South Korea is recorded the highest suicide rate in the OECD nations. And sadly, it is a common topic among Koreans that Korea’s suicidal rate ranks highest. Suicides are especially frequent near the bridges over the Han River in Seoul and the average death per day was around 45. Samsung Life Insurance came up with an idea of “Bridge of Life” campaign. This was a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) campagin in partnership with Seoul City that tires to prevent future suicides. Their ultimate goals were to “create a campaign that stops suicide from emotional level [as oppose to technical ways such as installing more CCTV, making bridges less accessible to pedestrians]”.

They installed sensors on the guardrails, so that when people walk by, lights are turned on according to their movements. Along with that the lighted rails appears short messages like funny jokes and other phrases that would speak to the anxious minds of those attempting to end their lives.

[Photo1] SOS Phone Booth with buttons that call 911

[Photo2] An Art installation at the end of the bridge

As a result, the rate of suicide has actually gone down and not only that, but also the bridge has turned itself into a healing place as well as tourist attraction. So by doing this, Samsung Life Insurance indeed earned a great positive brand image and continuously remains as the most well-recognized and mostly well-known insurance company in Korea. (The video is attached. If you have not seen it before, I recommend you to see!)

References:

http://www.samsungvillage.com/blog/2013/06/bridge-of-life-reminds-you-of-the-good-of-life.html

In this technology-based generation, most of us use at least one social media services, such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblrs or Twitter. As many people spend time communicating with people through these modern social networking, there are more competitions within the social networking markets and more threats from a younger generation of social outlets.

Among these rising social networking tools are such as Snapchat, WhatsApp, Line, Kakaotalk and Tumblr. Each of them has a different perspective on what social networking should be like ㅡ private messaging and creating contents with images and videos. Most of the services are going into the similar directions (with visual attempts) and most of the upstarts are not bringing in significant revenue. Consequently, many companies has been making changes to its service, mostly from feedback of competitors.

Twitter, for example, has stuck to its main vision of letting people share messages no more than 140 characters. It did not spend as much time on creating new products as they spend on engineering problems in its early days. However, recently the company has been making changes to its service, and some of them seem to be responses to the competitor’s. Twitter has broaden spaces for pictures instead of extending the limitation of characters. It is also introducing features that deliver information to uses automatically that people would like to follow. It is definitively in competitive advantage in a sense that it is “quick and immediate and short”, but it could present challenges down the road as the company to send its users relevant advertisements.

All the social networking markets, including Twitter, are always going to have international competition. And if all the companies aim for the same goal, there will be more of competition that leads to market inefficiency than it will to efficiency. Technologies will keep develop in the future, and those markets should keep feedback each other and try to meet with trends.

References:

About two weeks ago, there was a shutdown in the United States. The centre of this storm was from the Act President Obama tried to pass. This Act aims to make healthcare affordable to all people in the United State; this is known as “Obamacare”. Currently, the US medical expenses are steep. In order cover the medical expenses, people need the insurance, but insurance in turn is also expensive. The government provides Medicaid for people people below a certain income and for those over 65 years of age. However, those who do no meet the conditions for Medicare or Medicaid often cannot afford to buy individual health insurance. As a result, Obamacare makes having health insurance mandatory while making it affordable for everyone by making changes to certain tax rules.

In order to pass any Acts, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate must agree upon a budget following fiscal. This year however, the politicians were no able to agree on the budgetㅡwithout a budget, non-essential workers of the Government cannot be paid. The House of Representatives is largely controlled by Republicans and the US Senate is controlled by President Obama’s Democrats. And the Republican party, which was not pleased with the Act, continues its efforts to make changes to the Act.

This eventually led to the shutdown in US. It means the essential services such as social security payments and military services will continue to operate but employees of non-essential services will be asked to leave without payment. So how will this impact in the US economy? If employees are not paid, they will not have money to meet other obligations like rents and credit card payments, which will gradually cut US GDP off. Further, it will have some kind of impact to the world economy in terms of exports, but not much unless this draws into the long term. However, analysts do not believe that this incidence will go out into the long term.

References:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24343698

http://news.yahoo.com/govt-shutdown-enters-2nd-week-no-end-sight-074025328–politics.html

Did you know that there is still child labours going on in the other side of the world?             And would you believe if there are still some people whose rights are violated because of your want for soccer ball?

Have you ever wondered who make soccer balls? The research found that there are workers stitching soccer balls in Pakistan, India, China and Thailand whose labour rights are violated.

As we know the soccer ball industry signed the “Atlanta Agreement”, which refers to the reports of violations of human rights in soccer ball production. However, the soccer ball industry including FIFA does not live up to their promises. The workers get wages below the legal minimum as it is rated low as US $0.35 per ball despite working 12-13 hours a day. What is worse, since making soccer balls take a long time workers can only produce maximum four balls each day. There are still gender discrimination against female home-based workers, who are paid the least amount of wages and face constant threat of losing the jobs due to pregnancy.

The soccer industry should keep up their promises to protect children’ and women’s rights from the unfair and unethical situations. It should keep outlining steps to improve working conditions, and keep consisting many organizations with campaigning about taking responsibility of the workers’ rights in their supply chain.

Companies should consider, before they produce a thing, if they are keeping promises as human-beings ㅡwhether they are being humane and ethical ㅡ before they take the profits from those unprotected workers. And we should be aware that there are still inhumane activities going on on the other side of the world, and try to help out to the extend we all can help or make the condition better.

References:

http://www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/foulball-campaign

http://www.ituc-csi.org/world-cup-soccer-balls?lang=en