If the expected birth of a child is after 2007, all women, regardless of length of service, will qualify for full maternity leave. This includes 39 weeks of statuory maternity pay. They will also be allowed to work for up to 10 “keeping in touch” days during maternity leave. This also applies to adoption leave.
Recommnded Jana Action: Revise your internal maternity / adoption leave policy
Ajit Nazare at Kleiner Perkins has 7 rules for software start-ups they consider funding.
KP’s 7 rules for start-ups
* Instant Value to customers – solve a problem or create value with the first use
* Viral adoption – Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
* Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
* Simple, intuitive user experience – no training required.
* Personalized user experience – customizable
* Easy configuration based on application or usage templates
* Context aware – adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices, etc.
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: start-ups
These are all great value points for any organisation who has product to sell, and Dan Dodge’s blog is definately worth a visit if you have never been there.
The recently aired Channel four documentary Dispatches may have had consumers wincing, but you can bet it also had a fair few executive managers reaching for their cell. The programme showed the apparant ease with which personal details, inlcuding Bank Account Details, Credit Card Details etc, could be procured from employees at Indian call centres. With more and more companies having Indian outsourcing operations, the risks of consumer personal data seem clear, but imagine the risk to the reputation of the large corporations if it comes to light that effectively part of their own organisation, albeit virtual, have been selling off their own consumer data.
The outsourcing industry in India is currently worth about $23 billion, and is *the major* factor in India’s economic rise. Indian IT service companies point out that this type of theft is limited to one type of outsourcing – call centres. Ian Marriot, ann analyst at Gartner says “India is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. The increase in outsourcing is stretching India’s ability to meet the demand for experienced staff and soon European companies may need to consider alternative locations.”
With the acquirement of Del.icio.us by Yahoo we here at Jana became more uncomfortable of having our interests in the hands of a commerical body that at some point would no doubt try to exploit it. To that end, with the aid of some open source software, we have released our own, which you can find at http://www.Jana.uk.com/bookmarks. I’m sure you’ll agree that is has all the features of Del.iciou.us, and now even supports the Del.icio.us API. We’ll publish an article soon on how you can take advantage of this. Feel free to use this whether you are clients or not. It becomes more useful by aggregation as we all know.
The “first European search engine” is taking on Google with its propreitary AI technology. Accoona.eu has been designed to automatically understand what language is being used for a query. Accoona also outlines how the technology understands the meaning of a search query rather than just looking at individual keywords or boolean strings.
Accoona can be found at www.Accoona.com
Google sneaked out a nice little tool recently called Related Links. Web designers can place Related Links units on their site to provide visitors with links to useful information that’s relevenat to their site’s content, including news, searches and pages.
Web 2.0 is often spoken of as a future goal, but the truth is that the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is in many ways indefinable. The change is a gradual growth and we are currently witnessing the segway from one to the other, with new business models and companies showing what can be done, with the most fruitful area being Software as a Service (SAAS).
This being said, it is possible to highlight 10 key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:
1. Open standards Base: Ensure service connectivity is reliable
2. Ubiquitious Broadband: The infrastructure is now available to support web 2.0 models.
3. Less investment required: Companies can get far without a massive investment meaning companies can quickly be incubated to spread the risk.
4. Better Browsers: New format support, RSS etc enriches the user experience
5. Powerful development environments: AJAX is young but powerful and holds the promise of being easier to use compared to J2EE
6. Device convergance: Ability to access the web from a multitude of devices means on-demand services are more functional for real everyday use.
7. More Innovation: The de-skilling of the technological requirements mean more people get involved in trying to create, often from a more creative user-base.
8: Change in Use: The focus of the web and web 2.0 is firmly on usefuleness and in many cases commercial basis.
9. Maturity: Resiliance and Scalability are easier to provide with cheaper hardware and better understanding of how to achieve this.
10.History: Lessons from the dot com crash are noteasily forgotten…
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