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Kaja Horvat

Online Shopping: More Popular (Yet Less Satisfying) Than Ever | TIME.com - 0 views

  • consumers are increasingly content to turn to the web to get their holiday shopping done.
  • Yet as more consumers turn to online shopping before and after the holidays, more critics are voicing their dissatisfaction with e-retail. The biggest argument in favor of online shopping is that it eliminates the hassle of having to go to a store, but still, online shopping is hardly without hassles.
  • Among the problems: Purchased items were shipped to the wrong people; presents that were supposed to be gift-wrapped never were; cards alerting the recipients where the goods came from were buried deep inside packages or weren’t included at all; and, of course, clearing up these matters with customer service was a maddening, time-consuming process. Among the larger problems that Ephron, and surely many others, have with online shopping is this:
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  • On a 100-point satisfaction scale, e-retail as a whole received a score of 78, down from 80 in the 2011 holiday season
  • for the eight year in a row, Amazon received the highest overall customer satisfaction rating in ForeSee’s study.
Kaja Horvat

BBC News - Internet shopping: What makes the online consumer tick? - 0 views

  • Data can be used at every stage of a marketing campaign from planning how it will run, to effective implementation, to measuring how successful the campaign was
  • data also shows us what really influences people online.
  • What does this mean? It means that today's savvy shoppers are taking their time when it comes to making a purchasing decision - often checking out online forums, blogs and social networks such as Facebook before they invest.
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  • In March 2012, UK retail websites received an additional 8.5 million visits through social networks and forums compared to March 2011, representing a 2.3% increase year-on-year.
  • two in every five visits to online retailers now come from a search engine.
  • Recently, we conducted some anonymous research into the way that people engage with brands and social networks - specifically Facebook. We looked at the top 100 online retailers, and benchmarked that against the number of fans those retailers had on their Facebook page. The correlation showed that the more fans a retailer had on Facebook, the more visits the website received, to the extent that for every additional fan acquired a retailer could expect to see an additional 20 visits to their company website from Facebook over a 12-month period.
  • As Facebook has evolved, it has become more than a source of traffic for retail websites; in some cases it has also become the digital shop front.
  • 4% of the UK's Facebook population have purchased a product from a brand's Facebook page
  • social media in particular offers companies a huge opportunity to expand their brand equity and profile, engage with consumers and influence their customers.
  • A recent poll conducted by Experian showed that 5% of consumers have actively sought feedback on a purchase made in store on Facebook or Twitter, while 24% of people would be positively influenced to buy a product after seeing an advert on Facebook.
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
Rok Urbancic

BBC News - Google must drop ivory adverts say campaigners - 0 views

  • Campaigners say Google are encouraging the poaching of elephants by running advertisements promoting ivory products.
  • more than 10,000 ads about ivory were running on Google's Japanese shopping site.
  • one of the world’s richest and successful technology companies with such incredible resources had taken no action to enforce their own policies
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  • adverts relating to endangered species were not allowed on their sites.
  • They found more than 1,400 of these types of ads
  • ads on Google's wholly owned Japanese shopping site, they found more than 10,000.
  • They have written to the internet giant asking for their removal.
  • They say that the adverts are still up and running.
  • Dealing with the ivory issues is one of the key tasks for this meeting of Cites
  • The sale of elephant tusks was banned back in 1989.
  • around 30,000 elephants a year are still being killed to meet the demand for trinkets and carvings that are often sold to tourists
  • The internet has given a huge boost to the ivory business.
Mateja Žnidaršič

A truly world wide web? | Media | MediaGuardian - 0 views

  • In its early, idealistic days the web was heralded as a force for democratic change. According to the early web revolutionaries, the medium opened up the world of publishing to everyone, regardless of nationality, race or location.
  • the network continued to grow organically, expanding to take in an ISP, a shopping site and a small businesses portal.
  • The BBC also plays an important role. As with its wider new media activities, the corporation's public service role has increased in importance as commercial competitors have fallen by the wayside.
Jan Keček

Doubt cast on Pirate Bay's claim to have set up in North Korea | Technology | guardian.... - 0 views

  • Pirate Bay says it was 'persecuted for beliefs of freedom' but analysts say site is still likely being routed through Europe
  • The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing site that was ejected from Sweden last week, claimed to have set up shop in North Korea on Monday.
  • The Pirate Bay is a popular site that hosts links to torrented material, though a separate program is required to download the links' content. This function puts the Pirate Bay in a legal grey area in most countries though it has been the subject of many lawsuits.
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  • It seems that the Pirate Bay's claim was an elaborate joke. North Korea has been claiming to have opened up its internet boders recently, playing host to Google executive Eric Schmidt. In late February, North Korea began allowing foreigners to access mobile internet, resulting in a fresh cache of Instagram images of North Korea.
Sandra Hribar

Are Twitter and Facebook affecting how we think? - Telegraph - 0 views

  • How many times do you click on your email icon in a day? Or look at Facebook, or Twitter? And how many times when reading on the internet do you click on a link navigating away from the text that was the original object of your enquiry? The web, it seems, is like an electronic sweet shop, forever tempting us in different directions. But does this mental promiscuity, this tendency to flit around online, make us, well, thicker?
  • power of modern electronic media – the net, mobile telephones and video games – to capture the attention of the human mind, particularly the young mind, and then distract it has lately become a subject of concern. We are, say the worriers, losing the ability to apply ourselves properly to a single task, like reading a book in its entirety or mastering a piece of music on an instrument, with the result that our thinking is becoming shallower. Sir Tom Stoppard aired a version of this view last week when he warned that the printed page was in danger of being "swept away" on a tide of technology, with the moving image assuming ever-greater precedence in the lives of young people.
alja polajžer

BBC News - Clarity call for mobile and internet privacy - 0 views

  • Clarity call for mobile and internet privacy
  • The Communications Consumer Panel said that people should have control over which information is shared.
  • Data doubts
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  • The panel, which was set up to advise communications regulator Ofcom about consumers' interests, wants more control for shoppers over their data.
  • Consumers using their mobile phones can allow businesses to collect data about their location and the products and services they are interested in.
  • the Information Commissioner raised concerns over people's awareness of data privacy.
  • "It has never been more important to protect your personal information. Whether you are surfing the net, shopping online or signing up to social networking sites, it is crucial that people are thinking about how their information might be used," said Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner.
  • From employers looking up potential employees on Facebook to cyber-criminals hacking into unsecured wi-fi networks, not protecting your personal information can cause serious harm and distress."
donnamariee

Does social media cause a more isolated society? - 0 views

  • Does social media cause a more isolated society?
  • ocial networks “don't only change what we do, they change who we are.”
  • As MIT professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle sees it, our s
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  • our preoccupation all things virtual, over face to face communication
  • “Connected, but alone?
  • expect more from technology and less from each othe
  • offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." In other words, she says, "We're getting used to a new way of being alone together
  • ext and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings
  • in 1985, long before tweets and adding friends and social media dialect
  • relationship with television was similar to how many relate to their Blackberry
  • Just like the television was an expression of Eric's isolation and inability to relate emotionally, so too is the overuse or over reliance on social media in 21st century. The concept [Connected, but alone] isn't new, just the technology.
  • With a society seeking and yearning for connection, we have an opportunity to take a risk emotionally and share ourselves with another soul willing to do the same, healing one another.
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    Essay theme article
Jernej Prodnik

Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany - Eu... - 0 views

  • Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany Internet giant investigates abuse claims by foreign workers in its German warehouses Tony Paterson Berlin
  • Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers. Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.
  • Another worker called Maria said she was thrown out of the cramped chalet she shared with five others  because she had dried her wet clothes on a wall heater. She said she was confronted by a muscular, tattooed security man and told to leave. The guards then shone car headlights at her in her chalet while she packed in an apparent attempt to intimidate her.Several guards were shown wearing Thor Steinar clothing – a Berlin-based designer brand synonymous with the far-right in Germany. The Bundesliga football association and the federal parliament have both banned the label because of its neo-Nazi associations. Ironically, Amazon stopped selling the clothing for the same reasons in 2009.ARD suggested that the name “HESS Security” was an allusion to Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. It alleged that its director was a man, named only as Uwe L, who associated with football hooligans and convicted neo-Nazis who were known to police. The programme-makers, who booked in at one of the budget hotels where Amazon staff were housed, said they were arrested by HESS Security guards after being caught using cameras. They were ordered to hand over their film and, when they refused, were held for nearly an hour before police arrived and freed them. The film showed HESS guards scuffling with the camera crew and trying to cover their lenses.
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  • ARD said Amazon’s temporary staff worked eight-hour shifts packing goods at the company’s logistics centres in Bad Hersfeld, Konstanz and Augsburg. Many walked up to 17 kilometres per shift and all those taken on could be fired at will. On arrival in Germany, most were told their pay had been cut to below the rate promised when they applied for jobs at Amazon.  “They don’t see any way of complaining,” said Heiner Reimann, a spokesman for the United Services Union (Ver.di). “They are all too frightened of being sent home without a job.”Silvina, a Spanish mother of three in her 50s, who lost her job as an art teacher, was featured in the film. She applied for three months’ work with Amazon to earn some badly needed cash. “It’s like being in a machine and we are just a small part in this machine,” she told the programme.HESS Security did not respond to the allegations made by ARD.Amazon employs 7,700 full-time staff at seven distrubution centres in Germany. The accusations led to the company’s Facebook site being inundated with angry complaints.The company said: “Although the security firm was not contracted by Amazon we are, of course, currently examining the allegations concerning the behaviour of security guards and will take the appropriate measures immediately. We do not tolerate discrimination or intimidation.”
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