SoKy Local Business or "SoKybiz"

This new wireless "blink" card scares the begeebers out of me. I can see a huge windfall for one market and a consumer nightmare.

Ga. Credit-Card Holders 'Blink' Cards May 25, 8:19 AM (ET) By SORAYA NADIA McDONALD

ATLANTA (AP) - About 400,000 credit-card holders in Georgia will be the first in the country to use a new technology that allows them to pay for items by waving their card near a terminal instead of swiping it through a machine.

Residents of Atlanta and 160 other cities in the state will test drive the new "blink" cards, which JPMorgan Chase & Co. ( JPM) will begin mailing to its customers June 1.

http://apnews.myway.com...

Just imagine the convenience of being able to pull out that trusty "Chase" card and waving it everything you wanted to buy? Or simply waiving your card in the air at the restaurant to pay for the bill instead of waiting for the waitress to bring your bill? Oh the conveniences of technology.

Looking into potential markets however, I see a windfall for venders of those little swipey machines the stores use to process your card. See, the store had to buy a special machine that would read your card information from that magnetic strip and then talk to the "bank" to make sure you had a good card with enough balance remaining to make your purchase.

The merchant would buy these machines outright for hundreds of dollars or over time on a lease. (Preferred by the merchant account vendor because they make huge profits on the rental fees.) Now, all their existing merchant clients need new fancy machines to receive the information from the new "blink" cards. Ching baby!

From my reading on MyWay, Google and Yahoo, the new machines will send and receive "encrypted" signals from the card and make a beep when the transaction is complete. This is is supposed to speed up the transaction and make wait times much shorter at checkout. Sounds like a win win for everyone right?

But wait... how exactly does this work anyway? I'm guessing that the machine itself will be doing all the transmitting and receiving and the card will have to be "in range" to be read. According to news reports, no signature is going to be required because the card must be in the presence of the machine to be processed. This just doesn't sound good to me. Having some experience with merchant card readers, merchant accounts, and a good bit of technology I am afraid there might be a gigantic hole to be exploited by those who would steal from you.

The technology exists already to hack into Paris Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick as we have read in the news, how long will it take our techno-terrorists to create a method of receiving funds from your credit card by simply walking past your wallet or purse? How hard would it be for an unscrupulous individual to rig a laptop with the new card reader set on $200 transactions and walk through the mall singing cha-ching all the way to the bank? Oh sure, each card reader is registered and the money's go right into a merchant account so my scenario is a little far fetched, but simplifying it slightly, I can see the possibility of someone being able to get your credit card number (and what ever other information is available from the card itself) simply by getting close enough to read it.

This technology seems to be creating more holes in the system and I personally think the same amount of time and effort should have been placed into Bio-Identification systems and features at the point of sale. It could be as simple as putting the fingerprint information into the card that would cross reference with the bank database, well in my opinion.

I love technology! I love the new gadgets and features! This new wireless "blink" card scares the begeebers out of me.

I have a keen interesting in telecommunications having some experience at least using the technology but even so far as designing and installing a very small custom system in my travel agency. I have studied the latest wireless technology and internet phone products and I get really excited about this new stuff. Sure, I have a cell phone (actually 4 on the family plan), a business phone system, and recently reduced my lines at home down to one line from the three lines I had previously. I have ear buds and headsets, multi-line phones, speaker phones and even recording devices. I even installed my 3 line phone system in my home so I considered myself adequately familiar with telecommunications technologies.

Recently, my wife and I opened a travel agency and I decided to grab the telecommunications bull by the horns. I was real excited about the new internet phone stuff I read about online and knew this was the coming thing. When I was researching the internet phone systems (VOIP) that might be available in our small town, I found that even the vendor had trouble communicating the technology or worse, failed to understand its capabilities and limitations themselves. Sure, they new the lingo and the terminology but when faced with comparing analog, digital and hybrid systems most vendor front line sales people are confused. When I contacted national vendors, they understood the technology okay but they did not understand the limitation for a small business in a small town. It took a great amount of research to determine that VOIP was not the way to go in Bowling Green Kentucky.

Note: I ended up piecing together the "perfect" plan but invested a considerable amount of time installing the system to make it work. Perhaps I'll write on that at another time.

Then today I was reading a few small business blogs and technology news sources and I found out that this communications issue is not as remote as our small town in south central Kentucky. ZDNET reports that small businesses are "baffled by telecom terms." They write; "Mention 3G, Wi-Fi or VoIP to the manager of a small business and you'll get a baffled look, according to a study that calls on the telecoms industry to raise its game." I would have worded that a little differently to say, "call on telecoms to dumb down the terminology to get your message across."

When I was trying to explain to my wife and partners about the advantages of the current VOIP systems, I had to present the technology in terms THEY understood. I would use basic phone references and expand from there. I think too many times the "Sales Engineer" tries to wow the customer with their vast knowledge of the English alphabet, (well that's all it is with WI-FI, VoIP, 3G, XYZ, ABC and MOUSE) and most small business owners are going to feel inadequate, inferior or just plain intimidated by their own ignorance. If the person is not comfortable with the technology, it's going to be much harder for them to embrace it much less spend thousands of dollars on it.

The ZDNET article reads: "Just 16 percent (of small businesses survey in the UK) were able to accurately say that 3G was a high-speed mobile technology, while 17 percent gave a wrong answer and 67 percent said they hadn't heard the term. Wi-Fi fared even worse: just 8 percent understood that Wi-Fi was a wireless technology that provided fast Internet access at hot spots, with 7 percent giving an incorrect answer and 85 percent not able to give an answer. And awareness of voice-over-IP services was lower still, with only 3 percent defining VoIP accurately, another 3 percent giving a wrong answer, and 95 percent admitting total ignorance."

So what's all this mean? It means that technology sales people need to learn to communicate more effectively. They need to remember when they didn't understand the terminology or technology itself. They need to become proficient enough in their specialty to be able to present it as though to a child and allow the customer to understand and thus comfortable. From my personal experience, the sales force needs to truly understand the needs of the potential client and ask a lot of questions first before trying to offer a solution. Sure, this applies to selling most anything but with technology it's even more important because through the interview process you can determine the level of technology the person understand. In other words, do you call it VoIP or "Internet Phone?" or "Network Phone System?" Or really cool magic?"

It's not a question of whether or not the technology is coming because it is, it's a question of whether or not you want your company to get the business or someone else who is willing to be so good at what they do they can sell it in the language of the common business owner. Don't wow me with your vast knowledge of technical terms, wow me with all the ways the technology will help me more productive, more organized, more profitable or in a word happy.

In my own business as web developer, I deal with people who have various levels of knowledge about the internet. From corporate system administrators to end users, I modify my 'language' to effectively communicate. Recently, I was on a conference call with one of my editors and we patched in a systems administrator. I explained the situation with the administrator in an entirely different language than I did the editor. Why? Because it was necessary to use specific terminology or language in order to help each truly understand the situation. It was only because of my experience in dealing with people as a sales/marketing professional as well as my years of experience with technology that I am able to switch gears so easily. It's a valuable lesson that I am simply trying to share. If you have chosen to market a technology such as telecommunications, it only makes sense to learn how to effectively communicate.

Well this turned into a dissertation; I think I'll share it with a few friends in the telecom industry.

I've spent the last few weeks reading about blogs for business. It seems there are as many opinions about blogging as there are individual blogs and with an estimated > 9 million blogs, that's a lot of opinions. What is a blog anyway? The word blog came from Web Log and from my perspective it more closely resembles a personal diary or journal than a log. I have read a number of them and even created a few just to see what the attraction is. It's kind of cool, you get your own little soapbox or pulpit online. Some blogs are confrontational, some are nothing more than the ramblings of people with no social life but there are a few gems out there if you look hard enough.

From my standpoint as a web developer and business owner I can see some value in blogs because it accomplishes what I have been telling my web customers for years, it provides a method and now motive to produce fresh content for your website on a regular basis. A website is great but if it's not updated it becomes static and worn out quickly. Blog-mania (my word for the new emphasis on blogging) is helping people pay attention to getting information out regularly and that has to be a good thing. It is also making the common web surfer greedy for current content and regular updates.

So what's this mean to the owner of a business online? I guess it means it's time to consider blogging. I'm going to try to blog here at SoKyBiz some of the considerations for business blogging as I continue my development of a good CMS + Community forum + Personal blogging application + mailing list subscription app +++.

Basically, for my business customers I want to be able to offer them a good clean website that is functional, accessible and easy to use not only for the audience, but also for the customer (customer being the website owner in this case). The site would have a method for the owner to administer the content easily, adding pages, images and content any time they want. Keeping it simple to make updates for the customer and accomplishing the hard stuff behind the scenes like image resizing and compression, spell checking, HTML validation and accessibility tags. I could spend months (and have) trying to teach a client customer why these things are important and I would still have to follow them around their website double checking validation and rules. So, do it reliably and automatically behind the scenes is important.

With the blogs becoming so popular and the aggregators coming of age, the site will have to be published in the standard methods but also an RSS feed provided. Methods to engage the client audience is also a consideration either through direct commenting on pages or user forums or direct email. It's going to be a big job... I can do it.

Where do I start? Okay, here's the deal. I have some pending projects I have to clean up first. I have a couple of clients that require my personal attention and also an Air Force Reserve "mission" on the schedule, toss in my 7 night stay in Punta Cana in June and it's going to be a little busy in paradise for another month.

So stand by... here we come!

(edited Thursday 01 Feb, 2007)