Membership
The future of the phone joins the IIA
Welcome today as well to Blueface who offer business and residential Voice over IP services. Using Blueface VOIP allows much more flexibility and includes call conferencing and call management. Their site allows you to purchase packages based on your talk requirements and they also sell VOIP phones. Currently they are running a very tempting introductory offer which includes a Siemens phone. They also have a busy discussion forum, the grandaddy of social networking tools so they are there to help anyone who would like to more about the future of the phone.
(Don’t forget that another of our newer members, Argilon, is offering a special discount to IIA members on a VoIP workshop next week.)
Yes I am aware of the fact that I could have used any of a selection of pop music related titles on this post too. Hanging on the telephone. Call me. etc. Please feel free to add your own suggestions. I’m running out of steam.
Membership
Everybody needs good neighbours
Right I’ll admit it. I had a great karaoke session at the weekend which is probably the reason why all of today’s blog posts have pop titles. However my weekend started off with a bout of meeting the neighbours at the Digital Hub Barbecue. I spoke to some lovely people from Zamano, IIA members, who very kindly took me under their wing on my arrival as all my colleagues are away so I was there by myself. And then the evening became the night in the company of Aoife from Clickstream, another member company, the two of us blathering away in Irish. I met Aoife originally on my second day working in the IIA at an event we ran about accessibility in April. There was a great buzz in the Digital Hub area as the students in the National College of Art and Design were holding their end of year exhibitions.
However I didn’t have an opportunity to meet some of our newest members who are also neighbours. The latest addition to the association are the accomplished Net Affinity who are also based in the Digital Hub. They are a digital marketing agency providing a range of integrated digital media services in Ireland since 2000. They combine their extensive wealth of marketing, design and technical expertise to creating smart, strategic & results driven campaigns. A great addition to the Association, bringing a wealth of experience in a diverse range of sectors. Are they party people? I can’t honestly say…YET but keep your eyes peeled and you should be hearing about an opportunity for us all to find out soon. Ooooh mysterious!
Membership
Workin’ 9 to 5: what a way to make a living
But’s it getting much easier all the time with technology to help us. Our newest member 1TimeTracking is going to make resource tracking a whole lot easier for all of us. It will free up managers to concentrate on the bigger picture, rather than wasting precious time emailing their team for timesheets. It allows the self-employed to track time and expenses for specific clients and projects ensuring cost-effectiveness for all. As its charged per employee it is itself a cost effective solution for the microtrader trying to juggle a number of clients. For those with employees it’s an easy way to ensure compliance to the Working Time Act as well. There’s a free trial for the first month so go on, give it a whirl and tell us what you think.
Membership, Web 2.0
Any radio stars better watch out
Because our newest member, Micheal Kelly, from MikeKellyTv.com has great plans for online video. He doesn’t mess about either. His business is up and running only a short time and already he has joined the IIA and nominated himself to join our Social Media Working Group. Video is, of course, a huge element in social media so it is great to have him on board.
Membership
Pillar of the community
Welcome today also to one of our neighbours here in the Digital Hub. PillarProjects joined the IIA yesterday. They are certainly going to add something to the IIA with the following mission:
Our mission is the realisation of your business benefits through successful projects. We believe the success lies in the attitude & skill set the person brings, combined with the support that is given to our people.
Attitude, skills, support: you could say the three pillars of business wisdom!
Welcome!
You might be wondering why are all these people joining the IIA? I’ll tell you!
Membership is like Neapolitan Ice Cream with three flavours allowing companies to choose between Corporate (50+ employees,) SME (Up to 50 employees), or Individual (Less than 3 employees). We can generate usernames and passwords for all staff within a member company which allows lots of flexibility in the use of our extranet.
Members of the IIA get considerable discounts on all our events and access to member-only events. As a member-driven and member-focussed organisation we rely on members’ input to ensure a vibrant and cutting edge programme of events and therefore welcome all suggestions from our members. We welcome input from members as guest bloggers and as speakers at events throughout the year.
All members are welcome to post industry-related press releases, tenders, publications, vacancies and appointments via the IIA extranet. Members can also avail of special offers made available by members, discounts on events run by the IIA and member-only resources such as whitepapers, research and reports.
But sadly there is no free ice cream. So far. I’m working on it.
Uncategorized
High achievers
Welcome to another new member this week. (Was I the only one who took a break over the Bank Holiday?) Achieve-IT are a website design, hosting and IT Training company with a broad portfolio of clients. I’m particularly drawn to one of their clients’ sites: Accompanying Irish Music on the Guitar. Grafton Street busking, here I come!
Membership
Best behaviour
Net Behaviour were on their best behaviour last week when they joined the IIA. They attended the recent IIA Congress and I subsequently made contact with them as I did with many of the non-member delegates. To quote their own website:
Net Behaviour are online experts fusing established planning methods, bespoke research and extensive experience to create key insights into the digital consumer which enables us to provide clients with great digital marketing campaigns.
When I read this I immediately thought of all our members who contact me looking for facts and figures about the nebulous net and who attend our events aimed at increasing sector skills in the area of developing, managing, and measuring online campaigns and I knew Net Behaviour would be a good fit.
Normally I include a new member company’s logo but I hope you will forgive me for using a different element of their site which caught my magpie eye. Instead of profile pictures they each have a personalised robot image. The image above is Managing Director Justin Cullen’s profile image. We will all be assimilated 🙂
Uncategorized
Protect us from all anxiety
One of the many things I have been doing since I began working here in the Irish Internet Association has been responding to queries that come in from members and from the general public. In order to do this I have to try very hard to keep abreast of the kind of issues that are concerning our members. One of our newer members originally contacted me with a query about data protection legislation and I felt terribly ignorant when he seemed to know more than I did. Happily he still joined the IIA!
So last week I gratefully accepted an invitation from the Institute of International and European Affairs to attend their event “Perspectives on privacy in the Internet Age” with presentations by Peter Fleisher, Chief Privacy Counsel, Google Inc., and Billy Hawkes, Data Protection Commissioner. There was also a brief presentation from the floor by Inspector Pat Burke of An Garda Síochána. Here is a brief synopsis but please if you were present and feel I am misrepresenting anyone, I would welcome corrections and clarifications. Thanks!
Both Peter and Billy opened their presentations quoting Scott McNealy’s now infamous and eight year old comment “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” although it became quickly clear that neither of them are even remotely as blasé as McNealy was way back then when it comes to privacy and data protection.
Both of the speakers talked about how, now that information storage is so cheap, it’s actually more cost effective to keep rather than delete information. Fleisher suggested that corporations who are required to comply with privacy and data protection legislation could deal with this in a number of ways:
- Time based anonymisation: forgetfulness should be programmed in so that once information reaches the time limit required by law, it is forgotten by the database.
- Include privacy controls so that users can choose what level of privacy they wish to set for the information that they are storing or publishing online.
- Education: Corporations like Google have a responsibility to educate users about privacy and data protection in a clear and accessible manner.
However Google’s biggest difficulty in relation to privacy legislation is that they are required to comply to location based regimes as he called them. Even within the EU and based on the EU directive countries could set their own time limits for data retention and Google has to comply to all of these while in reality all of this data exists in the cloud rather than any specific location. He also pointed out that in the US there are 39 Security Breach laws each with their own details because the legislation that governs privacy in the US is not federal.
In relation to education Fleisher told us that Google have developed a selection of videos about privacy which have been viewed by half a million viewers. He suggested that corporations might consider video as a more personable approach to privacy statement than the current privacy statements that can now be found on most websites. Fleisher said that the APEC privacy framework was, so far, Google’s preferred framework with it’s emphasis on preventing harm and focus on accountability.
He finished up by reminding us that the big question should be what do we want technology to do for us rather than what is technology doing to us?
Billy Hawkes, the Data Protection Commissioner, had some very interesting statistics about data protection in Ireland and attitudes to data protection and privacy among Irish citizens. Firstly he pointed out that only 10% of companies in Ireland transfer data outside the EU so there may not be currently a requirement for global laws. Citing the Eurobarometer 2008: Data Protection in the European Union: Citizens’ Perceptions, he pointed out that Irish people were slightly more concerned about privacy than the EU average but were also among those most opposed to monitoring of internet usage. All these details can be accessed via the Eurobarometer website. (PDF) Nora Owen, who chaired the session, in her summing up made particular reference to Hawkes use of the phrase “function creep”. He used this when referring to the reasons why data is being kept. Does less privacy and more monitoring equal enhanced security for citizens? Does it equal less crime.
When talking about the future he suggested that corporations should include privacy by design or commission privacy enhancing technology. Similar to Fleisher he emphasised the need to educate people about revealing information, making the point that privacy rights are technology neutral.
Inspector Pat Burke from An Garda Síochána also added from the floor that through their cooperation with the Data Protection Commissioner and always operating within the law and with the right to do proper, legitmate investigation they have had some success in tackling crime which uses the Internet as a platform such as child pornography, internet fraud and identity theft. They have also been able to tackle transnational crimes such as human and child trafficking.
Questions from the floor were put by TJ McIntyre from Digital Rights Ireland and Mark Kelly of Irish Council for Civil Liberties who asked if Google would use a human rights framework to which Fleisher responded that Google are very focussed on the ethical use of the Internet and while they were forced into “the odious concept of censorship” in China, their search results in China include a statement that the results have been filtered. They also will not offer Gmail in China. Brian Greene also made the point that 90% of people using the internet are consumers rather than content producers and there are issues when corporations get and retain data about consumers. Fleisher clarified that Google comes in two flavours: plain ol’ search or search enhanced via logging into your Google account where Google gets to know you and offers you results based on your search history. It’s the consumers choice which search to use.
An interesting afternoon and do you know what? The lunch was delicious too!
As I mentioned at the top of the post I’m new to a lot of these issues so I would really appreciate any comments or clarifications via the comments below.