Privacy Issue, Again

It all started after a staff from a furniture installer was dismissed. He filed a complaint to the authority, saying his dismissal was the result of his refusal to enroll his fingerprint for time and attendance.

The news was fast-spread by the Hong Kong media on 14 July after Privacy Commissioner Roderick Woo Bun issued a statement to the press and commented, “Fingerprints are sensitive personal data, given their uniqueness and unchangeable nature, employers should carry out a serious and cautious assessment before collecting such data.”

The news came just two weeks after the successful launching of FingerTec model R2i and Q2i in Hong Kong; I can imagine the frustration of Founder Hong Kong’s staff when the news hit the media. What a pity!

Launching of model Q2i, Elvis Law is second from the left

I wish I was there at the launching

The following two weeks, they’re in full combatant mode. Phones kept ringing. “One project that needs 20 units is put on hold,” a reseller informed. “Do you have less intrusive solution besides fingerprint?” another inquired. Journalists called for clarifications from Elvis Law, now a reputable fingerprint solution figure in Hong Kong, a ‘title’ that I used to tease him.

“The most shocking call was from a high-ranking officer from Criminal Investigation Section,” Elvis told me during my trip to Hong Kong last week. Indeed, what this person was asking for is some support documents about minutiae points in fingerprint technology, which prevent reforming original fingerprint for a crime purpose, and he plans to use the fact to fight the Privacy Commissioner on his exaggerated statement.

“Hmmm, ‘buddy punching’ to cheat employers is also a crime, according to the officer,” he cracked into a triumphant smile.

When something bad happened, the good sometimes follows. To curb ‘buddy-punching’, some initially was unaware that employers have started to explore the idea. Sales has increased for FingerTec Mifare card models where fingerprint is stored in individual card but not in the system, escaped the accusation of inappropriate collecting of personal data.

And, the issue has sparked some debates over the Internet and newspapers. It seemed the pros beat the cons. The most distinctive critic is that the lawmaker is always lagging behind in technology advancement.

The truth is; so far there is no reported case of any commercial-based fingerprints being reused in crimes. Do you hear any? The technology intelligently prohibits it from happening. J In commercial fingerprint algorithm, once the fingerprint template is produced, it’s no way to turn it around.

The technology has changed the world, reshaped the way we live and think and act. To me, no worry, the laggards shall follow, one day.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Beauty and the Beast

Customers are often impressed by FingerTec products and marketing materials; so much better than the rivals, they say. And I heard some colleagues label me as a perfectionist.

But I know FingerTec is still far from being perfect, and me from being a perfectionist.

When I read the book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs” by Daniel Lyons, I think in terms of beauty standard, I am no match to him even in comparison to the fake Steve in the book.

Steve Jobs

Let’s see how the fake Steve amused us from the below excerpt:

It is Tuesday afternoon. I am barefoot, sitting on a cushion in the lotus position, gazing at a circuit board. This board, no bigger than a playing card, has taken years to create. It is the heart of iPhone, the most important object my engineers have ever assembled. And it is wrong, I do not know why, exactly. But it is wrong. By this I do not mean that the board does not function correctly. It functions perfectly. But it lacks beauty. My engineers argue that a circuit board need not be beautiful, since no one will ever see it.

“Yes,” I say, “but I will know it is there. And I will know that is not beautiful.”

For ordinary or non-artistic people, his reaction might seem funny, irrational, or even bizarre. But as an eccentric artist, the tolerant level is none, zero, nada. As an artist, it doesn’t matter whether his audiences notice the imperfection or not, if he detected it, he has to make it ‘right’. This explains why some of the ‘perfect’ paintings as perceived by ordinary eyes, were destroyed by the artists themselves, without hesitation.

Besides all the technologies that make it a superb smartphone, Apple’s iPhone is a piece of art by itself. I was admirably impressed when I received my iPhone: a beautiful glossy black box; inside, cushioned in black velvet, is the rounded edges, sleek, thin and light object, like a piece of crafted jewelry. Solid. And perfect.

What else, if not iPhone?

Can FingerTec deliver a product such as iPhone that is appraised by many for its artistic craftsmanship?

As an industrial product, we have to prioritize reliability, robustness and cost-effectiveness; beautiful exterior has to come next.

But as an art lover, I would never let something ugly slipping into our production line, or printed matters that convey only messages without being complemented with beauty. I strongly believe that artistic value enhances desire to purchase. That’s what makes iPod and iPhone successful products.

Nowadays when customers are spoilt for choices, between Beauty and the Beast, what’s your pick?

Our magazine ads

No matter how scarce our resources are in comparison to Apple, most of the tasks related to FingerTec involve skilled designers.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Face Recognition, The Next Big Thing

"The thicker face the face, the harder the verification”

“Sorry…the machine doesn’t recognize ugly people.”

“A little make-up would help the machine.”

“You’re possibly not a human, access denied!”

“Sometimes it does matter if you’re black or white! Auwww!!” – MJ style certainly.

The R&D guys joked when the prototype failed to recognize faces back then. Some of them even suggested having these kinds of greetings in the machine, which obviously was shot down immediately by the more sane ones.

2 ＋ 3D Face Recognition Algorithm

Recognize this face?

Having our past experiences in the biometrics industry, gradually we had to diversify our research and development into other areas, and we choose to develop face recognition. The road to commercialization stumbled upon engineering and re-engineering of the 2＋3D face recognition algorithm. After myriads of denials from the marketing department over time, the overall outcome now is positive.

So, another market revolution can be expected, this time, led by face recognition.

According to a research report, face recognition would keep its status quo in between 16-18% for another 6 years, whereas fingerprint technology will slowly lost its momentum, from current market share of 55%, gradually declined to 31% in 2015 for a combination of private and public sector.

Ready For The Change

Of course, the market development might not always follow the forecast. Especially for high-tech products, if the time is ripe and the product is right, you have higher opportunity to change the world, or to prove expert’s projection is rather conservative or wrong.

This time, we are more than ready when come to term with the new biometric technology and market. We understand the customers better, more aware of their requirements, and the market acceptance would be easier, we reckon.

For instance, facial recognition is truly contactless when embed with one-to-many verification technology. Every time you want to gain an access, or to check in for attendance, what you need to do is just to stand before the reader, it will scan and verify; or flash an RFID card prior to the process if the reader is incorporated with RFID functionality.

Our Face Recognition Roadmap

FingerTec FaceID 2 (artist's impression)

FingerTec FaceID 2E (artist's impression)

We will introduce two new products simultaneously into the market before year end with a codename FaceID 2 and FaceID 2E respectively. The first, FaceID 2 would be a combination of fingerprint and face recognition technology, providing options for users either to use single method, or a combination depending on their security needs.

The latter, FaceID 2E, would be an external face recognition reader which can be plugged into FingerTec existing fingerprint reader models through USB port. (Note: Only apply to future batch of FingerTec reader models with USB port)

Standalone face recognition reader only without any fingerprint module, is also in our pipeline, schedule to be launched by 2010.

For our existing partners, prepare yourself for a shake-up in biometrics market. Please bear in mind that when opportunity knocks, you can either open your door or you can let it pass.

FingerTec once again will abide by our philosophy, to lowering the entry barrier and making high-tech products mass; and most importantly, our brand is tagged with an affordable price.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

TA100DIY, A Concept Realized

Salesforce.com, the world’s leading CRM (Customer Relation Management) system that we’re currently using, puts emphasize on “NO SOFTWARE” in their sales strategy.

No doubt, “NO SOFTWARE”, is more clear than if they were to use “Cloud Computing” technology term, which needs further elaboration and having no catchy punctual to actually ‘catch’ customers.

“No Software” is the fundamental

NO SOFTWARE. The same goes to TA100 DIY but it is not something related to “Cloud Computing”. TA100 DIY is simply NO SOFTWARE. It’s just like a smart phone; all the smart features are put together in one phone.

NO SOFTWARE. Offered at a competitive price yet loaded with superb features is what TA100 DIY all about; suits perfectly for SME and SMI.

“TCMS V2 is overtly too sophisticated for our small business. We only have a few staff, and we are not going to use some of the features. 'Overnight shift' for example, is of no use to us.” Commented some customers.

“TCMS V2 requires training. For small businesses that are tight in budget, they even want to save on small training fees.” Lamented some resellers.

TA100DIY, everything in one box

“Can we just sell the machine as cash-and-carry item and the customers do the rest by themselves?” Asked some idealistic resellers, a twinkle in their eyes.

Harder than we thought

When the first batch of TA100 DIY was introduced to the market a few months ago, some users started to rebuke, “I had to type long username to register users one by one with those small keypads. So inconvenience! The user has to punch some key first before they can put their finger, unlike the other models. No good too. The HTML reports have flaws, etc …” And the list extended.

And some users came back demanding us to ‘upgrade’ the DIY machine to become a normal machine with TCMS V2 software. We helped them downgraded the firmware, and we sent them TCMS V2 software (of course, with some charges involved).

The Will Lives On

But I did not back away from the lukewarm response, in fact I told my staff, the market has thousands times more small offices than large corporations or factories, and these offices will need time recorders to record their attendance. Simpler and cheaper Biometrics reader would suit their requirements better than the normal machine with software.

“If some percentage of these offices starting use our TA100 DIY, we will see much improvements in our sales.” I reiterated.

The R&D team later was instructed to gather customer’s feedbacks, refine the crude features, adding some new ones, and enhance the batch processing to import and export data and etc.

DIY is the Final Destination for TA100 DIY

For resellers, TA100 DIY can definitely help them to reduce training hours spent at end users. For tech-savvy end users, TA100 DIY should be a walk in the park. If you can operate your mobile phone, you can do TA100 DIY.

My aim is to make the DIY reader so simple, even housewives could use it in the house to check their husband’s IN and Out (go out and back home) movements. (And have records to prove it) :)

I bet on the DIY reader to be as successful as the rest of the models.

What’s next?

Of course, software will remain inevitable for all other FingerTec models including the ones we are going to produce in the future. We have also started the TCMS V2 web version development, which would involve cloud-computing technology, and eventually, our next milestone is to operate like Salesforce.com.

Stay tuned with FingerTec, interesting things keep happening.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

DIY Concept on FingerTec

My 8 years old daughter offered her helping hands to assemble the DIY (Do-it-yourself) bookshelf that I bought from IKEA. I was amused to see her first labored up, later down to an Allen Key using her two tiny hands to tighten the screw to no avail.

IKEA, do-it-yourself home furnishings

At IKEA, you pay and transport bare skeleton furniture home and fix it on your own.  To make you do part of their jobs has eventually made IKEA the world’s largest furniture manufacturer.  It’s called “mass collaboration” (to make the website owner gets rich) in Web 2.0 term. :)

This is the power of DIY.  

Only by DIY, IKEA manages to flat-pack and save much of their transportation costs and warehouse space. In flat-pack, large percentage of IKEA items can be stuffed in a sedan and driven home by customers.

But when FingerTec adopts the DIY concept, neither we want to flatten FingerTec readers (simply because we can’t), nor shifting the installation, setup, training and all the technical supports from the resellers to end users.

Our DIY concept is to lower the technical barriers for resellers and customers.

For resellers, you have almost everything to market and support the products with ease using our online resources.  For end users, you would find a lot easier to adopt FingerTec in your daily operations.

Our DIY concept including of the following efforts:

1.    The hardware and software should be easy to use and free from technical glitches.  Our Product Development and Quality Control teams well understood this objective.

QC:Burning test for 7 days

Manuals & Video Guides to be packed into every individual product

2.     Step-by-step video guide with user manual for users.  To reduce training and support costs. Failure rate to adopt fingerprint device is lowered down to the minimum.

3.  Step-by-step video clips for hardware repair. Do not need to return the faulty machine to us; resellers DIY and save on transport cost.

4.   Localization. Have you ever seen any fingerprint products that provide standard local language? We have over 20 languages for hardware and 14 for software. Our sales team can speak 10 different languages.

5.   Marketing materials? Plenty in softcopies or hardcopies.  To help you to sell in no time. My Indonesian partner once told Norana, “I beat one veteran in fingerprint business by just showing the management a few FingerTec marketing videos without much talking, and I secured the project.”

6.     Training? Of course. Online. Most of our resellers worldwide self-trained by tapping on our training resources.

7.     Extended technical support to end-users.  Our system helps resellers to support end-users. Any technical query from users that write to support@fingertec.com will get our direct response within 24-hour, it is inconvenience to route them back to their vendor, unless specified so by certain resellers.  An end-user technical website http://user.fingertec.com is established for users to self-help themselves for any technical problems.

8.   We have designed and redesigned our packaging to reduce the packaging size and weight, to be environment-friendly and fit just fine to protect products and to save transportation cost. That’s IKEA! 

IKEA DIY concept is reversing a supposedly full-assembled furniture to bare bones in a smart way.  A lot of customers don’t mind the troubles; to them it’s fun to assemble a table or a chair.

But for Hi-tech equipment, it is no fun. The lesser you do, the more troubles customers have to bear. We have to shoulder them all to lower the threshold, to make the sophisticated products become simpler and easier to use.  And, it works! We have sold FingerTec products to clients in over 90 countries in the world, and far more than IKEA. (Revenue wise can’t be compared-lah. We are like toaster; they are apples. People eat apples everyday.)

This is the power of DIY.

Many may argue that FingerTec makes things easy, but not really DIY, and customers still have to engage installer or vendor to help them to get the machine up and running.

“Can I just buy FingerTec on the shelf and make it work on my own?”

I take the challenge from there and now TA100 DIY is the answer.

TA100DIY, the front page packaging design

(To be continued in my next article: “TA100 DIY, A Concept Realized”).

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Dali & TCMS V2: Unveiling New Version

Who is Salvador Dali? The Chief Programmer of TCMS V2?

Very unlikely.  We didn’t hire any Spanish to do our software, it’s costly, I reckon.

He was an artist, a surrealist painter. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, 1904, and died in 1989.

Then, what is the link between TCMS V2, Time & Attendance Software that bundled with FingerTec readers and he?

The logo.

A few years back, when we first designed the logo for the software, I gave the idea to absorb Dali's soft-watch painting concept, the graphic designer eventually produced the logo as follows:

Dali employed extensive symbolism in his works.  For instance, the hallmark “soft watches” that first appeared in The Persistence of Memory adopted Einstein’s theory that time is relative and not fixed. For better understanding of time in E=mc2 equation, you may refer to Stephen Hawking’s “The Brief History of Time”. (Frankly, I struggled and only managed to understand the first two chapters)  

Here I show you some of Salvador Dali’s interesting surreal paintings:

Time is fixed, time is an essence, and punctuality is important (at least in most part of the world). Rush hour traffic, 10 o’clock appointment, 3 o’clock meeting, so on and so forth. This is time in business world.

But time is meaningless when there is no life form in this universe.  Time only appears when life began. When life is gone, seeped into eternity, time becomes static. This is time in philosophers’ world.

“Time is not important, only life is important.” This is the famous phrase in the movie “The Fifth Element”.

We created a verse in our TA100 poster, “When mankind starts to time, the value tends to multiply”.  It conveys the idea that time is not worth as much when nobody cares, therefore when you are timed, it is important to add value to yourself to make your time more valuable.

A lifetime is so short, shouldn’t one live a more valuable life?  How to manage time to create value, the value that meaningful to you, and to the society? That’s very much dependant on one’s perception and his or her inclination. As long as this is the value that you pursue, it may end up with some meaning to you (but it may not, in the society’s perspective). You may spend one meaningful hour, but wasted the whole life. It’s relativity too.

Time is fixed, and time is relativity. And it’s a mixed of sense and sensibility, and also art and science. Just like the TCMS V2 soft watches logo (but according to my wife the painting looks like a woman’s ovaries system; I have no issues, it gives birth to life, it’s still a good thing), time is kind of floating in the air…

Now, FingerTec is unveiling the better and more efficient version of TCMS V2 (version 2.2) to spare some of your time to pursue what you wish in life.  

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

The Blood Ties

I fed my father rice porridge in his sick bed. The out-of-character intimacy thrilled me.

He wanted to say something but his voice clattered at his throat.

A sudden stroke struck my father at the end of March brought me back to my hometown more often than usual.

Since I left home to pursue my degree, later started my career, and have a family of my own, I spent lesser times at my parents’ home in Melaka, despite it’s only 150km away from Kuala Lumpur.

I felt a twinge of guilt when I realized for the past 25 years I hardly looked back, and managed only very few Sundays a year to breakfast with my father at his favorite Dim Sum restaurant.

After knowing that his condition had stabilized, a month later I flew again, this time to Geneva, Switzerland to receive a Century International Quality Era Award.

The news about my father’s death hit me when I was strolling on the street of Geneva enjoying the cold Spring breeze, still wondering why none of the shopping mall is opened on Sunday.

Mr. Jose E. Prieto, the President of the Organizer is a nice guy, when heard of the news, expressed his condolence, and quickly arranged a special photo session to present the Award to me a day earlier from the official event, just before I left the hotel for Geneva Cointrin International Airport to hop on any available airplane to fly me back to Malaysia. Thanks to him.

I dislike the Chinese funeral rites tradition but still chose to abide. I lighted two white candles and joss sticks and burned silver papers, alongside with my siblings.

Hungry flames gobbled up the comfort-money like the money-crazed Cowhead and Horseface guards in the netherworld. Flakes of soot and ash drifted languidly in the solemn air. Hope to buy him a better afterlife.

The moment when his coffin was lowered into the crematorium, all the vivid images of the past suddenly swept over me. Him, still a radiant young man, cycled his favorite 4-year old to a movie; him, still a dedicated policeman, brought his obedient 5-year old to join his boring morning assembly; him, still a vigil night watchman, guarded the family and village through the race-riots in 1969; him, still in good appetite, chewed his favorite chicken legs in the Dim Sum restaurant; him, still sitting in his comfortable chair, smiled happily and toothlessly, when seeing his grown-up son came home with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren...

The mourners started to leave, but the blood ties stays forever and grows thicker by the day.

Melaka Memorial Park's Columbariums, where my father's ashes urn was placed.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ