Actics Blog

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More and more people are arguing that 2008 will be remembered as the year in which the business community really discovered sustainability. We read about these news every day, Apple begins to tackle its bad sustainability record, even WalMart pronounces sustainability to be a major concern.

A recent paper sponsored by BT and Sisco: ‘A new mindset for corporate sustainability’ (and available here) points at three major aspects of this shift in business mindsets.

* Boardroom commitment to sustainability helps build a framework for robust corporate governance.

* Investors are becoming increasingly receptive to sustainability.

* Sustainability offers a proven and legitimate framework for exploiting new avenues for innovation.

(via EthicalCorporation)

What will come out of this? Will the US recession trigger a new New Deal organized around sustainability and Green Capitalism? Will this be a way for the west to maintain its position vis-a-vis energy-intensive China? It’s a possibility.

Hurrah- Actics is exploding in China! According to Google Analytics, we’re attracting tens of thousands of visitors a month from all corners of the People’s Republic and are rapidly moving towards six-digit figures. Great news, isn’t it?

Well, not exactly. As our in-house Sherlock Holmes Henrik realized, something didn’t make sense. How could it be that Actics had so much Chinese traffic but not a single Chinese user? When you have tens of thousands of visitors you would expect at least one of them to sign up, wouldn’t you? It seemed like an insoluble mystery, but Henrik put on his deerstalker, had a quick last puff of opium, and then went out and discovered the answer: 

Actics has been copied! A Chinese site by the name of exnb has stolen our design- and as a result their traffic is now popping up in our Google Analytics reports.

Maybe we should be upset about such blatant theft. But then again: we’re not exactly alone. As I discovered in an article in the Economist, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube all have hordes of Chinese copycats. And on a funnier note, even Harry Potter hasn’t been spared. If you want to find out more about such contemporary classics as:

• ‘Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl’
• ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince’
• And the best one of all: ‘Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’

then check out this hilarious piece in the NY Times.

Next move form the evil empire. Microsoft has patented extensions software that will monitor the physical state and levels of concentration of employees, through wireless sensors connected to their PCs, laptops and even mobile phones. (As if Vista wasn’t enough…)Measuring heartbeats, body temperature, movements, blood pressure and facial expressions, employers can get  continuous info on the physical state and affective attitudes of their employees, even when they’re out of the office. Getting angry at the computer or even not showing the appropriate expression of enthusiasm while reading the company values, or seeing the logo will now be noticed and recorded. Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property, Horacio Gutierrez writes off the Orweillian potential of this project by claiming that its uses lie in alerting medical personnel to impending heart-attacks. ‘Privacy is an important priority for Microsoft’ he concludes. Yeah, and war is peace too .

here for full story

What do you do when you’re sitting around in Dubai and have a couple of minutes to spare? Exactly- you log in to Actics!

That’s what our intrepid reporter Neils Peter from experience design lab did. Or rather: he tried to, but then he got hit by the following message:

That’s right: Actics has been banned in the United Arab Emirates!

But why? What is it about us that is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates”? Eager to find some answers, I checked out the OpenNet Initiative, which is a great site on internet filtering and surveillance, and had a look at their country profile of the UAE.

As it turns out, the UAE are extremely active on the internet filtering front. To give a few examples: they block all sites in the top-level domain “.il” (no prizes for guessing what country that belongs to). They pervasively filter pornography, gambling, and sites promoting alcohol and drug use. And they also selectively filter sites that “express alternative political or religious views”. So is that what they found so objectionable about Actics: the fact that we “facilitate ideas” that are potentially “in breach of the general order”?

Whatever the case, the whole affair certainly adds a nice dose of glamour to Actics. YouTube is blocked in Iran and the BBC in Myanmar- and now we have made it into the big league, too! I’m tempted to say that it calls for a drink- but since that might get us banned by another 7 countries I should probably keep quiet.