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Archive for the ‘Corporate News’ Category

Wal-Mart & Worker’s Rights

20 Jan 2006

We all knew that Wal-Mart was a special store with special policies, but I’ve been sent to this link and it kind of made me wonder about how far an employer can actually go to avoid having to deal with some sort of union that represents the rights of the employees. It’s actually is even worse than it looked like. Tune in and be amazed of the guts this merchant displays:

Wal-Mart

When Wal-Mart employees stand up for themselves and try to form a union, they face threats, propaganda, discrimination, intimidation, and even firings in retaliation. Learn more about Wal-Mart’s unionbusting practices on the American Rights at Work website:

  • An entire Wal-Mart store in Jonquière, Quebec successfully formed a union. But rather than negotiate with the employees for decent wages, affordable health care, and a respectable work environment, Wal-Mart shut down the store. Click here to read more.
  • A large number of academics have raised their concern over Wal-Mart’s decision to close the store in Jonquière, Quebec. Click here for the list of academics who signed a statement calling on Wal-Mart to respect human rights and to conform to international standards.
  • A Wal-Mart worker in Alaska mentioned “the need to have a union” to a co-worker. After being interrogated by the store’s management, the worker was fired. Read his story.

Check out the website to learn more.

 

Conclusive Link Dump, Dec. 29th

29 Dec 2005

Yeah. It’s the final link dump . It had to come this far some day. There’ll be no more linking posts on this blog this year. Here’s some stuff from the inbox :

Read :

* It was a year with both positives and negatives for RFID. (top stories)
* KB Cafe Blog Awards – Vote once in category nr. 32 for this blog :)
* Track Chitika Clicks with Google Analytics
* Real-time texting for deaf people
* No Room In MySpace For YouTube
* Movil.be Looking For A Sponsor
* Top 50 gadgets of the past 50 years
* Halfway Between Product Placement And A Commercial
* How Big A Problem Is Blog Plagiarism?
* Target Your Co-Workers With USB Air Darts

Do :

* Scott Blake’s Bar Code Art Clock
* Openomy organizes files and users online via tags
* Identify Syndicated Content, Use the Customizable Feed Icons

Download From Coolz0r :

(right-click, save as) [pdf, 611 kb, 53 pages]
* Advertising Age’s 19th Annual Global Marketing 2005. All Facts & Figures.

pray
Image from [here]

 

Corporate Ethics, Bananas & Frogs

12 Dec 2005

For my paper of Ethics I interviewed George Jaksch from Chiquita, currently the senior director of corporate responsibility,
responsible for social and environmental matters within Chiquita’s European team. The interview was recorded on Friday, November 25th and took 48 minutes. Today the paper was due, so this weekend I’ve been busy making the transcript of the conversation which had been put on DVD from the MiniDV of the Cam. It’s a really long interview in which we talk about the code of conduct of Chiquita, about the efforts they’ve made to comply with the Rainforest Alliance standards and about the green frog they’ve added to their banana logo. I felt it would be a waste of effort and time I’ve put in the transcript if I didn’t share it with ‘the net’, because what has been said really was interesting. I learned a lot about how a company like Chiquita deals with corporate responsibilities, how they live by their values and make every employee aware of the importance of living by the code of conduct, which is in fact a 35-pages code.

First there’s some info about George Jaksch, then some related links, and then there’s an 11 page long transcript. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

George Jaksch was born in London and grew up in the UK and Germany as a citizen of both countries. Following studies of economics (Cambridge, UK) and agriculture (Seale-Hayne, UK), he for several years developed his own farming business in Colombia. He first joined Chiquita Brands in Colombia, then later held management positions in banana production (Panama, Ivory Coast), quality assurance in Europe and the USA, sales and marketing, and recently corporate responsibility and public affairs with residence in Antwerpen, Belgium.

Related links to this interview :

- Chiquita
Nature & Community Project
The Rainforest Alliance standards
- Sustainable Agriculture Network Standards for Bananas (pdf, 89k)
Chiquita’s Core Values
Chiquita’s Code of Conduct
The Better Banana Project
The Television & Print ads
That Famous Jingle

Read the rest of this entry »

 

NewsFlash & Links For Dec. 6th

06 Dec 2005

Randy still has a blog in the running for the Canadian Blog Awards. His nomination in the Best Sports Blog award is Game Certainty. Any votes would be tremendously appreciated.
You can vote everyday. If you love Randy, spread the word and vote daily !

R|Mail stats : Yesterday we passed 10.000 subscriptions. Owww Yeah !

Current state : Feeds = 7207 – Users = 3196 – Subs = 10124

Geek Dinner with Scoble is in two days ! I’ll be heading over there with Frédéric from the Flemish Highly Cultivated Druppels Blog. – Mister F. is going to pick me up on the parking lot next to my college right after my last class at six pm, it happens to be near his 9 to 5 7 to 9 working spot. Really looking forward to some good conversations.

Martin is working off his ‘pooper’ on the new Movil version, due somewhere this month, depending on the diaper load and decibels his youngster is producing. It’s going to be wicked ! I’m setting up the marketing for it and the official kick-off is planned somewhere end of January 2006. Stay tuned. Big Thanks to Ricardo for the coding-monkey madness!

School is mighty busy nowadays. A lot of papers to hand in, presentations due etc. I have to finish my qualitative and quantitative market research on the usability of Hamjournaal, the site we helped to reposition and optimize. It’s a project from the Journalism department of our college. We (the interactive marketeers) have put quite some work in it, and it looks like it’s paying off. I still have to pull some statistics in SPSS from that research, and write out the interactive strategy some more. Then I have to meet up with Pieter (from my class) to streamline the entire research proposal and hand it in. For ‘Ethics’ we met with Georg Jaksch from Chiquita and did a 50-minute interview on Chiquita’s Massive Code of Conduct, their employee policy and their efforts in the ‘Nature & Community‘ project. That paper needs to be done by Monday, so there’s still some work to be done.

I’m really doing a countdown. Two more weeks of torture, X-mas holidays, some exams in January and after that I’m off to the fun zone called i-Merge to participate in the 2.0 madness. Joy! Pleasure overload, here I come !

So since there’s not that much time to blog, here are some good reads :

* Who Gets To Define What Spyware Is?
* Nokia targets blogs for new handset launch
* EuroBestLive 2005 Awards : The winners
- Read the previous post on this
* Chitika Supported Countries
* Froogle Spam?
* Why Google Will Be Big in 2006
* ChoiceBlogger, by Philipp Lenssen
* Yahoo RSS to SMS
* Ricky Gervais Podcast (The Office)
* Paranoia and RFID
* No, People Still Don’t Care About Video Phones
* Now, coupons get into mobiles
* IMDb’s Movie Keyword Analyzer
* TiVoToGo to go for Macs in mid-2006?
* Affiliate Spam In Google Base
* Maarten Schenk’s Video Archive of Les Blogs 2.0 -
- Tons of Pics on Flickr
* Mobile Mistletoe – for unlimited kissing
* Top 10 Software Euphemisms

 

Links For Nov. 30th

30 Nov 2005

Randy has a blog in the running for the Canadian Blog Awards. His nomination in the Best Sports Blog award is Game Certainty. Any votes would be tremendously appreciated.
You can vote everyday. If you love Randy, spread the word and go vote !

Closely Related : KBCafe Blog Network OPML
Other interesting stuff :

* Sesamize Your Banana (or a compatible cell phone) – Sesame Street Mobile
* A new “Wikipedia Browser” named Gollum – and some other Wikipedia tools.
* RFID In Your TiVo?
* Google’s original PageRank equation – via [Besting Adwords]
* TiVo and Yahoo! bring some new functionality to your DVR
* CustomizeGoogle Offers New Option to Block Google Analytics Cookies
* ICANN’s Latest Get-Rich Scheme: Single-Letter Domains
* TiVo To Offer TV Ad Search
* Define: Accidense
* StarSight – Street lamps recharge cell phones
* eMiniMalls v. Adsense – Which is Better?
* AutoScreenRecorder 2.0 Pro and Free Released
* Sony BMG Knew About The Rootkit Before It Went Public
* Girlfriends Against Video Games
— I’m still waiting for ‘Girlfriends Against Blogs’ :)

Download :
Because they found there is a real thirst for timely, industry specific email marketing statistics, Bronto has just released its first quarterly industry statistics report.

Read the report here [pdf!] and sign up to receive the quarterly industry statistics report via email. – From [Email Marketing, Best Practices]

 

Around The World

16 Nov 2005

Google Base went live, as predicted yesterday. Uploading items is a piece of cake. I added myself in the database with with this blog and tried to get my rss feed listed, but Google requires some special tags to get it all done. I don’t want to go through all that trouble, so I got refused for that entry. My entry is only valid for 31 days, and that’s too bad because I uploaded it as a ‘People Profile’, and I don’t think that should expire. – but it does.

Then I thought : let’s upload the entire contents of my blog and see what happens. I created an FTP account through the ‘direct upload‘ and created an account on the uploads.google.com server. (You need a different login and password, for logical security reasons). I was able to connect and put the files online, but the server isn’t really an FTP server. I can’t make a folder to put the images, and .html files apparently aren’t accepted. – Here’s how to upload bulk.
Bulk doesn’t seem to expire, which I find very funny. You can’t delete uploaded files.

No bulk files, and just two listings. That’s it for me. I don’t mind, I have nothing to sell anyway, except for my conscience, which also expires in 31 days. You never know the devil is watching (or Googling, in this case) or maybe some crooked dude needs to have a clean conscience. :)

Here’s how to list an item.

If you want to know more about the entire Google Base thing, read this.

I tried to send an email through the ‘contact the poster’ link, and that worked fine. Only thing is, it took three hours for the mail to arrive. Quote Nathan : "Its not awful, but it adds more on the ‘Google can’t do anything in real-time’ meme."

Read reviews on Google Base :

Philipp on Google Blogoscoped aka ‘The Birdcage’
Nathan on InsideGoogle & a second post

—-

I’ve been quoted in ‘PC World’ Magazine, the December 2005 issue. Too bad I can’t buy it in my bookstore, but I’ll ask Erik Larkin if it’s possible to send me a copy. For the record : I did get contacted before he started to write his Software Surprises article, so no stealing text or whatsoever. I was hoping for a link though, but I’ll nicely ask him if it’s possible to add it. Online only is good enough :)
– Correction to be clear : I got contacted by Andrew Brandt, the Senior Associate Editor.

The article Erik is referring to is : Toolbar Needed To Run FlashPlayer from June 23rd 2005.

A spin-off can be read here : The Comment.
Indeed. This incident was the direct reason I added comments on this blog. Something I still don’t regret having done.

 

Links For November 6th

06 Nov 2005
  • Yahoo’s Think Tank creates your ideas for free.
  • Trigger Happy is back ! (extreme hidden camera in Flanders)
  • Barcode Art Clock (via Polskaya)
  • The Simpsons .wav page – all the songs from the episodes
  • Game : Give Bush a brain
  • Game : Simpsons Millionaire Quiz
  • French rioters organize via Internet and cell phones
  • Text message the Virgin Mary from your mobile phone
  • RFID Reader Embedded in Vending Machines
  • No place to hide at RFID tracking party
  • Teens wear their hearts on their blog
  • Mukana cellphone/GPS sash for the visually impaired
  • Yes, But Will They Treat My Internet Addiction Online Too?
  • Riot Tone. The new bumper sticker?
  • Tryvertising – When experience is becoming more important than messages
  • Tribute to the Brussels 1958 World Fair
  • SMS buddies help ‘O’ Level students cope with exam stress
  • Historic SMS vote deemed ballot box success
  • Bill Gates – His vision of the future of Silicon and how it will change the world
  •  

    Link Love & Other Must Reads

    04 Nov 2005
  • Steve Rubel has been diagnosed with skin cancer. He has basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common and most treatable form of skin cancer. He caught it early. After a brief procedure, his doctor expects him to make a full recovery with little change in lifestyle.
    Steve has launched a blog for this, to help prevent this sort of cancer and to inform the world. The url is www.skincancerblog.net. It’s powered by TypePad.
    I wish you the very best, Steve, and a very quick and prosperous recovery !
  • A new report from eMarketer and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has been released. According to the report, there’s a top ten of reasons why word of mouth marketing is gaining momentum . [Read on CustomerWorld ]
  • Samsung has announced today of a planned 10GB flip phone (the followup to their 3GB SPH-V7900) – [Read] via [Engadget]
  • “At the WPC EXPO 2005 in Japan, attendees and different objects were fitted with RFID tags whose movements and habits were monitored and stored as XML markup. The really neat trick here is the system’s software, which has limited abilities to predict someone’s behavior and manipulate real-world objects accordingly.” [Engadget]
  • Sony Ericsson files patent for cellphone eavesdropping feature. In other words : the voicemail-override for jealous lovers or concerned parents might be around the corner. No more hiding behind a flat battery or bad signal.
  • Google launched an official Google Video blog to highlight uploaded videos. – via the [Google Blogoscoped]
  • Frappr integrates Google Maps with an easy-to-use interface to setup your own map and allow people to add themselves as points on the map. – via [Shiwej]
  • http://www.web-specialists.com/ is the best example of VERY BAD SEO. So bad that I won’t link to it. Still, a Google search for Houston Web Design doesn’t even reveal that super SEO website. Hah. Downright stupid. – via [InsideGoogle]
  • Nokia has announced three new phones in its Nseries line of flagship phones. All three are 3G phones with video calling, 2 megapixel camera or better, S60 3rd Edition smartphone OS, a new full-web browser with “minimap” navigation and RSS, Bluetooth, FM radio, USB 2.0 with mass storage mode, and an SD or miniSD memory slot supporting cards up to 2 GB. [Read on PhoneScoop]
  • new nokias on phonescoop