Whatever...

Johnson King: work hard, play harder…

Yes, it’s like the 80s never ended at JK, where we all regularly work 16 hours a day before partying like disco monsters at the capital’s finest nightclubs til dawn…

Errr, perhaps.

But this adage from the age of shoulder pads, leg warmers and hideous perms was certainly in evidence last Friday at the JK AGM.  Not for us the staid conventions of a sit down meal at some over-priced restaurant, oh no…

With Malibu & Coke to fuel us, and Hoddle & Waddle’s Diamond Lights to ‘spur’ us on, JK’s London, Paris and Munich offices came together in an epic clash of –

HUMAN TABLE FOOTBALL!

It was hard, it was bruising, and it didn’t half make you sweat.

These pictures tell their own graphic story…

 

Everything’s gone green?

By Juliana Wimmer

For years, environmental issues have been of great importance in Europe.  In particular, climate protection is increasingly at the centre of discussion in German politics.  Attention has focused on how different industries can reduce their emissions, such as the environmental pollution caused by the air traffic industry.

The IT industry is also being targeted to reduce CO2 emissions, adopt energy-saving measures, and recycle e-waste etc.  This is especially important considering that IT equipment is responsible for about 2% of the global CO2 emissions, which is actually equal to the pollution caused by air traffic.

However, it seems that the importance of environmental issues in the IT industry is viewed differently across Europe.  According to a survey by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Scandinavia and the Benelux are outriders in the field of green IT: for one third of the CTOs there, green IT is a key priority, whereas only 14% of their German and middle-European counterparts share their opinion.  A worrying 27% state that green IT plays no role at all.

But perhaps surprisingly, given the US reluctance to ratify the Kyoto protocol, it’s American IT companies that are taking the lead in environmental protection.  IBM for example has launched Project Big Green, which has allocated 1 billion dollars per year to develop more environmentally-friendly technologies.  The project includes new products and services to sharply reduce data centre energy consumption, with an aim to ‘green’ the world’s business and public technology infrastructures.

Other big companies such as HP, Dell or Sun are cooperating in an industrial consortium called the Green Grid to lower the overall consumption of power in data centres around the globe and to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve IT energy efficiency.

The question is, will such initiatives provide just guidelines or will they become coercive for all IT companies one day?  In Europe, the regulations (eg. WEEE, RoHS, REACH, EuP) already implemented put a certain pressure on providers and end-users by fixing limit values that must not be crossed.  However, I believe that further regulation is necessary to permanently reduce CO2 emissions and turn good intentions into action.

For instance, a recent survey by Forrester shows that 85% of the CIOs think that environmental protection is important, but only 25% believe that green IT should be an inherent part of the procurement process. Is it because they’re not familiar with green IT yet - or because they’re lacking the will to actually do something?

Ultimately, it all comes down to whether the implementation of environmentally friendly strategies will contribute to cost reduction.  As one CTO has put it: “We would produce green because it’s reasonable for the business, not because it’s green”.  Another was even more direct: “We don’t do this because we’re nice people, but because we want to make money”.

Going green for profit – now there’s an idea…

Read me! READ ME!!

By Flora Haslam

That we're drowning in email can hardly come as a surprise (and indeed might not have been such a big story this week were it not August), but the latest research from the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley made for some surprising reading in the recommendations it drew.

Its suggestion that email senders at work should set aside dedicated email reading times to catch up on their messages and never press other employees to respond to email is a slightly worrying prospect for the PR industry at least.  Meanwhile, the recommendation that workers should check their emails just a few times a day seems somewhat unrealistic, particularly given the research was conducted among academics and creatives. 

I daren't think how quickly a PR agency would go out of business if this was the case, or how many pitches the journalist that sent out a response source three hours ago would have already read by the time you got around to opening his email!

Yes, unlike a phone call, email allows you to make a decision about whether to respond straight away - assuming the sender hasn't slapped a read receipt on it and isn't circling with their hand on the phone receiver from the moment you click open - but I for one certainly haven't got the willpower to refrain from opening a message as soon as I see it. 

Whether the contents are good ("I'd be delighted to profile your client in the FT") or bad ("I'm afraid our CEO is now unable to make it to London for the day of briefings you've arranged tomorrow"), I still want to know as soon as possible.  And my suspicion is that anyone - in our profession at least -  able to leave emails unread for hours on end is simply not cut out for the job.

Granted it's vital to have a system that allows you to get work done without email taking over your life, but I'm not convinced that email reading slots are the way forward.  Maybe we just need to cut back on the fantasy football and cats that look like Hitler chat that regularly circulates the office.  Err, or is that just our office?!

I THINK I'M PARANOID

By Tom Kirkham

The UK's information commission has just issued a warning about the low level of public understanding regarding the sharing of personal details, and the implications this can have on our legal rights.  Richard Thomas, the information commissioner himself suggests that Britons have woken up in a 'surveillance society' without debating its emergence. 

Not so at JK Towers!

Many of my colleagues have been outraged, frustrated and more than a little concerned about their civil liberties for as long as I can remember.  Some of these conspiracy theorists :o) have even gone so far as to make their feelings on CCTV and data-sharing known to the wider world.

Now I don't necessarily disagree with these concerns - I don't like the idea of my personal details being passed around the houses, or companies like Google keeping track of the websites I visit.  Nor do I want to be spied upon as I head to my local supermarket, or have my groceries logged and recorded on a police database.  However, I guess I just tend to take the optimistic (or maybe naive) view that as I'm not a criminal, and I don't present a significant terrorist threat, I shouldn't have anything to fear.

Despite these sentiments though, a new study from Jupiter Research has alarmed me slightly, and got me thinking about how much we the general public might be contributing to the surveillance problem.  The study claims that a sizeable proportion of consumers in the US are now looking to get their hands on location-based tracking devices. While the parental uses for these devices aren't without merit, I was astonished to see that 26 percent of mobile owners in the 18-to-24 age bracket would pay extra for services that tracked friends' locations.

Is it not enough that we all have mobiles in the first place?  That we all have SMS and can immediately contact one another if we realise we're going to be 30 seconds late for dinner?  That we can access our email and our IM and our Facebook wherever we go?  That doubtless in the near future we'll be able to do all these things on the underground and in the air as well?

This may be a US survey, but when you consider how quickly we've come to embrace and now obsess about social-networking, and how the texting revolution took off in the first place within the UK, surely it's only a matter of time before market demand crosses the Atlantic - a real cause for paranoia!

We don't need this level of insight into each others' lives.  It's not condusive to improved social interaction, it won't make us any safer, and it won't stop us being late for dinner.  In fact it's far more likely to breed compulsive snooping and result in distrust, anxiety, damaged relationships and goodness knows what else. Most worryingly, if we get it, there's a real chance that we won't be able to do without it. 

Furthermore, once we endorse the idea of tracking and surveilling one another, it'll be a lot harder to object to our leaders doing the same thing.  At least the government will be doing it to try and catch criminals - we'll just be doing it because we're weird.

Guest blog - Everyone’s gone Facebook bonkers

As well as being a platform for JKers to have a good old rant about the world of technology and PR, 'Whatever...' will periodically be running guest blogs from friends who live beyond the (fire)walls of Johnson King Towers.

Here’s Graham Cluley, the man from Sophos, on the perils of squid and spanking online…

The papers were recently filled with stories of how Oxford graduates in a post-exam frenzy throw pieces of squid at each other in the street.  Bloody students you might justifiably think and wonder why those who went through the public school system don't use calimari.  But it turns out that university authorities are ploughing through students' Facebook entries, hunting for incriminating photographs of the fish-fuelled antics.  Students have been reprimanded - all because they were dumb enough to post the pictures on Facebook.

The Sun even ran a (rather tacky) story about a policeman who was daring enough to reveal he was gay in his Facebook entry.  According to The Sun this potentially put the policeman, who it was said could at some point, perhaps, guard the Royal Family, at risk from terrorists who may try to use the information he posted to blackmail him.  They even tried to outrage their readers by saying that the poor copper's Facebook page invited visitors to "bite, grope, lick or spank him".  Err - but just about everybody's Facebook page does that!

Then a recent dinner with my PR gang turned into an orgasm of Facebook talk.  The chattering classes (Facebook, remember, is for the educated and middle classes - not for the chavs on MySpace) are obsessed with the etiquette of who you become friends with, what graffiti you've left on so-and-so's wall and have you thrown a sheep yet with SuperPoke.  With people fatigued by yet another dull roll call of wannabes on Big Brother, the talk has turned to Facebook instead.

And the technology journalists are up on Facebook too.  They've created groups and networks where they hang out, talk about the most outrageous media trips they've ever been taken on, and ask each other for help writing stories.  But when you speak to them about it they all shuffle their feet, look embarrassed and say "they're only there for research".  Ahem.

And then it happened to me.  I did my first interview on Facebook.  Not about Facebook, I was interviewed by a journalist via Facebook.  He didn't email me, he didn't phone me, he didn't contact my PR agency.... he 'poked' me and asked me some questions about a computer security story.  Watch out, if you're a spokesperson for an internet company, it could happen to you too... 

Is this the future?  Should I be permanently logged into Facebook just to see if a journo is trying to get in touch with me?  Or will we all be obsessed with something else in six months time?