Deterrence: a remedy for saving elephants from poaching?

Gao Yufang is a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. From September 2012, he started working on a Master’s research project about the policy process of international ivory trade, concentrating on Chinese role in this contentious issue. From May 2013 through January 2014, Gao carried out extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Hong Kong, mainland China, United States, Botswana and Tanzania. He was invited by IUCN and the Government of Botswana to participate as a Youth Ambassador in the African Elephant Summit from 2 – 4 December 2013. The following is a blog article written for Elephants Without Borders who hosted Gao’s stay in Kasane in Northern Botswana.

Gao in Kasane

After the African Elephant Summit in Gaborone, I decided to stay in Botswana to get a glimpse of elephant conservation in this southern Africa country. I thought this could be a supplement to my main fieldwork in East Africa. Many conservationists in Kenya had told me that the situation of elephant poaching and ivory trafficking is very different in Southern Africa. I was keen to see the differences with my own eyes. Luckily, Elephants Without Borders, a promising small conservation group, kindly offered to host my two-week stay in Botswana’s northern town of Kasane.

Kasane lies at the meeting point of four countries: Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Nearby the confluence of the two major rivers of Chobe and Zambezi, this astonishing wild place is home to one of the largest populations of African elephants on the continent. Interestingly, despite the huge elephant population, poaching remains at a low level and ivory trafficking has not yet become a threat. I was curious to know why.

During my limited time there, I held discussions with conservation practitioners, Chinese nationals, hotel managers, craft traders, tourists and ordinary local people. Many reasons for the illicit trade and poaching were brought up: some people talked about the social and political stability in this country, some mentioned the low population and economic prosperity compared with other African countries, while others tried to find answers in the history and geographic location of this nation, or the personalities of its people. Among the many factors raised, I was particularly impressed by one: people’s fear of punishment.

Gao talking with a local trader

As a local craft trader said to me, “if you are involved in these activities, the government will definitely find you and deal with you.” Apparently, they were frightened by the risk of engaging in illegal activities. My local interviewees knew well that the wildlife department, in collaboration with the security, defense and police forces are strictly guarding against poaching and ivory trafficking. And, they knew that they are supposed to report to the authorities on any criminal clues they notice. This fear of punishment also spread among the Chinese nationals. My Chinese interviewees were deterred from smuggling ivory by the severe penalty which, according to them, can be as high as an expulsion from this country and confiscation of all their property here – this risk was simply too much for businessmen like them to bear, not to say that it was already rather difficult to get and maintain a work visa for Botswana.

In the past two years, I saw that international conservation community increasingly place more emphasis on deterrence as a strategy to save the African elephants. Whether deterrence will work or not depends greatly on two factors: the level and the certainty of punishment. It is for sure that the penalty should be high enough so that the risk of engaging in illegal activities exceeds the perceived profit. Equally, if not more important is a high level of certainty of punishment. This means that whoever commits a crime, there is a high probability of being caught and there is no way to get away from the penalties. If the deterrence strategy is to function well, it requires high performance in legislation, enforcement, and judiciary; it also calls for effective intelligence (ie, the reporting system in Botswana) to detect illegal activities at the first place. As well, adequate awareness-raising effort is important in that it spreads knowledge of potential risk (or in other word, spread the fear) in order to garner voluntary compliance.

But deterrence alone is not enough, and it is definitely not a long-term strategy. As the president of Botswana spoke in the African Elephant Summit, “We know that all this could change – and quickly – if incentives to poach increase, or our deterrent capacities decline”.

People tend to behave in ways that they perceive will benefit them in the values they cherish. Deterrence increases the perceived risk of value deprivation: if I do something, I will lose something I care about. In contrast, incentive is about the perceived value indulgence: if I do something, I will gain something I want. Perceived value deprivation and perceived value indulgence are two sides of the equation, both of which should be attended to if we are to secure a long term success. In the value indulgence side, it is important to understand: what the incentive is, where the incentive comes from and how to decrease the incentive for poaching and ivory trafficking while increasing the incentive for conservation.

There is no panacea or simple remedy. Without changing the conditions that cause the current and potential future trends of elephant poaching and trafficking, the problem will not be resolved. To address the issue requires a contextual understanding about the players, their perspectives, and the value dynamics. On the basis of this understanding, coercive and other strategies such as economic, educational and diplomatic ones must be employed collectively. In this way, we may have a good chance of securing our common goal of a viable future for African elephants.

You Can't Spell Big Data Without BI

When I first started attending conferences and meet-ups branded as "Big Data events" some odd years ago, I have to be honest, as a person who tracks business intelligence (BI) technology I felt a bit lost. Hip, new Hadoop-based startups would discuss the latest dot-zero release of Pig Latin, Mahout, and Hive in painful detail, while NoSQL vendors bragged about how many petabytes they could process and store. What was often ignored, however, was a plan on how a mere mortal (i.e. someone who doesn't understand MapReduce, HiveQL, or similar) would actually be able to access, analyze, and draw insights from all of this data in a straightforward manner.

Fast forward to today and I would argue that there has been a change in mentality in the Big Data camp. There is a much more mature and pragmatic look at businesses' needs and wants, as well as a healthy honesty of Hadoop's (and similar Big Data frameworks/platforms) limitations. Most importantly, there seems to be an ongoing goal to converge Big Data and BI technology - something I believe is crucial if we ever want to create real business value out of Big Data.

BI brings home the (Big Data) bacon
In contrast to Big Data, BI is already an integral part of many organizations' fabric. If implemented correctly, BI can empower organizations with data-driven (rather than gut-feel) decision-making. BI's ability to analyze, explore, and deliver business information in a timely and proactive way makes BI more of a "must-have" than a "nice-to-have" in today's tight markets and economy. Being able to just store Big Data, on the other hand, creates zero business value in the present.

The key is to pair Big Data with the right BI tools. One of the more interesting developments in the BI market during the last couple of years has been the addition of visual data discovery tools. These types of visual data-exploration tools allow users to see and discover patterns in large and complex datasets in an intuitive and visually compelling manner and can be low-hanging fruit for BI users who want to dabble with Big Data.

It should be noted that making BI and Big Data mesh together is still a work in progress, but there are some significant trends that point to continued and improved coupling of BI and Big Data technology:

1. BI vendors are scrambling to be 'Big Data ready' (and vice versa) - Big Data is a great opportunity for any BI vendor and every vendor out there is already investing money to be able to grab mind- and marketshare gained from it. But the problem BI vendors have bumped into is that querying something like Hive directly, which is batch-oriented, is not very interactive and can often be unreliable. To bypass this, BI vendors are improving their integration with Hadoop, NoSQL, and NewSQL vendors/technology to better the access to Big Data stores.

2. SQL is the new black - Access to data in Big Data stores has often been coupled with complex querying and processing languages that are read-only and often lack ACID functionality (i.e. lacks transaction reliability). A couple of years ago, if you ever mentioned SQL to a Hadoop or non-relational Big Data vendor they would look at you like you were from a different planet. However, during the last year there has been a change in mentality and SQL is back in vogue amongst Big Data vendors. In particular, interactive SQL on top of non-relational environments seems to be all the rave these days. For BI this means organizations will be able to leverage skills and tools they are already invested in.

3. Realization that non-relational environments will augment, not replace, EDWs - You might have heard that the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is on its deathbed. More than likely these types of statements started at a marketing department at a non-relational Big Data vendor. So please take it with a grain of salt. EDWs will continue to be a good way to deliver structured, reoccurring, and reliable data in a BI environment.

What a non-relational environment can add to the BI stack, however, is the ability for BI users to explore beyond aggregated and structured data sets, adding innovative ways of getting new types of answers and insights with functionality such as active archiving and massive data exploration of raw data. At the end of the day, EDWs and non-relational environments aren't enemies, they are friends and can both be part of an organization's BI architecture.

4. BI startups born in a Big Data era - There is also a fresh wave of innovative BI and analytics startups that were born with one goal in mind: run efficiently on top of Big Data technology. Whereas traditional BI vendors either have to fork its codebase or create a new set of products, these vendors were created ground-up to enable BI users to gain insights from large, complex, and disparate data stored in relational and non-relational environments.

Happy to hear your feedback - are you seeing similar trends? Are your organizations looking to couple Big Data with BI?

What Makes an Entrepreneur Extraordinary?

Being an entrepreneur is tough. Being a successful entrepreneur, even tougher. Lots of people dream of being running their own business and being The Boss but that’s all. They just dream. Maybe dabble a little with a business at some point and give up when it isn’t wildly successful right away. What separates the “also rans” from the extraordinary?

For a good part of my life, I alternated between working for other people and entrepreneurship. Some of my ventures turned out pretty well, others went down in spectacular flames. Those “failures” weren’t much fun, but they opened doors to learning and growth. And to be honest, there were times when I went through those doors kicking and screaming.

For years I’ve studied what makes some entrepreneurs successful while others limp along or throw in the towel. What characteristics are key to passing ordinary on the way to EXTRAORDINARY?

1) A vivid image of where they want to go and what it will be like when they get there. A dream that’s so clear, so compelling that it’s worth the work it takes to achieve it. Coupled with that image is the belief that it’s possible even when facing huge obstacles. They believe in themselves and their dreams.

2) A willingness to try and risk failure. And a willingness to learn from those mistakes. Read the stories of successful people and you’ll find that every single one had setbacks and disappointments. As Michael Jordan, arguably one of the greatest basketball players of all time said, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Henry Ford tried several businesses and went bust five times before establishing the Ford Motor Company. Risking failure, learning from mistakes and trying again -- and again -- and again. That's what makes someone extraordinary.

3) Action-oriented. They’re self-starters who don’t wait for conditions to be perfect before they begin. They don't wait for permission. With a plan in place, they focus on what’s going to move them closer to their goals. Procrastination is fear wrapped up in excuses. Those who achieve their dreams show up every day and do what’s necessary. They understand that small steps, taken consistently, eventually result in success.
Does it take more than just these three traits to be an extraordinary entrepreneur? Yes, and I’ll be writing more about them in the future but without these traits no one can be truly successful.

About the Author: Bonnie Pond, author of The Power of Three: How to Be Happy and Get What You Want in Life (Without Doing Anything Illegal, Immoral, or Unethical) has founded several small businesses. She knows building a company takes hard work and that having a life outside of work often takes a back seat. A double cancer diagnosis a few years ago led to Bonnie's commitment to live like she really means it and make her life count -- and to help others do the same. As the "Live an EXTRAORDINARY Life" expert, she's worked with hundreds of people around the globe focusing on happiness, confidence-building, purpose, overcoming fears and doubts, and action vs. procrastination. In her work as a speaker, author, and host of a weekly radio show, Bonnie shows people how to step up and take their lives from ordinary to EXTRAORDINARY.

Think About It...

The problem of life is not that is too short, is that we wait to long to start living it. 
-- Marc Ford.

Pitbull to Hit 'Today' for Spring Concert

The rapper, who covered The Hollywood Reporter's latest issue, is set to perform on March 31.

 

Miller Mobley

Pitbull is hitting 30 Rock as the latest stop on his media tour.

The rapper, who graced The Hollywood Reporter's latest issue, is set to appear on NBC's Today  on March 31 as part of the morning show's spring concert series. The 33-year-old artist, known for singles "Timber," "International Love" and "Hey Baby," will perform live.

"I fell in love with hip-hop because to me it was therapy," Pitbull told THR. "I could listen to [someone] and go, 'This is happening in his neighborhood, too?' It became my way of getting things off my chest without having to do it physically."

On Twitter, the rapper stated that he'll play "Wild Wild Love" off of his latest album, Global Warming: Meltdown, on Monday.

State of PR: When the Worlds of PR and Publishing Collide

Public relations, unlike marketing, is an industry where your comfort level with and ability to adapt to change is a requirement for success. Unlike other facets of marketing where shifts are slower, PR is dynamic. And it's always favored the quick and the nimble.

Rapid change is a constant in our industry. Part of this is due to the news cycle, which now moves at light speed. However, there are other dynamics at work as well that are only accelerating the pace.

For example, technology has created a far more global environment. There's also been a shift in perception in the C-suite. PR is now seen as more than publicity and a critical link to creating relationships that build or re-build trust.

The biggest changes, however, may be in how people now get their information. This directly impacts how firms like ours, the industry's single largest player, counsel clients in how to promote their brands and also protect their reputations.

My role is to study these content shifts and accelerate our embrace of them. And with this in mind, here are three of the biggest trends impacting the industry:

1) News You Read Differs from News You Say You Read

Social media was just a blip on the media's radar screen when I joined Edelman in 2006. Today, thanks in part to the hockey-stick growth in smartphone usage, it's now a major driver of traffic to news sites. One global media executive I met recently shared that social media now accounts for 50 percent of his traffic.

This, as a result, changes how journalists do their job. They are now expected to not just report the news but to package it in a way that encourages social shares. There's a growing art and science in how to tell stories in a way that elevates the audience's own image and this, studies have shown, can introduce readers to new sources of information that they become loyal to.

Buzzfeed is one of the best examples here. Their infectious mix of listicles and slideshows are irresistibly shareable. But make no mistake – they are the means to discovering the hard-hitting journalism Buzzfeed is also cranking out.

The media are now creating content in two different styles: one built for sharing and another meant for deeper consumption. And this impacts how we, as professional communicators, counsel our clients in the same as the art and science evolve.

2) Every Company Can Be a Media Company

The second important shift is that companies are now growing confident in their ability to go direct to their audience with original content. They're sharing their own stories on their own channels and in their own voice.

Part of this change is, again, due to social media. Over the last seven or eight years, businesses have set up the infrastructure to create compelling content for their digital embassies on social networks. However, it's broader.

There's a renewed interest now in corporate/brand blogs and magazine sites. One of the best examples is Microsoft Stories. (Microsoft is an Edelman client but we didn't work on this project.)

In addition, companies (either on their own or with the help of programs like the Edelman Creative Newsroom) are setting up the means to be always on and always ready with content.

3) Paid, Earned and Owned Content are Colliding

Last, but not by any means least, is the rise of sponsored content or what many call "native advertising."

With revenue pressures only growing, many publishers large and small now allow advertisers to publish their content right next to what's editorial. Or, in other cases, they're partnering with brands to co-produce new content. (We published a report on this topic, which you can find here).

This is a change that's here to stay and it's a real opportunity for the PR industry to lead the charge. It requires a journalistic mindset and a respect for the reader/viewer. This is what the best in PR are known for.

However, importantly, it gives public relations professionals an even more prominent seat at the marketing table. And this will unlock all kinds of new opportunities for growth in PR.

There are many other changes impact our industry. But these are three that are creating the most immediate impact for people at all levels.

9 Small Business Twitter Marketing Examples to Study

Are you debating whether your small business should invest time on Twitter?Do you wonder how Twitter can help your business?
By being an active part of the Twitter community and sharing the right mix of content, you can reach a larger audience, generate more leads and become the go-to source when customers are ready to buy.

In this article I’ll show you how nine small businesses use Twitter to cater to their audiences, find prospects and expand brand recognition.

Why Twitter for Small Businesses?

Twitter has evolved a lot since 2007. It used to be about conversations, but these days some would say it’s just another way to push out marketing messages and links without true engagement with customers.

Twitter is perfect for small businesses. 

I don’t agree. I see a lot of businesses using Twitter to its full potential and cultivating relationships with loyal followers, and those relationships can turn into sales.

Twitter offers businesses of all sizes multiple opportunities to find and convert prospects, but it takes more effort than pushing out scheduled tweets about your products.

It’s worth it to invest the time and resources to develop your presence on Twitter. When you do, you’ll see more growth and loyalty from customers, as well as more sharing, engagement and leads. Consistent conversations go a long way!

The nine small businesses I showcase below show how attention to community and a little creativity make all the difference in reach and company growth.

#1: Use Twitter to Stand Out

It can be tough to be up against big brands. The hospitality business in New York City is a good example—it’s one of the most competitive markets in the industry.

Management at the Roger Smith Hotel, a small boutique hotel in Manhattan, knew they had to find a way to stand out, so they turned to social media marketing.

Reward Twitter followers with special perks.

To get started, hotel management did what a lot of businesses do: They invited key journalists and social media influencers to try out their services. As those influencers took to Twitter to share their experiences, the Roger Smith Hotel got its brand in front of a much larger audience.

The hotel didn’t stop there. The team took that boost and ran with it. Now their Twitter feed is lively with trivia, coupons, pictures of New York City and more. They even give discounts to customers who reserve a room via Twitter and the hotel has a Twitter kiosk in the lobby!

#2: Keep Your Followers Interested

How can a domain registrar and brokerage service like Namecheap attract more than 100,000 Twitter followers? They provide the right mix of business and fun. Trivia and giveaways have always been staples of Namecheap’s Twitter feed.

Updates don’t have to be all business or all fun; bring the two together in your updates.

During Super Bowl XLVIII, Namecheap posted 48 interesting questions related to both the big game and information technology. This kept their fans interested and related to the company’s niche.

#3: Stick With It

If you’re not seeing immediate growth on Twitter, don’t give up. As they say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Houston-based coffee shop Coffee Groundz is a great example of this.

Coffee Groundz has the distinction of being one of the first small businesses to set up shop on Twitter. Instead of being discouraged and writing off Twitter as a waste of time with no ROI, Coffee Groundz kept at it. It took a while, but they managed to get thousands of followers thanks to a steady stream of tweets.

Offer your followers perks.

Coffee Groundz tweets special recipes, promotions, pictures of fancy coffee beverages and interesting tidbits of online conversations. Taking the time to show the company’s personality and build trust has grown Coffee Groundz’ followers to almost 15,000.

#4: Provide a Balance of Work and Fun

Bradbury & Partners is an Atlanta-based executive recruiting firm that focuses solely on the mortgage origination industry. Having such a narrow niche can make it hard to grow a Twitter following, but Bradbury & Partners has found a way.

Liven up the conversation, especially if your niche can be a little dry.

The firm uses hashtags, sharp commentary and links to questions they tackle on the Q&A social network Quora. To provide a balance of work and fun, they also post niche-related jokes, photos and cartoons.

#5: Keep Your Mobile Users in Mind

Are you ever without your smartphone? Probably not—and neither is your audience. Mobile is the way we both market and consume information. Twitter says it was “born mobile.”

In the past few years, food trucks have become big business. These moving eateries frequently change location (obviously), so it makes sense to tell people where they’ll be and when they’ll be there. Enter Twitter.

Kogi Korean BBQ, a popular L.A. food truck, owes as much to Twitter as it does to its delicious and ingenious fusion of Mexican and Korean cuisine.

Use Twitter updates to give followers real-time information they can use.

In 2009, Kogi Korean BBQ saw that taco truck fans in Southern California were tweeting menus and locations of their favorite food trucks. They quickly set up a Twitter profile and started updating their customers with schedules, locations and pictures of menu items.

This is still relevant today. Remember to keep your mobile users in mind when using Twitter.

#6: Listen to Your Customers

You may not think of JetBlue as a small business, but within its industry it’s a modest carrier compared to Delta or United. Even so, JetBlue was the first airline in the United States to earn accolades for its use of Twitter, a corporate effort that continues to this day.

JetBlue uses Twitter as a customer service platform and has a team in place to monitor and respond to customer questions, compliments, and yes, complaints.

Monitor Twitter and respond to your customers.

To engage its 1.7 million followers, the company also shares discounts and deals, travel tips and pictures from passengers.

Share user generated content to help other customers.

#7: Promote Hard to Find Products

Many small businesses struggle with whether they should be on Twitter. They wonder if it’s really the way to reach their customers.

MendezFuel was in the same boat. The owner of the company has four gas stations and needed to set them apart from the bigger chains. How do you make a business like a gas station in South Florida interesting enough for customers to follow on Twitter?

Put a twist on regularly stocked products to entice customers to come to your store.

Gas station convenience stores typically carry the same products and those products are generally the same brand. That goes for beer too. As a fan of microbreweries and craft beers, the owner of Mendez Fuel recognized his opportunity.

The microbrewery scene in South Florida isn’t as vibrant as in other regions, so it’s harder to come by those beers in a convenience store. By offering them in his stores, he knew his followers were likely to come to his gas stations to get their hands on a frosty and unusual craft beer.

Promote your hard to find but popular products to grow a niche following.

#8: Connect With People Who Need What You Have to Offer

Twitter is filled with medical professionals who keep busy with shameless self-promotion. New York City’s Dr. Sinkin belongs in a different category. He’s a dentist who actually engages his followers.

Dr. Sinkin uses Twitter’s search function and third-party services to find conversations related to the dental field. When he runs across a tweet related to dentistry, he engages. For example, if he sees a tweet that indicates someone has a toothache, he introduces himself as a dentist and includes a list of remedies to try.

Offering his followers useful information helps him establish authority that may help him gain new clients.

Twitter is the perfect place to search for people who need what you offer and to surprise them with helpful advice.

#9: Use Twitter for Lead Generation

IdeaPaint sells an amazing paint product that turns walls into dry-erase boards. It’s a product that appeals to a range of audiences—businesses, parents, artists, etc.

Celebrate the creativity of your followers.

IdeaPaint uses Twitter for lead generation by reinforcing its commitment to generating ideas and supporting creativity. Their stream focuses on the collaborative and imaginative spirit a blank whiteboard presents. Anything is possible: business plans, reminders and all kinds of art. The company’s tweets often make mention of the creative process.

Some Final Thoughts…

Twitter isn’t just for big companies or spray-and-pray marketing. Any business can find a place on the platform—the key is conversation. Pay attention to your customers and respond to their questions, compliments and concerns. Keep their attention with fun facts, real-time information and local flavor.

State of Innovation: The Global Brain Comes Online

 

We are witnessing the rise of the global brain, when a buzzing hive of knowledge, connectivity, technology and access unites the human and the machine, the physical and the digital, in previously unimaginable ways.

Scientific discovery, information sharing and sheer ingenuity are giving us the ability to hack our human brains to learn, do, be more. At the same time, we can model human intelligence into machines to help us gain insights, increase speed and know more.

And we are gaining unprecedented access to the brightest minds in the world, connected to each other and with exponential speed to knowledge and insight – if you know how to harness it.

Consider the potential of a connected, global brain by connecting the dots of these trends:

• Ubiquitous data. Sensors are being embedded into seemingly everything, creating a stream of data to track, analyze and predict.
• Understanding how the brain works as well as we do the body. Efforts are accelerating to connect brain imaging and chemistry and electricity and data with open access from neuroscience.
• Ideas from anywhere. Anyone with access to the internet can connect with people whose ideas and insights are not limited by their education or location.
• New kinds of jobs driven by new skills, from data analytics to programming software and making things.
• Unlikely combos and mash ups of technologies, businesses and brains as access becomes cheaper and better.

What might this mean?

Unlock value and make money in new ways. Trillions of dollars may be available through industrial productivity, efficiency, and enhanced human performance.
Tech companies reverse roles. Hardware and advanced materials companies like GE are extending the impact of their brilliant machines with software. Meanwhile digital-first companies like Google and Amazon expand from bits to atoms through robots, drones and wearables.

Expertise of three billion (and counting) people online can be yours. As we found in our partnerships with the engineering collaborators at GrabCAD and open data scientists at Kaggle, experts in most subjects are outside of your company. Considering ideas from anywhere forces you to know what you are good at and what needs to be protected – and it's not everything!


Build new skillsets, particularly in data science. I like to say, if you don’t like data, you won’t like the future. Many new jobs will require us to be equally adept at hardware and software. We’re changing how we make things via digitization of factories, supply chains and brainpower. A new motto: Wield (welding guns) and write (code).

Partnerships are in your future. The democratization of technology is enabling a growing new generation of entrepreneurs who need partners to help them scale. And large companies and governments always need speed to ideas and market.

My mission as a marketer is to consider these changing trends, tides and technologies not for their shiny newness, but for the impact they will have as our behaviors change and we adapt. Being a marketer means being a behaviorist.

So sure, there’s some bad behavior to be considered in the mash up of machines and people. But as the global brain comes online, it means that we’re all going to get a lot smarter. And a lot more human.

State of Business: Simplify or Ossify

A few months ago, I visited one of our rail customers to discuss our locomotives. At their request, I spoke to a group of leaders and managers in the transportation industry. I have addressed thousands of customers in my career but something has changed.


I launched into my take on the big themes and what we are working on at GE. But when I started talking about our leadership culture and how we are changing for our customers, the atmosphere in the room went from polite listening to active participation. I touched upon something that is keeping people up at night, something they can relate to. It was like electricity.

Every company is looking for ways to be faster. Technology is transforming all our processes and there has never been more global competition. We need laser-like market focus to achieve effective customer outcomes. We need to permanently remove costs and eliminate bureaucracy, not just cope with it or move it around.

At GE, we are transforming our culture around what we call Simplification. This is not just management speak, it’s a crusade.

We’ve already simplified to shape our company around the big growth drivers of this era – advanced manufacturing, the Industrial Internet, and the Age of Gas. Now we are applying Simplification at every level of the organization.

Simplification defines the way we make decisions, how we work together, and work with our customers. It is about organizing ourselves to be continually focused on efficiency, speed and market impact. We use it to drive decisions closer to customers and make our teams accountable for outcomes, not process.

By cutting through the layers and empowering our employees, we are putting accountability where it matters and bringing new ideas to market at a faster pace. We are using simplification to reduce the time it takes to introduce a new product 30 percent, boost field approvals 50 percent, and cut the deal cycle in half.

I’ll give you one example. In our Oil & Gas business, customers feel pain when a drill rig goes down and stays out of service. So we created an app called Rig Down. It allows us to track the response across our service, engineering, and operations groups, respond as fast as possible and keep the customer informed in the process.

The app pushes the issue directly to the top of the list, and makes all of the parts for that customer immediately available. Now, the person on the ground can make the right decision. And, by the way, they can be rewarded for making it faster.

Complexity is our past; accountability, speed and market impact are our now and our future.

Simplification is GE’s most important culture change in more than 20 years. Our customers are smart and they measure us by what outcomes we can deliver for them and how fast. That’s why speed and commercial intensity must be part of everything we do. Embracing simplification is a victory for us, for our customers and our investors.

State of Entrepreneurship: Too Many Startups, Too Little Traction

t’s not exactly an “industry” per se, but from where I sit, the startup industry is in a bubble of epic 1999 proportions. Where do I sit? Across from literally several thousand entrepreneurs a year, usually in groups of 2, 5 or 25. In the past six months, I’ve been with startups in New York, Oklahoma, Moscow, France and Spain, to name a few. As I travel, I consistently see the same three problems: dispassionate entrepreneurs; startups that should but refuse to die; and startups that seem sexy, glamorous and “hot,” with no clear signs of product/market fit or a revenue model.

No doubt, there are plenty of bright, passionate, tireless, entrepreneurs out there with many startup successes ahead. The long-term future of this so-called industry, at least in my opinion, hinges on finding more of both.

The dispassionate entrepreneur
Clearly, there is a massive glut of startups in every city and town. And it saddens me that far too often, the startups are born for the wrong reasons. For example, it’s much more fun to say “I’m an entrepreneur” than “I’m between jobs,” and that has driven many thousands of mostly un- or under-employed people to start companies.

So what’s wrong with that, you ask?

Sense of entitlement: It’s usually unspoken, but too many founders believe that “If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, so can I,” and they enter their startup with the presumption of success. They feel entitled to a big victory, usually accompanied by a big payday, because they’ve “given up” the job they couldn’t find and taken on entrepreneurial risk. The challenges and demands of entrepreneurship are massive, and only the talented, passionate few — those with tenacity and breakthrough ideas — survive.

Race to the Finish: Everyone assumes entrepreneurs succeed by eating cold pizza, sleeping under their desk, and working ridiculous hours. Startups aren’t magic, and finding a startup with sustainable, repeatable, scalable profitability doesn’t happen quickly or easily (as outlined in excruciating detail in “The Startup Owner’s Manual” which I was proud to co-author with Silicon Valley legend Steve Blank). Founders race into production without asking such silly questions as “Who will buy this?” or “What will they pay?” or “What features do my customers want?” Most of those impatient entrepreneurs are far likelier to go broke than they are to get lucky.

“It’s a job.” Entrepreneurship is not a job; it’s a calling. It takes a determination, passion, and intense level of commitment that lasts years, not months or weeks. I want to throw up when I hear young people say they “want to be their own boss” and then tell me why: “Because I can work my own schedule, have weekends off, have lunch with my friends when I want to.” Good luck with that. I ran my first startup for 17 years, and worked the same 80+ hour weeks in year 17 when we were incredibly profitable as I did in years one through seven, when we weren’t.

Startups That Refuse to Die
A startup deserves to die if it has “flatlined,” a medical term for achieving no or negligible growth and just motoring down the road without radical changes (or pivots) to the product, the business model, or the team. Some of these startups are fortunate to be backed by (usually second- and third-tier) VCs who keep them going because they can’t afford to write them off. One such startup I sadly invested in for some years continues to operate, even though sales are now 20 percent of peak revenue and declining steadily and unprofitably. Why? The last investors standing can’t afford or acknowledge the write-off and sizeable loss that should rightly accompany this startup’s funeral.

In other cases, the founders have settled on “good enough,” often because they don’t have anything else to do. Mom will give us another three months of “investment,” or Uncle Fred will, or we’ll just stop paying some of our bills ‘til somebody notices. Nobody wants to confront the honest, ugly conversation that opens with “This isn’t working.” Easier to just keep pedaling downhill.

Where’s the revenue model?
My favorite examples of the “missing revenue model” are Twitter and Instagram, with others like Pinterest and 92.4 percent of all smartphone apps not far behind. It’s just wonderful to have millions of users, or tens of thousands of downloads… but how exactly will Twitter or Instagram ever convert that to sustainable, recurring revenue that investors ultimately need to see? Ninety-two percent of all app store downloads are free downloads — an astounding statistic in itself, especially with over 1 million startups actively engaged in making companies out of them.

In my view of the world, this is the pin that will prick the bubble. When Twitter’s next few quarterly statements come out, how good will that $50 share price look on the NASDAQ? And how many TWTR’s are “out there,” public or private? My fear is that there are dozens, if not many dozens, just pending this kind of realization.

What’s the answer?
Get serious, or get a “real” job with a W-2 and health insurance. Work your way up to Manager or Regional Manager at Starbucks if all else fails, or work up a sweat trying to make your startup great. To do that,
(a) get to work — harder than you’ve ever worked before
(b) get out of the building and get feedback on your idea from the only people whose feedback matters — the people you’re hoping will give your startup money, and (c) torture and iterate and pivot your idea until you see the “skid marks” on the highway as your company starts to get customer traction.

Apple, Comcast in Talks for Streaming-TV Service

The service would use Apple's own set-top box to provide content to Apple TV owners.

Apple is in talks with Comcast about a streaming TV service that would use its own set-top box to provide content to Apple TV owners, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Citing anonymous sources, the Journal reported that Apple is seeing "special treatment" from Comcast to ensure that it would not be subject to web congestion and thereby offer optimal streaming capabilities.

The discussions are said to be in the very early stages, but Apple is reportedly aiming to allow users to stream live and on-demand content and digital video recordings in the cloud. This would, in effect, replace the traditional cable set-top box.

Comcast would have to invest in its own network to make such a service available. As part of a deal, Apple reportedly would ask for part of the subscription revenue.

Apple is expected to launch a new version of Apple TV sometime in the near future. Last month, it was reported that Apple was in talks Time Warner Cable and others about adding video content to the service, which it hoped to have available for sale by Christmas. The new device will reportedly have a faster processor and upgraded interface that makes it more user-friendly.

The news of Comcast's talks with Apple comes on the heels of last month's announcement that it is planning to acquire Time Warner Cable.

Here’s How Comcast Plans to Rule American Cable and Internet

It’s been a little more than 100 years since this country witnessed an accumulation of economic power to rival what Comcast is assembling. Like the Gilded Age magnates who controlled oil and refining and leveraged their product with railroads, Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, is building a cash-generating machine that controls every aspect of its business.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Gilded Age magnates took advantage of the laissez-faire philosophy of the time. Today, even though there are in theory more safeguards, regulations, and guidelines to prevent such industrial consolidation, no one is even suggesting that they be used, certainly not to an extent that will prevent a lot of damage. The prevailing view of what constitutes an abuse of power is too weak — and so are potential protections against such abuse.

Much of the news in the internet world has been taken up by the possible consequences of Comcast’s proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable system. But the issues extend well beyond this deal. There’s also the recent Supreme Court decision that gives Comcast complete control over its TV channel lineup. And there’s the news that Netflix has decided to connect its broadband distribution to Comcast, paying for the privilege. Together, they portend a truly frightening future for both television and the internet.

Controlling the Channels

Let’s start with the cable TV network, the core of Comcast’s business and the most pedestrian contrasted with the relative flash of high-speed Internet access. On February 24, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Tennis Channel’s final legal gasp on a complaint against Comcast that was filed in 2010. That year, the Tennis Channel went to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and claimed discrimination because Comcast put the channel on a pay tier, where it would have fewer viewers, and thus a lower advertising base, than if it were on basic cable like the Golf Channel, which Comcast owns.

At the FCC, an administrative judge held extensive hearings and decided for Tennis Channel. The relevant FCC bureau held for Tennis Channel. And the Commission itself decided for Tennis Channel. Then Comcast went to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which more often than not takes the opportunity to knock around the FCC. The Appeals Court reversed the FCC, finding that Tennis Channel’s placement on a different programming tier wouldn’t benefit Comcast. No harm (to Comcast at least), no foul.

There are a couple of lessons to take from the Tennis Channel experience that bear on the bigger picture. First, Comcast now has legal carte blanche to do whatever it wants on its channel lineup, including discriminating against independent programmers. That means if you want to start a channel on the country’s biggest cable operator, you may have to agree to some special conditions, maybe even take on Comcast as an “investor.”

Second, the more universal lesson that that small businesses are out there on their own. The government and its laws which exist in theory to protect them are, in practice, useless. Tennis Channel probably spent millions in legal fees, won every round they were supposed to win, and then lost. There is a reason only two complaints have been filed against Comcast. The other was from Bloomberg, which has deeper pockets than Comcast. Bloomberg wants its financial news channel to be put in the same “neighborhood” as other news channels like CNBC and MSNBC, which Comcast owns. Bloomberg thought that the wording of one of the conditions on which Comcast was able to gobble up NBC-Universal required a channel switch immediately. Bloomberg spent millions litigating the word “now” before the FCC agreed with the company, three years after Bloomberg filed its complaint. The matter is now pending in a Federal appeals court.

These cases are the reasons that whenever anyone talks about putting conditions on an FCC-approved deal, they are basically wishing out loud. Big companies have more money and lawyers and will make mincemeat out of conditions, throwing more into it than most mortal companies can afford. Conditions only work when they are enforced, which is rarely. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) listed some of the conditions and lack of enforcement in a letter to the FCC. Conditions are window dressing.

Expanding the Empire

Once the channel guide is set, then the question becomes: who will get the service? The answer shows the utter futility of modern anti-trust law. The largest cable company, Comcast, wants to pay $45 billion to buy the second-largest, Time-Warner Cable. The combined company would span 70 million subscribers — about 40 percent of all broadband subscribers and 30 percent or so of cable subscribers — and it would have access to 19 out of the country’s top 20 markets, including New York and Los Angeles, where Time Warner is the local cable company. However, the companies don’t compete directly because each has its own service territory, and so it would be hard to say there would be lessened competition. That’s the argument Comcast executives make to justify the deal.

That’s also the theory that allowed telephone companies created after the breakup of AT&T to reassemble most of AT&T in two existing companies, except stronger than the old Ma Bell because of the profit-engine of wireless services. What the theory ignores is the enormous market power of a company with 30 million subscribers stretching across the country. The problem is acute for broadcasters. They have to negotiate terms with cable companies to get their channels on cable systems. When there is an impasse, and there have been many, the cable system simply drops the TV network until there’s agreement. With Comcast in all but one of the top markets, its power to force terms on broadcasters will be considerable.  There will be disruptions in ad sales as well.

The “competition” for wired Internet access has been over for a while, as Verizon and Comcast cut a deal. Comcast ditched plans to get into the wireless business and will sell Verizon wireless to customers. Verizon, in areas that don’t have FiOS, will recommend Comcast broadband. Will that continue in territories now served by Time Warner that would be gathered into the Comcast empire, like, say, New York City? Say what you will about wireless, it’s still not as robust a service as wired broadband services are.

That leads to the last building block.

The Toll Plaza

This is where the deal between Netflix and Comcast comes in. Comcast now will determine which program providers, like Netflix, have the privilege of paying extra to provide content their customers want. Big companies like Netflix, or other video providers, can afford those direct connections.  Smaller, newer services can’t, and their growth will suffer.

The timing and the framing of the deal lead to any number of questions, but the conclusions seem fairly clear. First, look at the circumstances. For some reason, in the months prior to the deal, Netflix customers on Comcast and Verizon’s networks had been experiencing some very serious service issues.  There can be many reasons for the degradation of picture or more frequent buffering, but remember on basic fact:  consumers have paid for Netflix content twice already.  They (we) pay once for the broadband service and another time for a Netflix subscription.

Every bit that goes over the network has been requested by a customer. This isn’t Netflix pushing traffic. It’s Netflix responding to customer demand. If you look at it that way, then the “agreement” between Netflix and Comcast becomes a little more interesting. Netflix will pay Comcast an undisclosed amount of money to connect directly to Comcast’s network, but Netflix will not get “preferential treatment“  from Comcast. On the other hand, it may be that Netflix’s service problems will magically improve as a result of the payments to Comcast.

Verizon will be next to charge Netflix for the privilege of delivering movies and TV shows customers wanted.

The End Result

The one company that may truly know what’s going on is Cogent, the Internet access carrier which had been carrying Netflix traffic. Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer has said Comcast and Verizon aren’t investing in creating more capacity for exchanging traffic. His larger point, however, is that companies which can’t afford to pay whatever Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T want for non-prioritizing direct connections will have their traffic degraded.

If Comcast buys Time Warner, the toll gate gets much larger, encompassing not only Comcast’s 22 million customers but Time Warner’s eight million (after Comcast ritual of discarding three million) in the largest markets.  As it is, Schaeffer said, Netflix is paying a lot to connect to one cable company.

The sum of those Comcast actions is pretty impressive. They can discriminate among programmers on their cable networks, expand their market of those networks to millions more people, and can charge Internet commerce companies for direct access to their newly enlarged service territory.

Once upon a time, government agencies might have been interested in such things. But with the narrow definitions of anti-trust hobbling the Justice Department, the Federal Communications Commission having given away (so far) its authority over broadband and Congress more in the thrall of large companies, it’s almost a certainty that consumers will get the short end of the stick, again.

"Spider vs. Fly" Animated TV Series

Ford Movie Group signs with DeZerlin Media to produce and write an animated series called "Spider vs. Fly".

Ford Movie Group launches "Fordtopia", Non-Profit Foundation.

Marc Ford, CEO of Ford Movie Group, launches "Fordtopia" non-profit foundation to produce documentaries and PSAs based on critical issues around the world.

Marketing Automation Mastery: Go for Easy, Not Simplistic

As a vendor that sells marketing automation software, I find that when I talk with potential customers, they are often confused about how to differentiate between simplistic and easy - two terms that are far from interchangeable.

Consider the remote control. A simplistic remote control would simply have a big fat red button to turn the TV on or off. But that doesn't do much. Today's television watchers expect to perform many functions with one device: change the channel, record a show, pause, mute, get bonus features, etc. The remote must do these things - and still be easy to use. And your marketing platform should be no different.

"A complex user interface comprising many elements, if designed well, can achieve our goals as well as, if not better than, a simplistic design." - Frank Guo

Simplistic vs. Easy
In your quest to avoid simplistic, you don't want to end up with something that is complicated or hard to use. We've all grappled with a remote control that's impossible to figure out. Or worse, struggled with three remote controls for one entertainment system. It's inefficient.

Say you're a marketing executive embarking on a 12-city road show. You have a sizeable target list for each city, and you have a messaging approach that will appeal to each particular city:

"Feeling that Arctic Chill, Chicago? We'll keep you warm at our product launch with artisan hot cocoa from Windy City Chocolatier."

"Out of things to wear on the red carpet, Los Angeles? There's no dress code at our upcoming product launch!"

Your marketing strategy includes a series of city-specific emails and landing pages customized to each location. With a simplistic marketing tool, you would have to prepare a unique program from scratch for each specific city. This might go smoothly the first time. But by the third time you have to re-make the invitations, re-create the landing pages, re-update the confirmations, it's tedious. By the ninth clone, it's a downright pain.

With the right marketing automation software, things are still easy, but not simplistic: You simply clone your first program, update the specific variables you need for each specific city, and voila, the system updates all the campaign assets. You can easily propagate your marketing outreach across all 12 cities - and still customize your messages. This not only makes your job easier, but more importantly, it makes your buyer's experience personal and relevant.

"There is a very big difference between simple and simplistic. Google has a single box on their home screen. Type something in it and you can access the world. Simple to use, but far from simplistic. Unfortunately, being that simple is far from easy. But then, any idiot can make something complicated.

What Makes Easy, Easy?
So, what makes a marketing tool versatile, allowing you to perform complex, sophisticated functions easily? It must be:

• Well-designed. It needs to have the right amount of buttons and features to perform to your precise needs - no more, no less. You should be able to do simple things quickly, and discover the ability to more sophisticated things when you need them.
• Repetition-minded. It must streamline repetitive tasks, allowing for variables within each instance. 
• Quick to learn. It must be intuitive and a cinch to figure out.
• All about mastery. It's not just about the learning curve. A great marketing tool should make every day easier. It must be easy to do every time - not just the first time. 

The Easy Path to Marketing Mastery
The dynamic world of digital marketing constantly evolves. A tool that can be learned quickly is nice, but it also needs to enable you to be nimble in your ever-changing landscape. That's why well-designed marketing software makes getting to marketing mastery easy.

No one would ever say that marketing is simple; it's challenging and complicated. If you're living in the marketing world today, your needs are not simple. An overly simplified tool won't help you in the long run. Digital marketing's transformation is never going to stop, so you need tools that work for you in the face of accelerating change. You need a tool that is powerful enough for your needs today, and tomorrow, and yet also easy.

The Ivory Highway

By Damon Tabor

 

Inside one of the world's largest, most shadowy criminal trafficking networks – from the jungles of Cameroon to the black-market bazaars of Beijing.

Killing an elephant was easy, really. You found its tracks, big as serving platters, and you followed them. Then, Pierre said, you just aimed for the head. But in the thick rain forests of Cameroon, this seemed fantastical. There were branches, brush, slick gullied hillsides. The animal moved – often quickly. Moreover, Pierre hunted with an aged rifle he described as a caribou douze; inherited from his father, it was a weapon of indeterminate origin, and it was unlikely to be precise. What Pierre shot most likely died slowly and in great pain.

Thin and jittery and wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves jersey, Pierre was a Cameroonian contract poacher. We had agreed to meet at a seedy hotel in Bertoua, a city in the country's sparsely populated southeast and a major ivory-smuggling hub, to discuss the business of elephant poaching. A corpulent, shrewd bush-meat dealer named Madame Mado had provided an introduction, but Pierre was at first still suspicious. He stood outside the hotel door and scanned the room's interior for several moments before entering. In Cameroon, a wildlife NGO run by a former Israeli intelligence officer had begun targeting ivory traffickers, often by setting up sting operations in just such hotels.

Pierre, which is not his real name, lit a cigarette and settled into a plastic chair. He was reluctant to discuss the men hiring him to kill elephants – referring to them only as "command" – but he acknowledged they regularly placed orders for ivory. Very likely, Pierre's bosses were government officials or businessmen, perhaps even officers from l'armée camerounaise. In a poor, corrupt country like Cameroon, only a small elite could bankroll hunting expeditions in the jungle that lasted weeks and required expensive supplies – food, rifles, ammunition, cheap plastic packets of gin. "Somebody calls me, and they give me cartridges," Pierre said. "I go with porters and spend three or four weeks in the forest," searching for tracks. Sometimes he also imitated the plaintive honk of a lost calf in order to attract its mother. Pierre claimed not to shoot female elephants, but poaching has become a dark lesson in supply-demand economics. Ivory's surging price compelled poachers to kill whatever they could: cows, which grew smaller tusks than bulls, and even calves bearing only small nubs of dentin.

Pierre had been poaching for 25 years, and he had killed scores, if not hundreds, of elephants. With some pride, he claimed to have shot 23 during a single trip – so many that harvesting all their tusks had taken more than a week. "If you've killed the first one and the others have not noticed, you can kill all of them," he said. Pierre used a special machete to remove their ivory – painstaking work that required separating the tusk from the animal's upper jawbone. "If you cut it, you have destroyed it," he said. "They have to be removed right, from the inside. It takes time."

Across Africa, men like Pierre are now killing so many elephants that conservationists have begun calling the trade "industrial." Poachers are both brutal and diabolically ingenious in their craft, mowing down entire herds with cheap assault rifles, burying land mines, and even fashioning homemade shotguns from Land Rover steering columns. In Zimbabwe, poachers recently laced salt licks and watering holes with cyanide, killing hundreds of elephants. In 2011 alone, some 25,000 elephants across the continent were slaughtered – the highest recorded level of poaching since a ban on international ivory trading was implemented in 1989. In 2012, the number was perhaps as high as 50,000. Last year, the most comprehensive survey of forest elephants ever undertaken found that Central Africa's entire population had crashed by 62 percent over the past 10 years. Today poachers are killing so many elephants that they've exceeded the animals' reproductive capacity, leading some conservationists to predict that Africa's remaining 420,000 elephants could be wiped out in little more than a decade.

"There is a real risk that, if substantial action is not taken, elephants will go biologically extinct in Central Africa very soon," J. Michael Fay, a renowned conservationist who has spent decades studying the region's rain forests, recently testified before the U.S. Congress.

In late December 2011, some 100 Sudanese horseback poachers armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers crossed from Chad into Bouba N'Djida National Park in northeastern Cameroon. The raiders, possibly affiliated with Sudan's murderous Janjaweed militia, easily overran the small unit of unarmed eco-guards, then hunted with impunity for months, killing one group of elephants after another. Families were herded together, then systematically shot. Calves died alongside mothers. In some cases, gunmen waited for elephants to return to mourn their dead – and then shot them, too. By April, some 400 of the park's savanna elephants had been wiped out, the worst mass killing in modern history.

The slaughter in Bouba N'Djida is, in many ways, a signal event: The nature of modern poaching has changed. Small-time, subsistence hunters are no longer taking down the occasional elephant. Poachers have become systematic, ruthless, heavily armed. They are capable of overwhelming the porous borders and poor security plaguing many African countries. According to conservation groups, sophisticated criminal syndicates – poachers, middlemen, traders, elusive kingpins – increasingly dominate the trade. Some operations, like that of Pierre and his "command," are modest. Others move tusks by the ton. According to Tom Milliken, ivory expert for the wildlife trade-monitoring group Traffic, many trafficking gangs are "Asian-run, African-based" and now operating "in almost every country where you find elephants." Additionally, according to the UN, wildlife crime, of which ivory constitutes a significant proportion, is now a $10-billion-plus annual business – fourth behind drugs, human trafficking, and arms. This profitability has attracted not just organized crime but African militias and rebel groups: Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army – accused of carrying out mass murder – as well as Somalia's Al Qaeda–affiliated Shabaab terrorist group have been implicated in the ivory trade.

"Up north, it's war," a lieutenant with Cameroon's special forces – which recently had been deployed to fight the hunters marauding on horseback through Bouba N'Djida park – told me. "They are not simple poachers. They have GPS, Kalashnikovs, and rocket launchers. They carried the tusks with helicopters."

By late 2012, the potential loss of Africa's most charismatic megafauna – and the specter of rebel groups funding their operations with illicit ivory proceeds – had attracted the attention of Western politicians. That November, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton called wildlife trafficking a national security issue. "Trafficking relies on porous borders, corrupt officials, and strong networks of organized crime, all of which undermine our mutual security," she declared. (President Obama soon followed with an executive order committing $10 million to combat the illegal trade in wildlife.) The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) also recently unveiled an $80 million anti-ivory poaching partnership with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Over three years, the project will deploy sniffer-dog teams at key ivory transit points in Africa and hire 3,000 rangers to help protect elephants at 50 sites. "The end game is getting those PIKE [proportion of illegally killed elephants] rates down and buying us some time so we can change the demand equation," says John Calvelli, WCS's executive vice president of public affairs.

The "demand equation," according to a unanimous chorus of conservation groups, is China's booming ivory market. (A smaller amount of ivory is also smuggled to Thailand and the U.S.) In Beijing and other major cities, the country's newly minted middle class now possesses sufficient disposable income to purchase ivory carvings, a luxury once reserved for only the country's wealthiest class. On websites like Alibaba, China's version of eBay, ivory trinkets trade under the title xiàngyá, Mandarin for "elephant's teeth." During a recent Christie's auction, an 18th-century ivory bowl sold for a record $842,500 – 28 times more than the appraisers' estimate – after two Chinese buyers engaged in an anonymous bidding war. China's CCTV recently reported that investors were hedging against the faltering housing market by purchasing ivory, which has become known as white gold. And, as China has increased its presence in Africa over the past decade – financing everything from stadiums to hydroelectric dams – an increasing number of its citizens are being arrested sneaking contraband ivory trinkets onto Asia-bound flights or becoming involved as buyers and middlemen in larger smuggling operations.

In October 2012, Hong Kong customs agents intercepted two cargo containers carrying more than four tons of ivory worth an estimated $3.5 million – the largest seizure in Chinese history. The next month, they seized another container with 1.4 tons. Two months after that, they seized yet another carrying 1.4 tons. All the containers had originated in Africa, and all had first passed through multiple transit countries to obscure their origin. This kind of complex routing, as well as the staggering hauls of ivory, Interpol says, strongly suggests the involvement of organized crime. The logistics required to acquire such massive quantities of elephant tusks and move them overland and across the ocean are significant – virtually corporate organizations managing an illicit global supply chain. Yet these syndicates' operations – their size, structure, modus operandi, and, above all, the identity of the kingpins controlling them – remain almost entirely unknown. At one end of the chain is a poacher like Pierre; at the other, thousands of miles away in Beijing, a consumer purchasing an ivory trinket. Everything in between remains opaque, a true black market.

Dogs Ally with Elephants in the Fight Against Illegal Ivory

By Ruth Starkey
Dogs live in an astonishing olfactory world, using their keen noses to detect bombs, drugs, or even the apple you left in your luggage. Canines are ubiquitous in the world's airports, and now conservation practitioners are using their sense of smell to seek out and protect rare turtles, identify individual tigers, find invasive snakes, and sniff out deadly snares.
Our furry friends are also being recruited into the fight to end elephant poaching across Africa by sniffing out concealed ivory.

Between 1980 and 2012, Africa's elephant population dwindled from 1.2 million to about 420,000. My colleagues at Wildlife Conservation Society, Samantha Strindberg and Fiona Maisels, recently reported on a study they led documenting the staggering loss of 65 percent of African forest elephants in the past decade alone. Without swift action, we face the real possibility that elephants will join their cousins, the mammoths and mastodons, in the hall of extinct species.

The burgeoning middle class in China and other parts of Asia has fueled the slaughter of Africa's elephants. Growing disposable income and a sense that ivory signifies wealth has driven the demand for ivory products. While most ivory trade is illegal, a small legal market, and poor enforcement both in China and along the supply chain, has opened the floodgates to illegal trafficking. The trade is driven by the same criminal cartels that traffic in drugs, guns, and humans in China and other parts of Asia.

Unfortunately, demand for ivory shows little sign of abating. Poachers killed some 35,000 African elephants for their tusks in 2012, the worst carnage since the international ivory trade was banned in 1989. That rate of slaughter equates to 96 elephants per day (roughly one every 15 minutes).

To raise awareness of this carnage, Wildlife Conservation Society launched 96 Elephants, a public advocacy campaign that now involves more than 100 partners. At a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2013, the heads of state of 11 African countries, along with a broad coalition of civil society actors, called on consumer and transit countries to implement a moratorium on the sale of ivory until elephant populations rebound.

We must stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand. Stopping the killing requires boots on the ground, eyes in the sky (drones, planes, and helicopters), and working alongside and in partnership with ecoguards, rural communities, and government officials. Stopping the demand means we need to get people to stop thinking of ivory as a luxury good, and start associating "blood ivory" with dead elephants.

But how do you stop the trafficking? Once an elephant is killed, and the ivory moves into transit, it's easy to hide few hundred tusks in a false compartment in a shipping container when that container sits in a port with tens of thousands of nearly identical containers.

In recent years, dogs trained to sniff out ivory have shown to be especially effective in addressing the trafficking issue. The deployment of these "sniffer dogs" at key transit points—on roads, in ports, and in airports—has proved as useful in the fight to protect elephants as radio collaring on the ground and population monitoring from airplanes and helicopters.

WCS has been the driving force behind a sniffer dog unit in Gabon, a wildlife haven with over 40,000 forest elephants—more than half the continent's total. Since 2004, the country has lost 11,000 elephants to the ivory trade. To stem this loss, WCS provides technical support to the sniffer dog unit of the Gabonese national park agency (Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux, or ANPN). The dogs are trained to detect ivory among a range of scents associated with poached animals, as well as the psychedelic rainforest shrub iboga.

We started small, with two dogs provided by the detection dog company Wagtail UK Ltd, to ensure that the program would work before expanding. Dog handlers from the ANPN were trained over a three-month period by Wagtail. Lumi, an energetic cocker spaniel, and Cooper, a Labrador, are tasked with detecting shipments of illegal ivory and other scents at airports, shipping ports, and roadway checkpoints. Sprightly and determined, the dogs are efficient searchers. Where it might take hundreds of person-hours to inspect luggage manually, a dog can sniff out illegal items in just seconds.

The dog unit has been very successful. In less than a year, Cooper and Lumi have alerted officials to illegally trafficked wildlife products including: ivory bracelets; shark fins (40kg in one haul); leopard skins; and bags of pangolin scales destined for Asia. They regularly find hidden quantities of bushmeat as well. In exchange for their valuable service, the dogs receive a modest but prized reward: After each ivory discovery, Cooper and Lumi enjoy playtime with a tennis ball.



The sniffer dog program resonates beyond the mere deterrence of poachers. Like the drug trade, the ivory trade has become an organized criminal enterprise, involving greater and greater use of technology and powerful weapons. As militants across the African Sahel have turned to the ivory trade to help finance their operations, the crisis has attracted the attention of all nations concerned with stability and security in the region.

In February 2014, conservationists and government representatives from around the world gathered in London for a series of meetings sponsored by a new organization, United for Wildlife, a coalition of the world's leading conservation organizations working with the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry.

The resulting London Declaration on Illegal Wildlife Trade calls for a global crackdown on wildlife crime, and on the corruption and organized crime activities that feed it. The declaration coincided with the release of President Obama's national strategy to combat wildlife trafficking and a near ban on all commercial sales of ivory in the United States (heretofore the second-largest global market for ivory).

In September 2013 in New York, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made headlines with the announcement of a Clinton Global Initiative plan to stop the slaughter of elephants. In addition to supporting a moratorium on ivory sales, CGI and its partners made a three-year, $80-million pledge to end the ivory trade. Among the many anti-poaching strategies funded by the CGI commitment will be new K9 teams.

As part of its involvement with CGI, Wildlife Conservation Society has several other sniffer dog projects in development. ANPN and WCS are discussing expansion of the dog unit in Gabon, and WCS is working with Wagtail to establish a canine unit in Tanzania.

Nepal Defeats the Wildlife Trade

The world is in the grip of an epidemic of wildlife crime that threatens the very existence of some species. Huge numbers of rhinos, elephants and tigers were illegally slaughtered in 2013, killed for body parts that sell for high sums on the international market. In South Africa alone, where rhino poaching increased a staggering 5,000 percent between 2007 and 2012, 900 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2013. African elephants

are being killed at a rate of 30,000 to 35,000 a year. Estimates put the number of tigers poached in 2013 in India at 39 or 48. Even the lower number represents the most tigers poached in a single year in India over the past seven years.

This grim picture has one bright spot. On March 3, World Wildlife Day, Nepal commemorated a full year in which not a single rhino, elephant or tiger was reportedly killed in the country. Nepal also recorded a zero-kill year in 2011; a sole rhino was poached in 2012. The country’s secret is a combination of enforcement and incentives that, in effect, turn local communities into wildlife guardians. Other nations suffering from poaching should take notice.

Poaching is a transnational crime, increasingly perpetrated by criminal networks that traffic in animal parts around the world. These networks are often involved in other illicit trade, such as arms, drugs and human trafficking. Gangs in Africa overwhelm underfunded conservation agents and government rangers. Communities near wildlife preserves too often find profit in poaching: The fee for one dead animal can equal years of legal income.

Nepal’s multipronged strategy is first and foremost supported by a strong commitment by the country’s leadership. Collaboration between park agencies and national law enforcement officials, as well as with international organizations such as Interpol’s Wildlife Crime Working Group, has allowed Nepal to identify and arrest wildlife criminal kingpins. Criminal penalties are stiff, and the Nepalese Army patrols the national parks.

But turning local communities into stakeholders in the animals’ survival is also vital. Abundant wildlife attracts tourists and creates jobs. So Nepal’s government gives 50 cents of every tourism dollar it collects to communities near wildlife preserves, making animals worth far more alive than dead to both local citizens and the country as a whole.

Eliminating demand by policing buyers and dealers, as the United States is trying to do in the case of elephant ivory, is of course an essential part of any effort to put wildlife criminals out of business. But Nepal’s example shows that much can be done at the source.

How to Select a Video Hosting Provider for your Business

You finally decided to take the plunge into video hosting for your business, and want to implement videos for products, introducing your company, or customer testimonials. But, how do you actually get those videos online? In this post, we break down the key factors you need to consider when signing up with a video hosting provider, and how to make the best choice for your business.

 

Budget

If you have a small budget for video hosting for your business, you actually have a lot to work with. Video hosting does not have to be expensive or complicated, rather, it should be easy and affordable. Although certain free options are tempting, like Youtube, you have to consider whether it is the right choice for your business. If you properly evaluate your business needs, and what you want to achieve with online video, you will likely find it is worthwhile to invest in a professional video hosting service. The most obvious reason is the ads that free hosting providers like Youtube depend on for revenue, but far worse for your business are the other videos that appear at the end, driving people back to Youtube, rather than staying on your site (for more detail, please refer to our blog post on Youtube and small business). To properly compare the cost of hosting your videos on different websites, look at the cost per GB of bandwidth or storage, and weigh the cost against the availability of different features.

 

Security

For any small business, the security of content, especially videos you invested a lot of time and effort into, is paramount. The main exception would be marketing videos, where you might want them to be shared widely, but we are focusing on the type of videos you want to publish on your website, like testimonials, product videos, and the like. Features to look for include SSL embed codes, login protection, signed embed codes, domain whitelisting, and password protection. These security tools enable you to control how your videos are shared online, where they can be played, and who has access to them.

 

Marketing

A properly designed video content marketing strategy will help grow your email list, generate leads, and improve both SEO and SEM. To achieve these core marketing goals with video, look for tools that will enable you to capture viewers’ email addresses, analyze your audience in-depth, customize pre- or post- roll screens, and generate video sitemaps for SEO. To really leverage these features, consider where your target viewers are in your marketing funnel. Are you trying to generate leads? Or are you driving conversions? Having a clear focus on your desired outcome when implementing different marketing tools will make a big difference to their efficacy.

 

Customer Service

Sometimes, it is really important to get a quick answer to your question, or to solve a technical issue you are having with your online video. Want to wade through forums or Google searches? Or just reach a live person quickly and easily? Customer support can be make or break for video projects - it is easy to overlook a key setting, or to not be totally comfortable getting everything set up for the first time. At SproutVideo, we know better than most how complicated online video can seem at first. That is why we make certain commitments to our customers, like providing live chat and email support for all plan levels.

 

Scalability

Sure, you might be just starting out with video, but you need to think at least ten steps ahead to make the right call about where you stash your videos today. Video hosting is particular sticky as far as online business services go because, after going through all the effort of uploading, customizing, and embedding your videos, the last thing you want to think about is starting all over with another platform. Some projects might be shorter term than others, but in general, life will be much easier if you pick a platform and stick with it. To make the best decision for the long term, look for an API documented in at least a couple languages, and tools that will help you handle large numbers of videos. Evaluate the cost per GB at larger volumes of storage and bandwidth than you currently need to make sure the platform you want will be affordable in a few months or a year.