InformationWeek

CEO Takes A Flying Leap

Some CEOs will go to great lengths to motivate their workers.

Take Mike Green, who jumped out of a plane at 14,500 feet to honor a bet he made with his team of software engineers. Green, president and CEO of InPower, a San Francisco maker of client-server human resources software, went skydiving on May 10 to deliver on a promise he made to his development team.

Green agreed to make the jump if developers delivered the InPower Pay 2.0 payroll application on time at the end of last year.

Green says he's really glad the developers met their deadline. 'Otherwise, I would have had to jump without a parachute!' he joked.

Hands-Off Operations

Virtual servers Inc. wants to free companies from the hassle and cost of owning their own network application servers. The service provider offers virtual World Wide Web, file transfer protocol, post office protocol, and other E-mail application services.

For $150-a-month you get 75 Mbytes of server space. Customers maintain control over their applications, with access to usage log files and other administrative utilities.

Virtual Servers was founded by Steve Jenkins and Jeremy Young, and is based in Provo, Utah.

A Web site is under construction at http://www.vservers.com/

Sure, Now He Tells Us

All the reengineering, technology development, and outsourcing of the past few years may have cut, instead of beefed up, America's corporate muscle, says Stephen Roach, a Morgan Stanley economist. Roach once saw those trends as big contributors to a productivity-led economic recovery.

"Maybe I went too far," Roach says in a report he issued this month.

It looks more likely that "the so-called productivity resurgence of recent years has been built on the back of slash-and-burn restructuring strategies that have put extraordinary pressures on the work force," he recently wrote.

Corporate America may now be too lean in both factories and skilled workers to grow-especially in light of the productive capacities of developing nations.

Roach says he's now rethinking the measures he's used in the past to gauge corporate productivity.

He also says companies must strive for a more sustainable form of productivity-and that gutting the work force isn't the answer.

Virtual Learning

Spectrum Virtual University is offering free summer classes to all comers over the Internet. Courses range from Internet basics to the intricacies of the file transfer protocol and Telnet. There's also a hands-on workshop that will show you how to "Build The Ultimate Web Site."

The enrollment deadline is June 14 and classes are scheduled to begin June 24. Classes run for eight weeks.

You can visit the virtual campus on the World Wide Web at: http://horizons.org . While you're there, fill out the brief online enrollment form.

Log On, Think Positive

A Herndon, Va., software maker wants to help companies communicate more effectively with workers. Toward that end, SoftReach just released NetReach version 2.0, a network-based screen-saver that includes 30 themes for motivating and enlightening employees. The screen saver messages cover topics ranging from business ethics and information security to interpersonal skills and workplace safety practices.

A development kit, due out in the third quarter, will let users customize the messages that employees see on their PC monitors.

But this raises a question: Will workers see these messages as an edifying contribution to their day-or an intrusion into their private workspace?

Desktop Video Browsing

The folks who brought you the Mosaic Web browser are developing an enhancement that will allow users to view real-time video over the Internet from within their browsers. Dubbed Vosaic, the technology is being developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The beta code includes a client add-on for integrating video and audio into HTML files, the Video Datagram Protocol for sending continuous media over the Internet, and an audio/ video server prototy pe for managing large files.

Users with a T1 connection will see standard full-motion video, while those with a 28.8-Kbps link will get about six frames per second.

The client software allows for embedded hyperlinks within the video stream, and video compression. The server supports full VCR operation, allowing users to fast forward, rewind, pause and record video images.

Beta code will be available next month at http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/vosaic/

Web Site Of The Week

FreeSoft is a World Wide Web site that offers free software, games, and an Internet encyclopedia. The online tome includes a history of the Internet and its standards, related organizations, technical specifications, and technology concepts. Also included is an index of the requests for comments that form the basis of the Internet's technical documentation. For Internet specs, click on http://www.freesoft.org/

Illustration by Andy Levine

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