Timekeeping devices

Mar 18 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, General Management

Most modern companies employ their own methods of office timekeeping to track employee working hours. Gone are the bundy clocks and bundy cards of old, where employees punched in and out with the clock stamping the appropriate time and date. These days, more sophisticated electronic devices are used to track employee time. In my experience working for several organizations in the past, one of them used a swipe-card mechanism while one used a network-based electronic bundy. In terms of employee fraud, I thought the swipe-card to be unsecure, since the technology involved bar coding, which can easily be copied. As ...

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The right tools

Mar 07 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Concepts, Business Enhancements, General Management

What helps boost a company’s productivity? Undoubtedly, employees’ enthusiasm is one factor. Your business won’t do well if its people are disgruntled and dissatisfied. However, it doesn’t end there, for your employees also need the right tools to do their jobs well. And in this case, it’s the employer’s responsibility to make sure its people are well-equipped to do the tasks at hand. I recall having worked for an IT firm before that did not mind having its staff use old, dilapidated computers. What was the effect? Work was done at a slow pace, since the managers and technical personnel weren’t ...

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Going flexi

Feb 27 2006

Posted by J. Angelo as Business Enhancements, General Management

Unpaid overtime is likely to lead to low levels of productivity, and as we wrote on before, the Trade Union Congress wants to do something about it. After all, the UK has the highest incidence of unpaid overtime in all of Europe, with almost 20% of the total workforce putting in the extra hours without claiming the extra benefits and pay. For a small business, one good idea to adopt is a flex-time policy, where employees are not given a fixed time for work, but are asked to put in the required eight hours per day—this means they can ...

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UK business owners over-stressed

Feb 26 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, General Management, Tricks of the Trade

A recent survey of 7,000 small and medium-size business owners in the UK shows that as much as 43% experience rising stress levels. This is due to various factors, majority of which involve an unsure business environment in some sectors. For instance, business owners are said to be facing constant pressure in terms of competition from the global market (after all, who could compete with low-cost labour countries such as China?). The study also points out the number of holidays in a year taken by the respondents as a factor to reducing stress. Here’s a great tip for business owners and those ...

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Small businesses hit by inflexible software licensing schemes

Feb 25 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, Business News, General Management

A study has determined that 59% of small and medium businesses in the UK are not adequately updating their software because the process is tedious and time-consuming. The survey of about 500 I.T. managers of small firms was done by Internet security company intY. According to the study, the companies found it unnecessary to undergo the regular software updates, believing that only large networks are affected by security threats. But what’s worse news is that small firms are found to be paying more than what they need to, in terms of software licensing. About 61% of the SMEs surveyed paid more ...

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Blogs as marketing tool for startups

Feb 21 2006

Posted by J. Angelo as Business Concepts, Business Enhancements, Sales and Marketing

On the tech front, FON, the Spanish startup firm that envisions to provide free, wide-area wireless Internet access through mesh-type WiFi networks (starting in Spain and also the USA), has been hit with its latest marketing tactics. Several high-profile bloggers have recently written rave reviews on their personal blogs about the service, with disclaimers that they are involved with FON as advisors to the board, and that there is possibility of compensation for their service. Blogs, or “web logs” are known to be good below-the-line marketing mechanisms, especially for starting companies. Several businesses are known to actively interact ...

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What to do with an avian flu breakout

Feb 18 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, Business News, General Management

One of the major concerns of businesses in case avian flu breaks out as a pandemic and spreads throughout the population is continuity of operations. A recent study by the World Bank pegged the cost of a possible outbreak to reach the equivalent of US$ 800 billion per year, including possible losses incurred. One scenario faced by businesses is the possibility of extremely high absenteeism rates, as up to 25% of the population or 15 million individuals may be affected if such an outbreak occurs. This may not only be in the homefront, but also in cases where some business ...

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A new dot-com era

Feb 15 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, Business News, E-Commerce

We recently reported on what business analysts consider the second dot-com era, with venture capitalists again warming up to the idea of signing up technology-oriented businessmen and entrepreneurs with good ideas. While it seems that VCs should have grown more risk-averse after the bursting of the tech bubble in the late 1990’s, they’re gambling once more on tech. However, this new craze for tech investments may have a solid foundation after all. The Internet has been said to have matured in less than a decade after the tech industry’s downfall. A larger percentage of the population is online, and more ...

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Microsoft to launch mobile email platform

Feb 13 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, General Management, Virtual Office

Good news to road warriors: Microsoft is launching its own mobile email platform, in an apparent move to compete against the BlackBerry technology. Highly popular among the business crowd, mobile email devices allow mobile phone subscribers to receive email messages on their mobile phones or dedicated email devices (which usually double as mobile phones, actually). Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry has been the device of choice for quite some time now, but is facing challenges in the legal arena and was almost shutdown because of a patent infringement case. Microsoft is partnering with Vodafone for the launch of Windows ...

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Do we foresee a golden era in tech?

Feb 12 2006

Posted by Gordon as Business Enhancements, Business News, E-Commerce

2006 may see a lot of newly-minted millionaires from upcoming investments by Venture Capitalists, as we earlier wrote about. While there are still jitters over the possible instability of tech-related investments, businessmen feel that now could be the right time to invest given a better IT environment. One stark difference with today’s dot-com era (or whatever other appropriate name it can be called) from the 90’s is that the Internet has matured since then. The Web is now more standardized and more usable. People have also begun to trust in online transactions, an important assumption in doing e-commerce. Now we ...

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