billso.com

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s an interesting idea: the University of North Texas is using Facebook to post lists of lost-and-found items. Facebook users at the university can join a group and see these lists.

UNT has partnered with a for-profit service called Trace.com, which in turn is part of another web service called MyThings.

I’m more familiar with another service called StuffBak, which sells adhesive labels imprinted with serial numbers. Users apply a sticker to an item, and then complete a registration form on the company’s web site. I wrote a brief article back on 20 September 2006 about the service.

An online inventory

MyThings has a broader set of features, including document archiving for receipts and invoices, as well as a database of manuals and documentation for products. It makes sense for universities to offer product registration and recovery services to students, who often bring high-value electronic devices to campus each day.

Linking the service to a popular social network may spur students to try an online registration and inventory service. Over time, campus police departments can use these services as another tool to manage and reduce theft on campus. Theft is one item that US universities must report to the US Deaprtment of Education each year, as required of the Clery Act and discussed at Security on Campus.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on allegations that US Customs agents have inspected and confiscated laptop computers, iPods, and mobile phones during passenger inspections. Passengers claim they were asked to provide passwords and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One person claims their laptop has been held for an over a year.

According to this article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a civil lawsuit against the Federal Government, based on 20 complaints from Northern California residents. The goal is disclosure of the US government’s boder search policies. One sourse of concern is an apparent pattern of racial profiling, in which agents targeted Asian and Muslim passengers.

The US Department of Justice asserts that electronic equipment falls into the same category as a briefcase, and may be searched and confiscated for inspection.

However, the scenarios described in this article sound more like coercion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many corporate travelers have confidential or private information on their computers and phones. The Post article cites a Canadian law firm that sends corporate travelers headed to the United States with “empty hard drives”. There’s an operating system and a web browser on the laptop, of course, but employees access their email and documents through a secure Internet connection such as a virtual private network (VPN). This helps keep confidential data off the drive, as the law firm fears discovery by search more than a hacked Internet connection.

BoingBoing and the Consumerist each had articles about the Post report, although both blogs misidentified US Customs as the TSA.

Sadly, the activities alleged in this lawsuit do not surprise me. BusinessWeek recently reported on Indian IT outsourcing firms that have systematically underpaid IT workers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These workers make tempting targets, as their outsourcing companies can send the workers back home for any reason. By the time some workers determined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client companies will step in to help these guest workers.

From VNUnet.com and UPI: Earlier today two undersea cables that carried Internet traffic to the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent was damaged. The outage is most noticeable in India, Pakistan, Kuwait and Dubai. Internet traffic has mostly be rerouted to slower cables, and the damaged cables may not be repaired for another week.

No word yet on how this has affected outsourced operations in India. A CNN report claims that Dubai’s financial sector, television stations and telephone services have been affected by the outage. CNN also quotes sources who state that the damage was caused by a ship’s anchor.

Heather Paulson of revenews.com posted a comment that software development firms and their clients are panicking a bit over the situation.

LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!

BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.

That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and  more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.

PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.

In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.

On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.

Business Week’s Steve Rosenbush filed a story today about the IT services industry. This includes a wide range of services, from colocation to outsourced services.

The enterprise sector of this industry is dominated by large consulting services firms, including units of EDS, IBM and CSC. It seems that private investors are interested in buying out some of these major publicly-held IT services companies soon. There are over 1000 firms that might be candidates for acquisition, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

This is the kind of acquisition that the Carlyle Group made when they purchased Hawaiian Telcom from Verizon. Carlyle also owns One Wilshire, which I discussed on February 22.

Sometimes the private owners will flip the company for a profit after a few years. In other cases, the company is split into pieces and sold at a profit. In both cases, layoffs, reorganization, and change are part of the agenda.

It remains to be seen if HawTel can generate enough revenue to satisfy its new owners. The Business Week article mentions that private investors tend to use a 20% internal rate of return (IRR) as one benchmark of performance, based upon projections of future earnings. A 2006 quarterly loss figure of US$44 million, compared to the US$1.6 billion purchase price, didn’t help matters.

HawTel’s eroding landline business needs help. I discussed on November 16 how HawTel has had to switch consultants in its systems integration project. Last May, it became apparent that HawTel was sending bills out late, which led to HawTel’s changing plans.

In December 2005, Stewart Yerton of the Star-Bulletin wrote about the company’s “Save the Line” campaign to keep current its landline customers.

The company’s recent delay of its IPTV rollout to 2008 doesn’t help matters. IPTV would let HawTel compete against Time Warner Cable for pay television subscribers, by sending television signals through HawTel’s landline network.