Brandkarma

Brands on notice as rating website launches
JULIAN LEE
March 26, 2010 - 10:04AM



The wisdom of the crowds as well as its collective buying power is being harnessed to reward companies that treat the planet and workers well and punish those that don't. A web-based service created by an Australian launches this week to enable shoppers to vote on which companies treat their staff, customers, suppliers, investors and the environment the best.

Thought to be the first of its kind the service invites users to comment and rate a company based on up-to-the-minute information it publishes about the world's top 300 brands.

By aggregting the individual opinions of thousands of users 'the crowd' determines how good or bad a company is. High-scoring companies are likely to attract more custom from communities of concerned shoppers, while lower-scoring one will be encouraged to do better.

Brandkarma founder Craig Davis said it adds "another voice in the room" to balance those of NGOs, corporations and governments in the debate around sustainability.

"The question around the choices that we make is becoming more significant. People exercise those choices - in effect their vote - every time they buy something," said Mr Davis, whose day job is chief creative officer at Sydney advertising agency Publicis Mojo.

After more than 20 years of creating ads for global companies such as Nestle, Shell, Unilever and Ford, Mr Davis said he asked himself the question: "What kind of world do you want to live in - and leave to your kids." The answer is a service that borrows social networking tools to create a Facebook of brands that claims its mission is to "help people help each other make better brand choices and encourage companies to be good to all their stakeholders".

A brand's overall performance is easured by its appearance on the website – red is bad while green is good – and by its overall score that can allow comparisons to be made with competitors. He said he was not worried about companies that were receiving poor ratings rorting the system as they "would eventually be found out". He would make money out of selling the insights gleaned from the data back to companies to "make better brands" but would not divulge any personal information of users. Experts in the field of ethical or consumer activism welcomed the idea. Oliver Wagg, the managing editor of Ethical Investor magazine, said that Australian consumers who were interested in shopping sustainably had few places to turn to for information.

"An increasing number of directories and websites are emerging to help consumers make the right decision about 'green' products and services. But these sources generally point consumers to products and services that brand themselves as 'green', leaving them to carry out their own verification and of course open to false advertising, or 'greenwashing'," he said.

Although Brandkarma is thought to be the first service of its kind in the world, consumer activism in generally has already taken root.

A US-based service called Carrotmob is gaining traction with its co-ordinated grassroots efforts that leverage consumer power.

In October its Australian debut attracted 200 people who shopped exclusively at a Surry Hills supermarket that had pledged 20 per cent of its sales to go towards the "greening" of the store. More such events are planned.

Source: smh.com.au

YouTube becomes a TV Station

YouTube becomes a TV station tomorrow
JULIAN LEE
March 12, 2010 - 12:02PM

YouTube's first major move away from being a video-sharing site and towards an online TV destination begins early tomorrow morning when it begins streaming free live Indian Premier Cricket League matches.

The Google-owned YouTube yesterday unveiled eight sponsors, half of which are global brand names. HSBC, Hewlett Packard, Coca Cola, Samsung, Indian mobile phone company, Airtel, Honda motorcycles, an Indian university, and one of the teams, the Bangalore-based Royal Challenger team were named as sponsors of the initial 56 matches of this season.

YouTube does not disclose the dollar size of the sponsorship packages but interviews with executives have indicated that because this initiative is a new one they are not asking advertisers to pay over the odds.

At least 32, 30-second ads will appear during the play in each match watched live or on demand later.

The cricket deal is part of YouTube's ambition to become a destination for internet users as a place not just to upload content but watch it, in the form of movies, sport and concerts, said Leigh Terry managing partner of media buyers OMD.

"Rather than just going to YouTube and searching for a video they hope to become a destination much like a portal where people can go for a variety of content, not just sports," he said

"I have a feeling that this is just going to be the first [of others] to come."

Mr Terry said that while YouTube's success at attracting audiences was not in doubt - an estimated 36 million videos are watched by Australians each month - it had struggled to gain advertising dollars. "The audience hasn't been the problem, it's the quality and the exclusivity of the content," he said, adding that initiatives such as this addressed that.

Source: smh.com.au

Internet access seen as a right:

Internet access seen as a right: poll
March 9, 2010 - 11:20AM

More than three-quarters of people across the world believe access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll carried out for the BBC indicates.

The poll, which questioned more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries, suggested strong support globally for access to the web.

The findings released on Monday come as efforts are stepped up across the world to increase net access, with the United Nations leading a push for more people to be given the opportunity to get online.

Countries including Finland and Estonia have already ruled it is a human right, said the BBC.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, told the broadcaster.

"The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created."

Almost 79 per cent of those questioned said they strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the description of the internet as a "fundamental right of all people." This included people who had access and those who did not.

A total of 87 per cent of internet users questioned in the poll, carried out by GlobeScan for the BBC, felt access should be a right, while more than 70 per cent of non-users agreed with this view.

Mexico, Brazil and Turkey were among countries where support was highest, according to the survey.

The findings also suggested people in a diverse range of countries felt the web was a vital part of their lives. Three-quarters in Japan, Mexico and Russia said they could not cope without it.

South Korea, where nearly all citizens enjoy high-speed net access, had the greatest majority of people - 96 per cent - who believed access was a fundamental right.

The US Treasury Department on Monday eased sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Sudan to allow exports by US companies of services related to web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, chat, social networking and photo- and movie-sharing.

"We're supporting the right of free expression," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday

The decision to allow exports of web tools to Iran was intended to allow Iranians to "communicate without being blocked by their own government", she explained.

AFP

Source: smh.com.au

botnet

Spanish botnet could have paralysed an 'entire country'
March 4, 2010 - 10:33AM

Spanish criminals who stole bank details from computers around the world did not realise the power of the illegal network they had created which could have paralysed an entire country's computer systems, police said.

Police gave a news conference on Wednesday, a day after they arrested three people for what they believe to have been one of the biggest computer crimes ever detected.

They declined to identify the men, aged between 25 and 31, from small Spanish towns, whom they suspect of infecting more than 13 million computers with spyware.

Police believe the men were not expert hackers and bought their virus program on the black market before using it to take over other people's computers in order to create a "botnet," a network of enslaved computers.

"Fortunately this botnet of 13 million computers was controlled by someone who hadn't realised how powerful it was," Juan Salon, the head of the cybercrime unit of Spain's Civil Guard Police, told a news conference.

The network would have had much more computing power than the one used in a notorious "cyber-attack" on Estonia, police said, adding that it could in theory have been used for a similar assault on a nation's vital computer infrastructure.

Estonia accused Russia of being behind the 2007 attack, which swamped websites belonging to many of the country's institutions, putting them out of action. "Thank God, their criminal mentality wasn't very sophisticated," said Salon, who said the men apparently tried to offer their botnet to criminal gangs for hire, but do not seem to have made huge profits although they made a comfortable living.

The criminals used the virus to infect machines - initially exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser - which then allowed them to record key strokes and login credentials. This botnet was known as "Mariposa" - the Spanish word for butterfly.

The leader of the gang was caught with personal details of 800,000 people, said the Civil Guard. Government institutions and companies had also been affected, it said, although it declined to give more details.
The Age, 5th March 2010