Breaking News Online by Van Poppel

Pada September 2007, remaja 17 tahun di Belanda van Poppel mulai membuka news aggregation disebut Breaking News Online. Hanya dalam satu bulan, situs itu langsung terkenal sebagai penjual video Osama Bin Laden.

Kisah menjual rekaman Bin Laden kepada kantor berita Reuters itu hanya salah satu kesuksesan Breaking News Online (BNO). Situs aggregator yang mengumpulkan berita-berita penting dari berbagai media dan menyampaikan pada penggunanya itu terbukti sukses.

Breaking News Online dinilai mampu menemukan dan menyebarkan berita lebih cepat dibandingkan media besar. BNO terbukti memiliki user lebih banyak dibandingkan media lain.

Situs itu sangat popular di jejaring sosial Twitter dengan pengikut empat kali lebih banyak dari media besar ABC News, serta dua kali lebih banyak dari Newsweek. BNO secara intensif menyebarkan berita lewat RSS, email, FriendFeed dan sebentar lagi merambah ke iPhone app.

Kesuksesan BNO ini mengubah peta distribusi media. BNO bisa sukses berkat infrastruktur riset yang efisien, penilaian editorial berkualitas tinggi serta pembangunan channel distribusi yang berbeda. Tak hanya mengumpulkan berita secara asal-asalan, BNO juga mempekerjakan editor berita di AS, Irlandia dan Mexico.

im itu mengawasi update berita, memilih berita yang akan menjadi besar berdasarkan pengalaman jurnalistik, serta menyebarkan berita itu ke berbagai chanel distribusi. Selain lewat email, link berita terhangat dikirim melalui RSS, serta lewat situs jejaring yang sedang booming Twitter.

Pengamat blog Mike Bracco dalam The Next Web today menuliskan berbeda dengan pesaing mainstream lainnya, BNO berhasil karena hanya menyediakan berita dalam kategori breaking news. Layanan itu bahkan mampu melaporkan berita 10-15 menit lebih cepat dari website utama atau blog, juga sebelum dilaporkan oleh TV.

“Dalam permainan berita pada saat ini, yang terbaik dan tercepat dalam hitungan menit adalah sebagai pemenang. BNO mampu memenangkan game dengan update berita paling cepat,” katanya.

Kini BNO ingin mengumpulkan uang dari layanan itu dengan menyediakan berita di iPhone. BNO app di iPhone akan dijual US$ 1,99 dan akan menarik biaya langganan 99% per bulan bagi user yang ingin mendapat update breaking news.

Apakah akan sukses? Media Huffington Post yang sangat popular sanksi dengan model bisnis itu. Ariana Huffington mengatakan biasa mengirim berita pada jutaan pembacanya, namun belum tahu cara menjadikan trafik tinggi itu untuk menghasilkan uang.

BNO coba mencari uang dari usahanya melakukan riset berita, pemilihan editorial, pendistribusian dan memberikan link konten milik orang lain. Jika BNO sukses, maka akan menjadi ancaman bagi pemilik asli berita itu, karena mendapatkan uang hanya dengan mengirim link berita milik orang lain.

Perusahaan itu mengatakan tidak berniat sebagai aggregator selamanya. BNO akan membuat berita sendiri saat perusahaan makin berkembang. Apakah BNO akan membuat kejutan lagi? Internet bekembang pesat, akan menjadi sesuatu yang luar biasa karena BNO diprakarsai oleh remaja 17 tahun.

Management : Giving Power to the People

'Empowered' people have moved to front-stage in the rhetoric of management. Rhetoric is also being matched by action, to judge by anecdotal reports and management surveys. One of the latter, for example, found that 56% of the British managers questioned were planning to empower their employees. But such statistics are not as encouraging as they seem. Clearly, well over half the companies concerned had not yet introduced whatever they meant by 'empowerment' They are far behind their times. It's a very old idea that employees work more effectively when allowed to use their brains, not just their hands. The problem lies in giving deeper practical meaning to the concept. Rob and Margaret Brown, the authors of Empowered!, illustrate the difficulty with the very sub-title of the book: 'A practical guide to leadership in the liberated organisation'. The issue isn't only personal, a matter of the manager-managed relationship, but deeply organisational.
n the authors' definition, 'empowerment' isn't just a matter of delegating job authority to the job-holders. It means that 'everyone can take action to enhance his or her work, either in personal or organisational terms'. Instead of the traditional bureaucracy, with its emphasis on control, standardisation and obedience, Brown-blessed empowerment can only thrive in the liberated surround of innovation, flexibility, commitment, zero defects and continuous improvement.

The Browns are by no means alone in calling for both new kinds of company and new breeds of management. They quote copiously from gurus who sing the same song - among them Charles Handy, whose teasingly titled The Empty Raincoat has added to his self-conscious stature as prime prophet of the new economic age. But the gap between the gurus and reality, between prophecy and practice, is even larger than that between the rhetoric and reality of empowerment.

The latter is coming to pass, anyway, not because of preaching, but through practical necessity. Service has become the increasingly decisive means of differentiation in the market place, just as innovation has become central to having a market at all. Since the winning difference in service and ideas can only be delivered by individuals able to act on their own initiative, the much-trumpeted 'customer focus' must mean empowerment. Employees working to rule won't provide the vital edge.

That's why Hal F. Rosenbluth provocatively entitles his book The Customer Comes Second. His global business is entirely founded on service-travel management. Operating on a mixture of business nous, experiment, reading and humane instincts, he has built remarkable commercial success round his people principles. The approach is no different in kind from his imaginative use of IT. Rosenbluth saw that unique software could cut his costs, give him competitive advantage, improve customer service and generally reduce defects. He has exactly the same motives in mobilising, to the best of his and their ability, the talents of the Rosenbluth employees.

The self-interest of the boss and the economic interests of the firm thus supply the joint key to empowerment, which is itself an unfortunate word. It suggests that power belonging to somebody else - above all, higher management - is being handed down to people who would otherwise be powerless. The actuality is that organisations, often unwittingly, sometimes deliberately, impede people's efforts and ability to improve their performance. The paramount task is not to empower, but to enable. And there's the rub.

Most managers come from order-and-obey or command-and-control cultures. The Browns, in contrast, would plunge management into unfamiliar waters, in which employees have 'not just the right but the duty to appraise your boss'; in which it can no longer be presumed that 'the professional knows best'; in which 'information, knowledge and decision-making (and therefore power)' are distributed 'by using the technical capacity of modern information technology.'

The authors advocate these and other liberation characteristics in a very direct, convincing and approachable manner. But the attributes are so far from current practice that you can understand why management practitioners pay lip-service, rather than service, to empowerment. The Browns so passionately espouse the cause that they sometimes appear to believe in perfection. They should hearken to Handy: 'I no longer believe in a Theory of Everything, or in the possibility of perfection.' Pragmatists won't easily embrace the book's 'goals of empowerment', which hold that people should:

• understand and feel good about themselves
• relate to each other with empathy and respect
• give voluntary agreement to the rules and structures that govern their lives
• have sufficient resources (of knowledge, training, authority, time, tools, support, etc. as well as money) to be able to contribute all the value they can to their chosen roles.

Not that the book is impractical. On the contrary, it provides relevant (if over-familiar) cases, coherent advice and pertinent questions (in so-called 'workshop' boxes). It advances logically and intelligently through the liberation stages of redistributing control, organisational learning and 'making it happen' to reach 'empowering people' and 'the skills of empowerment'. Yet managers will probably respond less readily to this preaching than to Rosenbluth's extended parable of a business which achieves 96% client retention by living the belief that 'companies must put their people - not the customers - first.'

Here the rhetoric translates into a series of heterodox actions: 'A lot of people never get to see their company's headquarters. They may never meet the top officers of the company. Here, they do both on day one.' Typically, though reservations are automated by an IT system named PRECISION. This isn't exclusive to an all-powerful IT centre: 'focus groups of future users designed what they wanted it to do', while 'an evaluation mechanism' allows reservationists to suggest enhancements while the program is actually in use.

Paying people handsomely for 100% error-free performance, so Rosenbluth found (to his delighted surprise), reduced operating costs by 4%. He taps employee power wherever he can. 'Time teams' are set to 'scrutinise every procedure, process and program to answer three burning questions: (1) 'Why do we do this?' (2) 'Do we need to do it at all?' (3) 'If so, how can we do it better?' In this hard-driving environment, however, niceness is all. A profiling study of reservationists showed that the correlation between excellence in tasks and people skills was 'incredibly high'; the data, writes Rosenbluth, 'support our belief that nice people do a better job'.

This fascinating case emphasises, first, that the path to 'empowerment' leads through specific behaviours: and second, that you can serve both God and Mammon. That thought is central to Handy's philosophy. Left to themselves, he writes, today's economic forces will drive society towards 'good jobs, expensive jobs, productive jobs, but much fewer of them.' What 'makes good corporate sense' is worse than nonsense for those left outside the privileged circle, stranded by the collapse of the old economic system.

You can't empower a worker who hasn't got any work. From inside the circle, an East German quoted by Handy bemoans the passing of the four Fs ('family and friends, festivals and fun') in favour of the four Ps ('profit and performance, pay and productivity'). The Browns and Rosenbluth, however, would argue that the Fs and the Ps can be combined in the liberated or people-first organisation: Handy agrees on its form, pointing to today's common division into 'project teams, task-forces, small business units, clusters and work groups - smart words for doughnuts.'

Doughnut is itself Handy's smart word for companies which have 'their essential core...which is surrounded by an open flexible space which they fill with flexible workers and flexible supply contracts.' These workers are by definition empowered: they are sub-contractors, purchased for their full range of abilities and placed in environments where they can deploy those skills to the fullest advantage of internal and external customers alike. They may sometime look like full-timers: but their time, like their talent, is theirs to command. Many will have 'portfolios' of different jobs.

As Handy points out, 'technology enables more and more people to go portfolio.' That presumably means information technology, which doesn't feature in his index. Nor do networks, personal computing, the Internet, virtual reality, Intel, etc.,etc. A mid-Nineties book that aims to 'make sense of the future' oddly ignores the very tools and systems that will enable that future. Without them, the 'doughnut' corporation will never work: IT's relentless speed of change, moreover, must change the nature of the corporation and empowerment in ways that can already be observed, but not extrapolated.

Where Rosenbluth and the Browns are exhilarated by the potential for new forms of work and organisation, Handy often sounds somewhat glum. Writing of a world where 'To wait for a leader to guide us into the future is to be forever disillusioned', he ends with this downbeat message: 'It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.' The thrust of empowerment comes from the belief that the fires can be large and the darkness banished by the ability of human beings, working fully together, to transcend their individual limitations. Pragmatic optimism makes 4P ecomomic miracles with 4F humans.

by Robert Heller

A Check List for Success

A millionaire reader once told me that he had built up his eminently successful business by following these dozen points from my 1980 book, The Business of Winning:

• Improve basic efficiency – all the time
• Think as simply and directly as possible about what you’re doing and why
• Behave towards others as you wish them to behave towards you
• Evaluate each business and business opportunity with all the objective facts and logic you can muster
• Concentrate on what you do well
• Ask questions ceaselessly about your performance, your markets, your objectives
• Make money; if you don’t you can’t do anything else
• Economise, because doing the most with the least is the name of the game
• Flatten the company, so authority is spread over many people
• Admit to your failings and shortcomings, because only then will you be able to improve on them
• Share the benefits of success widely among those who helped to achieve it
• Tighten up the organisation wherever and whenever you can – because success tends to breed slackness

You’ll see that the Clean Dozen form an acronym – IT BECAME FAST. And even after a quarter of a century I wouldn’t change a word or a thought. Follow these precepts, and you have every hope of becoming a fast-moving leader.

Robert Heller: a check list for success

Foton View XLC

PT Foton Mobilindo (FM) sebagai pemegang merek kendaraan Foton di Indonesia akhirnya meluncurkan View XLC di gelaran Indonesia Internasional Motor Show (IIMS) 2009.

Multi Purpose Vehicle (MPV) ekstra besar tersebut ditawarkan dengan harga yang cukup 'miring'.

Ada tiga tipe yang ditawarkan FM untuk Foton View XLC yakni Tarvel dengan harga jual Rp225 juta, tipe Family yang dilepas Rp235 juta, dan Executive yang dibanderol Rp 245 juta.

"Dengan fitur yang bisa bersaing dengan kompetitor dari Jepang dan harga yang sangat kompetitif kami yakin View bisa diterima pasar Indonesia, sebab di negara asalnya mobil ini begitu populer," papar Director Sales and Marketing FM Frans C. Harsono di sela peluncuran Foton View di JIExpo Kemayoran, Jakarta, Jumat (24/7/2009).

Foton View XLC merupakan MPV berkapasitas 12 penumpang yang menggunakan mesin turbo diesel 4JB1 2.8 Liter sebagai sumber tenaganya yang mampu menghasilkan daya 91 hp pada 3.600 rpm dengan torsi maksimum 202 Nm pada 2.200 rpm.

Kehadiran Foton View XLC semakin meramaikan persaingan pasar di kelas ini, sangat jelas market yang dituju yaitu Market Travel yang terus bertumbuh denga baik di Indonesia dan perusahaan-perusahaan transportasi besar yang menyediakan kendaraan wisata. Foton View XLC akan head to head dengan KIA Travelo dan Isuzu Mikro Bus yang berasal dari Isuzu NKR 55. Akankah Foton View XLC mampu bersaing ?,

Perolehan Kursi Berdasar Keputusan KPU, MK, dan MA

Perolehan kursi yang ditetapkan Komisi Pemilihan Umum (KPU) terpaksa diubah 2 kali akibat adanya putusan Mahkamah Konstitusi (MK) dan Mahkamah Agung (MA). Putusan MK mengubah perolehan kursi hasil penghitungan tahap ketiga, sedangkan putusan MA mengubah kursi hasil penghitungan tahap kedua.

Putusan MK berkaitan dengan sisa suara parpol di dapil yang ditarik ke provinsi pada penghitungan tahap ketiga. Dalam keputusan KPU, hanya sisa suara dari dapil yang masih memiliki sisa kursi saja yang ditarik ke provinsi. Sedangkan dalam putusan MK, sisa suara yang ditarik ke provinsi adalah dari seluruh dapil, baik dapil itu masih memiliki sisa kursi atau tidak.

Adapun putusan MA terkait sisa suara parpol di tahap kedua. Dalam keputusan KPU, parpol yang telah memperoleh kursi di penghitungan tahap pertama hanya bisa menyertakan sisa suaranya untuk penghitungan tahap kedua. Sedangkan dalam putusan MA, parpol yang telah mendapat kursi di tahap pertama itu bisa menyertakan seluruh suara aslinya, bukan hanya suara sisa.

Baik putusan MK maupun MA mengubah konstelasi perolehan kursi tiap parpol. Namun hingga kini baik putusan MK maupun MA belum ditindaklanjuti oleh KPU. Berikut perbandingannya berdasarkan penghitungan yang dilakukan Center for Electoral Reform (Cetro) yang diterima detikcom, Sabtu (24/7/2009):

Keputusan KPU :
Hanura 18
Gerindra 26
PKS 57
PAN 43
PKB 27
Golkar 107
PPP 37
PDIP 95
PD 150

Putusan MK :
Hanura 16
Gerindra 26
PKS 57
PAN 46
PKB 28
Golkar 106
PPP 37
PDIP 95
PD 149

Putusan MA :
Hanura 6
Gerindra 10
PKS 50
PAN 28
PKB 29
Golkar 125
PPP 21
PDIP 111
PD 180

Perubahan perolehan kursi DPR pada pemilu kali ini semakin membuat rakyat bingung dan sangat tidak tertarik pada situasi saat ini, ini menandakan ketidakmampuan KPU sebagai penyelenggaran Pemilu 2009 dan menjadi catatan yang kurang baik bagi pemerintah yang berkuasa. Kenapa jadi semakin ruwet ya ?, apakah pasca keputusan MA ini, partai-partai yang merasa dirugikan tidak akan melakukan upaya hukum lainnya ? dan sampai kapan berakhir ?

Review BenQ Joybook Lite U121 Eco

BenQ Joybook Lite U121 Eco yang begitu mungil dan gaya. Apalagi ia juga menyimpan berbagai fungsi yang bisa menyokong aktivitas sehari-hari, seperti berselancar internet, untuk sekadar mengakses jejaring sosial favorit, atau malah mengerjakan tugas kuliah maupun pekerjaan kantor.

Joybook Lite U121 Eco, memudahkan dan tidak memberatkan, karena berbobot yang ringan dan hemat listrik. "Dengan berat 1,5 kg, netbook ini cukup ringan dan memudahkan pekerjaan Anda kapan saja dan di mana saja," kata Oki Widjaja, Presiden Direktur PT. Galva Technologies di acara BenQ Indonesia Dealers Gathering, Bali 19- 21 Juli lalu.

Mungil, Stylish dan Ramah Lingkungan, Hanya dengan berat 1,5 kg, netbook ini cukup ringan dan memudahkan pekerjaan Anda.

Dengan layar 11,6 inci beresolusi 1366x768 dengan rasio 16:9, bekerja di komputer mungil ini tak seperti bekerja di sebuah netbook. Terlebih lagi, ia didukung dengan keluaran HDMI dan kapasitas penyimpanan yang besar mulai dari hard disk 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB, hingga 500 GB. Cukup untuk menyimpan dan menonton video beresolusi tinggi.

Netbook ini diotaki oleh prosesor Intel Atom Z520 berkecepatan 1.33GHz. Baterai enam sel membuat PC ini berdaya tahan hingga delapan jam. Bila pengguna merasa kurang dengan memori RAM DDR2 sebesar 1 GB, pengguna bisa mengupgrade-nya hingga 2GB.

Selain penyimpanan hard disk, netbook ini juga bisa menggunakan solid state drive dengan ukuran bervariasi, 8 GB, 16 GB, dan 32 GB. Ia juga disertai dengan konektivitas WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 serta modem mobile broadband HSUPA opsional.

Netbook yang tersedia dalam dua pilihan sistem operasi; Windows XP Home dan Linux Lite, juga dilengkapi dengan kamera 1.3-megapiksel. Namun, sekali lagi, yang bisa membuat pengguna tak lagi bisa ke lain hati, yakni desainnya yang stylish dan tersedia dalam beberapa warna. Yakni biru juga putih.

Indonesian Vehicle Sales Projected to Rise at Least 11% in 2010

Domestic car and motorcycle manufacturers revised their sales targets for the next 18 months as the Indonesian International Motor Show kicked off in Jakarta on Friday.

Although sales of new vehicles have fallen sharply this year, analysts believe they will rise more than 11 percent in 2010, said Bambang Trisulo, chairman of the Indonesian Automotive Industry Association (Gaikindo).

He said nationwide vehicle sales may exceed 500,000 units in 2010, up from an estimated total of 450,000 this year — a 25 percent decline from 2008.

Gaikindo had earlier reported that vehicle sales rose 10 percent month-on-month in June.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian Motorcycle Industry Association (AISI) said on Friday that it had raised its industry sales forecast this year, to a decline of less than 20 percent, from an earlier projected drop of 40 percent.

“We had expected up to a 40 percent drop in sales, but the recovery has been faster and better than what we’d expected,” Gunadi Sindhuwinata, the chairman of the motorcycle association, said on Friday.

“I now expect sales to drop less than 20 percent.” Bloomberg, JG