Thursday, April 03, 2008 Ng: Total system analyzer By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
ONE of the products we recently developed, which is generating a lot of interest, is a software called Total System Analyzer (TSA).
Why all the interest? The software allows management to know what people are doing in their computers. But while the technology can help a company save time, it is also the number one cause of time wastage.
Consider cell phones and texting. Cell phone is a great enabler, but how much time do we waste on it? We can look at computers in the same way. How many hours do we spend doing social network, surfing and looking at YouTube, or downloading videos and mp3s? How much of company time do we use in chatting, answering personal e-mails or playing games?
All these are anathema to the company. That is why, according to the ePolicy Institute, while only 19 percent of US employers monitor the usage of their computers in 2001, in 2005, the figure increased to 36 percent. In 2007, 45 percent of US employers started monitoring computer use of their employees.
The TSA monitors what each employee is doing in their computer, as well as log what websites they are visiting or what software they are running. It also logs and analyzes how much of their hard disk contains video or mp3 files, or illegal software.
While one of the goals is to insure software license legalization, it also helps analyze how much of the software the company buys is utilized, while insuring that things not allowed by the company is not done during office hours.
Employees must understand that management has the right to read company e-mail, listen to conversations made on company phones and even check computers assigned to personnel. Tools like TSA allow the company to do this in real time.
One of the things that I consider as this week’s downers is the news that CNET and even Newsweek have started to downsize. Newspapers and magazines have been adversely affected by the Internet. More and more people are going to the Internet to read news, and the advertisers are going there as well. Blogs and informal news sharing are also starting to form part of the news gathering efforts of many individuals.
A report by Nielsen showed that Google’s Blogger was able to increase its number of visitors from 23.6 million in February 2007 to 37.2 million unique visitors in February 2008, which is a growth of 58 percent.
Moreover, Wordpress.com is now the second most popular blog site. It posted an impressive 209-percent growth, with 16.5 million users in just one year.
Two years ago, I wrote here that blogs may be a fad. But it does not seem to be fading away, and more people are blogging now than before.
It is a great way for people to express their views and many mainstream media and news organizations, even companies, now include blogs among their mainstay websites as these allow them to share and interact with their customers and readers.
As more and more people read news and share data in the Internet, it looks like ebooks are finally growing as well. Ebooks has existed in the last five years, but somehow its growth was said to be overrated. However, it is slowly growing.
According to the latest report, ebook sales grew from around $2 million in the fourth quarter of 2004, to over $8 million in 2007.
