OVTO Online Virtual Travel Office

OVTO Online Virtual Team Office

A Virtual Team — also known as a Geographically Dispersed Team (GDT) — is a group of individuals who work across time, space, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. They have complementary skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Geographically dispersed teams allow organizations to hire and retain the best people regardless of location. Members of virtual teams communicate electronically, so they may never meet face to face. However, most teams will meet at some point in time. A virtual team does not always mean teleworker. Teleworkers are defined as individuals who work from home. Many virtual teams in today's organizations consist of employees both working at home and small groups in the office but in different geographic locations.

Why virtual teams?

* Best employees may be located anywhere in the world.
* Workers demand personal flexibility.
* Workers demand increasing technological sophistication.
* A flexible organization is more competitive and responsive to the marketplace.
* Workers tend to be more productive; i.e., they spend less time on commuting and travel
* The increasing globalization of trade and corporate activity.
* The global workday is 24 vs. 8 hours.
* The emergence of environments which require inter-organizational cooperation as well as competition.
* Changes in workers' expectations of organizational participation.
* A continued shift from production to service/knowledge work environments.
* Increasing horizontal organization structures characterized by structurally and geographically distributed human resources.

Benefits of virtual teams:

* Some members of virtual teams do not need to come in to the workplace, therefore the company will not need to offer those workers office or parking space.
* Reduces traveling expenses for employees.
* It allows more people to be included in the labor pool.
* It decreases both air pollution and congestion because there is less commuting.
* It allows workers in organizations to be more flexible.
* By working in virtual teams, physical handicaps are not a concern.

Problems with virtual teams:

* Misunderstanding in communications is the leading complaint among members of virtual teams.
* Working on a project over the virtual workspace causes lack of project visibility.
* Difficulty contacting other members. (i.e. email, instant messaging, etc.)
* Differences in time zones.
* It can be difficult for team members to fully comprehend the meaning of text-based messages.

Tips to ease communication problems for team members:

* Allow the team members to get to know each other by arranging occasional face to face meetings. This can also be accomplished using webcams and video conferencing which may or may not necessitate that all team members use the same hardware and/or software applications.
* Allow team members to get an idea of where the overall project is going. This way each member will know how they fit into the project.
* Create a code of conduct. This will avoid delays and will make sure that requests are answered in a timely fashion.
* Do not allow team members to disappear. Have a calendar for each team member so that everyone's schedule is available to view.
* Develop trust among the team.
* Store charts, diagrams, etc. on the internet so that the whole team can see them.

Who are the members of virtual teams?

* Members can either be stable or change on an ongoing basis.
* Members can be in the same company or from various companies.
* Members can live in the same community or in different countries.

Basic types of virtual teams

* Networked Teams consist of individuals who collaborate to achieve a common goal or purpose; membership is frequently diffuse and fluid.
* Parallel Teams work in the short term to develop recommendations for an improvement in a process or system; the team has a distinct membership.
* Project or Product-Development Teams conduct projects for users or customers for a defined period of time. Tasks are usually nonroutine, and the results are specific and measurable; the team has decisionmaking authority.
* Work or Production Teams perform regular and ongoing work usually in one function; the team has clearly defined membership.
* Service Teams support customers or the internal organization in typically a service/technical support role around the clock.
* Management Teams work collaboratively on a daily basis within a functional division of a corporation.
* Action Teams offer immediate responses activated in (typically) emergency situations.

Reasons for virtual teams in the workplace:

* Allows for people in different parts of the world to come together to work on a project.
* Creates alliances and mergers between organizations.
* Extends the market to different geographical locations.
* Reduces costs for an organization.

Nine key steps to developing virtual teams:

* Secure a project-based idea conducive to collaboration.
* Build a business plan to include the team vision, purpose and goal.
* Identify critical players to support the project.
* Select people who can contribute their core competencies to the project.
* Enlist their service.
* Establish an initial meeting with members to lay down the groundwork,set guidelines and processes.
* Strategically align all members to the projects goal.
* Set a timeline.
* Monitor activities and progress.

Critical success factors of virtual teams

* The existence of availability standards.
* Ample resources to buy and support state-of-the-art reliable communication and collaboration tools for all team members.
* The existence of corporate memory systems such as lessons learned databases.
* The existence of written goals, objectives, project specifications, and performance metrics; results orientation.
* Managers and team members with a better-than-average ability to accurately estimate.
* A lower-than-normal ratio of pushed to pulled information.
* Team communication is prioritized by the sender.
* Human resource policies, reward/recognition systems as well as career development systems address the unique needs of virtual workers.
* Good access to technical training and information on how to work across cultures.
* Training methods accommodate continual and just-in-time learning.
* There are standard and agreed-on technical and "soft" team processes.
* A "high trust" culture; teamwork and collaboration are the norm.
* Leaders set high performance expectations; model behaviors such as working across boundaries and using technology effectively.
* Team leaders and members exhibit competence in working in virtual environments.

Team-building key for virtual workplace

Darleen DeRosa’s studies focused on the lack of team building in a virtual workplace. DeRosa earned her PhD in organizational psychology; she has invested four years of graduate school at the masters and PhD levels obtaining her degree. As part of Right Management Consultants, she conducted this study because she feels that even though organizations have invested so much time and money into virtual teams, organizations are missing the foundation for virtual workplaces; support.

DeRosa’s study included surveying and interviewing 10 different major international firms; two thirds agreed that the performance of virtual teamwork is “important or very important” to the fundamental success of their business. Of 21 virtual teams, sixty-five percent claimed that they’d had never participated in an effective team building session, thirty-six percent said they had never met their team members face to face. Teams that had been together for less than a year were more productive and performed substantially better than teams that had been together for more than a year. An overall observation is that productivity and performance decreases over time.

A recent study by the Gartner Group; an American research company, stated that by 2008, 41 million corporate employees will operate in a virtual workplace at least one day per week.

Having employees working in a virtual workplace poses some concerns and challenges, most of which would be eliminated by working in a physical office. Most of these challenges stem from the lack of face-to-face interactions among team members. Darleen DeRosa discovered seven key challenges that employees are faced with when working in teams in a virtual workplace. Here are the challenges that she has identified in her research:

? Companies must compensate for the lack of human contact, and find appropriate ways to support team spirit, trust and productivity.

? Leaders must be especially sensitive to interpersonal, communication and cultural factors.

? No trust, no team. Trust is a top factor in determining virtual team success. But interpersonal trust, compared to task-level trust (a faith that team members will do their job) is more difficult to achieve in a virtual environment.

? Team building pays off. Virtual teams that invest time in team building perform better than those that don't.

? Team performance tends to drop off after one year. Attention must be paid to interpersonal, communication and cultural factors to prevent a "peak-and-decline" syndrome.

? Technology makes virtual teaming possible, but isn't a perfect substitute for human interaction. Teams must be careful to use the appropriate technology for various tasks.

? While meeting in person requires time and expense, virtual teams that meet once or twice a year perform better overall than those that don't meet. To help make an easy transition from a physical office to virtual workplaces for employees, organizations have created “virtual water coolers” and chat rooms to encourage employee interaction and communication.

DeRosa has concluded that companies are not optimizing their virtual workplaces. There is an enormous potential for increased productivity and performance, however organizations have failed to build the foundation for making an easy move to virtual workplaces. People tend to be more receptive to face-to-face interactions. A virtual workplace eliminates this human contact. As a result, in order to build the foundations for a successful workplace, organizations have to find a way to replace human contact with an equivalent interaction. Increased productivity and performance should be the driving forces for finding that replacement and endorsing the movement to virtual workplaces.

Aiding Software for Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are often spread all over the globe, ranging from different offices to different cultures; so how is it that they can remain on track with objectives and come together to achieve goals to contribute to the organization? The answer is that they use collaborative technology--in particular they use software that allows virtual teams to be as efficient as same-location teams.

Software that aids virtual team functioning can be separated into two main categories--software that provides ease of communication and software that provides task and document organization.

Software that improves the ease of communication often includes features such as presence awareness, instant messaging, and web conferencing. These tools allow team member to be accessible to their teams 24 hours a day. Members can have real time conversations and do not have to follow lengthy correspondence as dispersed teams have had to in the past, which leads to greater efficiency.

Software applications that organize team tasks and documents also improve their teams' efficiency. These programs consist of a central location where all members can access important documents to the team, track progress made, assign tasks, and even provide calendars with key dates and timelines to keep all members current.

There are many software programs for virtual teams, such as Lotus software by IBM, NetMeeting by Microsoft, Facilitate.com by Facilitate.com, Thinktank by GroupSystems, and many more. Software of this type is a fast-developing area, so organizations should look often for software programs that suit the size and functionality of their teams.

OVTO Overture Online

Yahoo! Search Marketing (searchmarketing.yahoo.com) is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.

Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc. (formerly Goto.com) (overture.com). Goto.com was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service following previous attempts that were not well received.
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Origins of Goto.com

Goto.com was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service.

In February 1998, GoTo offered advertisers the option of bidding on how much they would be willing to pay to appear at the top of results in response to specific searches. The bid amount was paid by the advertiser to Goto every time a searcher clicked on a link to the advertiser's website. By July 1998, advertisers were paying anything up to a dollar per click.

GoTo's business model was based on the idea that its paid listings would make it more relevant than other services, especially for general searches, and web sites that pay more are probably better sites. A similar service had been offered by Open Text in 1996, but this precipitated outcries and bad publicity because searchers at the time did not want the search process more commercialized.

In contrast, GoTo's pay-for-placement model was very successful. Commentors theorised that the web had matured in the intervening two years, and these type of economic models were more acceptable since the web was no longer just a place for academic research, but also a place for buying products. GoTo founder Bill Gross speculated at the launch that GoTo would succeed because, as a relatively new service, it had no reputation to taint with paid listings, unlike Open Text.

On October 8, 2001, Goto.com, Inc. renamed itself Overture Services, Inc. GoTo's chief operating officer Jaynie Studenmund said "We also felt it was a sophisticated enough name, in case our products expand."

Through partnerships, Overture enabled portals such as MSN and Yahoo! to monetize the hundreds of millions of web searches made each day on their sites. Indeed, these partnerships proved highly lucrative, and in a period otherwise marked by dot-com failures, Overture became a substantial profit driver for portals like Yahoo!

This success enabled Overture to acquire web sites such as AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

Acquisition by Yahoo!

In 2003, Overture was acquired by its biggest customer, Yahoo!, for $1.7 billion. The old brand name of Overture has now been phased out as Yahoo! re-brands many of its products under the Yahoo! name. The exception to this is in Japan and Korea where the local businesses continue to use the Overture brand.

Details of current service

Goto.com's and Overture's original services provided only a list of search results ordered according to the bid amounts paid by the respective advertisers. Yahoo!'s Search Marketing's latest iteration, code named Panama, was released early in 2007. It replaced the old formula with one more similar to what Google AdWords uses to rank advertisements against search results. The exact formula is secret, but it is basically Bid * Quality Score = Ad Rank, where quality score is comprised of the ad's CTR (click-through-rate), the relevance of the ad to the creative, and the 'quality' of the landing page the ad is sending the user to.

Yahoo! Search Marketing also provides features such as Geo-targeting, Ad Testing, Campaign Budgeting, and Campaign scheduling.

Patent litigation

In May 1999, Goto.com filed a patent application titled "System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine". The patent was granted as US patent 6269361 in July 2001. A related patent has also been granted in Australia and other patent applications remain pending.

Prior to its acquisition by Yahoo!, Overture initiated infringement proceedings under this patent against FindWhat.com in January 2002 and Google in April 2002.

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWord service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections - a tactic that had some similarities to Overture's search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

Adware partnership

In April 2003, Overture announced a three-year partnership with Gator Corporation, (now Claria Corporation) an adware company. Under the partnership, Gator's software monitored a web-user's activity on web sites and search engines (even sites such as Google that are not affiliated with Overture) and grabbed search keywords. These keywords were submitted to the Overture search engine. As a result, advertisers who paid for listings in Overture found their products advertised through Gator's Search Scout software, even if they wanted nothing to do with Gator. Overture faced a great deal of criticism for entering into this partnership.

When Yahoo acquired Overture, the Claria software impaired the operation of Yahoo's services. For example, when a user with a Claria application installed used Yahoo Search, they received a standard set of Yahoo results with sponsored listings at the top supplied by Overture. The user would then receive a full-screen pop-under window from Search Scout. Since Search Scout uses Overture's paid listings as well, Claria's window has the exact same listings as the Yahoo search results.

Subsequently, Yahoo! came out with the Yahoo! Toolbar, which allows users to remove adware and spyware from their system. The toolbar affected the operation of Claria's software and may have put stress on the relationship between the two companies. Claria's website, claria.com, does not list Yahoo! as a partner and a March 2006 press release states that they are exiting the adware business.

Are you interested in mult-player online internet games? Such as runescape and neopets?Internet Game Online-games, tips, cheats and kids forumsAnother good forum is the Internet Junction For Gamers IJFG.COM Internet Junction For Gamers, Runescape Market and More IJFG.COM Jokes, Pranks, Runescape and other cool games at IJFG.COM. RuneScape is set in a medieval fantasy world, similar to "Guild Wars" or "EverQuest", where players control character representations of themselves. As with most massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG), there is no overall objective or end to the game. Players explore, form alliances, perform optional tasks, and complete quests for rewards and to build character's skills.

RuneScape has often been one of the top massive online role playing games. It is a unique game. But, with a unique game, comes unique players. Players get bored, and then try to develop cheats....autos or bots that will help them achieve success in their beloved games of Runescape 2.

RuneScape is a virtual world which is divided into two part: Members Areas and Non-Members areas. People who pay to play (p2p), receive access to the special areas. They also have access to the free areas. The members' places are much larger, offer "better" items for the gameplay of rs2, and much, much more. The character that you create when you first start playing runescape, moves around the game on foot; either by running, or walking. Players are challenged to their utmost skills by fighting new monsters, completing difficult quests, and manipulating marketing. As Runescape 2 is an RPG (Role playing game), there is no set path a person must take to play rs. They can choose what to do, and when, whether it be training their money-making skills, or fighting another player. Players usually interact with each other by chatting through public chat, or private chat.Internet Junction For Gamers, Runescape Market and More IJFG.COM IJFG.com was a runescape 2 based site. They have now, however, taken another look....

Of course the king of all game cheating websites is trick the trik (otherwise known as RPG Cheats Site), where you can find cheat forums, mmorpg topsite, arcade games and any mmo game related topics.

The master of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) cheats can be found at Trik.com Trik.com; this site is one of the best today. The forum section, Trik.com forum, originally came from IJFG.com (Internet Junction For Gamers) , which was one of the best websites that discussed various gamers' issues. The full name was Internet Junction For Gamers, Runescape Market and More. This site had Jokes, Pranks, RuneScape and other cool games. RuneScape is set in a medieval fantasy world, similar to "Guild Wars" or "EverQuest," where players control character representations of themselves. As with most MMORPG, there is no overall objective or end to the game. Players explore, form alliances, perform optional tasks, and complete quests for rewards and to build characters' skills.

Trik.com continues IJFG.com's success, but Trik.com has more to offer. Trik Topsite can be found at Trik Topsite; the TopSite is a great addition if you want to find the best MMO RPG site(s) or raise your site in the rankings. Trik.com also has a viciously competitive Arcade. If you want to be the #1 Arcade on Trik, then come prove yourself at Trik.com arcade: Trik arcade. Trik.com ?Trik.com/topsite ?Trik.com/forum/arcade.php

With the rising popularity of commercial MMORPG games came the desire from ardent players of these games to run their own servers beside the ones run by the game's creator. Since the original server software is not usually available, the behavior of the server has to be re-engineered. This can be done by analyzing the data stream with the original server, or by disassembling and analyzing the client which is available.

Ultima Online was one of the first large MMORPGs. Due to its openness in implementation, server emulators arose very quickly, even during the beta stage of development. The destination to which the client connects was changeable by simply editing a text file. In beta stage the client-server data stream was not encrypted yet. The term server emulator became known through Ultima Online server reimplementation such as UOX, which was the pioneer. Many forks and reimplementations followed UOX, because its source code was released under the GNU General Public License relatively early. RunUO is today the most widely used UO-server emulator. After RuneScape implemented anti-cheating measures, many gamers left and started their own private servers. The best place to discuss the private server is at Trik- The Master of Private Server.

Another useful site is Rune Web ruwb.com . This site is about more serious RuneScape gold trading, account exchange, gold for real life cash and many services. It includes tips on how to avoid getting lured/scammed while using the marketplace. For programming, visual basics, java, C/C++, scar and all other languages such as PHP, HTML, ASP, Delphi. There are also sections for graphics talents, plus many cool videos and fun stuff.

A defining moment in internet gaming history was when a group of gamers called (hygo 7) decided to start an ultimate game forum, which they named hygo.com. It has the best financial backing, the friendliest game community, and the highest quality of information. Currently Hygo.com has entered a new phase...Hygo.com is offering the best private server game. With thousands of members, Hygo.com is your next place to visit, as they have an amazing game with a community and economy. Hygo.com - The Online Adventure Game. is definitely one of the top sites you want to join right now!

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