I attempted to use Storify to compile some tweets about JCrew's stores launch in Canada and the backlash from its customers about the higher prices in Canada. Here is the "Story"
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Monday, August 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
CanPages brings Street View to Canada - Move over Google!
Like many other people I know, I’ve been waiting anxiously for Google Street View to be launched in Canada. It seems that Google has had some difficulty in complying with the federal privacy legislation in Canada, and that’s the primary reason why the service hasn’t made it here just yet.The main issue here is the high-resolution personal images and other identifiable information (e.g. car license plates) that have sometimes accompanied Google’s street view in the other countries where it was launched previously (including U.S., U.K. and France). Collecting personal images without the explicit consent of the people in those images is a prohibited practice under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
So while Google is getting ready to start filming Canadian cities, Canadians have another alternative to check out. We now have our own Street View equivalent in some cities - thanks to the partnership between the British Columbia-based yellow pages directory service provider CanPages.ca, and San Francisco-based MapJack.
By my own initial assessment, the street view service offered by CanPages is a strong contender for Google Street View. In fact, I’ve seen features in Canpages.ca that I haven’t seen in Google Street View – e.g. high resolution full screen mode, pedestrian pathway views, image configuration, and did I mention pedestrian pathway views. The virtual 360 degree panning works pretty well too.
The service has been launched in Vancouver and some other parts of British Columbia, perhaps rightly so, given the timeline for the Winter Olympics in 2010. I suspect the service will be a hit with the tourists!
To check out the various features myself, I decided to virtual walk the part of the city that I’m most familiar with from my last visit to Vancouver. Since the CanPages.ca service is primarily a yellow pages service, I had to supply a business name or a landmark to get started, and I searched for the Sheraton Wall Centre Hotel in Vancouver where I’ve stayed previously. Once the listing was displayed, I clicked on the Street View option and panned 180 degrees to get to the front view of the hotel building (see screenshot below).
Here’s a screenshot of the full-screen view (size reduced for posting here of course). It truly allows users to immerse themselves into the cityscape.
In terms of its business model, the new Street View offering is aligned with CanPages’ yellow pages service, as it provides advertisers – especially local businesses an innovative means of reaching the website's visitors. Specifically, when a user clicks on a storefront in Street View, he/she will get to see a local profile of the business, and possibly other relevant links to video advertisements, website URL, and general information such as hours of operation or restaurant menus in the case of food service locations.
Overall, I think it’s a sound business offering as it comprises enough originality to spark end-user interest and also presents long-term functional value to the consumer.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
B-school Bashing in Overdrive!
It seems like B-School are being bashed left right and center this past week, and MBA programs are being blamed for the current financial mess that we’re in. I’ve also read various opinion editorial pieces and heard interviews of faculty members who have commented on the role business schools have played directlyor indirectly in leading to the current financial mess. Notably, the academics who’re chiming in have been from all tiers of schools… from Harvard to Stanford to McGill to Dalhousie.
First and foremost, is Henry Mintzberg and his article in the Globe & Mail where he refers to the current financial crisis as a “monumental failure of management”, and points to management education as a major contributing factor. It wasn’t surprising to read his column since he has always been a detractor of traditional MBA programs citing that the MBA approach to a management education is fatally flawed, and as an answer to this problem, he co-founded the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPM).
Mintzberg’s opinion about b-schools producing graduates who have an “excessively analytical, detached style of management” is shared by Peggy Cunningham, who is the new director of the School of Business Administration at Dalhousie University, and is currently involved with restructuring the the school’s business programs around the core concept of responsible leadership. In her interview to the Globe & Mail, she says that it’s the excessive focus on individual success and obsession with corporate competition that makes people forget about social accountability.
In both these discussions, focus on individualism has emerged as a common theme that can be identified as a root cause for the current mess, and I started to wonder whether individualism is really to blame here! I believe that it’s important to differentiate between individualism and self-centeredness. It is my contention that individualism isn’t necessarily a bad thing – afterall, it is our individualism that gets us to be self-reliant, remain active, competitive, and independent to be able to look after ourselves and our families. The problem arises when individualism gets overridden by self-centeredness and that’s what leads one to ignore or overlook values of social and moral consciousness, and ultimately causes irresponsible economic behaviour.
Coming to the issue of business schools, while it’s easy to point fingers at them, I personally don’t think the blame wholly lies there. In this podcast, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Unversity’s Graduate School of Business talks about b-schools and how what is taught in management programs is really only a small part of the problem.
I personally believe that there are things that b-schools need to do better - especially in instances where there has been an unbalanced and unhealthy focus on financial engineering and novel modeling techniques… but I also believe the current financial mess has a lot to do with common sense management or lack thereof. Common sense cannot be taught in business schools, and someone doesn’t need an MBA to figure out that overly and recurrently leveraged portfolios and risky derivates will probably lead to disastrous consequences.
On the one hand, it may the "Quants" in the firm who used imprudent innovative techniques for risk assessment, but it was the decision makers who went along without taking the time to understand the assumptions or dynamics of such novel mechanisms.
Contrary to what common sense would dictate, in their pursuit of exotic financial instruments, the Quants put too much faith in mathematical risk models and in the process, they forgot that financial models are just that – models! They’re meant to be used as maps and not bibles.
This is not to say that B-schools don’t need to change – many would need to re-evaluate their programs and curricula and incorporate business ethics more seriously than they have before. I know that for most schools seeking accreditation through AACSB or EQUIS, this is a requirement, but I suspect that many schools still treat the subject of ethics as a snippet in their course discussions.
In devising a new way forward, management schools need to make sure that students have a naive faith in free market, and they also understand that business ethics is not to be a taken as a moving target and that there’s no harm in bending the rules to suit one’s own personal interests. Secondly, for schools focusing more on the technical aspects of financial engineering, and risk management, they need to strike a balance between short-term gains, social accountability, and long-term sustainability.
Hand-in-hand, our overall business culture also needs a massive overhaul – afterall, management schools are a reflection of current organizational customs and conventions, and most practices that get communicated at schools make their way into the books and syllabi through the industry. Investors demanding higher returns and rewarding managers for short term performance need to look at the bigger picture. The question of proper performance incentives needs to be revisited, as managers becoming shareholders in the company doesn’t seem to be the be all and end all approach for getting managers to perform in the best interests of the firm. The decline of regulatory oversight is another issue that deserves a closer look.
To end my diatribe, I agree with Jeffrey Pfeffer when he says that B-Schools don’t really shape the world as much as they reflect the broader societal trends and the ideology of the world they exist in, and to lay the blame entirely on them is being over-simplistic and overly reductionist.
First and foremost, is Henry Mintzberg and his article in the Globe & Mail where he refers to the current financial crisis as a “monumental failure of management”, and points to management education as a major contributing factor. It wasn’t surprising to read his column since he has always been a detractor of traditional MBA programs citing that the MBA approach to a management education is fatally flawed, and as an answer to this problem, he co-founded the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPM).
Mintzberg’s opinion about b-schools producing graduates who have an “excessively analytical, detached style of management” is shared by Peggy Cunningham, who is the new director of the School of Business Administration at Dalhousie University, and is currently involved with restructuring the the school’s business programs around the core concept of responsible leadership. In her interview to the Globe & Mail, she says that it’s the excessive focus on individual success and obsession with corporate competition that makes people forget about social accountability.
In both these discussions, focus on individualism has emerged as a common theme that can be identified as a root cause for the current mess, and I started to wonder whether individualism is really to blame here! I believe that it’s important to differentiate between individualism and self-centeredness. It is my contention that individualism isn’t necessarily a bad thing – afterall, it is our individualism that gets us to be self-reliant, remain active, competitive, and independent to be able to look after ourselves and our families. The problem arises when individualism gets overridden by self-centeredness and that’s what leads one to ignore or overlook values of social and moral consciousness, and ultimately causes irresponsible economic behaviour.
Coming to the issue of business schools, while it’s easy to point fingers at them, I personally don’t think the blame wholly lies there. In this podcast, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Unversity’s Graduate School of Business talks about b-schools and how what is taught in management programs is really only a small part of the problem.
I personally believe that there are things that b-schools need to do better - especially in instances where there has been an unbalanced and unhealthy focus on financial engineering and novel modeling techniques… but I also believe the current financial mess has a lot to do with common sense management or lack thereof. Common sense cannot be taught in business schools, and someone doesn’t need an MBA to figure out that overly and recurrently leveraged portfolios and risky derivates will probably lead to disastrous consequences.
On the one hand, it may the "Quants" in the firm who used imprudent innovative techniques for risk assessment, but it was the decision makers who went along without taking the time to understand the assumptions or dynamics of such novel mechanisms.
Contrary to what common sense would dictate, in their pursuit of exotic financial instruments, the Quants put too much faith in mathematical risk models and in the process, they forgot that financial models are just that – models! They’re meant to be used as maps and not bibles.
This is not to say that B-schools don’t need to change – many would need to re-evaluate their programs and curricula and incorporate business ethics more seriously than they have before. I know that for most schools seeking accreditation through AACSB or EQUIS, this is a requirement, but I suspect that many schools still treat the subject of ethics as a snippet in their course discussions.
In devising a new way forward, management schools need to make sure that students have a naive faith in free market, and they also understand that business ethics is not to be a taken as a moving target and that there’s no harm in bending the rules to suit one’s own personal interests. Secondly, for schools focusing more on the technical aspects of financial engineering, and risk management, they need to strike a balance between short-term gains, social accountability, and long-term sustainability.
Hand-in-hand, our overall business culture also needs a massive overhaul – afterall, management schools are a reflection of current organizational customs and conventions, and most practices that get communicated at schools make their way into the books and syllabi through the industry. Investors demanding higher returns and rewarding managers for short term performance need to look at the bigger picture. The question of proper performance incentives needs to be revisited, as managers becoming shareholders in the company doesn’t seem to be the be all and end all approach for getting managers to perform in the best interests of the firm. The decline of regulatory oversight is another issue that deserves a closer look.
To end my diatribe, I agree with Jeffrey Pfeffer when he says that B-Schools don’t really shape the world as much as they reflect the broader societal trends and the ideology of the world they exist in, and to lay the blame entirely on them is being over-simplistic and overly reductionist.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
I-News? Sorry – Not Me
There’s no denying that traditional print newspapers are slowly becoming a thing of the past – but a “new” initiative by the MediaNews Group, the fourth-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., seems all primed to take us even more into the past… say around 1939.According to a recent article in the NY Times, the MediaNews Group is planning to test market its new idea of having household readers print out their personalized newspapers at home using a proprietary printer. The company has trademarked the term Individuated News (I-News) to refer to the media-delivery system, and it will be testing these systems with the Los Angeles Daily News this coming summer.
Actually, this is not the first time such an experiment is being conducted. Check out this web page on Modern Mechanix - in 1939, radio fax units were tried out in homes to allow people to receive news through radio signals and have their bulletins printed at home on a continuous sheet of paper.
click to enlargeI don’t know about you, but I don’t see this specific idea as a solution to the woes of the media empires trying to protect and hopefully boost their readership and revenue through innovative means. I suspect most of us would not want to have a printer at home dedicated to printing newspapers.
Personally, I see the short to medium term future of newspaper readership in the use of portable electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-Book Reader devices. flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper. In fact, the Kindle already offers several user-friendly features for newspaper readers such as ta flip page modality for reading articles just like paper versions of news papers, and moreover, the ability to bookmark, clip and save articles for later reading. The truth is that online news readers have already adopted various technologies and practices to aggregate and personalize the news they want from multiple sources through customized news feeds, and if mobility and portability are really important to the readers, they can get the same feeds through portable reader devices. There is great potential for newspapers in the active matrix electronic paper displays (EPDs) technologies which are fast improving in their capabilities and will soon be able to provide good color reproduction functionalities. What I don’t get is why don’t the media giants invest more seriously in technology projects which would allow them to reposition themselves more effectively in the print media value chain. By occupying positions as content creators, publishers and technology providers, they’d have a better chance at sustaining themselves over the long-term. Also, given the rapid adoption of web 2.0 by organizations, news media companies can position themselves as distributors of trusted research content, and offer this content via syndicated streams through certified APIs, web services, and enterprise mashups.Friday, September 19, 2008
Security Authentication & Authorization: The Case of Sarah Palin's Email Account Breach
So I take it that many of you have now heard that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account was broken into a couple of days ago. I’ve now read through a few news stories and also gone over the actual chronology of the incident by reading the online post of the person who has claimed responsibility. The guy claiming responsibility posted his story on an online forum with the handle “Rubico”.
This case makes a rather interesting discussion piece for a course I teach on Internet Security… and reminds me of the many conversations I’ve had with security colleagues in the past when I was involved with the implementation and institutionalization of authentication credentials, access control procedures, authorization mechanisms, and single-sign-on (SSO) implementations.
So, it’s pretty apparent in this situation that the authentication mechanism is only as strong as its weakest component, and the fact that there is an option to reset the password without ever having to leave the browser window is a critical issue in the validation workflow. Why not include an out-of-band multiple factor authentication component to authorize security related changes such as password resets? Why not use something similar to MyOpenID (http://www.myopenid.com) or Passpack (http://www.passpack.com) to complement or strengthen the current procedures?
This case makes a rather interesting discussion piece for a course I teach on Internet Security… and reminds me of the many conversations I’ve had with security colleagues in the past when I was involved with the implementation and institutionalization of authentication credentials, access control procedures, authorization mechanisms, and single-sign-on (SSO) implementations.
The gist of the story about Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email hacking is that the intruder gained access via the forgotten password mechanism on the Yahoo! webmail interface. By following the typical verification prompts and challenge questions, the intruder was able to reset the profile's password. All that was needed were just a few pieces of information that were easily acquired through Google searches and Wikipedia entries about the Alaska Governor. Overall, this was a case of knowledge-based security mechanism hack, and it is also a classic illustration of the importance of proper password management. It demonstrates how our common password habits can expose us to a rather simple security hack. That being said, the consequential impact of this simple hack can turn out to be something quite destructive such as the disclosure of confidential information.
Relevant details and a quick chronology of this incident are as follows:
- the person (lets call him Rubico) who hacked in to Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account used “an anonymizer” service called CTunnel (http://www.CTunnel.com) to browse to the Yahoo! email service site.
- Rubico used Sarah Palin’s email address on the login screen and clicked on the "Forgot your ID or password?" link. He knew Palin’s correct email address from several online websites of government institutions, groups and committees that Palin had served on.
- Rubico was then prompted to either supply an alternative email address for resetting the password, or to choose the option to reset without access to a registered email account. To me, this option to bypass the alternative email mechanism is an obvious red flag. Rubico, as can be expected, chose the latter option.
- At this point, Rubico was asked to answer a "secret" security question. This so called knowledge-based authentication is supposed to add an additional layer of validation in a single-factor authentication scheme whereby the end-user has to provide something else he/she knows. In Palin’s case, her “secret” question was “Where did you meet your spouse?”, and Rubico had found the information to answer this question through public sources. Apparently, she had revealed in her TV interviews that she and her husband were high school sweethearts. So Rubico tried a couple of variations of the name of the local high school where she grew up and eventually got a hit on “Wasilla High”.
- Finally, the Yahoo! account profile verification prompts ask to verify the ZIP code and Country. Once again, for public figures such as Palin, this information is generally commonly available.
- Once Rubico entered the correct answer to that single “secret” question, and completed the profile verification prompts he was immediately allowed to change Palin’s password, and he promptly changed it to “popcorn”. At this point, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering why Yahoo! didn’t make the password reset mechanism and the validation workflow a little more challenging.
- The only somewhat positive aspect of the validation workflow is its last step where the end-user is notified that his/her account is now "up to date", and that he/she will also receive an email on the alternative email account with a notification of the changes that were made to the account. This is probably how Palin would have discovered that her Yahoo! email account was compromised, but alas, that news was already out in the open through numerouschat channels and public discussion forums.
So, it’s pretty apparent in this situation that the authentication mechanism is only as strong as its weakest component, and the fact that there is an option to reset the password without ever having to leave the browser window is a critical issue in the validation workflow. Why not include an out-of-band multiple factor authentication component to authorize security related changes such as password resets? Why not use something similar to MyOpenID (http://www.myopenid.com) or Passpack (http://www.passpack.com) to complement or strengthen the current procedures?
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