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Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
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  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
donnamariee

Technology and productivity: The hollow promise of the iEconomy | The Economist - 0 views

  • Apple is the most creative, innovative and envied technology company of our time,
  • spring of 2000,
  • Cisco and its ilk as the internet transformed the economy.
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  • If fact there is little sign in the data that machines are displacing humans any faster than usual
  • Perhaps because of uncertainty, though that’s a poor explanation for a phenomenon occurring globally.
  • How to put a price on the contribution of Facebook or Twitter to the Arab spring?
  • IN THE battle between David Einhorn and Apple over the latter's $137 billion cash hoard lies a deeper lesson about the outlook for the economy. Mr Einhorn, an activist investor, says Apple clings to its money out of a “Depression mentality”. Perhaps. But the more mundane explanation is that Apple, like many of the world's big companies today, is generating more cash from its existing product line than it can usefully plough back into new projects.
  • Today, we all know Apple’s products, and a lot of us own one. Yet it is hard to identify the impact they or any of today's social-media giants have had on productivity. I was at first delighted with the convenience and freedom to read documents, check Twitter and search the web on the iPad mini I got in December, but it occurred to me recently that this was at best an incremental improvement over doing it on my BlackBerry or laptop. It also provides me with many more ways to waste time. As Tom Toles, the Washington Post’s cartoonist, puts it:
  • No doubt some of those YouTube videos were being watched over Apple products. Not that I blame Apple for Penney’s culture (after all, Google owns YouTube), but it is a reminder that the social-media revolution has been a mixed blessing. Yahoo at one time stood atop the Internet but the ability of its workers to do their job from anywhere may be backfiring on productivity
  • are genuine benefits of social media and the related hardware. In its first few decades the computer/internet revolution re-engineered business processes, enabling companies to interact with each other and customers in more ways at lower cost than ever, producing measurable, bankable results. Now, it’s leading to brand-new consumer products, many of whose  benefits are unmeasured or unmeasurable.
Patricija Čelik

As 'Do Not Track' Effort Seems to Stall, Web Companies Race to Look Privacy-Friendly - ... - 0 views

  • Increasingly, Internet companies are pushing each other to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control.
  • “It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Mr. Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as technology intersects their life.”
  • In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals.
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  • To some degree, these developments signal that the industry is working hard to stave off government regulation, which is moving at a glacial pace anyway. There seems to be no movement on broad privacy legislation on Capitol Hill, and no consensus has been reached on standards for “Do Not Track,” a browser setting that would let Internet users indicate that they did not want their activity tracked by marketers.
  • Whether Internet users are ready to pay to protect their personal data is unclear, though surveys have repeatedly pointed to consumer anxiety.
Maj Krek

Google and Skyhook: the internet privacy invasion | openDemocracy - 1 views

  • every v isitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • Location Based Browsing”,
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  • address of every visitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • Google, Microsoft and Firefox all claim we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • ensure every website
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets
  • we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets , including Britain’s, gathering wi-fi data from people’s homes and businesses.
  • To ensure every website in the world can contact Google and ask the home address of every visitor to any page on their website
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • address of
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybod
  • website
  • Location Based Browsing
  • their
  • Location Based Browsing
  • Street View project
  • every website
  • in the world can
  • contact Google and ask
  • the home
  • To ensure every
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • isitor to any page on their website. Websites can have a little piece of software (known as XSS) installed to grab our router’s MAC address from our browser if we visit any page on their site. This software is undetectable to the user, the browser does not warn us what is happening and has no setting to prevent it. The website owner can then send your MAC address to Google Location Services. At this point, without verifying that you have given permission, Google can provide your home address.
Anja Vasle

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

  • At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
  • We understand pretty well the factors that determine the fortunes of companies that make things people buy – which is why, for example, one can predict thatApple won't be able indefinitely to sustain its huge profit margins on its iDevices.
  • This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers.
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  • The two key factors that will determine Facebook's future are the power of network effects and the "stickiness" of its service – ie, the extent to which it can dissuade users from leaving.
  • he key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits.
  • Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly.
  • How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit?
  • n fact, it is now so dominant that millions of people around the world think that Facebook is the internet.
  • At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet.
  • But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small.
  • in the technology world one can go from zero to hero is a very short time
  • Google has a well understood and currently profitable business model and a huge technical infrastructure but ultimately is vulnerable to a well-resourced competitor armed with better search technology.
  • A telephone network with a million subscribers is infinitely more valuable then one with only 10. In technological ecosystems, network effects are very powerful: they explain, for example, how Microsoft came to dominate the market for desktop operating and office systems.
  • If you put your faith in network effects, therefore, Facebook looks like a good investment because it'll be around for the long term.
anonymous

A world wide web of communication - but Yahoo! tells its staff to get back in the offic... - 0 views

  • A memo sent last week by the company’s head of human resources told Yahoo! staff that they had until the summer to migrate back to the company HQ in Sunnyvale, California, or forfeit their job amid mounting concern that workers were “hiding” from bosses who had lost track of who was supposed to be where and doing what.
  • Some analysts have suggested the back-to-work diktat could be a covert way of reducing staff numbers and restoring a competitive work ethic at the company which employs 11,500 people in 20 countries. However, the move was described by Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson as “perplexing” and a “backward step”.
  • Chief executive Ms Mayer, 37, who once ranked her priorities as God, family and Yahoo!, is charged with turning round the company which has been eclipsed by rivals such as Google. She is said to have become frustrated at the sight of the half-full company car park emptying rapidly at 5pm each day – not least after building her own nursery next to her office to allow her to put in longer hours.
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  • Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the CIPD, said there was a powerful business case for allowing workers greater freedom.
donnamariee

BBC News - How the cloud helps firms cope with ups and downs of IT - 0 views

  • Imagine running a business where most of your customers arrive during two weeks of the year.
  • Welcome to the world of Doug Clark, the IBM executive responsible for the infrastructure that runs the website of the Wimbledon tennis championships.
  • Spikiness is a common problem in the information technology world. It refers to the surges in demand for computing power and information storage. Retailers suffer from spikiness. They expect their website to be swamped in the run-up to Christmas.
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  • Instead of buying huge amounts of computing power and storage that may be unused for most of the year, companies can get what they need in a more flexible way.
  • IBM has allotted enough computing resources to cope with the surge during the tournament.
  • Cloud computing has another useful feature. Instead of being locked into long contracts, firms can buy their IT over much shorter time frames. It can even be metered. This is extremely useful for companies that are launching one-off projects or perhaps start-up firms that are not sure how successful they are going to be. Extra capacity can be bought online and paid for as needed. Zoopla is a UK property website which allows users to search for homes.
  • Zoopla uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006 and is the biggest player in cloud computing.
  • Analysts at Tier1 Research estimate that just 2% of total spending on information technology is on cloud services. Daniel Beazer, a hosting and cloud analyst at Tier1 Research, said: "Most companies have been around for a lot longer than the internet and have systems that are decades old." "Mostly what they have works, just about, so why bother shifting it? The savings from virtualisation and the cloud aren't currently big enough to justify it," he said.
metapavlin

'We are the 8%' - why tech companies matter to the UK economy | Saul Klein | Technology... - 0 views

  • y 2016, the internet is forecast to grow to 12.4% in the UK, contributing some £225bn to the overall UK economy.
  • Certainly the past 15 years have seen London, in particular, generate some incredible homegrown successes including ASOS, JustEat, King.com, Mimecast, Moshi, Net-a-Porter, Playfish and Skype. It is the US giants Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google and Facebook, which currently generate more than £15bn of annual UK revenues combined.
  • Understanding the internet's role in our economy and society is so fundamental now that we cannot afford to operate blindly. If we are in a global economic war for talent, resources and income, perhaps we need to establish the internet age-equivalent of Winston Churchill's 1941 creation of the Central Statistical Office (the precursor to the Office for National Statistics), and build a transparent central statistics body for relevant economic internet related data.Government can and does have an enormous impact on the economy.
Maj Krek

The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet - Peter Osnos - The Atlantic - 3 views

  • The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet
  • The mantra of a "free" Internet has shaped the prevailing view of how we access information and entertainment in the digital age.
  • the role of the broadband Internet is reaching a stage where anything less than total availability at minimal prices is a matter that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting.
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  • But access to this "free" information on the Internet, as everyone acknowledges as soon as it is pointed out, is not gratis.
  • The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services
  • the devices that connect us to search engines, countless websites, social media, and e-mail bring us vast amounts of content for which we do not pay separately.
  • 100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure.
  • the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century
  • One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication.
  • No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers
  • For all the progress in delivering information and entertainment in the Internet era, Americans deserve and should demand something closer to the ideal of what is possible with our technology.
sintija

BBC News - Viewpoint: The universal web must be adaptive - 0 views

  • Access all areas
  • Along came search technologies
  • Viewpoint: The universal web must be adaptive
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  • Viewpoint: The universal web must be adaptive
  • Along came search technologies
  • Google
  • Google
  • ability to search content anywhere on the web
  • new web business.
  • spurred a new web business
  • Access all areas
  • internet went wireless
  • We need standards
  • mobile devices will outsell laptops
  • increasing the complexity of how content was served
  • Building websites for all the new browsers, screen sizes and device features is becoming difficult.
  • The future of the internet is creating highly adaptive experiences for users
  • Companies that don't figure out how to get their information to customers on any device will disappear.
  • one solution
  • such as HTML5, to make programming to any device use the same language, and software solutions to help companies simplify building websites and web apps to any device using any feature.
  • truly mobile internet future is now a reality
  • companies need to
  • focus
  • on their customer journeys, personalised experiences and developing rich content rather than on how to build websites - or they will disappear.
nensic

Under the regime of precarity: bring your own device | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time. This explains the fierce struggle going on among key market players.
  • Today large communities use devices like smartphones, tablets, e-readers and ultrabooks to navigate this new ecosystem.
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  • The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.
  • as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.
  • The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:
  • The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.
  • the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android. 
  • Apps galore
  • Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation
  • The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.
  • War over the immaterial
  • Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.
  • A political analysis of mobile devices
  • The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.
  • In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life
  • In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.
  • they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.
  • The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.
  • But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.
  • In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.
  • In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures
  • Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.
  • Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.
  • The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and  from total submission to a life of labour.  
  • Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.
  • Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices
  • So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive. 
  •  
    "Bring your own device (BYOD) is a business policy whereby employees bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and use them to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers and databases as well as their personal applications and data."
Rok Urbancic

Microsoft faces hefty EU fine | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • European commission expected to fine Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros after software company broke antitrust promise
  • The EU competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, is expected to use the fine – which could run into hundreds of millions of euros – to set an example after the US software giant became the first company to break a promise made to end an antitrust probe
  • The fines relate to an antitrust battle in Europe more than a decade ago. In order to avoid a penalty then, Microsoft promised to offer European consumers a choice of rival browsers.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • EU rules mean the company could be penalised $7.4bn (£4.9bn) – or 10% of its fiscal 2012 revenues
  • this did not happen for a period during February 2011 and July 2012, a lapse Microsoft blamed on a technical error. It has said it since tightened internal procedures to avoid a repeat.
  • The European commission has already fined Microsoft €1.6bn (£1.4bn)
  • Microsoft's share of the European browser market has roughly halved since 2008 to 24% in January, below the 35% held by Google's Chrome and Mozilla's 29% share
Blaž Ulaga

Leader: Google is watching you | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views

  • technology puts adverts on the web, is against the public interest.
  • It is sad that huge and well-resourced companies are buying up the market share of others instead of building up their own capacity
  • Google holds information about the private activities of its users that the intelligence agencies would die for
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Consumers must be allowed to find out what information about them the company can access
inesmag

Apple value falls below $400bn, as Warren Buffett says 'ignore critics' | Technology | ... - 0 views

  • Apple is still embroiled in a legal tussle with Samsung, once its biggest supplier of phone parts. Photograph: Michaela Rehle/Reuters
  • The company is under increasing pressure from rivals including Google and smartphone manufacturers like South Korean electronics giant Samsung, whose Galaxy line has challenged iPhone's success.
  • Samsung used to be Apple's biggest supplier for phone parts, and Apple its largest customer. But in 2010, Jobs vowed to go to "thermonuclear war" over what he saw as copying of iPhone features by phones using Google's Android operating system.
mancamikulic

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world
  • They weren't due to get them until last Friday
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing"
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • from "mainframe" computers
  • Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it
  • "OK, Glass, take video!"
  • The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head.
  • And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass
  • the question of privacy
  • how will we behave in groups
  • David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially
  • Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything
  • Joshua Topolsky
  • have tried out Google Glass
  • This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private".
  • forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends
  • use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.
  • So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • Oliver Stokes
  • ou could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming
  • Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at.
  • Song Chaoming
  • nalysing mobile phone records
  • how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map
  • Social media
  • Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google
  • Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.
  • Twitter
  • we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues.
  • this is a live issue,
  • One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things
  • how will we behave with each other?
  • hows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps
  • Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard
  • they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything
  • we get too deeply involved with our technology
  • she pointed out how smartphones change us:
  • Topolsky
  • It brought something new into view
  • the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."
  • how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts
  • Glass makes you feel more powerful
  • Hurst
  • is likely to be annoying
  • here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
  • body language change
  • model seems to require voice control
  • how much are we going to share with others
inesmag

Google and competition: searching for a solution | Tom Watson | Comment is free | guard... - 1 views

  • Some time later this month we are expecting the European commission to decide how it will proceed with its investigation of the search giant Google, following the latter's submission of proposed remedies at the end of January over allegations that it has engaged in a range of anticompetitive practices.
  • Google is a global company and its activities will require a global solution.
  • Google's global revenues were £23.5bn in 2011. Those are its revenues before tax, although Google's approach to tax is another and equally interesting story. Those vast revenues do not come from those who search, but from those who bid to place advertisements alongside the search results. This means that Google has a clear interest to arrange the rankings in a way that maximises its profits and faces a stark conflict of interests when it does so. It has every incentive to demote other companies, who might actually be offering answers or services that are more relevant to the user queries, and to advance its own services.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There is no reason why an appropriate remedy that introduces fair rankings should in any way impair the user experience.
  • that Google, with more than 90% of the search market in Europe, is overwhelmingly dominant.
  • Effective remedies will aim to protect competition for the future but need also to acknowledge the past. Google has continued to expand and exploit its position during the period of the investigation and it will be necessary to find a solution that tackles that past misbehaviour and reintroduces something approaching a level playing field.
Meta Arcon

Figuring out the future of online privacy - CNN.com - 1 views

  • They may not be paying for the services directly, but customers still have a lot of power -- and companies know that they need to listen.
  • "We can't just sit back and allow the industry to just continue to ignore a core component of the user experience online," said Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader.
  • The more devices that connect to the Internet, from smart cars to home thermostats, the more data there are about a person to collect.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Free versions come with ads, but for a price, people can upgrade to the ad-free experience.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information
  • Not everyone will want the same level of privacy,
  • "Do not track" seems like a clear, smart option to give consumers
  • Companies that provide free services, such as search engines or social networks, have to strike the right balance between respecting their customers' privacy concerns and serving advertisers.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information, attached to their real-world identity, in exchange for more heavily customized computing experiences.
Jan Keček

Smartphone operating systems: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed | The Economist - 0 views

  • IF YOU have a new smartphone, it is almost certainly either an Apple iPhone or one of the many devices that runs on Google’s Android operating system. According to IDC, a research firm, more than 90% of the 228m smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2012 belonged to one of the two dominant species. Android is the bigger bea
  • st. Its share has grown as the smartphone market has boomed, to about 70%.
  • Mozilla, a non-profit organisation best known for Firefox, a web browser, unveiled plans to bring a smartphone operating system to market. Called Firefox OS, it has the backing of 18 mobile operators based in countries from Asia to Latin America.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Most Windows smartphones are made by Finland’s Nokia, which dropped its own plans for a new system when it threw in its lot with the American software giant. BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly called Research In Motion, hopes to recover lost glories with BlackBerry 10, which appeared in January after much delay.
  • One reason for the challengers’ optimism is that a lot of ground is unoccupied.
  • BlackBerry and Microsoft have the advantage of familiarity; 80m people use BlackBerrys. Companies’ information-technology departments trust them as secure. Microsoft hopes that Windows’ dominance of personal computers can be transferred to mobiles. With that in mind, all new Windows devices, on desks, on laps or in hands, have the same look, with “tiles” for touching, not clicking.
  • Whereas most applications on Apple and Android devices have been written for those systems, Firefox OS uses open standards. In principle, apps based on it can run on any device connected to the web.
Katja Saje

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive.
  • The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it.
  • (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."
  • For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?
  • we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting.
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop.
  • "People will have to work out what the new normal is,"
Katja Kotnik

Who controls the internet? | Jemima Kiss | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Have you ever noticed that wherever you are in the world, every telephone keypad looks the same?
  • would mean internet companies paying hefty fees to local telecoms companies, reigniting historic tensions between US internet giants and incumbent telecoms firms across the world.
  • With the world's internet population predicted to reach 3.4 billion by 2016, there is everything to play for.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "It's the absolute antithesis of the internet where the participating parties on the edge of the network pay for access to it," he said.
  • "Freedom to innovate on the network has been largely a consequence of its economic model and its openness."
  • Mueller says: "We're all 'prepared to fight t
  • We're not building the kind of new institutions we need to govern the internet and keep it free."
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