Young and underutilized skilled work force

Although Greece is on the bring of collapse it is home to a large population of young, educated, and highly technical individuals. There is a common storyline that I’ve heard numerous times in the Greek community that goes something like this:

I have a _______ who has a Master’s degree in _________ and speaks _______ different languages fluently. They are highly intelligent but they cannot find a job anywhere in Greece. They are currently working part-time at the front desk of _______ for 400 euros a month.

Fill in the blanks with whatever you want, I’ve heard this story in so many variations I am beginning to believe that everyone in Greece works at a front desk. Exaggerations aside, this story doesn’t skew far from the truth. Some of these bright individuals are lucky enough to land jobs in other countries, such as England or Sweden, however these are usually the crème de la crème of eligible Greek job hunters. Most of the people in that demographic aren’t so lucky because the world simply can’t accommodate every Greek job seeker without sacrificing those seeking jobs native to their respective countries.

Cheap skilled labor

The highly skilled potential workforce that is twiddling their thumbs at under-qualified jobs isn’t the only reason Greece is ripe for a startup scene. Wages for skilled workers in Greece is still quite cheap, and recent austerity measures are driving wages down even further. According to PayScale, technology salaries in Greece are obscenely low compared to countries like England, Sweden, or the United States. Here’s a quick rundown of the average salaries of common startup jobs:

Startups are not cheap ventures and more often than not your access to cash will be quite limited. There’s always exceptions where Venture Capitalists who are convinced that innovation can be forced out of a group of people will throw unlimited dollar signs at a company and watch the hopeless pivots pile up, but not everyone can be Color. So creating a startup is all about getting the most bang for your buck, and getting highly motivated skilled laborers at a fraction of what they would cost in any other startup-rich country is a huge plus.

Ripe for disruption

The current economic and political crisis and the history of Greece in the post-industrialized era makes for a perfect recipe for a startup haven. For years most Greek industries have been plagued by a lack of technology infrastructure. It is expected that 2012 will be the year Greece breaks the 50% mark on Internet penetration and adoption has not shown any major booming signs (it was only 33.5% penetration in 2006). When it comes to Facebook, at least a third of all Greeks have an account on the world’s largest social network.

Up until recently, if you wanted to make non-monetary changes to your bank account (such as adding your spouse) you had to go to the branch in which you had opened your account at. It didn’t matter if you had moved halfway across the country and were at a branch from the same bank, you had to travel all the way back to the initial branch. Of course, upon arriving there you were given the option to transfer the account to your new local branch.

Government agencies are just now digitizing their records. National ID cards were pieces of paper filled out by hand and then laminated up until recently where the handwritten part was replaced with a computer (everything else remained the same). Greece is still a very “old” country, and countries that are old are prime targets for getting brought into the present.

The number of startup ideas that can disrupt Greek society is endless. Things that American or British citizens take for granted such as retailers with online stores, bar code scanning apps that find the cheapest local price, accessing public records online, and tracking postal shipments are potentially disruptive ideas for the Greek industry. The possibilities are not limited to consumer apps or services, but cross barriers into the realm of government and enterprise.

With an abundance of skilled workers, cheap labor, and an ecosystem that is begging to be transformed, Greece is an entrepreneur’s dream come true. Yes, there is currently some political and economic instability, but these things will blow over. Some people have already gotten a head start, but the Greek startup scene is at its infancy. Greece’s government is also taking startups seriously and aims to provide funding and to bring entrepreneurs and VCs together. Check out their surprisingly not-your-typical-ugly-government-website called Startup Greece if you have the time. Now is the time to get a foothold in Greece. Now is the time to invest in a startup, to corral the bright young minds that are working at those front desks, to add Silicon to the sandy beaches.

Lines in Shot Composition

Horizontal Lines

Horizontal lines in a shot usually depict themes of peace, tranquility, calm, or repose. Think of a shot of a sunset with the horizon acting as a horizontal line.

Diagonal Lines

These lines represent conflict, action, or movement. Think of a shot where the camera moves down while “looking” up.

Vertical Lines

Probably he most prominent of lines, they show strength, authority, or dignity. Think of the columns in an ancient Greek temple in Clash of the Titans. On a related note, a dolly shot of a subject moving through vertical lines represents a journey of some sort.

Curved Lines

Extremely typical in romantic or love scenes, they represent fluidity, humanity, and sensuality.

Isolation

American Beauty and Road to Perdition did a great job with isolation shots. To show isolation, the subject is graphically or visually put in a “box.” This box can be literal, such as a door frame, or it can be a bit more abstract, like a box of light behind a character’s head that shines through a window.

Screen Direction and Position

The following examples are based off of the conventions of Western cultures. In Eastern cultures, the opposite of what I list is true. I’ll explain in more detail in a second.

Screen Direction

Bad guys walk right to left. Good guys walk left to right. Think of movies that feature Nazis and you will definitely see this pattern. Nazi soldiers generally march from the right side of the screen to the left side of the screen. The Allied forces do the opposite. This ties in with the Western/Eastern bit that I was talking about just above. It has roots in the way people in each of those cultures read and write. In most Western cultures, you read and write from left to right whereas in Eastern cultures you read and write from right to left. If the movie or show was developed in an Arabic country, for instance, the good guys would be walking from right to left instead. This isn’t some sort of rule that Hollywood developed, but it is based on the human psychology.

Screen Position

If all of the above seem a bit convoluted or difficult to keep track of, then screen position is probably the easiest to spot in any show or film. Taking into consideration the rule of thirds (where a frame is divided into three equal parts), there is such a thing as the “powerful” third and the “weak” third. Every film or show has conflict in it and often there are many sub-conflicts that play out during its course. Think of the typical action movie power switch-a-roo: the final showdown has the bad guy completely dominating the good guy, until something happens and the good guy takes the upper hand and finishes off the bad guy. The fight scene is a mini conflict that’s part of a bigger conflict in the film. That fight scene is also a perfect example for explaining the powerful and weak thirds of the frame.

Usually when you have a frame, the weak person is on the left side of the frame and the powerful person is on the right side of the frame. Power and weak don’t necessarily have to do with physical strength, but it can deal with who is in charge of the argument, who is intellectually superior, who is wealthier, etc. The list of applications can go on and on, but this is the general convention. Next time you watch a show or a film and there’s a scene focused on two people at odds with each other (fighting, arguing, etc), pay attention to their positions in the frame. If there is a shift of power in the scene, you will definitely see some sort of transition (such as the camera moving around) to reposition the actors in the frame. Oh, and this doesn’t apply to chaotic fight scenes for obvious reasons.

He was put down today after being diagnosed with Canine leishmaniasis (Kala azar disease).

Does this mean Facebook bought Instagram to shift its userbase away from the olds? Looking at the raw data, that is one way of analyzing it. The question of whether Instagram itself was worth $1 billion is still under debate, but what Instagram is bringing to Facebook, almost 40 million users in the lower age bracket might be seen as a significant advantage for Facebook.

As younger users tend to exhibit less brand loyalty and are keen on jumping to the next hot social network without a second though, bringing Instagram into the Facebook ecosystem might be the carrot-on-a-stick for keeping younger users on Facebook while simultaneously boosting Facebook’s younger demographic. And since Android users are getting Google+ shoved into their eye sockets, the release of Instagram for Android allows Facebook to retain a social network foothold with Android users by owning something that Androids users clearly covet.

A good read as a follow-up to my post from yesterday about how Verizon’s excuse of spectrum shortage is actually BS.

Verizon turning a blind eye?

Yet Verizon is still confident that its LTE network is reliable enough to take on voice traffic as well via VoLTE (Voice Over Long Term Evolution). Better yet, it is confident to follow through with this plan without any 3G handoff technology in place, meaning if your LTE connection cuts out, your call dies instead of switching over to the stable 3G network it currently has in place. That isn’t to say that Verizon should never switch its voice traffic over to VoLTE, but it should do so when its LTE network has matured enough so that the switch would cause minimal service disruption. Verizon’s LTE network is still relatively new (it launched in December 2010) and it has yet to fully test its network’s capacity because consumer LTE adoption only began to take off late in 2011 and is expected to see a normal adoption rate in 2012.

Remember AT&T’s 3G network before the iPhone? It was fast, reliable, and it more often than not yielded favorable results. After iPhone sales skyrocketed, the load on AT&T’s 3G network quickly became so unbearable that people were practically begging for Verizon to get an iPhone as well. The same is true for the current state of Verizon’s LTE network. It is all that it claims to be now because most people who own smartphones are either still on-contract with their 3G phone or bought an iPhone instead, which doesn’t use LTE. The adoption rate of LTE devices isn’t significant enough as of now.

The many outages Verizon suffered over the past year are further evidence that it still hasn’t ironed out all the kinks in its LTE network. Furthermore, its LTE network isn’t fluid in reception across all areas. Its signal strength fluctuates continuously in major metropolitan areas but for the times that you hit an LTE dark patch, there’s 3G there to save the day.

Packet Switching vs Circuit Switching

For data this isn’t a problem. When you email, Facebook, or Tweet you aren’t using a continuous stream of information that can’t be broken. Data is transmitted through packet switching: a chunk of information is broken up into tiny pieces and send across a network full of millions of other pieces from all over the internet in no particular order. When all those pieces reach their destination, they are re-assembled into the original chunk and the chunk is then compiled with other chunks into whatever it is you were sending (yes, I know that this is a very crude and basic definition of packet switching, but this isn’t an IT blog. If you’re interested in the technicalities behind telecommunications then I highly recommend Telecommunications Essentials, Second Edition: The Complete Global Source). When it comes to transmitting voice via packet switching, “how are you” may arrive at the receiving end as y, then m, then o, then r, then h, etc and then recompiled to its original message when all the packets have been acquired.

Now, when it comes to a strong data connection with no fluctuations, transmission isn’t an issue. But when you do try transmitting voice over a connection whose strength is wobbly, you get something very similar to Skype Mobile: intermittent connections, cut-outs in the conversation, distortion, and a lot of dropped calls.

This is why voice traffic has been limited to circuit switching, which when compared to packet switching, is a continuous, non-breaking link between the transmitter and the receiver. Whereas packets get sent into the wild and collide with other packets, circuit switching ensures that your voice information travels uninterrupted and without interference between two points. In circuit switching, the path the information takes is per-determined before it is transmitted and the source and destination gateways are closed to all other information traffic. In packet switching, the information is sent out blindly and finds its way to its destination in a way that’s most efficient and convenient, without hogging the source and destination gateways.

Verizon’s justifications

So why is Verizon pushing ahead with this switch despite all of these red flags? The answer is one word: spectrum. Spectrum, like oil, is a precious and limited resource that once it is depleted, it is gone forever. There are so many radio frequencies that can be used for different purposes and it is up to government regulators to divide that spectrum in a reasonable way. Every country has the same amount of spectrum at their disposal. Depending on the frequency, different technologies work best with different areas within spectrum. The Spectrum Management Wikipedia article has a 2003 chart of spectrum allocation in the United States, just so you can get an idea of how insane allocation is.

Carriers can’t put all of their technologies on a single block of spectrum for obvious reasons, which is why Verizon’s LTE network runs in the 700Mhz block (746Mhz to 787Mhz to be exact) while its CDMA2000 network runs on the 800Mhz band for 1x voice and 1900Mhz band for 1xEV-DO (broadband). Verizon, along with other carriers such as AT&T, has been clamoring on about the need for the government to auction off more spectrum because they simply don’t have enough spectrum right now to make their next generation networks fully deployed and effective.

In their defense, Verizon is absolutely right that they need more spectrum. Other carriers are recycling spectrum from now outdated or defunct technologies to be used for their LTE networks, like T-Mobile and Sprint are doing with their PCS networks. LTE is the next big thing in telecommunications, and the exponential growth rate of bandwidth consumption means that carriers like Verizon need to gobble up as much spectrum as they can to avoid capacity issues like AT&T experienced shortly after the iPhone launch.

This is just one side of the story, though. Carriers make it sound like the apocalypse will arrive if the government doesn’t auction off more spectrum, but that is extremely narrow-minded propaganda on their part. Their shortage claims are all based on the assumption that telecom will experience technological advances when it comes to data networks, but the technology will remain stagnant when it comes to delivery methods. Martin Cooper, the man who (for all intents and purposes) invented the cellular phone, said it best in a recent interview with Chris Ziegler from The Verge:

There has never been a scarcity of spectrum, and I suggest there never will be. Because as fast as the requirements happen, as people demand more and more spectrum, the technologists come up with answers…The reason that carriers keep looking for more spectrum is that it’s in their blood. You own spectrum, you have a monopoly on that spectrum.

Mr. Cooper also touches on the recent trend of offloading to WiFi, which is propelled by the bandwidth caps carriers like Verizon impose on their customers. I, for one, noticed my monthly bandwidth jump from around 1GB to almost 4GB after I switched over to an LTE device on Verizon. Am I torrenting files and downloading movies on my phone? No, but I am taking advantage of certain services that weren’t available to me with 3G (or at least, available but not reliable), such as streaming radio and video chat (which are carrier promoted services). As a result, myself and many other consumers and businesses are using WiFi to offload data whenever they have the chance to conserve bandwidth each month. By doing this alone, I almost halved my LTE data usage.

Although offloading to WiFi isn’t a technological advance per se, all we have to do is look at the previous “G’s” for evidence of Mr. Cooper’s words. Technological advances resulted in increased bandwidth speeds and capacity on networks, such as GPRS (2.5G) making way for EDGE (2.75G) or 3G networks being enhanced with HSPA (3.5G) and eventually being one-upped by HSPA+ (3.75G, or the current non-LTE networks that T-Mobile or AT&T claim are 4G). Advances in LTE technology as well as simultaneous advances in WiFi (802.11ac and WiGig) will continue to keep the need for spectrum at a practical minimum.

Can you hear me now? Hello? Helloooo?

Verizon isn’t delaying its VoLTE switch and with no 3G handoff there is one result that can be guaranteed from the switch: dropped calls. This isn’t going to affect users who are more or less stationary while they talk on the phone. Users who are on the go will experience similar horror stories to those of AT&T users, such as getting five calls dropped while driving for ten miles on the expressway.

Verizon will most likely give VoLTE priority over all other LTE traffic to make sure that background data or downloads will get appropriately throttled when a voice call comes in, but that won’t do much to a data network that still has many limitations when it comes to coverage. Consumers experience these same issues all the time when making calls over Skype or Google Talk, and the underlying technology of VoLTE is marred by the same limitations these current VoIP technologies experience.

As of now, Verizon is rushing to make sweeping changes amidst exaggerated qualms. Cooper’s Law has yet to be proved wrong for the over a century and it isn’t about to be just because Verizon says so. As consumers adopt LTE, they are also learning to offload to WiFi so the issue of bandwidth and spectrum are hardly troublesome enough for Verizon to push voice traffic over to its relatively green LTE network.

Inman does a wonderful job pointing out the glaring issues with digital distribution today and in a sense, justifies pirating content because of the inability of Big Media to keep up with technological trends to satisfy consumers. I agree that it is quite ridiculous that the first season of Game of Thrones is unavailable for digital streaming from almost all legitimate services such as Netflix, iTunes, or Amazon, especially since it has been over a year since the season ended and season two premiers in a little over a month.

Furthermore, the only way to legitimately stream the full first season of Game of Thrones is by using the HBO Go service, which inconveniently requires you to:

1. Be subscribed to a major cable or satellite company.
2. Be paying for HBO on top of your monthly television subscription through said companies.
3. Be in the United States

Inman echoed a situation that is not only prevalent with many consumers today, but is also becoming the new norm as people begin to curate their digital content: people are cancelling their cable/satellite subscriptions and opting to pay for a cheaper streaming alternative like Netflix, iTunes, or Amazon. Because of these restrictions, people simply head over to their favorite torrent site and grab the content they want from there because it is far more convenient than jumping through all the hoops services like HBO requires, or more convenient than waiting when licensing agreements get green lit for content to become legitimately available (in the case of Game of Thrones, over a year). Inman hits the nail on the head with this one and reinforces why piracy is still a much more favorable option to legitimate services.

However, there is an unspoken issue with this comic that holds true for he majority of digital consumers of the 21st century. HBO is releasing the first season of Game of Thrones on Blu-Ray in just a couple of weeks. Since The Oatmeal doesn’t subscribe to cable or HBO, he could have waited until March 6, 2012 to buy or rent the Blu-Ray. Granted this isn’t a digital streaming alternative, but it still is an easy and legitimate alternative to piracy. Inman taps into one of the many childish fallacies that we as consumers show: we have a sense of entitlement that we should get access to the content we want, when we want it, and however we want it.

To be fair, HBO has waited over a year for a non-HBO Go solution for people who want to enjoy the first season of Game of Thrones. This still doesn’t excuse the inability for consumers to wait just a couple of weeks to get the content they want instead of heading over to piracy channels and justifying their actions by blaming Big Media for their lethargic tendencies to release content in ways that makes sense for 2012. HBO is a service that you have to pay for, and those funds go towards making excellent series like Game of Thrones. It makes sense that HBO would want to give priority access to its content to those who pay the bills.

We are so quick to blame corporate greed and obliviousness to modern trends for not getting our content right now that we distort reality to give credibility to our spoiled and frugal predispositions. I completely understand the frustrations Inman experienced with his search for a legitimate stream of this show. I, for one, believe that HBO could have kept the HBO Go exclusivity for six months after the season finale, just to maintain the exclusivity for its paying customers. Waiting over a year to give the rest of the population access to one of the most widely discussed and critically acclaimed shows of 2011, let alone a format that is quite arcane by 2012′s standards, is unacceptable.

Still, Inman could have waited two more weeks to get his fix. Both sides of the coin have excellent arguments in their favor, but a middle ground is possible with some concessions to common sense from both camps. Digital distribution can work to everyone’s benefit if both parties, creators and consumers, let go of their hubris just a bit. You are entitled to get your content quickly and in a convenient way, but Big Media needs to make its money too in order to continue to give you awesome entertainment.

So take Inman’s comic with a grain of salt before grabbing your pitchforks. Understand that both parties are at fault here, HBO for its extreme walled garden policy, and Inman for not waiting two more weeks.