Big Brother Is Watching You - Hey, It's Good Thing!

'We get sued every day', said Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google. It was a comment worthy of his more bullish rival, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, and it shows how companies who purport to change the world for the better develop a thicker skin as they mature.

It's a thin line between use and abuse of data in this modern age. So much information on us as individuals is collected and then we lose control over what is done with it. What starts as essential information for a transaction becomes a commodity to be traded itself. The issue of late surrounds Google's Street View service which was launched in the UK this month and got its first formal complaint put to the Information Commissioner (ICO).

In the complaint drawn up by privacy campaigners it cites over 200 reports from members of the public identifiable by the service.

Cool Google

Google has the reputation of being the soft mega-corporation who offers its employees cycles to get around its Bay Area Campus, who brought us the ability to search the web in seconds and who brought cool new applications and gadgets to make the computing dream come alive. It is also a highly profitable corporation and it is hell bent on replacing Microsoft as the dominant player in the future. Google Street View does not seem to be one of those sinister moves by a big company, it seems more like the kind of 'really neat' or 'cool' stuff from a company whose two founders are pleasant multi-billionaires who are ethical, nerdy and general all round cool dudes. Street View, we would like to think, has to be one of their zany ideas for people to try as they could not possibly be any other agenda or money to be made from it.

Street View allows a viewer of Google Maps to actually go and take a look at 25 cities in the UK, and get 360 degree views. As with most things in the computer world many might initially ask 'Why would you want to do that?' But as with Google's satellite views, I could not stop myself taking a look at my own address and seeing that the picture was taken in high Summer and you can see two sunbeds with yellow towels in my garden and my car parked outside the garage. It was way cool and has now become part of everyday browsing. Google Maps is just an amazing service which I even have on my PDA and, yes, I have used it when looking for addresses in London.

My theory is if I use then it has to be simple and useful, believe me.

So What's The Beef With Google Street View?

After the ICO had given permission in 2008 for Google to go ahead there is now a threat due to the complaint that Street View may have to be turned off. Prissy privacy campaigners would tell us that there had been 'clear embarrassment and damage' caused by people being viewed. This was also in breach of the permission granted by the ICO to Google in the first place.

Google had said that they would blur people's faces and car registrations when it was launched.

It sounds just another pathetic attempt by campaigners to spoil our fun. However, there is definitely risk here as one of the complaints received was from a women who was identifiable and had moved house to get away from a violent partner - she was pictured outside her new home. Another complaint came from two work colleagues found to be in a 'compromising position' - the image was subsequently circulated amongst their workmates.

You can see how this can quickly develop.

The Legal Position

Legal Eagles argue that data protection is all about taking reasonable steps and the argument is that if Street View is breaching privacy then almost anything you can do with data is a breach of privacy.

That is one point of view. However, in this instance, the data is being collected without the express permission of those in the pictures to have their images distributed. If you do not have their permission to distribute the data then actually presenting it to millions of potential viewers on the web is pretty irresponsible to say the least, particularly if the images can result in embarrassment or damage.

The same argument can be applied to You Tube and other picture sites which now flourish on the web. In the business world, giving your business card to another person can mean your data can not only become freely available on the web but also sold many times. Services like Jigsaw actively rewards its users for contributing full business card information on contacts made which are then sold as a highly targeted services to other individuals and companies to find contacts and build lists. LinkedIn is similar is some respects but has curtailed access to some information unless of course you pay. There is a very definite implication when you hand someone your card that no permission is granted for the recipient to distribute it and certainly for any third party they should hand it to. But it happens.

The problem here is that already people have proved that they can 'lift' the images from Street View and distribute them and that means that Google really has not taken enough precautions to stop that. But all you have to do is send the link to everyone to achieve the same results, so it boils down to the collection of the data in the first place, how it is subsequently displayed, who has access to it and what might they do with the data once viewed

Will Google Get Around This?

Inevitably they will. They got through to China by taking on board their rules and I guess if they can make sure their blurring technology is more effective then they can re-launch pretty soon. The concept has great merit but as always there is a tendency to trivialise the risks of potential outcomes. We can all point fingers at 'nanny' campaigners but when we are personally affected by it then we suddenly become very indignant - and rightfully so.

The obvious argument goes the other way. If you put yourself in a compromising position, there is always a risk you pay a price. People like Max Mosley have argued successfully that is not true and may even have claim to have 'lost his dignity' because of it and get a large amount of compensation - he was filmed in an orgy with dominatrix prostitutes dressed in strange pseudo-Nazi outfits.

If he can get away with that then Google Street View doesn't stand a chance. As always there has to be a balance. It looks as if Google's first effort got it wrong - but the cool dudes among us hope they put it right as it looks a great tool.

Microsoft's Head In The Cloud?

Following up on my article about SaaS and Cloud Computing yesterday, it is worth knowing what Microsoft are up to.

A senior source at Microsoft told me last year that Microsoft believe that delivering all their Office Suite of products to Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) is a priority and could account for up to half their business in the future.

Of course, as usual with Microsoft, no one quite knows when that future is - as we have just seen on typical announcements about new product version availabilities.

Azure Tinted Glasses

Microsoft's firm strategy to tackle both Google and Amazon's significant advances on Cloud Computing Services are in the form of a new online operating system called Azure. In the race to secure this ground, Azure is seen as Microsoft's major play for the future.

But Microsoft loves mixed messages. Steve Clayton, Head of Software and Services at Microsoft International has said that on-premises products are still very much part of the future. Citing Google's much publicised recent outage, he pointed to the fact that reliability is still a key issue.

That comes as pretty laughable from a company that produces an operating system that is subject to virus, phishing and hacking every day due to its lack of security and whose products regularly crash mid session (as I type I have a frozen Internet Explorer open on my machine that has 3Gb of memory and XP). An outage at Google is massively publicised yet Vista users every day encounter annoying problems which impact productivity unnecessarily.

But that's Microsoft for you - follow Steve Ballmer's advice 'Microsoft is the answer, now tell me what was the question?'

Online Applications Soon

What Clayton did concede is that Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint will be online soon.

I am not sure about everyone else but I have found applications like OneNote and SharePoint to be very exciting and then very disappointing. SharePoint has lots of 'cool' features, particularly very good dashboard facilities but as with so many Microsoft products it solves parts of the problems and then leaves gaping holes with no attempt to plug them. Sold as an Action Tracking style system it pails into insignificance when matched with say ActionBase yet the two work well together to solve the bigger problems.

Dynamics is similar, a poor man's version of Salesforce.com it neither gives you the features you need nor the integration - Salesforce.com is way in advance. Yet all of it comes with the Microsoft tag and that has enormous clout for many Corporates as I dare say Azure will have when it finally arrives.

Until then Google and Amazon are way out in front on Cloud Computer facilities and I recommend that, if you are a small business concerned about the cost of scaling your business up and down, then Cloud Computing is well worth considering.

Laptop Only Required

As a veteran of the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry, I can tell you everything is rosy until the darn Internet gets in the way. For all the benefits in the world you just need the unavailability of the Internet for a short while to evaporate the lot.

Or so it would seem. Recent studies on availability of Exchange Servers or inhouse networks show that internal network or component failure is more common than major Internet outages and it's just that they are seen as 'usual events' rather than complete failure to work. Anecdotally, how many times have you been told that a business or individual within has had trouble sending or receiving mails or lost important data or files, worse still, has had major applications inaccessible for periods? It seems that internal shortcomings of applications or networks are so run of the mill as to go largely unreported - yet the self same people who experience that level of poor internal service are the first to speak out against the advance of SaaS or the new phenomenon of Cloud Computing.

The Growth And Dangers Of SaaS

Salesforce.com is one of the major successes of SaaS and it has popularised the use of high availability centrally accessed information for particularly mobile users. As a former user of Salesforce.com, I can safely say it is streets ahead of all other dedicated applications for contact and sales management I have ever used. The beauty was that whenever I logged on I had direct access to all my information, with the latest revision of software and in the form of the application itself so I could do all the things I needed to manage my own contacts and my those of my reports anywhere in the world.

And with the growth of Mobile Broadband, it means that you can do this without the need to be static. Now you can go onsite to a customer presentation or meeting and have full access to all information needed and you can catch up and work in a coffee shop or over lunch, while updating the central database for everyone else to see what is going on.

The obvious downside is the reliability of the connection or availability of the Internet or more frustratingly, if the Vendor suffers an outage or failure at their end. It has happened - as recently as January Salesforce.com suffered problems leaving 900,000 users without access to their application and information while Citrix, Webex and others have had problems. In my particular companies, Genesys and PlaceWare (now InterCall and Microsoft RTC respectively) we had many instances of failure.


Cloud Computing is an extension of SaaS - it is also the concept of having online storage and processor power highly available, as an when you need it. This is a superb solution for small businesses who find it difficult to cope with the cost of scaling their business - particularly if you have to start flexing server, storage or licence muscles in order to cope with growth. At early stage, the cost of adding an incremental, fully kitted out user is very high in proportion to over all costs, once you have grown to a certain size, the cost as a proportion to overall costs gets progressively smaller. Equally, the cost of failure of any one component is disproportionately high or the cost of insuring against such failure. Maintenance contracts are at minimum 20% of the hardware value which typically over 3 years amortisation is cheaper to replace and this does not allow for the cost of application support.

Cloud Computing takes that strain away. With the growth in things like Google Apps, you can not only have a full suite of Office applications at your finger tips, but all the associated storage and computing power needed, anywhere in the world for a single monthly fee. It takes the hassle away of worrying about scaling as it is simple and less of a proportion of your costs, while maintenance and upgrades are taken care of and the whole system gears in size in exact proportion to your own requirements at every step - there are no sudden jumps as you go from 100Gb to 1Tb storage or requiring a new server as you hit the limit of the old one - it's all taken care of for you.

I dealt with one client in the US that had 20 staff in 20 different cities in the US allowing them to 'appear' like a national organisation and they supported the whole lot through Cloud Applications even their Accounting System and Budget/Forecasting system as well as classics like Salesforce.com. No need of an internal network or costly server, everything was hosted in the cloud complete with a hosted VoIP centralised phone system from RingCentral. Meeting me at the IOD Hub in London he showed me how he could run his business in exactly the same way from London as in California, right down to answering the phone.

I also host my Exchange server at Fasthosts who also host my web site - this means that anywhere in the world, as a small business, I have full access to a full Outlook client as if I were on my own network, fully maintained and backed up for me for a single annual cost which allows me up to 10 email accounts and plenty of storage - and it is a fraction of the cost of having my own server with maintenance and storage - plus someone to run and support it for me.

I also use Spare back up which automatically runs each day no matter where I am and backs up all files which have changed and I can restore any I accidentally lose at a single touch easily - this covers all my PCs for a single charge of £29 per year for a huge storage space that I have only used 19% of so far.

Not Just For Small Businesses

In ComputerWeekly last July, Taylor Woodrow announced they would be migrating all 1,800 employees from traditional desktop applications to Google Apps. The estimated saving to the company would be £1m over 3 years according to Rob Ramsay, the IT Director, just on Office applications. He said that Google Apps will allow Taylor Woodrow to scale up and down much more easily and in a more cost efficient way.

In these tough times, Rob Ramsay's logic is sound. Not only does Cloud Computing support expansion efficiently but also contraction. This recession has hit very hard with many industries having to lay off staff. When that happens, typically the money spent on supporting the staff lost is itself wasted or at least until the company can re-use them again. In things like Microsoft Office licences, you typically pay an Enterprise licence fee so you are stuck with the cost whether the people use the licences or not. Cloud Computing allows you to simply add up the numbers and pay for what you use only, so downsizing actually produces savings, while scaling back up for the upturn becomes a less onerous task in terms of people time and cost.

New Kinds Of Business

Cloud Computing is also allowing the introduction of new types of business. Huddle is an Enterprise 2.0 start up that not only uses Cloud Computing for its own use but uses it to deliver services to its clients, some of whom are Boots, Centrica and MasterCard. Huddle is a secure, online collaboration and networking service for companies of all sizes - not dissimilar to the likes of Citrix and Webex but it started because of Cloud Computing.

If you use applications like LinkedIn or Facebook as your contact management system, then you will understand these are also gifts from Cloud Computing as is Google Apps. With packages like Huddle, Webex, Yugma or Skype plus applications like Vonage or RingCentral or Yak.com you can have a full communication and collaboration suite at your disposal for a reasonable cost without the costly outlay for capital purchase or lease of telephone equipment and use your PC or WiFi or mobile phone as your only telecom apparatus. Accounting packages like http://www.freeagentcentral.com/, budgeting packages like http://www.adaptiveplanning.com/ or CRM packages like Salesforce.com start to complete the picture - you can have your entire business run by a single laptop, anywhere in the world for monthly charges.

High Availability, Low Down Time

The Internet has come an awful long way since the heady days when I ran PlaceWare Europe Ltd. Then Internet outages were rare but frequent enough to cause angst and doubt in customers' minds. Things have changed dramatically and now the Internet is nearly ubiquitous with the advances in WiFi and mobile broadband. As a small business, I am completely reliant on access to the web and I don't have a problem with it, being able to work offline when required and online when I need to with equal effect and a fraction of the cost of if I had to fund and maintain it all myself.

Now is a good time to consider the alternatives, whether you are a large business or small. Feel free to give me a call or drop me a mail if there is anything you would like to discuss further on +44 (0)207 193 2356 or nigel.dunn@calxeurope.com.