Nielsen Co., the media company known for audience measurement, reneges on an agreement to hire American workers fat $52,000 per year to outsource.  The move, which has drawn negative reviews from Oldsmar, Florida city officials, came after the company announced it would lay off 117 workers at its global technology center Oldsmar.

 

Nielsen received property tax breaks in 2001 to build a $100 million global technology center in Oldsmar. The tax breaks were pegged to the number of high-wage jobs -- those that paid at least $52,000 -- the company created. That forced Nielsen to disclose hiring details at that facility, effectively putting the employee count of the facility on the local political radar.

In April, when the layoffs were reported locally, Oldsmar city council members responded angrily to the move. One council member accused the company, its largest employer, of "making a joke of the tax incentive program," and another charged that Nielsen "had abdicated their responsibility as a corporate citizen." Adding fuel to the fire were local media reports, which publicized the layoffs and the council's reaction.

Nielsen had about 1,200 workers at the facility when the incentive agreement was reached, an employee count that gradually grew to 1,700. But last October, Nielsen announced a 10-year outsourcing agreement valued at $1.2 billion with Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai. The move was designed to allow Nielsen to integrate and centralize IT systems.

That deal was followed this year with the news that 117 employees would be laid off. Although 50 of those workers have been hired by Tata, Nielsen last week announced it was cutting another 170 jobs -- and some of those affected are training Tata employees to do their work. The company expects to have about 1,300 employees by year end at its facility, with the addition of another 250 or so contract workers.

 

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ICANN, the nonprofit group that manages the Internet Domain Name System, voted today to begin the process of relaxing the rules for generic top-level domain names (gTLD).

The action means that companies and other organizations eventually could run their own domains. For example, IBM could run the domain .ibm, and Microsoft could run the domain .microsoft. Currently, the endings of top-level domain names are limited to a few which include .com, .net and .org, as well as country codes such as .ca for Canada or .uk for the United Kingdom.

Prices to register the new domain names, expected to be anywhere from $150,000 to $500,000, would most likely prohibit individuals from applying for new domain names. ICANN said the high fees would allow it to recoup the approximately $20 million it expects to spend on implementation of the new policy.

Groups applying for new top-level domain names must also either prove they are technically able to operate Web sites or contract with a company that does. According to ICANN, new domain name will probably start appearing by the end of 2009.

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Key Metrics on data breaches have been published by Verizon Business in its cybercrime study.  The metrics are:

• 66% involved data the victim did not know was on the system
• 75% of breaches were not discovered by the victim
• 83% of attacks were not highly difficult
• 85% of breaches were the result of opportunistic attacks
• 87% were considered avoidable through reasonable controls

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(IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. has filed 21 lawsuits in 14 U.S. states against resellers, alleging that they engaged in the sale of pirated software.

  

Some of the cases were caught, thanks to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage or Office Genuine Advantage programs in which the copy of the Windows operating system or Office suite on a user's computer is electronically authenticated online. Microsoft began rolling out Windows Genuine Advantage in April 2006.

Others lawsuits were sparked by calls to Microsoft's antipiracy hot line, the company said.

Almost all the lawsuits concerned Windows XP or consumer versions of Office. Only two suits alleged piracy of an enterprise version of the software, and Windows Vista was not the subject of an allegation in any filing, according to information from Microsoft.

Among the companies against which lawsuits were filed were several that had been previously been accused by Microsoft of software piracy and had settled with the company, it said.

The lawsuits were filed in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Oregon, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Washington.

According to a recent report published by the Business Software Alliance, an antipiracy group funded by software makers, the U.S. had a piracy rate of 20% -- the lowest in the survey. Although because of the size of the market, losses from piracy in the U.S. were estimated at $8 billion, which is higher than any other single country.

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Microsoft proposes getting rid of phone numbers with a new service called Echoes 

Echoes (version 1) - Microsoft's services platform for telco providers that is due out this summer - Microsoft plans to synchronize contacts. With Live Messenger contacts will appear in a mobile user's address book (if the carrier is using Echoes).

Messenger contacts will automatically appear in users' phone address book, so that even if they  don’t know one of their Live Messenger contact's phone number, they still will be able to call it. Numbers will be able to ring simultaneously on multiple devices/systems. On the flip side, Echoes will help insure instant-messaging-to-SMS continuity. A user can send an IM to any mobile contact, and the contact can respond via a text message.

• Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact
• Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
• The user will be able to compose a text message or place a voice call to these contacts
• Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back
• Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user's PC
• As the mobile user will appear always "online" to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the  mobile
  

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(Reuters) - Microsoft said on Wednesday that starting sometime next year it will make it easier for users of an open-source rival to work with Microsoft Office.

Without adding any special software to Office, users will be able to open documents sent to them in the open source Open Document Format (ODF), the company said. As well, users will be able to edit and save documents in that format.

Microsoft is going to be providing support for three new file formats directly in the Office product.  In addition to ODF, Microsoft will also support the Adobe PDF fixed format and Microsoft's competitor to PDF, known as XPS.

 

Microsoft offers support for ODF in its current version of Office but only if additional software is downloaded separately and installed.  The company did not address concerns expressed earlier this month by a British government agency, BECTA that Microsoft's existing ODF software does not work very well.

 

BECTA has complained to competition authorities in London and Brussels that the ODF translator software has limited functionality and is poorly integrated, compared with Microsoft's own products.

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Virtually all organizations must satisfy statutory records retention requirements, including broad-based requirements such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act impacts all public companies and has been a prime point for regulatory compliance. A few of the many mandated requirements are:

• SEC 17a
• FINRA 3010
• FDIC Advisory
• Investment Advisors Act of 1940 (hedge funds)
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• IDA 29.7
• FDA 21 CFR Part 11
• OCC Advisory
• HIPAA
• Financial Modernization Act 1999
• Medicare Conditions of Participation
• Fair Labor Standards Act
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• Toxic Substances Control Act
• UK Data Protection Act
• UK Companies Act
• UK Company Law Reform Bill - Electronic Communications
• UK Combined Code on Corporate Governance 2003
• UK Human Rights Act
• UK Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001
• Basel II
• Markets in Financial Instruments Directive

Although many records retention requirements do not impose specific requirements on email or instant messages, Janco has found that approximately 80% of enterprises use email for closing orders or performing other types of business transactions. As a result, email is housing a greater proportion of corporate and other records and so increasingly is subject to statutory records retention requirements.

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(eWeek) Though IT employment is at an all-time high in the U.S.--some 3.8 million employed residents in the U.S. consider themselves IT professionals according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a record high--and is expected to climb even higher--computer and mathematical sciences jobs expected to grow faster than any other professional occupation through 2016, nearly a 25 percent increase--there are those that work in the field that no longer think it's all it's cracked up to be.    

Salary competition from offshore outsourcing, companies posting ads that expressly favor H-1B visa holders to the exclusion of U.S. workers, the fear for job safety that comes in a recession year and the constant pressure to keep skills up to date have worn some tech professionals out to a point that they would consider alternative careers.

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Leadership skills that the CIO and CTO need to have include:

 

   

• Ability to manage employee turnover costs and prevent hassles by using the best hiring and interviewing techniques.
• Unify employees into a smooth-running, productive team, despite differences in personality, background, and age.
• Find the delicate balance necessary to effectively supervise friends and former peers.
• Establish supervisor-subordinate relationship boundaries that are understood and respected.
• Identify difficult employees and handle them easily, appropriately, and swiftly.
• Give constructive criticism that is not taken personally-  by even the most sensitive employee.
• Originate project plans and set goals that your team and management will support.
• Control absenteeism and tardiness.
• Know when to take corrective action or firing an employee; and know the legal implications of your decisions.

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(Reuters) A recent study by the NPD Group finds that despite vanquishing rival high-definition format HD DVD, Blu-ray sales haven't picked up.

Sonys Blu-ray high-definition optical disc format way have won the so-called high-def format war when Toshiba threw in the towel on its competing HD DVD format back in February but, so far, Blu-ray sales do not show it. New sales figures from market research firm NPD show that sales of Blu-ray standalone players dropped a stunning 40 percent between January and February (presumably as many potential customers were waiting out the high-def war), but rose only 2 percent from February to March once Toshiba gave up on HD DVD. And the sales figures are still so low that NPD refused to publish specific numbers because it might be too easy to identify specific retailers from the figures.

    

The general wisdom was that once the high-definition disc field was winnowed down to one technology, consumers would embrace it in droves, particularly as conflicting marketing messages vanished and the library of compatible movie titles grew.

However, instead, consumers appear to be bypassing Blu-ray media in favor of high-definition downloadable content or embracing inexpensive standard DVD players that can upscale content to 1080p resolution. Where Blu-ray players are still priced over $300, upconverting DVD players can be had for around $50, and they're compatible with consumer's existing DVD collections. In fact, upconverting DVD players have seen a five percent increase in sales during the first quarter of 2008, compared to the same quarter in 2007.

Some industry watchers project that Blu-ray player prices will drop below $200 in time for the end-of-year holidays, and consumers will begin adopting the technology at that point. However, ABI Research forecasts it will take even longer for Blu-ray to gain significant market share, with the market only embracing Blu-ray in another 12 to 18 months, perhaps just in time for the 2009 end-of-year holiday season.

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