News You Can Use: 11/14/2018
- China is making the internet less free, and US tech companies are helping
While doing business in China, US tech companies must play by local rules — or leave, as Google did in 2010. Sarah Cook, Freedom House’s senior research analyst for East Asia, tells The Verge that abiding by local regulation is a waste of time. “Rather than develop tailor-made products to comply with China’s draconian censorship rules, we believe tech companies’ resources and ingenuity would be better spent on helping users jump the Great Firewall and access the uncensored version of their products,” she says.
But most companies aren’t doing that. This August, Apple pulled 25,000 apps from its Chinese App Store, claiming they were “illegal” according to local law. In 2017, Apple removed VPN apps that people had used to elude Chinese censorship. When Apple launched the Product RED version of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in China, it removed any trace of the Product RED branding that’s designed to support AIDS-related charities, in what some critics say may have been a response to China’s anti-LGBT policies. Currently, LinkedIn restricts Chinese users from accessing politically sensitive profiles or posts from people outside the country. Microsoft’s Bing search engine still sanitizes Chinese language search results, nearly a decade after the New York Times first reported on it.
- This Map Shows You How Much Money Every Member of Congress Got from Big Telecom
The map only includes incumbents, so you’ll have to dig a little deeper to get information on other candidates. Still, it’s a good starting place for checking where your members of congress stand before you cast a ballot. In New York, for example, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has gotten $413,307 from ISPs, according to the map, while Senator Chuck Schumer has attracted $1,018,574 in contributions from Big Telecom.
Net neutrality and the influence of Big Telecom is a hot issue for many voters, after the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality last year. Major ISPs were in favor of scrapping the rules and used their financial and lobbying power to try to push it through.
- NAFTA, explained with a toy car
- Facebook Is the Least Trusted Major Tech Company When it Comes to Safeguarding Personal Data, Poll Finds
Only 22% of Americans said that they trust Facebook with their personal information, far less than Amazon (49%), Google (41%), Microsoft (40%), and Apple (39%).
“Facebook is in the bottom in terms of trust in housing your personal data,” said Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema. “Facebook’s crises continue rolling in the news cycle.”
http://fortune.com/2018/11/08/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-reputation/
- Half of YouTube viewers use it to learn how to do things they’ve never done
A new Pew research study that surveyed 4,594 Americans in 2018 found that 51 percent of YouTube users say they rely on the video service to figure out how to do new things, and the service proved important both for regular users and irregular users. “That works out to 35 percent of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for,” the study reads.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/7/18071992/youtube-pew-study-education-news-childrens-videos
Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash
News You Can Use: 8/3/2016
- AI and machine learning on social media data is giving hedge funds a competitive edge
Morse said sentiment derived from consumers about certain brands, which can also impact equity prices, is a new twist on the subject currently being explored and which we can expect to see a lot of in the future. Twitter can also gauge macro and geopolitical factors he said, citing a study last year which showed Twitter data predictive of unemployment levels in the US.
StockTwits, which provides real time commentary on individual companies, was the inventor of the cashtag, adopted by Twitter over time.
- This American Life: Choosing Wrong
Stories of people making the wrong choice, even though the right one is staring them squarely in the eye. Basketball players making a conscious decision to not do the thing that makes them better, pollsters refusing to see the truth of Donald Trump, and more.
This was a great podcast about doing the wrong thing and why it happens. Totally worth a listen.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/590/choosing-wrong
- The Government Buys $2 Trillion Worth of Stuff Every Year. Here Are 5 Ways To Do It Better
Promote smart risk-taking and innovation:
Almost all interviewees agreed that the procurement workforce’s contribution to solving complex problems is limited by a risk-averse, change-resistant orientation. Agency leaders must encourage creative problem-solving and invest in training and recruitment that promotes this approach. - Why I quit often…
”Now that you change jobs often, your resume looks like the sponsor page @ a fundraiser.” I get this often from prospective employers and and colleagues. It’s the elephant in the room…and I get it. It looks bad. They want to know: Why can’t you just keep a job? Stop jumping ship! My response is complicated. I don’t want to keep quitting. I don’t enjoy changing health plans every year, remembering more system login’s and passwords or proving myself over and over again – It’s not easy, trust me. It’s exhausting – but I need to be motivated and do what’s best for me. Similarly, you need to drive your career and once you surround yourself by motivated people, things will happen – for everyone.
- Supply chain problems can be solved through professionalization, innovation, speed
“The challenge we all face is that the rate of change is accelerating, often not in our direct control but with major consequences for our businesses. Global and local challenges are at the heart of competitive strategy and all institutions are being forced to confront them in an increasingly efficient and innovative way. The supply chain industry is at the center of operations in most industry value chains and therefore has a vital role to play.”
Photo: dan carlson
News You Can Use: 6/22/2016
- Cable and telecom companies just lost a huge court battle on net neutrality
The court verdict puts to rest — for now — a key question: Whether the Internet represents a vital communications platform that deserves to be regulated with the same scrutiny as the common networks of the past, such as the telephone system. Writing for the court, Judges David Tatel and Sri Srinivasan held that despite advances in technology, the underlying importance of the Internet to everyday communications and commerce makes it more similar to the phone system than not. Today, for example, consumers are accustomed to using not just the email accounts that their broadband provider gave them, but also using third-party services such as Gmail as well as Netflix, Amazon and Uber.
- What’s going on with IT hiring?
CompTIA, an industry group, said about 96,000 IT jobs were lost last month across all industries, not just the technology sector. That figure includes the impact of the approximately 37,000 telecommunications jobs sidelined by the Verizon strike, which was settled this month. But it was a rough month, by some estimates.
Analysts have been generally cautious this year about IT hiring trends. Although the unemployment rate for IT professionals is about half the national average of 4.7%, said CompTIA, some analysts use terms ranging from “modest” to “pre-recession” to describe IT hiring.
- The Psychology of Solitude: Being Alone Can Maximize Productivity, with Scott Barry Kaufman
- 4 Steps to Avoid ‘Death by Meeting’
Whether your meetings are derailed by the shiny object syndrome, or you get stuck in the weeds, the only person who can save you is you! That’s why, when I’m facilitating team events, I make sure that our agendas include business items as well as elements relevant to the team. That way, we weave in learning with business needs, giving team members an opportunity to practice and apply the skills they are learning.
What often happens, when a team gets stuck in the weeds or off track, is that team members start making eye contact with me: raising an eyebrow, in effect begging me to, “Get us out of here — we are stuck!” It always strikes me that it’s me, the guest facilitator, who is asked to save the day.
- Doth thou protest too much?
Many will applaud this effort to reign in what is seen as an out of control protest process. After all, the protest rate has grown some 45 percent during a period of time that total federal spending has dropped 25 percent. In 2001 there were about 700 individual protests filed with the GAO; in 2015 that number was over 2,500. Interestingly, of those protests on which GAO ultimately ruled, its “sustain rate” had dropped to 12 percent—from 18 percent just a few years earlier and 22 percent in 2001.
https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2016/06/03/insights-soloway-bid-protests.aspx
- How Google killed Nest and why acquisitions fail
I think the real problem is that when most companies do an acquisition they treat it almost like you and I would buy a car. They focus on the price and closing the deal after becoming interested in the firm’s products and/or services. But you don’t buy people, and a firm without the employees who made it a success is a failure in the making and worth a fraction of its assessed value. Part of the real cost of the acquisition is critical employee retention, and retention packages do a poor job of making people want to stay.
- Verizon to bid $3B for Yahoo’s core Internet business
First Verizon buys AOL, and now they are looking into buying Yahoo. Verizon is where all of your old embarrasing email addresses like (mustang_guy_1972_xx@yahoo.com) go to die.
http://www.cio.com/article/3080025/verizon-to-bid-3b-for-yahoo-s-core-internet-business.html
Photo: Isabella Jusková
News You Can Use: 6/15/2016
- Can Vendor Scorecards Cut Down on IT Project Failures?
Besides providing performance feedback during a large project, the scorecards also are expected to be a way for the state to take into account previous performance in future procurements, something that has been difficult to do in the past because evaluations were based on requirements built into the procurement vehicles. “We had no systemic way of measuring performance and taking it into account,” Ramos said. “We saw that as a gap.”
http://www.govtech.com/state/Can-Vendor-Scorecards-Cut-Down-on-IT-Project-Failures.html
- AI Will not Save Procurement … It Will Only Hasten its Demise
An AI can detect the presence of risk indicators that you have defined against known risks, it cannot identify risk indicators for unknown risks. If the algorithm doesn’t understand that a tsunami is a risk because it can damage harbours and destroy coastal plants, the risk will not be identified until it discovers a news story about how the supplier plant had to shut down. And if it does not understand that legal proceedings can bankrupt a small company, it could overlook a filing with the potential to bankrupt the supplier. If the supplier was strategic, that is something the organization would want to know about immediately.
- DAO: A Sandbox For ‘Smart Contracts’
Smart contracts are the digital equivalent of the pen-and-paper kind which, even today, are the gatekeepers to major business relationships. Smart contracts work by executing themselves automatically under a given set of conditions, which are pre-programmed into the software that supports them. In the case of DAO, funds will be transferred based on a majority vote, which itself is executed by digital signatures. Slock.it is the company behind DAO’s smart contract infrastructure.
Also:
The issue is one of control. There is potential for smart contracts to put buyer-supplier relationships under significant strain if, for instance, a dispute occurs and adequate consideration has not been given to the process for dealing with this in the digital setting. In computer-to-computer purchasing, for example, with which party does the burden of proof sit? The recent and public SWIFT-Bangladesh Bank saga has already showcased the extent of the tensions caused by disagreements over who’s system is at fault.
http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–harry-john/dao-a-sandbox-for-smart-contracts-620229
- How to Keep Millennials in Procurement
Another differentiating characteristic about millennials is that they are not as interested as previous generations in climbing the traditional career ladder, going from a junior buyer to a senior buyer, to a manager and on to procurement director, Peck said. They can be happy with lateral career moves that spark change in their daily routine or challenge them in a new way.
Career training, too, is highly valued among millennials — something Peck pointed out was a huge positive for procurement and supply chain organizations. In her experience, Peck said it can be “like pulling teeth” to encourage other generations of employees to take training courses or continue their education. With millennials, however, this isn’t a problem.
http://spendmatters.com/2016/06/02/how-to-keep-millennials-in-procurement/
- The Purchase Order Is In … Now What?
At ROYCE, we’ve been burned in the past because we were so starstruck that a luxury department store actually chose us that it blinded us from the far-reaching implications of that order. No one was asking the important questions — What’s their credit history? What are the logistics chargebacks? What the hell is a “loyalty discount?” (Side note: I will never forget the time that a prestigious UK retailer gave us a significant PO, only to subtly mention in the fine print that there were 21 percent off worth of discounts and co-op advertising costs, after already succumbing to aggressively discounted landed costs!) There’s nothing more anticlimactic than landing a career deal, only to meekly utter “thanks, but no thanks.”
- ‘Vendor overload’ adds to CISO burnout
“The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology,” said Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv.
“Five years ago, the role was buried many layers down in the organization, if it existed at all,” she said. “Today, the CISO is a business leader.”
Diedre Diamond, founder and CEO of CyberSN, speaking at the recent SOURCE Boston conference, offered three other reasons: Lack of understanding of the role, lack of advancement potential and unhappiness with leadership or company culture.
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3077243/it-careers/vendor-overload-adds-to-ciso-burnout.html