Yahoo prohibited telecommuting employees

Touted as a way to better manage work and family life, and reduce transportation costs and pollution, telecommuting is booming. But Yahoo has reopened the debate on its interest in the United States. The boss of the internet group, Marissa Mayer, decided that all employees would now have to come to the office to "feel the energy and excitement" of the team, according to an internal document released this week by the Wall Street Journal."The speed and quality is often sacrificed when working from home. We need to be united Yahoo, and that starts by being physically together," she says. "We do not discuss internal matters," responded a spokesman for the group told AFP. "This is not a general vision in the area of ​​working from home, it is about what is right for Yahoo! now."Telework, saving energy and transportThe group goes against the general trend. Between 2007 and 2012, the share of U.S. companies allow their employees to work flexibly, including home increased from 48% to 53%, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. And according to a 2011 report from the Department of Labor, 24% of U.S. employees work at least a few hours a week from home.In the telecommunications equipment Cisco Systems, which develops virtual private networks (VPN) used to secure remote access to corporate network, the average employee teleworking an average of two days a week. At IBM, 29% of 128,000 employees worldwide participate in a program of flexible work or at home. The IT group considers that the reduction of commuting between home and office in 2011 helped save 24 million liters of gasoline and 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States nothing.Teleworking "is particularly important in the technology sector," where companies seek "to recruit and retain the best and brightest," said Cindy Auten, head of Mobile Work Exchange, an organization promoting telework. Leave work at home is often a near necessity, accepted by 85% of employers identified among the "best places to work," said she. British billionaire Richard Branson said on Twitter "perplexed by the decision to stop Yahoo! telework. Give people the freedom to work where they want, and they excel," he argues.A need to "return to its roots""There are great benefits to teleworking and there are companies that need to do more telecommuting", but Yahoo is in a particular situation, it "needs to return to its roots," nuance John Challenger, the firm Board Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Internet group, which must innovate to boost its growth, however, will probably not completely prevent its employees to do some of their work at home, warns analyst. "Some people have always worked from home," said he. "And now the technology allows them to work weekends, nights or holidays. There are no borders between work and home."Telework is also not necessarily a panacea for employees: according to the labor department, they often work more at home than they were in the office, thus making unpaid overtime. "The ability for employees to work from home can actually allow employers to increase their expectations for their availability on evenings and weekends, and lead to days and weeks longer working," he noted in its report in 2011.

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Here PayPal moved to Europe with a new case

 The second is as a physical device, a reader credit card that offers a numeric keypad on the front.

Connected together wirelessly, simply launch the application from a Smartphone, to enter the desired amount of the transaction and have it validated by the customer. The customer then introduced his payment card in the box and enters a four-digit code (not the one linked to a credit card, but one linked to their PayPal account and Paypal functionality Here).

The system should be interesting for small traders not wishing to embarrass hitherto processing banking transactions. But it is also the part of PayPal users that the system should be greeted with enthusiasm, becoming accessible online account to settle transactions in physical stores.

Here PayPal should settle in Britain in the coming months, and the company hopes to deploy its system more widely in Europe in the summer. Note that, like all PayPal transactions, the payment will be subject to a fee, fixed + variable depending on the amount of the transaction, and that the system of purchase protection and managements of disputes may be used for payments made through the system.

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The Happiness Machine

A few years ago, Google’s human resources department noticed a problem: A lot of women were leaving the company. Like the majority of Silicon Valley software firms, Google is staffed mostly by men, and executives have long made it a priority to increase the number of female employees. But the fact that women were leaving Google wasn’t just a gender equity problem—it was affecting the bottom line. Unlike in most sectors of the economy, the market for top-notch tech employees is stretched incredibly thin. Google fights for potential workers with Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and hordes of startups, so every employee’s departure triggers a costly, time-consuming recruiting process.

Then there was the happiness problem. Google monitors its employees’ well-being to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work outside Mountain View. The attrition rate among women suggested there might be something amiss in the company’s happiness machine. And if there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.

Google calls its HR department People Operations, though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS. The group is headed by Laszlo Bock, a trim, soft-spoken 40-year-old who came to Google six years ago. Bock says that when POPS looked into Google’s woman problem, it found it was really a new mother problem: Women who had recently given birth were leaving at twice Google’s average departure rate. At the time, Google offered an industry-standard maternity leave plan. After a woman gave birth, she got 12 weeks of paid time off. For all other new parents in its California offices, but not for its workers outside the state, the company offered seven paid weeks of leave.

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So in 2007, Bock changed the plan. New mothers would now get five months off at full pay and full benefits, and they were allowed to split up that time however they wished, including taking some of that time off just before their due date. If she likes, a new mother can take a couple months off after birth, return part time for a while, and then take the balance of her time off when her baby is older. Plus, Google began offering the seven weeks of new-parent leave to all its workers around the world.

Google’s lavish maternity and paternity leave plans probably don’t surprise you. The company’s swank perks—free gourmet food, on-site laundry, Wi-Fi commuting shuttles—are legendary in the corporate world, and they’ve driven a culture of ever-increasing luxuries for tech workers. This week, for the fourth consecutive year, Google was named the best company to work for by Fortune magazine; Microsoft was No. 75, while Apple, Amazon, and Facebook didn’t even make the list.

At times Google’s largesse can sound excessive—noble but wasteful from a bottom-line perspective. In August, for example, Forbes disclosed one previously unannounced Google perk—when an employee dies, the company pays his spouse or domestic partner half of his salary for a decade. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Google doles out such perks just to be nice. POPS rigorously monitors a slew of data about how employees respond to benefits, and it rarely throws money away. The five-month maternity leave plan, for instance, was a winner for the company. After it went into place, Google’s attrition rate for new mothers dropped down to the average rate for the rest of the firm. “A 50 percent reduction—it was enormous!” Bock says. What’s more, happiness—as measured by Googlegeist, a lengthy annual survey of employees—rose as well. Best of all for the company, the new leave policy was cost-effective. Bock says that if you factor in the savings in recruitment costs, granting mothers five months of leave doesn’t cost Google any more money.

The change in maternity leave exemplifies how POPS has helped Google become the country’s best employer. Under Bock, Google’s HR department functions more like a rigorous science lab than the pesky hall monitor most of us picture when we think of HR. At the heart of POPS is a sophisticated employee-data tracking program, an effort to gain empirical certainty about every aspect of Google’s workers’ lives—not just the right level of pay and benefits but also such trivial-sounding details as the optimal size and shape of the cafeteria tables and the length of the lunch lines.

In the last couple years, Google has even hired social scientists to study the organization. The scientists—part of a group known as the PiLab, short for People & Innovation Lab—run dozens of experiments on employees in an effort to answer questions about the best way to manage a large firm. How often should you remind people to contribute to their 401(k)s, and what tone should you use? Do successful middle managers have certain skills in common—and can you teach those skills to unsuccessful managers? Or, for that matter, do managers even matter—can you organize a company without them? And say you want to give someone a raise—how should you do it in a way that maximizes his happiness? Should you give him a cash bonus? Stock? A raise? More time off?

Some of Google’s HR lessons won’t apply to other companies. The search company has been insanely profitable for much of its history, and many of its problems are atypical. Google has the luxury of worrying about the best way to give people more money instead of, say, the ideal manner in which to lay them off. Still, a few of POPS’ findings—like how to train a better corps of managers and how to improve interviews—will apply to most other firms. And among the tech giants—many of which are also quite profitable and face some of the same problems Google does—the search company is alone in trying to answer its HR questions scientifically. “We make thousands of people decisions every day—who we should hire, how much we should pay them, who we should promote, who we should let go of,” says Prasad Setty, who heads POPS’ “people analytics” group. “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigor to people decisions that we do to engineering decisions. Our mission is to have all people decisions be informed by data.”

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YouTube: back entire movies illegal

The Wall Street Journal noted the launch of hundreds of movies in full including feature films from studios such as Disney, Sony, Columbia or Tristar. Put online is not illegal because of these studios.

In reality, this is not really a resurgence of this phenomenon on YouTube. A simple search on for example the Google search engine allows for many months to get a "free cinema session".

This also applies to entire movies with sound in French. On Facebook, several pages of the rest of users can keep abreast of some updates online. It may be more or less recent productions.

Following the publication of the WSJ article, several Disney films including the classic cartoons were eventually blocked. For this, the studio has used the Content ID system.

With Content ID, the owners have the ability to manage the use of their content. Embedding all or part of protected content, video illegal on-line can be identified via a confrontation with reference files.

Technology "works" but it is "not always used correctly" and some studios "forget to block illegal content" according to the WSJ. American national newspaper adds that the uploaders are able to tweak. They "manipulate audio or video to avoid detection by the system."

The Motion Picture Association of America - which represents the interests of the U.S. film industry - said to be aware of the problem and hope to work with YouTube to resolve.

Remember that YouTube offers a perfectly legal movie rental.

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