Steve Crescenzo in his blog post “What does ‘engagement’ mean in the communications world?”, questions the role of engagement consultation companies in improving engagement between employees in the company. He shows an example that raises the problem that actually an improvement in engagement between employees often doesn’t result in productivity, rather it results in a more unproductive environment. Now, Facebook by introducing Workplace, an application introduced to improve positive engagement and communications in a company.

Workplace, a messenger app by Facebook has created a new possibility for communication company culture. This app has integrated “social media into the professional setting”. The new app works by connecting employees in a company like the regular Facebook messenger app, but with an additional integration with work applications such as the Microsoft office applications and the ability for employees to add different tabs to conversations, so that they’re able to switch between work applications and people very easily. The vice president of Workplace, Julien Codorniou said “Our vision is for Workplace to be an employee’s command center for everything that’s happening with their team, their company and their industry, no matter what type of company or industry that is”. The aim of this company is to develop a culture of communication that is professional and focused to the goal of their company. Workplace as an application has a potential to eliminate all potential communication problems that employees would have to each other. This could potentially remove the barriers between departments and department, or even the intern and the CEO. With the removal of the barrier between employees, this could improve the flow of ideas that would result to an improvement in a company’s overall communication efficiency.

Introducing this new application, some might suspect that companies wouldn’t want to apply Workplace to their company operations because of the learning curve that employees have to experience to get to know this new app. But in a time that is continuously introducing new social media applications and technology, I think it would be easy for the employees to learn how to use the application and integrate it to their workplace.

Companies have shown improvements in communications after using the application. “When unprecedented hurricanes struck the US, Delta used Workplace to coordinate their disaster response and real-time communications. Delta also used Safety Officer, a bot by ServiceRocket, to account for Tampa Customer Engagement Center employees”. And also a hotel chain in China called Ginger hotels have uses Workplace to execute credit and air travel approvals. After using the application, they’ve seen a result of 50% increase in productivity.

Word count: 430 words

References

Bragg, T. (n.d.). How Workplace by Facebook is encouraging a company culture of communication. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from http://techwireasia.com/2017/11/how-workplace-facebook-encouraging-company-culture-communication/

Crescenzo, S. (2016, January 13). What does ‘engagement’ really mean in the communications world? Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://crescenzocomm.com/blog/1832-2/#more-1832

The idea of a startup is built surrounding the value proposition of the new startup company. An Israelian startup company called, Zebra Medical Vision, uses AI technology and algorithms to detect cancer. Everytime the algorithm is used, the hospital will be charged $1.

Visual medical scans are used by doctors to provide them with the visual information to help the doctors detect any diseases or disorders that the patient might have. But most medical scans cost a lot of money and often doctors cannot detect very early signs of these diseases, such as cancer. Building this product, they aim to target the customer segment away from the “Western Market”, into the East where people need it more. In one of the methods of experimentation of the product, one of the leaders of this program, Kassim Javaid, said that the algorithm is missed 60 of the time, and it discovered 95% of vertebral fractures from scans.

It is still unclear whether this technology could be a success or not. But at the current moment, with the success of this technology, it is going to be a sustaining technology to medical scan services. This new service going to improve all technology and services related to disease and cancer detection. This product could work together with medical scans, where the algorithm will detect the disease or disorder through the medical scan, or it could detect directly with the patient.

If this product is proven to work, this new technology would revolutionize the medical technology and improve the method of early cancer and disease detection. This is a technology that will make doctor’s jobs easier and patient more confident with their doctors. In the future, it could potentially save people suffering in these diseases, and better, saving thousands of lives.

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References

The infamous gaming company, Razer has announced that they’ll be launching a new gaming smartphone. Like any gaming hardware, it will be powerful. Even though it only has a Qualcomm Adreno 540 GPU, the same GPU that could be found in other phones, such as the Sony Xperia XZ1, Samsung Galaxy S8 active, and Google Pixel 2. What makes it different from all other phones is that it has a 1440p resolution and an astonishing 8 GB RAM, which makes this phone perfect for mobile gamers.
By introducing this new type of phone, Razer has successfully opened up a new market and raised the standards for all other phone companies. This phone would instantly solve lagging problems for mobile gamers, eliminating any chances of losing a game due to lags. Customers also wouldn’t have to worry whether if, the software or hardware could handle the game. With this kind of specification, it would handle any mobile game developed in the next few years.

On the down side, even though Razer hasn’t announced the official prices, we could expect prices to be high, considering the specification of the mobile device, and the generally high prices for Razer products. The next question is, will this phone be as a success as all other phones in the market. Looking at the current habits of buying a new phone, most people buy phones for necessity reasons, is this overpowered phone, something that people need in the future? And will it be a success?

References:

https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/13/razer-phone-something-you-need/

The Residencial Tenancy Act is Toronto is causing landlords and developers to have less incentive to give out more supply. As of May 30^th, 2017 landlords can only increase their rent by the amount that is set by the Government of Ontario’s Rent Increase Guidelines and as of current day landlords can only increase by 1.5% as of current rent, following the rate of inflation in Toronto.

The government is trying to reduce the costs of rent to the tenants, starting by decreasing the rate in which the rent is increasing by. The government is also opening up some land owned by the government to be used to build 2000 new apartments, in putting efforts to increase supply. The government’s efforts in rent control might be ineffective considering that further increasing the supply will cause prices to fall, maybe not in the short run, but maybe in the long run.

Economists such as Benjamin Tal, the deputy Chief Economists at CIBC doubts the effectiveness of this policy. He said, “It’s Economics 101. You limit the ability to raise rent, you decrease supply”. What he’s saying could be true because as the landlord’s ability to control prices are limited, people would have less incentive to rent their properties to other people.

In my opinion, in the short run landlords will not really affected by the policy, but in the long run, it will definitely cause landlords’ incentive to decrease, or not the quality of the buildings will decrease as incentives decrease. Both will cause significant loss in for tenants, or consumer for apartments.

Works Cited:

Word Count: 262 words

Ethics is an area of knowledge that deals with the problem of right or wrong. While business ethics is how a business deals with the decision of right or wrong in a business environment. This would include both the business’ way of handling operations outside and within the business.

A way of looking into business ethics would be through the stakeholder’s theory demonstrated by R. Edward Freeman. He said, “for any business to be successful, it has to create value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities, and financiers”. He argues that a company have to create value for all of these parties to be successful. For example, when the business doesn’t have a good relationship with the local communities, they would create conflict and eventually problems will arise and be in the way of them being successful. Thus, any failure to be successful in creating value for all of these parties would be “a business in decline” as Freeman says it.

A great example of bad business ethics would be a recent case of the indictment of bribery and fraud on Charles “Chuck” Rizzo, the former CEO of ‘Rizzo’s environmental services’, trash firm in Detroit. He made fraud legal documents and bribed a few people including chesterfield township supervisor; Michael Lovelock and a former New Haven trustee; Christopher Craigsmiles. The money made from these deals was later used by Rizzo to contribute to building his new mansion. This example shows a bad set of business ethics, creating fraud legal documents and bribery is illegal and thus eventually led to Rizzo’s indictment and the FBI investigation on the company. This would be an example of “a business in decline”.

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