Google reveal their ‘Android’ phone

In America T-Mobile and Google have unveiled their first ‘Android’ phone.  Whilst it may not win any beauty contests, the smart phone’s software and advanced web browsing is likely to impress.  Its functionality is more impressive than even the current crop of smart phones, including the iPhone.

The handset, previously code-named the HTC Dream, is now officially called the T-Mobile G1. It goes on sale on October 22nd in the US only on the T-Mobile network.

Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile USA’s parent company, will also be selling the device from November in the UK through its T-Mobile service. The phone will be available throughout the rest of Europe with a roll out starting during the first quarter of 2009.

From a hardware perspective, the G1 won’t re-write the rules in the way the iPhone did. The device uses a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from a touch-screen exterior, which looks similar to other devices on the market.  But inside, the Google Android software significantly improves the mobile web experience for users making it a serious competitor to the iPhone - and a hands-down winner when compared with other smart phones like the BlackBerry or phones running Microsoft Windows mobile operating system.

For now, G1 is targeted at the consumer market, a fact Cole Brodman, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for T-Mobile USA, acknowledged openly during the launch event.

Still, T-Mobile executives and Google’s top mobile executives, Andy Rubin and Rich Miner, said that because the operating system is open, third-party developers could easily create an application to hook into corporate email. Eventually, G1 users could download the application from the Android Market on their devices.

Derrick Cameron, MD of IT firm Eximium comments “It strikes me that when it comes to web surfing, Google has created a user experience far better than what’s on offer from other smart phones around today.  It will be interesting to see if it is able to create anything like the interest in the phone that Apple did.  Google is a very well respected brand and it I look forward to seeing if they can transfer some of their brand loyalty away from the PC to the mobile phone market.”

To see our other article about the G1 phone, click the following link;

http://www.eximium.net/blog/index.php/2008/11/business-advice-luton-29/

Fighting the Viruses

We are all concerned with protecting ourselves from the threat of computer viruses. People are continually finding new and sneakier ways to insert them into our technology and so we here at Eximium try to keep up with all the news and any new developments regarding this issue and report anything of any interest or benefit to you.

It was whilst I was researching this that I came across an article by Bobbie Johnson, who is the technology correspondent for The Guardian. He writes about Google donating 15 million dollars to research viruses of the medical kind. I was pleasantly surprised to find a big corporation ploughing some of its profits into something which will benefit everybody.

To read the full article for yourself click the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/21/google-healthcare

Terminal 5 ‘Lessons Learned’ Still Useful

I was pleased to be invited to speak earlier this month, at an NHS leadership development event,
about the lessons business leaders can learn from Terminal 5.  I did a 1-hour talk for them, based on 2 of the articles I’ve previously had published about the problems at Terminal 5 and the lessons that any business owner or manager can learn from them.

There were 24 senior leaders from the NHS in attendance, and I must admit I was quite intimated by the nature of their roles, the size of the annual budgets they each deal with (circa £500m!), and the real ‘life and death’ environment they work in.  Even so, my talk generated much useful debate and it was obvious from their comments that there were useful learning points for all.

Earlier in the year, I spoke to 60 SME business owners and managers for 20 minutes on this same subject at a networking event in Hatfield, and the response was equally positive.

This continues to prove that anyone in business can learn useful lessons from the problems that BA had.  Also, it’s great to see that it’s still as fresh and relevant as a subject as ever.  My view is always that it’s important to learn from your own mistakes but even better to learn from someone else’s!

The type of problems that occurred at Terminal 5 are happening all the time where business change is concerned, particularly if technology is involved.  This was just a very high profile incident.  Any business change project will benefit from careful management and clear communication, and I guess that’s probably the key message that we can all learn from disasters like those at Terminal 5.

You can see one of the articles I had published about this on smeweb.com using the following link:

http://www.smeweb.com/management/features/lessons-learned-from-heathrow-terminal-5.html

Equally, if you’d be interested in me speaking at your event about this subject, or anything else relating to business IT, please just drop me a line from our meet the team page here:

http://www.eximium.net/meettheteam.asp

Tips for getting the most out of a consultant

Make sure you tell your consultant as soon as possible if the project is veering off in the wrong direction from where you would like it to go, or if they aren’t meeting your needs.  It gives them a chance to rectify any situation before it gets out of hand and get things back on track.

IT ill prepared for new set of carbon rules

IT departments and their managers need to ensure that they are prepared for the introduction of a forthcoming carbon cap and trade scheme experts have warned.

Part of the Carbon Reduction Commitment which is detailed in the government’s 2007 Energy White Paper, the carbon cap is one of the tools by which the government aims too reduce UK CO2 emissions by 1.2m tonnes by the year 2020.

As part of its strategy to achieve this ambitious aim, the government is targeting organisations which have a high electrical consumption - over 5,000 KW of electricity a year. It is estimated that this comprises around 10% of the UK’s businesses.

Those organisations are expected to have carbon reporting processes in place by 2010 – much of the responsibility for that will fall on IT.

And Richard Kellett, head of solutions and technology marketing at business intelligence firm SAS, said organisations need to start applying the technology needed for the scheme now in order to be properly prepared.

It is tempting to aim to meet the basic requirements of legislation, he explained, but this can mean business leaders become blind to opportunities to improve business processes. “This type of approach is extremely short sighted, and puts you in a constant game of catch up.”

Business leaders may come unstuck unless IT is proactive in preparing for the introduction of carbon reporting, warned Jes Seymour at consultancy company IT Insight. “IT departments have a tendency to trip over when they do things in a rush,” he said.

Derrick Cameron of Luton based IT firm Eximium warns that “The biggest risk is that IT departments could underestimate the scale of process changes that carbon reporting could introduce.  Although it might seem a simple enough idea to introduce, the scheme may mean changes to older systems and mean significant overhauls.”

Under the government proposals, organisations will be given a three-year period of grace in order to establish adequate carbon reporting processes. Businesses that fail to comply by April 2013 face being fined.

The Blackberry bites back

There’s been a good deal of development in mobile technology recently, with more people wanting to access the Internet from their mobile phones.  As we have mentioned before, the advantage of having a reliable and useful link to your emails, business diary and the Internet, whilst on the move, is invaluable to business people today.  The mobile phone market has stepped up to the plate and produced the Nokia E61, the iPhone and the G1, which we have written about, among others.  Now, one of the original Smartphones, the Blackberry, is hitting back with the UK launch of the Storm last week.

Like the iPhone and the G1, the Storm is exclusive to one network provider, in this case Vodafone, and went on sale on 14th of November.   It’s free when you sign a 2 year contract at £35 a month or more.  This is cheaper than both of its main rivals.

Like the iPhone, it is a touch screen device.  Touch screens seem to be growing in popularity at the moment , however the new Google G1 does not have one.   HTC who make the G1 have recently launched their touch screen device called the HTC Touch HD and Nokia has a touch screen phone in the offing, but has not yet signed up an operator for it.  They have launched the E71 however, which looks like a usable and well put together alternative, as always.

Blackberry has a long standing customer base, who may be loyal to what they know and love, or they may be tempted to try something new.  Only time will tell.

Tips for getting the most out of a consultant

It can be helpful to consider what aspects of the work members of your team could do instead of the consultant having to do it.  This is a way to maximise your spend on their time, by ensuring they spend it only doing what they need to do.  It also gives your team a closer understanding of the work so, when the consultant goes, they’ll understand more about what went on.

Watch Out - The Spammers Are Getting More Devious Than Ever

There has been a new wave of spam emails we want to make you aware of.  They come with an attached ‘zipped’ file (i.e. ending in .zip) and claim to be contacting you with regard to your account.  Some are more sophisticated than others and can be very effective at fooling you into thinking you are looking at a genuine email.

The more obvious ones appear to be contacting you as a customer.  They are informing you that they have sent you the information you will need to ‘recover your account’.   You may receive emails supposedly from your credit card companies, informing you that there has been some suspicious activity in your account and asking you to check the purchases on the statement attached.  Others are from bogus customers claiming to have made some amendments to the contract attached and asking you to review it. 

The most deceptive of these claim to be from a courier service regarding a parcel delivery.  They say that they are from ‘United Parcel Services’ and have a ‘UPS Tracking Number’ in the subject, very neatly tricking you into thinking at first glance that they have come from a legitimate company. 

Some example text in the body of the email is:

‘Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on Oct the 28 in time because the recipient’s address is not correct.  Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office’

With Christmas around the corner, your staff are likely to be caught more off guard than usual and some of these messages even go as far as to notify you that you have 10 days in which to collect your parcel or you will be charged by the day thereafter.

Here are our top tips on how to deal with potential spam:

1. Be vigilant. Always check that you trust the sender of the emails you are opening. Even if you don’t know them personally, you are likely to know of them.

2. Treat all emails which you are unsure of as spam.  If the mail is genuine, the person trying to contact you will try again and it’s easier to cope with a slight delay than the potential after effects of a virus, spyware, etc.

3. Don’t use unsubscribe. Never click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link of an email you are unsure of as that is another way of opening the flood gates, as it notifies them that someone is at that address and susceptible to spam.

4. Never open an attached file if you don’t know the sender. Even if the file is zipped and it appears that the sender has been security conscious - this is potentially a ruse.

There are things you can do to protect yourself, minimise the potential impact that this kind of spam can have on your business, and even stop the majority of these emails getting through to you.  It is very important to have good, strong anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-spam protection in place.

For further information, please see the following link to our managed security service page:

http://www.eximium.net/managed_security_services.asp

New software targets the ‘pump and dump’ scammers 

New software that can identify unscrupulous scammers using the internet to hype stocks and share prices has been introduced. These ‘pump and dump’ schemes have been circulating for some time and often involve manipulation of the market, but increasingly, spammers are sending out junk mail to encourage small investors to cash in stock. Reports estimate that these scams account for around 15% of all junk e-mail. 

Once stocks are high, the fraudsters then sell the artificially inflated shares to line their own pockets whilst legitimate investors and brokerages lose their money. A 2006 study of these ‘pump and dump’ scams in concluded that spammers may make a return of up to 6% using these dishonest methods.

The software has been developed by VeriSign to tackle this growing issue. “This gives brokers a jump on the attackers and raises the bar,” said Perry Tancredi, Senior Manager of anti-fraud services at Verisign.  Mr Tancredi said that the company’s fraud detection kit would help “decrease the time between the attack being launched and the brokerage being able to respond.”

Prior to this, he stated that brokerages had relied on counter measures such as restrictive stock trading or analysis packages that only spotted a problem when money had gone.

“What this self-learning behavioural engine does is look at the different attributes of the event, not necessarily about the computer or where you are logging on from but about the actual transaction, the trade, the amount of the trade,” said Mr Tancredi.

“For example have you liquidated all of your assets in stock that you own in order to buy one penny stock?” he said. “Another example is when a customer who normally trades tech stock on Nasdaq all of a sudden trades a penny stock that has to do with health care and is placing a trade four times more than normal.”

Derrick Cameron, MD of IT firm Eximium was delighted to hear of the new software. “This sort of scam costs honest organisations immeasurable amounts of money and the creation of this software sends a clear message to scammers that we can find the solution to any illegal practice they can come up with.  Hopefully, this approach will also help restore investor confidence at a time when it is much needed.”

The New Google G1 Phone

The new Google G1 phone went on sale in the UK last Thursday, November the 6th. T-Mobile has exclusively released the phone, which can be obtained for free on packages from £40 a month.

The G1 was successfully launched in the US last month and is up against the Apple iPhone, the Blackberry and other Smart phones such as the Nokia E61 (which Derrick Cameron, our MD, uses). It provides an increased speed for mobile users of the Internet and the quality of the pages available, using software Google has developed.  It apparently gives the phone the capability of a hand held computer by using an application called ‘Android Market’. Other phone manufacturers are expected to produce ‘Google’ phones, using the Android software over the next 12 months.

Analysts have said that the phone could potentially change the face of the mobile phone market, but say that it doesn’t have the same ‘cool’ factor of the Apple iPhone which has been a massive success.  One of our consultants, Jon Wilkes, certainly enjoys his iPhone, as Derrick does his E61, so we’ll have to wait and see if they can be swayed and if this will improve business people’s ability to continue to work when they are on the move!

Tips for getting the most out of a consultant

If you want to use their expertise, make sure you give them the opportunity to advise you on what you are trying to achieve and the manner of how you are trying to get there.  Don’t assume they will tell you anyway.

Letter lottery defines spam load

A new study shows that how much spam you get may depend on the first letter in your e-mail address. The analysis of more than 500 million junk messages identified the letters that get more junk than average.

According to the study, the difference may be down to the way spammers generate the e-mail addresses that they want to target.

The analysis was carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr Richard Clayton, in a bid to understand the widely noted discrepancies in the amounts of junk mail or spam that different people receive.

Dr Clayton took as his dataset the 550 million e-mail messages sent to customers of net service Demon between 1 February and 27 March 2008.

Looking at the mix of messages landing in inboxes, Dr Clayton found a wide discrepancy in the amounts of junk that different addresses received which seemed to hinge on their initial letters.

The most popular letters for spammers were ‘A’, ‘M’, ‘S’, ‘R’ and ‘P’. Around 40% of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of these characters as their first letter were junk. Much less popular were ‘Q’, ‘Z’ and ‘Y’, generating 20% or less. 

Dr Clayton states that spammers often generate e-mail addresses by carrying out so-called “dictionary” attacks. In these, spammers take the part of a live e-mail address in front of the “@” symbol that they know is live, and add that to other net domain names to generate a new one.

For instance, spammers who know that there is a real person attached to john@example.com may try john@another.com to see if that reaches a live account too.

As a result, the relative abundance of names beginning with ‘M’ compared to ‘Q’ could explain some of the disparities, as spammers would be more likely to re-use popular names and send them more junk.

Dr Clayton said that the research had thrown up some anomalies that needed further research. For instance, addresses starting with the letter ‘U’ appear to get more than 50% spam despite there being relatively few of them.

Derrick Cameron from IT firm Eximium comments “These findings will come as something of a revelation for many. Spam email is at best an annoyance - and at worst can have implications for security. Dr Clayton’s conclusions may well help many companies to drastically reduce their junk email, which has to be good news for everyone – except the spammers of course.”

Tips for getting the most out of a consultant

If you have asked them to generate any documents or specifications for you, and you have a particular format in mind, give them a template to follow – this will ensure it is in line with what you wanted.  If you don’t have a specific format you need, ask them to produce a template showing you what they will produce, so you can comment on what they will provide and ask for any extra sections, etc.