Boldly
evolving from a "stuffy" (boring, nerdy) consulting cabinet to a
humming bee-hive of creative 'Dot Com' activity, our kettles are now
brewing some of the stuff that tomorrow's "3.0" businesses and
demanding users will savor with joy.
On the main project board for Ribeco Group ® companies
are some thrilling innovations: awaiting (in some cases) allotted
programming and editing time, (in other cases) development partners,
venture capital or institutional investment, (and other) the right
handshake in the right moment. Some are, as we write this, in full-scale deployment.
What about...
(1) ECINT - European Institute for Economic Intelligence
With backing
from the new EIT (European Institute for Innovation and Technology),
RIBECO ® co-created this new pan-European broker-consultants' agency
for Ethical Certified Business Information. Registered in Spain, France, Belgium and the UK as Non-Profit Association and Foundation, ECINT ® is
pending EU charter as an official body of the European Union, to be
ratified by the European Commission, on earliest possible notice. The
European Institute of Economic Intelligence, founded 2007, is jointly
presided by our chairman Rick Beets and his long-time strategic partner for value-added IT consultancy, physicist and computer scientist Edmond Armisén, the CEO of MON Telematik.
Some of ECINT's goals, now conscientiously implemented, are:
- Referencing and sourcing of public and institutional data bases, including those of several official EU bodies,
to be compared and merged with clients' wish lists. ECINT's strategic
relations are mainly private sector and some regional Government
institutions of the EU member States promoting startups and
internationalization;
- Generating
primary information by online company and personal profile searches,
while protecting this information proactively on a worldwide basis, to
help guard individual Freedoms and Privacy rights, while
disclosing specific data in an ethically responsible manner to
ECINT-accredited Clients;
- Representation and placement of public credit history and finance- and finance applicatons-related information, including the online direct resale to accredited entities of all such documents by the EU countries' official credit history Registries;
- Representative
commercialization and specialty Consulting for Secure Data Storage and
Transfers, including Data Havens; of Competititve intelligence and BI
tools, custom- and semicustom solutions for IT platforms and ERP
environments;
- Executive
profile search and comparative statistics services for most public and
private EU companies, as relayed from leading 2.0 sites: a useful
service for recruiting or doing business with Europe's profiled
professionals;
- Development of the EPPM: a Single European Presentation Document Standard
for private and publicly held Corporations, along the lines of the PPM
requisite in the USA, often required to qualify for private finance
and/or public listings; for which ECINT ® was originally chartered by the EU. All consulting and training for the EPPM is coordinated by ECINT ®.
(2) An online MegaMall, a truly interactive 3D Shopping Centre
- with integrated moving avatars and Facebook-style chat
functions, comparative searches and evaluation by article, SSL
certificates, customer reviews of products and businesses, all handling
rated ISO-9001 with Six Sigma processing standards: fully transparent, consumer-friendly contents.
Together with 'The Barcelona Group'
development team and other strategic partners, Ribeco ® seek to take
the Internet to its very limits: bringing the concepts of "fun" and
"trust" back into buying and selling, in a cosy setting reminiscent of traditional Saturday shopping...
We
are negotiating with top-rate consumer marketing companies, few of
which will pass our scrutiny (quality & consistency standards the
MegaMall must impose).
(3) Online image- cq. photo- manipulation & storage development / web contents. Now reloading..., Chromalife ® !!
Easy-to-use
"book" presentation tools, 100% online, 100% userfriendly (Free
Software). For photographers & design professionals, for end users;
and specifically, some presentation tools for modelling & acting
professionals, their agents, casting agents or managers. It's as secure
and professional as FLICKR would want to be...
Upgraded with bright
ideas, Chromalife ® and its spinoff sites playfully "force-include"
that all of their customers download Free (and gratis!) Software
applications that, each, REPLACE leading proprietary software
alternatives: TheGIMP (incl. GimpShop front-end and Gallery plug-ins)
to "ax" PaintShop Pro and PhotoShop, OpenOffice and no MS Office,
Firefox but please no IE...; a bit of Blender for 3D, OUIRA Flash and/or some smart programs for vector design, to do away with Macromedia's dead-in-the-market products...
(4) Intuitive on-line Hobby Portals, including a Creative Community Meta-web
such as plans to "Flickr" any artistic crafts and creative hobbywork,
exposing them in easily configured Point-of-Sale Galleries. While new
portals are being launched by our partners 'The Barcelona Group', the original pilot site for such creative hobby portals is Beads-Pearls.com, for home and professional start-ups in jewellery and artesans' fashion accessories.
(5) Industry-specific FULL-VIDEO employment & recruiting portals.
With
a "region-by-tribe" focus, we build employment sites that are segmented
by compatible industries, offer video ads and responses AND live video
conference Job Interviews (on a known VoIP platform); Ribeco intend to
rise to the occasion and provide their own specialty and technical HRM
services in key geographic areas. And, why not, pool among the labor
markets our own administrative, marketing & management
experts, UNIX & IT Security gurus and Enterprise platforms
technicians? We plan to soon launch one globe-spanning corporate
Meta-web for our various region-and-industry-oriented web portals.
Video interviews - Too good to be true?
Years of experience in HR and Outsourcing taught us that applicants'
and recruiters' time is best spent face-to-face, and, modern video
streaming on VoIP must be everybody's best spent time!
Pilot site to a new generation of industry-specific 2.0 sites was ShowYourLight.tv,
full-media presentation and industry networking site for (aspiring and)
professional actors and models, developed by SYLmedia ® and 'The Barcelona Group'.
(6) In-house & sponsored development of Free Software apps and alternatives to "Trusted" Computing - such as may REPLACE some
proprietary software in the market, while protecting computer
users from the secret spying routines of TCPA companies and the
restrictions of DRM that treat any customers as would-be delinquents.
While software developers come under more pressure to liberate their source code and become responsible
developers, on the "100% Replacement Wish List" are ever fewer
applications - thanks to an active FS community, the wish list gets
shorter every time!
[N.B. By replacing the "plug-ins" and
other PERIPHERY, we (Ribeco, the Free Software community) may finally
get to the CORE: no-one should have A REASON LEFT IN THE WORLD to pay
for crummy products like Microsoft's and the sorry likes of them...
(Quote us on this one, dear MS Legal Dept., when and if you try to earn your paychecks).]
- "Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam..." (CEO's Slashdot signature)
(7) Slowly expanding: our recycled PC donations program.
Clients
proceeds, extra benefits, 2d generation spin-off from IT & FS
projects, we continually put Free Software into the hands of new,
motivated users.
Bill Gates, a visionary mass marketing wiz, used
this very tactic (so humanely, in poor inner city slums and in the
Third World) to his obvious advantage: by donating free hardware,
"coincidentally" he diffused MS operating systems, DRM and TCPA
products to millions of otherwise-not-easily new adopters...
[N.B.
Another successful tactic to make markets MS-dependant was, the
"leaked" circulation of "cracked" serial numbers and "illegal" copies *
to make their software be coveted by the young-and-curious (=
"unfortunately" so much harder to emulate with Free Software: you see,
it's Free!!).]
(*) At
RIBECO, we often compare MS to a drugs peddler, agressively dealing out
deadly substances to kids in the school yard, for free, to generate a
future market of peer-pressured young addicts.
An off-set in this
analogy, Free Software (*NIX, GNU, OpenOffice, etc.), must then
logically be a health product: like 100% natural alternative medicine...
(8) Secure parallel-remittance money & data transfers : legal 'hawala'!!
Combined with a "Digital Geldschrank" strategy (loosely based on the fictitional "anonymous safety deposit box" concept from Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code", even if that book didn't consider local EU laws), an alternative to traditional money orders, prepared during 7 years by RIBECO: a 100% legal SECURE-&-ANONYMOUS Money Remission and Data Transfer network, a legal form of the ancient "hawala" system of parallel remittance:
used for milennia by expatriate Chinese, Indians and Pakistani (in
Urdu, it's called "Hundi"), including -unavoidably- some "bad guys"
with whom we DO NOT sympathize. ** Still... respectable companies need privacy, too!!
The
new service is pending negotiations with investors and a few money
order companies, one of which we may accept as a Partner. Now
beta-testing, the Remittance System
features advanced public-and-private-key strong encryption routines,
using a few select Tax- and Data Haven countries (e.g. outside the Wassenaar Arrangement) for its key processes, so to guarantee full anonimity in any points-of-service records. Our groundbreaking initiative should be announced very soon --front page of the Wall Street Journal...
**
It has been argued (by some governments and banking instutions) that
such a system -just like its ancient predecessor- must lead to abuse or
benefit by illegal elements, while boosting worldwide money laundering.
The same myopia
(often from the same people) has witnessed some countries outlaw
cryptography and steganography for public use and communications. So
ironically, these countries prefer to be dependent on easily-intervened
national security systems(!), with TPM master-key dependent
cryptography running on possible SPYWARE software platforms: notably,
MS Windows, DRM and "Trusted Computing" products ...
Worse still: money launderers and hate groups will ALWAYS find a way to send their goodies to their contacts, outlaw what you will. Securely, in most cases. The old "follow the money trail" ploy surely hasn't led the FBI snoops to catch /bin/Laden (as hackers call him) with his hand in the cookie jar. A few relevant quotes:
- "In the hands of an evil man, a rose is a lethal weapon." -or-
- "He who wishes to strike a dog, will usually find a stick." (Confucius)
- "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." (Edward Abbey)
"Several concepts from Neal Stephenson's books Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon
come to mind. And why not?? Not all expats or multinationals are 'bad
guys'... but in a competitive business climate may arise some very
legitimate reasons to transfer resources invisibly! In a democracy, we
all ought to enjoy some Freedoms -AND- the benefit of the doubt..." (Rick Beets, Chairman, Ribeco Group)
Text by Rick Beets and Eduard Nebot, (c) 2004, 2007, 2009.
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