Name-tagged photo galleries - what a nice tool for the (secret) police.

Google Picasa recently launched facial recognition for photos. The software works OK and with a decent effort you can "name-tag" all your photos. The name-tags give you nice organizing and sharing possibilities. So quite an ingenious option! The same kind of technology is available for Apple iPhoto and with add-ons also for Flickr. Probably this feature will soon become a must for all bigger photo galleries.

Now lets think about it a bit. A name-, geo- and date-tagged photo (or a movie) in a gallery is an enormous source of information: who knows who, who has been where and when did this happen. If one would gain access to the Google's, Apple's and Flickr databases and all the tagged galleries one could build up information banks that are unprecedented. And if you happen to be amongst the secret police then why stop there. Next connect the photo databases with information from social networks, public internet and the traditional police, bank, credit-card and other databases. So with a simple "select..." query you might get more information about a person than he himself knows. Like what are his 1970's classmates doing at present or what really happened at the party his teenage daughter attended last Friday.

Most surely the amount of geo- and name-tagged photos is growing exponentially with camera mobile phones becoming cheaper the gallery services becoming better. If you have small children and have visited their kindergarten parties you probably have noticed that practically every parent is taking (name-, geo- and date-tagged) photos and making (name-, geo- and date-tagged movies). The lives of our children will be really well documented.

Google's Privacy Policy sais: "We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law." Now surely the police and especially all the anti-terrorist units can require Google to do so by law.

A rather nasty side-effect is that besides "the good" also "the bad" will sooner or later gain access to the data. Through hacking or ... just making offers that one cannot refuse to the developers, testers, sysadmins, back-up administrators working for the web-galleries. The only serious obstacle at the moment protecting the data is the share amount of it.

So what are the conclusions and uses of this new development:
- Firstly, live decently. Be aware that everything you do is essentially public information.
- Secondly, this technology could be used more at spots of crisis. For example, why not build a free and easy to use mobile-gallery service for Pakistan and Afganistan. One might even share out GPS enabled mobile phones for free. It seems that the Taleban members like to take photos and show off their arms. Why not let these photos be automatically geo-, date- and name-tagged. :-)
- Thirdly, learn IT! Integration of IT systems and query building will become more and more important for the police and military each day. At least for the next ten years this will create many IT jobs.

Good people management and family life ...a collision?

How to motivate your team of specialists? This is a question frequently asked by modern managers. Everybody knows that a good salary is only a pre-requisite. In order to motivate your team and get the work done much more is needed. You have to make the work interesting, you have to give people freedom of choice and let them develop their own ideas. Modern management is a craft.

Almost all successful companies and amongst others the technology companies have discovered the importance of motivation years ago and have all started to systematically develop the work-place "atmosphere". This is really good as it has made working fun and people much more enthusiastic. If the people love their work and do it with a passion great things happen! Everybody wins - specialists love their work, the companies get good results, customers get nice products....but there is a serious downside to this.

Few companies and few specialists have realized that there is a zero-sum game going on. The object of the game is the employees (and why not also the employers and owners) time. The employers have become really good at this . The best workplaces have an atmosphere where:
- People love what they do.
- People feel that their work is important and they are important.
- Somebody always listens to you. Either your manager, your collegue or the personel manager. They care!
- Because it is fun and important you give 110%.

Now time is a finite resource - so if the workplace wins more of your time and attention then somebody must lose? Who? This is of course different for each one of us, but consider this:
- Does your partner and family have advisors and consultants on "people and relationship matters"?
- Have your relatives been trained on relationship management?
- Do your partner, friends and relatives get paid to have a good relationship with you ... or are they in turn seriously motivated by their employers to pay more attention to their important and fun job?
- Does your partner organize really fun events where you can really party and express yourself ... or are the events dominated by your children expressing themself and you trying to get them scream and dangerously run around less? :-)

So inevitably it is the family and friends who lose in this game. And I would say that this is the second most important reason why we have so many divorces nowadays.

My suggestions:
Firstly everybody can make the TV to be the ultimate loser. Don't watch it! Spend the time won with your family, friends, work and studies.

Secondly the employers should take a second step in the employee motivation plan - think about the families. If we have been successful in making work seem important and fun we most certainly can make family life important and fun.

Thirdly the employers should put some limit to the workhours. And I do not mean switching off the e-mail system at 17:00, but maybe sometimes ask your people to sleep and not to send e-mails, develop software or configure IT systems at 3 o'clock in the night.

NOTES:
* Thanks to Linnar Viik and his great innovation course where we discussed this issue.

** I think that the most important problem why people divorce is the possibility to buy ready made food from groceries and have machines do most of our housekeeping work. This eliminates the important physical reason - hunger and dirty clothes - to live together.

Why you should not build an internet service and drop out of school

Recently there was an article on Arctic Startup encouraging everybody to start an Internet Service. Being old and a little realistic and a father I think I should cool some of the enthusiasm. :-)

Firstly, don't drop out of school. Never! The higher your education the happier your life - the smarter the people you socialise with and the better you understand about what is happening in around. Don't do it even when you make it as an enterpreneur. Nobody likes an un-educated and ill-literate boss. An internet service is no different from any other traditional business and education is one of the few values that a person has. Giving it up just to make a few bucks would be stupid. Besides if we leave out some exceptions (like Bill Gates) then there are not that many rich people who don't have higher education. At some point you just need the general intellectuality. I have worked as a manager of IT specialists and I claim that there is a clear and visible difference between those who have higher education and those who don't. Not having higher education tends to results in a "ceiling of career and salary".

The other problem with Internet Services is the ease of starting them and their globality. If it is easy for you to start one then it is easy for everybody else also. This results in really harsh competition. There are practically no entrance barriers. Neither know-how, capital, geographical nor IP or licensing. You have nothing protecting your revenue. Actually I don't know if there is any other industry where you get so fierce competition. Even the cab companies and restaurants have more entrance barriers (a car, a drivers licence, geography) than Internet Services. As a result that even the profit margins of the PC industry (that are probably less than 5%) look really tempting compared to Internet Services. If every schoolboy can make a service on weekends with zero investment then you end up running the service for free for the rest of its existence. If on the other hand you want to make usability, features, marketing or a large number of users your advantage then be ready to invest - 10-s of thousands of euros.

Estonian talent hunt (Ajujaht) winners!

Last Tuesday the final ceremony of the Estonian young enterpreneur competition Ajujaht (I would translate it as Talent hunt) took place. Usually such competitions have the image of being more of a school project rather than serious business competitions. I would say that previous years Ajujaht was on the level of school projects competition, but this year the level of the ideas and teams was amazingly high. Most of the ideas in the final 8 were already in production and half of them had already some revenue. The prize fund was also significant this year - 1 000 000 EEK (about 64 000 euros).
The competition will be held at least for the next 4 years and hopefully the ideas and teams get better year after year and the whole ecosystem around the competition gives a boost to enterpreneurship and new startups.

Here is the list and my comments of the finalists:

A team called Growfish was the winner (235 000 EEK). Their idea is to develop a fully automatic fish-breeding system. IT would consist of electronics and software. The system would optimize feeding, growing and water quality management etc. So less cost, better quality and less unfortunate accidents. The fish-breeding industry is growing 250% every year so such a system is needed.

One of my favourites - ReUse Republic - got the second place. Their idea is to re-design "previous season" clothes that have not been sold. They have already signed agreements with different brands and have already re-designed and sold hundreds of items. They are going to open a shop in Kristiine Keskus soon and are holding negotiations with Kamppi Keskus in Helsinki. So if they open, go and visit them!

The third place went to Optimistid, whose idea is to build design motor-boats. They have already contacts with US and Brazilian (if I am correct) potential investors/buyers and hope to get their first 160 km/h going boats on the water soon.

Another favourite of mine was the team Aega on (There is time). Their idea was to create a web portal where you can order an artistic picture, for example a Japanese animation style, and an artist would draw it specially for you. You would only have to pay if you like the picture.

Then there was a team who organizes fishing tourism to Estonia. It was quite a nice way of integrating their hobby and work. They had already brought numerous tourist groups and had many trips in plan.

The team Agression is developing a political-economic board-game. Amazingly the market of board-games is a growing market. How do people have time for board-games with all the internet, social-media, Facebooks, blogging and computer-games around?

Finally there was an idea to build a tracking system to cars that would enable insurance firms to charge by the distance driven not by month. I would personally be quite fond of such a service - as I try to keep my driving to minimum. I have read that in US such a service is in a pilot phase already. Does anyone know more about it?

Green energy in Estonia and IT

From the beginning of april it is possible to buy Green Energy in Estonia. I changed my previous "oil shale energy" contract against the new "green wind and hydro energy" contract. So now the electrons coming to my home come from Estonias wind and hydroplants. :-) Well, at least the contract with Eesti Energia states that the power consumed by green energy consumers is less than the power put into the electric grid by wind and hydro plants. I hope they keep their promise and if there will be more green energy consumers they speed up their new wind power development projects.

What do you think, are Estonian consumers and businesses environmental? And should MicroLink change our serverroom power contracts to green energy? The price difference is actually not that big, about 9% for the base contract. The servers hosted in our 4 serverrooms + UPS-s + cooling consume about 240kW of electricity, that is 2,1 GWh/year. Which is about half of what Virtsu wind plant's first 3 turbines produced in 2002.

It is only now that I realize what a clever and environmentally friendly electricity pricing system Estonia has. :-) In a nutshell the "oil shale energy" consumers do sponsor the "green energy" consumers. Which is of course right, as the consequences of limestone energetics are so horrible, that they are even visible on satellite images.

Sales, Marketing and Developers

Probably the biggest reason why startup IT projects fail is that only the technical work is calculated into the project, but sales and marketing is forgotten. This is especially true when the founders are technical guys themself. For example programmers and server administrators. They usually think that an elegant technical solution and a clever service itself is thrive automatically people to using it. (To be honest I have also made that mistake in the past.)

Remember the view of Dilberts boss: "Everything that I don't understand can be done by one person in 10 minutes." This goes for techies planning sales and marketing.... and also vice versa.

But what should be the percentage of work spent on the technical solution compared to sales and marketing in a successful SaaS project? Should there be two, three or perhaps six sales and marketing persons per one programmer in a startup? Do you know if there are any statistics on this subject?

How about hosting and IT service providers? Should there be more sales and marketing people and customer service people than system administrators? In MicroLink's case the number of sysadms and IT-specialists is far greater than the number of sales, marketing and customer service people...which of course means that our customers get technologically great service that is not too expensive as we don't keep too many sales and marketing people on our payroll. :-)

If we look at statistics then the services industry calculates for 65% of western economies GDP. Can this be translated that for each techie there should be 2 sales and customer-service persons as an average?

Marketing in Management Books

Business bestsellers, like the ones from Constantinos C. Markides or Gary Hamel rely on examples. Examples of successful and un-successful business cases. The most typical examples seem to recur from book to book. For example the Xerox's failure to compete with Canon in small copier market is a theme that travels through many business textbooks.

After reading the same cases from different influential, smart, authoritarian gurus over and over again this does change your opinion about the companies and their products. :-) Even worse, if you yourself happen to write a case study about a success story. (like I am currently writing about Google) As a result you would:
- Buy Japanese (Honda or Toyota) cars, because their technology is superior.
- You would never buy a Detroit car.
- You love Google.
- Xerox - you would never consider buying.
- IBM ... well maybe you would buy something from them. Mostly because you feel sorry for them as they have lost so much to Microsoft, Intel and others and have such a huge dinosauric business model.

So try to make a successful business case and show it off to professors writing those bestseller business books. :-) You might get enormous marketing value. Imagine every "soon to be rich" MBA student in the Western Civilization reading about your success.