Some weeks ago I attended a presentation about Kaizen (held by Mr. Minoru Tominaga, a recognized expert about Kaizen) which gave me back my hopes. Hopes about a better world. Kaizen is a Japanese concept which has spread to many companies all around the world. It literally means “constant improvement” and can be applied to many different aspects of business (or even life). Since it’s development the concept naturally experienced continually changes on itself and at the moment Kaizen often focuses on customer relationship and customer care. In Japan customers are called “honorable guests” and that already describes it perfectly. The customer is “king” and should at least be treated with the greatest respect possible. I do not want to go into detail about this topic but there are many companies (even in the western world) which try to improve their relationship to their customers. I too think that in the near future it will be an important factor to survive the tough business battles. In the last years company were trying to achieve the best quality to keep their position on top. As many competitors forced themselves to increase quality the level is almost the same. But one thing which can still distinguish one company from the other is indeed their way of treating their customers. I do not demand to get any presents or anything for free from companies. But I demand respect. The same respect I would give to other humans.

Lately I got the impression more and more that companies try to get their advantage at any cost (even with dubious methods). If you pick up your phone or start your email client and tell customer care about any problem there is a hight chance that they tell you without any hesitation that you are right and that they will solve the problem immediately. If you are confused now and do not know what I mean then I have a short example story which occurred some weeks ago. We went on a holiday to Portugal and decided beforehand that we will need a rental car. So we booked an Avis car as they were the cheapest (after some price comparison). We received a coupon which covered all the costs in Portugal. By showing the coupon to the Avis branch office they would give us the car and there would not be any extra costs (except some local insurance which had to be paid at the office). Everything went like planned except that when returning the car the clerk charged us a much higher one way fee than covered by the coupon. We did not argue but simply paid the difference. Back home after some days I decided to tell Avis customer care about the incident. Avis customer care checked all the facts and decided that they would give us back our money within the next days. No arguing, nothing. Of course I only told the very short version of this story and I maybe will again choose Avis as their customer support was really cooperative and nice. But the overall impression is that those things might occur not by accident but on purpose. In that case it really might have been a small mistake but there are more cases like that. First you are cheated and if you complain they will correct their fault like nothing happened.

That should not be. You should not be cheated in the first place.

Now after all that complaining we finally have reached the main story. A story about my heroes. A company in Spain which produces olives. The company I am talking about is HUTESA Agroalimentaria, S.A.. Some days ago I bought (like many times before) three glasses of olives. The olives themselves are filled with almonds and I pretty like them. When arriving at home I realized that something was different with the olives. Instead of whole almonds I only found olives stuffed with almond halves. If it would have been like that from the beginning I would not have bothered but I thought it must be some kind of silly joke. How could someone reduce the quality of a product just to earn some more money. I know that happened many times before to other products but this is terrible. Stuffing olives with only almond halves. I really felt miserably tricked. The next day I decided to send some feedback to Hutesa. No complaint or anything mean… just saying that I am not happy with their product and that I will not buy their olives anymore.

Sure not to have made any difference but with a great relief I went on to life my usual life. To my great surprise I received a very nice answer on the very same day. They said they are sorry to loose me as their customer and that the cause of the measurement was the pressure by a very big client of theirs. They decided to use almond halves to stay competitive. I did not answer immediately and the next day I received the same message in Spanish (they must have thought that I could not read their first email and tried to reach me again). This time I replied immediately.

Again I received a reply saying that they wanted to inform me that due to my claim they will put whole almonds inside again. Now I got really happy on one hand as I caused a change (Yes!! It still is able to change the system!). But on the other hand now I am very worried that they might not be competitive enough with other olive companies. I do not want my claim to cause any layoffs or other social dramas. I wrote the same to them and that is where we are now. As soon as there are any news I will keep you updated.

One thing I also promised is to write about this on my blog (although there are not many readers) I wanted to tell everybody about this very nice company. And I really do not know what is wrong with our global market. Who are the bad guys? First for me it was the company producing the products. Then after telling me the horrible truth it seems to be the food trade. But if you ask them I am pretty sure they are not the root cause either. They also might suffer from mean competition. Is this true capitalism? Will it get worse? Has it just started in Europe?

Now I seem to look very stupid. The little boy discovering the “evil” face of capitalism. Running my own business together with two partners I hope we will do well in the long run. But I am optimistic that even companies with a heart can be successful. For me Hutesa will be my first choice olive company (because they care about their customers). And I hope other customers will also show initiative and take actions when they are not happy with any product. Do not make it your goal to change anything immediately but if enough people give feedback there has to be a change. You have the right to let anybody know how you feel. You do not have to insult anybody but you can express your unhappiness. Corporations and companies might one day realize that real and honest respect towards their customers and clients is increasing their competitiveness.

HUTESA Agroalimentaria, S.A.

Wouldn’t it feel good to escape the dictatorship of the lobbies and to show them that they cannot control everything like they want to?

Why don’t we show the lobby to go back to the place where they came from? I really do not want to wait until it is too late, to wait until the European commission just enforced the law. Let us show them that the people have a voice too. Let us organize ourselves now and demonstrate against this practice before bad things happened. Everyone who is interested but too lazy to follow the topic can drop me an email with his/her details wolfgang (@t) hafenscher (dot) net and I will inform him/her about the current situation and give him/her details about public demonstrations and other activities near his/her place.

I am not going to found any new organization but will rely solely on existing organizations. My goal is to be the interface to the existing organizations for those who are interested in the topic itself but do not have the time or the will to follow all the activities.

Get information about the whole case at http://swpat.ffii.org/
Some other background info at
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.truth50.com/

We start from the museum of art history.

We cross the highly frequented “Ring” (the inner of two circles surrounding the city center) and pass by the “Hofburg”

The Hofburg was and still is the residence of the Austrian leaders and I think the current president of the United States (Geroge W. Bush) will be welcomed there when he visits Austria this summer. The stand in front of the building is not always there. People could sit there and watch the runners of the Vienna Marathon which took place last Sunday.
Right after passing the Hofburg we end up at the “Michaelerplatz” where you have the chance to meet Mozart’s little Brother if you are lucky… I don’t have to mention that we were lucky:

Although his clothing may look quite antiquated he knows how to use a mobile. If you head straight forward you will most probably get to see some old form of transportation: the Viennese Gondoliere (like the Italian ones, just replace the Gondolas with Horses).

If you pass continue the street, passing by the traditional and famous K.u.K. Hofzuckerbäcker Demel you will then end up at the plague pillar

Then you really are in the center. Right around the corner at the end of the street you’ll find the “Stephansdom”. After shopping we went to get some more Mozart right behind the Hofburg:

It is no coincidence that you bump into some kind of Mozart artefact. Our most famous musician (next after Johann Hölzel) is celebrating his 250th birthday. Not only one single day but the whole year. Happy birthday Wolfgang. A toast to the genius of our “Woiferl”.

While using my favourite flavour of GNU/Linux as operating system I got so used to have multiple alternatives for every task that I also started to look out for alternatives for other everyday tasks. It seems as if one of the most recurring tasks to me is searching the internet. Looking up any keyword or topic I just heard of and did not know what it meant or did not know the background. My favourite engine is the Google search engine at the moment. But for several reasons I don’t want to rely on only one solution anymore.

Working in the IT-branch I do care of alternatives because you always have to have a good resort if plan A fails. That is why most internet service providers are connected redundant to the internet. It happened to us that some workers dug a hole somewhere between Vienna and Linz. Sadly they cut the three main fibre channels which connect half of Linz to the Vienna core node. If you are not connected redundant all your services will stop to work for an indefinitely time. Now imagine that one day the google webpage might not be accessible one day because all their servers were confiscated by the US because of investigations against terror. So a good alternative would be the lifebelt for those who are seeking for information.

Another thing is that it might be a good idea to spread ones activities over different services. If you take a look at the current Google empire you will realize that they have already all the data they need to track all of your activities. It is obvious that Google can see what you searched for when you use the Google search engine. But what about the not so obvious trackers? Nearly on every page on the web you can find ads which are coming from the Google Adsense program. It might not be so obvious for average surfers but technically it works like that: if a website uses the Google Adsense program the webpage itself includes ads which are coming directly from the Google servers and not from the original page itself. For e.g. if site A has got a google banner on the index page and you are watching it your browser first gets the source code of the index page of site A and then displays it to you. As the sourcecode contains commands for your browser to fetch ads from Google it connects to the Google server, fetches the information and integrates it into the index page of site A. One would think that there is no connection yet between site A and Google yet but there is. To be able to integrate the Ads site A has to provide a user ID to Google so that it delivers ads and so that Google can relate clicks on ads to the user ID for accounting reasons.

In other words: Not only by using the search engine you are giving Google the power to collect your data. On every single page which you are visiting and which contains Google ads, Google videos, Google maps, any other Google service Google can collect your data. They know on which page you where on which day and what content the page displayed. So they can make a really good profile of your person. They don’t have your personal details yet but in business world it must be a very very big power to have access to that data. A company with that information is able to track all the trends and interests on a global basis. Just amazing if you would sell such information to marketing companies or even governments. An incredible thought.

I wonder when Google is going to start as a telecommunication provider for mobile phones. The access to data would be more or less the same, just in real life. You can track where which person is at which location at which time. And as you are providing the data channels you can also analyze the content itself. And in this very case you even know the personal data such as name, address, etc. as well

Ok. Enough conspiracy theory for today. I am not telling anyone to be that paranoid but just to think all over before wakign up *after* someone misused all the gathered data. And to be honest I am not going to dump Google as my favourite search engine in the near future. And on my webpage you can see that I am also using Google maps. I will just try to also switch to alternatives more often which leads us back to the main topic here: the Google alternative.

In Europe there is some development going on on an alternative search engine to Google. The project is called Quaero and aims to bring out a good search engine alternative. On one side I am not a fan of “let’s make some clone of something” just to break into a market which is more or less entirely in American hands. But on the other hand I am a big fan of alternatives, especially when one single corporation has the control over the complete sector. One search engine which is involved in the Quaero project is Exalead. The details can also be read at Wikipedia.org. The interface is also very simple and easy to use but comes with some nice features (which you can turn on if you want but which you are not condemned to use from the beginning). So you don’t have to install multiple plugins [1] [2] for your Firefox browser.

The festival was quite successful and very very interesting and entertaining for the audience. We are already looking forward to the next festival, taking place from 24th to 29th of April 2007.

Kontakt movie, imdb.com

The “European animation highlights” are a compilation of short films which gives a good overview of European animation works of the last year. The DVD should be available around June (hopefully, the initiators of the DVD said). The range of different styles was amazing. From light, entertaining trick films to really deep and heavy animations. I have to admit that one or two masterpieces were too abstract for my taste but it was good to see all the different types of contributions. One of my favourites was Fallen Arts which was an award winning computer animation. Just take a look at the incredible awards list. But the compilation also contained works of yet unknown students who delivered high quality animations too. The first work was “Maestro” which you can download here (44MB MPG). Sadly I did not find any other works online.

“On the outskirts” is a documentary film which deals with new communities which have evolved on the Turkish coastal areas. Large buildings where the Turkish people who worked hard in foreign countries (especially Germany) spend their retirement. The director itself explained to the audience that she wanted to focus on the problem the children of those workers face. They are forced to go “back” to a country which language they barely speak and to which they hardly have any connection anymore. It was very informative to listen to the directors stories. I am glad that I could see the film as it shows me a different Turkey than that I had in my mind.

The images of the festival officials are not published yet at the Crossing Europe gallery homepage. I am quite sure that I must be on one of the photos they took today Will check it out tomorrow…

This year I am going to see four movies and I am coming right back from the first of them: The Slovenian film “Odgrobadogroba” (Gravehopping)”. Starting as a really funny movie it focuses on a topic which is tabu in most countries, suicide, and gets quite tough and touching in some scenes. The plot focuses around the main actor, a man whose profession is to hold speeches at burials, his family and his neighbours. My favourite character was the father of the main role… the poor old man whose wife had died 6 years ago and who tries to escape his loneliness constantly. His expression is great and his person is just so likeable.

My favourite quote:

“Not everyone is born, but everyone is going to die.”

I am still very sorry that the audience (us included) did not ask any questions after the movie. I think we were just so moved by the film and would have needed some time to get ready for conversation. Sorry again about not being that talkative but thank you very much for this great movie.

Check back tomorrow for my comments on “European Animation Highlights” and “On the outskirts”.

Gravehopping movie homepage
Producer (left) and Director (right) of the film, talking to the audience

Crossing Europe film festival homepage

*) This is purely my own opinion. Feel free to have your own opinion and probably share it with others on the forum mentioned.