Steve Osborne’s article, Ultimate Note-Taking: Capture Text, Audio and Visual Notes, provides some good pointers on taking good notes using audio, images, and handwritten notes.
Archive for June, 2008
The French have a reputation for aggressive intelligence operations to support their economic and industrial needs. They are acting in their own interests, as Charles de Gaulle said, “The French do not have friends. We French have interests.” . Their actions have a historical precedent as you can see from some of the previous articles about the French during the Industrial Revolution. A review of recent history further explains the French approach to Competitive Intelligence.
Working from Home
More than a decade ago I fired the employees and got rid of the office downtown. Computer and telecommunication technology makes the “office” a nearly obsolete concept for many information workers.
Why I work from home:
- I only have to correct my own mistakes
- I can play jazz, Beethoven, or blast out Eye of the Tiger –nobody cares!
- No commute, no huge gas & parking bills
- I can get to work early, or not
- I can work late, or not
- I can use Dovorak on a QWERTY keyboard — nobody cares!
If you need to interview current or former employees of a company for competitive intelligence or investigative purposes, then Google is the first resource to consult.
This simple search will help you find employees of a given company:
Acme Company “employed by” OR “work for”
This might be tedious to sort through the results as ” work for” may turn up a lot of irrelevant hits. Try this with IBM as the company name and you will see what I mean.
To find references to a person’s employment try this:
“john smith” “employed by” OR “work for”
With either of these searches you might want to add a country, province, or city to limit the number of hits returned.
Tamara Thompson’s excellent article on gathering information about university students in the USA illustrates how a real researcher goes about doing what some call a Deep Web Search.
The last link in the article shows how to find student directories at US and Australian universities. In Canada, a Google search for intitle:student inurl:directory site:ca seems to work best.
An excellent article at Knowledge Is Power about using a blog to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about competitors and manage the spin on news about its rivals while usually reporting positively about your own employer.
Another post about Black PR defines this as distinct from a disinformation campaign.
By now you have heard of the secret intelligence files left on a commuter train in England.
Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee told the BBC: “Such confidential documents should be locked away…they should not be read on trains.”
This should be a reminder to the private sector regarding trade secrets.
Trade Secrets
A trade secret is not protected by a Patent, Trademark, or Industrial Design. A trade secret is confidential and proprietary information that you protect because of its commercial value and the competitive advantage that it produces for your company.
Competitive Intelligence
Exposing a trade secret in public by working on a critical document on an airplane, leaving a trade secret on a commuter train, or exposing it in an proposal, may eliminate the confidential nature of the data, and once you do that, you have, by definition, given up protecting it, therefore, it is not a trade secret that you can claim as proprietary — your former trade secret moves into the public domain for all to see and use.
As a competitive intelligence practitioner, I often find former trade secrets loose in the public domain due to irresponsible security practices. If the owner does not protect the trade secret, it ceases to be confidential and proprietary data, and is likely to become somebody else’s competitive advantage, or worse still, it might become a standard practice for an entire industry.
B. C. man uses stolen identity to amass $1M
Went By ‘Zino’; Police uncover his crimes when ‘man purse’ stolen
Rob Shaw, Canwest News Service Published: Thursday, June 12, 2008
VICTORIA - For the past 17 years, “Zino” has lived a seemingly ordinary life in Saskatchewan and B. C. By the age of 40, he had bought houses, opened bank accounts and collected credit cards. His real estate holdings across B. C., and more than 14 credit and bank cards, gave him assets and credit in excess of $1-million.
The only problem — “Zino” does not exist…
Mr. Nardi’s real name contained a long history of contacts with police. And so the identity of “Zino” gave him a clean slate from which to travel and accumulate assets unnoticed
The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a self-regulatory body, replaces both the 90 year old Investment Dealers Association and Market Regulations Services Inc. as the single overseer of the integrity of debt and equity trading in Canada.
The Investment Dealers Association the IDA had regulated member firms in the brokerage business as well as fixed-income trading and Market Regulations Services Inc. conducted market surveillance.
Avoid Undue Diligence like the Plague
June 2, 2008
Due diligence is the verification of information given to an investor by a startup in contemplation of a potential investment. Undue diligence, the solicitation of information for competitive reasons…
You are more likely to fall victim to the services of a competitive intelligence expert…
Don’t respond to RFPs unless you are in a commodity business…
This article illustrates how the simple approaches to gathering competitive intelligence data often lead to success even when the target is suspicious of your intent. Sour-grapes and self-pity are no substitute for vigilance and competence. The author of this article did not understand what constitutes a trade secret and a competitive advantage.
Kroll’s sleuths are more Clouseau than Columbo
Inspector Clouseau is alive and well, and he works for Kroll Associates, the corporate spies who are supposed to specialise in finding, and keeping, company secrets.
…in fact, it is so boring that after downloading it I took to reading the ‘metadata’ concealed with the electronic document that tells you who wrote the report, why and when.The results were considerably more interesting than you might imagine. The report’s ‘properties’ field listed three Texas-based oil and gas exploration companies and the names of seven men - none of which has anything to do with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. What is more, the subject line mentioned the term ‘due diligence investigation’, which is corporatespeak for the type of inquiry often carried out by firms like Kroll when a company is considering a takeover.
GooFresh
Google offers a date-based syntax, but you can only access it via the advanced search, which limits your time options, or the date range: syntax, which uses Julian dates and is a bit difficult to use.
Goofresh is a way to search for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.
If you enclose your search terms in square brackets, then Yahoo! will only retrieve pages that have your search terms in that order. The search terms may be anywhere on the page, but the first term will appear before the second and the second before the third, etc..
An example would be [crisis planning]. It returns a document that is entitled Planning for a Crisis. It might seem backward but at the end of the quotation near the top of the page you find “Crisis Management:Planning for the Inevitable (1986)“.
This Google search should find any unsecured web cams: inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=”.
However, you can take this further by adding the site: operator. You could even set-up a Custom Google Search Engine for a group of domains.
This ink is waterproof though it may not seem so at first glance.
This ink will smudge when it first encounters water, but after the surface ink that did no fully bind with the paper washes away, you are left with very black, permanent writing. How much surface ink exists seems to depend on the paper. In Molskine notebooks it smudges a lot, but unlike the Aurora and Jentle inks, the writing remains legible. It smudges less in my police notebooks.
Kiwa-Guro also makes my extra-fine nibs glide across the page as nicely as the silky Aurora ink. This ink will be another ink I will use for a decade or more.
