Corrections or additions?
These articles were prepared for the November 15, 2000 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
For Writers, New Blocks
For most people writing home to mom and dad is a writing
challenge in itself. Professional writers working in the new interactive
media can find plenty of variations on the old writers’ block: How
will their words play out — in print, video, graphics, and animation?
The Princeton chapter of Moving Image Professionals assembles a panel
on Wednesday, November 15, to sort out the issues in this new medium.
As the press release asks, "Is there one tried and true way to
structure content and write for interactive media?"
The meeting will be Wednesday, November 15, beginning with dinner
at 6:30 p.m. at the Olive Garden restaurant on Route 1 in Lawrenceville.
The presentation starts at 7:15 p.m. For directions, visit www.movingimage.org.
Or call Dennis Nobile, president of Moving Image Professionals,
at 609-716-1737. Free admission for MIP/ITVA members; others are $10.
On the panel: John Loven, who designed his first interactive
program for Strawbridge and Clothier stores in 1983 and since then
has produced or designed more than 160 interactive multimedia programs;
Victor Davis, who began his career in video, at NBC and NJN,
and then became a corporate video producer for such companies as GE,
Unisys and Lucent; Lena Lattanzi, an interactive industry veteran
with experience in program development, graphic design, project management,
and instructional design; and Robert Gengerke, whose New York-based
firm, Magic Box Communications, produces interactive programs for
training, public relations, and trade shows.
The moderator: Andy Kienzle, director of content solutions for
RAC Productions at 182 Nassau Street.
Among the topics on the agenda:
Key differences between writing for interactive media and print, video,
live presentations; steps for organizing content; how much technical
knowledge of programming is required to write effectively; challenges
in recasting information from other media; differences between CD-ROMs
and websites; and elements that make websites effective.
Thursday, November 16
Top Of Page
Legal Rights
On the Internet
In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. That’s why
it’s important to know where you stand legally when you start to do
business on the Internet. Attorney Richard Ravin, head of the
E-Commerce and Intellectual Property Group of the law firm of Hartman
& Winnicki in Paramus, speaks to the issue of "The Internet, the
Law and Your Legal Rights," at a free seminar sponsored by the
New Jersey State Bar Foundation, the educational and philanthropic
arm of the New Jersey State Bar Association.
The seminar will be held Thursday, November 16, from 7 to 9 p.m. at
the New Jersey Law Center, off Ryder Lane, in New Brunswick. Woodbury
attorney Allan Richardson and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott
Christie will also be featured. Advanced registration is required.
To register, call 1-800-FREE-LAW, or go to www.njsbf.org.
Ravin has been interested in E-law for several years. "I had been
practicing commercial law for many years, and then I personally discovered
the Internet around 1995," he says. "I realized that this
was where business was headed, and that in order to practice business
law I needed to learn as much as possible about Internet law. Before
long I was giving the seminars and representing clients with various
Internet issues. Now it’s the majority of my practice."
Ravin is a graduate of Syracuse University and the Newhouse School
of Public Communications, and took his law degree at Nova Southeastern
University School of Law. He is currently the co-chair of the Internet
law Committee of the New York Bar Association’s Intellectual Property
Law Section. He is also a member of the New Jersey State Bar Association’s
Intellectual Property Law Section and lectures for the New Jersey
Institute for Continuing Legal Education, the Venture Association
of New Jersey, and the New York State Bar Association. He has written
many articles on Internet law.
Ravin defines E-commerce as "doing business electronically: communicating
electronically, advertising electronically, entering into contracts
electronically — that’s that area that is going to develop over
the next few years. But one cannot and should not think about E-commerce
without thinking about privacy concerns, database security, and database
privacy." Ravin lists several areas that are of prime importance
to anyone doing business on the Internet:
wish to control your website and domain name, it’s very important
to know that the contents and inventions that come out of your website
may not belong to you. If you hire a website designer and you do not
exercise control over the content, the ownership of the copyright
can fall to the designer or subcontractor.
agreements provide that the franchisee has the right to exclusively
advertise in a particular area; a retail franchise will normally get
geographic exclusivity. But with the Internet, if one franchise goes
on the web, he could be invading other franchisers’ territory. And
what if the franchiser sells retail on its website? Many of these
franchise arrangements existed before anyone thought of the Internet,
and the courts are in the procedure of sorting it out.
in two categories: referring sites and referred sites. If you link
to another site, and that site has engaged in copyright infringement,
you could be liable for copyright infringement too. The same is true
of defamatory statements.
In the same way, framing can be problematic. Framing is the process
of sending people to a linked site by framing the original site so
that the viewer never really leaves it while looking at the referred
site. However, the referring site can now be considered as a publisher,
and liable for claims and statements made on the referred site. And
if the referring site, by the framing process, is blocking out advertisements
from the second site, the first site could be liable. Deep linking
(linking deep into another site and bypassing the main page) could
also bypass disclaimers and terms for services.
1, says that any notice (an eviction, for example) which legally has
to be in writing can now be given electronically. The law is vague
and leaves the courts to determine what constitutes reasonable notice,
verification of a delivered notice, and other ramifications. There
are exceptions — wills, for example, cannot be E-mailed.
the world will go the way of the European Union Privacy Directive.
That directive states that before collectors of data use any personal
information (name, phone, habits) collected on the Internet, they
must disclose to the subject what the information is to be used for,
and must get permission to use it. This directive specifically excludes
telling people that they are giving permission by not saying no —
they must specifically say yes. No country in the European Union can
export data to a country without proof that the other nation has as
stringent protection as this. Ravin believes that there will be similar
laws set up in the U.S., so you might as well set up your website
now to reflect this trend.
An Ohio viewer clicks to a New Jersey website via a Pennsylvania server.
Whose law applies? That partly depends how interactive the website
is. Is it a passive website? Is the customer entering into agreements,
submitting purchase orders, or using a credit card number?
says Ravin. Just don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in the bricks and
mortar world. "People think that because the Internet is free
and open territory they can say and do what they want. It’s just not
true. Copyright infringement, bulletin board libel, harassment by
spammimg — they’ll all get you into trouble; and you in your turn
are protected against them. Just like in the real world."
— David McDonough
Friday, November 17
Top Of Page
Taking a New Measure
For Business Success
The game has changed. The way people are managed is
a much greater source of competitive advantage than ever before,"
says Mark A. Huselid, associate professor of human resource
management in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
Though human resources departments have moved into the 21st century,
says Huselid, accounting finance departments are stuck in the 19th
century: "The way firms measure and report what they are doing
is linked to a measurement system invented 150 years ago. For an industrial
age company, conventional metrics work great, but for a new software
startup, they don’t."
Huselid will give a class entitled "The HRM Scorecard: Criteria
for `Valuation’ of Your HRM Assets," on Friday, November 17, from
8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Rutgers Center for Management Development
on Rockafeller Road. This lecture is third in the Human Resources
"Hot Topic Faculty Speaker" fall series. Cost: $375 including
breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon networking session. Register at
732-445-5526 or call Bonnie Westbrook at 732-445-5448. The next
session in the series is attorney Barbara A. Lee, dean of the
School of Management and Labor Relations, speaking on "Managing
Organizational Liability and Reducing Exposure in Handling Whistleblowers"
on Friday, December 8.
Huselid’s book "The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and
Performance," has been co-authored by Brian Becker of SUNY
Buffalo and David Ulrich of the University of Michigan and is
due out in March from the Harvard Business School Press. He also edits
the Human Resource Management Journal (www.rci.rutgers.edu/~huselid).
A graduate of California State at Fresno, Class of ’86, Huselid has
two master’s degrees from Kansas State, and a PhD from SUNY Buffalo.
His parents were entrepreneurs with a parts distribution business,
and he himself ran a machine shop for eight years. He is also an avid
drag racer and though he has curtailed his racing career, he is even
now building a car. He and his wife, a professor at Hunter College,
live in Princeton Junction and have two preschool children.
Organizational number-crunchers realized 10 years ago that their metrics
could only tell what did happen, says Huselid, and that they couldn’t
tell what is going to happen. They began to try to measure
intangibles: How does HR create value? What is it, where is it, and
how can we measure it? "We are developing measurement systems
to track that. We are extending the idea that intangibles and people
matter."
Then in 1996 Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
up with some answers in the best selling business book, "The Balanced
Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action" (Harvard Business
School Press, $29.95). Even now this book is in the top 400 best-selling
books of Amazon.com and the authors’ follow-up title ("The Strategy-Focused
Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business
Environment," September, 2000) is in the top 100 sellers on Amazon.
Huselid explains the concept. "If you are an R&D company and you
know that one of the key drivers of your success is cycle time for
new products, our approach would ask, What are the HR types of things
that could drive cycle time?"
These factors are not generic to every company, Huselid says. "The
hard part is deciding what creates value, getting a sense of what
things you need to do to drive business success." Once you get
answers on what the key factors are, then you need to collect the
data and figure out how to present that data to the management team.
At an R&D company, for example, the driving factors might be attracting
and retaining talent, promoting workers quickly, giving workers cross
training so they don’t leave, and offering incentives for them to
stay.
For another company, the crucial factor might be to help employees
know where they fit in the organizations. "How employees understand
their roles and their contribution to the firm’s success — that
is a leading indicator of success," says Huselid.
A factor like understanding roles can be measured by survey data and
monthly random polls, but what the company really needs to do is weave
employee understanding throughout its company culture.
you work for me and meet your goal, that helps me meet my goals).
might key variable pay to the number of new patents generated or the
shortening of product to market cycles.
slough in the early ’90s. "They spent money going through the
conventional mission statements and it didn’t change anybody’s behavior,"
says Huselid. "Then officers went to the stores and asked the
employees `What’s your job.’"
They were dismayed by the standard answer: "We’re trying to protect
the company’s assets." In other words, the salespeople were putting
their energy into preventing shoplifting, not boosting sales.
Executives then asked the salespeople how much the company kept out
of every dollar spent in the stores. The usual answer was 40 cents,
but the real answer is closer to two cents. In other words, they had
a very low level of understanding what they were supposed to be doing.
At that point Arthur Martinez, the CEO, and Tony Rucci
who was senior vice president of PR, developed a measurement system,
not only to help employees understand the system but to track their
progress. They used a learning map, a 4-by-6 foot graphical representation
of key business problems. For cash flow, for instance, they used an
illustration of water flowing from a faucet.
Rucci is no longer with Sears, but the results of this strategy made
business history. As Kaplan & Norton say in their newest book, "Measurement
creates focus for the future because the measures chosen by managers
communicate to the organization what is important."
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