Shazam Takes Another $32 Million Funding For TV Tagging | paidContent:UK.
Interesting development for Shazam, whose CEO Andrew Fisher I profiled for New Media Age, with a follow up story in the Sunday Times. Warning: both links are to subscription services.
In a co-ordinated, peaceful action 120 Citizens UK activists infiltrated the huge Earls Court Tesco on Monday evening to protest against poverty wages being paid to the company's thousands of outsourced cleaning staff.
Singing Beatles songs with adjusted satirical lyrics, protesters carrying dusters and mops took over a floor of the giant Tesco and performed a dance to the delight of shoppers and the consternation of security guards.
You can hear a snippet of the singing here:
The Evening Standard covered the story here and the Telegraph covered an earlier Easter-themed action here.
Since its launch in 2001 the Living Wage Campaign has helped put £70 million in the pockets of London's low-income families and helped improve their quality of life. Whilst the campaign has achieved great success in the higher education, banking and legal sectors, retail has so far proven difficult.
But earlier this year Lush, the high-street bath products store, was the first retailer to adopt the London Living Wage (now set at £8.30 an hour by the Greater London Authority's low pay unit). Citizens UK, the community organising charity running the campaign, is in active talks with major retailers such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, as well as major players in the hotel sector such as Hilton.
Campaigning pressure is beginning to have an affect on Tesco, which recently announced a 2.5% pay increase for all its 230,000 directly-employed staff, taking basic hourly wages to around £7. now campaigners want the supermarket chain to turn its attention to indirectly employed staff, such as cleaners and security guards.
Image via CrunchBase
Just testing out a new browser plug-in assistant for bloggers called Zemanta. It adds links, photos and relevant articles to enrich your posts.
Once you've downloaded the software it integrates into most major blogging platforms and pops up as a sidebar when editing/writing your post. You can choose which images and related articles to add, and share your Twitter and Facebook social networks with it.
But how safe is it? Opening your private networks to third party plug-ins isn't without risk. More research needed. But on the face of it Zemanta seems clever and worth a closer look.
Last week I was transported to Monaco - alas only in spirit - and the glamorous world of millionaire playboys, motor racing and astonishingly expensive classic cars.
A group of car enthusiast businessmen have set up a fund (IGA Automobile) specifically investing in classic and iconic cars, some of which can sell for as much as $30 million these days (as I reported in the Sunday Times, InGear, 9/1/2011). Tiny production numbers coupled with increasingly wealthy collectors are pushing prices sky high.
But can it last?
Fund founders Grant Tromans, Ray Bellm, and Nick Lancaster certainly hope so and think they could raise as much as $150m from wealthy petrolheads keen to turn their passion into profit. One such celeb petrolhead is Pink Floyd's Nick Mason who races his own Ferrari 250 GTO (pictured above), one of which sold last year for $26 million.
If I had a spare $500,000 lying around - the minimum investment - I'd be tempted myself. It's certainly more fun and less contentious than investing in arms dealers, tobacco companies and rapacious miners.
Identity fraud is on the rise largely because we're far too cavalier with our personal details. We still don't see them as assets to be protected.
In the sharing internet era we reveal far too much about ourselves on social networking sites without tightening our privacy settings, and leave our post, chequebooks and payment cards within easy reach of neighbours, tenants and even friends and family.
In my Moneywise investigation into ID fraud I tell the disturbing stories of people who've been ripped off, reveal the latest techniques criminals are adopting, and give you ten tips on how to protect yourself.
In my Moneywise investigation into the increasing cost of overdrafts I reveal the latest tricks banks are employing to recoup lost profits, including repackaging unpopular and highly-criticised 'unauthorised' overdrafts as something else entirely, whilst increasing borrowing rates despite bank base rates remaining at an historic low of 0.5%.
And they're up to their usual tricks of making account terms and conditions as complex as possible to prevent comparison on a like-for-like basis. No wonder hardly any us bother to switch accounts even when we know we're being fleeced.
But let's not forget: "We're all in this together!" Big bonus anyone?
Hang on a minute. I'm confused. Didn't I interview this guy back in February when he was working for Directgov? I surely did...and here's the link to prove it.
But now Mike Hoban, bored with crunching Government websites (and let's face it, who can blame him?) has popped up as chief marketing offcer for Confused.com. Does that mean more head-banging price comparison site ads featuring annoying tenors, cutesy meerkats, and disruptive stand-up comedians? Not on your nelly, promises Hoban, thankfully. Instead, Confused.com is eschewing the 'irritate the punters into brand recognition' line in favour of a subtler feel-good lovey-dovey approach that emphasises Confused.com's consumer champion image. Or something like that.
Well, let's just hope it works otherwise I fear I'll be interviewing Mr. Hoban again in another six months.
My Moneywise investigation into payday loans and other forms of short term credit - Beware offers of easy credit (5/11/2010) - really opened my eyes to the indifference of regulators, policy makers and even consumer watchdogs to this pernicious type of lending, with its exorbitant interest rates and bully-boy scare tactics for defaulters. Targeted at people already in financial difficulty, short term credit, so easily available now online, ensnares the vulnerable and plunges them into a vicious cycle of debt. Get into trouble with the repayments and all hell breaks loose: debt collection agencies, threatening letters and impaired credit references. It's a sorry state of affairs.
Attempts by campaigning groups, such as London Citizens and Compass, to get a cap put on credit interest rates have so far failed to convince law makers to interfere in what they see as the free operation of a competitive market. The problem is, this isn't a competitive market. Desperate people don't tend to shop around and even if they do, the number of payday loan operators is limited and APRs consistently enormous.
It's clear to me that the Office of Fair Trading should not be regulating this sector at all. It seems to grant credit licences willy-nilly, and even allows licence-holders to continue trading when under investigation following consumer complaints. The OFT has always been reactive, not proactive, and simply doesn't have the resources or the inclination to police this sector effectively. The Financial Services Authority is a much more logical body. But what's going to happen to that under this new coalition government?
More info on the Compass campaign: End Legal Loan Sharking here.
It's bad enough to be scammed once; twice is a tragedy. Yet thousands of people who've lost investments and savings through notorious 'boiler room' scams are now being conned again by bogus firms claiming they can get some money back for victims. These callous fraudsters are often the same team as the original fraudsters, or opportunists who've simply bought the contact list of victims.
The sad truth is that many fraud victims are so desperate to recover some of their losses that they'll believe almost anything from people offering to 'help'. In this case, the proverb 'once bitten, twice shy' doesn't seem to apply.
'Recovery room' fraud, as this follow-up version of boiler-room fraud is called, is on the rise as criminals look for new ways to rip people off in the recession. They'll usually pose as solicitors claiming they can get compensation from some spurious European fund, or stockbrokers offering to sort things out for an up-front fee. They often begin in a friendly manner but can soon become aggressive to pressure victims into parting with their cash.
For more on this particular scam and how to protect yourself, read my Moneywise investigation: ''Been scammed before? Don't let it happen again' .
