By Larissa Ham

(In photo: Jodi Ettenberg, centre)

For many people it’s the ultimate dream – ditching cubicle life for the freedom of the open road, without worrying about running out of money.

For a growing number of tech-savvy entrepreneurs, or ‘digital nomads’, making a decent living wherever there’s Wi-Fi has become a happy reality.

We speak to three enterprising types who have managed to create a work/life balance with a difference.

(In photo: James Clark, website builder)

Clark, who still calls Melbourne home when asked, describes himself as a “location independent entrepreneur”.

First bitten by the travel bug when he moved to the UK on a two-year working visa in 1999, Clark found his wanderlust impossible to shake. Luckily, it was around the time the internet started showing great promise.

“That’s when I kind of realised that I really loved the internet and I loved to travel and decided to put the two of them together,” says the now 41-year-old, speaking via Skype from Singapore.

After his UK visa expired, Clark moved to Dublin and vowed to set up a business that would let him continue his globetrotting life. Working temp jobs, he learnt web design at night.

In 2001, he began making travel websites and by 2003, his business, Urban Nomad, had become a full-time proposition.

For many years he lived half the year in St Kilda and spent the rest travelling, but has had no fixed address since 2010.

His main venture is based in Australia and offers web design, e-marketing and search engine optimisation. Clark says his work comes via word-of-mouth or his website, Nomadic Notes, which he created to boost his profile and document his adventures. That’s also led to perks such as a press trip to Jordan.

Clark gets some interesting reactions to his lifestyle.

“I went home once and I ran into a friend and they’re like ‘I heard you’ve become a bum’,” he says.

“It’s a business. I’m pretty sure I work more hours than half my friends.”

TIPS

• Do easier work in cafes, but save new projects for a quieter space such as your hotel room.
• Meet up with other digital nomads through forums such as the Dynamite Circle.

Jodi Ettenberg, food blogger

Canadian-born Ettenberg, 33, originally planned to take a year of leave from her job as a lawyer in New York to travel.

But somehow one year morphed into five, as her travel blog Legal Nomads gained a following and spun off into freelance writing and photography, a self-published book, speaking engagements and social media consulting.

“For the first two years I was working off my savings. I was on a blogger site and not on WordPress,” says Ettenberg.

Now her website gets about 150,000 page views a month.

She’s travelled to destinations including South America, Russia and Mongolia and is now spending four months eating and working in Ho Chi Minh City.

“There’s a fallacy that because I’m posting photos of soup all the time I must not be working at all,” she says. “I’m building a business that I’m really invested in and I’m really proud of.”

Ettenberg says she rarely gets lonely as she hangs out with other digital nomads, arranges meet-ups on the way and regularly returns home.

“I didn’t set out to be a digital nomad. I just kind of followed each rabbit hole,” she says.

“It’s not like I quit my job because I was disenchanted with the corporate world, but now I’ve left it, I’ve loved building something new.”

TIPS

• Develop a routine to avoid sensory overload.
• Use Evernote, WhatsApp, Skype and Boingo.

Colin Burns, web developer

Surviving on your nomadic wits as a single person is one thing, but what about doing it with two kids in tow?

Ask Burns and his wife Tracy, who left Brisbane with Noah, now 7, and Hayley, 5, in January 2010.

Burns had sold a web design business to another company, which he then worked for – but quickly realised he hated being an employee. The day after quitting he won $25,000 in web design contracts.

“That was kind of the catalyst. We realised we really didn’t have to be in Australia to do this kind of work,” says Burns, who wanted to spend more time with his young children.

“We just figured raising kids was difficult anyway, whether we were at home or travelling.”

Giving themselves six weeks to take off, the young family was hit for six when Tracy was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Three months later she was OK and they were away.

“That first year we did a fair bit of travel, backpacker-style travel,” says Burns.

Tracy home-schools the children while her husband does the back-end work for Australian websites.

Much of their time has been spent in Asia, where life is cheap and Wi-Fi is plentiful.

“You pretty much know that most places in Asia have Wi-Fi. Unless you’re on a tiny deserted island in Thailand you’re going to be fine,” says Burns.

In July, Burns and his family will ditch the backpacks indefinitely, as the children start school in Queenstown, New Zealand.

“We’re at that point now where I’ve had enough and the kids have had enough and Tracy’s had enough,” says Burns. “You can have too much of a good thing.”

Burns plans to continue his business from Queenstown and is also involved in a soon-to-be-launched New Zealand start-up Scrattch.com that aims to be a Pinterest for content. (A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard) Ed.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/exotic-life-for-aussie-digital-nomads-20130322-2gjju.html#ixzz2OKUKxVdv

By Sameer Murdeshwar

Across the world, especially in urban regions and cities, crime has been rising for the past few years. A cursory search online reveals terrifying statistics such as a rise in violent crimes in more than half the cities that have the highest crime rates in the US, and a staggering hike of 10% for muggings and robberies in the UK.

The increase in crime has been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis, which has led to fewer jobs leading to higher unemployment. The solution to tackle this problem is simple – more cops on the beat to patrol the streets. The irony is that the same issue causing the problem is also hurting the solution. Budget cuts have reduced the number of patrol officers. Slashing police funding leading to planned attrition among local law enforcement over the past two years has contributed to a rise in street crime.

To effectively solve this problem, a new kind of technology known as “predictive policing” based on predictive analytics has been developed. How it works is based on the following premise – Criminals follow patterns, and with analytics, law enforcement agencies can help determine where the next crime will occur and sometimes prevent it.

In the past, this has been used effectively in other areas such as retail to predict consumer behaviour. Pattern detection works best with large amount of historical data dealing with places and times of previous detected and solved crime. Using this data, a model can be built to factor in all attributes related to specific types of crime such as auto theft, murder and robberies.

A forerunner in this space is IBM. As part of its “Smarter Cities” programme, IBM has been helping agencies such as London’s Metropolitan Police, the Polish National Police and a number of US and Canadian cities detect crime. Their program known as CRUSH – Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History, targets high probability crime areas in cities to allow police to deploy troops more efficiently.

IBM acquired i2, a Cambridge based crime analytics company last year to help build capabilities in this field. Other companies who have jumped on the predictive crime analytics bandwagon through organic and inorganic means include PredPol and HP. PredPol is a company formed after tests and programs were run successfully on crime analytics by scientists at the University of California – Los Angeles, and Santa Clara University. HP acquired Autonomy for USD 11 bn to build its investigative analytics service to help analyse historical crimes and predict and prevent new crimes.

The results from the use of this service has been very encouraging – In Memphis, serious crime has fallen by 30% and violent crimes declined by 15% in the past five years. In New York City, case closings are 25% higher than the national average and crime has decreased by 20% in spite of a decrease of 3,000 officers. However, predictive analytics does not promise to replace the effectiveness of police patrolling, but it certainly helps law enforcement agencies with tightened budgets and reduced payrolls.

With outsourcing analytics service providers working furiously in this area to bring out newer and more accurate iterations of this service, the accuracy of results in reducing crime is only going to improve. With agencies in Europe and North America having partnered with outsourcing service providers, it is now time for their Asian counterparts to do the same. This will bring in a new wave of public-private partnerships and will lead to safer cities worldwide.

- Sameer Murdeshwar, Analyst, ValueNotes

• ABPOA takes small steps to establish presence in and support BPO community interest in WA 
  ANDREW CHRISTOPHER the founding partner of RFBE Consulting is the new WA regional coordinator for The Australian BPO Association in Western Australia. Andrew is a finance and governance educated professional with 30 years of UK and Australian senior management, leadership and internal consulting experience in facilitating business and operational excellence. Andrew is passionate about sharing knowledge of and assisting businesses (people) committed to Business Excellence. Companies or individuals interested in hearing more about ABPOA in Western Australia should contact Andrew Christopher on Mobile: 0419197558 or Email: achris@rfbe.com.au
• Ukraine IT Outsourcing Sector is ten times bigger
  The volume of IT outsourcing services provided in Ukraine has grown by a factor ten. The Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative has recently published a report ‘Exploring Ukraine. IT Outsourcing Industry’ that is available at http://bit.ly/Tc3jQj. The ‘Exploring Ukraine. IT Outsourcing Industry’ report analyzes main indicators on the state of Ukraine’s outsourcing industry and reveals the main trends of the Ukraine’s software development and IT outsourcing service industry in 2011, the market structural features and includes general information about the country, its infrastructure and specifics of conducting business in Ukraine.
• PSIA at Microsoft WPC
  Philippines Software Industry Assoc. (PSIA) led a Philippine delegation to Toronto, Canada to participate in the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The Philippines was one of the 156 countries represented at WPC, which gathered over 16,000 participants from around the globe. The WPC is an annual gathering of Microsoft’s global partners to share and learn about the latest in technology, business strategies, products, and opportunities.
• Jabra business customers to enjoy enhanced user experience thanks to Avaya Compliance
  Jabra, a global manufacturer of innovative hands-free audio solutions, today announced that its Jabra UC VOICE Series headsets, Jabra PRO 920 and Jabra PRO 9400 Series wireless and corded headsets, and Jabra SUPREME UC Bluetooth headsets are now interoperable with key collaboration solutions from Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration systems, software and services.

By Jameson Berkow

Businesses stand to save more than US$1-trillion per year by outsourcing their IT to remote “cloud” computing providers by 2015, says a Microsoft Corp. study released Monday, allowing them to spend more on new hires.

“Efficiencies gained from cloud are applied to innovation broadly (not just IT), such as hiring more sales, finance, production, marketing people and more,” reads an excerpt from the study, conducted by International Data Corp. on behalf of the world’s largest software firm.

“In this way, cloud computing differs from traditional outsourcing.”

Nearly 14 million new jobs will be created around the world by 2015 as a result of growing cloud computing adoption, the study found. Canada in particular can look forward to cutting itself a very large slice of that economic pie.

Canadian businesses have been adopting cloud computing services at a rapidly accelerating rate in recent years and the IDC data found North America at large was leading the world in cloud adoption rates. Nearly 36,000 new jobs will be created in Canada as a result of could computing by the end of this year, the study said.

By the end of 2015, Microsoft expects that figure to double beyond 70,000.

Projected levels of IT spending, relative degrees of automation and workforce size were among the factors IDC used to determine its results. The researchers created a sophisticated economic impact model to determine “a little money spent up front to reach for the cloud leads to impressive returns down the line.”

So as the debate over widespread cloud adoption rages on, it appears the pro-cloud cost-savings argument may soon have millions of new supporters.

Source: Edmonton Journal

Banking has become a fundamentally more difficult practice in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, note Celent analysts in their annual discussion of the trends in global banking. Banks in North America and Western Europe remain under pressure, while banks in Asia, Australia, and Canada are beginning to do much better.

“China, Canada, and Australia seemed well positioned for 2011,” says Bart Narter, senior vice-president of Celent’s Banking Group. “The United States has benefited from stabilizing of loan losses, but regulatory pressure on retail revenues loom large. Europe is mired in the crisis.”

The group sees two key business drivers:

1. Many economies are in low-to-no-growth mode: Banks must do more with existing customers in order to grow, and must reduce costs in order to improve profit.

2. Digital channels are taking on new importance in all geographies with smartphone penetration increasing everywhere.

The drive to reduce costs and the reality of the huge growth in mobile and smartphone usage is driving banks to think even more about digital channels. Digital channels can mean internet banking, personal financial management, mobile banking, mobile marketing, and tablets. All have been changing (and will continue to change) the shape of banking. Banks across the globe are building-out mobile capabilities and investing in improving the internet banking experience on both the retail and commercial sides.

Another consequence of huge cost pressures is the increased appetite for outsourcing, which manifests itself in many ways, including:

1. Replacing internally developed systems for off-the shelf systems.

2. Using SaaS through an external provider, perhaps in an external cloud, perhaps in an internal cloud, or perhaps in a bank-dedicated outsourcing facility.

Outsourcing means more than just business process outsourcing. It can mean shared systems in a service bureau, software as a service, internal clouds, or external clouds. It can also mean new business models in existing spaces, or using off-the-shelf software instead of internally developed systems. Banks are more willing to use other parties to solve their technology and operational challenges.

The continuing focus on risk and compliance is putting more emphasis on analytics. That means understanding the customer better through data the bank already has or can acquire. This insight can be used to better retain customers, better market to them, better understand their risk to the bank, and better predict when they will visit a branch.

In markets where economic growth is low, such as the United States and Western Europe, banks need to gain greater wallet share of existing customers. In both areas, banks are realizing that they have lots of data that can inform risk, pricing, cross-selling, and staffing. That realization has yet to turn into reality in most cases, however, but this is an area that is becoming strategic for banks across the globe.

Source:Celent

Software developer VanceInfo buys Chinese business outsourcing firm

Software developer VanceInfo Technologies Inc. said last week that it has purchased LW International Holdings Ltd., a Chinese business outsourcing services company.

China’s VanceInfo will pay $5.6 million in cash and stock for the company, with further payments based on LW International’s performance during the next three years.

LW, also known as Lifewood, was started in 2004 and serves clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific regions, mainly in the health care, publishing and financial services sectors.

VanceInfo said there are increasing synergies with between the business outsourcing and information technology businesses.

Lifewood reported about $4.5 million in net revenue last year.

Source: CanadianBusiness

Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available. The new report analyzes the worldwide markets for Business Process Outsourcing in US$ Million by the following Service segments – Logistics, Sales & Marketing, Customer Care, Finance & Accounting, Human Resource, and Other Services.
The report provides separate comprehensive analytics for the US, Canada, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Rest of World.

Annual estimates and forecasts are provided for the period 2007 through 2015.

Also, a seven-year historic analysis is provided for these markets. The report profiles 519 companies including many key and niche players such as Accenture Plc, ACS, A Xerox Company, Amdocs Limited, Ceridian Corporation, CGI Group, Computer Sciences Corporation, Convergys Corporation, Dell Services, HP Enterprise Services, Hewitt Associates LLC, Intelenet Global Services Pvt. Ltd., Intelligroup, Inc., KARVY Global Services Limited., Keane, Inc., Sapient Corporation, Spherion Corp, StarTek, Inc., Tata Consultancy Services Limited, TriNet Group, Inc., Gevity HR, Inc., and Unisys Corporation.

Market data and analytics are derived from primary and secondary research. Company profiles are mostly extracted from URL research and reported select online sources.

Source: ReportLinker.com

Outsourcing by U.S. technology companies is on the decline, according to a survey by BDO USA, the accounting and consulting organization.

About 35 percent of the one hundred chief financial officers (CFOs) of the companies surveyed indicated that their firms are currently outsourcing services or manufacturing outside the U.S. — down from a high of 62 percent in 2009, and a slight decline from the 37 percent decline in 2010.

The study also found that of the companies who are not currently outsourcing (65 percent), the majority would not consider outsourcing too far from home (58 percent), either choosing the U.S. (25 percent), Canada (13 percent), or indicating no plans to outsource at all (20 percent).

The CFOs indicated that while they are concerned about some U.S. regulations that may change taxes, they don’t expect jobs to head overseas any time soon.

“Outsourcing can be looked at as a bellwether of the economy,” said Don Jones, Partner in the Technology and Life Sciences Practice at BDO USA.

“Tech companies turned to outsourcing in 2009 in order to reduce operating costs and ride out the recession. Since then, we’ve seen a marked decrease as companies recover and look to create jobs and growth close to home.”

Since 2008, most foreign countries saw a decrease in the number of U.S. firms establishing outsourcing operations (the average destination saw a 29 percent decrease, while Western Europe was the only destination that saw an increase, 9 percent).

India now favored country to outsource to

Among U.S. firms that are still outsourcing, BDO states, India has surpassed China as the favored region for the first time (24 percent of respondents selected India, versus 18 percent for China).

Also, of the companies that seek to outsource, the most likely ones are involved in manufacturing (53 percent), followed by IT services and programming (43 percent), R&D (38 percent), distribution (26 percent) and call or help centers (12 percent).

“Manufacturing is most commonly outsourced because it can be both labor and capital intensive,” said Jones. “When done right, an outsourced manufacturing function can cut operating costs and help tech companies to realize significant savings.”

Read more at IBTimes