Former Ukrainian PM's daughter engages Hillgrove PR

Alec Mattinson, prweek.com, Tuesday, 08 May 2012, 9:15am, Be the first to comment

Eugenia Tymoshenko, daughter of former Ukrainian PM Yulia Tymoshenko, has appointed Hillgrove PR as the international campaign to highlight her mother's treatment in prison intensifies.

Eugenia Tymoshenko: hires Hillgrove PR to highlight mother's plight

Eugenia Tymoshenko has hired Hillgrove to represent her personal comms with the media in light of recent news on the state of her mother, now an imprisoned opposition leader.
She has given a number of interviews across Europe highlighting her mother’s deteriorating health while being held in an Ukranian prison. On Monday she met with Germany's justice minister to increase European pressure on Ukraine's leadership over her mother's case.
The Ukraine is co-hosting this summer’s Euro 2012 football tournament, causing the international media to focus on the country. Dirk Niebel, Germany's development minister, became the country's first member of government to announce he is to boycott the tournament yesterday.
The former Ukrainian prime minister reportedly suffers from chronic back pain due to a herniated disc but the government has allegedly refused to give her adequate medical attention.
It is thought that the engagement of Hillgrove PR, led by Richard Hillgrove, is designed to highlight Yulia Tymoshenko’s condition and secure worldwide support for her release.
The former leader of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and prime minister from 2005 to 2007 and then in 2010, is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence on charges of abuse of office.
She has also been accused of tax evasion but denies all charges against her and claims that the charges are part of a political campaign by her opponents to keep her out of politics.

2012 U.S. Peace Index Highlights America’s Most and Least Peaceful States and Cities

Maine is most peaceful state for 11th consecutive year, Louisiana least peaceful state Wyoming has improved the most while Arizona records the biggest fall Cambridge metro area is the most peaceful, Detroit the least peaceful The U.S. is more peaceful than at any time in the last 20 years Further improvements in peacefulness would generate hundreds of billions of extra economic activity
Washington, D.C. (April 24, 2012) – The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) announces the second annual release of the United States Peace Index (USPI). The 2012 USPI provides a comprehensive assessment of U.S. peacefulness at the state and city levels and analysis of the costs associated with violence and the socio-economic measures associated with peace.
The USPI – the only statistical analysis that offers a comprehensive nation-wide measurement of crime and its costs to the 50 states – is based on analysis of homicide, violent crime, policing, incarceration rates and availability of small arms data.
With improvements in all indicators from the 2011 to the 2012 USPI, the U.S. was found to be more peaceful than at any time since 1991. The Northeast is America’s most peaceful region with the lowest homicide, violent crime and incarceration rates in the country. The South is the least peaceful region with the highest homicide, violent crime, and incarceration rates, as well as the highest prevalence of gun ownership, and the second highest police employee rate.
According to the Index, if all the states in the U.S. had the same level of peacefulness as the most peaceful state of Maine, $274 billion worth of extra economic activity could be generated. This additional economic activity would be enough to generate over 1.7 million jobs.
The total cost of violence to the U.S. was conservatively calculated to be over S460 billion while the lost productivity from violence amounted to $318 billion. California was found to have the highest state burden of violence at over $22 billion per year while Vermont has the lowest at $188 million. For each
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state taxpayer, the total economic cost of violence varies greatly, from $7,166 per taxpayer in Washington D.C. to $1,281 for Maine taxpayers.
“What the USPI shows is that over the past 20 years, America has become substantially more peaceful, witnessing a significant and sustained reduction in direct violence,” said IEP founder and executive chairman Steve Killelea. “Homicide rates in the U.S. have halved since 1991 and the violent crime rate has also fallen by nearly half during the same period. The state level trends are also very encouraging. 42 states reduced their violent crime rates, and 13 out of 16 Southern states increased their peacefulness.” Killelea added, “Given the financial costs of incarceration, emphasis needs to be placed on programs that reduce the likelihood of reoffending or finding more cost effective ways that deal with non-violent offenders. Programs dealing with education and vocational training have been proven to be effective in reducing recidivism. To highlight the size of the problem, if all of the people who were in incarcerated were contained in one city it would be the fourth largest in the U.S.”
"For decades, many studies have looked at the issue of peacefulness; however, what we observe with the USPI is that, for the first time, we have the ability to cross reference data painting a much clearer picture of the real costs of violence in the U.S.,” said Steve Clemons, Washington editor-at-large, The Atlantic. “Quantifying the cost of violence or the lack of it seems to be an important tool to help decision makers to make informed budgetary decisions when it comes to crime control. Studies like this one give us a window into our full potential as a nation, which directly impacts our ability to compete in a globalized world.”
There were improvements in all indicators from the 2011 to the 2012 USPI. The homicide rate decreased by 3.78 percent, the violent crime rate fell 6.03 percent and the total number of state prisoners fell by 0.6 percent. Despite these gains, violence and violence containment is costing the average taxpayer $3,257 each year.
Maine is America’s most peaceful state for the 11th year running with recorded reductions in the homicide and incarceration rates as well as the number of police employees. Maine also has the least cost to taxpayers with violence costing $1,281.
Louisiana is America’s least peaceful state for the 20th year running. Louisiana is ranked last in the nation on homicides, equal last on incarceration and ranks in the bottom ten on the other three indicators. In spite of this result, there is still some cause for optimism, as both the homicide and violent crime rate have fallen along with the incarceration rate.
The most peaceful metropolitan area in America is Cambridge-Newton-Framingham in Massachusetts, followed by the Edison-New Brunswick metropolitan area in New Jersey and the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro area in Washington. The least peaceful metropolitan area is Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Michigan, followed by the New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, Louisiana metro area, and Miami-Miami Beach-Kendal, Florida. The more peaceful metro areas were found to have lower poverty, inequality and unemployment rates.
The biggest riser in peace over the year in analysis is Wyoming which moved into the top 20 states on the USPI for the first time since 1995, rising six places from 23rd to 17th thanks to improvement in homicide and violent crime rates. Arizona experienced the biggest fall, dropping into the five least peaceful states due to an increase in its homicide rate.
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“What is absolutely clear from the Index,” continued Killelea, “is that peaceful states perform better across a range of economic, health, education and community factors. They have higher high school graduation rates, lower poverty, better access to basic services, higher labor force participation rates, higher life expectancy and less single parented families. Even social capital – like volunteerism, civic engagement, trust, and group membership – is higher in more peaceful states.”
For more information on the 2012 US Peace Index, interactive maps, and to download the report, go to www.visionofhumanity.org
IEP is the non-partisan, independent research institute that annually produces the U.S. Peace Index and the Global Peace Index. IEP is dedicated to promoting a better understanding of the social and economic factors that develop a more peaceful society. It achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peace, providing metrics for measuring peace, and uncovering the relationship between peace, business, and prosperity. For more information on the Institute for Economics and Peace, visit www.economicsandpeace.org or follow the Global Peace Index on Twitter @GlobPeaceIndex.




Contacts:
Michael Shank, Institute for Economics and Peace
(202) 550-4935
mshank@economicsandpeace.org
Craig Brownstein, Edelman
(202) 326-1799
craig.brownstein@edelman.com
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It's that time again!

ZoomEvery summer, Apple holds its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco and 2012 is no different. The Cupertino-based company today announced WWDC 2012 will commence on June 11 and is scheduled to run for five days. The conference will take place at San Francisco’s Moscone West and will feature more than 100 technical sessions from Apple engineers, 100 hands-on labs staffed by more than 1,000 Apple engineers, lunchtime sessions with people at the top of the tech industry and the science and entertainment industries. There'll also be the Apple Design Awards, which highlights exemplary apps for iPad, iPhone, and Mac.

“We have a great WWDC planned this year and can’t wait to share the latest news about iOS and OS X Mountain Lion with developers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The iOS platform has created an entirely new industry with fantastic opportunities for developers across the country and around the world.”

Not mentioned in the announcement was whether or not we'll see a brand new iPhone at this year's WWDC. With nearly every iPhone (including the very first model announced June 2007), Apple has done the big reveal at WWDC. However, the iPhone 4S was the exception to this rule. Apple stayed quiet about the phone and there was no 'one more thing' at WWDC. Instead, the phone was introduced several months later in September. Apple usually sticks to the same upgrade cycles for each product (iPad in February/March, iPhone in June, iPods/iTunes in September, etc.,) but it's not yet clear if last year's September reveal represents a new cycle for the iPhone. We expect it won't be long before the rumors start, though, so stay tuned!

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Ouch. Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the security software firm Kaspersky, accused Apple of having missed the boat on computer security.

Speaking at the Info Security 2012 conference, Kaspersky noted that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft" as far as software security is concerned. This may come as a surprise to those who watched Apple's 2006 ad that claimed that there were 114,000 known viruses for Windows in 2005, "but not for Macs". It has always been one of Apple's most prominent claims of advantages over Windows that Microsoft-based PCs are just more vulnerable than Macs.

Of course, Apple may have to eat its words as the Apple platform gains popularity and turns into a much more attractive target for hackers. Kaspersky noted that his company is lately seeing an increase in malware: “Cyber criminals have now recognised that Mac is an interesting area,” Kaspersky was quoted in an article published by Forbes. “Now we have more, it’s not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft’s world, Mac. It’s full of malware.”

Apple has frequently been cricticized for its inconsistent and rather rare and secretive patch cycle, but Kaspersky believes that the company may be facing the same problems "Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago." He stated that Apple may will "have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software.”

Apple vs. Mac vs. Virus
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A new malware is attacking Mac OS X because users haven't updated Microsoft Office.

ZoomJeong Wook Oh of Microsoft's Malware Protection Center reports that his team has stumbled across a new piece of malware targeting Apple OS X computers. It exploits a remote code execution vulnerability in the Office productivity suite which Microsoft actually patched back in June 2009 (MS09-027). Almost three years later, not all machines have the patch installed, thus leading to the spread of this new hacker tool.

"The vulnerability is a stack-based buffer overflow - the attack code could corrupt variables and return addresses located on the stack," Oh wrote. "As we analyzed the malware, we found that the malware author managed to corrupt a local variable and used that corrupted variable to deploy 'stage 1' shellcode to a designated area. This corrupted variable is later used for a target address and is where the stage 1 shellcode is copied. The corrupted return address points to this target address as well."

Oh said that the malware, a Mac OS X version of backdoor, is probably targeting only Snow Leopard or lower versions of Mac OS X, as it fails when trying to execute on OS X Lion machines. He believes the attacker had knowledge about the target environment beforehand -- knowledge that includes the target operating system, application patch levels and more.

Like other backdoor trojans, this new malware grants remote control access to the infected computer. The main payload file is a standard executable for Mac OS X called launch-hse. "This binary is a command and control (C&C) agent that communicates with a C&C server (master) to perform unauthorized actions that are similar to other C&C bot clients," he explained. "The function names give clues that might indicate that this binary is connecting to a C&C server, parses command from it and performs file retrieval or creates process."

Ultimately Mac users will see an increase in malware attacks as the platform grows in popularity. Oh said that exploiting Mac OS X isn't much different from other operating systems, and even though Mac OS X has introduced many mitigation technologies to reduce risk, the end-user's protection against security vulnerabilities has a direct correlation with updating installed applications. That means keeping software up-to-date so that hackers don't slip in between cracks that were patched long ago.

Microsoft is incredibly excited about Windows 8.

In fact, it is so excited about its new operating system that it is compelled to promise that the new operating system will "delight media enthusiasts around the world". However, DVD and Blu-ray playback support is not going to be part of that pleasure unless you shell out a few extra bucks.

Déjà vu. Remember the outcry when Microsoft announced in 2006, shortly before the release of Windows Vista, that the spanking new operating system and its Windows Media Player would not support DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback out of the box? Well, the same is happening with Windows 8. Back in 2006, Microsoft argued that the it was worried about unsigned drivers and copy-protection concerns that may have put it in the line of fire of Hollywood. In the end, Hollywood had argued for years that Windows was the Pandora's Box of digital evil.

This time around, the justifications provided by Microsoft are not about copy protection anymore. However, Microsoft is still dancing around the actual reason why DVD playback will be cut. My personal favorite? DVDs just don't sell anymore and are in an unstoppable decline, so there is no reason to support DVDs in Windows anymore. Granted, I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie on a PC, but there are still plenty of people who, for example, enjoy DVD playback on a notebook on an airplane. Tell them that DVDs optical media sales are in a decline and that would be the reason to cut DVD playback from Windows and you are sure to get an earful.

Of course, the real reason is mentioned in the post as well. It's about the cost of decoder licensing that Microsoft wants to recoup. You can still get DVD playback, but you will have to pay extra - as you did for Windows Vista if you wanted that feature in the Windows Media Player - and acquire the Media Center Pack or the pro pack to end up with Windows 8 Pro "with Media Center". There was no information how much those extras will cost, but if you want to avoid them, you also have the option of choosing third party media software solutions, which have now an opportunity to market themselves in a much more efficient way.

How an Austin Barbershop Built Its Brand

How an Austin Barbershop Built Its Brand
Photography by Sarah Wilson
Enhancing the haircut experience: Michael Portman of Birds Barbershop.
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Michael Portman has heard his salon customers share information with their hairdressers that they wouldn't confide in anyone else. As he says, it's a business built on trust. After all, how many deals compel the service provider to wield a sharp pair of scissors to your scalp or neck?

Today, six years after he and childhood pal Jayson Rapaport opened the first of five Birds Barbershops in Austin, Texas, Portman is especially pleased when a customer comes in for a haircut in advance of a job interview. "That's a pretty trusting moment there," Portman says.

Like many entrepreneurs, Portman has found that savvy branding efforts go a long way toward cultivating that trust. And while there's no single formula for branding your way into a client's warm embrace, it's generally agreed that it takes more than a clever slogan or a catchy jingle. At the very least, it takes strong job performance, effective marketing (often online) and favorable public opinion. Yet experts say building trust through branding also requires an ineffable something that leaves customers feeling good about the whole exchange.

"Branding now is trying to measure not just the affinity, but the trust a consumer has in you," says Todd Copilevitz, a branding consultant in Atlanta.

Birds BarbershopTo build trust through branding, says Karen Post, a Tampa, Fla.–based consultant and the author of Brand Turnaround, an entrepreneur must establish a distinct identity. Portman and Rapaport did this by offering standard haircuts at below-market prices--$19 for men, $39 for women--and keeping salons open seven days a week. ("Every salon in the world is closed on Mondays," Portman says. "What's with that?") Tapping into Austin's rich musical heritage, they installed old-fashioned jukeboxes, then turned up the volume. Because Austin is such a bicycle-crazy town, they offered men who rode to Birds a free hair wash. (Women get a shampoo with the standard cut.) And abiding by the company ethos of keeping things local, they formed myriad partnerships in support of hometown causes and events.

Their mission was simple, really: They wanted to make the haircut experience more fun. And that's where the beer comes in. After noon each day, anyone who gets a haircut at Birds receives a free can of Shiner beer. Birds pays nothing for the beer but gives Shiner plenty of promotional punch, including a neon sign in every salon window. Shiner comes from the Lone Star State's oldest independent brewery, so it holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Texans. For Portman, the arrangement has been invaluable in helping Birds establish its identity.

Birds Barbershop

And that has led to success. Last year, Portman says, Birds took in nearly $3 million in revenue.

Birds has relied heavily on social media to build its brand. Copilevitz says the online world, which gives consumers a robust and timely forum for expressing opinions, has forced businesses to revert to old-school customer service. "That is, dealing with people as people," he says. "They're using social media to talk to their customers in an open, honest way, and they do that on a stage where millions of eyeballs can focus on that discussion."

Using social media effectively, adds Portman, also means knowing when to lay low. "We're part of the conversation, just like when you're sitting around the table with friends," he says. "You don't say anything unless you have something to say."

This article was originally published in the April 2012 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: In Brand They Trust.