Convercent has raised $10.2 million for its compliance software that helps companies promote the good and manage the bad. The round was led by Azure Capital Partners with Mantucket Capita participating in the round.

Convercent uses social, mobile and the tenants of the consumer user interface and mobile apps to the often antiquated world of compliance and corporate ethics.

The software replaces what is often just a .pdf file that people have to read when they get hired.

Convercent uses semantic web technologies to link disparate data sets that help anticipate issues and be proactive instead of reactionary to bad things that happen inside companies. The technology aggregates unstructured data and builds analysis around it.

It visualizes a corporation’s data so the compliance officer can get a broad or detailed picture of the organization.

Current providers like Ethics Point rely on heavy enforcement tactics to enforce corporate policies. It focuses on making sure employees go through corporate training and materials.

Convercent says it can anticipate issues that may arise through its granular views of the organization and where the trouble spots are surfacing.

With young people entering the workforce, companies will have to provide ways for them to use mobile apps to stay connected to the values of a company. Brands like Starbucks depend on its brand value for success. Without engaging employees, there can be a disconnect that can reflect on the company.

With Convercent, a customer can give employees an app that they can use on an iPhone or Android device which provides all the information they need to get familiar with the values the company espouses. For example, employees post pictures of volunteering and other types of corporate activities.

Convercent is part of a new wave of companies disrupting the human resources market. The challenge for Convercent is building a deep analytics and collaborative platform in a market the major enterprise companies have their sights on. Companies like IBM will leverage their analytics and social technologies to build their own solutions to solve compliance issues.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

What’s the penalty for lying on a resume? It’s an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made “an inadvertent error” on Yahoo’s website and in an SEC filing claiming he had a Computer Science degree. TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon just wrote this should cost him his new job. At Yahoo, the penalty could include “immediate discharge.”

I got a job at Yahoo in 1999. Before I started, I was required to fill out an Employment Application. The form included educational and employment history information and notes “A resume may be attached.” At the bottom of the form, there is a boxed section, with the bold headline “Authorization: Please read carefully, initial each paragraph and sign below.”

Here’s the first paragraph in that section:

“I certify that the facts on this Employment Application (and any supplements attached) are true and complete. I further understand that any omissions or misrepresentations made by me on this application will be sufficient grounds for denying my application, withdrawing any offer of employment or immediate discharge.”

So, if I had made ANY misrepresentations (in Yahoo PR speak: inadvertent errors) as a Yahoo employee, I would have been at risk of losing my job immediately. We’ll find out of the same rules apply to the CEO.

Some caveats here of course. This application is more than 10 years old and Yahoo might have changed this part. Unlikely. Also, Thompson’s employment application (if he even wrote one) and his contract are not part of the public record, so we don’t know exactly what’s in there.

We do know what’s in documents Yahoo filed with the SEC where the false degree was also mentioned. As activist shareholder Daniel Loeb noted in his letter to the Board, Yahoo’s Code of Ethics may have been violated. It states “Disclosure in reports and documents filed with or submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision, and in other public communications made by Yahoo! must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable.”

Update: Michael Arrington, who is now CEO of Yahoo according to his LinkedIn profile, just reported Yahoo even has a 24-hour IntegrityLine to report Code of Ethics violations. Mike says he called the number “and damn if they don’t pick that phone up on the first ring.” I tried calling the number and all I get is some peaceful on hold music and a message “Thank you for holding.” Seems that line might be pretty busy right now.

Perhaps, Thompson should have read this article, found ironically on Yahoo Voices titled “3 Reasons You Should Never Lie on Your Resume.” It ends with the following suggestion on why its not a good idea. “In the end, you’ll be happier for not having to look over your shoulder for the rest of your career, just wondering if, right now, someone is calling that bogus school you mentioned last year when you finally got your dream job.”

[Image: alexskopje/Shutterstock]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At over a million digital listens, “Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory” is This American Life’s most popular episode. That’s no small feat for one of the world’s most well-known radio shows. When it aired, it set off yet another firestorm of controversy regarding the ethics of Apple (and other large tech companies) using cheap Chinese labor through major manufacturers like Foxconn. Mr Daisey, who has been touring for years with a monologue about his visit to the factories there and the moral implications thereof, provided details to This American Life to put together what was really a powerful and attention-grabbing piece.

Unfortunately, in the words of This American Life host and producer Ira Glass, “We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.”

This week’s show will take a full hour to detail the errors and fabrications in Daisey’s report.

The episode’s lurid details provoked many responses on the web, including several editorials on TechCrunch. These details were not entirely new, and we have written about the labor and environmental conditions in Chinese factories before, but such a discussion is always relevant. But although the discussion was fruitful, it seems it may have been based partially on false information.

Without duplicating too much of the blog post, press release, and forthcoming broadcast, it seems that a Marketplace staffer, China correspondent Rob Schmitz, thought that some of Daisey’s claims didn’t add up. The fact checking team at This American Life (not NPR, as previously written) had already cleared the story despite some small discrepancies, but some things Schmitz was personally acquainted with stuck out — for instance, the idea that Daisey had met in Shenzhen with workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane. The poisoning occurred, no doubt, but it occurred a thousand miles away in Suzhou, a place Daisey never visited.

He also contacted Daisey’s interpreter, whom Daisey claimed to be unable to reach, and apparently for good reason. She contradicted much of what Daisey claimed in his monologue and on the radio. Schmitz has written up his investigation here.

In the investigative segment shortly to air, Marketplace’s Schmitz confronts Daisey with this information. His response (echoed in a blog post):

I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.

A few weeks ago, a book called The Lifespan of a Fact was released, a peculiar volume detailing a battle between a writer, whose essay had been embellished with inaccuracies and fabrications, and his fact-checker at The Believer, who was attempting to undo those embellishments. The question of which was more valuable, the point being made in an essay that didn’t strictly cast itself as a factual one, or the truth of the matter that it in many ways obscured, is an interesting one. But in this case things seem a little more clear-cut.

Mr. Daisey represented as facts and his own experience things that were not true and which he had not done. TechCrunch interviewed Daisey as well early in 2011 (part one; part two). His statements to us must be questioned, now factually as well as conceptually.

Fortunately, none of our reporting on China and Foxconn relies on his testimony. Our own John Biggs has been to China to report on the state of manufacturing there twice, the first time to Shenzhen proper to see how smaller factories and shops are run, and the second time to “Foxconn City,” where he received a tour of the mega-campus where your devices are made and assembled. These reports, needless to say, are factual.

Update: it is This American Life that did the retracting, not NPR as first reported (and immortalized in the URL). Entirely my mistake, due to the fact that the show is often broadcast on stations the primary affiliation of which is NPR. This American Life is produced by Public Radio International, and Marketplace is produced by American Public Media.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Disrupt runners-up, Cloudflare have been getting a lot of attention recently, thanks to the company’s role in helping LulzSec’s website stay online. In fact the hackers even gave Cloudflare a shoutout on their Twitter feed — offering to trade rum for a premium account — leading to a surge in customer sign-ups.

Of course, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince is quick to point out that the company takes — at best — a neutral approach to hosting LulzSec, and that protecting the hackers has only served to make Cloudflare’s systems more resilient for all of its other customers. Still, it’s a pretty ironic twist for a company which promises to protect websites against DDOS attacks and other nefarious activity.

Keen to understand the company’s position on helping hackers and on sharing user data with the authorities, I invited Prince into the TCTV studio for a quick interview (I’m in LA on Skype so forgive my lousy connection). In the video below we discuss how Cloudflare has grown to handling over 5bn page views a month, the ethics of helping hackers, the importance of neutrality, a conspiracy theory or two and (further ironically) how Prince and his team were inspired to start the company after a call from the Department of Homeland Security.

Oh, and Prince also explains how a huge amount of the Cloudflare’s early success was due to launching at Disrupt — and coming second (“there’s nothing like coming in second as a way to motivate engineers”). Finally, he extends a generous offer to eventual winners Qwiki: “we can help them read out Wikipedia articles even faster.”

I start, though, by asking Prince whether the FBI knocks or just kicks down the door…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week I wrote a post about my current investment policy at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I’ve said many times, is transparency. To that end we will (as we always have) be extremely careful in disclosing any investments I’ve made in startups or in venture funds. And these interests will be disclosed even when other TechCrunch writers are covering these companies.

In that post I said that there would be a lot of criticism headed our way from our competitors. And that’s exactly what happened. AllThingsD calls me “vaguely icky.” The Atlantic Wire says what I’m doing “lowers the bar for journalistic independence.” And Tom Foremski says “It’s best to have a blanket policy of no investments allowed. That way readers can read the news without having to do all the leg work to figure out if there is any bias.”

So, hold on a minute.

We can argue all day about whether or not my policy is a good one. You’ll have your arguments, I’ll have mine. But the really important thing to remember, as a reader, is that there is no objectivity in journalism. The guys that say they’re objective are just pretending. Everyone is conflicted in different ways, and yet the “rules of journalism” don’t require any sort of transparency or disclosure unless it’s a direct financial conflict. I’m going to have to write a longer post about his yet again.

But when you read a tech blogger call a CEO “tough and misunderstood,” should you know that the CEO in question is social friends with that blogger, and leaks confidential information to her? The answer is yes. But you’ll never know. Or when the same CEO is called incompetent by another blogger who was just turned down by said CEO to speak at his conference. Disclosed? No. Conflicted? Yes.

Like I said, that’s a different post. But in putting this current issue to rest, there are some things I’d like to point out.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, the chief whiner about our policy, is married to a Google executive. This is disclosed by her, but I certainly don’t see it as any less of a conflict than when I invest in a startup. And yet she whines. One of her writers, Liz Gannes, is married to a Facebook consultant. She covers the company and its competitors regularly. She discloses it as well, but it isn’t clear whether or not her husband has stock in Facebook. That’s something as a reader I’d like to know. And regardless, it’s a huge conflict of interest. I think someone will think twice before slamming a company and then going to sleep next to an employee of that company. Certain adjectives, for example, might be softened in the hopes of marital harmony.

Foremski, the other chief whiner, is a real piece of work. Despite railing against my policy, he has his own direct conflicts of interest. The man who said just a week ago how horrible I am for investing in startups has financial interests in a whole slew of tech companies – “Disclosure: Current and past consulting clients and sponsors of Silicon Valley Watcher: Pearltrees, Intel, Tibco Software, Edelman, Infineon Technologies, SAP.”

And he isn’t so good about disclosing these interests. If one of our writers pulled this stunt they’d be fired in a second.

Why do the people who complain the most about TechCrunch have these vague conflicts of interest themselves? Why aren’t they more forthcoming in their disclosures? How do they justify their hypocrisy, even to themselves? Seriously, how?

Look, I’m still new to this journalism thing. I treat our readers the same way I’d like to be treated. With full and complete disclosure. I’m really sorry if that upsets the old guard. But the reality is this. The people complaining the most are the people who are the most deeply conflicted. They’re the people who are, at best, vague about their own conflicts of interest. Right and wrong don’t seem to be concepts they worry about too much. Nor do they seem to be overly concerned with hypocrisy or even the basic underlying lack of logic in their rants.

Really, it all came into focus for me this week. A major news publication asked for “my side” after all this complaining. I spent a half our on the phone with him at his request. And he never wrote. Why? “My editors want to leave Arianna dangling in the wind,” he said, referring to the fact that Arianna Huffington, my boss, was taking heat for this situation. It never occurred to him that he just killed a story because that story might help a competitor (Huffington Post), and how screwed up that was.

I have little hope for this industry until the last of the old guard have finally been put down. They do NOT control the news. They do NOT control opinion. They do NOT get to say who gets to write content and who doesn’t. And they do NOT get to rant about their ethics when they constantly fight against simple transparency.

Swisher doesn’t get to complain about my investment policy when she is married to a Google executive, and when we can’t figure out whether or not one of her writers owns Facebook stock through her husband. And don’t even get me started on the time her employer, the WSJ, killed a story that was critical of its sister company MySpace, and then denied it. Foremski doesn’t get to tell me my policy is unethical when he has financial conflicts all over the place and seems unconcerned with proper disclosure and transparency. And major media doesn’t get to preach to me about their ethics policies when they kill stories because their editor wants to keep Arianna Huffington squirming.

Before I started TechCrunch I never understood how screwed up this whole news world was. It’s ugly as hell out there, people. These people, the tech press, just disgust me.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve been in Las Vegas for most of the month and so have been out of the loop on some of the major stories rocking the world of technology and media. Stories like the startling news that, having made a sack-load of money from the sale of TechCrunch to AOL, Mike is going to begin investing in start-ups again.

Like most jealous little fucks with a WordPress login uncompromising guardians of media impartiality, I was shocked – shocked – at the news, but unlike most of those guardians, I was reassured the honesty of his disclosure. I also laughed at HuffPost’s official statement that – well – Mike is special and that everyone should stop whining.

“Michael Arrington operates from a unique position. He was an investor in technology companies and start-ups before he started TechCrunch, and his extensive knowledge of, and involvement with Silicon Valley is one of the very things that has made TechCrunch a must-read site. TechCrunch is committed to transparency.”

Indeed we are. And so, prompted by Mike’s ethical pivot, I’ve decided it’s time to update my own code of conduct, the previous version of which can be found here. After all, in the two years since I last updated the document, I’ve quit drinking, received another book advance and – yeah – made some cash from my own TechCrunch shares. The drinking thing alone has left me with more spare cash that I know what to do with.

Here then, for the record, are the relevant changes to my core ethics now that I am sickeningly rich…

“Principle One: I am a whore.”

In the previous version of my ethics statement, I explained that the quality of my work is directly related to how much I’m paid….

“Look at the cover of my book. See the word Whore? It’s in red. That’s because I am a whore; a hussy; a slut-for-hire; a man of scarlet letters. I write newspaper columns because people pay me to do so. I write books for the same reason. The more I get paid, the better I write…”

…Now that I am dripping with wealth, that is no longer the case. Henceforth, the quality of my work will be related only to whether I can be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. (Today was a sleepy day)

“Principle Four: What are friends for?”

Previously, I made clear that I would generally write mean things about my enemies and nice things about my friends…

“If you’re my friend I will write nice things about you; if you’re not I probably won’t.”

…Now that I have more money than I know what to do with, however, I no longer feel any loyalty towards my friends; I can always buy new ones. As for my enemies – I don’t need to write about them to get revenge; I can simply pay to have them killed.

In terms of my day-to-day interactions with PR professionals, I previously adopted a non-discrimination policy….

“When trying to hook up with your PR girl at your party, how attractive she is will play almost no part in my decision making. That would smack of discrimination.”

…That policy is no longer in operation.

“Bribery: If you buy me a Happy Meal as a bribe, I will refuse to accept the free toy. See also, Kinder Surprise eggs.”

A couple of simple text changes to the above. For “Kinder Surprise eggs”, now read “Fabergé Eggs”. For “Happy Meal”, read “Happy Ending”.

And finally, an all important note on stocks. In the previous iteration of my ethics statement, I made clear that I try to avoid owning stocks as all of my investments very quickly turn to shit. This is still the case, except now I deliberately invest my vast wealth in things specifically in the hope that my involvement will lead to their downfall.

Recent investments include $5,000 for 60% of ZDNet’s Tom Foremski’s sense of proportion and a little over $3.50 for a controlling stake in the editorial integrity Forbes.com. Both investments are performing nicely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch