Today is Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day, even amnesty international has joined in. I’m sure you will read a lot about all different kinds of countries, organisations and individuals, who in one way or another violate human rights. I want to talk to you about a different form of human rights violations, the kind we all experience almost every day.

I’m not talking about the fact that the US government and others have decided that there are humans of a “lesser” kind, also called illegal combatants. Even so this is a very slippery slope into a 1940 Nazi-Germany kind of situation, and takes the moral high-ground away from us in our legitimate fight against terrorism.

I’m talking about sexism in our society, in our businesses, in our schools and universities. This is going on in countries who have signed the declaration of human rights and violate their legal and spiritual obligation on a daily basis.

Tragically sexism is not only directional from male to female, it is happening also from female to male, male to male and female to female.

Many forms of human rights violations are so horrendous that they will quite rightly dominate the majority of todays postings, but next time we all criticize anyone for human rights violations, maybe we should spend a few seconds reflecting on our own actions.

Sexism hurts and injures people every day - let us finally change it. –ST.

I am - and others - are getting more and more communications from small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, about how worried they are about the credit crunch.

At the same time unemployment figures in the US and elsewhere show no increase in the unemployment, so what kind of recession is this? What started it and how is it affecting small business?

In my personal opinion, the story goes something like this:

Enter the “greedy banker”, who recklessly hands out money to just about anyone how wants any and to some who may not even wanted a credit. Banks are obliged by law to make checks on their creditors. It is all very well to tell creditors they will lose their house if they can not pay the monthly installments on their credit. It is true at the same time that bankers should know they will lose money if they recklessly hand out money.

Then the “greedy banker” gets into trouble, as he/she should have known would happen. Our governments using our (tax-) money recklessly to bail these “greedy bankers” and there shareholders out. So they can go back to “work”, pay themselves the wages and bonuses we all can only dream about, and start repossessing the houses of the very people who’s tax-money was used to bail them out, for mistakes the bankers made.

If I had a mortgage with one of these banks and they wanted to reposes my house, I would fight them in court for damages for miss-selling loans to me and endangering my financial future and that of my family. As mentioned before, they ought to be liable for this mess. I do not see any prosecutions going down for reckless and maybe even fraudulent credit practices, where are all the prosecutors? Did none of the greedy bankers know what they were doing? There certainly is public interest, thousands and thousands of families who have to loss it all, not to speak of all us tax-payers, who want hospitals, school, police to name but a few and not to bail out “greedy bankers”?

Unbelievable damage has been done to our economy by these “greedy bankers”, and now small business is going to get it. Judging from the ever growing number of emails I receive, many banks asking for business loans back, not extending facilities, not providing new finance for small business to grow and with this forcing many small businesses out of business. They are using our own money against us to help themselves.

In short, it is my believe that this whole recession has been created by “greedy bankers”, to fill there own pockets. Which small business has ever received loans from government to stay in business, well we all do not have meetings with the Prime Minister or President, do we?

It is time to develop mechanisms to hold our politicians accountable for what they do with our money, it is also time to hold our public servants/prosecutors accountable for their failure to investigate these - in my personal opinion - at best reckless “greedy bankers”! After Arthur Anderson, Enron, WorldCom and others, why not clean out the banking system and make them accountable for their mistakes and greed - no more dividends for any shareholders until all this public money has been payed back with interest and charges.

To all of you who have written to me about this, I’m really sorry, but I have no answers for you other than not to get involved with banks if you can and bootstrap the hell out of your business.

As you can tell it’s been one of these weekends, I hope you have a better one. — ST.

A few weeks ago the good people from the 3 Network (Hutchison 3G UK Ltd.) sent me their new USB dongle for my laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro. This happened just when I wanted to change from my current mobile broadband provider anyway, so just in time.

I have to say I’m pleased, very pleased with the performance of this little unit and for once feel always connected to the Internet. Some of the postings to this blog over the past week have been made using this little device and it helps me utilizing every minute of otherwise useless time on a train or waiting somewhere else.

For anyone working in a mobile capacity, having a broadband dongle is a must and using the 3 network is fast, certainly much faster then my old provider. More importantly having this kind of technology will improve your productivity in several areas:

• You can work from anywhere, you can take your work home and be more with your family;
• it really makes our OnlineOffice even more valuable since it’s all online;
• it makes you and your business more accessible, by providing a better client experience;

But don’t take only my word for it, go to the 3 mobilebuzz website and see what other people say. I have written about the 3 Network before and praised them for their deal with skype, their current mobile broadband offering is another step in the right direction for mobile data services.

I’m a happy client, well done 3. — ST.

Disclaimer: I was sent this dongle to test by the 3 Network free of charge, but I will be taking out a subscription after my free trail period is finished.

UPDATE: The 3 Network have cut the price for their dongle in half, so from tomorrow you can get the dongle for £49.99, even less reason not to get one.

Having been a member of ai-amnesty international now for over 30 years, I need to support this appeal by Bloggers Unite. If I could ask all of my fellow bloggers to do the same. While it may be “off-topic” for many of our blogs, it is certainly not “off topic” for our humanity and humility.

On May 15th, 2008, let’s come together and all blog about human rights. There are thousands of hum rights issues you can blog about - anyone of these will do, to create awareness.

Topic you could consider include:

On our flight back from Australia, fiddling with her PowerBook laptop, my wife said to me out of the blue: “Apple (computers, iPod, IPhone, etc.) is like Australia!”

Now here was a comparison I had not heard before. She explained it this way, when ever I want to do something no my computer I think where would it be if I had designed this PowerBook computer and there it is, easy. When ever I want to do something in Australia, I go and talk to people and there you go no problem done. She then carried on and said, “you try doing that in Europe or the US - everybody is stressed, miserable and our political correctness is slowly driving me up the wall.”

And indeed a few weeks ago I read in “The Age” - a daily paper in Australia - that in Europe and the US about 70% of people had a negative outlook for the future, about 20% a positive outlook and the rest didn’t have an outlook.

In Australia, these figures are reversed, over 70% of people have a positive outlook and it shows in everyday life, the whole society is more friendly and less stressed - why is that? I wonder if Australians are really aware of this fundamental difference? Here people are still interested in improving things and have this “go and get ‘em” mentality, while I fear we in the US/Europe often only care about making money fast, we are often not interested in building long lasting value, but have this “quarterly” outlook in life. This kind of behavior my yet come to haunt us, as it has a profound social impact.

As far as Apple products are concerned this is a pretty big endorsement too. It translates - for me anyway - into, “I have less stress in using this computer, in comparison to all others.” Why would that be so? I believe it to be the outlook of people like Steve Jobs, who clearly does not think about himself first, but his company and he is not motivated by making more money, but by moving things forward.

To bring this down to a simple denominator - I guess you could conclude, that chasing the money makes us stressful and ill, chasing a vision is fun and therapeutic.

So I guess, she is right: Apple is like Australia. — ST.

When my wife went to university in London in the eighties one of her professors was of the opinion that the education was wasted on women, since they would leave university, get married and have children. While nobody says these things anymore in public, we still seem to have the same mentality.

Today I travel around the world and speak with all kinds of people about micro-business, like home-business. Often the conversation includes the so called “skill shortage”, felt especially hard in Australia these days. When I question this alleged shortage, I’m always surprised about how little consideration is given to well skilled and educated parents - mainly women - sitting at home looking after the family.

After one of these conversations today, I was reminded of this professor and began wondering if he was right with his opinion in the final analysis? Trivially, his assertion that educating women is a waste, is completely nonsensical, but the final result to the economy seems to suggest his analysis could be right. How else can it be explained that we ignore this massive “skills resource” sitting at home.

The technology we at WinWeb have developed allows for work from anywhere at anytime, others have done the same in other areas? Where is this “skill shortage”? The truth in my opinion is more the fact that we often block this remote working possibility from our minds, but why?

If you consider the skills potential of parents, if each parent would only contribute one hour on average per week to their learned professions. This would be a staggering number of man hours per week.

The benefits for the home working parent would be very tangible too. They could show a almost uninterrupted work history, stay in touch with their profession and would therefor find it much easier to get back into full-time employment after the kids have grown up.

To often my conversation partners look somewhat bewildered at my initial suggestion, but then often admit they had never thought about this possibility.

It is not a waste to educate women or any parent, it is however a waste to treat parents as if they do not exist in work terms. I consider it an insult to each parent and unbelievably damaging for our economy. — ST.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said he made the decision because the two private takeover offers on the table, did not offer the taxpayer “sufficient value for money”!

The problem for the chancellor, the same statement would be true if one looked his performance, he makes decisions and the taxpayer suffers - to the tune of £55bn, to be precise. Under the “new (Labour) strategy”, this will jump to a staggering £110bn - a whopping £3,500 per tax-payer. This is the first such move since the “good old days” of the 1970s, with the added spice that the shareholders have already promised legal action.

The government has recruited Mr. Sandler, the former Boss of Lloyd’s of London, to run Northern Rock. “It is business as usual, ” he said. I wonder if the tax-payers feel the same way. Or the employees for that matter, as there is the expectation of 1,000 job cuts under Mr. Sandler. In the absence of a vision for Northern Rock, there is always “restructuring”, cutting cost to you and me.

Mr Darling has seen his ratings fall, while he follows my new slogan for Labour:

• Northern Rock - Too little. Too late.
• Non-doms - Too little. Too late.
• Capital Gains on Business Sale - Too little. Too late.

I can’t stop wondering, if the tax-payer is ever going to get “sufficient value for money” out of this government, or any of these disasters caused by this Labour government.

Personally, I can’t wait for the: Darling - Too little. Too late. ST

The British Camber of Commerce - BCC reports a £10bn rise in the cost of red-tape to £66bn in the last 12 month.

In a time when our economy is in a slow down cycle, this figure is staggering. The government policies are fiscal policies are failing on a grand scale while it is spending tax-payers money through red-tape at an unbelievable rate.

Not only the cost of red-tape will be of worry to most small business, but the inherent loss of competitiveness is not to be underestimated. The biggest burden is the working-time regulation with alone £1.8bn in a year - a total of £16bn since it’s introduction.

The governments claim of an overall reduction in the cost of red-tape have been exposed as wishful thinking, once again.

Francis Chittenden of the Manchester Business School who has co-authored the report with Tim Ambler from the London Business School has the hope, that the civil servants who actually reduced their cost of red-tape a little, would be promoted, in order to achieve better results in future years. But even he admits it may be too little too late.

This, in my opinion, should be the Labour Parties new slogan: Labour - Too little, Too late. ST.

Today I got an invitation from someone to link up with him via LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. So I signed in and accepted the invitation. Scanning through my LinkedIn homepage, I noticed that a “colleague” from WinWeb had signed up. Once I clicked on the link I was shocked to read that someone else was claiming to be CEO of my company, WinWeb International Limited.

As you can imagine I was a little perplexed, but then you realize that these social networks all have certain limitations, and this is one of them. Anyone can claim to be someone else and there is little you can do about it. It could also be a simple mistake, but who knows?

So be careful when you meet someone online for business, they may not be who you think they are. ST.

Currently the UK is a hostile place for micro business and small business, there is the government which seems to be hell bend on making it more and more difficult for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants to run their affairs. Unless you are Richard Branson and get invited to fly to China and India with the PM and getting your hands on the fifth largest bank in the UK with taxpayers money, you are having a tough time.

Today I travelled to Ken Livingstone’s London from the suburbs in Hertfordshire with the 11:17 train to Kings Cross, to do some business. While waiting on the platform for my train, I was reading about Ken’s plans to increase the congestion charge to £25 per day for some cars, that is about $50 per day to drive into London with your car. I’m still wondering what is happening to all the money Ken is getting from us everyday right now, since the promised travel improvements certainly have not happened.

My train arrives and is over-full, in-fact two stations on and nobody can get on the train anymore, hundreds of people are left on the platforms. If you run a small business and want to travel to London your are in trouble these days, the whole infrastructure is not functioning. On one hand we have Ken who has long lost touch with what is happening to people, charging exorbitant amounts to enter London by car, without that we have a public transport system in and around London that can cope even at non-rush-hour times.

Needless to say that I arrived late for my meeting and when I complained about the service, I was told to fill in a form.

London is my favorite city and my favorite city is in trouble, big trouble. Let’s hope Boris Johnson can sort this mess out. ST.