Scam with Spam

Spam, meaning unsolicited e-mail is illegal in many countries and quite rightly.
Spam to me, though, still brings instantly to mind the famousMonty Python sketch, led by Michael Palin.
The subject of this blogpost is more serious unfortunately.
Last week I found in my Yahoo inbox two spam e-mails which, among the other stuff about increasing my sexual prowess, caught my attention.
The first was disguised as being from the National Lottery Commission in the UK, claiming that my e-mail address had won me a prize of £730,000. After a micro second of elation, the stink of a decomposing rat drifted to my nostrils. Non-UK residents like me cannot enter the National Lottery! At the end of the mail I was asked to confirm my name, address and telephone number in an e-mail to a gmail address. That rat decomposed more quickly then. I visited the National Lottery website, which I found to be full of warnings about scam e-mails. The National Lottery Commission, it said, do not advise winners by e-mail, and if they did, a branch of Her Majesty's Government would not stoop to using free e-mail, such as hotmail, gmail, yahoomail etc.
The second spam mail came from, apparently, Western Union, saying that I had won a prize of US$550,000. This one came straight to the point. Send an e-mail to receive our bank account details and then pay into it $355 and we 'll send you the winnings. This one came from a rocketmail address, not a Western Union address.
So two dead stinking rats!
I have forwarded these to the ISP, Yahoo, also to Western Union and the National Lottery Commission. Please do the same if you receive mails like this.
Who are the neanderthals out there who are taken in by spam like this?
Should we call in theInquisition?

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Protecting Your Business Secrets-Learn from the Spooks

Many businesses have secrets.

Often these secrets are so important that disclosure could ruin the business completely. For Swiss banks it used to be the names of the numbered account holders, although the Swiss government has now forced more transparency on the country's banks. For manufacturers of processed foods and sauces it is often the recipe. For software writers it is the source codes, for intelligence agencies it is the codenames and the real identity of their sources in foreign countries. For many businesses participating in competitive international bidding for multi-million dollar projects it is the the price they bid and their copies of the submitted bid.

The reference to intelligence agencies was included deliberately for it is from the world of espionnage that some guidance must be learnt on the subject of protecting secrets.

Disclose company secrets only on a strict "need to know" basis. If a person does not need to know the secret to carry out his job do not tell him.

If secrets must be communicated in writing, either do it by hand or by marking the envelope "Strictly Confidential-Mr X eyes only", and call him to let him know it is coming so he briefs his secretary not to open it. Secretaries, especially if poorly paid or temporary can often be the source of leaks, for money or love.

If you must discuss company confidential business on the telephone, or even by e-mail, devise a system of codenames, known only to yourself and the other party. In the Third World try to avoid telephone calls from or to your hotel room. They are often listened to. Call from your local office or Embassy, or a cellphone call in the street is often safer.

Have a combination lock fitted to your office door, or, if not, you must clear all your papers in to a safe place before leaving the office, even to go to the bathroom. Lock all your documents away, always, before you leave the office for the night, or for prolonged absences.

When travelling by plane put all confidential documents in your carry on baggage, not the check in cases. If travelling by car do not leave confidential documents in your briefcase in the car, alarmed or not. The car may be stolen.

Have a filing cabinet with a combination lock in your office to keep your confidential documents in while you are absent for more than two hours.

Keep a high capacity fine shredder in your office and make sure you empty it yourself and put the contents in a garbage bag. If possible have the garbage bag burnt.

It may be wise to keep some of the very secret stuff at home, or in a safety deposit box at a bank. If you have domestic staff at home, you need the combination safe there as well and take the same precautions as you do at the office.

Alright, this all seems like something from John Le Carré or Tom Clancy but the writer knows from bitter experience that it is necessary, having once had a copy of a highly compettive tender stolen by an employee for a few hours. It was obviously copied elsewhere and then offered for sale to a competitor. Fortunately, the competitor refused to buy it and called the writer. The employee was promptly dismissed and his office and his car was searched before he left. Any further evidence of stolen documents would have lead to a call to the police.

Remember, in a highly compettive business environment some unscrupulous company may try to bribe one of your employees to steal your secrets.

A BREAK IN A SUBMARINE CABLE CAN CAUSE SEVERE PROBLEMS

Christmas Day has always been the busiest day of the year for international telephone calls. People based overseas always want to call their relatives and friends in their home country on that day.
This Christmas, December 25, 2008, became a problem for such callers. Calls proved either impossible to make or were terminated in mid call. The voice quality was also bad.
Even voice over internet calls on Skype, for example, had problems.
In addition internet connection to overseas websites were very slow and the waiting time often unacceptable. This, in January, 2009 is still the case
So what caused these problems?
On December 19th, 2008, three high capacity submarine fibre optic cables were either cut or severely damaged, probably by a large ship’s dragging anchors. The cables involved in this accident were SEA-ME-WE 3(South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) and SEA-ME-WE 4. In addition FLAG FE (Fibre Link Around the Globe. Far East) was involved. The incident took place in the Mediterranean, off Sicily.
A heavy ship like a supertanker sails on for many miles even when the engines are running astern, and they need big, weighty anchors.
A cable ship, Raymond Croze, owned by France Telecom, one of the owners of the cables, is on the scene to effect the necessary repairs.
First however the ship had to find the cables. A dragging anchor can pull a cable a long way from its original as laid position. For this purpose a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is used, connected to the ship by and umbilical cable for navigation and transmitting video of the sea bottom.
Once the cables were found the damaged sections are hauled out of the water aboard the cable ship where the repairs take place. This takes time. In the latest very high capacity submarine there are many fibres in the core. SEA-ME-WE 4 has 192 fibres which enable the cable to have a transmission speed of more than 1 Terabit per second Each fibre has to be repaired individually with a strong, clean joint that does not impair its optical transmission capability.
When cables like these are out of service massive disruption and damage can be done to business world wide. Many companies worldwide, especially the multi national corporations, have set up high capacity private networks to carry data and voice traffic between their many offices. Banks, stock exchanges, currency and commodity markets depend on them every second. For example a fall in the Dow Jones Index, instantly seen on the monitors in the trading rooms of other countries can trigger a similar fall, in the FTSE 100 for example. Then there is the vast amount of e-mail sent around the globe every day.
Data has overtaken voice as the main medium of communication for at least 10 years now.
Can these problems be avoided?
The answer is yes, most of the time, but breaks in three submarine cables in the same place is virtually unknown. Navigation charts show the marine crew the whereabouts of submarine cable zones and anchoring or deep sea trawling is usually prohibited in these areas. The trawler skippers often ignore the warnings, driven by the desire to get a large catch to port to sell it at the best prices. Large ships however, usually only drop their anchors in an emergency.
Fibre optic cable planners rely on achieving redundancy which means the ability to restore traffic over one or more other cables. Telecommunication companies sign reciprocal agreements with other cable system owners to achieve this. Redundancy was forcibly abandoned in this case by the fact that three cables were put out of service at the same time.
Let us hope that those anchors were dropped in a real emergency.

The Internet Generation Gap

Now I know who is running the Internet, turning it into Web 2.0, writing all the software, creating useful and sometimes useless, applications. The same people have launched YouTube, FaceBook, Friendster, Twitter, Plaxo and all the international and regional social networks.
Now I know it is not us, the baby boomers. We are too busy running countries and multi-national corporations, law firms, stockbroking companies, quaint little country pubs or lying around the swimming pools in our villas in Spain, Phuket, or Boracay. Some are just retired enjoying a game of golf after breakfast and a snooze after lunch.
I should have come to that conclusion when I first realised that some of the people I know of, a similar age, cannot even operate a DVD/CD player, never mind a mobile phone or a computer. Those who can fire up a computer are using dial-up internet connections and think that broadband can be tuned into on the radio!
No it is not us. It's the kids, the bratpack, fresh from school or university with a degree in computer science .
This fact was slowly dawning on me a couple of years ago but it really banged home when I attended a two day E-Commerce Conference at the Intercon in Makati City, organised by the DigitalFilipino Club. No sleeping under The Times after lunch in that Club! If, as is unlikely, they read The Times, it would be the on-line edition, on their laptops, while they tuck into their beef tapas and fried rice for breakfast.
When I entered the Conference Hall the lights were low and eyes were all peering at laptop computers, connected to the Internet by the hotel's wi-fi(If you do not know what that means, stop reading and go and have a cup of Horlicks).
The full horror hit me when the lights went up for the lunch break. I was the oldest person there by several decades!!!!
Instead of going into a quiet corner to sob, I carried on bravely. At lunch I sat and talked with some of the juvenile participants. I made an important discovery. They are smart, very smart. They are also highly motivated and energetic. Some of them have set up companies for web hosting and design, some have bought or hired servers to host blog sites and on-line directories, some act as freelance consultants, some make a living from blogging on sites which carry advertising.
I was relieved, really, to know that such important tools of modern life are in the hands of smart young people around the world. Imagine how the internet, computers, mobile phones and other portable digital tools would be if left to my generation, the baby boomers. We would still be sitting around with Steve Jobs in his garage, discussing whether Bill Gates was going to take the IBM or Apple route and start up a company he was thinking of naming Microsoft. Bill was right to retire from Microsoft and concentrate on his charitable foundation, that is now clear to me.
I was moved to post this blog after a meeting I had this morning with another two members of the Internet bratpack, who are hoping that I will hire them to improve my websites.
You see, I am trying to hold my own and instead of fighting this technology, embracing it. Try it.

The Importance of Good Account Management

Many businesses rely on orders from a small number of clients. This is often particularly true in the capital goods, defence, telecommunications or infrastructure projects sector. How many customers are in the market for a nuclear power plant?
If you are the CEO or VP-Marketing of such a company you need to consider setting up Account Management Teams to focus full-time on the most important customers. If you do not know the strategy, organisation or Cap ex plans of your key accounts you do not know how to position your company and its products to win orders.

Appoint a mature, experienced marketing professional as VP-Account Management, reporting to the VP-Marketing or even the CEO. Yes, the position is that important!
Give him a free hand to choose his team, either from within the company or by recruitment. Check that they are all good communicators and have strong inter-personal skills.
Give them a written job description that your full top management group has bought into.
The job description needs to contain the following:-
-create strong personal relationships at all levels of the management in the accounts they are responsible for
-gain the confidence of his colleagues in your company so they are content for him to lead the relationship with the accounts and make available to him the resources he may need
-learn about the accounts' strategies, clients, products, financial situation, shareholders, and problems. The Account Managers must become experts about your company's most important customers
-be able to have easy access to their accounts management for meetings, breakfast or lunch appointments for any of your company's executives including the CEO and Chairman of the Board
-be able to obtain inside information, ethically of course, about Cap ex , your competitors and anything else to support you in winning business
-keep all necessary managers in your company briefed on issues they should be aware of
Be aware that the establishment of such teams can initially cause some friction within the organisation, since some managers will have less direct contact with the customer and may resent this. It is important to brief the managers about the account teams and their purpose. Make a presentation to them with all the account managers present. If done well, this will reassure the doubters, and demonstrate that they still have an important task.
The account teams should be well compensated and a bonus system, related to order intake, put in place.
Many major companies and multinational corporations have benefited from the account management style of handling customer relationships

Why You Should Be at Those Company Conferences

Why you should be at those company conferences

Many large companies, especially the multi-national corporations (MNC), invite managers to conferences. Do not hesitate to accept and be there for the entire conference including the social elements. Participate enthusiastically and you will benefit from attending.
When you have read this article you will understand why.
For many years I was a senior marketing executive with an MNC. Its headquarters are in Paris, it has offices worldwide and manufacturing facilities in Western Europe, the USA, China and Australia. My position involved a lot of overseas travel. It was always challenging and often exciting. In my time I met Presidents, government ministers, and the CEO’s and Board members of major businesses.
I attended a lot of that company’s conferences around the world; from Pasadena to Shanghai, from Brussels to Singapore, from Paris to Kuala Lumpur. Additionally, I went to conferences that the company paid for me to attend, to improve my experience, make valuable contacts, and hold meetings with important players in the market. Particularly memorable was the annual conference in Honolulu, every January, in a venue adjacent to Waikiki beach.
The company conferences ranged from marketing to strategy, to detailed discussions of organisation. Every year an Area Conference was held and the President and CEO of the MNC attended and made his own presentation about the company, together with the Area President and other senior executives from Paris and the from the region.
The conferences were usually held in the Ballrooms of 5 Star hotels, in which the attendees had rooms reserved for them by the company. Suites for the top managers, of course, in which I was often called to meetings over breakfast or after dinner.
The presentations were always impressive. A specialist company was hired to design and set up the room. The graphics and the audio-visual aspects were superbly managed. The presenters, all of them, were required to rehearse the day before, and it showed in the slickness of the presentations during the conference.
They usually lasted two days. The first evening after our arrival would be informal, with a cocktail party first, followed by a buffet dinner or sometimes by a barbecue. In, some countries, particularly in the tropics, these events were held around the swimming pool.
The dress code was smart casual, except for the formal dinner on the second night to which VIPs from the hosting country were often invited. I remember being placed on a table in the Shangri La in Singapore with B. G. Lee. He is now the Prime Minister of Singapore.
Often sight-seeing tours were also arranged after the conference was over. I was taken around Beverly Hills in LA and then on to Universal Studios; also around the old parts of Brussels and the Grimaldi Palace in Monaco. These were very relaxed events with plenty of food and beer taken along.
Why are these events important to you, the reader, and the employee of the company?
You will learn about the company you work for. You will hear about its financial situation, its strategy for growth, its senior management team, its products and its problems, some of which you will be expected to play a part in solving. You will learn about the company’s style of management.
You will meet a lot of people there. You may meet the President of the company himself and some Board Directors who, in my experience, are always willing to meet the company’s managers and listen to their opinions. You will also meet many other managers from various parts of the company including head office. Some of the contacts may be very useful to the success of your management later on. Make sure you take a lot of business cards with you. Network your way around at the social events, and ask for a card from anybody you think may be of value. I recommend that, when you get back to your office, you send an e-mail to the contacts you believe may be able to help you at some point in the future. Tell them that you valued the opportunity of talking to them and that you look forward to talking to them again. Use words which will prompt a reply and then you will automatically be added to their list of e-mail addresses.
Meetings are often held in the margins of company conferences and if you think you need to be present then go to them, gatecrash if necessary. Unless the meeting is very confidential, nobody is likely to object. Also be ready for private one on one meetings. Some of my most useful meetings took place in a hotel room over a glass of whiskey after dinner.
Most conferences these days do not take questions from the floor. Mobile phone numbers are usually displayed on screens so questions can be sent by text. Take every opportunity to send in a good question and make sure you include your name and position in the text. Any chance of raising your profile is good for your future in the company.
Some of the sessions may seem irrelevant to your position, but if attendees are expected to sign in, then you had better be there. You may still learn something and make another good contact.
By way of example of the need to network at conferences, I once received a call from the Executive Secretary of a Cabinet Minister in an Asian country, asking if I could arrange for his boss to meet a French government member of the same rank and responsibility, during a forthcoming trip to Paris. I telephoned one of my conference contacts in the company’s Head Office. He arranged the requested meeting successfully and quickly. After the return of my client I received a letter from the Minister, thanking me for arranging the meeting, giving me a personal mobile phone number and a private e-mail address. I was invited to use these details if needed for any problems, business or personal. I once took advantage of that offer!