Loosing brand power in social media sphere

A simple description of Facebook, Twitter, My Space, LinkedIn or Flickr collectively, can be refered to internet and mobile based publishing technologies that allow individuals to share information in various forms with each other and the general public.

Soon enough as social media keeps dominating business communication; it is growing and follows the e-commerce evolution. Despite this new age of conversing, social media is not a piece of cake, there are many risks that prevail an organization as employees engage in using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn among other social interractive online forums.

Problem at hand, Is your brand at risk

The ever increasing adoption of social media by business also begs the question: What if any legal risks are attached to social media adoption by an enterprise.

In as much as a good percentage of individuals perceive business outreach via social media networks boosts devotion and improves customers’ loyalty to a company. Though, lack of formal guidelines on the way employees interact with the social media may have serious repucursions.

On an international view, social media presents two general threats to enterprises -- phishing attacks and disclosure of intellectual property, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at San Francisco-based nCircle Inc.

As pressure builds from multiple fronts. Sales and marketing teams want to engage and sell to customers through social computing. Users want more freedom to access personal accounts from the workplace. HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they might not be aware of the risks involved in engaging with these forums.

Some of the risks involved include loss of reputation and possible liable suits when employees blab or posts photos and videos about what they shouldn't. There are also risks of malware attacks, identity theft, phishing and privacy breach of sensitive data.

A practical example of Telcom limited in South Africa, suffered the rath of customers hate site actions. Due to monopolizing the telecommunication industry, the company handled its customers in a bad way. They responded by creating a page “Telkom hellcom” that ruined the company’s reputation.

Individuals can also masquerade as companies or people on social media sites and put out false messaging that is interpreted by the public as being real. This can affect stock prices and it can impact what shareholders think of a company thus impacting investment and the bottom line.

Lots of inappropriate information is passed in these environments that might cost organization image. According to Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in 2010, business managers should be held responsible for security in social media forums and not the IT department.  

Governing social media, get involved, share and apologize

In East Africa, Millward Brown, a global research company carried a research on 25 coporate companies on what policy measures they have taken when interacting in the social forums. None of them have written policies in place to govern the use of social media.

Organizations should make sure that the corporate communication policy not only covers the media and press, but also social networking. Though, many East African companies have tried wholesale blocking of these sites.

By doing this on corporate PCs obviously doesn't prevent anyone from using alterative means, to go out and make the same outrageous mistakes that could harm the company.

This however is a temporary solution because according to Millward Brown research statistics, the social way of sharing information is growing at an alarming rate.

Social media is rewriting the rules of IT security and changing the security perspective of enterprises. The way these communication forums are packaged, it is very hard to control data breeches like in case of emails. Enterprises can only counter this by responding positively to what customers say about them.

Due to the sophisticated techniques of securing social media content that arent fully effective, employees must understand what confidential data is. So when they are on these sites, they understand the ramifications of what they are doing.

Mobile money transfers, hackers homework!

Recently I happened to attend the launch of an Ethical Hacker training programme that was introduced in the Kenyan market by EC-Council and SIMOS Consultancy firm. What really attracted my attention is the way various security ethusiats talked about numerous angles of breaches that we face especially with the consumerization of tech products that we engage in due to increased internet connectivity.

Am not talking about individual people but also companies and organizations have trusted this systems to build their brands and run their business on. To some it is unavoidable especially the telcoms with their numerous services and as they try to reduce the amount of liquid cash we carry in our pockets.

What am i driving at, for instance are the numerous amounts of monies sitting in the cloud platforms during various exchanging systems owned by Kenyan telcoms? For example the MPESA, YuCash, Zap and OrangeCash, how secure are these amounts of cash lying in this space! And how long will it take for black cyber criminals to hit on us?

Let me be a little bit technical, we have all used celphones, at some point between our conversations; we experience noise (technical interruption of communication signals). When this happens, the transeivers try to reconstruct this message and at this period is when our conversations are tapped by external listeners. Now think about what happens when subscribers try sending money between this communication channels and this happens!

Mobile money actually has brought a huge change in the way we transfer cash from one place to the other. Our sim cards have become money wallets but again will these send hackers back to books on how to best they can have Kenyan money sitting in simcards and hovering all over the space!

…I don’t trust Wezesha laptops deal...

Thanks to the ICT government intiative of giving a helping hand to the university & college students a chance of embracing the digital world. Wezesha is a bright idea; I mean soft loans for me to get a laptop, who would refuse. Funded by the World Bank this is a brilliant take that brings up a technology oriented person as he/she narrows in to specific disciplines of undergraduate studies.

As a tech ethusiast I took a step ahead and did some math, clearly something aint right. Am not just being paranoid about stuff but lets look at the calculations.

We analysized the laptops available in this deal and noticed some 'anomalies';

For instance, the Samsung N150 is stated as costing KES 19,100 courtesy of Safaricom, but the same on the Safaricom Shop goes for KES 29,999, a difference of KES 10,899. Now, the voucher given to students is worth KES 9,600...

And then this HP Compaq CQ56-152si costs KES 41499 via the program but a similar of its kind with the same specifications on chekelea.com costs KES 41,440! 

This Toshiba Satellite C660-1EL costs KES 40,999 with the voucher while the same costs KES 39,760 without the voucher.

I would say my fellow tech analyst and I arent money minded but lets have a clear picture of things.

Technology for your eyes

Its amazing how the world is shifting into technology, does it mean one time we will completely stop working? From watching over our health to the way we do things at some point there is an element of technology used. My take, in the years to come the world will be a gadget, am not sure whether life will be boring or interesting at some point, because we will have turned into technology slaves.

Recently I run into some cool stuff I think would be wise to share, a revolution to your eyes! The Rocket sun glasses species. This technology of eye engineering will not only protect your eyes from the sun rays but also computer display and office lights.

The Gunnar Optiks Rocket Amber, one of this tech glasses uses raw technology to squeeze the last bit of eyesight-preserving skill from its “indoor glasses.” its amber lenses filter out the high end of the visual spectrum, reducing eyestrain under harsh fluorescent lights.

For the riders’ goggles, Wiley XL-1s has an ultra foam rubber seal that forms a fitting layer between the frame and your eyes. This layer will keep out dust and insects while riding the motorcycle at high speeds. In addition, the Wiley XL-1 has light-adjustable lenses that provide crystal-clear clarity.

For those who want flexibility, the Oakley Split jacket is one of its kinds. With its switchlock technology, it’s easy to change the lens without breaking them. The frame has the easiest and reliable lens changing system. Though all these pairs come at an expensive price, just for yours eyes.

The Tablets pool

In November 2010 ViewSonic fished out their new gadget, the ViewPad 7 Android tablet from their pool, at first everybody turned their necks to catch a glance when the Apple Ipad was mentioned and it was indeed the in thing in the market especially when reference was made to the tablet family. Right now, tech companies have opened their flood gates in the tablet business. I don’t know maybe it’s the business mobility era that the world is into.

Well, I need a break from this because where do I take my ageing desktop PC let me not even mention the laptops we are clinch on. The technological improvement on gadgets innovation from various companies is so immense that am spoilt for choice. Each and every company in the electronic development space is coming up with a tablet, to ease the daily routine transactions and minor processes needed by an individual. To add on that, this tablets do not come with only basic functionality but a lot of high tech navigation power with different kinds of backlight for various applications use.

A glance to a few of these tablets, the gPad  which is a product of Rydeen, a company that engages itself with car technology, the Adam with a 1024 by 600 Pixel Qi display which is its selling point is from the Notion Ink a company from India.  Archos who initially baked portable media players also came up with the Archos Home 7 Tablet, among others. We can walk the talk about tablets the whole day but competition is at hand to kick others from winning the users hearts, for instance am not shouting and not biased too on Apple but word has it there is a powerful baby Ipad coming soon, so watch out.

The growth of the hard drives.

Computer hard disk drives can be compared to storage containers in our daily lives. Unlike a cabinet used to store paper records and files, Wikipedia defines a hard disk drive as a non – volatile random access device used to store changing digital data. In other words the hard disk gives a computer the ability to recall things when there is no power.

International Business Machines (IBM) introduced them in 1956 and over the years they have evolved in terms of their storage capacity, their speed to read and write data and they have been less vulnerable.

Hard disk drives are the physical storage areas for secondary data that is to be processed by a computer system via a volatile temporary memory (RAM) to the processor (CPU).

Enough of what it is and what a hard drive does, this storage device has over the years evolved since the 1960s. Punch cards were the core storage devices in the 20^th Century; they were fed into IBM 350, which was a commercial computer system. From 1979 to today: Six hard drives have reduced in size from 8-in. (inch) model, followed by 5.25-in., 3.5-in., 2.5-in., 1.8-in. (used by Apple IPod first in 2001) to 1-in.

Today, isoSafe have introduced an indestructible portable hard drive, not even a short gun could damage it. This was show cased in the ongoing International Consumer Electronic Show http://www.cesweb.org/default.asp, which is the world largest technology show.

The show, dubbed CES 2011 has been an ongoing event, takes place in the begging of each year in Las Vegas, kicked off on the 6^th of 2011 ends 9^th.  The hard drive is build not only to with stand physical impact but also with a HydroSafe water barrier technology that prevents damage to the data due to water leaks up to 72 hours in water.

The hard disk has not only developed in terms of physical strength, size and sleekness but also its capacity. isoSafe hard drive is 2 Terabyte huge, if I can compare this storage to a normal 8 GB flash drive, it means this hard drive can hold data of 250, 8 GB flash drives. In other words, 2 Terabytes can hold approximately1333 high definition (HD) movies.

This is a breakdown of computer storage capacities.

· 1 Bit = Binary Digit (A Bit is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses. It can be used to represent two states of information, such as Yes or No.)
·  8 Bits = 1 Byte
· 1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte 
· 1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 
· 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte

· 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte (a Terabyte could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video.)

· 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte

There is nothing constant as change; everything is evolving to the betterment of life. Since we are on hard drives as storage device, let’s watch the future and see what technologies like the “cloud computing” have for us in terms of data storage & what happens to the physical hard drives that exist. 

Kenya Internet Exchange Point

Kenya hosts a physical infrastructure that interconnects local networks directly and enables these networks to exchange traffic via a local exchange point, rather than doing this through expensive and distance offshore networks. The internet exchange point has enabled the local service providers (ISPs) to exchange traffic between their networks on a communal agreement ground.

The elimination of third party networks comes with a lot more merits to the local internet connection because it means cost will be cut down due to reduced bandwidth to the remote exchange servers. This is as a result of direct interconnections which cut down parts of the traffic which must be delivered through the upstream transit providers and hence reduce the average per – bit delivery cost of their service.

 Another advantage that is experienced is the constant high connection speed especially in areas which have poor long distance connections, eliminating the need to route local traffic over expensive international links only to return to the country which they originate from. To add on, the availability of local routing network connection through the internet exchange point improves the efficiency in routing and eases troubleshooting and makes the connections fault tolerant.  

With the upcoming technology of cloud computing, most Kenyan ISPs will benefit from the pool of resources and infrastructure pulled together to handle the internet exchange points without fully investing on initial capital needed to set up the infrastructure. Though at the moment any costs incurred by the IXP is shared among all its participants.