A New Start

FT: Japan's quest for innovative freedom

Japan's quest for innovative freedom

By Jonathan Guthrie and Robin Harding

Published: June 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 12 2008 03:00

Nodding politely, a mechanical doll created by Toshiba founder Hisahige Tanaka totters across a tabletop and offers a visitor a cup of tea at the company's research and development centre near Tokyo. Ingenious and intriguing, the automaton was produced in the 19th century, portending the renaissance in Japanese applied technology that followed the second world war. This delivered such consumer boons as Toshiba laptops, Toyota cars and Nintendo games.

Now Japan is questioning wheth- er its innovation system can serve it as well in the 21st century as in the 20th. There are doubts over whether Japan's Y18,000bn ($168bn) annual R&D budget is well spent. Reformers want an environment that is more entrepreneurial and less dominated by big companies. Corporate R&D bosses and academics are struggling to put aside long-standing grudges.

If Japan were a technology company it would be worried about its pipeline. The job of replenishing this has traditionally fallen to big corporations such as Toshiba. Ichiro Tai, a jolly, bespectacled man who runs Toshiba's R&D centre, says: "We have 1,000 researchers and they should have far more ideas. The number of patents [one each a year] is far too small."

Dissatisfaction is as much a management tool for Mr Tai as it is for a sales boss driving his team towards ever-higher targets. Tosh-iba could nevertheless do with some high-profile breakthroughs after losing its battle with Sony to set the standard for high definition video players. Mr Tai duly shows off hopeful new technologies to awed visitors. One is a system that uses quantum physics effects to encrypt data. Another is a battery that can be recharged in five minutes which could be used to power electric vehicles.

Mr Tai muses that greater freedom could spur the creativity of company research staff. Yet Toshiba is characteristic of Japanese technology companies in protecting its elite scientists from commercial pressures more than many western ones. The electronics group, which had sales of about Y7,000bn in the year to March 2007, uses a tripartite structure. The R&D centre and its academic satellites do blue-sky research. A second tier of labs commercialise new technologies. A third layer engages in the nitty-gritty of improving existing products within business units.

Politicians and bureaucrats are now asking whether Japan is over-reliant on such corporate ideas factories. Like every country with a decent science base, Japan envies the global success of Microsoft in PC operating systems and Google in internet search. Surely, the argument runs, Japan would produce new global gorillas of its own if its innovation system were more like that of the US.

The Japanese government has accordingly announced a Y100bn venture fund to invest in fledgling technology businesses. The idea is to encourage more private and institutional investors to pump their money into start-ups too.

However, there are formidable barriers to injecting some of the pep of Silicon Valley into the commercialisation of new technology in Japan. The biggest is that Japan does not have an Anglo Saxon-style enterprise culture. Would-be entrepreneurs have few role models apart from Masayoshi Son, founder of communications group Softbank. Aspiring to become very wealthy is regarded as faintly unJapanese.

Equally, "business failure is seen as shameful in Japan, though that perception is beginning to erode", says Seiichi Yoshikawa of Nippon Keidanren, Japan's powerful business lobby. When new technology ventures fail, it tends to be as units of large corporations, rather than as standalone companies. This cushions the impact. The downside of the system is that it can suppress maverick talent.

At Japan's ministry of economy, trade and industry, Yuji Tokumasu, who works on science and technology policy, is fretting over a parallel problem. According to a chart he brandishes, even as Japan's spending on research and development has soared in the past 20 years, value added in the manufacturing sector has stagnated.

Japan already spends more than 3 per cent of its gross domestic product on R&D - more than any other country. One way of reading the chart is to surmise that diminishing returns have set in, that every extra yen spent on R&D goes to employ less talented researchers, who study less promising approaches to the same problems. Japanese universities' poor record on turning research funding into results published by top scientific journals suggests that government money can be more efficiently spent. It could be that rather than spending too little on R&D, Japan spends too much.

However, Mr Tokumasu and others in the technology establishment take heart from R&D expenditure data. If only Japan could convert all of this spending into scientific breakthroughs, new businesses and saleable products, they argue, it would prove a powerful source of economic growth.

The country has a world-class science base, as exemplified by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University. In 2006 Professor Yamanaka created cells resembling embryonic stem cells from other tissue in mice. Last year, in parallel with US researchers, he repeated the feat for humans. The technique has huge potential to advance gene therapy, given moral strictures on using real embryonic cells. Prof Yamanaka has a chance of winning a Nobel Prize.

But businesses can be impeded from working with university researchers such as Prof Yamanaka by historically chilly relations. During the growth years of the 1960s and 1970s, corporations sought independence in R&D. Public service anti-corruption rules made it difficult for academics to hobnob with business people. It is telling that two of Toshiba's most important academic collaborations are with British universities - Cambridge and Bristol.

In 2004 universities were incorporated and gained ownership of the intellectual property created in their laboratories. The change irritated some people. "Before, they got research for free," says Takafumi Yamamoto, plain-speaking boss of Todai TLO, Tokyo University's licensing organisation.

Mr Yamamoto believes the dominant role of large corporations in business life is weakening. Partly thanks to entrepreneurship education "young people do not all want to be soldiers for big companies", he says. Flotations of university spin-outs have increased enthusiasm for the commercialisation of research among academics. They are meanwhile likely to become more assertive in protecting their intellectual property rights following the establishment of a new division of the High Court specialising in IPR. Mr Yamamoto says: "There could be an increasing number of cases brought by the universities against the companies."

So is traditional Japanese consensus under threat? Not according to Yutaka Asai, chief technology officer of Oki, the telecoms and printers group, who neatly reconciles the spat between business and universities. Companies may wind up with a smaller share of revenues from individual academic collaborations, he says. But, at the same time, a fairer division of the spoils should prompt more tie-ins, making everyone better off.

A 'technique' for managing academics is vital for collaboration

Yukinori Kida, owner of a small Toyko-based components business, has some advice for big Japanese companies forging collaborations with universities. Making it work depends on "technique" in managing academics, he says.

Innovation has helped KDA keep going in the face of Chinese competition. Six years ago, with help from the University of Tokyo, the company found a better way of moulding the ceramic bolts used in equipment exposed to high temperatures. The breakthrough allowed Mr Kida to cut costs and won him a valuable market niche.

KDA, which employs 50 staff including Kaori, Mr Kida's daughter and expected successor, made a profit of Y30m on sales of Y1bn last year. It is now working on new plastics and ceramics moulding methods with researchers from Tokyo and Nagoya universities. "In three years we hope to double sales," Mr Kida says.

KDA spends a healthy 3 per cent of sales revenue on new product development. Mr Kida uses students as researchers, believing they are open-minded as well as cheaper: "University professors are strong on narrow subject areas, but if you need to study a problem from a new perspective, they are really not that good."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Brickfish aiming to use viral adverts to catch the attention

Brickfish aiming to use viral adverts to catch the attention

By Paul Taylor in New York

Published: July 3 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 3 2008 03:00

When Kodak, the US photo supplies company, decided to re-enter the inkjet printer business with a range of printers that claim to cut the cost of ink in half, the company chose an unconventional way to get the message out.

Kodak teamed up with a San Diego-based start-up called Brickfish that has pioneered a new web-based viral marketing method called social media advertising.

Together they created a campaign dubbed "Pricey Ink Stinks" built around a competition that challenged online visitors to find another use for their old, ink-hungry printer and blog about it, take a photo, draw it or video it for the chance to win one of the new Kodak models.

The campaign was a success, generating 87 entries and more than 173,022 "engagements" which Brian Dunn, Brickfish's chief executive, claims are a much better metric than unique visitors or page views. Engagements, or a campaign's "e-score", measures consumer action defined by entries, votes, reviews and views of branded user-generated content.

Clients use the Brickfish platform to launch online advertising and marketing campaigns designed to capture the attention of consumers - particularly the young, creative and connected - and tap the power and reach of social networking.

Instead of marketing to consumers, the Brickfish advertising platform effectively co-opts consumers who become part of the campaign, generating blogs, images, video and audio content that is shared virally and voted upon. Meanwhile, Brickfish enables its clients to monitor and track the campaign through "viral map" technology that provides detailed analytics about campaign reach, performance and demographics.

"This viral, consumer-driven marketing approach has proven to be five to 10 times more effective than existing online advertising methods such as display ads and search optimisation," claims Mr Dunn.

With online banner ads stuck with their 0.1-0.2 per cent click-through rates, marketers at big-name companies including Samsung, Nike, Qualcomm and Procter & Gamble have begun to listen.

P&G used Brickfish to launch a campaign for its Aussie shampoo brand. Like the Kodak campaign, the Aussie effort was a contest site. The competition attracted 4,017 entries and more than 2m visitors, 80 per cent of whom were viral connections through sites such as MySpace, MyYearBook and SugarFoot. Brian Jochum, P&G's Aussie brand manager, described it as one of P&G's most successful engagement branding efforts so far this year.

"In order to broadly reach consumers across the internet, Brickfish provided us with a highly cost-conscious and effective method to virally spread our brand name to thousands," he said.

Using Brickfish's media platform, P&G was able to track not only the initial message sent but subsequent ones to other social networks.

In total, Brickfish has launched more than 200 campaigns for clients, including about 30 for the fashion and cosmetics industries.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

By Alan Cane

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Amore incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster's name was Leo. It was the world's first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.

Sixty years ago, nobody would have seen anything like Leo. Official secrecy meant that the public knew nothing of the spectacular progress made by British scientists in developing the code-breaking digital computer, Colossus, which helped win the second world war. Civilian computers did not exist and nor did the software to run commercial applications. Caminer was the intrepid, determined person who invented the first business programmes.

What made his achievements as the world's first commercial systems analyst so extraordi-nary was that he started from scratch. At the time he was the systems manager for J. Lyons and Company, then Britain's biggest caterer. The Lyons board had heard about the development of "electronic brains" in the US but those were all being used for scientific or military purposes. Lyons, which prided itself on its efficiency, took the remarkable decision to develop its own digital computer to automate the running of its catering business.

Caminer was the key member of a team of bright young technologists responsible for bringing to life the vision of the Lyons board. Leo - Lyons Electronic Office - ran a programme for the first time in September 1951. Under Caminer's tutelage, the Lyons team developed systems and ways of working that were groundbreaking for the time and are still relevant today. Indeed, if the rules for systems development laid down by Caminer had been taken to heart by succeeding generations, fewer computing disasters would have tarnished the image of the industry.

Caminer programmed Leo to take over routine office tasks and do them in a fraction of the time taken by clerks. Where it had taken eight minutes to calculate an employee's pay - Lyons had 30,000 workers - Leo could do it in 1.5 seconds. Leo was programmed to handle the daily deliveries from Lyons bakery to 200 retail outlets, to organise restocking, to calculate the overnight production requirements, such as how many miles of Swiss roll had to be made, and even to work out delivery routes for vans. Later, Caminer ran programmes that could detect patterns in the till receipts and pinpoint when the company's restaurants were busiest and which of its chocolate cakes and iced fancies were selling best. Today, businesses analyse such information as a matter of course but in the 1950s this marked a retail revolution.

Soon other major companies such as Dunlop, Ford and Imperial Tobacco were coming to look at Leo and learn from it. Lyons set up a subsidiary to make computers and 80 Leos were sold all over the world.

Caminer, a charming individual with exquisite manners and a delightful sense of humour, had a short fuse where programming standards were concerned. More than one of his colleagues had work literally thrown back for failing to meet his expectations. Yet Caminer himself had had no training in computing - hardly surprising because the subject was so new that everybody involved in Leo learned on the job. What was unusual was that Caminer was not even a mathematician and had no formal academic qualifications.

Born David Tresman in 1915, he was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant. His father died fighting on the Marne when he was three. When his mother married again, he adopted his stepfather's name. Raised initially in London's East End, he later went to the Sloane School in Chelsea but by his own admission he was not a natural student. He was more engaged by unemployment and the rise of rightwing dic-tatorships in mainland Europe. He spent his youth pamphleteering and, as he put it, "generally fostering the revolution". He marched against Oswald Mosley, the anti-Semitic British fascist leader.

Having failed to get into Cambridge - he said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches" - he became a management trainee at Lyons through a contact of his mother's. The catering group, which served millions of meals every year, was known for its tea shops and Corner House restaurants with waitresses known as "nippies".

On the outbreak of the second world war, Caminer joined up and served at El Alamein, where he recalled the "wondrous sight of a desert fox crossing the shimmering sands at first light on the morning of the battle". After being wounded in the western desert and losing a leg, he returned to Lyons, becoming manager of the company's systems research office. It was then that he became involved in its computer project - on a salary of £5.05 a week.

Leo eventually became part of what was then the British computer champion, International Computers - ICL - and Caminer was appointed head of market development. He was asked to take charge of software for ICL's New Range 2900 series, its flagship through the latter part of the last century. He specified the ICL operating system VME/B, a brilliant concept that was in some ways too advanced for the machines on which it was expected to run.

Caminer completed his career by implementing the European Union's computer and communications network in Luxembourg. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

He always believed that small, close-knit teams of the sort that worked on Leo were the ideal: "These days the spirit has changed," he complained just before his death. "Computer staff have become nine to five workers. Teams are so large I'm surprised they ever get anything done."

He is survived by his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1945, and by their three sons and two daughters.

Alan Cane

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT:Sector catches them young

Sector catches them young

By Richard Milne

Published: June 16 2008 19:47 | Last updated: June 16 2008 19:47

Joachim Belz is looking for engineers. The chief executive of Weidmüller, a German maker of components for the electrical and electronics industries, wants to hire 200 in the next two years but he has a problem: there are not enough of them.

“We have problems filling these posts as quickly as we would like,” he says. “But we have complained long enough about it in Germany. Now we have to find a solution.”

It is a sentiment echoed not just around Germany, the supposed land of engineering, but across large parts of Europe. Manufacturing companies from Spain to Switzerland are finding it hard to recruit high-skilled employees domestically, a trend that could affect growth in the long term.

So how are they tackling the issue? The answer is a series of increasingly far-sighted measures that range from visiting kindergartens to creating companies inside universities.

The steps taken by Weidmüller, which is based between Hanover and Dortmund, are typical. For long-term results, it sends managers into local junior schools to play science-based games with children from eight years old and upwards. “It could take us 10-15 years to reap the fruits from this but we are being deliberately long-term,” Mr Belz says. Older students and teachers are invited to the factories to see how products are made. “We need to get them excited about the wonders of science,” he adds.

Value of education: local universities that can feed a far-flung HQ

European companies based in obscure locations often have a hard time attracting highly skilled employees. Mondragon, the world’s largest cooperative with sales of €15bn ($23bn, £12bn), has opened a university near its headquarters in the Basque Country in north-east Spain. “We needed to stop the brain drain to other countries,” says Jesus Ginto, head of communications.

Companies in Franconia, in central Germany, have grouped together to open an international school in Erlangen. Adidas, the sporting goods group based in nearby Herzogenaurach, is one of the big supporters of the venture alongside Siemens. “We need to attract the best international managers and this is one of the ways to convince their families to come to this small town in Germany,” says Herbert Hainer, chief executive.

Joachim Belz, chief executive of Weidmüller, a components maker based in Detmold in a rural part of northern Germany, says companies need to do more to address “the big challenge of location marketing”.

Weidmüller supports the Institute for Industrial IT at a local technical college and tries to encourage other institutes such as the renowned Fraunhofer to set up in the region.

Weidmüller spends €5m ($7.7m, £3.9m) a year on education programmes, not an inconsiderable sum for a company with a turnover of €500m. That includes paying for students to take a university degree – costing about €60,000 per student – as well as for work placements, visits to colleges abroad and a dual programme in which study is combined with technical training in the company. “We get a good return on investment – we can win all these people for us,” says Mr Belz.

Other companies go even further. Bosch, Siemens and ThyssenKrupp – three of Germany’s largest industrial groups – all work with kindergartens to try to get children interested in science from as early an age as possible. Siemens provides kindergartens with a “discovery box” containing experiments for three- to six-year-olds ranging from electricity, the environment and water. One example sees the children constructing a basic electric circuit with batteries, lights and wires. “We want to get them to learn things in a playful not a pedagogic way and they can learn so much more at that age than they can later,” says the Maria Schumm-Tschauder, the project’s co-ordinator.

It is not just about raising interest among children. Thomas Kaeser, chief executive of Kaeser Kompressoren, a leading provider of compressed air, says it is important to invite teachers from schools and universities into companies to see how a factory operates. “They are normally totally shocked at how different it is from their preconceptions,” he says.

Some companies have even bigger ideas. ThyssenKrupp, the steelmaker, has set up a biannual event called IdeenPark, or Ideas Park. Vast halls are filled with endless hands-on experiments for children – and adults – such as understanding how a bobsleigh works and designing their own electrical circuits. Nearly 300,000 people, many of them young children, visited the last event in Stuttgart. “It was a great success,” says Ekkehard Schulz, ThyssenKrupp’s chief executive.

It is not just companies that are contributing to this long-term focus. In the Basque Country of Spain, the provincial government of Biscay helped set up a large industrial park outside Bilbao. José Luis Bilbao, the head of the government, says: “Our biggest problem here is the lack of human resources so the park helps tackle that.”

But companies are having to act in the short term too. VDI, the German association of engineers, estimates there are 95,000 vacant posts for engineers in the country – up from 18,000 just three years ago. That is due both to a surging demand for engineers and the lack of students in technical universities. Senior executives such as Dieter Zetsche from Daimler say the situation is slowly improving after a period a decade ago when companies stopped hiring engineers. But the recent rise in engineering students is still not sufficient to cover the gap.

Instead companies are seeking to co-operate more with local universities. Lenze, a German maker of mechanical drives, has set up three companies inside technical colleges in an attempt to commercialise innovations and attract engineers to it. “That has helped us keep our lead in filing patents in our sector,” says Erhard Tellbüscher, chief executive.

Ormazabal, a Spanish electrical components company that in spite of its size competes against Siemens and ABB, is taking a more down-to-earth approach and trying to help students at the engineering schools in Bilbao and Madrid with their projects. Guillermo Amann, the chief of staff for the head of the company, says: “We are trying to catch the students before they freeze and lose interest or go elsewhere.” Weidmüller invites 10 students each year to a week-long “summer academy” at its headquarters where they work and socialise together. It also offers more places for apprentices than it needs and the demand is clearly there – for the 55 places on the three-year programme it receives at least 1,200 applicants.

Of course, companies can simply try to look for engineers abroad, and some do. Mr Amann says Ormazabal recently brought four French electrical engineers to Bilbao as well as two Brits in its high-power laboratory and two Germans. Eduardo Giménez, the corporate marketing director of Ingeteam, another electrical components company in Bilbao, says it is bringing in people from its operation in eastern Europe and the Czech Republic in particular. “This is one of the secrets for us in opening up branches around the world – we can bring the people back here,” he says.

ThyssenKrupp has gone further and made acquisitions to gain highly skilled workers, such as the purchase of Uhde Shedden, a Thai company with 340 workers, most of them engineers. It has also built up a subsidiary in Siberia near a technical university to tap its qualified engineers and will soon have 400 workers.

A common refrain among these companies is that, given the skills shortage, they have had little choice but to decentralise research and development facilities that were previously located solely in the home nation. Ormazabal now has R&D centres in China and France, as well as factories outside the Basque Country in Madrid. Weidmüller has a development centre in China and a new one will soon open in the US.

Mr Belz, like other engineering executives in European industry, says the losers from the lack of skilled workers will not be companies but countries. “If you can’t get the engineers for the tasks at your base then you have to bring the tasks to where the engineers are.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: FT REPORT - DIGITAL BUSINESS 2008: How staff get round IT controls

FT REPORT - DIGITAL BUSINESS 2008: How staff get round IT controls

By Dan Ilett
Published: May 28, 2008

It is frighteningly easy to bypass controls aimed at restricting access to websites, if you know how.

For example, to access restricted sites from a company network, simply connect a PC to a "proxy" server outside the network and a user can stay on Facebook all day, ignore all the censorship controls, and no one will know.

Proxy servers allow users to bypass banned websites by giving them a second, unrestricted path to them. About 90 per cent of IT managers say that sneaking past the internet controls in this way is a big problem for them, according to research from Bloxx, the website filtering company.

"Tunnelling through to an anonymous proxy to get access to information blocked by over-zealous [web]-filtering rules is common in organisations where the workforce is very internet-savvy," says Graham Smith, security portfolio manager for Cable & Wireless.

"We did an audit for a company a couple of years ago and roughly three-quarters of users were bypassing company security systems and accessing the internet via another less secure solution.

"This was temporarily put in place by their IT department to deal with an issue that affected only a handful of users. It did not block any websites and let users browse the internet much quicker then the official solution.

"Ironically, the IT department had forgotten about this temporary service, yet it was common knowledge to just about everyone else."

Bypassing IT security controls for personal interest is one thing. But some employees are now saying they have to circumnavigate security controls just to do their jobs more efficiently.

Some 68 per cent of staff admit to bypassing their employer's information security controls in order to do their jobs, according to research from IT Governance. This suggests that even in some of the most sophisticated and security-conscious organisations, managers are failing to achieve the balance between security and the appropriate availability of information.

Alan Calder, chief executive of IT Governance, gives as an example the payroll department of a company. "They were overworked processing bonuses and wanted to take work home to finish it off," he says.

"Their company's IT security policy didn't allow for such a scenario by offering encrypted laptops or the ability to access the system remotely over a virtual private network.

"Instead, the only obvious option that staff could see was to copy the files on to an unencrypted USB stick and take it home in their pocket, with all the obvious potential for loss of highly sensitive personal data.

"A similar example occurred at a training organisation. Often it proved necessary to see trainees out of the office, which [required] access to a portable format of files. But the design of the IT system did not provide a secure means for data to be taken offsite. Once again, staff were resorting to their own unencrypted USB stick and private laptop."

With the recent wave of compliance regulations and some enormous data blunders hitting the headlines, businesses should understand how to achieve the balance between data protection and freedom of information.

But when it is so much faster to log on to a PC as someone else rather than apply for a user ID and password, the system breaks down - and it could get worse.

"The techno-generation has grown up in the information age and is culturally engaged with technology," says Andy Joone, senior research consultant for the Information Security Forum.

"Their view of information is that it should be set free. They are big users of file sharing utilities, of MP3s, and share personal information freely through social networking sites. They also often live in a virtual world such as Second Life.

"They often have different risk perceptions, especially when it comes to protecting information and have difficulties in knowing why controls are there in the first place. On seeing controls, they just see obstacles and - being the techno-generation - are far more likely to disable or bypass those controls.

"We have a generation entering employment that wants to set information free. The same people are highly technically competent. We haven't made the case for why controls are there. Is it any wonder that people will disable or bypass what they see as unnecessary obstacles, or even challenges to be overcome?"

This will place an increasing burden on the IT department to get the balance right between control and accessibility.

Mr Smith adds: "A security control that prevents or hinders legitimate business activity should not be regarded as a good control.

"Many organisations resort to controls that will impact legitimate business, where it could be more appropriate and beneficial simply to monitor misuse, thereby allowing employees to work efficiently for the business."

Telepresence

videos/links at:
http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html
http://www.musion.co.uk/Gorillaz_MTV_Awards.html
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2007/04/02/theater/20070401_LOSING_FEATURE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/theater/02eyel.html

The 'Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience' was an ambitious collaboration between Cisco and Musion Systems, which took place during the opening of Cisco's Globalization Centre East in Bangalore, India.

Musion seamlessly integrated their 3D holographic display technology with Cisco's TelePresence's system to create the world's first real time virtual presentation.

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, 'beamed up' Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a 'face to face' discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

This demonstration married the telepresence display technology of UK based Musion with the ultra high definition camera and codec technology that powers the Cisco TelePresence offering and the Cisco Human Network that hooked together Bangalore and San Jose.

How The Heck Did They Do That?

The Musion display technology is similar to the tech that telepresence provider Digital Video Enterprises uses for their seamless tele-immersion room.  A sheet of Musion's patented, transparent Eye-liner foil is stretched across the stage.  The ultra high-definition image of Marthin De Beer and Chuck Stucki are captured in San Jose and the images of the virtual humans are then transported over the Human Network to be displayed in Bangalore.

The Cisco shots make it difficult to see the technology at work but the New York Times ran a story illustrating some of capabilities the Eyeliner video product brings to a modern theater production. It helps make the tech more tangible.

Actors (not seen by the audience) are reflected onstage on a nearly invisible screen, observed by Aldo Perez, right, in the play "Losing Something," at the 3LD Art & Technology Center.

The Musion system takes a captured image and shines it down to a mirror on the ground with an ultra-bright projector. The image then bounces off the mirror and is displayed on the Eye-liner foil (as shown above). For more images of the process at work, check out the Times' slideshow

An excellent example of the Musion system technology shown in the Gorillaz video performance. The MTV Europe Awards marked the first live performance of Gorillaz. The Musion® Eyeliner™ System was used to beam the three-dimensional holographic performing cartoon characters on stage.

Their appearance at the 2005 MTV Awards was billed as the 'world's first 3D hologram performance' and was one of the highlights of the evening.

As the world's most successful "virtual band", the human artists behind Gorillaz traditionally appear at live gigs as silhouettes on a giant screen combined with images of their cartoon alter egos. However, with the help of Musion® Systems, they were able to perform in full holographic glory.

videos/links at:
http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html
http://www.musion.co.uk/Gorillaz_MTV_Awards.html

http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2007/04/02/theater/20070401_LOSING_FEATURE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/theater/02eyel.html

大姐 and 小妹

they were here!!

FT: Penguins offer safer surfing for junior web users

Penguins offer safer surfing for junior web users

By Maija Palmer

Published: May 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 12 2008 03:00

The founders of Club Penguin - Lane Merrifield, Lance Priebe and Dave Krysko - are possibly some of the nicest guys in the internet business. They give millions of dollars a year to children's charities and are fierce advocates of family values.

Mr Merrifield looks more like a kindly primary school teacher than an executive, the kind of man you might trust to look after your children. This is what parents are, in effect ,doing as they let their children join Club Penguin, the virtual online world for six- to 14-year-olds.

What started out as a sideline project in the sleepy holiday town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, is rapidly growing into a global phenomenon.

Club Penguin has 20m users and analysts estimate up to 10 per cent of them have persuaded parents to pay about £4 a month for souped-up access to the site. Stephen Prentice, senior analyst at Gartner, notes: "Kids' virtual worlds are the success story. If you exclude online games, around nine out of 10 virtual world users are probably under 12."

Club Penguin became so successful that last July it was bought by Disney for $700m (£350m). It is now building an international presence with Disney's backing, beginning with the opening of a UK office earlier this month. It is also hiring a marketing executive for the first time since it was founded in October 2005.

There is some irony in the fact that the Club Penguin founders now find themselves owned by a big US company. All three originally moved to Kelowna to escape the corporate rat race. And, they had started the site in order to create an advertisement-free zone for children that also offered entertainment.

The site's popularity - it made a profit within four months - showed the founders they had found a gap in the market.

Safety features were a big selling point from the outset. Mr Merrifield's wife is a clinical psychologist specialising in childhood and helped shape the site; his sister and mother, both teachers, also offered advice.

Virtual Worlds Management, which tracks networking sites and virtual worlds, estimates that there are more than 100 youth-focused virtual worlds either live or in development, with 52 of them aimed at children under seven. Disney alone is understood to be developing up to 10 virtual worlds aimed at children.

The fact that many of these sites are associated with commercial brands such as Barbie, Beanie Babies and Bratz worries parents concerned about their children being exposed to too much advertising online.

Safety is also a problem. A recent survey by Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, found that nearly half of all British children have a profile on a social networking site, including a quarter of all eight- to 11-year-olds with online access. These children are theoretically too young for Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, which have minimum age limits of 13 or 14. However, many find ways round the age restrictions. Given that last summer MySpace alone detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, parents concerns are real.

Their search for safer online alternatives - sites that are more closely monitored and where children cannot reveal personal information - plays to Club Penguin's strengths. It employs more than 100 moderators who monitor the site for unsafe behaviour. They are trained to spot bullying, or attempts to share contact details.

Pictures cannot be posted on the site. Instead, children are represented by a colourful penguin. Filtering software prevents phone numbers being published.

Club Penguin's culture of niceness is key to its success. But how well it can continue to walk the fine line between wholesomeness and commercial pressures is unclear. Mr Merrifield says that Disney has been very hands-off with the company and lets it do things its own way.

Mr Merrifield admits the company could create soft toys based on its virtual penguin characters but he pledges this would only be done with careful consideration. "It will be very purposeful. It will be based on what the audience want," he says.

The question is: which audience is he talking about? Eight-year-olds do not mind commercialism - they love toyshops. It is parents who resent it, and Club Penguin will have a tricky balancing act to please both sets of customers.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Rebooting the Indian green revolution

Rebooting the Indian green revolution

By Amy Yee in New Delhi

Published: May 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 2 2008 03:00

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.

ITC has rolled out 6,400 e-choupals across India since 2000. The initiative has gained new relevance as New Delhi urgently tries to tackle threats to food security, the growing gap between rich and poor and stagnant agricultural growth that has added to soaring food prices,

India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."

India has the most to gain from improvements in agriculture because it is home to nearly two-thirds of Asia's poor, most of whom rely on farming, Unescap said.

Middle-class Indians are eating more and better food. Yet its population of 1.1bn is growing at about 1.4 per cent and food grain production increased just 0.9 per cent last year, according to ministry of agriculture statistics.

Agricultural growth has steadily decelerated because of years of under-investment as attention has focused on high-growth manufacturing and service industries.

But big strides can be made with relatively simple measures. In Kurthia, which is 40 km from the bustling holy city of Varanasi, the e-choupal consists of a computer in a modest house rigged with a small satellite dish. Farmers pose questions that are e-mailed to ITC -agricultural scientists and experts at agricultural -institutes.

Yogesh Bhrigulanshi, a farmer and the ITC local manager in nearby Bisuari village, says rice yields have risen 70 per cent, to 3,900kg per acre, since the arrival of the e-choupal. "We used to use fertiliser without any knowledge," says Mr Bhrigulanshi. "We used to use pesticides for any disease on plants. Now we know which pesticide to use and if it needs to be used."

ITC plans to invest $1bn on e-choupals in the period to 2015 to connect farmers to information, products and services. The hope is that as rural incomes rise, farmers will buy more products and services, ranging from seeds and fertilisers to insurance and healthcare.

Rural standards of living have improved. Mr Bhrigulanshi bought his second mobile phone last month and two years ago purchased a television. His 11-year-old son, wearing a white uniform and striped blue tie, goes to an English school that costs Rs25,000 ($625) per year. That compares to the $7 annual cost of his previous government school.

There is still a long way to go. Farmers say there has been little improvement in roads, electricity and water over the years. Government agricultural subsidies for fertiliser, pesticide and equipment do not reach them. Subsidies should be provided through private parties, Mr Singh suggests.

They remain sceptical of the Indian government's recent promises to invest heavily in agriculture and waive $15bn (€9.7bn, £7.6bn) worth of loans to farmers. Writing off bad loans means "defaulters benefit. Those who have paid do not have any benefit," opines Mr Bhrigulanshi.

"Government always talks about farmers when elections come," adds Mr Singh. "But practically, we are not seeing anything."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008