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Privacy to porno: What censorship means around the world [map]

Rani Molla — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:03:28 +0000

Google released data today that shows requests for censorship and surveillance are on the rise worldwide. Google keeps track of government requests to remove its content (requests it sometimes abides) and releases data biannually. We mapped those numbers, which include July 2010 through June of this year, to show the main products each government is targeting and the reasons they gave for doing so.

What it shows is that censorship varies greatly across the world — some of which stretches the definition of what people usually define as censorship. For example, since the reports began in 2010, the United Kingdom has led the way with 97,891 removal requests, 96,280 of which were for Google’s AdWords.

Country	Sum of Items Requested To Be Removed
United Kingdom	97,891
South Korea	33,235
Brazil	15,919
United States	12,537
Germany	7,962

But the majority of the U.K.’s removal requests occurred in 2010 at the behest of the U.K. Office of Fair trading, which asked for “the removal of fraudulent ads that linked to scams,” according to the July-December 2010 report. Google removed nearly all of them, more than 93,000 items.

Other nations engage in a much more traditional — at least in a Western sense — censorship. Thailand, for example, has far fewer government removal requests (431), all of which are directed at YouTube for criticizing Thailand’s king. The latest numbers show in the last six months Turkey and the United States have led the world in data removal requests.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the data are the reasons Google was asked to take down content. They provide insight into a government’s priorities and rationale. While Brazil and Hong Kong are diligent about copyright requests, they are so for different reasons: Brazil had 11,613 removal requests directed at Picasa Web Albums, Hong Kong directed its 381 at YouTube. Countries across the world cited pornography as a reason for removal, with Turkey as the most aggressive (557).

And while defamation was the leading worldwide excuse for removal requests, the products that caused the defamation varied greatly, from Web Search to Blogger to AdWords. Take a look at each country to see its frequency and reasoning for petitioning Google.

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UK now has 2 million “superfast” connections

Om Malik — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:48:28 +0000

Underground photo courtesy of Annie Mole via Flickr under Creative Commons

The United Kingdom, one of the laggards in Europe when it comes to superfast broadband, has finally passed the two million subscription mark or roughly 10 percent of the UK’s fixed lines, according to broadband research firm, Point Topic. Their data shows that UK superfast broadband has downstream bandwidth of over 25Mbps. [What speed you actually get at home is a whole different thing, but that's a story for another day.]

Cable broadband along with Copper/Fiber hybrid broadband technologies are taking market share away from the plain old DSL, a trend that has gained momentum in US over the past few years. Of the total 21.3 million fixed broadband lines, there are 16.3 million that use old broadband technologies. The UK during the “first half of 2012 saw the tipping point where DSL, for the first time, started to lose subscribers overall,” Point Topic notes.

During the second quarter of 2012, The UK added a mere 175,000 new subscribers. However, more than 600,000 new superfast subscribers signed up. Virgin Media and BT are two of the biggest “superfast” broadband service providers in the country. Europe wants to go all “superfast” by 2020. Countries like the Netherlands, Sweden and many emerging European economies such as Estonia are far ahead of the UK in terms of superfast broadband offerings and penetration, though the UK government wants to offer best broadband in Europe by 2015.

February gets a new holiday: Anywhere Working Week

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:04:43 +0000

February may be the shortest month, but as many in the Northern hemisphere can attest, it usually doesn’t feel like it. With winter grinding along and the post-holiday comedown hitting home, it is generally one of the gloomiest months of the year. No offence, Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day (itself a source of depression for many), but it is a month in obvious need of more holidays.

Luckily, we now have one. A whole week’s worth of celebrating remote work, in fact. It may not sell as many roses or chocolates as that better-known mid-month holiday, but Anywhere Working Week is now in full swing in the UK. Announced late last year with the support of MP Norman Baker, the seven-day event to highlight the personal, business and environmental benefits of flexible and remote working has a fistful of big-name founders, including Business in the Community, Microsoft, Nokia, Nuffield, Regus, Vodafone UK and Transport for London, and it is also supported by the UK Department for Transport, WWF and the Trades Union Congress.

“It’s no longer viable for businesses to stick to rigid, inefficient ways of working if they want to compete successfully in the market,” says Gordon Frazer, the managing director at Microsoft UK on the initiative’s home page, and the weeklong event is meant to promote these more flexible practices. To spur participation the sponsors are offering giveaways to those who sign up as supporters, as well as a handy calculator that British individuals can use to find out how much they would save by working remotely.

As the Digital Workplace Forum points out, the event is hardly making waves and compares it unfavorably to a similar but more cleverly promoted event in the Netherlands. The Forum blames the British government for its lackluster support, saying:

The lack of visible ‘oomph’ with Anywhere Working week is disappointing. . . . For all the positive benefits which flow from the Digital Workplace we believe the UK government should be championing remote working far more actively. It reduces pressure on transport, is good for the environment and produces a healthier, happier and more productive workforce.

To be fair to the British government though, the U.S. equivalent, Telework Week 2012, is next week and is hardly a pressing topic of discussion around American kitchen tables either. The truth is remote working doesn’t have tons of immediate sex appeal (that’s probably why the Dutch had to use pretty women in pink bathrobes to get their event some attention), despite the Digital Workplace Forum and the Anywhere Working Week sponsors’ being completely correct about its many benefits, which is both a shame and a marketing challenge.

How could the Anglophone countries take a leaf out of the Netherland’s book and find a way to make remote work a hot topic?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Martin Kliehm

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Yup, Britain is a freelance nation too

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:01:22 +0000

Just a few weeks ago, British online labor platform PeoplePerHour released survey findings showing that British small businesses are increasing relying on freelance talent. It wasn’t a hard result to believe considering the crescendo of chatter about the rise of independent workers and the “gig economy” on this side of the pond, but if you’re a skeptic looking for even more evidence, there is now some on offer.

PeoplePerHour competitor Freelancer.co.uk has released its own findings from a survey of 12,000 businesses that used the service. The company found UK businesses increased their spending on freelancers by 134 percent this year, hiring talent from around the world. The company chalks this impressive growth up to the intense economic pressures British small businesses are under.

With a global workforce of more than three million highly skilled but affordable freelancers, it is little wonder that Britain’s small businesses have started outsourcing their work to secure and boost the bottom line. They are increasingly taking advantage of freelancers offering a range of skills to support their businesses. Without them bankruptcy rates in the UK could be much higher,” said Saif Bonar, Freelancer.co.uk UK Manager, adding, “with Government support and lending from banks coming up short, small businesses have realized if they don’t outsource they won’t survive.”

In an email accompanying the release, a Freelancer.co.uk spokesperson also noted that the steep rise in the use of freelancers reflects larger shifts in the labor market as well as short-term stress on budgets, and pointed to the work of London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, which describes these changes, including a greater reliance by businesses on independent talent. We’ve covered her ideas, including tips to “futureproof” your career here on GigaOM before.

Where will the shift toward more freelance work be quickest – Europe, the US or somewhere else?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iker Merodio.

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iZettle launches across Nordics — next stop U.K.

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:06:04 +0000

Since launching late last year, payment service iZettle, Europe’s answer to Square, has only been available in its native Sweden. Now it is launching across the rest of the Nordic region — and putting the pieces in place to expand into Britain later this year.

As of tomorrow, customers in Denmark, Finland and Norway will officially be able to get their hands on the company’s iPhone and iPad card-reader, which enables them to take card payments using an iOS device instead of using a cash register.

CEO Jacob de Geer told me that iZettle planned on distributing between 15,000 and 20,000 free dongles over the next two weeks, mainly to those merchants — large and small — that have already expressed interest in using the system. That will roughly double the size of the rollout since the service came out of beta last November.

“We’ve been pretty happy with how the system works and now we’re ready to expand,” he said. “We’ve been piloting in these markets for some time, and we’ve had fantastic virality. Since the Nordic markets are nearby to us, the word’s really spread.”

Like Square’s basic service — which de Geer admits was the direct inspiration for iZettle’s own technology — iZettle has garnered buzz for letting anyone who signs up plug a card into their device and take payments. Like Square too, it takes a 2.75 percent cut of all transactions in exchange for providing its service. Unlike Square, however, iZettle has to cope with the more demanding technology of chip-based credit cards and the complicated regulatory system across Europe’s patchwork of countries.

But now that the company has gone beyond its own borders for the first time, it looks set to keep growing: in addition to the Nordic expansion, the company has also just hired a managing director for the U.K. ahead of a planned launch there later this year.

Stewart Roberts, currently director of global innovation at Barclaycard Group, will start in May with a remit to build out provisions and partnerships. That could prove a significant hire for the Stockholm-based business, which received $15 million in funding from Index Ventures and Creandum last year with an eye to becoming a significant European business.

De Geer told me that he expected to find that merchants in each country would adopt iZettle in different ways, especially since it could be seen as a lower-cost alternative to traditional Chip-and-PIN readers used by many small businesses.

“We’ll see totally different usage patterns,” he said. “The cost of a reader without the PIN pad is much lower, which makes it appealing for smaller merchants like chiropractors, carpenters, or anyone still bound to cash, checks or invoices.”

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British small businesses using more independent workers

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:03:51 +0000

At Net:Work last December Gene Zaino, the president and CEO of MBO Partners, made a bold prediction based on his firm’s research: Independent workers will be the majority in the U.S. by 2020.

Whether Zaino’s estimate of exactly when freelancers and independent professionals will outnumber regular employees proves correct, the general trend toward a rise in the number of independent workers is hard to deny. Online platforms connecting these pros to contract-based work are flourishing, and media chatter about the so-called “gig economy” is growing steadily louder. But is what is true in America also true abroad? Are other countries experiencing the same rise in the percentage of workers going independent?

A new piece of evidence suggests that freelancers are a growing part of the economy in the U.K. as well, at least when it comes to the small-business sector. Online labor platform PeoplePerHour.com recently polled 1,300 British small businesses about their use of freelance talent. The survey found:

Eighty percent of responding businesses said freelancing had become more common in the UK small-business community over the past year.
Thirty-two percent of respondents had started using freelancers for the first time in the past six months.
Forty-one percent of respondents planned to increase freelance hiring over the next 12 months, compared with 16 percent who plan to hire more in-house staff.
Thirty-three percent reported they now use freelancers on a weekly basis.

The release accompanying the survey also points out that the trend has been good for PeoplePerHour specifically, with total registered users doubling from 120,000 to more than 240,000 over the past year.

The technology changes that are enabling businesses in the U.S. to take advantage of independent workers are just as present in the U.K., as are strong economic pressures on businesses to cut costs and maintain agility, so the findings are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, the survey is interesting as a confirmation that these trends are affecting workers and organizations across the Atlantic as well.

Image courtesy of Flickr user C.G.P.Grey

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Samwers clone Wrapp: Have they gone too far this time?

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:00:27 +0000

Rocket Internet, the German web incubator run by the Samwer brothers, is notorious for aggressively cloning American sites and launching them in Europe. They’ve done it with everything from eBay to Facebook to Groupon — and just a couple of weeks ago they came under fire for the shamelessness of Bamarang, their carbon copy of the design flash sales site Fab.com.

While their tactics win them few friends — even Russian superinvestor Yuri Milner apparently turned down the chance to join their latest fund over concerns about their approach — there is at least an obvious method on display. So far, the Samwers have targeted established, well-funded, American services who have yet to gain much of a footprint in Europe.

But today a report about their latest venture seems to show that they’re changing tactics.

According to Berlin blog Silicon Allee, Rocket is gearing up to launch “Dropgifts”, a rival to the gift-giving service Wrapp:

Rocket Internet’s next clone startup will be called Dropgifts and will be modeled on the Wrapp gift-giving service, Silicon Allee understands. Two Facebook pages have already been set up for the new service fromRocket, the Samwer brothers’ investment vehicle, a hint that it will launch sooner rather than later.

[…]

The site also includes three bullet points: “Surprise your friends with free gift cards”, “Choose from a variety of awesome brands” and “Sign up and start Dropping free gifts today”. The “awesome brands” include some names from Rocket’s very own stable, such as Zalando and Wimdu.

Wrapp essentially allows people to send gift cards to their friends on social networks — sometimes paying from their own pocket, sometimes passing on offers from retailers and other businesses. Groups can also use Wrapp to club together and send joint presents.

While it’s not entirely clear what Dropgifts will look like — the sites are currently password protected, and the Facebook pages were taken down over the weekend — the report appears to be accurate. Indeed, when it does launch, the service seems to plan on going big: a search of domain records appears to show that individuals linked to Rocket have lined up Dropgifts sites in countries across Europe, from the U.K. in the West to Russia in the East, and from Finland in the North to Italy in the South.

The difference between Dropgifts and the other Samwer clones is that unlike previous targets, Wrapp is not an established, well-funded, American service: it’s a young startup that only launched in Sweden at the end of last year. As it says on its website:

Wrapp is based in cold and dark, but sometimes warm and bright Stockholm, Sweden. We also have an office in sunny California’s Silicon Valley. Currently we only partner with retailers in Sweden, but other countries will be added very, very soon!

True, Wrapp isn’t necessarily an entirely run-of-the-mill startup. It has a great founding team, including serial entrepreneur Hjalmar Winbladh, the former CEO of Sendit and Rebtel, and Andreas Ehn, the former CTO of Spotify. It closed $10.5 million in funding at the turn of the year, from well-regarded investors including Reid Hoffman of Greylock and Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom through his company Atomico. And it’s ambitious, with plans to launch in America and the U.K. this year.

But unlike most of the businesses that Rocket clones, Wrapp is barely out of the starting gates.

I spoke to Wrapp’s Winbladh today, and he told me that he was “surprised” by the rumors.

“At this point we don’t have much information about them — so it’s premature for us to say anything,” he said. “But it’s surprising that they would clone something as young as Wrapp.”

Wrapp already has sales people working in Germany and the U.K., both markets that Rocket appears to have lined up for Dropgifts, he said — and added that he believed the company was well prepared for a battle on German territory.

“I’m used to competitive situations, and there are lots of things with this product that make it hard to copy,” he said. “And because of the situation with clones in Germany, companies like Wrapp have to launch with strategies in place for the German market.”

So have the Samwer brothers crossed the line this time?

I’ve written recently that cloning and copying is a fact of life for most significant businesses, and heard from experts who say that it practice happens more often than we would like to admit, often in our own backyards. But while they argue that the best way of fighting that sort of copying is to go international earlier and execute better, what do you do if you are the underdog? Where do you draw the line?

Compared to the Samwers, who are currently pitching investors for a $1 billion growth fund to pump up their businesses, Wrapp is very small fry indeed. Rocket isn’t just hoping to build a copy of an existing major site and exploit a geographical market it has yet to enter, as it has done in the past with eBay and Groupon: it’s looking to elbow its way past that competitor before it even gets going.

Under the antitrust laws of many countries, using market dominance in one area to force out competitors in another is considered anti-competitive practice. By this token, the Samwers — who control one of Europe’s strongest Internet companies and have a massive war chest — are starting to tread a fine line.

Rocket did not respond to a request for comment. I suspect its employees may simply scoff and suggest that Wrapp for not growing fast enough, the question is how far and how fast can a very young startup be expected to expand.

“Of course I’m paranoid about it — I am an entrepreneur, which means I am paranoid about everything,” said Winbladh. “I won’t say I am not concerned, but they will actually help me to execute even better because it will help me galvanize the team.”

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Roku adds BBC iPlayer to bolster UK launch

Bobbie Johnson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:31:17 +0000

When Roku said it would start shipping its media streaming boxes to the U.K. for the first time last month, there was a significant omission from the lineup of services it was offering — the BBC’s iPlayer.

The iPlayer is the dominant force in Britain’s streaming TV landscape, available everywhere from the PC to cable to mobile, and responsible for nearly two billion viewings in 2011 alone.

No surprise, then, that today Roku is announcing that it’s launching an iPlayer channel for its British customers, allowing them to access the service’s library of popular television programs through their devices.

The moves adds a real backbone to the service — which already boasts a lineup including UFC, Fox News, and Netflix, which launched last month in the U.K and Ireland.

“This is among the first of many significant content partnerships for Roku in Europe and we look forward to making additional announcements in the coming weeks,” said the company’s European boss, Clive Hudson.

Rumors continue to circulate that will soon add Netflix competitor Lovefilm, but the deal with the BBC makes a big difference for anyone purchasing a Roku box, which are priced locally at £49.99 and £99.99 ($79 and $158).

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O2 sends 3,000 staff home to telecommute for a day

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:01:36 +0000

Remote work may be a reality for freelancers with no managers eager to look over their shoulders, at plenty of tech firms that are comfortable with remote collaboration tools and edgy, young companies, but it’s still a long way from wide acceptance at your standard, stodgy corporate headquarters, right?

Maybe not. Even big companies without a particular reputation for cutting-edge practices are slowly starting to realize that the real estate savings and employee morale benefits of remote work make it an attractive option. Take UK telecoms giant O2 for example, which closed its headquarters in Slough this week, sending all 3,000 staff home to work for an initiative designed to test the company’s ability to manage remote workers.

“We believe a cultural step-change is underway affecting staff and businesses, as work increasingly becomes something we do, rather than a place that we go,” O2 business manager Ben Dowd told UK tech news site, V3. “Today’s office-wide flexible working initiative is an opportunity for us to tangibly demonstrate the opportunity and potential available to British businesses today.”

Of course, O2 has a horse in this race as it sells a platform to support remote workers, so the firm is hardly the least likely to push the practice. Dowd acknowledges that this week’s experiment had obvious marketing benefits for the company. “By sharing experiences from across our business, from business divisions to operations, we hope to encourage more organizations to help their workforce become mobile,” he said.

But on the other hand Slough (home to Wernham Hogg Paper Company in the British version of The Office) is hardly Silicon Valley or SoHo either, so the large-scale experiment still offers some evidence that telecommuting is seeping out of trendy enclaves and into the business mainstream.

Image courtesy of Flickr user teamjb.

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How Google will court startups at London ‘Campus’

Bobbie Johnson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:49:40 +0000

Updated: When the news broke a few months ago that Google was taking up a lease on a seven-storey building in East London, it wasn’t exactly clear what the Internet giant wanted the space for. There were some vague mentions of a “creative space” and “hackathons” but in reality it all seemed a little vague.

After all, what does Google have to gain from opening up a place just a few miles from its swish base in West London? Sure, the new space is at the heart of the city’s much-hyped “Silicon Roundabout” area… but is that really enough?

Now more solid details are emerging about what the company plans to do with the 25,000 square foot space, though, I have to admit they’re intriguing.

According to the London Evening Standard, 4-5 Bonhill Street will open next month under the name of “Campus”, and essentially become a co-working space for London startups:

It will feature open plan office spaces where firms can rent desks, along with cafes, meeting rooms and event spaces. Google will also have an office to give advice to firms.
Plans for the building seen by the Evening Standard show space for over 200 desks, along with lockers to leave expensive equipment, table football tables and even tea making stations. Small wooden booths can be hired to work on sensitive projects, while upper floors feature open spaces and even a cinema area for presentations.

Google will keep plenty of desks in the building too, but what’s particularly intriguing is that other companies will be moving in as well. I understand that Seedcamp, the pan-European incubator, will be moving its operations entirely into the Campus building, and it seems that other groups including Springboard and TechHub will also be using the space.

That makes it a smart move for Google in more ways than one.

Most obviously it gives it increased visibility in the developer community: London’s a city where small distances can make a big difference, and while its main Victoria complex is only four miles from the new building, that is in fact a world away for many of the engineers who are clamoring to be near the heart of the British capital’s technology scene.

In the short term this gives it a boost at a time when rivals like Facebook, Twitter and others are starting to increase their British presence. And that means it could be useful in the longer term for hiring and even acquisitions.

In addition, Campus also allows Google to do a little public relations work, acting as a champion of the local technology industry and working alongside the British government: no small thing when the company has been under fire for paying just $1.9 million in U.K. taxes on more than $3 billion in revenues.

But while the deal appears to have been blessed by the authorities — though Google hasn’t yet answered my questions on what incentives it was offered to open Campus — the truth is that the government may be smiling about this deal through gritted teeth.

The authorities have made a concerted effort to woo major technology companies into the area — dubbed the “Tech City” development — in the hopes that big businesses can fill the vast space left behind when the Olympics finishes this summer.

But while the official Tech City group has been bending over backwards to get Google to sign on the dotted line and take over a significant office space in the Olympic Park, it seems that Campus may be the best it can manage. Instead of committing to East London as Downing Street had hoped, over the past few months Google has leased hundreds of thousands of square footage elsewhere in the city and continued negotiations to move its operation to an 8 million square foot space in North London — just outside the Tech City zone.

So while government officials may crow about bringing a major Silicon Valley name into their orbit, the reality is that Google’s only serving one master here: itself.

Update: Shortly after publication a Google spokesman responded to my question of whether there were any incentives given for opening Campus: there were none, he said, and Google is “just looking to help fuel the community and support their ideas and concepts.”

Photographs used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr users mbiddulph and osde-info

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