Are you looking for some interesting summer reading material? These recommendations are ready to take to the beach, or just entertaining yarns (and some true tales thrown in to for good measure). They also make great gifts for your favorite nerd. Read my article in SearchWindowsSever.com.
Not to mention that it is perfect for IT degree enthusiasts.
In the past week I have done several stories for ReadWriteWeb where I had to really dig to get the price from the vendor. This seems the beginning of a trendlet, especially when it comes to Web-based services. Even IBM’s press announcement had nothing on its pricing plan, something that would have been unheard of a few years ago back in the day when the “ivories” were chock full of product info. (They were called this because they came printed out on ivory-colored paper stock, back when we didn’t have Web sites to review these announcements. You know, in the days long ago around the same time that Tom Watson was using punched cards.)
The argument for omitting prices goes something like this: We sell a service that is based on (latency, traffic, bandwidth consumed, storage, insert your favorite metric here), and there are wide variations in customer usage, so each deal is priced separately. We can’t really quote a single MSRP because of the way we price our service/product.
Well, that is nice. But what is really going on is that the vendor hasn’t decided on its pricing strategy, and so has instructed their PR firm or marcom team to just omit this information and see what the reaction is by potential customers and other related parties. Based on this free research, they will come back and adjust the Web pages and add the appropriate pricing.
But is so wrong-headed. The wrong price can turn the most amazing product into a dog, and not putting a price online (or a way to at least have potential customers calculate a price) just makes everyone more frustrated and the chance to actually lose a customer to a competitor, where this information is clearly stated.
I mean, even Amazon’s Web Services, which has certainly one of the most complex pricing schemes around, at least puts this page up where you can try to calculate what your usage will be. They don’t make it easy to find it though. And they do frequently change their prices, as the costs for providing compute power and storage goes down. What is even more relevant is that there are new businesses that are offering to analyze your AWS usage and suggest ways that you can minimize your bills, such as UptimeCloud.com. (You know your pricing is out of whack when independent vendors come up with tools that can help explain it to your customers!)
So folks, put a price tag on your Web site and include in your announcements and other press materials. Priceless may work as a branding for Mastercard but not for most IT services.
Plenty of people think they are experts on social media, but we all still have a lot to learn. Though the best way for a CMO to get better at social media is to use it more frequently to listen to customers and partners, sometimes reading a few good books on the topic can help one better master the subject. Here I review a few of my favorites.
Last week I had an opportunity to spend some time with Andy Carvin. He is a journalist with National Public Radio who broke the story of the fake Syrian lesbian blogger “Amina Abdullah”. You might have seen him briefly on The Daily Show, and the story is an amazing hoax that finally broke apart with a lot of investigation.
The blogger, as it turns out, was actually neither Syrian nor a lesbian, but the genesis of a married couple living in Scotland: Tom MacMaster and Britta Froelicher, the latter an expert on Syria.
And while it is true that on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog; in this case, a lot of people helped Carvin finally figure piece together the dogs’ identities. There are some important lessons for online journalists here, and those thinking about becoming or continuing in this trade in the coming years.
First off, Carvin uses Twitter as his personal assignment editor. He tracks trends and does lots of searches and posts queries to stay on top of what could potentially be news, or to direct his own research. Twitter makes this both easy and hard, because a lot of what is posted or retweeted can be just noise. It helps to have fined honed instincts here.
Second, he archives and collects the elements of his stories in Storify.com, which is a tool that can be used to snapshot Tweets and blog posts and pictures so you can see the particular moment in time that he is researching. If you haven’t yet used Storify, it is worth taking a look here.
You can see Carvin building a case that Amina was phony and how he tracked down who “she” really was – asking his Twitter correspondents whether anyone actually meet her face to face or over video chat.(McMaster was clever and often stated that the Syrian authorities were blocking Skype videos, something that was patently false.) This the way new style of reporting, and what is intriguing for me is that you can see how the pieces came together in uncovering the hoax merely by scrolling from the bottom to the top (it is a lot of scrolling, granted, but all the more impressive showing how doggedly Carvin pursued things). Back in the olden days, we just had phone calls and hastily scribbled note pads. Storify is the reporter’s new notepad.
Third, social media is both a blessing and a curse. Rumors can spread like wildfire, and truth can be hard to come by. One of the reasons that the Amina hoax persisted is that McMaster was a terrific writer, able to get into the voice and perspective of his part. McMaster also used gay dating sites to establish a relationship with a real lesbian in Montreal, which I guess was used to build his street cred for his character. Reporters have to understand the multiplier effect of social media and treat this carefully, or they could fall into the trap that many of them did in their original reporting of Amina’s phony kidnapping. You have to dig deeper and be persistent. You also have to treat your sources with a lot more care, because we are dealing with real human relationships here – no matter if they are online ones.
Finally, there is this paradox: as reporters such as Carvin build massive Twitter followings (he is nearly at 50,000), they become their own independent brands. NPR has been terrific in letting him operate independently, but other organizations may not be as tolerant. We still don’t have the best models for how businesses can transfer or use the popularity of their superstars.
Ironically, Carvin, like myself, has never had any formal journalism school training. Perhaps that is a sign of things to come as well.
How many emails does it take to book a meeting? While that sounds like a spin on one of those ubiquitous lightbulb jokes, for most of us, it’s no laughing matter. Serial emails are the most often used collaborative mechanism. That’s a shame, and there are dozens of alternative collaboration tools available—both new and old—including wikis, workflow managers, Web and video conferencing, and smartphone applications.
To hear more about some enterprises that have turned to collaboration tools to become more productive and competitive, you can read my story in this month’s Baseline magazine here.
Now more than ever, cloud computing has become the single most important factor in helping boost the reseller channel to new heights. No matter their specializations or backgrounds, all channel players can leverage cloud computing to become more profitable, competitive and widen their reach with acquiring new customers and business opportunities.
You can register and watch live this MSPtv event on Thursday June 23rd at 12:30 ET here.
Lately, there is lots of news about various bank accounts being compromised – including the network of the International Monetary Fund, the biggest piggybank of them all. Coincidentally, there was the news that both Facebook and Google’s Gmail have beefed up their security with two-factor authentication. They both now have optional mechanisms for making sure that your login process is more secure.
Two-factor authentication is called that for a reason: you need more than type in your username and password, something that you have on your person that isn’t easily known to anyone else (like your mother’s maiden name or birth date). Both sites make use of texting you a short string of numbers to your cell phone as part of the login process: once you set this up, as long as you have your phone nearby (and who doesn’t?), you can be sure that no one else can login into your account.
Older forms of two-factor authentication used small key fobs that had a button: when you pressed the button you got a code number that you used to type in at the moment you were logging in. The number changed every 30 seconds or so, making it difficult to hack. Using a cell phone is much more convenient: the fobs were forgotten or lost.
Two-factor authentication has been around for a long time, and lately has gotten a black eye, thanks to the behavior of RSA, one of the leading companies in the market. Their SecurID system was compromised several months ago, and the company has been slow in getting the word out and replacing the fobs for its customers. As a result, several of its competitors have stepped forward and offered deals on replacements.
I’ve had a fob for my eBay/Paypal account for several years: I think it cost $10. (It now costs $30!!) You can still get them, although there are free alternatives available that can make use of your smartphone to get SMS texts and you can also sign up with Symantec’s Verisign Identity Protection program for their fob. Symantec doesn’t make it easy to find this online.
(Note: I did one of my sponsored screencast videos of the service for them last year.)
But even better is what Google and Facebook have put in place. If you have a Gmail account (but not a Google-hosted email account, sadly), you can get this set up in about 10 minutes: Go to your account’s personal settings and you should see a menu item for two-factor authentication, and follow the instructions show in their blog.
The problem is that adding two-factor for your Gmail account will create problems for you for other applications that access your account. If you use your smartphone or Outlook to access your email, you will need to setup these apps to handle the two-factor authentication. If you read your email on a tablet, ditto. So this may not be as easy as you first think.
Facebook has taken lots of (deserved) knocks on its security, and it also has implemented two-factor authentication lately. Go to Account/Account settings/Account Security and enter the information requested under the Login Approvals section, at least until they rearrange their menus and put it somewhere else.
Two-factor isn’t a panacea, and it does add an extra step. And as the folks at Lockheed found it, it isn’t flawless. But it does offer much better protection than straight username/password. If you use Google, Facebook, and Paypal, it is time to start using it.
As companies use the Web to build new applications, and as the amount of data generated by them increases, they are reaching the limits of traditional relational databases. A set of alternatives, grouped under the umbrella label NoSQL (for not only SQL), has become more popular and a number of notable use cases, including social networking giants Facebook and Twitter, are leading the way in this arena.
You can read my article over at ITworld here.
Next week, at our 2Way conference in New York City, I will be moderating a panel to address issues surrounding real-time communications. To help illustrate where we have come and where we need to go, I have assembled for my panel four representatives of companies that are pushing the envelope. The companies include:
All of these vendors have various programming interfaces, widgets and tools to make it easier to share audio and video content on a website: the goal is to make the site more engaging and keep a visitor browsing and have a site stand out from others that are more static. The bad news is that we are still in the early days of how a particular browser supports this content: if we are going to post something in Flash, for example, that cuts out all the iPad users out there. If we embed a video player, that means we tie ourselves closer to the source site that serves up that content.
I first met Adrian Lamo about ten years ago. Back then, I was teaching a high school networking class and I thought it would be cool to have the kids experience a “real” hacker, since so many of them aspired to learn how to get into the computerized grading system that the school ran.
Lamo at the time had been arrested for breaking into several different computer systems, including that of the freelancer database of the New York Times. His method was to find an open Web proxy server and use that to gain entry inside a corporate network. (It is still a common entry point, although many companies have finally figured out how to protect themselves.) At the time, he was called the “homeless hacker” – not because he was living on the streets, but because he was young and had no fixed address, and would go from couch to couch as the mood took him. I offered him a place to stay and a chance to get to know him better, thinking how cool could that be?
When I told my then-teenage daughter about his impending visit, she was rather incredulous (you have someone wanted by the police staying with us) but ultimately she was won over by his geek cred – she had a problem with her cell phone that she recalls him fixing in a matter of seconds.
Well, Lamo went on to settle his lawsuit with the Times, and got a degree in journalism, ironically enough. I went on to become one of those listed in the NYT freelancer database (thankfully now more secure, I hope), having written a few articles for them on technology over the years. And he then went on to become one of the important figures in the Wikileaks/Cablegate case last year, when he divulged the name of Private Manning to the feds as the leaker. At the time, his decision was vilified in the hacking community, with threats and other nastiness expressed online.
“Who would have thought that when we first met ten years ago that I would have been involved in the single biggest intelligence leak in history,” he told me. How true. He continues to work as a security consultant, helping corporations understand better security practices as well as going out on the speaking circuit. Ironically, his preferred method of communications these days is FedEx! “I’m a little bit of a Luddite these days,” he said. He also thinks that his actions were justified for the greater good of our nation’s overall security posture, and to help ensure further freedoms. An interesting position for a hacker to take, to be sure.
I had a chance to speak to Lamo last week and record the interview for ReadWriteWeb, where you can listen to the 13-minute podcast here.
