The self-encrypting hard drive

Have you ever had your laptop stolen? There is more a sense of violation, of personal intrusion, than when someone breaks into your home or lifts your wallet. I have been robbed several times over the years, but losing the laptop hurt the most.

It happened about seven years ago, I was on a business trip to Seattle and had some time to kill after an appointment, so I went to the mall and bought my wife some presents. I didn’t want to cart them around so I dropped them off in my rental car and then headed back to one of the mall’s restaurants for dinner. When I got back to the car, I just had this feeling, and sure enough when I checked the trunk it was cleaned out. My wife still jokingly insists that I made up this story but it is sadly true.

Luckily, I didn’t lose that much data, and I was using Lotus Notes so it was easy enough to replicate once I got a replacement from my employer. And while you might know about encryption programs that secure parts or all of your hard drive, you may not have heard about the latest in security technology called self-encrypting hard drives that have come to market lately.

Using disk encryption software has never caught on. People I guess don’t trust it that it will always work, so you have this conundrum of wanting to use protection software on something that is too valuable to lose but too valuable to just leave out in the open, such as your financial information or your website passwords.

What self-encrypting drives offer is an ability to make the encryption effortless. The drives have a special processing chip that automatically encrypts and decrypts your data, and if you were to look at one of these drives you couldn’t tell anything was different, which is the idea.. All you have to do is enter a start-up password and you are good to go. For corporations, there are fleet management tools that can lock or unlock your entire collection of desktop drives. One such program is Wave System’s Embassy Remote Administration Server. I spent some time reviewing this product as part of a series of sponsored video screencasts and you can watch what it does here.

What is nice about this and equivalent software tools is that you can still gain access to the data if someone forgets their password or is terminated. You can also make sure that the drive gets wiped clean when it is stolen: we all have heard about data breaches where sensitive data was left on the laptop and posted online.

SEDs are available from most of the major drive makers, and on many laptops available today. Will they get used more often than ordinary disk drive encryption software? Hard to say. But if you have ever had your laptop stolen, it might be a good idea to enable this protection, especially if you regularly leave it in your car.

How to start a new company in 50 hours or less

I was working this past weekend, but before you send me sympathies I should tell you that I was having tons of fun. I was one of the coaches at our local Startup Weekend here in St. Louis. And I had a blast.

Startup Weekend is an outfit that has been around for several years. They do this blitz unconference-meetup-hackathon event that starts Friday evening and some 50 hours later (with optional time off for sleep), ends Sunday night with a series of pitches from participants. In between random people, many who have never met each other, try to figure out how to work together and form a company on the basis of a few wild ideas. It is just crazy enough that it actually works: last year more than 2,000 new ventures were started in cities scattered around the world. Zaarly.com is one of the success stories that started about a year ago, and Foodspotting.com is another company that had its origins with one of the Startup Weekend.

This past weekend I could have attended Startup Weekends in Nice (France), San Jose, Minsk or Norway, but I figured I would take the easier route and just drive downtown to the local one. I am glad that I did. Over the weekend, I met with a half dozen of the 12 teams that were eventually working together, offering advice and pearls of wisdom, some of which was taken, some of which was ignored. That is part of the fun of the process: you aren’t making the decisions, just acting like a trusted advisor.

This whole notion of trust is an interesting one, something that I thought about last night when I finally got home from the festivities. I mean, these people are just sitting in a random conference room. They don’t know if the person across the table is a charlatan or the real deal. And the group has to select a team leader and figure out who is going to do what when and how. That is a lot of decisions to make in a very short time.

On top of this, there was a broad mix of skills and people that came together for the weekend than you would find at the typical tech conference. I was expected to see a lot of multiple-pierced 20-somethings; instead there were lots of minorities and women and people nearing my advanced age sitting around the tables with the Gen Y’ers. That was amazing: and what was more amazing is that everyone had something to contribute. Several of them came from other cities that don’t have their own weekends, they wanted to be part of this that badly.

Nevertheless, the people in St. Louis weekend seemed to be getting along just fine. The winner of the weekend was a group that didn’t even have the germ of an idea when they sat down together. By the end of the weekend, they had done some test marketing, grabbed gigabytes of data from the Internet, put together a very compelling pitch, and two of the members were trying to figure out how to quit their day jobs to devote time to the venture. That was exciting to watch.

Startup Weekend isn’t completely free: there is an entrance fee of around $100 to support its operations, and there are grants from a variety of corporate benefactors to keep it going.

The weekend kicked off a series of events for St. Louis entrepreneurs. Tomorrow, there is the initial meeting of the local chapter of Startup America that tries to foster relationships between entrepreneurs (startupmo.org). Then Thursday is an open house for the next group of five companies that will receive investments from Capital Innovators, a tech accelerator program that has been in operation for several months. And I am involved in another mentoring operation called VentureAdvisors.org that is trying to provide a broad selection of services for more mundane companies.

These events plus the Startup Weekend are being held at an old office building downtown that used to house the regional headquarters of Macy’s. I am glad to see St. Louis bring new life into its downtown, and bring so many people together who are interested in starting new ventures.

The Worst Uses of Excel

Over on ReadWriteWeb, we ask a daily question and cull the answers from our readers. Yesterday’s question was to find out the worst uses of an Excel (or any) spreadsheet, and the responses were funny to the point of being poignant and somewhat sobering. Clearly, people need to learn at least one other software package to do many of the things they stick Excel with.

There is something about the rows and columns of a spreadsheet that I guess just invite a lot of abuse. I always knew that Excel was the go-to database program for those who were confounded by SQL or Access or even Filemaker, but still some of the posts from our readers were extraordinary. One group of three took nine days to code up an inventory tracking app. That is just insane.

But it was when folks mentioned, several times, that they had seen word processing done on Excel that I had to just say, stop me before I hurt myself. Printing out labels? Or other documents? Drawing a map? Company brochures? Resumes? Don’t people know of Word or its equivalent? Haven’t they been taught anything about some other software tool? Apparently not. “They didn’t know that Word existed,” said one of our readers.

Others use Excel for presentations, putting each slide on a separate worksheet. Yes, I guess you can do that. But if you are going to go through the motions of cut and pasting a graphic, why not use something that already is made to do that, like, uh, Powerpoint?

Excel of course isn’t the only spreadsheet game in town, and now there are any number of online services that can be abused and twisted into odd applications. The online database company TrackVia recently came up with their own quirky apps that their customers have built in their service, including tracking the schedule of “exotic dancers”, free taco nights at the local ball park, and a museum in France that has an antique wine database. You can read that one here.

How about you? What is the worst Excel app you’ve seen in your career? Feel free to email me or share your comments below.

How Banks Can Text You Fraud Alerts in Real Time

Like some of you, I was in the market to buy a new phone late last year, and went online to the AT&T store to make my purchase the day or so after the new iPhone 4S was available. Smart, I thought to myself: avoid the lines (not that there are many lines here in St. Louis, but still). Took about five minutes to enter all my information and then I was done. I got a confirmation email that my order had been placed, and an estimated ship date a few weeks away. That was fine: I wasn’t in a hurry.

But then there were a bizarre series of circumstances. My order was summarily cancelled by AT&T. I thought at first that there was something wrong with my credit card, so I tried a debit card. Same process: initial confirmation emails followed by a cancelled order. That was perplexing. Now I was getting steamed: a simple five-minute process to avoid the hassles was turning into a project. What gives? It turns out that I have a fraud alert on my credit card, due to some ID theft circumstances a few years ago. And apparently, when you purchase something from AT&T online, they don’t have any way to check with you out of band to see if that purchase was legit. Or so I guessed.

If you have ever had one of your purchases challenged by your bank or credit provider, then you might want to watch this video showing you what Clairmail is doing with its mobile fraud prevention system. You can’t buy this as an individual: they sell just to banks and other financial institutions. Watch this short video explanation:

But you get the idea: they send you text messages when suspicious activity is flagged on your account, in real time, while you are in the store, about to make the purchase. No more awkward moments hearing that your card has been declined because you failed to alert your bank that you are traveling overseas, or because you placed a fraud alert marker on your account. A quick text to confirm that it is indeed an intended purchase and you are good to go.

Clairmail has “hit a home run” with their mobile solution, according to Sean Mulvihill, the VP of Sales and Marketing Operations for the company. Their software is found in many of the nation’s top banks and they have other products that enable banks to white-label online services for an entire secure mobile Web app. I just wish my bank were one of their customers.

Startup Rules of the Road

I met with two 20-something budding entrepreneurs this week, just by chance. I love working with and mentoring these young people. There is so much energy and hope to better themselves and make the world a better place too. And so much they need to learn. I thought I would encapsulate some of my advice that I gave them, and perhaps motivate you to reach out to someone you know who is looking to start their own business and send this post their way too.

• First, it is so often said that you have to find your passion. But it is very true. If you are going to suffer the long hours and the many frustrations of starting your own business, you need to have something that is going to power you through the darkest times. If you come up with a business idea that doesn’t get your groove on, drop it and think of something else.
• Find the narrowest niche you can and fill it completely and hopefully exclusively. It doesn’t really matter what you do. What matters is what everyone else isn’t doing, and how you can complement or fill in the gaps. The narrower the niche, the better. It helps if you can explain your niche in a short sound bite too, because that is what you are going to be doing a lot of. And don’t be afraid to change to a new niche when the market shifts or as you get better at understanding what your customers need, too. You aren’t going to be running MegaCorp (at least, not yet), so being flexible is key.
• Understand your own limitations and use them to decide on the nature of the businessyou wish to create. For years I have had a one-person freelance writing business, designed purposely not because I am anti-social, but because that is my preferred work style. You need to think through the implications of your ideas and understand what you are getting yourself into with the particular business you have in mind. One friend of mine designed her freelance business around a small staff, because that was what she was comfortable with. Different strokes….
• Building a website because isn’t the same thing as building a business. While is certainly is the case that many businesses are going to have some kind of online presence, they just begin with the website. A corollary to this is:
• If you aren’t technical, find someone who can help and treat them well.Make that: treat them extra well. When I built my first website back in the early days, I hired a kid all of 19 years of age. Now I would hire even younger: they have the skills, and they work cheap. But sometimes you want to partner with someone with more maturity, and realize when that is needed.
• Pick domain names, corporate names, and other names to match and be easy to speak and remember. This is so important. There is a site called KnowEm.com that can help you figure out if your chosen name is available on hundreds of social networks, and even search the US Patent and Trademark Database. This is a good place to start.
• Don’t forget about email newsletter marketing.Email may be going the way of the dinosaurs, but it is still a very powerful tool that can help spread your word and get you customers. One friend of mine built up his business big time with a weekly newsletter: over a year he had more than two thousand subscribers, and a regular business. The service provider that I use for my email newsletter charges me the grand sum of less than $5 a month.
• Speaking of monthly costs, keep your recurring costs low. It is amazing what kinds of services you can get these days for free or nearly so in just about everything. Look at what you can get on open source sites. You can host your own blog, set up your own domain, sign up for cloud-based accounting, and a lot more for less than $500 a year, in some cases a lot less. It used to cost me $500 just to have a server sit in a rack someplace. My friend Bruce Fryer has a site called CheapBastardStartup that has links to running his 100% virtual corporation. He suggests raising $50,000 and get a product and customers and then go after the big money once you have proven your concept. But I suggest starting with even less dough – say $5000 – and see how far you can run with your idea with that. Don’t figure on paying yourself a salary, at least initially.

I am sure that there are lots more ideas for getting started. Feel free to share them in the comments.

Blogging is far from dead

I took a look around for an article that I wrote today for ReadWriteWeb on new models in Web publishing and was glad to see that blogging is far from dead. Indeed, it is evolving rapidly into some interesting new forms and I wanted to take this opportunity to review some of them with you. If you want to read more or share your thoughts, click on the link above.

We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the “golden age of blogging” into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote on his blog last week that all future blogs will have something different, such as new mixes of media, different kinds of long-form content, and new opportunities for different kinds of celebrities to shine.

It used to be one point of view per blog, but that has changed, particularly as blogs (such as RWW) have grown and added professional journalists. Even tying yourself to a particular high-touch staff isn’t needed anymore: look what happened over at Engadget.com when Patel and Topolsky and others left the site last March. Sure, traffic took a small hit initially, but pageviews bounced back up.

What we mean by “long-form” content is changing too. It used to be a 600 word post was brief, now that is considered long. My post on RWW was more than 1100 words: that was really long! Same is true for videos: three minutes is now the cutoff point.

Data-drive analysis is now more important than ever. Adrian Holovaty changed the nature of daily journalism by transforming a collection of soldier Middle East war deaths into a searchable online site for the Washington Post, and now other newspapers have programmers to assemble their own curated data collections.

And then there is DocumentCloud.org that is used by a large number of blogs and traditional media to show the sources behind their reporting. You click on the button at the top of each article, and then yellow highlighted text appears that has hyperlinks to the original source materials. Think of it as when you had to show your work in high school math class. It is an intriguing idea.

The High Price of Add-on Online Fees

New rules will go into effect in a month for US airline advertising that take the emphasis off the asterisk and adds transparency to their add-on ticketing fees. Ironically, some of the low-fare airlines such as Spirit are fighting the changes, claiming freedom of speech infringement by the government. I guess the right to deceive their customers should be part of the Constitution, or at least left to free enterprise to sort this all out. The rules were supposed to go in effect earlier this fall, but were extended to January 24th to give the airlines time to legally outmaneuver them. I mean, to comply.

It used to be that one went online to avoid add-on fees by travel agents, but as the airlines have made visits to bankruptcy courts more frequent (American is the most recent), they have come up with a variety of ways to squeeze more money out of the public without being so, well, obvious and clear. There are baggage fees, fees for using particular forms of payment, and fees for sitting in those extra-spacious exit row seats. Buying a ticket online is now akin to buying a computer from Dell: there are so many screens to click on to avoid various up-sells (rental cars? hotels? a new printer cartridge, maybe?), that the process is a user experience nightmare.

But the fee asterisk and its associated add-ons are onerous. Spirit, for example, charges all sorts of fees depending on the ticket. They claim the online booking fees are “optional” since you can avoid them by going to the airport and buying your tickets there. Right. As if we don’t spend enough time waiting in airport lines. You can read their fine print here and it will take you a while. Here is a screenshot showing you that a $164 round-trip ticket would cost you an additional $62 in fees.

Granted, they aren’t alone in charging high fees for online purchases. Many of these are local and other taxes that the hospitality industry has to bear. But the objection is how the consumer is informed of them during the online purchase process. Spirit doesn’t divulge all the fees until you have selected your flights and are getting ready to pay them, which is understandable given the many nuances of its complex fee structure. But that is still reprehensible, from an airline that advertises $9 fares that turn into something quite a bit more.

As another example, two tickets for Book of the Mormon, the popular Broadway show, can have almost as much in add-ons as Spirit does. The site Broadway.com is at least a bit more upfront about what they charge you, as you can see here at right.

Easyjet, the European low-fare airline, has different ticketing prices depending on the way you pay. “All bookings will incur a £8.00 booking fee except for bookings made by Visa electron (a debit card that isn’t available in the US and Canada) which is free.” Then you are presented at checkout with this somewhat confusing screen at left.

So the biggest number on the page is the fee that you would pay with a regular credit card, that includes the surcharge. Got it? This is a user experience nightmare.

Concert tickets for years have had high add-on fees, but at least the online concert ticket booking sites are more up-front about them. Still, two tickets for an upcoming show of George Strait for example that started out costing $80 a piece add $13 for various fees at Ticketmaster, more if you want them mailed quickly to you.

That is still less of a proportion than what the airlines add on.

Some thoughts for the future to improve the experience:

• Limit the upsells. I shouldn’t have to click through more screens to decline offers at checkout than it took to buy the original item.
• Disclose the fees at the beginningrather than at the end of the purchase process.
• Simplify, as Thoreau once said. If you need to explain your fees with an asterisk, it is time to get rid of both.
• Keep them below 10% of the total price.Otherwise it isn’t really a fee, it is just generating more revenue.
• Make it easy to find the fees. At least Spirit posts them on their site in plain sight.