actually going and doing it, and "S" is - obviously - success.
This was painstakingly worked out by an genuine statistician/industrial psychologist who was categorically not whoring out his profession to get his name in the headlines.
Anyway, the press release also reveals that "women are out performing men" (surely missing a hyphen there?) and are "much more likely to enjoy seamless growth". And, believe it or not, "greed [is] no longer seen as a key driver for business success".
Consider yourself enlightened.
Monday 20 November 2006, 2:55 PM
Scamalot
I've been glancing through Michael Peel's Chatham House report Nigeria-Related Financial Crime And Its Links With Britain, off the back of how it was reported in the papers (such as the Metro's "'Nigeria e-mails' cost £150m a year" headline).
Now, we all know the "419 scam" scenario - email rocks up in your mailbox asking you to fund the release of some stash of ill-gotten cash, of which you'll supposedly get a cut - but a couple of things stopped me from writing this up as a fully-fledged story. Firstly, it's based on old data from CIFAS (the anti-fraud body, or one of them at least). Secondly, CIFAS never said these figures were all down to email-based fraud. Thirdly, they never said they were all down to Nigerians either, which makes those headlines this morning rather confused and more than a bit unfair.
One interesting historical fact did emerge from the Peel report, however:
"Advance fee frauds have been around for centuries, most famously in the form of the 'Spanish prisoner' scam. In this, a wealthy merchant would be contacted by a stranger who was seeking help in smuggling a fictitious family member out of a Spanish jail. In exchange for funding the 'rescue', the merchant was promised a reward, which of course never materialized. In the early twentieth century, the Nigerian Customs and Trade even printed a letter from Britain’s ambassador in Spain warning the public in Nigeria to be 'upon their guard' against the scam."
That's irony for you, folks.
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