June 25, 2009

Security of Digital Gold with Unified Messaging

Filed under: Convergence, Security — ahastings @ 10:42 am

sun-through-the-cloudsThe security of personal information on the web has been a concern since the web’s inception. As more and more applications reside in the cloud, so does the data that constitutes your digital life. Recent articles in TechCrunch and GigaOM question the privacy of some of the most ubiquitous online tools. The truth is that the benefits of tools such as Facebook, Google apps, and Twitter outweigh the insecurity of streaming personal data into the cloud. This dynamic has caused users (damn near everyone with a computer and internet connection) to overlook security issues. It is equally beneficial to remember that the success of the Internet is built on the ability to share information with like-minded individuals, not the companies that store that information on their servers.

As electronic communication behavior gets increasingly complex, so does the desire for a unified platform. Take the Google suite as an example; the ever-popular apps enable you to conduct your life within a Google browser window. This is a valuable service but it also means that all of your correspondence, scheduling, documents and contacts are housed on one company’s servers. As we begin to unify our online lives and entrust “the aggregators” with increasingly more personal information, it is important, as consumers to be aware of the protection offered by the gate keepers. One questions we must ask ourselves is, Does the steward of our data have anything to gain from that information?

The emergence of the universal inbox poses a new set of security challenges. If we are consolidating all communication (email, chat, text, voice, social networking, etc) into one place rather than distributing with a number of sites, the measures the company hosting personal information takes to protect that digital gold becomes increasingly important.

June 19, 2009

Modern Day Fable

Filed under: Convergence — jothmeister @ 2:04 pm

rvx-imageSo, you have a cool idea and a prototype you’ve built to show off the idea. It’s time to build the company you have dreamed of. You’ve gone as far as you can on your savings and need to find an investor as you are ready to build a team, a product, and launch the company.

You send some intro emails out and one investor is interested and writes you back asking for more info. You send back what he wants and, Bingo! he asks for a meeting.

At the meeting you give him your business card, which has your Skype name, your cell phone, and fax numbers on it. You encourage him to use whatever mode of communication is best when he has questions and needs a fast response from you.

Later you are at your computer and your Skype chat client goes off and it’s him asking for a phone number for one of your references which you immediately give him because he can see you are online and you want to be very responsive to him.

A bit later he texts you saying he thinks your proposed valuation of your company at $1.5M is reasonable and he is going to give you a term sheet for a new investment valuing your company at that amount. You are so thrilled you can hardly speak and you can’t wait for the fax machine to get a call.

Indeed a fax does arrive on your multi-function printer an hour later and it’s the term sheet. But here the valuation is set at $1.0M and you are surprised, confused and disappointed. Of course, you assume this is just a mistake. You call him but he is not there so you leave a voice mail. 

You have some other meetings and when you check your cell phone voicemail, you have a message from him saying he agrees there was a mistake and he had meant to have the term sheet say $1.2M. Well, that is a bit better but it’s still not what you had hoped for and it’s not what you had agreed to.

You are certain he had agreed to $1.5M and you want to prove it to him. He’s very fair and reasonable and if you can just show him he already agreed to this he will honor it. But with so many clients and so many modes of communication you cannot remember by which mode he said that. You look in your email but nope not there. You look in your saved chat sessions but not there either. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t find any history of deleted voicemails or text messages so there is no hope there.

Maybe you dreamed that he agreed to $1.5M so now you are beginning to doubt yourself and you decide to just accept his $1.2M valuation. Because you can’t see all modes of communication in one place you just devalued your baby by $300K! And maybe even questioned your own sanity.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one client for all your modes of communication, where with a click you could see in one place all emails, all chats, all faxes, all voicemails, and all text messages that form a conversation with one of your contacts?

 

June 15, 2009

Knowing About Stuff You Know You Should Know About

Filed under: Convergence, Overview, Social Networking — Tags: — jothmeister @ 9:54 am

tour_1So many people seem confused about what Twitter really is and what it is good for. First, let’s clearly disabuse anyone of thinking Twitter is just like Facebook status updates. It is not that. Facebook status updates are more personal in nature and tend to answer the question “What are you doing now?” Tweets on the other hand answer the question,”What have you learned, said,or seen, that you want to tell others about?” In a nutshell, Facebook is for people you know, and Twitter is for people you don’t know and with whom you may share common interests.  

Now let’s compare Twitter to an RSS feed. You can sit in your RSS reader (usually a browser or an email client) and the updates come to you,, which is great for blogs and news sites you are already aware of and trust.  

Then there are the sites that are full of information you never knew you were dying to know about.. So how can you possibly know about all the cool content you could know about? The answer:  find someone you trust, who spends their time discovering and reporting on things you want to learn about and follow their every move. They effectively become a human RSS feed for tons of information you would never find out about otherwise. Enter: Twitter.  

Eventually the vast majority of users will realize that Twitter is a personal promotional tool (I promote my content and I also promote what I find interesting elsewhere ), it will become more and more valuable,  providing you with the “Wisdom of Crowds” to get recommendations for what you should spend your time looking at. Once that happens, tools that aggregate the best Tweets from the best Tweeters on a specific subject will become the most important way to deal with not just Tweets, but entire conversations over multiple platforms including email, chats, texts and every other form of electronic communication. Twitter is another step in the process as we try to figure out how to deal with the complexity of so much input of information in our daily lives.