The Weekly Round-Up: 04.02.05

"Arise Sir Charles..."

Let the Round-Up begin this week by congratulating the founder of the Carphone Warehouse, Charles Dunstone, who received a knighthood for his services to the mobile phone industry...

...for all of about two minutes.

Because, sadly for Dunstone he received his knighthood not from the Queen but from a PR company who put out a press release boasting that "Sir Charles Dunstone" would be speaking at some conference or other.

Two minutes later came a second press release clarifying that "Mr Charles Dunstone is not a 'Sir' as stated in the previous IDM Press release".

That must be the most short-lived Knighthood since King Arthur slipped while Knighting Sir Stephen the Unlucky and accidentally beheaded him.

On a similar note, if your client is called MetaNetworks, it's probably best you don't refer to them as MeatNetworks in the subject line of a press release (you know who you are... which is good, because we didn't).

It got our attention but probably only because we're hard-up, hungry hacks to whom a MeatNetwork sounded a very filling proposition.

Pity the poor Round-Up who thought it might be an invite to the first barbecue of the year.

Also failing to engage their brains before hitting 'send' this week were the team behind Ryan Air's email newsletter – an excellent source of information regarding low cost flights around Europe... if you speak Swedish.

Clearly due to some confusion their end, Ryan Air sent members of their UK mailing list an email which began: "Säg det med vingar på Alla Hjärtans Dag..." The Round-Up couldn't agree more.

The Round-Up thinks it probably says something along the lines of 'Say it with flights this Valentine's Day...' but wasn't about to try wading through the rest of the text. 'Say it with flights', fine, but also say it in a language spoken by your UK customers...

And back to the subject of dodgy press releases, a security announcement which arrived in the editorial inbox this week claimed the total economic damage from malware - viruses and the like - in 2004 may have been as high as $204bn.

Exsqueeze me...? How much?

The report claimed this made 2004 "the worst year on record"... for making up numbers. Sorry, for virus damage.

The report cites little more than best-guesses – while redefining the word 'best' in the process – basing its claim on the assumption that every Windows PC in the world suffered as much as $340 worth of damage related to viruses.

Despite such apparent lunacy, at least one well-known UK IT publication scraped the barrel and ran the story.

Things must be getting desperate over there. However, as a gesture of goodwill the Round-Up will refrain from mentioning which large publishing house got suckered-in by the hype.

But speaking of Dutch organisations there was scandal in the lowlands this past week when an administrator from the Netherlands' border control division shared 75 highly classified documents with users of Kazaa.

The documents contained information relating to phone-tapping by the Dutch military, a hitherto unimagined organisation in the mind of the Round-Up.

The hapless staffer in question took the files home to work on and somehow contrived to drop them into the 'my shared files' folder which is viewable by other Kazaa users and normally intended to contain little more than music and movie files. Fortunately the only person to stumble upon the files was a journalist writing for Dutch blog site Geen Stijl who shared the tale of woe with the entire world.

The Round-Up imagines that made for an interesting chat with the boss... and more interesting still if that boss happened to be Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell who is apparently the nation's ideal employer, according to a survey out this week.

Go figure.

Presumably the company compiling the research interviewed good looking young people with little discernable talent – a demographic who have found Cowell a more than generous boss in recent years.

According to the hard-hitting research, around 50 per cent of Brits would like Cowell running their company. In second place was Gordon Ramsey, third was Peter Kay, fourth doesn't even exist - it was the fictional David Brent character from BBC sitcom 'The Office' - and fifth was Joe Pasquale, who apparently won I'm a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here... the prize for which was clearly the opportunity to redefine the word 'celebrity' in most people's minds.

All this clearly demonstrates why bosses do the hiring, not their staff, and is evidence that far too many people in this country go home and relax their podgy brains in front of one reality TV show after another.

The Round-Up presumes Jeremy from 'Airport' and Maureen from 'Driving School' were sixth and seventh respectively – while 92 per cent of respondents probably see Jane MacDonald from 'The Cruise' as the ideal CFO.

Abe Elkinson, a director at Trust Medical who commissioned the landmark piece of research, said: “To say we were surprised by the public’s choice is an understatement."

Then don't.

But Abe continued: "Simon Cowell isn’t known for his sweet and gentle personality - in fact he’s made a career out of being sarcastic, rude and ridiculing people.

"So for him to come out top as the nation’s favourite boss is rather ironic."

No it isn't. What is it about irony that people don't understand? There is nothing ironic in that statement at all.

Abe Elkinson is clearly blighted by the same condition that plagued the song-writing of long-faced Canadian chanteuse Alanis Morrisette.

For example: 'It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife/ It's meeting the man of my dreams.../ And then meeting his beautiful wife.'

Not ironic in the slightest. Annoying, granted. A sign that you have too many spoons, definitely, and possibly also evidence that the man of her dreams wasn't really married but rather asked a female friend to pose as his wife because some crazy spoon-collecting Canadian was trying to crack onto him.

Undeterred by a chronic failure to understand the meaning of words, Elkinson continued, getting to the serious reason behind the heavyweight report – that bad bosses can put people under stress.

Why didn't they just say that rather than dragging Cowell and Ramsey down with them too?

"On a serious note, a stressful working environment puts a lot of pressure on the heart and is actually worse for you than putting on 40lbs in weight or ageing 30 years.”

But given it's actually impossible to age by 30 years through any other means than waiting around for, well, 30 years, that latter scenario is unlikely to play out in too many offices around the country.

Of course there are plenty of examples we could all cite of bad management and even those who have climbed the very highest peaks of leadership find their credentials questioned at various times.

Both Bill Gates and Tony Blair found their leadership qualities scrutinised this week after they shared the stage at Davos.

The reason? A page of 'doodles' scribbled by one of the men... but which one?

At first Tony Blair was outed as the phantom Davos doodler, leading one graphologist to say his scribbling revealed him to be "a bit of a daydreamer hoping for the best". A second graphologist (the Round-Up was surprised to hear there is even one but for there to be a second is just baffling) said Blair's calligraphic musings revealed "an aggressive, unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure".

But – and, like Jennifer Lopez, it's a big but(t) – it wasn't Blair. It was actually Gates whose attention span had seen him lapse into scribbling.

At this point Downing Street got very huffy and defensive and turned on the press who had wronged their boss.

A Downing Street spokesman said somewhat smugly: "We look forward with amusement to explanations by a variety of psychologists and graphologists of how various characteristics ascribed to the PM equally apply to Mr Gates."

Presumably because the press would never dare write a nasty word about Bill Gates... the gnomish crap-jumper-wearing geek.

So Gates clearly has some work to do on his management style – and his listening skills, according to no lesser authority than two 'leading' graphologists. But his arch-rival Steve Jobs is clearly doing something right. (The Round-Up would have called Jobs his 'nemesis' but neither man is cool enough to have a nemesis – a position normally reserved for the sworn foes of super-villains, comic book heroes and James Bond).

Apple has been revealed to be the most influential brand in the world, according to a study by brandchannel.com. And more good news for tech, Google came second.

The rest of the top five was made up of Ikea, Starbucks and Al-Jazeera.

The breakdown by region also made for interesting reading. The Asia-Pacific region, with a more traditional tech-slant voted local brands Sony, Samsung and LG into the top three, whereas Europeans voted Ikea top brand, with Nokia in fourth.

In the US, the constituency where the overall poll appears to have been won, Apple was first and Google second, with another boost for Jobs coming in the form of a fifth-place finish for Pixar.

And finally, a curious email attachment accompanying a virus was brought to the attention of the Round-Up this week. The virus isn't really battering down too many doors - so don't go to panic stations just yet - but the image which downloads onto a user's machine is certainly raising some eyebrows, featuring as it does a provocative picture of an oven-ready chicken... with very conspicuous tan lines.

No really, have a look... The Round-Up doesn't quite know why they've done that either.

And finally, finally... headline of the week must go to the person within Reuters - of all places - who came up with the following:

'Ringtone Frog's Genitals Deemed OK for British TV'

The story – if you care – is about an excruciatingly annoying TV advert featuring a frog-like creature riding a make-believe motorcycle. His motorcycle noise is available to download as a ringtone but while that message is drilled home, ad nauseum on a number of digital TV channels, many viewers – the Round-Up included – have found themselves watching the advert and thinking 'I can see his bits'.

The ASA received 60 complaints from viewers about the rather small amphibian appendage (perhaps it was a cold day) but has ruled the company can keep the offending body part in its advertising.

Which is nice.

Until next week, here's some news: