ISO Certification has documented benefits to large organisations as well as SMEs. However, the benefits that the certification standards have also include the community.
With years of experience working with SMEs the team at Business Certification explain the benefit of Certification to the community within which SMEs operate.
If you want to find out more get in touch with them – LIKE on Facebook, follow on Twitter and Google+
ISO Certification may seem like an expensive exercise that SMEs cannot afford. With time consuming processes and exacting standards the certification process may seem daunting.
With years of experience working with SMEs the team at Business Certification explain the benefit of Certification.
If you want to find out more get in touch with them – LIKE on Facebook, follow on Twitter and Google+
As most offices and businesses on Glenhuntly Road close down for the day one store comes to life. I went to check out what was behind the retail store front at Caulfield Music Centre.
Caulfield Music Centre, located at 593 Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick, in Melbourne is an integral part of the Elsternwick/Caulfield community. The Music centre operates a retail store offering a wide range of musical instruments, books, and related music paraphernalia. The Centre also offers music lessons and has serviced three generations of students. Currently there are 200 students with 16 teachers who use the Centre’s music rooms for lessons ever week. Finally, the Centre also offers bands and singers excellent and well-appointed rehearsal rooms.
One of the Centre’s permanent fixtures is Julian Crew-Taylor, who has worked as General Manager, customer service and coordinator, and has been at Caulfield Music Centre for 23 years. He has a great rapport with the bands who practice at the Centre as well as parents and students in the community who have been using the facilities for three generations. He has a wealth of knowledge of music that he is always willing to share. He has a close connection with the Music Teachers and students who come to the centre. Caleb Garfinkel is just one of the many students turned Music Teacher, and Slava Grigoryan fan, from the community of Caulfield. Many parents, who as young kids came to Caulfield Music Centre to learn music, now bring their children to the Music School to encourage a love of music in the next generation and are the heart and soul of the Music School.
Caulfield Music Centre has also seen its fair share of celebrities from Slava Grigoryan to Kate Ceberano. There are also some quirky characters who walk through the door. One of the more quirky characters is Ziggy Barrett, he is part of the band The Sweaters. Just one of many bands who practice at CMC. The bands and singers use the rehearsal studios to hone their skills and music to make it big on the world stage. Some of the bands such as The Sweaters, Push Button Auto and Stompy and the Heat play at venues around Melbourne as well across Australia and even internationally. But they still choose to come to Caulfield Music Centre and practice every week.
Come down to CMC any day of the week and you can hear the sound of bands and kids from six to sixty years of age rocking out and honing their craft.
The appointment of the 6th Minister for Small Business in five years was one result of the recent Labor Leadership spill, Dennis Alphonsus wants to know: what the Government has done for small business lately?
The recent Labour Leadership spill on March 21st was the biggest non-event in Labor’s erratic year except for giving the media something to fill air time as well as setting Social media abuzz. According to Twitter analytics the hashtags #spill, #Auspol, #qt and the names of Federal politicos generated more than 247,000 tweets. After all the speculation and opinions the only result of the Leadership spill was the reshuffle of Julia Gillard’s cabinet.
Ignoring the fact that most of the new appointments are novices, the biggest surprise was the appointment of Gary Gray as Minister for Resources and Energy and Small Business. For those not paying attention, Gary is a former executive from energy group Woodside Petroleum. Those in the mining lobby will be very welcoming of one of their own, while those in the small business community will be scratching their heads at Gray’s appointment.
What irks small business owners more than the appointment of someone who clearly will take time to grasp the needs and current issues faced by small business owners, on any high street across the country, is the fact that in the last 15 months there have been 5 different individuals given the Small Business portfolio.
This new decision shows the complete disregard this government has for small business and the empty rhetoric that small business is a key contributor to the economy. Jeremy Clements, Owner of Caulfield Music Centre is damning of the perpetual changes in Federal Government. “The government continuously states small business are the backbone of our economy. Yet they have ministerial changes too frequently, that don’t allow any government focus on mid or long term strategy.”
With close to 2 million small businesses across hundreds of niches the small business owner is not a small subtext in the story of the Australian economy. Rather the small business owner is an integral part and needs to be represented as such at a Federal Level.
“Small business owners deserve a voice in government and a representative who will institute long term policies by assessing the toughest aspects of running a business. An intelligent place to start would be the Rent-to-Earnings ratio,” says Jeremy Clements.
The clear message from small business owners is that they feel the current government does not care about them. Chris Bowen, who resigned from the role, did not initiate any policies relating to small business. One hopes that the new minister engages with small business and initiates policies to ease the challenges faced by small business owners: specifically the high cost of employing staff and the rising rental costs.
You can follow Dennis @DennisAlpho
A Small business owners has his say on the recent appointment of Minister of Small Business @DennisAlpho http://wp.me/p3ejpm-eG
@DennisAlpho asks Do you know who is Gary Gray and what he stands for? http://wp.me/p3ejpm-eG
The life and times of Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, is so fantastical and filled with paranoia that it should be made into a movie; oh wait it has. The movie titled ‘Underground: the Julian Assange Story’ is a feature length biopic about the early years of Assange. I believe the movie will show him as a gifted youth with a passion for the truth and a desire to unmask the secrecy and lies in the corridors of power.
While this is not far from the truth the more pertinent question that has been raised about Assange is whether or not he is a journalist or just a source? Does the existence of WikiLeaks and the track record of Assange releasing secret and sometimes damming documents to the public make him a journalist? Assange calls himself the Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks. However, there are many voices that believe he is more of a high-tech source in the digital era rather than a true Journalist.
It is interesting to note that Assange came to prominence or infamy, depending on how you perceive it, in the mid 1990s. Julian and fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecom company. This was one of many activities of the Cypherpunks group of which Julian was a member.
The attack on Nortel was not malicious and in my mind shows two things: Julian is very intelligent and he has a clear disrespect of authority. This incident would bring Assange to the attention of only a handful of people in Australia. However, in 2007 when WikiLeaks, the website set up for dissemination of confidential information, released the Guantanamo Bay operating procedures the world sat up and took notice. In 2010 the release of the ‘Collateral Murder’ and later the ‘Afghanistan War Logs’ was instrumental in stirring up a hornets’ nest in the United States of America. And when the USA is upset the World takes notice.
Thus the saga began: Assange was accused of being a terrorist, a woman in Sweden accused him of rape, and he decided to seek political asylum and to avoid extradition by entering the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK. All this after he received the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize and divided opinion in the Journalism community as to his status as a bonafide Hack or a hacker with an agenda.
There are so many holes in the Assange story and dubious claims that it is hard to consider Julian having any integrity and the big issue with releasing sensitive information: Duty of Care. Duty of care is a core component of being a good journalist. As David Conley states Assange isn’t a journalist by practice, education or training. He is a convicted hacker who uses WikiLeaks to publish all information even information that is harmful and jeopardises the life of Afghan informants and soldiers. If Assange were a journalist he would need to have a duty of care as a hacker he does not.
Among all the dissenting voices weighing in on the debate Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, does not believe that WikiLeaks is journalism but data dissemination. I agree with this sentiment and I also believe that Assange is a revolutionary in some ways such as providing a platform for encrypted dissemination of documents. Assange needs to take the time to read the sources and present the information in an unbiased tone of voice while protecting the lives of the innocent. Only then will Assange go from being an ‘Australian diva with his secrets’ to a true leader of the revolution of journalism in the digital age.
From its Inception in 1851 the New York Times has collected accolades as though they are going out of style. The NYT has received 108 Pulitzer Prizes and had more than two (2) million papers printed daily. Today the circulation has dropped to just around 1.5 million copies daily making it the third largest newspaper in the United States of America. The excellent documentary Page One highlighted the tumultuous time that saw the closure of many Newspapers across the USA. It was a time when even the venerable New York Times was shaken and stirred especially the uncertainty that seemed to permeate the news makers working in the News Room.
The News Room or Engine Room of the New York Times was for many years seen as the pinnacle of Journalistic achievement. To have made it in Media or as a serious journalist you had to be working at the New York Times.
What made the Old Gray Lady so special? It is not as though the New York Times (NYT) was the first to hire a woman journalist. While Jane Grant was one of the first female Journalists at the NYT her experience at the NYT was less than satisfactory. It was not until 2010 that the NYT had its first Female Executive Editor in Jill Abramson. So the NYT was not at the forefront of equal opportunity.
The NYT was not the first to introduce colour photographs in fact the paper was one of the last in the USA to have colour photographs. A point that may seem innocuous today but was quite an ‘un-revolution’ back in the day. Again the NYT was not the first to embrace new technology.
Perhaps the fact that the NYT has been at the forefront of breaking scandals and exposing the underbelly of political, economical and social injustice has given the paper a sense of gravitas. From the exposé of the Pentagon Papers when Daniel Ellsberg, a former State Department official, leaked papers that had damming evidence of the USAs time in Vietnam War. To the exposé of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video that showed the US airstrikes on civilians that were carrying cameras instead of guns from the whistleblower website Wikileaks.
Both the stories brought to light the lies and shameful conduct by the US government. These well researched and thoroughly fact checked stories were well written and were beyond reproach in journalistic integrity.
So is the NYT all about exposé’s and being the voice against the US government? Looking at the history of coverage by the NYT and some of the cadre of personnel who work at the prestigious address; 620 Eight Avenue, Manhattan NY it is clear that trustworthiness makes the NYT such an institution.
The motto ‘All the news that is Fit to Print’ ran deeper than just a catchy slogan. While the web is a place that anyone can post anything, the integrity and trustworthiness of the NYT online content brings a sense that the principles that governed the print version also undergirds their online content.
Moving into the digital age and user pays subscription model has been a master stroke. A move that no one would predict the Old Gray Lady would undertake. But go online she did. Dusting off her old fashioned bonnet and cardigan the Gray Lady embraced a quite unfashionable position: Paid online content. Surely news on the internet is free?
But 30 million unique site visitors a day shows that the admirers have continued to come because what the NYT brings to the Media world is not just style or a unique voice but substance. The Old Gray Lady has come a long way.
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