I am integrating facebook publishing to my FB Page. This is a lot of technical work, and so this posts content is minimal… this is just a test.

Update: I was yet again unsuccessful in integrating FB to recieve posts from this blog.

Update [May 12, 2012]: I am trying this again…

Yesterday I started producing requested ‘Country of Origin’ (CO) documents for customers. The chain of responsibility for NAFTA compliance starts with the first producer and continues until the end product is created. Each company that manufactures a part is responsible for keeping track of the origins of the components or material that go into making the part, and they in turn are expected to pass their knowledge onto their customer who will presumably use the part to complete a car, refrigerator, or other. At this time I am focusing on completing the requirements for the customers, and in doing so am gaining an understanding of those requirements in order to request similar data from the companies suppliers.

The requirements for a companies compliance to NAFTA are difficult to achieve, mostly because they are dependent on the records of their suppliers, and the capabilities of those suppliers to collect and contribute the necessary information to their customers. It is a significant issue within the system, while the responsibility lies on the manufacturer the workload is almost entirely held by the suppliers. Suppliers are very reluctant to dedicate resources to a project that does not directly contribute to their sales. This is mostly due to the lack of communication and understanding of the ramifications of ineffective records in the case of an audit.

Proof of compliance to NAFTA regulation is the responsibility of the exporter. The importance of NAFTA compliance is apparent in the heavy implication of invalidation through audit from any of the countries. Those ramifications include fines, and the possibility of retroactive tariffs with automatic compounded interest. Audits can be conducted by any, or all customs agencies of the NAFTA countries. While the negative aspects of these ramifications are dire, the difficulty of remaining compliant only exasperates the issue.

The old system used by the company I am interning with consists of a letter sent to the suppliers and a blank CO form. It is easy to assume that, compared to the web based system used by the end producers, the letters are not very effective at producing the required documentation. One of those systems, the one I am currently using to satisfy CO requests of the customer, is administrated by a third party and has some serious faults. It is not user friendly and is implemented in a way that requires a lot of time on behalf of the supplier, which in turn causes the supplier to defer completion of the required documents putting their customer (my company) at risk for compliance issues.

The pro’s to the third party system is that the stress of compliance, record keeping and review is handled outside of the company. The companies human resources can be directed to more productive issues. The down side is that those third party compliance systems I have seen are not only costly, but still have the same difficulty as the letters at achieving their results. They backlog of work I have been working to alleviate these past couple of days includes requests that date back almost two years.

Throughout my internship I plan to, not only compare the costs of those two systems but also identify the ability of my company to deploy their own system to request that compliance data from their suppliers.

This past summer I approached a librarian on the best available source, bibliography, citation, and reference management software available. I had this crazy idea of having all of my sources in one place, neatly ordered, and available on all of my devices. This couldn’t be a new demand, surely any student who wants too be successful has a system to keep their sources in order. She responded with a quick push of the universities proprietary citation management system, RefWorks. I had looked at this, and yes it was a web app so it was available on each of my computers (I only have two, and my phone) but it only collected citation materials. Worse, it does offer an export option, but after I had finished my degree I would be forced to pay $100/year to access that information. I don’t know about you, but I like to own my personal work and thinking of something more along the lines of a database that could store all of those random PDFs of journal articles I read so I don’t actually have to pay to look up those articles again.

Enter Zotero

I continued to ask about posible resources to manage sources and perhaps automatically create a bibliography from them. I went through a list of possible tools and finally came upon Zotero. The name was given to me by a history and journalism professor along with a few others.

Zotero integrates the best of the web, allowing you to find, and save news and journal articles on your system to read, or cite latter. It integrates into Firefox and can create and save bibliographical sources from many websites including news sites, online journals, books and more. It has quickly been integrated to be used on sites, like this one, to both cite sources and to be cited. There is also a budding community of research professionals (and students) who share those articles and books the are using.

The selling factor of Zotero is it’s open source status, it’s free and it let’s me keep my information in order, and with me. There is nothing more frustrating than the notion of loosing work because you can’t pay for a service. Zotero has saved my academic research and allows me to perpetually expand on it without having to worry about reoccurring costs.

Facebook’s recent acquisition of Instagram for $1Billion dollars, or 1% of FB’s IPO. Facebook is obviously not buying users, Instagram only has ~30M compaierd to FB which has almost a Billion users. Of those few IG users its estimated that at least half are already on FB. So what’s so great about this little iPhone app that makes people love to share their memories each day? Is it really worth $1B to Facebook cannot be an accounting error, but if it is, then why?!

One reason may be all of those pictures that people have let Instagram hold onto and share. I loosely estimate that Instagram’s users have shared roughly 300 photos each in the past year and a half. That puts around 90 Million photos on Instagram’s servers, which will soon be Facebook’s servers. On a stock photo site each of those pictures would have sold for about $.10 a piece which is about what my estimate for what Facebook will pay for them. That is a great deal considering hundreds of thousands of pictures are And while they still technically ‘belong’ to the user while they are on Facebook’s servers Facebook can rent them out. Instagram as a company has claimed no such power. The difference between how the two companies approach their users photos is evident in their terms of service.

In my previous post I contrasted Instagram’s current Terms of Service with that of Facebook. This was to explain why I didn’t want my photos on Facebook, and why I had until recently used Instagram to share photos. The main difference is Instagram’s claim to a limited license of those photo compared to Facebook’s transferable license. Or, Facebook can, and wants to, let anyone use your photos. They may also presumably charge those people access to use your photos.

No big deal since none of these people actually considered making any money from their photos. It’s also more than likely that Facebook will continue making those photos available for free to anyone inside it’s network. So if your a small business looking for a picture to add to an Facebook advertisement your creating you don’t have to look much further than instagram for that ideal photo which will probably be offered for free as long as you keep those adds on Facebook. The aquisition of all of these photos, as a new way to keep people comming back to facebook is the most probable cause for the purchase of instagram.

There is something else, another possible use for the service Instagram provides. This one with more of a sinister angle to it, for those of you who love conspiracy theories. Instagram, whether intentionally or incidentally (I don’t know), has managed in the past two years to train an army of 30M amateur photographers. Those photographers own their own equipment, they perform their own editing, and they snap pictures at command. Instagram has successfully social engineered a rabble of smartphone wielding, owl eyed, consumers into becoming potential photographers with big payout possibilities for Facebook.

There are three important aspects of Instagram’s photo sharing that create an ideal place to find pictures. First, armature photographers are conditioned into taking quality pictures through the ‘like’ process of peer review. That means people are always adding the best possible photo. Second; users are prompted to use hashtags (the more the better) to identify the subject of their photos. This creates an easily searchable database of photos. Third; Instagram, and other companies have been known to guide the subject of the photos through contests.

Under Facebook’s terms of use a company seeking a large amount of photos for an advertisement campaign needs to look no further than Facebook. Hypothetically speaking if Bottling company X wanted to get a lot of pictures of people drinking their product they no longer have to hire professional photographers and models to get those photos, they only need to ask FaceGram to run a contest with a hastag like #drinkproductX. In one weekend they would have thousands of pictures to beef up their campaign, so long as those pictures are only used on Facebook advertisement (in accordance with FB ToS) which brings in big money for FaceGram. They can charge for putting on the contest and for distributing the adds.

One of the biggest drawbacks with advertising on the Internet is that consumers condition themselves to ignore adds. If you can have a different photo for each impression of your advert then you have a much higher chance for a successful click. By switching the photos the advertisement has a chance to avoid the consumers conditioning, giving it a renewed chance to sell each time it appears in a browser. The disconnect for this type of advertisement has been the cost of creating those photos. If FaceGram plays out this recent acquisition with the strategy outlined they have a chance to increase the success rates of advertisements on their site, which in turn increases their total revenue.

Silly Kids, The following app can be found in Apple’s app store under the Entertainment category. It’s a prime example of borderline theft through social engineering.

It’s extensive description and instructions continue, and as I read I’m thinking: there is no way an app from the official app store can do these things…

My assumptions are proved as I find the disclaimer paragraph at the bottom of the description:

Of course I was curious about the app, not because of what it claimed to do, but because it was a top seller and had a total of 1star. I was looking forward to the reviews:

I’m glad I don’t have kids, but if I did I would make sure they had a serious scarcity of money to spend on things like apps. A dollar will be a cheep price for the lesson they learned from buying this app.

The app itself has been out for about a week and probably took less than that to make. It has over 700 reviews, so I’m guessing this app maker just snagged over a grand with out much other than a deceitful couple of paragraphs. Small change when you look at the cost to these individuals. I wonder how much money is made off of this type of con? Does Apple really care? Of course not, they’re pulling 40% of the profit from these rackets.