Imagine one day, all you need to do to know about a person – even someone you have never met – is snap a picture. Your smartphone will display everything about her or him by digging up information online.
That day might not be far from now. Reports emerged a few weeks ago of Google developing a facial recognition application that allows you to get the contact details – name, email address and even telephone number – of a person you’ve just met by simply taking his picture.
Naturally, this technological innovation is raising more privacy concerns despite assurances that each person has a final say on whether to make his personal information accessible. While this special app is still being designed, the era of paperless, immediate connections is upon us. Corporate travellers, when running out of name cards, can simply direct new business acquaintances to any one of these online apps or services designed to store one’s contact information and build instant networks.
Trade event organisers can also facilitate interaction among their delegates through online sites, and finding people online is easier by the day.
GO800
For avid tweeters, here is a new, innovative way of connecting and interacting with fellow tweeters. Go800 uses a text-to-talk concept, which enables users to call anyone with a Twitter account simply by texting their usernames to a dedicated number. Each user who wants to be “Go800-enabled” has to register and enter a number they would like to be reached on. People who want to reach “enabled” users need only to text the Twitter username to 46800 and they will immediately be connected without knowing the actual telephone number.
The group has also rolled out a mobile website enabling users to log in through their Twitter accounts and view their recent calls. Currently, the service is only available in the US and Canada.
www.go800corp.com
Google Voice
Launched in 2009, this service forwards and re-routes calls to a single Google Number, consolidating a user’s various phone numbers at home, work and mobile. Users must have at least one phone connection, either land line or a mobile service, which is then connected to a Google Voice number so all inbound calls are automatically re-routed to that number. Users get to choose their Google Voice number and personalise how many phones are connected to that number or which phone receives particular calls based on who is calling. Google Voice also enables voice mail, which can automatically be transcribed as SMS messages either to mobiles or to email addresses. Google Voice accounts can make international calls for low rates as well.
Currently, some Google Voice services are only available in the US, but the software is slowly being rolled out around the world in phases. It would be handy at times when users know just one telephone number, like work contact numbers, but need to contact them on their mobile. Using one Google Voice number removes that difficulty.
www.google.com/voice
Skype
This VoIP service has evolved tremendously since it was launched in 2003. The software was first a simple call and chat service but in 2005, videocalls were introduced and today users can make calls from Skype to non-Skype numbers for a charge, send text messages through Skype, share screens and use it over 3G networks via smartphones or tablets.
The number of users exceeded 663 million as of 2010. In October last year, the software unveiled a new version for Windows, which links Skype accounts to Facebook accounts so people can call or SMS Facebook friends. Like Facebook, Skype enables searches based on name, location and gender thus enabling users to pinpoint the person they are finding.
Last month, Microsoft acquired Skype for US$8.5 billion. It is not completely clear yet what this will mean to the users, but a press release by Microsoft says that “Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities”.
www.skype.com
QR codes
First invented in Japan, this new technology allows information to be stored on a two-dimensional square consisting of black modules, with capacity up to several hundred times what an ordinary bar code can hold. There is no limit as to how big or small the square can be, as long as the smartphone camera viewer can capture it in full. QR (Quick Response) Codes store encoded data that range from text to a vCard. They can also direct the smartphone browser to a URL. They can be generated online for free and to retrieve information from them, you need a QR code scanner, which is available for free online and can be easily downloaded to your phone. Some smartphones such as BlackBerrys are already embedded with the capability.
Some are envisioning that QR codes will replace business cards in the future: you only need to show the code from the monitor of your smartphone and your new contact can quickly scan it. South by Southwest (SXSW), an event consisting of film, interactive and music festivals and conferences in Austin, Texas, has QR codes on its attendants’ badges so that they can get each other’s details down with their smartphones.
www.qrcode.kaywa.com
Facebook vs LinkedIn
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is a social media powerhouse that enables one to search a person based on name, location and gender. While it is a fun way to share thoughts and pictures among friends, it can become a minefield when business and work contacts are mixed in. There have been stories and news reports of people getting fired for complaining about work on Facebook because they forgot that their bosses were “friends”.
Slight embarrassment was caused when the wife of the new head of MI6 in the UK innocuously put swimwear pictures of her husband on her Facebook page, with minimal privacy settings. While most people laughed off those images, there was a bigger concern that the location of the couple’s flat and whereabouts of their children may also have been revealed online. There are settings to limit certain information to be viewed by a selected group, but they are not foolproof. Your friends can re-post outside of your circle, and once something is out there, you don’t have control of it. So, if you are the head of an intelligence agency, you and your whole family should stay away from Facebook.
For those who prefer to keep Facebook a strictly personal channel, LinkedIn offers a purely professional alternative. Not only can users upload their company contact details and their résumés but also email another user without actually being connected to them. LinkedIn’s search engine is also more refined than Facebook’s in that users can find people by company, search for job opportunities and even figure out exactly how mutual friends are connected.
But LinkedIn is not free of privacy concerns. At default settings, you can be inundated by connection requests from people in totally different industries and whom you have never heard of. Spamming can also occur on LinkedIn. More importantly, your competitors might also be looking, so think twice before posting activities, or make use of the privacy settings such as “turn on/off your activity broadcasts”, “select who can see your activity feed” and “select who can see your connections”. These can be accessed through “settings” under your login name.
And, again, your boss might be watching. One hotelier told us that he witnessed, on LinkedIn, the whole process of one of his managers enquiring salary details of another position in another company in another city. “Good to know what’s on your employees’ minds!” he says.
www.facebook.com
Full Exposure
The gap between the real and the virtual worlds has been narrowing at breakneck speeds for a long time. But, now, I think they’ve pretty much collided, destroying any sliver of a barrier between the two.
Take QR codes for example. By having them stamped onto physical material – newspapers, billboards and, in some countries, even gravestones – we are provided with a world of additional information and another means of interaction, and all it takes to access them is a smartphone.
And now we have Google Goggles. This application, only available for Apple and Android gadgets for the time being, allows users to simply point their phones at certain objects to obtain data about them. The software uses the almost magical tool of image recognition to identify the object and then dig up all information about it using Google’s super-spider search engine.
This amazing technology obviously has advantages for the business traveller. Point Google Goggles to a name card and the app does wonders: it not only digs up information about the card’s owner, it also immediately uploads the person’s contact details with an auto-prompt for adding them to the contact list or address book.
And it does so pretty accurately. Oftentimes, when using an automatic reader to scan a text document, things get jumbled up, with details appearing in all the wrong places. Business Traveller has tested the software on iPhone and Galaxy Tab and it detected the first name, last name, email address, company name and telephone number on business cards without errors. It also ran an online search on the person for additional information.
Privacy? What privacy? In the future world, this term might become obsolete as well.
