Category: Business

Former Reddit CEO urges women and minorities to “Speak up” against discrimination

November 12, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Citizen Justice

In March of 2015, Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao lost a widely publicized discrimination case against venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. Despite the loss, Pao’s advice for tackling sexism and racism in Silicon Valley is to continue to “Speak up.”

Pao published an essay about her battles with discrimination in law and tech on Lena Dunham’s website Lenny.

“Unfortunately, some people just don’t treat men and women, white and minorities, heterosexuals and LGBTQs as equals. We could all work harder and better than everyone else, but we weren’t getting a fair shot to rise to the top,” Pao observed after entering the tech industry.

Yet, according to Pao, it’s (gradually) getting better. She cites women and minorities’ willingness to share “others’ bad behavior, data, and their own experiences publicly” as the main source of progress, and encourages people to continue to take part in public conversation about issues affecting them.

Pao’s high-profile discrimination case, though unsuccessful on surface-level, initiated conversations that lead companies like Apple, Google and Twitter to actively pursue diversity in their workforces.

Reddit users complained that Pao was engaging in censorship when she shut down five forums associated with online harassment. After receiving a petition with over 200,000 signatures for her to step down, Pao resigned from her position of interim CEO.

“I was called the ‘most hated person on the Internet’; a recent article even called me a ‘pariah of Silicon Valley’,” Pao admits. In the face of such hostility, she continues to advocate boldness and offer solidarity: “Don’t be silent… You are not alone. There are millions of women and men who are supporting you and want you to succeed.”

Article via CNET, November 10, 2015

Photo: Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network 2014 – Austin via Dell Inc. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

IPhone factory investigated: wages and conditions are poor

October 24, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Citizen Justice, Human Rights, Tech

Tech giant Apple is under scrutiny for factory conditions overseas. Despite the company’s efforts to regulate its manufacturers, a recent report by China Labor Watch indicated that many improvements are still to be made.

The report, released this Thursday, detailed criticisms of an iPhone factory in Shanghai. The organization urged Apple to raise staff wages, which currently amount to $1.85 an hour. Employees work shifts of 9 hours a day, in addition to a minimum of 20 hours overtime each week during the busy September season—when Apple prepares to release the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus—in order to cover living expenses. Including overtime, workers generally earn $753 a month. China Labor Watch also noted cramped living dorms and a lack of adequate safety training.

Apple does make an effort to monitor its manufacturers, however. The company audits the companies in its supply chain on a regular basis and releases the reports independently. Apple also sets the guideline of a 60-hour maximum workweek, which 92 percent of factory staff were compliant with for the majority of 2014. That number fell to 75 percent September of last year, when Apple primed to release the iPhone 6. In the Shanghai factory featured in the recent report, only 42 percent of employees worked 60 hours or less a week.

Apple also is advocating clean energy usage by its manufacturers, and announced new solar power and energy efficiency projects in China this Thursday. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook commented, “Our culture is to leave the world better than we found it.”

Article via CNET, 22 October 2015

Photo: RT @ BGR via Humans Developer [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Startup helps off-grid communities purchase clean energy

October 23, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Enviro Justice, Human Rights, Tech

Globally, off-grid villages have few reliable energy sources. People throughout the world rely on solar products donated from non-profit organizations—which are not guaranteed indefinitely—or resort to purchasing expensive and unclean energy like kerosene, due to a lack of investment capital for cleaner energy. Angaza, a San Francisco startup, seeks to facilitate the purchase of clean energy by off-grid communities at affordable rates.

Angaza has a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) system in which a person can make a small down payment of under $5 to take a pico-solar device home. The solar device has a meter that measures energy usage against the original payment, and shuts off automatically when the paid amount of energy has been used up. At that point, the user can make a mobile payment to reactivate their device, or sign up for a weekly payment of roughly $1-$2 until they pay it off (in usually under a year).

Angaza’s initial target region is West Africa, where a majority of adults own mobile devices. USAID is funding Angaza’s field research on the PAYG system in rural Tanzania. Angaza will also be partnering with SunnyMoney, the top distributor of pico-solar products in Africa. Angaza collects a percentage of transaction fees as well as licensing fees from manufacturing companies that use its embedded technology.

CEO Lesley Marincola completed her B.S. and M.S. at in Product Design and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, then went on to work on Amazon Kindle’s design team.

Article via TechCrunch and USAID, 23 October 2015

Photo: Solar Energy via itstonyhaha [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Legal advice now available online for small business owners

October 21, 2015 Shelby Bice Leave a comment Business

A collaboration between the American Bar Association and Rocket Lawyer had led to a new program being launched that allows small business owners to get access to legal advice more easily. The program, called ABA Law Connect, has begun testing in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and California. It uses Rocket Lawyer’s cloud-computing software to create a program that allows business owners to post a legal question for a small fee. The question, and a follow-up question, if desired, are answered by lawyers who members of the American Bar Association in good standing. Then, if the small business owner is pleased with the responses, they can establish a working relationship with the lawyer that answered their questions. In this way, both sides are benefited: lawyers have access to larger number of potential clients, and small business owners can receive legal advice promptly and cheaply.

This is simply one example of the ways that the American Bar Association is trying to make legal services more accessible, a goal that Rocket Lawyer also shares. The CEO and founder of Rocket Lawyer, Charley Moore, explains that he wanted his company to “leverage technology in order to bring quality and affordable legal services to small businesses”. Though ABA Law Connect is still a pilot program, hopefully it will made more widely available in the future.

Article via ABA Journal, October 1, 2015

Photo: Heine Brothers Coffee via Independent We Stand [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

UNICEF and Target make fitness bands for kids

October 15, 2015 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Human Rights, Tech

UNICEF has teamed up with Target to offer fitness bands for children, in an effort to tackle American childhood obesity and global malnutrition. The partnership is part of the UNICEF Kid Power program, an expansion of a successful pilot program in Boston, Dallas, and New York earlier this year. During the pilot in March of 2015, 12,000 students from the three cities walked 500,000 miles, inciting UNICEF to donate nearly 200,000 therapeutic food packets to children in developing countries.

The fitness bands connect to a mobile app that presents fitness challenge goals and provides information on other cultures. Points given for completing challenges are redeemed for life-saving therapeutic food packets that UNICEF delivers to families with malnourished children globally.

Target now sells the wristbands online for $39.99. Each wristband sold before Dec. 31 of next year donates $10 to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. The wristbands will be sold in select stores in 2016.

The program was originally inspired by alarming parallel statistics: 1 in 4 children in the U.S. are underactive, and more dramatically, 1 in 4 children in the world are malnourished. Carl Stern, president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, says, “first and foremost, I’m a mom. I cannot imagine the heartbreak of being a mom who can’t feed her children … In the year 2015, we should be able to make sure that all children get a meal.”

Article via Mashable, 13 October 2015

Photo: Omloop Grolloo 2010 via Martin Borgman [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Lawyers should wipe smartphones after use

October 9, 2015 Astrid Countee Leave a comment Business, Ethics, Privacy, Security

Lawyers, like everyone else, have been quick to adapt to use of smartphones for business use. Having a little computer in your  pocket that is attached to the internet makes it easy for lawyers to reach and respond to clients and keep up with industry news. Law firms have become dependent on this technology and as a result smartphones have become a ubiquitous device. Since the time of the reign of blackberry, lawyers have been handed smartphones for company use on a regular basis.

But what is happening to these phones once the firms are done with them? More specifically, what is happening to all the client data that is collected on these phones while they were in use? Large firms usually have an enterprise solution for handling old smartphones. But it is less likely that the same is the case with smaller firms.

A recent study by the Blanco Technology Group revealed that data is sometimes left behind on second hand devices. They found that one-third of discarded smartphones had residual data left on them. Of the mobile devices with residual data, over half was left there after an attempted deletion. This means that even for those who were trying to protect their data by deleting it, they were unsuccessful and did not realize it.

For lawyers, this type of liability can make the stakes much higher. Possibly leaving confidential client information on a device can be extremely detrimental. This means that law firms, large and small, will need to take extra steps to make sure that their mobile devices are wiped clean. This includes not just smartphones, but also tablets and hard drives as well.

Lawyers will need to upgrade their tech savvy to make sure that their data and their clients stay safe.

Article via Above The Law, 8 October 2015

Photo: The iphone 4 via Jorge Quinteros [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]