The company’s factor in Miho which is 65 kilometers from central Tokyo was closed by the quake on March 11th.  This factor is responsible for about 10 percent of TI’s output by revenue in 2010.

Production of about 80 percent of the Miho factory’s work has been temporarily shifted to factories in Texas and Freising, Germany.

For more on this, check out the story over at PCWorld.

AT&T sent a letter to tetherers requiring them to stop or be automatically charged a $20/ month DataPro plan on their bill.

Until now, people have assumed that AT&T either doesn’t care or cannot determine that the traffic comes from a connected device rather than the iPhone itself. Clearly, those assumptions are incorrect.

For more on this, check out MobileCrunch, osXDaily and TUAW.

Typically, when a tech issue hits a large tech company, they are up and running again pretty swiftly.  However, when a small to medium sized business has a serious IT-related issue, it can cause much bigger problems, over a far longer period of time.

So, I decided to ask The Tech News Blog’s IT Continuity Editor, Gareth Howell, to share some ideas on the kind of impact that failing to implement a disaster recovery plan, can have on a small business.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Implementing a bare metal backup system as part of your Disaster Recovery Planning can reduce your downtime by a day and half when you suffer a server failure.

Consider the following scenario:  You manage a successful small business with 100 employees, 20 of whom use a computer on a daily basis.  You have an in-house server running some form of office productivity software, plus Line of Business applications like accounting, CRM and possibly production control.  Your computer users (probably) have Windows computers; though the following still applies if you use Macs.  The desktop computers are configured to store all data on the server and the server has one of the commonly used backup software suites running on it.

What would you need to do if the server failed?

1. Possibly, source and replace the failed hardware.
2. Boot the server from the Recovery CD if there is one, or from the original installation CD if there isn’t, assuming you have it!
3. If there is a recovery CD, it should be a pretty easy process of following instructions to restore the server to the state of the last backup.

If there isn’t, you will probably need to:

1. Re-install and configure the Operating System from the Installation CD (2-3 hours)
2. Update the operating system to the patch state required by the Backup Software (this could take a day at least: depending on your network bandwidth.)
3. Re-install and configure the Backup software (maybe half a day.)
4. Run the Backup software and restore the server as before.
5. The additional costs of not having bare metal recovery.

Looking at the above, you can see that you could have added between 24 and 36 hours to your downtime, if you didn’t have the recovery CD.  During that period, you have no email, LoB applications, no files or documents.

How much productivity will you lose?

So, let’s say that 10 or those 20 computer users can still be 50% productive and the others 75%.  That’s a total reduction in productivity of 37.5% in your office staff.
Only you can calculate the actual loss in productivity expressed as loss in revenue, but it doesn’t take much for this to be higher than the cost of implementing a proper bare metal backup environment.

By Gareth Howell:
Gareth runs Agdon Associates; a Business Continuity company based in Cambridgeshire, England. For more information on protecting your business, check out their blog.

Ten, twenty – Maybe a hundred?

OK, what if you were Leo Laporte, one of the best known and most respected people in your field with hundreds of thousands of followers and fans?

The answer might surprise you!

Leo Laporte & Google Buzz: It’s complicated

Yesterday, Leo Laporte was checking his Google Buzz account when he noticed that a recent post had not been published.  He looked again and saw that in fact, not one of his posts for the past 2 weeks had been published.  Moreover, according to Leo, no one even noticed he wasn’t posting to Buzz!

Now, Leo has hundreds of thousands of listeners and viewers to his various Internet TV shows and his nationwide radio show.  He also has a following on Twitter (at time of writing), of almost a quarter of a million people (including me.)  Ironically, he is also one of the most followed people on Google Buzz, with over 17,000 followers there.

Leo’s missing.  Why didn’t anyone notice?

The general belief is that Leo primarily uses social media to broadcast, so there was a complete communication breakdown.  The suggestion seems to be that he either wasn’t listening or when people saw he wasn’t posting, they assumed there was no point telling him, as he’d be highly unlikely to respond to them.  This, by the way, is based on an incorrect assumption – Leo DOES connect (more on that in a moment.)

However, I can understand where this suggestion comes from.

It did, after all, take Leo 2 weeks before he realised that 50% of his “communication” stream was broken (the broadcast part).  Had he been listening, he would have heard the defining silence and immediately noticed the drop in conversations with him on Buzz.  Ironically, Leo does communicate a great deal with his followers.  His challenge is that he is active on a number of social networks and between them all, he has hundreds of thousands of people sending messages to him, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In other words, I believe his error was that he spread himself too thinly, across too many networks, to effectively communicate.

Is it even possible to communicate with that many followers?

I only have 16,000 followers on Twitter, but hundreds of thousands of followers must make 2-way communication almost impossible.  I have personally “chatted” many times with Leo on Friendfeed and equally, I have also had many messages ignored!  However, the same can be said of any “tech celeb” with a large following.  I’m guessing Leo’s Twitter stream looks like The Matrix, because HE IS seen by his followers as approachable and interested.

Clearly, if you follow someone with a massive following like Leo (or Veronica Belmont, Pete Cashmore etc), you need to accept that the way they connect via social networks will be very different from the average user, with a more manageable network of contacts.

Further reading

I found 2 really good posts on this subject:

• This post by Brad McCarty on The Next Web makes some excellent points about social media’s strengths and weaknesses.
• This post on Techcrunch, by Paul Parr is also well worth a read.  It widens the discussion to look at where to, and not to, post our content.

Photo Credit: Leo Laporte

Twitter business model to include advertising?

This got me thinking.  In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website.  Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too.  These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.

Both Tweetdeck & Seesmic Desktop are superb apps, but they are also a lot more resource hungry, than simply using a browser to access the Twitter website. Now that users are able to get all the core functionality direct from Twitter.com, using their favourite lightweight browser – There’s less motivation for NEW Twitter users to bother installing the aforementioned Twitter apps.

The Twitter team are actively, suddenly doing everything they can to make Twitter.com stickier.  Obviously, this keeps MORE new users on Twitter.com.

Here’s why I think these recent moves by Twitter are so interesting, from a business model point of view.

Twitter’s business model puzzle

One of the biggest challenges Twitter has had to deal with, is how to turn the popularity of the service into an effective business model.  A big reason that this has been such a challenge, is that only a small percentage of tweets are sent via Twitter.com.  As a result, Twitter gets just a small percentage of the ‘eyeballs’ it could have; rendering Twitter.com far less attractive for potential advertisers.

I believe the recent introduction of Twitter Lists, project retweet and now the new ‘updates’ feature,  show that Twitter is focusing hard on developing a key part of their business model around advertising on Twitter.com.  As I mentioned some time ago, Twitter users in some Asian countries already see small banner ads on Twitter.com.

Conclusion

Whilst many longer term users will want to stick with their favourite Twitter desktop apps, there’s less and less reason for new desk-based users to want to use them.  This should see a significant increase in the number of people using Twitter.com and as a result, transform the site into a more attractive platform for future advertisers.

Very few users of Twitter are likely to object to ads, particularly if they are somehow targeted around the user’s tweets, so they are relevant.  Maybe Twitter users with an objection, could opt to pay a fee to have these ads removed; like wordpress.com do for their users.

What do you think?

BTW: You can follow me on Twitter here @thetechnewsblog

This investment, plus a number of essential upgrades and changes will help us to get the blog to you faster and more reliably than ever before.

Twitter search?

Twitter users generate a huge amount of data. They are also a helpful bunch; answering questions and suggesting links to people.  This week, Twitter stopped using TinyUrl as its URL shortening service and now uses Bit.ly. Bit.ly not only shortens URL’s, it ALSO indexes the content of the links it shortens AND gathers additional data.  This makes it a perfect partner for Twitter, now that Twitter is planning to take on Google and Co.

Twitter, Google & SEO

There’s no doubt that there is some REAL potential here, for Twitter to eat into Google’s search dominance.  Twitter will be able to claim that its search engine is human powered.  Advertisers like the idea of human powered search, which is why it was attempted by Jason Calacanis and his team at Mahalo.  Sadly, Twitter search (currently anyway) is way, way to easy to game – more on that in a moment!

Twitter search a “game changer?”

Although we refer to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the reality is that most SEO is based on Google Optimisation. Websites and blogs are designed and optimised to be found by Google.  For example,  this blog gets over 96% of its search traffic from Google alone.

My concern is that Twitter Optimisation (TO), will see a massive increase in spammy Tweets, as people flood Twitter with links and keywords / phrases.  This could, paradoxically, see a drop in Twitter users – as the nature of the service and the user experience deteriorates.

Surely it couldn’t happen?

It is already happening, with spammers including words from Twitter’s ‘trending topics’ list in their Tweets, with links to whatever they want to sell you.  For example – as I write this post, if you search for #startrek, you also get links to various porn sites.

Twitter claim that they will use a user reputation, ranking system, to make search terms more relevant. The obvious issue here is; “who is to say that one user is likely to be a trustworthy source of links?”  What happens when these ‘trusted’ link providers start getting paid by SEO providers to link to their clients sites?

Whatever happens, it’s going to be hard work for Twitter. I hope it works, just so we can finally have a competitive search engine / online advertising market.

I also think that Twitter’s team might want to look at how StumbleUpon are currently working with human powered links and the challenges they present.

Pirate Bay & Google

Many people, (including me) see what the Pirate Bay are doing as little different from Google.  The Pirate Bay does not store any illegal material on their website, but simply links to sources of material.  In the exact same way, the Google search engine will happily point you at warez sites, illegal porn sites, sites that show you how to scam people and sites that give passwords / codes for software illegally.

Pirate Bay & Google – Unfair!

I am not a judge, but I am convinced that either the Pirate Bay should have walked free today or Google (and Yahoo!, Kumo, Ask, Live etc) should find themselves similarly charged.  In fact, based on the tiny number of users the Pirate Bay has compared to Google, based on this judgement, Google’s founders would be serving life a few times over!

The reality is that The Pirate Bay have been dealt with in this way, to scare others from offering a similar service.  In my opinion, the big Hollywood studios have had more to do with the severity of this sentence than the judge.

Comment

Sadly, as no one with any power seems to have the balls to take on Google, Google will once again find themselves with nothing to worry about.  They are bigger than Hollywood and have the financial power to ensure they are never taken to task.

Mickeyy – Twitter’s 2nd worm in 24 hours!

The mickeyy worm / virus is just like the last one; in that it seems to spread when people visit the web page, that contains a friends profile.  Viewing profiles, using clients like TweetDeck does not seem to cause infection.  This comes as a bit of a surprise, as Twitter claimed earlier to have plugged the security gap that allowed the previous hack exploit.

The Mickeyy worm comes hot on the heels of yesterday’s stalkdaily worm, which was infecting Twitter with its own spam payload. Whilst neither of these worms are reported to be dangerous, they are beginning to show some amazing holes in Twitters security.

Mickeyy worm – What to do

To avoid infection, our friends over at mashable.com suggest the following:

1. Stop visiting Twitter profiles on the web, since these are the source.
2. You might want use a 3rd party app like TweetDeck (TweetDeck reviews) or Seesmic Desktop for now.
3. Disable javascript in your browser settings, or use a Firefox (Firefox reviews) add-on like no-script, which stops unwanted scripts from running.

If you think you might be infected, the mashable link above also gives details on what to do. (thanks mashable!)

Twitter stalkdaily spam worm

The ‘stalkdaily’ Twitter worm carried a pretty harmless payload, yet the security black hole it exploited COULD have been used more maliciously!  This is yet another security blunder, for the world’s favourite micro-blogging service.

Twitter stalkdaily – how to get infected

To get infected, all a Twitter user had to do was visit the profile of a friend – that’s it!  Fortunately, Twitter have removed this most recent flaw in their security and it’s ‘safe’ to use the service again.

Twitter investment – but where?

With tens of millions of dollars of VC money to invest in Twitter, it’s hard to see why the service is still so unreliable. The dreaded fail whale was so prominent last week, that I was hardly able to use the service for a few days.  The recent glut of security failings are of course understandable, as more and more people use the service and it becomes a hot target for spammers.

FriendFeed beta

This latest set back for Twitter, comes less than a week after FriendFeed released the latest beta of its service, to an extremely warm reception. Though FriendFeed currently has fewer users than Twitter, the functionality and reliability are both massively better.  With the new addition of real-time, threaded conversations – FriendFeed is a worthy Twitter alternative.