Source: NoiseToSignal

E-Commerce and its currencies can be a topsy turvy world.  Just when you thought everything was on an even keel along comes a (relatively) new kid on the block that shakes up the status quo.

So it it is with Bitcoin, which is either a boon or a bubble depending which side of the fence you choose to sit on. There are those who firmly believe it is the currency of the future but for folks who are not economists, it is difficult to see objectively beyond the hype.

Semil Shah of Tech Crunch at least attempted to make sense out of Bitcoin by asking five economists their take on the online currency.  Harvard Professor Chris Roberts neatly sums up the nagging feeling that many of us have about Bitcoin’s longevity in his statement:

“It would really be something if intelligent people chose to invest more trust in a currency system built and managed, in large part, by anonymous computer hackers than they did in currency systems built and managed by governments of the people, by the people. Fortunately, we are not there yet.“

In the same article Peter Rodriguez, Professor at Virginia’s Darden School of Business, makes two further points about the currency:

“In some ways, Bitcoin is just a virtual pack of smokes. But in other ways, it’s revolutionary. Cigarettes have inherent value and alternative uses, like cotton and even gold. Bitcoins are valued in and of themselves. They have even less alternative uses than paper currency or baseball cards“.

“Even it they just serve to measure the value of goods ultimately transacted in ‘real’ currencies, Bitcoins will have become something entirely new: a true, stateless, virtual currency rooted in nothing other than confidence in the set of rules that surround them“.

It is perhaps this last dimension, a stateless currency that is a huge part of Bitcoin’s attraction, especially in an economic climate where traditional currencies and banking systems have been taking such a hammering of late.

Rwanda-based Nyaruka suggests that it is developing countries that will and do benefit most from Bitcoin and its pretenders.

“Rwanda, like its neighbours, is very much a cash society, which means that most digital goods are out of reach, not because they aren’t affordable, but simply because most Rwandans don’t have credit cards.“

As this very good blog article states, Bitcoins are simply digital cash and because of this works well in any society where cash is the norm.  And of course digital cash is far easy to get hold of without going through the hassle of applying for, and managing a credit card.

It may be a surprise to some to learn that the decentralised, cryptographic, Bitcoin isn’t exactly new.  It was launched four years ago as an open-source digital currency by Satoshi Nakamoto, who it turns out is probably not ‘his’ real name and could in fact be a group of people hiding behind a pseudonym.  Hardly reassuring news to any enterprise assessing business risk and contemplating the digital currency.

Purely digital currencies such as Bitcoin have an inherent problem; that of double-spending. i.e. someone concurrently sends a single unit of currency to two different sources.

Thomas Lowenthal notes that “digital products like a movie or a text file are non-rivalrous. If you have a copy of my pseudo-trip-rock band’s new MP3 album, there’s still just as much MP3 to go around for everyone else who wants one. That’s not a problem for files, but it is a problem with currency, since the whole point is that there’s a limited supply.”

The key question to me is, does the use of cryptography do away with the need for an intermediary verification process, such as that which Paypal uses?

I am personally not convinced at this stage that business adoption is a wise move but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.  You need to ask yourself, is it safer to mine Bitcoins or to mine gold – or for that matter neither?

Corporate training is perceived as a bugbear by some and an essential by others.  Up-skilling your staff and promoting your own products and services to others should be far more than a “day off” in the eyes of the participants.

As one who has attended and delivered many such sessions over the years, I would be the first to concede that the ones I have attended are often a mixed bag, ranging from the riveting to the down right soporific.

A good training programme is all about building staff engagement; getting them motivated and clued up so that they can make a meaningful contribution not only to your company but also to their own feeling of self-worth.

Engaged employees are pivotal to the success or failure of a business.  A recent Dale Carnegie blog post reports that 69% of ‘disengaged employees’ would hand in their notice and take up an offer with another company if that enterprise offered them just 5% more money.  With ‘engaged employees’ it would take a 20% raise on their current remuneration to make them consider a shift to another company.

Staff retention and turnover is a prime consideration and worry for many businesses and it is especially so in a country like Singapore, where job hopping is endemic.

Finance and accounting specialist recruitment firm Robert Half found that Singapore employees in their sector were the world’s most chronic job hoppers, serving a shorter period of tenure in a job than anywhere else in the world. The reasons given were “better remuneration, promotion, a new challenge, an overseas posting or more flexible work arrangements”.

Not that personal gain is necessarily always the primary motivation to jump ship.  A 2011 study by NTU student Teh Kai Feng also suggested that the job-hopping trend in Singapore could also be partially attributed to way the education system is designed rather than purely personal motivation.

Human Resource consultant Angeline Seah told Ryan Ong of MoneySmart that she believes the Internet has also made it a lot easier for job-hoppers:

“Job hopping has become prevalent because of the Internet. In the past, it was a time consuming process to go from one employer to another. But the rise of job sites, like monster and JobsDB, has turned the employment market into a true marketplace. Nowadays, all you need is an Internet connection and five minutes. You can compare all the available jobs, and online applications are fast.”

She also cited waiting for a pay rise as being a contributing factor:

“Job hoppers work on the principle that switching jobs is easier than waiting for a pay raise. A job switch may raise income by 20% in a month. Pay raises are about 4%, and may take a year.”

What ever the reason, such a high turnover does not auger well for business continuity and is stressful for senior staff who are faced with the unenviable and repetitive task of recruiting replacements.

There was a time before the age of Millennials where a job for life was both an aspiration and for many, a reality.

Now only 31% regard a ‘career-for-life’ with one employer as “relevant” (Kelly Global Workforce Index (KGWI) survey). It is a reality that today’s employees are more self-centred than their predecessors.  Statistics also suggest that many of them will have changed jobs half a dozen times before reaching the age of thirty.

So what can you do to counteract this trend?

Providing excellent training opportunities for your employees will go some way towards retaining them as I have suggested above. The Kelly Services survey also showed that there is a common belief by over half of respondents (53%), that the only way to develop their skills and advance their careers was to leave their current position.

Your business challenge is to prove that this isn’t necessarily so; offer employees a career path within your organisation and give them the training they deserve to better themselves, and by extension, your enterprise.

The need for specialised skills is increasing not decreasing. High value jobs such as those in IT, sales & marketing and finance require increased levels of skills and so workplace education is critical.

If you are not going to provide it they feel even more motivated to leave you and find a company that will.

Perhaps the final word, on why training must be high on your agenda, should come from Josh Bersin of Deloittes:

“Today’s business climate is one of global skills gaps. New technology, shifting markets, and changing demographics mean that manufacturers, service providers, telecommunications companies, technology companies, healthcare providers, and many other industries live and die by their skills. 

As companies globalise their businesses, the ability to build skills has become a deep competitive advantage.“

Related articles

• Singapore Sees Higher Domestic Employment Gains in 2012

It comes as no surprise to learn that smartphone addiction is a very real thing, albeit a pleasant one for most in the 18-24 year old demographic.

According a new survey conducted by IDC in conjunction with Facebook, our interaction with each other through our smart phones starts almost as soon as our eyes open in the morning. Within the first 15 minutes of waking up 4 out of 5 smartphone owners are checking their phones.

The focus of the study was to understand how smartphone owners use their phones over the course of a day and the week, with an emphasis on social and communication applications and services.

Smartphones have become woven into the fabric of everyday life.  In the USA where the study of 7,400 people was conducted, half of the country’s total population use a smartphone and this figure is projected to rise to 67.8% of the population by 2017.  That’s 222.4 million interconnected people.

A sense of being ‘connected’ was the primary motivation and sentiment experienced by respondents. Talking on the phone (43%), texting/messaging (49%) and direct messaging via Facebook(40%) were the services that drove the highest levels of connectedness across the largest number of people.

Friday to Sunday had the highest levels of engagement and the ease of being able to slip a smartphone into one’s pocket was also a major factor.

The average daily time spent communicating on smartphone was 132 minutes and only 16% of that time was actually spent on phone calls. 84% spent their time texting, sending and receiving email and engaging through social media.

Facebook who co-sponsored the survey will no doubt be heartened to learn that 70% of respondents use Facebook on their phone and of this group, 61% use it each day.

82% read their Facebook news feed while 49% responded or posted comments on friends’ updates.  Interestingly, playing games on Facebook was not a dominant activity with only 16% showing this preference, while 7% used Facebook to find apps that interest them.

The survey found that Facebook dominates the total time spent on social and communications activities (on a smartphone),  making up 1 out of every 4 minutes.

One final word on Smartphone addiction; 63% of smartphone owners keep their phone with them for all but an hour of their waking day. And of course, many also use their phone as their alarm clock the next morning!

The full report can be viewed here.

Deutsche Telekom AG

The Top 5 source countries confirms our worst fears about the volume of attacks emanating from the Russian Federation, with Taiwan trailing a distant second.  But it is worth noting these locations are not necessarily the offending hackers’ country of origin as most attacks are automated and seek out the weakest system to exploit.

TweetPing

And if you ever doubted have active Twitter is a global communication tool, have a look at TweetPing (above), the brainchild of Franck Ernewein, a French web designer.

Every time a tweet is made somewhere in the world Tweetping gives of a light flash, superimposed on a map of the Earth.

But the site provides more details than a simple visual reference. Activity by continent is detailed in the bottom section of the design – the total number of tweets, total number of words & characters and the last #hashtags and @mentions.

Here is one hour of the Twitterverse in action presented in just five minutes

There are other excellent alternatives to the above. Frog Design‘s “A World Of Tweets” also presents data on a map showing where people are tweeting at from the past hour. A region’s heatmap gets “hotter” depending on the activity.

A World Of Tweets

Tweereal’s animation on the map features only those tweets containing geo-tags (coordinates)

Tweereal

So is Twitter the collective consciousness of the ‘Net as some pundits suppose? It must be coming close to be reaching this status as one in eight people in the world tweet, albeit that the range of content followed is often confined to relatives, celebrities and a few chosen brands.

Patrick Meier of National Geographic quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in 2010, that social media is the new nervous system of our plant.  Certainly if you throw in other social media maps such as these for Flickr, FourSquare and Facebook you get a better overview of global activity, but is activity enough to gauge the prevailing mood.

For this you really need to add a layer of sentiment analysis. The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project is heading in this direction. Here is their Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat.

Here is CISCO‘s take on the Internet of Things, which they call “The Internet of Everything“.

It boils down to interconnecting four key things: people, process, data and things.

As David Evans says in a recent blog article this will turn “information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.”

Source: CISCO

As this infographic shows the traditionally religious day of rest, Sunday, is prime time for this activity and it only dissipates around Thanksgiving, no doubt due to the close proximity of other family members!

Like it or not, pornography on the web is big business - there are more than 24 million such sites on the Web and just over $3,000 every second is spent by those who view them. In the US alone Internet porn generates $2.8 billion per year and that figure needs to be measured against the estimated $4.9 billion that the industry generates globally

Societal Effects

Setting aside any moral position on the subject, the evidence is fairly conclusive that apart from sheer economics, Internet pornography is having a major societal impact.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam undertook a large research study in the field of collective sexual identity.  Gaddam, the co-author of their resulting publication “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” says that ”Web porn has changed everything”. Tastes once regarded as deviant more widespread.

Another report also shows that Internet porn is creating a generation of young men who are hopeless in the bedroom. “A ‘paradoxical effect’ is created whereby with each new thrill, or ‘dopamine spike’, the brain loses its ability to respond to dopamine signals, meaning that porn-users demand increasingly extreme experiences to become aroused”

But psychologist Michael Castleman takes a contrary view. In an earlier blog post he writes “The evidence clearly shows that from a social welfare perspective, porn causes no measurable harm. In fact, as porn viewing has soared, rates of syphilis, gonorrhea, teen sex, teen births, divorce, and rape have all substantially declined. If Internet porn affects society, oddly enough, it looks beneficial. Perhaps mental health professionals should encourage men to view it.”

What ever the conclusions reached by research one fact remains; with 12% of Internet web sites pushing porn, it is likely to be around for a long time and be a huge money spinner for those who profit from the industry.

Even the fact that 45% of the smartphones shipped in the year 2014 will be priced below $200 doesn’t necessarily equate to email being opened.

According to a quick survey undertaken by Marketing Sherpa, only 2% of marketers find mass adoption of mobile email interaction among their customers.

Worryingly, a third of respondents didn’t know whether they clicked through on email offers or not?!

However, you have a better chance of having it read if you adhere to the principles of responsive web design.

GraphicMail’s Nicholas Eckert, in a PR Web article, says “As email readership continues its migration towards mobile devices, responsive design becomes even more important to mobile and email marketers”

And it is what your email contains that makes people want to open it and read it.

Overt sales-pitches will be left unopened; refocus your communications so that they become education-based emails.  If you give recipients something they actually want to read and learn about that you will succeed.  If you don’t, the result will be immediately obvious.

Onion’s creative arm, Onion Labs have partnered with the hotel company to produce a web site that encourages a worker to diagnose their ills and recommends vacations as a ‘prescription’.

The Urgent Vacation Centre also features the 14 symptoms of Vacationitis and a plea to stop the spread of this malignant disease.

I can particularly emphasise with the malady ‘Acute Retinal Monitoritis‘ !  The viewer has the ability to download a large or small version of each symptom for their office cubicle or share same through social media.

Yellow Post-It Fever doesn’t look too pleasant either.

“We are particularly targeting working professionals. It’s becoming harder and harder to switch off work, harder for people to think about and plan vacations. This time of year is popular for people to plan vacation travel. When they come through Christmas, they think ahead for the year, think about where they might go.”

It all goes to prove that when it comes to advertising a little humour goes a long way; in this case hopefully a long way away from a cluttered desk and a frenetic office.