A Brighter Sky

When we started to market FingerTec products in Hong Kong some years back, we were heavily surrounded by low-priced China products. Our associate company felt edgy, because Hong Kong is just a tiny dot with a huge Mainland China overhead on the map, the inflow of these products was fast and easy. Their low price strategy gave an impression that they could swallow Hong Kong market at anytime. And we also observed the silhouettes of low-priced Biometrics products scattered in the classified section of the newspapers in Hong Kong.

A few years past, this time when we returned to SecuriTex Show in Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, an exhibition that aimed for domestic market, I didn’t see any low-end Biometrics products from China around. Their ads from the local newspapers disappeared as well.

FingerTec booth at SecuriTex, Hong Kong

Founder Globaltech Ltd, our associate company later confirmed to me that these products are almost vanished from the Hong Kong market. “The sky is getting brighter, and our growth rate for FingerTec is 30% each year for the past two years,” Eric See, CEO of Founder GlobalTech happily pronounced.

To survive and prosper in Hong Kong, product quality and service are the two main essences, according to Eric. Besides, FingerTec has made its reputation with some large and successful installations such as NTT data center and Fine Asia Watch Chain Stores in Hong Kong.

SecuriTex Show is organized every two years for end customers to source for the best and suitable security products and also for the industry players to establish its network and exchange market information and experience. The security industry is relatively small in Hong Kong, you know everybody; everybody knows you.

The opening date of SecuriTex Show just coincided with the candlelight vigil of 4^th June this year. The event commemorates the 23^rd anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre that happened in Beijing, and had drawn a record high of 180,000 people to the Victoria Park, not too far from our Exhibition Hall in Wan Chai.

After the show, I walked slowly down to the park, reached there just before 7, and saw the crowd started to flow in from different directions but mainly from the Metro station. I was delighted to see so many young people, obviously born after the historical event, joined the commemorative rally too.    

When the Chinese government cracked down the Tiananmen Square demonstration by killing hundreds of university students 23 years ago in Beijing, I was just graduated from college and involved myself with a few NGOs in expressing our condemnation of the massacre to the China Embassy in Malaysia. 

Candlelight vigil to commemorate Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989

Today, when China is still suppressing any commemorative events for Tiananmen Square Massacre, the yearly candlelight vigil in Hong Kong has becoming the conscience of China to call for democracy, after the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from United Kingdom to People’s Republic of China as Special Administrative Region in 1997.

With more people and younger generations taking part this year, the candlelight had brightened the night sky.  

  
by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Cultural Collapse

Three years ago when we had a company trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou, one of our programs was to visit a tea farm at the West Lake Xi Hu, Hangzhou. That place is famous with its unfermented Longjing green tea and after a short teatime session, most of us bought home some tealeaves.

XiHu Longjing Tea Farm

My friend in Beijing who knew our tea farm tour told me after sometimes that the tealeaves we bought must be brought over from anywhere BUT the West Lake. He explained to me that the good grade Xihu tealeaves are quite in demand and available in short supply in the country. They are normally pre-booked before harvest and regular group tourists like us who are not tea hobbyists, wouldn’t be served with the original Xihu tea.  

If his statement was true, it means that we were cheated right under our noses. Isn’t it bizarre to see the tea farm before your eyes, but later being served tealeaves planted from somewhere else? Could this really happen? But when this happened in China, I couldn’t be certain. 

And I was shocked again after reading a headline on an IT magazine of China last month. The investigative report divulged a set of unspoken rules being played and resulted in the cultural collapse in TaoBao, the largest local B2C and C2C e-commerce portal being operated in China. Founded in 2003, TaoBao is owned by a conglomerate Alibaba Group, which based its headquarters in Hangzhou, China, and also the owner of a very successful B2B portal alibaba.com. After they ousted its rival eBay in China, TaoBao e-marketplace grew so big that any e-merchants who want to sell goods online in China have to deal with them and pay substantial fees accordingly.

Jack Ma &Taobao.com

However, online tenancy is just the beginning.  To prosper further, e-merchants have to gain certain privileges and that is where TaoBao managers come in to assist you, unofficially.  You would be “assisted” by the managers to jump queue when you participating in online promotion activities, and/or to make your merchandise more “noticeable” compared to other products and the list goes on.

Or for a naïve new e-merchant, you may receive a call from a stranger who tells you that your products have just been blasted with 10 bad reviews from different “customers”, and he could help you to remove the reviews with a price, specifically, USD50 per review. And for all the ten reviews, he will try to get you a quantity discount. He may further offer you to sign the credit promotion package and guarantee a Diamond for your company goodwill level by posting enough of positive reviews.

The best of all strategies was, TaoBao manager would recommend you to sign up for an agent dedicated to you; a person who has an immense experience dealing  with TaoBao, and he would be in charge for all your online matters. He will be charging a fee monthly and the best way is to cut some of your profits from TaoBao.  To prosper even more, you may consider offering some stakes or partnership in your company to TaoBao managers (of course, they will use proxy to hold the shares).

The periodical further observes, “Every evening, some luxury cars owned by e-merchants would stop by at Alibaba Group’s headquarters to pick up some managers to be entertained at nightclubs and bars in Hangzhou.” 

The unspoken rules are becoming an open secret. No matter how drastic the actions taken by Alibaba boss, Mr. Jack Ma, to fire the top and middle executives from time to time, the sleazy activities continued.

TaoBao’s problem was not exceptional, because corruption always involves two willing parties. If fraud is a norm, the entire society has to be blamed. The Biweekly concludes, TaoBao is entrapped in such a quagmire, and predict if the corruptive culture persists, it will backfire one day; but if Taobao does clean up the mess, it will jeopardize its current business.    

The Red Guard march in The Cultural Revolution 

In fact, if we study modern history of China, we would know that the decade-long Cultural Revolution from 1966 through 1976 has vastly destroyed good values of the nation. To restore the missing values in human nature, experts estimate, it takes generations.

The idea is quite absurd to the outside world. When Yahoo! new CEO Scott Thompson had to step down after a resume discrepancy scandal, we saw how the Chairman of Alibaba Group, Mr. Jack Ma still standing strong even when he span off and swallowed up the company’s payment business AliPay without the knowledge of any key shareholders, including Yahoo! Inc.  With this, we have no more doubt as to why TaoBao suffered a cultural collapse.

And for a country or a corporate that has no Cultural Revolution to blame, we have to bear in mind, a fish rots from the head down.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Reclaim The Truth

On 28^th April 2012, in my country, Malaysia, two hundred thousand people staged a peaceful street rally to call for a clean General Election. This was the third, and the largest so far since 2007. Predictably, it ended up with police forces beating and roughing up civilians in broad daylight when chaos erupted.

On the following day, the mainstream media, mainly the major newspapers and the government-controlled TV stations, officially shared the same storyline accusing some protesters for removing the barricade the authority used to fence off the Independence Square, which had provoked the police to fire water cannons, shoot tear gas towards the mass and use excessive force on civilians. The news, supported by some photos and video footages showed some protestors pushed through the barricade, threw stones at the police squad, and even overturned and vandalized a police car.

Naturally, this was just one side of the story. The Internet media, which is more liberal, had a totally different storyline. They voiced out that the police should be targeting the provocateurs rather than at the mass majority. The Internet media also produced some evidence to prove that those provocateurs were undercover cops planted by the government to rationalize their planned-attack. The published photos and video footages showed how police had brutally beaten innocent people, and one video clip in particular showed a speeding police car rammed into a crowd, and the bystanders helping to lift and flip the car to rescue a trapped victim underneath.

The Government could claim its triumph over the mass rally by saying that they had “successfully” clamped down the protest, and spread their version of the story. But their “victory” could be followed by the loss of more support in the coming election.  

A lot of people especially strong governments and mighty corporations had underestimated the power of the social media in the digital world. For example, this peace rally in Malaysia, when two hundred thousand pairs of eyes, two hundred thousand built-in cameras in their cell phones, started telling their tales, sharing their photos and videos that was candidly captured from different angles in real-time; their beloved family would listen, their friends and relatives would listen, and the stories later would turn viral through social networking media, the whole country would listen, and eventually, the world would listen too.

Those fragmented and unorganized stories, proliferate in debris on Facebook and Twitter, at last would form a larger discourse, and eventually would right the distorted truth.

This is where the Internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media. I quoted this statement from a topic, “Back to the coffee house” in the 7^th July, 2011 issue of The Economist. 

The periodical recalled, “Three hundred years ago news traveled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience.”

Nowadays, the accessibility of Internet allows readers to challenge the media elites, and the technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter, have become important conduit of personal news.  

The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to personal publishers, and renewed the approaches to journalism with wider scope in lightning speed. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets.

For big corporations, of course they still can spend big bucks to advertise false information, or to censor some bad publicity, but it is only limited to the mainstream media; the Internet social media would immediately put their accountability to test.

The Internet has abolished the unnecessary hierarchical communications; the autocracy voice from the top down has a reversal change here. In social news environment, customers or public are not the receiving ends.  They are participants. When governments or corporations can’t convert themselves to become good listeners, at least, they have to equalize the communications.

No matter how an organization actively participates in new social media era, the coffee house kinds of gossip culture is back, so changing of mindset is pivotal for organization to really gain in promoting their products, their services or even their brands by and large.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

A Little History

I wrote, “You were our pride, and will always be on our minds.” on his Guest Commemorative book before I left the Memorial Hall.

I was in Beijing on 10th April, attending the 6th anniversary ceremony to commemorate the late Professor Wang Xuan (1937-2006), the founder of Peking University Founder Group, and who was also a great scientist.  But most of all, he was my mentor. Without him, PUC Founder of Malaysia wouldn't exist. Without his encouragement and support, we will never venture into biometrics technology.

Professor Wang Xuan (1937-2006)

He invented the first Chinese Laser Typesetting System, helping China to abandon the conventional typesetting system. I still remember in the 80s of last century, English Electronic Publishing System had already been widely adopted in the printing industry. But for the Chinese language, it was still at the research level, to contain the large amount of character sets (more than 10 thousands) by using the 26-Roman character keyboard, or on the verge of the Chinese input method, not to mention the printing press that required high quality fonts. How to convert the jagged Chinese characters into a smooth vector font? How could Founder achieve the same output speed on the then computer for the same size of page that contain an average of 100 times more different Chinese characters than an English page? How to paginate a Chinese content on a computer? Besides, unlike the A to Z of 26 characters, to create the Chinese font, every different typeface has to be crafted approximately to 10 thousand separate characters.

If all these hurdles remained unsolved, the Chinese nation that once invented paper in the 1st Century and movable clay typesetting in the 11th Century would have been trapped forever in the conventional way of lead-cast Chinese typesetting that was being used for the past hundred years. The Chinese publishing industry would have fallen untimely behind in the computer era.

Manually picking every lead-cast Chinese characters to construct a pre-print page

Started as an academic research project at the University in 1975, with all the hardship Professor Wang underwent, eventually his invention had helped revolutionize the whole Chinese printing industry. The commercialization process of his research work also helped to expand the entities owned by Peking University into a very large and successful enterprise.

Today, Founder Group has an annual turnover of USD 5 billion, and a staff force of 20,000, diversifies businesses in real estates, hospital, securities and etc in China and some other countries on top of its core Electronic Publishing System and other IT products.

Founder Group headquarters in Beijing

With the guidance of Professor Wang, I co-founded PUC Founder in Malaysia in 1995. The company was later developed and listed in Malaysia Stock Exchange. He knew that the Chinese electronic publishing industry might not sustain our long-term growth in this region. He then introduced to us two researchers that worked on fingerprint verification algorithm from Peking University, and he encouraged us to take on the new challenge that finally initiated our new venture.

That’s how FingerTec began its long march, and the rest is history.

Overall, I'd like to think he had a great influence over me not because he was a great scientist, but rather because he was a great man. He once said, "You have to be a respectable man to build a respectable business." And, true enough, he did lead an exemplary life.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

FingerTec Website’s Facelift

After 6 long years of having the same look, for the first time our website went through a total facelift. Let me walk you through its major changes. We consolidated the initial two front page contents into one page, and rearranged the scattered icons in a more orderly manner. We also adopted SEO (Search Engine Optimization) concept and integrated its elements holistically.

Our website never had a conventional structure that incorporated our company profile as one of the major features, even when its appearance was minimalistic. When we first started the simple look, I even calculated to reduce the total wording for the front page just like Google’s striped bare search page. I also removed the lengthy company achievements, investors’ relationships and the content I felt was unnecessary.  I wanted the website to be a fully useful and straightforward e-commerce site. And I did all these for another reason: to reduce the burden of translations for our multilingual contents. 

My SEO consultant friend who is famous in his profession once reminded me that our website was not SEO-enabled. After I explained the rational, he agreed that our website should stay as it is. The unconventional design had attracted more customers than what I had expected. We prosper in business, and I attributed the success to the practicality of the webpage and its component sites. 

The Old

The New

Unlike many B2B websites that focus more on resellers and particularly sales but with minimum support, our major efforts went into technical support for resellers, and it has been extended to the end-users as well. 

Our contents swelled over the years. More functional icons were created. The initial simplified design could no longer accommodate our advancement, resulted in some new icons landed on unsuitable spots. It had also becoming difficult to keep pace with various translations. And to maintain simplicity on the first page, we have to expand to the second page. But it had cost users a few more clicks to get to the target. Eventually our website’s concept of simplicity had lost its original appeal. The worse part is, this is just the present, how about two years down the road when our contents doubled?

Hence, the restructuring of our website became inevitable in our case. This time, we had to embark in a different direction. We had to fix the existing weaknesses. We had to sacrifice some ideologies. We had to consider conventional wisdom. But we still have to uphold the ultimate objective of providing sufficient service to the resellers and end users. The consolidation and restructuring should help us enhance our objective to a greater extent.  

In the process of creating a new front page, we debated endlessly about the new order - what would be primary, and what should be secondary? What would be the buttons with reduced point size, and what should be kept as icons? What would be in the drop-down menu, and what should take center stage? We had brainstormed extensively to come up with this new look. And Tamy Phoon, who has been assigned to head this revamping project, had, and still has to take care of the SEO efforts at every turn taken. 

Replacing the old with something new is always an excuse for pride. But for a website that had done so much for us and carried a houseful of meanings and oversaw the growth of our brand, I felt nostalgic for the farewell too. 

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

CeBIT, Losing Its Clout

I think inevitably the influence of CeBIT is declining over the years. Undeniably, CeBIT is still the world's largest ICT Trade Fair but I just didn't feel like I walked into the cyclone of the digital world. It showcased a little bit of everything - a little bit of tablets, a little bit of communication, a little bit of security, a little bit of cloud computing, a little bit of social media, and a little bit more on business applications, but hardly was there any stimulant strong enough to excite me. The show felt like a weak theme song with disappointing lyrics.

CeBIT, a little BIT of everything

I didn't see much coverage of the 6 - 10th March CeBIT Hannover on any online technology media like TechCrunch, AllthingsD or Wired. In fact, the launch of the new iPad in Cupertino on 7th March, easily received more attention. And if I am not mistaken, there weren't any star products using CeBIT as their launching platform.

There were, however, old boys like SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Intel that played it big and dominated some halls, while new boys like Google and Salesforce tagged along halfheartedly with moderate booths spaces. In recognition of this post PC era, PC giants like Dell and HP knew their place and played a much lower profile in CeBIT, while other PC big boys had shied away from the show.

Many influential big names were missing from CeBIT this year, which made the show less attractive. At its peak during the dot-com boom, CeBIT grossed visitors up to 850,000 and pulled almost 8,000 exhibitors, but declined half for both to 334,000 and 4,000 in 2010. With only 15% foreign and diversified visitors, exhibitors might not get their target audiences easily.

Some says that CeBIT is meant for B2B and it is not a consumer technology trade show like CES in the United States. They continue to argue that this is a good platform for CIOs to meet up, to exchange views and sharing experiences. If so, CeBIT is indeed a very expensive gathering event for the IT guys. IT guys are a bunch of people that could find all their stuff over the Internet, and communicate to the right personnel online.  For example, if their company wants to implement Cloud Computing ERP, they would know where to look for the right solution, where to do thorough research and comparison, and where to get a free trial before making any decisions.

CeBIT is obviously more focused on B2B, but when personal technology is becoming the trend of the digital world, business computing has to rethink on how to accommodate personal technology into their offices. For example, when fewer PCs and notebooks were sold, we had no doubt that more and more consumer gadgets like tablets, iPad and smartphones are appealing for office purpose. Since digital technologies have become a part of everyone's lifestyle and the convergence with consumer electronics, smart gadgets and the home entertainment market, the line for personal devices and office devices can no longer be drawn.

I finally found this Van Gogh's Sunflowers 
in Pinakothek Art Museum in Munich 

To visit Mozart's birthplace in Salzburg is a bonus 

When Norana told me to forego CeBIT due to its diversified audience, we decided not to take part last year after our first participation in 2010. But being the largest ICT trade fair on earth, I was still pulled by its magnet. Hence, I came to see for myself this year as a visitor with the hopes to get a first-hand feel and figure out how to reposition or to blend ourselves into it.

My interest waned after the visit, and I had to agree with Norana to drop the idea to rejoin the show entirely. What can visitors expect out of an IT Show when the leading companies from Silicon Valley show a lukewarm response while China companies overwhelm the exhibition halls?

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

The Complexity of Translation

Due to my trilingual background, I don't read translated Chinese, English or Malay literature, I prefer the original languages. We all know that literary works and creative writings are the hardest to translate. It might not be so much the case of misinterpretations, it is more about the tone ended up feeling differently from its original version. To indulge in literature, unless you have no command of its original language, avoid the translated version, perhaps at all costs. 

Every language has the substance of its own culture

It’s simply because every language has the substance of its own culture; the complexity of the culture is even extended to the names of its people. For some famous Chinese writers who originally write their novels in English like Jun Chang, Ha Jin and Geling Yan, when their stories set foot in China, the Romanized Chinese names of the characters still bother me. Not only that they're hard to remember, the vivid meanings behind a Chinese name can no longer be discerned. It's the same effect when I read celebrity names like James Watkins, Daniel Craig, Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz in Chinese, you have to sacrifice extra brain cells to figure out who is who.

We are lucky because our commercial products have nothing to do with literature. The language we use to explain our products can be very simple and straightforward, users do not need to read between the lines. But still, you simply cannot trust any machine or software or Google Translate to do the job; to translate accurately, human factor is crucial.

We have no doubt that translations and localizations are vital for business to compete successfully in the global market. According to 2006 Common Sense report that surveyed more than 2,400 consumers in eight countries, in fact, 52% of consumers will only buy something from a website in their own language. In France and Japan, that figure increased to more than 60%. We have to bear in mind that consumers who do not speak any English are six times more likely to avoid English websites altogether. 

Can you speak my language?

Customers would perceive companies that can speak in their native tongue as more credible, but that’s not the reason why we privilege translations and localizations. As we steer our practical branding in full gear, we don’t want language to become the barrier for our customers to understand and to use our products.

And for that particular reason, we are managing a large volume of contents for translations everyday.

Let me explain why our translation work is complex. We have websites, software, hardware, usual manuals, video guides, technical tips, training and marketing materials, voice clips and etc, and for some materials, we translate them to more than 10 languages. We also frequently upgraded our software and hardware, and improving all kinds of support materials all the time. The contents around the products have to sync with the latest upgrades, hence the translations need regular updates as well.

When it comes to details, we know that translators always stumbled at literary works and sometimes decided to rephrase the sentences to bring the gist out rather than translating them directly, the same might happen to our products as well. For example, when we created some usernames as the sample data in software user manual; translators would need to be reminded to create different set of localized usernames instead of using the same names for translation. Isn’t it weird for users in the Gulf to read Wong Ah Kow as a name even if it is written in Arabic?

To manage contents and translations more professionally, this month, we have promoted Nattalina Zainal to this new position, Content Manager, to oversee the market and support of FingerTec products across languages. 

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ