Blogger's Lounge: Making Money Fast

Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.

While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.

The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.

And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.

Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.

Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.

And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.

Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.

But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.

One of the reasons American management isn’t what it used to be is that most companies do not give a rat’s ass about employees. Yes, you’ll get the usual human resources blather about how “our employees are our most important asset”, but actions on this front speak vastly louder than words. In the 1970s and early 1980s, management gurus and the business press argued that one reason German and Japanese manufacturers were trouncing their American counterparts was that they had better employee relationships. But even though there is still a mini-industry dedicated to producing corporate “leaders”, US companies too often see employees as costs, and their objective is to get buy spending as little as possible on them, rather than treating them to the extent possible as allies in building a more successful, profitable venture.

An article in the “You’re the Boss,” a New York Times column, demonstrates how deeply these warped values have taken hold in American business. Now admittedly, this feature focuses on small businesses, and these enterprises are often on the knife edge of survival. At the same time, every now-big company was a small company once, and presumably a venue like the New York Times is trying to help these companies perform better and for those that have significant potential, to chart a path that increases their odds of achieving it.

So consider this discussion:

Last spring I exchanged e-mails with Amy Christensen-Waddell, president of Albion Swords, which makes reproduction swords and armor (and I thought my business was niche!). Discussing employee pay, she asked: “If your people are making a lot of money, do you find it makes them more loyal?” I didn’t give her an immediate answer, but the question has been in the back of my mind since then. Here’s my current thinking….

But what about for the rest of us, for the unglamorous companies with mundane work, for the bosses with feet of clay? We’re going to have to think of loyalty differently. We’re going to have to buy it — by which I mean providing a package of pay, benefits, and workplace atmosphere that’s good enough that our employees can’t easily find better pastures…..

Unfortunately, for many years I was paying my people more than I could afford, and more than they could find elsewhere. Making that payroll was often excruciating. My employees were very happy with their paychecks, but the high costs were bleeding the company white. I cut wages by 20 percent in 2008 and partially restored them in 2009. Through all of that, I had no defections. My conclusion: I was paying more than I needed to.

There’s got to be a sweet spot in the middle where you pay enough to prevent defections but no more. Additional wages and benefits, beyond your employee’s next best choice, are paying extra for something you have already bought.

Now on the surface, this all sounds reasonable enough: employees can’t be relied upon to be loyal, so since they are mercenaries, the boss should pay just enough to keep them from bolting, but no more. But read the language more carefully. The author sees himself as having to buy loyalty, which is barely a step removed from seeing workers as commodities.

And how we got here is conveniently omitted from this picture. Managements at companies big and small have institutionalized short job tenures. But many people, particularly those who do not see themselves as being on a career fast track, value stability and the social contact that comes from a steady job. And if you’ve ever run a small venture, or even a small department in a company, having someone quit is hugely disruptive. You have to scramble and try to get the same amount of work done with fewer hands, and you run the risk of losing customers if you miss deadlines or let your product/service quality slip. And it’s a drain on your time to find and screen potential replacements, and a new person needs to be trained. So there are real risks and costs associated with losing staff. Yes, the author advocates paying enough to avoid attrition, but his attitude is employees come, employees go, rather than employees are the guts of his enterprise.

My experience over and over again is that hiring better people pays for itself, and once you get them, it’s worth it to pay more to keep them. In some industries, the output gap between “high” and “normal” can be very wide; in software development, top programmers are estimated to be ten times more productive. If you’ve ever had the good fortune to hire a superb secretary, you’ll similarly know that supposedly low level staff can be hugely efficient and critical working oars in larger teams. And there are other ways to pay people besides hard cash, for those that are strained. One firm I know was very tolerant of staff maintaining weird hours as long as they kept in touch with the mother ship and got their work done on time; it attracted people of a Bohemian temperament who in return for an interesting combination of indulgence of their quirks but insistence of high standards on client work, got considerable bang for its limited buck.

I’d be curious to get reader input, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most companies that made the transition from startup to long lived ventures didn’t get there by setting wages as just above the level where employees would actively shop there resumes. Running a small business is hard, and cash-strapped employers often have to make difficult compromises, but I am bothered by the fact that this piece sets standards so low. An employer not have the luxury of treating his employees as well as he would like to, or as his workers might deserve, but if he fails to set this as an aspiration, it is guaranteed not to happen.

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Blogger's Lounge

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Making Money Fast

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