Friday, December 25, 2009

HP: Quando uma questão de Hardware se torna numa questão de raça

Um bom exemplo do potencial dos novos media para transformar um evento local, numa questão mundial e como podem prejudicar a imagem de uma empresa. Basta um video no youtube feito por dois colegas de trabalho que prova que "a HP é racista", com base numa falha técnica. Neste caso, trata-se de uma situação ligeira, que revela, no entanto uma relevante falha num equipamento da empresa, e a ligeireza do vídeo também ajuda à sua massificação.


Fonte: TVNet
Vídeo que acusa a HP de racismo visto por um milhão


Este software deveria reconhecer movimentos dos rostos, mas não funciona com negros.

Um vídeo no Youtube que acusa a HP de ser racista já foi visto por mais de um milhão de pessoas.

Em causa está um software de reconhecimento facial para computadores portáteis que não reconhece rostos negros.

O vídeo de 2:16min narra o problema do software fazendo testes com num negro e com um branco para demonstrar o erro.

Um porta-voz da empresa disse à BBC que "a HP já foi informada de um problema potencial com o software de reconhecimento facial, inclusive em alguns dos seus sistemas, que parece ocorrer quando a iluminação na parte da frente é insuficiente."

"Nós levamos isso a sério e estamos a examinar o problema junto dos nossos parceiros."

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

China cria "Lista Branca" de Sites de Internet

Porque as listas negras são coisa da censura ou porque estão demasiado na moda... Pequim decidiu inovar e criar uma "Lista Branca" dos Sites que autoriza os seus cidadãos a ler (conceda-se a atitude democrática de não os obrigar a ler). Este "Menu da Net" justifica-se, segundo as autoridades, com o combate à pornografia... uma causa nobre, até porque, pode alguma alma menos séria lembrar-se de dizer, num país com tal taxa de natalidade é bom não lhes dar mais ideias...

Mas este é um assunto demasiado sério que coloca o espaço virtual chinês cada vez mais isolado, o que exige novas estratégias de acesso
por parte dos outros países à informação disponível e indisponível na Net chinesa.


No Tek.pt
Registo obrigatório para
aparecer na Internet chinesa


A China continua a apertar o controlo sobre a utilização da Internet. As novas regras incluem a criação de uma lista de sites cuja utilização é "aprovada" pelas autoridades do país, onde deverão ser inscritos os endereços que querem continuar a estar acessíveis aos internautas chineses.


Trata-se de uma espécie de "lista branca" (por oposição à expressão "lista negra") e foi apresentada esta semana num site governamental, juntamente com outras medidas a implementar em três fases, reporta hoje a agência Reuters em Pequim (China).

O Ministério da Indústria e Tecnologia da Informação ordenou aos serviços que fazem a gestão dos domínios e aos fornecedores de Internet que "apertassem o controlo" sobre os registos dos endereços das páginas Web.

Os sites que não se encontrem na lista de "autorizados" não deverão ser "transferidos ou mostrados", especificam os responsáveis.

A razão apresentada para as novas medidas é aquela a que o país já nos habituou: a luta anti-pornografia.

Mas a verdade é que o sistema, não só dá às autoridades a possibilidade de escolherem "à la carte" os sites a que os internautas nacionais terão acesso, como bloqueará automaticamente milhões de páginas absolutamente inócuas - atendendo ao propósito referido.

A norma não especifica se a nova regra se aplica também a sites internacionais, mas os meios de comunicação locais temem que estes possam ser também bloqueados por não terem sido registados.

A nova estratégia representa uma inversão da técnica de controlo utilizada à data no país, que usava uma "lista negra" para colocar todos os sites com conteúdos potencialmente ofensivos, logo que eram detectados.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Os melhores CEO's do mundo

A Harvard Business Review (HBR) elegeu Steve Jobs como o melhor CEO do mundo, depois de o presidente da Apple ter sido recentemente considerado o melhor gestor da década pela Forbes.

Para elaborar o 'ranking', a HBR usou como principais critérios a liderança que estes executivos exercem ou exerceram e os resultados financeiros alcançados. No caso de Jobs, teve peso a ascensão do valor de mercado da Apple para 150 mil milhões de dólares.

A HBR só inclui na lista gestores que tenham assumido o cargo em data não anterior a Janeiro de 1995 e não posterior a Dezembro de 2007. Nãp se estranhe por isso a ausencia de Warren Buffet ou Bill Gates, que assumiram os seus postos antes de 1995.

Os dez primeiros do ranking:

01. Steve Jobs (Apple)
02. Yun Jong-Yong (Samsung)
03. Alexei Miller (Gazprom)
04. John Chambers (Cisco)
05. Mukesh D. Ambani (Reliance)
06. John C. Martin (Gilead Sciences)
07. Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
08. Margaret Whitman (eBay)
09. Eric Schmidt (Google)
10. Hugh Grant (Monsanto)

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Jogos de Influência e Guerras de Informação, na TDSNews


Tendência


Jogos de Influência

e Guerras de Informação

Estados e empresas, desde sempre, procuram influenciar o tabuleiro geopolítico e geoeconómico socorrendo-se sobretudo daquela que hoje assume o carácter de principal arma: a informação, há muito no lugar do capital e da energia como principal matéria-prima. Este facto gera, respectivamente, inúmeras oportunidades e variadas ameaças, para quem a saiba dominar ou para quem dela não faça o melhor uso.

Começam a ser mais alvo de atenção os sinais de estratégias de influência que têm por base verdadeiras acções de guerra da informação e que englobam processos de intoxicação, desinformação, manipulação e de desestabilização para fazer impor desígnios estratégicos, de Estados e/ou empresas.

Um bom exemplo do poder da informação: a 25 de Junho, as acções do quarto maior grupo farmacêutico mundial, o Sanofi-Aventis, caíram após a publicação de uma nota de um analista financeiro da UBS, em Londres, que citava estudos que demonstravam o aumento do risco de cancro em pacientes que tomavam a insulina Lantus, um medicamento líder mundial.

O título caiu de 12,7 por cento e tudo com base num rumor iniciado por um diabetologista que trabalhava num produto concorrente, nos Laboratórios Eli Lilly e Amylin, dos EUA. O grupo francês deu uma resposta imediata, recorrendo a um painel de peritos independentes que concluíram os limites e as contradições de quatro novos estudos publicados, entretanto, na revista “Diabetologia”. Mas o mal, que podia ter tido uma dimensão muito maior, ficou na mesma feito, com graves prejuízos para empresa alvo da agressão informacional.

Uma Guerra de Informação... Nuclear!

Outro bom exemplo de guerra de informação é o caso relatado, em Outubro, pelo jornal francês Libération sobre o transporte de resíduos radioactivos franceses para a Sibéria. Segundo o diário, a Areva transporta resíduos radioactivos da eléctrica EDF para o complexo siberiano Tomsk-7m, gerido pela empresa russa Temex. As duas empresas francesas asseguram que não são resíduos, mas apenas “matéria radioactiva” reciclável, uma versão rejeitada por ecologistas e especialistas.

Ora, este é apenas um pequeno episódio de um confronto informacional e mediático entre as duas partes da contenda, marcado por inúmeros episódios deste género. Em traços gerais, a estratégia das duas partes é sempre igual. Os industriais falam em calúnias, dizem respeitar todas as normas, que adoptam metodologias rigorosas e comprovadas e ameaçam processar os meios de comunicação e pessoas que dizem tais mentiras; enquanto do lado dos ambientalistas há acusações de “gestão escandalosa de resíduos” em locais que o Comissariado de Energia Atómica qualifica como “referência nacional”, o que leva a que acusem também as autoridades de má fiscalização ou mesmo cumplicidade com práticas ilegais.

Esta cortina de (des)informação, embrulhada em inúmeras explicações e dados técnicos, nada ajuda à decisão do público e mesmo dos políticos, confrontados em permanência com argumentos díspares sobre matérias demasiado complexas. Os militantes anti-nuclear multiplicam-se em ataques informacionais na imprensa, na Internet ou em manifestações, mas não conseguem que os industriais se expliquem... pois as calúnias não se explicam.

Guerra pelo controlo do futuro mercado automóvel...

Ainda outro bom exemplo dos jogos de influência, note-se como a recente anulação da decisão de venda da Opel/Vauxhall por parte da General Motors provocou reacções diversas nos vários interessados no negócio. A GM preparava-se para entregar a empresa à fabricante de peças de automóveis austro-canadiana Magna e ao banco russo Sberbank.

Os britânicos ficaram satisfeitíssimos com esta anulação, pois o êxito da negociação significava o fim das fábricas britânicas, e o grupo Magna parece estar de acordo. Em contrapartida, os alemães reclamam, pois o acordo era do seu agrado, os russos mostram-se desagradavelmente surpreendidos e as autoridades europeias aguardam novos desenvolvimentos. Quanto à GM afirma ter “rasgado” o acordo, dadas as alterações de perspectivas quanto à “melhoria” do contexto económico na Europa, dada a melhor “saúde financeira” e “a importância da Opel/Vauxhall” para a sua estratégia internacional.

A mudança de decisão dos americanos provocou um claro incómodo a Berlim e Moscovo. O governo alemão fez notar o “espanto” e a “cólera” e a preocupação do executivo de Merkel é agora recuperar os 1,5 mil milhões de euros cedidos pelo governo para manter a Opel à tona de água durante as negociações. Da parte de Putin a reacção foi igualmente firme, já que apoiava os planos do consórcio Magna/Sberbank para investir no desenvolvimento da indústria automobilística russa. Agora, as portas estão menos abertas e o aviso foi já dado pelo porta-voz do primeiro-ministro russo: “há outras grandes empresas automobilísticas a concorrer com a Opel no mercado russo, pelo que o optimismo exagerado da GM, no que respeita ao melhoramento da conjuntura, neste contexto, pode ser infundado”.

Se é verdade que o acordo com a Magna evitaria despedimentos em massa na Alemanha, o mesmo não sucederia na Polónia, Espanha, Bélgica e Reino Unido, que agora respiram de alívio e aguardam com esperança novidades desta guerra pelo controlo do futuro mercado automóvel.

Guerra de informação ao serviço dos sindicatos

E também os sindicatos aderiram já às estratégias de guerra de informação, características, entre outras associações, das ONG. A procura de um debate de ideias foi substituída por múltiplos combates de informação, com mensagens bem dirigidas a empresas ou responsáveis políticos, capazes de fazer passar uma visão limitada, mas mobilizadora, que provoca danos nos alvos, obrigados a defenderem-se.

Um exemplo recente em França, que se destaca pela seriedade e implicações, é o caso dos 32 suicídios de funcionários da France Telecom. Para os sindicatos, a justificação é simples: a culpa é da pressão exercida pela empresa sobre os trabalhadores. Uma visão obviamente redutora, mas, da perspectiva dos sindicatos, eficaz.

A France Telecom é a má da fita, ainda que estatísticas revelem que os 32 suicídios numa empresa com a dimensão da France Telecom estão abaixo da média nacional. Mas isto a France Telecom não soube explicar e, mesmo que o fizesse, o mal estava já feito pela eficácia da mensagem dos sindicatos, clara, curta, concisa e vaga o suficiente para não poder ser liminarmente rejeitada: as pressões da empresa favoreceram os suicídios, até porque há uma ou outra carta onde as mesmas são referidas como causas.

Sem esquecer a perda maior (a vida das 32 pessoas que se suicidaram), a reputação da empresa saiu muitíssimo afectada de toda esta situação e, face às pressões informacionais, anunciou um investimento de mil milhões de euros para evitar mais suicídios (não se percebe como...).

A informação tem um valor incalculável, mas, neste caso em concreto e, mais ainda, nos outros relatados, podemos já adiantar que vale seguramente mais de mil milhões de euros. Bem mais...


André Gonçalves Nunes

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Relatório McAfee: Camarões domínio mais perigoso

o domínio de Internet Camarões (.cm), superou Hong Kong (.hk) como o mais perigoso da Internet, de acordo com o terceiro relatório anual da McAfee “Mapeando os perigos da web – Os domínios mais perigosos do mundo”. Já o domínio do Japão (.jp) foi considerado o mais seguro.

O domínio de Portugal (.pt) surge em 86º lugar. Foram testados 34.409 sites, com apenas 193 a apresentarem riscos. A taxa de risco ponderada melhorou de 0,5 para 0,3%.

O domínio de Internet com maior volume de tráfego do mundo, “comercial” (.com), passou do nono para o segundo lugar entre os mais perigosos, ao passo que “governo” (.gov) é, entre os domínios não vinculados as quaisquer países, o mais seguro.

"Os alvos dos cibercriminosos são regiões onde o registo de sites é barato e prático e onde correm menos risco de serem descobertos", explica a McAfee.

As medidas rigorosas dos gestores de domínios “.hk” para impor restrições aos registos relacionados a golpes, Hong Kong caiu 33 posições este ano. Agora, apenas 1,1% dos sites com este domínio representam um risco, enquanto, no ano passado, a proporção era de um site “.hk” arriscado por cada cinco.

Na lista dos mais arriscados, depois de Camarões, surgem República da China (.cn), Samoa Ocidental (.ws), Filipinas (.ph) e ex-União Soviética (.su).

Já entre os domínios nacionais mais seguros estão, após o Japão, Irlanda (.ie), Croácia (.hr), Luxemburgo (.lu) e Vanuatu (.vu).

Outras conclusão é que dos 27 milhões de sites e 104 domínios de nível superior avaliados, 5,8% representam riscos à segurança – ou seja, mais de 1,5 milhões de sites eram arriscados.

Os sites registados nos domínios da web da Ásia-Pacífico são consideravelmente mais arriscados do que os da web em geral, com 13% a representarem uma ameaça.



Piores domínios nacionais


1-Camarões (.cm)

2-RP da China (.cn)

3-Samoa Ocidental (.ws)

4-Filipinas (.ph)

5-Ex-União Soviética (.su)

Domínios nacionais mais seguros

1-Japão (.jp)

2-Irlanda (.ie)

3-Croácia (.hr)

4-Luxemburgo (.lu)

5-Vanuatu (.vu)


Download Relatório “Mapeando os perigos da web – Os domínios mais perigosos do mundo”

Ciberguerra fora das conversas EUA-China

A ciberguerra está no centro das preocupações dos governos mundiais mas nas conversas entre Obama e Hu Jintao parece ser assunto proíbido.

A China nada tem a declarar sobre a ciberguerra e ainda que nos EUA há muito se afirme oficialmente que a maior ameaça cibernética vem de Pequim, Barack Obama, segundo uma reportagem publicada na revista "Time" de Novembro, citada pela revista brasileira Época, não pode falar sobre o assunto com o homólogo chinês.



Em 1995 a Time fazia capa com a Ciberguerra, mas se hoje se sentem como principal alvo das ameaças, na altura eram os EUA que corriam "para transformar os PC nas novas armas de destruição"


Ler mais aqui

Friday, December 4, 2009

IC Vídeo: Hackers: Outlaws and Angels

Segundo vídeo desta rubrica, um documentário com a chancela do Discovery Channel, de 2002.










Wednesday, December 2, 2009

10 Tendências na Businesss Intelligence

The Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management

In the wake of the long-running massive industry consolidation in the Enterprise Software industry that reached its zenith with the acquisitions of Business Intelligence market leaders Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects in 2007, one could certainly have been forgiven for being less than optimistic about the prospects of innovation in the Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management markets. This is especially true given the dozens of innovative companies that each of these large best of breed vendors themselves had acquired before being acquired in turn. While the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl as the large vendors are midway through digesting the former best of breed market leaders, thankfully for the health of the industry, nothing could be further from the truth in the market overall. This market has in fact shown itself to be very vibrant, with a resurgence of innovative offerings springing up in the wake of the fall of the largest best of breed vendors.
So what are the trends and where do I see the industry evolving to? Few of these are mutually exclusive, but in order to provide some categorization to the discussion, they have been broken down as follows:

1. We will witness the emergence of packaged strategy-driven execution applications. As we discussed in Driven to Perform: Risk-Aware Performance Management From Strategy Through Execution (Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Stephanie Buscemi, and Denise Broady, New York, NY, Evolved Technologist Press, 2009), the end state for next-generation business applications is not merely to align the transactional execu tion processes contained in applications like ERP, CRM, and SCM with the strategic analytics of performance and risk management of the organization, but for those strategic analytics to literally drive execution. We called this “Strategy-Driven Execution”, the complete fusion of goals, initiatives, plans, forecasts, risks, controls, performance monitoring, and optimization with transactional processes. Visionary applications such as those provided by Workday and SalesForce.com with embedded real-time contextual reporting available directly in the application (not as a bolt-on), and Oracle’s entire Fusion suite layering Essbase and OBIEE capabilities tightly into the applications’ logic, clearly portend the increasing fusion of analytic and transactional capability in the context of business processes and this will only increase.
2. The holy grail of the predictive, real-time enterprise will start to deliver on its promises. While classic analytic tools and applications have always done a good job of helping users understand what has happened and then analyze the root causes behind this performance, the value of this information is often stale before it reaches its intended audience. The holy grail of analytic technologies has always been the promise of being able to predict future outcomes by sensing and responding, with minimal latency between event and decision point. This has become manifested in the resurgence of interest in event-driven architectures that leverage a technology known as Complex Event Processing and predictive analytics. The predictive capabilities appear to be on their way to break out market acceptance IBM’s significant investment in setting up their Business Analytics and Optimization practice with 4000 dedicated consultants, combined with the massive product portfolio of the Cognos and recently acquired SPSS assets. Similarly, Complex Event Processing capabilities, a staple of extremely data-intensive, algorithmically-sophisticated industries such as financial services, have also become interesting to a number of other industries that can not deal with the amount of real-time data being generated and need to be able to capture value and decide instantaneously. Combining these capabilities will lead to new classes of applications for business management that were unimaginable a decade ago.

3. The industry will put reporting and slice-and-dice capabilities in their appropriate places and return to its decision-centric roots with a healthy dose of Web 2.0 style collaboration. It was clear to the pioneers of this industry, beginning as early as H.P. Luhn’s brilliant visionary piece A Business Intelligence System from 1958, that the goal of these technologies was to support business decision-making activities, and we can trace the roots of modern analytics, business intelligence, and performance management to the decision-support notion of decades earlier. But somewhere along the way, business intelligence became synonymous with reporting and slicing-and-dicing, which is a metaphor that suits analysts, but not the average end-user. This has contributed to the paltry BI adoption rates of approximately 25% bandied about in the industry, despite the fact that investment in BI and its priority for companies has never been higher over the last five years. Making report production cheaper to the point of nearly being free, something SaaS BI is poised to do (see above), is still unlikely to improve this situation much. Instead, we will see a resurgence in collaborative decision-centric business intelligence offerings that make decisions the central focus of the offerings. From an operational perspective, this is certainly in evidence with the proliferation of rules-based approaches that can automate thousands of operational decisions with little human intervention. However, for more tactical and strategic decisions, mash-ups will allow users to assemble all of the relevant data for making a decision, social capabilities will allow users to discuss this relevant data to generate “crowdsourced” wisdom, and explicit decisions, along with automated inferences, will be captured and correlated against outcomes. This will allow decision-centric business intelligence to make recommendations within process contexts for what the appropriate next action should be, along with confidence intervals for the expected outcome, as well as being able to tell the user what the risks of her decisions are and how it will impact both the company’s and her own personal performance.

4. Performance, risk, and compliance management will continue to become unified in a process-based framework and make the leap out of the CFO’s office. The disciplines of performance, risk, and compliance management have been considered separate for a long time, but the walls are breaking down, as we documented thoroughly in Driven to Perform. Performance management begins with the goals that the organization is trying to achieve, and as risk management has evolved from its siloed roots into Enterprise Risk Management, it has become clear that risks must be identified and assessed in light of this same goal context. Similarly, in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, as compliance has become an extremely thorny and expensive issue for companies of all sizes, modern approaches suggest that compliance is ineffective when cast as a process of signing off on thousand of individual item checklists, but rather should be based on an organization’s risks. All three of these disciplines need to become unified in a process-based framework that allows for effective organizational governance. And while financial performance, risk, and compliance management are clearly the areas of most significant investment for most companies, it is clear that these concerns are now finally becoming enterprise-level plays that are escaping the confines of the Office of the CFO. We will continue to witness significant investment in sales and marketing performance management, as vendors like Right90 continuing to gain traction in improving the sales forecasting process and vendors like Varicent receive hefty $35 million venture rounds this year, no doubt thanks to experiencing over 100% year over year growth in the burgeoning Sales Performance Management category. My former Siebel colleague, Bruce Cleveland, now a partner at Interwest, makes the case for this market expansion of performance management into the front-office rather convincingly and has invested correspondingly.

5. SaaS / Cloud BI Tools will steal significant revenue from on-premise vendors but also fight for limited oxygen amongst themselves. From many accounts, this was the year that SaaS-based offerings hit the mainstream due to their numerous advantages over on-premise offerings, and this certainly was in evidence with the significant uptick in investment and market visibility of SaaS BI vendors. Although much was made of the folding of LucidEra, one of the original pioneers in the space, and while other vendors like BlinkLogic folded as well, vendors like Birst, PivotLink, Good Data, Indicee and others continue to announce wins at a fair clip along with innovations at a fraction of the cost of their on-premise brethren. From a functionality perspective, these tools offer great usability, some collaboration features, strong visualization capabilities, and an ease-of-use not seen with their on-premise equivalents whereby users are able to manage the system in a self-sufficient fashion devoid of the need for significant IT involvement. I have long argued that basic reporting and analysis is now a commodity, so there is little reason for any customer to invest in on-premise capabilities at the price/performance ratio that the SaaS vendors are offering (see BI SaaS Vendors Are Not Created Equal ) . We should thus expect to see continued dimunition of the on-premise vendors BI revenue streams as the SaaS BI value proposition goes mainstream, although it wouldn’t be surprising to see acquisitions by the large vendors to stem the tide. However, with so many small players in the market offering largely similar capabilities, the SaaS BI tools vendors may wind up starving themselves for oxygen as they put price pressure on each other to gain new customers. Only vendors whose offerings were designed from the beginning for cloud-scale architecture and thus whose marginal cost per additional user approaches zero will succeed in such a commodity pricing environment, although alternatively these vendors can pursue going upstream and try to compete in the enterprise, where the risks and rewards of competition are much higher. On the other hand, packaged SaaS BI Applications such as those offered by Host Analytics, Adaptive Planning, and new entrant Anaplan, while showing promising growth, have yet to mature to mainstream adoption, but are poised to do so in the coming years. As with all SaaS applications, addressing key integration and security concerns will remain crucial to driving adoption.

6. The undeniable arrival of the era of big data will lead to further proliferation in data management alternatives. While analytic-centric OLAP databases have been around for decades such as Oracle Express, Hyperion Essbase, and Microsoft Analysis Services, they have never held the same dominant market share from an applications consumption perspective that the RDBMS vendors have enjoyed over the last few decades. No matter what the application type, the RDBMS seemed to be the answer. However, we have witnessed an explosion of exciting data management offerings in the last few years that have reinvigorated the information management sector of the industry. The largest web players such as Google (BigTable),Yahoo (Hadoop), Amazon (Dynamo), Facebook (Cassandra) have built their own solutions to handle their own incredible data volumes, with the open source Hadoop ecosystem and commercial offerings like CloudEra leading the charge in broad awareness. Additionally, a whole new industry of DBMSs dedicated to Analytic workloads have sprung up, with flagship vendors like Netezza, Greenplum, Vertica, Aster Data, and the like with significant innovations in in-memory processing, exploiting parallelism, columnar storage options, and more. We already starting to see hybrid approaches between the Hadoop players and the ADBMS players, and even the largest vendors like Oracle with their Exadata offering are excited enough to make significant investments in this space. Additionally, significant opportunities to push application processing into the databases themselves are manifesting themselves. There has never been the plethora of choices available as new entrants to the market seem to crop up weekly. Visionary applications of this technology in areas like metereological forecasting and genomic sequencing with massive data volumes will become possible at hitherto unimaginable price points.

7. Advanced Visualization will continue to increase in depth and relevance to broader audiences. Visionary vendors like Tableau, QlikTech, and Spotfire (now Tibco) made their mark by providing significantly differentiated visualization capabilities compared with the trite bar and pie charts of most BI players’ reporting tools. The latest advances in state-of-the-art UI technologies such as Microsoft’s SilverLight, Adobe Flex, and AJAX via frameworks like Google’s Web Toolkit augur the era of a revolution in state-of-the art visualization capabilities. With consumers broadly aware of the power of capabilities like Google Maps or the tactile manipulations possible on the iPhone, these capabilities will find their way into enterprise offerings at a rapid speed lest the gap between the consumer and enterprise realms become too large and lead to large scale adoption revolts as a younger generation begins to enter the workforce having never known the green screens of yore.

8. Open Source offerings will continue to make in-roads against on-premise offerings. Much as Saas BI offerings are doing, Open Source offerings in the larger BI market are disrupting the incumbent, closed-source, on-premise vendors. Vendors like Pentaho and JasperSoft are really starting to hit their stride with growth percentages well above the industry average, offering complete end-to-end BI stacks at a fraction of the cost of their competitors and thus seeing good bottom-up adoption rates. This is no doubt a function of the brutal economic times companies find themselves experiencing. Individual parts of the stacks can also be assembled into compelling offerings and receive valuable innovations from both corporate entities as well as dedicated committers: JFreeChart for charting, Actuate’s BIRT for reporting, Mondrian and Jedox’s Palo for OLAP Servers, DynamoBI’s LucidDB for ADBMS, Revolution Computing’s R for statistical manipulation, Cloudera’s enterprise Hadoop for massive data, EsperTech for CEP, Talend for Data Integration / Data Quality / MDM, and the list goes on. These offerings have absolutely reached a level of maturity where they are capable of being deployed in the enterprise right alongside any other commercial closed-source vendor offering.

9. Data Quality, Data Integration, and Data Virtualization will merge with Master Data Management to form a unified Information Management Platform for structured and unstructured data. Data quality has been the bain of information systems for as long as they have existed, causing many an IT analyst to obsess over it, and data quality issues contribute to significant losses in system adoption, productivity, and time spent addressing them. Increasingly, data quality and data integration will be interlocked hand-in-hand to ensure the right, cleansed data is moved to downstream sources by attacking the problem at its root. Vendors including SAP BusinessObjects, SAS, Informatica, and Talend are all providing these capabilities to some degree today. Of course, with the amount of relevant data sources exploding in the enterprise and no way to integrate all the data sources into a single physical location while maintaining agility, vendors like Composite Software are providing data virtualization capabilities, whereby canonical information models can be overlayed on top information assets regardless of where they are located, capable of addressing the federation of batch, real-time and event data sources. These disparate data soures will need to be harmonized by strong Master Data Management capabilities, whereby the definitions of key entities in the enterprise like customers, suppliers, products, etc. can be used to provide semantic unification over these distributed data sources. Finally, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information will all be able to be extracted, transformed, loaded, and queried from this ubiquitious information management platform by leveraging the capabilities of text analytics capabilities that continue to grow in importance and combining them with data virtualization capabilities.

10. Excel will continue to provide the dominant paradigm for end-user BI consumption. For Excel specifically, the number one analytic tool by far with a home on hundreds of millions of personal desktops, Microsoft has invested significantly in ensuring its continued viability as we move past its second decade of existence, and its adoption shows absolutely no sign of abating any time soon. With Excel 2010’s arrival, this includes significantly enhanced charting capabilities, a server-based mode first released in 2007 called Excel Services, being a first-class citizen in SharePoint, and the biggest disruptor, the launch of PowerPivot, an extremely fast, scalable, in-memory analytic engine that can allow Excel analysis on millions of rows of data at sub-second speeds. While many vendors have tried in vain to displace Excel from the desktops of the business user for more than two decades, none will be any closer to succeeding any time soon. Microsoft will continue to make sure of that.

And so ends my list of prognostications for Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management in 2010! What are yours? I welcome your feedback on this list and look forward to hearing your own views on the topic.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Os Suicidios na France Telecom


Em dois anos 32 funcionários da France Telecom suicidaram-se e, pelo que se depreende das cartas deixadas pelos próprios, em alguns casos são apontadas razões directamente relacionadas com as condições de trabalho. Sem esquecer a perda maior (a vida dessas 32 pesooas) a reputação da empresa sai muitissimo afectada de toda esta situação. A recuperação de alguma credibilidade será difícil e nem o anúncio de um investimento de mil milhões de euros para evitar mais suicídios (não se percebe como o vão fazer...) será suficiente. Quanto vale um boa imagem?...Certamente bem mais de mil milhões de euros neste caso... Mas pena é que também tenha custado vidas... e essas perdas não se recuperam...

Em dois anos

France Télécom reconhece suicídio de 32 funcionários

por DN.ptHoje


A France Télécom anunciou que nos últimos dois anos 32 dos seus funcionários cometeram suicídio, 17 dos quais nos últimos doze meses. Um número superior ao avançado anteriormente, num escândalo em que os métodos de gestão de trabalhadores seguidos pela terceira maior operadora móvel da Europa foram muito criticados.

“Após um pedido da inspecção de trabalho, interrogámos recentemente os directores territoriais e regionais. Contabilizámos 32 suicídios em dois anos. O número foi comunicado, com total transparência, à inspecção de trabalho”, anunciou em comunicado o maior fornecedor de Internet de França, citado pelo ‘El País’.

Os sindicatos tinham anteriormente apontado 25 suicídios, depois de um período turbulento no Verão, em que vários casos trouxeram o assunto para o conhecimento público (alguns funcionários deixaram cartas de despedida apresentando justificações que denunciaram as práticas na empresa) e custaram o cargo ao sub-director da France Télécom. Nicolas Sarkozy, Presidente da França, mantwve o líder da telefónica no cargo, Didier Lombard, apesar das pressões dos sindicatos e dos partidos da oposição.

A France Télécom também destinou mil milhões de euros para evitar mais suicídios, anúncio que surge poucos dias antes de serem conhecidos os resultados de um mega-inquérito a 100 mil funcionários da empresa, realça o ‘Le Figaro’.

Google cede às editoras e limita notícias

A Google cedeu às intenções das editoras e vai permitir que estas definam um limite máximo de artigos a que que os internautas podem aceder gratuitamente, através da pesquisa de notícias Google, uma medida que desvaloriza o serviço de notícias Google, e lhe retira importância enquanto agregador.

Google to Let Publishers Limit Free Articles

By Dunstan Prial
FOXBusiness


In an apparent concession to angry news organizations, Google said Tuesday it will let publishers set a limit on the number of articles readers can view for free through the Internet giant’s search engine.

Google will let publishers limit readers to five free articles per day.

The move comes as news executives have escalated their criticism of Google, which they accuse of reaping billions of dollars in profits by publishing free content. Meanwhile, many news organizations are struggling as advertising revenues have dwindled in recent years.

Critics have included News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has specifically targeted aggregators such as Google News that pull together snippets and links to news from a variety of sources. Aggregators, according to the critics, collect advertising revenue for these snippets without compensating the news organizations that produce news stories.

Murdoch has threatened to block Google from displaying its news articles and has reportedly held talks with Microsoft about giving its Bing search engine exclusive access to some or all of News Corp.’s news content.

News Corp. is publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and NewsCore. The Journal already levies subscription fees for access to some of its content online. News Corp. is also publisher of FOXBusiness.com.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Quando os CEO's descem à loja

Os CEO's da Nike, Intel e Sun Microsistems são alguns dos altos-responsáveis de grandes empresas envolvidos cada vez mais directamente no processo de vendas. O objectivo: criar produtos e serviços que respondam efectivamente à procura dos seus principais clientes. Não perdem tanto tempo, nem tanto dinheiro a inventar a roda e a tentar convencer os consumidores de que o que oferecem lhes é útil... e sobretudo ganham tempo e dinheiro... O que importa é, não tanto saber o que os consumidores querem, antes o que os consumidores vão querer... pois, tal como recorda, no final, o artigo em baixo, Ford dizia "Se tivesse dado às pessoas o que pediam, tinha-lhes entregue um cavalo mais rápido".


CEOs who sell gain clarity on competitive strategy

photo: chessCarol Hymnowitz’s recent Wall Street Journal article “CEOs Are Spending More Quality Time With Their Customers” highlights a trend that can directly impact your company’s competitive strategy.

CEOs of Nike, Intel and Sun are becoming more involved in the selling process, focusing on tailoring products and services to meet the demands of their top customers.

And it’s more than just a ceremonial visit. These CEOs are overcoming objections and negotiating deals, giving them an intimate understanding of market pain and the value they may (or may not) provide.

From a marketer’s perspective, this is a great trend! A CEO who works directly with customers often gains a new appreciation for the strategic landscape. And that makes it easier for marketers to gain the CEO’s support for strategic initiatives. It can also help marketing gain a stronger voice in C-level discussions on business strategy.

From a CEO’s perspective, a deep understanding of true customer needs is a critical variable when shaping your company’s competitive strategy. It gives you an unvarnished look at your position in the market and a clear understanding of the issues your marketing needs to address.

Better yet, these CEO/customer meetings can trigger big ideas that can take your company in exciting new directions. Take, for example, Starbucks.

In the early 1980s, Starbucks was a wholesaler selling coffee beans. On a trip to Milan, Howard Schultz (a VP at the time) visited a coffee bar and came up with the idea to re-create the Italian coffee-bar culture in the United States.

The company founders resisted Schultz’s recommendation to change their business model from wholesale to retail. Recognizing the opportunity, he quit the company and started his own. He achieved immediate success and bought out the Starbucks founders in 1987. We all know the rest of the story.

Schultz’s first-hand experience gave him the insight to create an entirely new market. But it’s difficult to drive such innovation from a VP position. He had to quit Starbucks to make it happen on his own.

Schultz delivered what the authors of the popular book Blue Ocean Strategy call value innovation. Instead of just trying to beat the competition, make the competition irrelevant. Create a leap in value for buyers and you can open entirely new and uncontested markets.

Every CEO dreams of becoming the uncontested leader in a new market space. It’s also the best spot for marketing directors. After all, defining a new market space is usually more exciting and rewarding than battling in the trenches in a noisy market with established competitors.

But it’s rare for companies to achieve this goal. Logic tells me that meaningful value innovation comes from a deep understanding of the market and customers. It’s more than data and customer surveys. It takes big-picture right-brained thinking — empathy, synchrony, creating meaning.

Remember what Henry Ford said?

“If I’d built what people were asking me for, I’d have delivered a faster horse!”

It seems pretty clear that value innovation is an enormously powerful business strategy. And since CEOs need to drive strategic changes, it’s important to know the market like the back of their hand. But they need to know more than just the numbers. They need to understand customer experiences to truly innovate.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

11 boas aplicações para vigiar a concorrência

Apesar destas 11 ferramentas não serem suficientes para montar um bom sistema de IC, são, ainda que de um modo primário, um primeiro passo importante para quem queira criar um sistema base de monitorização de informação para um pequeno negócio, sobretudo se se souber utilizá-las e sobretudo fazer um mix correcto das mesmas para ter a melhor informação, para a melhor decisão, no melhor momento...

Aviso: Um mau uso destas aplicações pode resultar em excesso de informação, confusão e perca de tempo... precisamente o contrário do que se pretende.


11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs

Small Business TrendsNovember 18, 2009By Lisa Barone

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are great little inventions because they allow you track virtually anything and have it delivered either to your email or RSS. What kinds of stuff should you be tracking? The name of our competitor’s company, their employee names, their CEO, product names, locations, mentions of new features, etc. What kinds of media are you looking for? Their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos, Flickr accounts, Facebook pages, etc. Why? The more you know, the better off you are to make smart decisions.

Twitter

Follow your competitors on Twitter. Follow their employees. Follow the people that engage most often with your competitors. Follow the people your competitors are following. Use Private Twitter Lists to do it all discretely. Private Lists are a goldmine for stalking. I mean, researching.

Twitter Search

Create RSS feeds or Save Twitter Searches to track important keywords, competitors’ Twitter user names, and product names (yours and theirs). You can also use the Advanced Geo search to key in a certain radius from your competitor’s storefront.

Bit.ly

If you’re using Twitter, you’re probably already familiar with bit.ly. It’s one of the many URL shortening services out there. What’s different about bit.ly is that it gives you really great link stat information. It will tell you how many people clicked on your link, how many times it was retweeted, how many people clicked on the retweeted link, what times of day people retweeted it, who was doing the actual retweeting, etc. It’s a really great way to find and identify your network online so you can leverage them in the future.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Knowing that links are an essential part of getting your site to rank, Yahoo Site Explorer can show you WHO is linking to your competitors, as well as who’s linking to you. Where are competitors getting their links from? How can you get links from similar sources? What holes do they have in their link profile that you can capitalize on? This tool will tell you.

SEO for Firefox

This is great FF plugin offered by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall that gives site owners a robust look at whatever site they’re looking at. It tells you a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, how its done in social media, how many people are subscribed to its blog, if it’s listed in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory, etc. Because it offers such great information about links, many people like to use it evaluate competitor’s content pieces.

Quarkbase

Once you put your URL in it will tell you the most recent and the most popular pages from a certain site that have been submitted. You can see where they’ve been submitted, how many votes they received, how many subscribers they have, etc. You can also search by “submitted on” or “submitted by” to see where your competitors are having their content submitted and who’s doing the submitting.

SocialMention

This is a pretty neat tool. Enter in a search term (competitor’s name, product name, keyword, etc) and SocialMention will track down what people are saying about that term across different blogs and social outlets. It will even attempt to track sentiment analysis to tell you if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral (this can get a bit wonky). It will tell you how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV. It’s one of my personal favorite tools to play with.

Compete

Compete will give you a complete profile of any site on the Web. You give them the domain and give you an approximation of their unique visitors and the keywords that are bringing people to their site. You can also compare several different sites up against each other. There’s a paid option which will give you even more analytical type information, as well.

copernic.com

Copernic offers a great tracker tool that will look for new content on your competitors’ Web pages and then email you a highlighted version so you know what they changed. If they put up a page about a new product they’ll soon be carrying, you’ll know. If they start altering text to rank for different keywords, you’ll know. If they update their employee page to create new positions, you’ll know. It’s a $49.95 investment but, I think it’s worth it.

Domaintools.com

DomainTools will collect a bunch of information about a Web site and report back. You can find out if your competitors are listed in the Yahoo directory, get registration details, what other sites are on the same IP (may be sites that company also owns), etc. You can also set up Registration Alerts to inform you each time your competitor creates a new domain name or a Mark Alert to tell you if they’ve used a particular keyword.

There you have it. A list of some of my favorite spy tools. You still trust me, right?

NSA ajuda Microsoft a proteger Windows 7

A Agência de Segurança Nacional dos EUA (NSA) ajudou a Microsoft a proteger o Windows 7 contra ciberataques e está a prestar uma assistência similar à Apple, Sun Microsystems e Red Hat.

Na base desta colaboração, está o entendimento da entidade responsável pela segurança do país de que a protecção dos os sistemas de segurança nacional deve ser feita através de uma parceria entre instituições públicas e privadas. Isto permite elevar o nível de garantia de segurança de informação de produtos e serviços de forma mais ampla.

Se feito correctamente, esta é uma situação win-win que beneficia todo o espectro de utilizadores de tecnologia da informação, de militares e responsáveis políticos, governos, operadores das infra-estruturas crítica e população.

Em suma, tornar mais seguro o computador de cada cidadão, torna mais seguro o país.


Fonte: The Register

National Security Agency beefed Win 7 defenses

Now for Apple, Sun, and Red Hat

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco

Posted in Security, 19th November 2009 04:35 GMT


The National Security Agency helped Microsoft harden Windows 7 against attacks and is providing similar assistance to Apple, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat too, an agency official said.

The admission came in prepared remarks delivered Tuesday by Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, at a hearing before the Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

"Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the DoD, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks, whether those tasks are being performed in the public or private sector," Schaeffer stated.

"All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product lifecycle."

Microsoft has acknowledged help from the NSA before. The ultra-secretive agency provided assistance in shoring up Windows Vista, The Washington Post reported in 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010801352.html). The same article says Microsoft tapped the NSA for help with Windows XP and Server 2003 as well.

The latest assistance includes unclassified security checklists that protect against various threats and standards for cataloging computer vulnerabilities. It also involved the release of a "security configuration guide" for Windows 7.

The NSA is working with Apple, Sun, and Red Hat "to develop secure baselines for their products," he added.

"More and more, we find that protecting national security systems demands teaming with public and private institutions to raise the information assurance level of products and services more broadly," Schaeffer stated. "If done correctly, this is a win-win situation that benefits the whole spectrum of information technology users, from warfighters and policymakers, to federal, state, local and tribal governments, to the operators of critical infrastructure and the nation's major arteries of commerce."

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

A diferença entre Business, Market, Competitor e Competitive Intelligence

Porque não raras vezes há muita confusão entre o que significa cada um destes conceitos, eis uma breve definição dos mesmos.



Market Research & Competitive Intelligence Terminology Overview

From the Business Intelligence Glossary by Vernon Prior

Market intelligence concerns the attitudes, opinions, behavior, and needs of individuals and organizations within the context of their economic, environmental, social, and everyday activities.

Competitive intelligence is a systematic and ethical programme for gathering, analysing, and managing any combination of Data, Information, and Knowledge concerning the Business environment in which a company operates that, when acted upon, will confer a significant Competitive advantage or enable sound decisions to be made. Its primary role is Strategic early warning.

Competitor intelligence is a subdivision of Business intelligence that concerns the current and proposed business activities of competitors.

Business intelligence is now widely accepted as being concerned with Information technology solutions for transforming the output from large Data collections into Intelligence; usually through the integration of sales, marketing, servicing, and support activities. Also loosely referred to as Customer relationship management, it covers such activities as Data mining and Enterprise reporting, and the associated software. Those involved in business intelligence tend to regard it as one aspect of Knowledge management. Systems based on such software were formerly known as Executive information systems.

Competitive intelligence is the process by which organizations gather and use information about products, customers, and competitors, for their short term and long term planning.

A definição de CI surge aqui muito abreviada. Não se pode dizer que haja uma definição única, mas os principios presentes nesta são consensuais.











O ex-patrão da IC francesa em entrevista

Para melhor se perceber como a Competitive Intelligence pode e deve ter lugar estratégico enquanto política pública vale a pena recuperar esta entrevista de A. Juillet que explica, neste video de 2008, ao France 24 as suas funções no cargo de alto responsável pela Inteligência Económica junto do primeiro-ministro, posto que ocupou até Maio deste ano.


Guerra Económica no New York Times

Recupero aqui um texto do The New York Times, publicado em Agosto, que, a propósito do escândalo de espionagem electrónica, por parte de um alto responsável da empresa estatal de energia francesa EDF, que afectou o Greenpeace, fala sobre a prática da espionagem em França, aproveitando a experiência de Christian Harbulot e da École de Guerre Économique no campo da inteligência económica e estratégica.

In French Inquiry, a Glimpse at Corporate Spying

por David Jolly, August 1, 2009, The New York Times
link artigo original

PARIS — The story has the elements of a corporate thriller : a cast of characters that includes former French spies and military men, an American cycling champion, Greenpeace activists and a dogged judge whose investigation takes him from a sports doping laboratory outside Paris to a Moroccan jail and to some of the top corporations in France.

Like installments in a serial novel, new revelations have been dripping out since March. And while the climax is still probably many months away, the story is providing a rare glimpse into the shadowy and potentially lucrative business of gathering what corporations refer to as “strategic intelligence.”

“For most companies, on a daily basis there are many more things going on than can possibly be handed off to the police,” said Christian Harbulot, director of the École de Guerre Économique, or School of Economic Warfare, in Paris.

The companies they turn to for “extra help,” Mr. Harbulot said, include everything from corporate security giants like Kroll to what he terms “small operators,” ranging from ex-intelligence agents to computer hackers.

The sprawling case unfolding in France involves a mix of the latter and some of the biggest French companies, including Électricité de France, the world’s largest operator of nuclear power plants, and Vivendi, the media and telecommunications conglomerate.

According to a case file compiled by the investigating judge, Thomas Cassuto, and reviewed by the International Herald Tribune, investigators stumbled on to the case almost by accident, in the wake of a doping scandal at the Tour de France in 2006.

The American cyclist Floyd Landis was stripped of his victory that summer after testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone. Not long afterward, in November 2006, the French anti-doping agency filed a criminal complaint charging that confidential documents related to Mr. Landis’s drug tests had been stolen and sent to the news media and other labs. The documents had been altered in what lab officials said appeared to have been an effort to discredit or embarrass them by casting doubt on the handling of test samples. Investigators concluded that one such e-mail message was sent from a computer using the same Internet protocol address used by Arnie Baker, then Mr. Landis’s coach.

A search of computers in the lab in Châtenay-Malabry, a suburb of Paris, turned up a Trojan horse program that allowed an outsider to remotely download files.

No evidence has surfaced to connect Mr. Landis or Mr. Baker to the hacking, and both have vigorously denied any involvement. They did, however, make use of the pilfered documents in their unsuccessful campaign to overturn Mr. Landis’s cycling ban, on the grounds that the documents had entered the public domain.

The trail, picked up by a special cybercrime unit of the French Interior Ministry, led to a French computer specialist, Alain Quiros. He was caught in Mohammedia, Morocco, and questioned by French and Moroccan officials there (It is not clear from the case file exactly when).

Mr. Quiros initially denied any knowledge of the lab hacking, but when presented with incriminating evidence found on his computer, he confessed, telling investigators he had been paid €2,000 to €3,000, or $2,800 to $4,000, for hacking into the lab. He identified Thierry Lorho, head of Kargus Consultants, a corporate intelligence company in Paris, as having instigated the computer attack.

Then things got complicated. As the French authorities delved more deeply into Mr. Quiros’s computer, they found a copy of the hard drive of Yannick Jadot, the former campaign director of Greenpeace France, as well as that of Frédérik-Karel Canoy, a French lawyer and shareholder rights activist who has battled some of the country’s largest companies, including Vivendi and European Aeronautic Defense & Space, the parent of the aircraft manufacturer Airbus.

Mr. Lorho, a former French intelligence agent, acknowledged his role to the French officials. He told them that he had handed off the lab data to another man, Jean-François Dominguez, who had paid him for it. Both men are being formally investigated. Mr. Lorho also admitted that he had collected data on Greenpeace. His client that time, he said, was Électricité de France, which had paid him for “strategic intelligence” on anti-nuclear campaigners.

Mr. Lorho has said his contacts at E.D.F. were “perfectly aware” of the hacking and that such activities were understood to be included under the two one-year contracts he signed with the company.

One, signed in April 2004, paid Mr. Lorho’s company €12,000 a month; a second, signed in November 2006, provided for €3,900 a month.

The investigation found that in addition to information on Greenpeace in France, E.D.F. obtained data on the environmental organization’s activities in Spain, Belgium and Britain, where E.D.F. last year agreed to buy the largest nuclear power company there, British Energy.

E.D.F. has denied any knowledge of the cybertheft and has portrayed itself as a victim of illegal acts by Kargus Consultants.

But Judge Cassuto, who took over the three-pronged investigation in April 2008, has declined to grant E.D.F. civil party status in the case. The decision was upheld on appeal. Instead, the judge has declared E.D.F. an “assisted witness,” one step short of being placed under formal investigation, and the chief executive of E.D.F., Pierre Gadonneix, has been called in for questioning.

Alexis Gublin, the attorney who is representing E.D.F. in the case, said the company was cooperating “totally” with the inquiry.

Through their lawyers, Mr. Quiros, Mr. Dominguez and Mr. Lorho declined to comment. Astrid Granoux, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, said Judge Cassuto and the prosecutor, Philippe Courroye, would not discuss the case while the investigation was under way.

Spying by corporations on their perceived enemies is not new. In the mid-1960s, General Motors sent private detectives to dig up dirt on the consumer activist Ralph Nader when he began to criticize the auto industry’s safety record.

In 2006, top executives of Hewlett-Packard, infuriated by damaging leaks from corporate insiders, hired investigators to spy on journalists in an effort to learn their sources.

And over the past two years, some of the biggest companies in Germany, including Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Bank and the national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, have been caught overstepping the line regarding surveillance of critics and their own employees.

People in the field of corporate intelligence say information in the public domain is considered fair game. Theft of a computer hard drive would normally be understood as a step too far, they said. But it might not even be necessary as the technology advances: Experts say the Trojan horse attack is giving way to automated targeting of the “cloud” of information that people and organizations generate through their online activities.

In the Cassuto investigation, the connection to E.D.F., which is 85 percent owned by the French government, has touched a nerve in France, whose intelligence agents bombed and sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985 in Auckland, killing a photographer on board.

However, there has been no evidence to suggest that the French government was aware of or involved in the hacking.

In an interview with an intelligence Web site, Lerenseignement.com, Mr. Lorho said he assumed “full responsibility” for hacking into the Greenpeace computer, but he added that “I would like to see E.D.F., which sponsored the operation, take responsibility for its part.”

On April 10, E.D.F. said that, after an internal investigation, it had terminated its relationship with Kargus Consultants and, as a “precautionary measure,” temporarily removed from their posts two corporate security employees who had been dealing with the firm.

The two — Pierre-Paul François, an site protection engineer and former police officer, and his superior, Pascal Durieux, a security manager and former French Navy admiral — have been placed under formal investigation by Judge Cassuto. They have been transferred to other duties but continue to work at E.D.F. and to draw their salaries, their lawyers said. Both maintain their innocence.

E.D.F. also said it had terminated a contract with another corporate intelligence company, Securewyse, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The French newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné reported that Securewyse had been retained to monitor the French anti-nuclear group Sortir du Nucléaire, whose spokesman, Stéphane Lhomme, has been under investigation in France since 2006, when he passed confidential company documents to the media.

Securewyse did not reply to numerous requests for comment, but a company official told Le Canard Enchaîné that it had done nothing illegal.

Mr. Jadot, who has since left Greenpeace and was elected June 6 to represent western France in the European Parliament, said the case showed “a systematic policy of spying by E.D.F.”

But E.D.F. defends its need to keep an eye on activist groups.

“We have a duty to be vigilant,” Jean-Marc Sabathé, the company’s security director, said in an April interview with Le Monde. “It’s important to know, for example, if this or that group is in the radical extreme or if it is above board. But we have no need to pay hackers to find out!”

Meanwhile, the investigation goes on, with Judge Cassuto alternating among the threads as resources and scheduling allows.

In the doping lab case, Mr. Dominguez, who has been described in the French media as a photographer with links to French intelligence, told investigators that he had acted only as a middleman, passing on the data he received from Kargus to another man, who has not been located.

Judge Cassuto summoned Mr. Landis and Mr. Baker to Paris in May for questioning, but neither appeared for the hearing.

The judge has the power to issue international arrest warrants for both men, although he has not indicated yet whether he intends to do so.

Mr. Landis did not respond to requests for comment through Team Ouch, his new cycle-racing squad.

But he told Cycling News in November 2006, when rumors of the computer hacking first surfaced, that “any claims attributing these actions to me or my defense team are baseless, untrue, irresponsible and another example of the character assassination that I have faced since the initial allegations surfaced.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Baker denied any involvement in hacking into the drug lab’s computer, or in hiring anyone to hack into it. “If the L.N.D.D. computer system was hacked, I do not know who did this,” he wrote, referring to the drug-testing lab, Le Laboratoire National de Dépistage du Dopage.

In the case of Mr. Canoy, the shareholder activist, investigators raided the office of Jean-François Dubos, Vivendi’s general counsel, in June. Antoine Lefort, a spokesman for Vivendi, confirmed that Mr. Dubos “has been heard as a witness and his office was searched.” But he said that neither Mr. Dubos, who has not been placed under formal investigation, nor the company had sought to hack into Mr. Canoy’s computer.

Since 2002, Vivendi has fought 13 different lawsuits brought by Mr. Canoy, and filed two countersuits against him, Mr. Lefort said.

Mr. Canoy said the hackers stole data about his finances and even his family. “My son has a rock band, and everything including his songs and poems was stolen,” he said. “It is a complete violation of my personal and professional privacy.”

Mr. Harbulot, the expert on economic intelligence, said the most curious thing about the whole case to him was why a company like E.D.F. would get involved with “these kinds of people” in the first place.

“All of E.D.F.’s security needs should be taken care of by the state, because it’s strategically important,” he said.

Still, hackers like Mr. Quiros seem to be proliferating, he said, estimating there were “a few dozen” in France alone. “Not that he was very expert,” Mr. Harbulot said. “Like most hackers, he was undone by some really stupid blunders.”

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