Tag Archive for Twitter

| January 22, 2013
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5 Odd Tech Predictions

5 Odd Tech Predictions 2013  Julie Bort at the BusinessInsider found some really interesting ideas buried within this avalanche of humdrum thoughts. She shared them in the hope they will become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Hacking as a service1. Bad guys start offering “hacking as a service” – Security company McAfee says that criminal hackers have begun to create invitation-only forums requiring registration fees. The author speculates that these forums could become some sort of black-market software-as-a-service. Pay a monthly fee and your malware is automatically updated to the latest attack. Don’t pay, and it would be a shame if something happened to your beautiful website …

Smartphone ransomware2. Bad guys try to kidnap your smartphone – Hackers have become fond of a form of malware called “ransomware.” It’s a popular way to harass people who view Internet porn. While visiting a porn site, bad guys plant malware on a computer that threatens to report the computer user to the police unless they pay up.

In 2013, the article says the trend will be to hold your smartphone hostage. Hackers will sneak malware onto smartphones and then make you pay if you don’t want all the data on your phone destroyed or leaked. So thinks Chiranjeev Bordoloi, the CEO of security vendor Top Patch.

Fake meat3. Fake meat becomes a real thing – Vegetarians have been manipulating vegetable protein to make it look a little like meat and taste nothing like it. But now BusinessInsider says the race is on to produce fake meat like bacon in much more technically advanced ways.

Dutch researchers have found a way to “grow hamburger” in the laboratory from just a few bovine stem cells. Tech investors have funded companies that will create food from plants. Stealthy startup Sand Hill Foods is one such company on investors’ watch list. Beyond Meat, a startup funded by Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, makes realistic fake chicken and will ramp up availability in 2013.

smartphone healtcare4. Your smartphone will be like a personal nurse - Ms. Bort reports there is a healthcare revolution headed to your smartphone. IBM (IBM) has promised that one day soon doctors will use tech that will scan your body. They will send that data to the cloud for a diagnosis. Companies are developing smartphones with biosensors that do everything from check your blood sugar to detect the flu. Apple (AAPL) has promoted the iPhone as a platform for health technology since 2009, but some new devices are just coming to fruition.

Happy tablet5. The technology you use for work will be as much fun as the stuff you use at home – Most of us are so used to tech at work being a source of frustration that we can’t imagine a different world. But the author predicts that’s changing. In 2013, tablets will lead software to be redesigned for touch interfaces—which will make it fun and easy to use, more like a game than a spreadsheet. Best of all, more companies are adopting tech that lets you download a “virtual work desktop” on any device, simply by logging in on a Web browser or launching a mobile app.

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Category: Security | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| December 18, 2012
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VC’s Take on Ed Tech

VC’s Take on Ed Tech  at GigaOM reports on an open online course on entrepreneurship in education, called Ed Startup 101. During the course Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, gave a little insight into how venture capitalists view opportunities in education technology. Union Square Ventures has invested in education social network Edmodo, Skillshare, Codecademy and Duolingo.

Ed Startup 101VC Wilson said that education’s, notorious reputation for bureaucracy and long sales cycles have traditionally turned off VC’s (full video available here). But as startups have attempted new models that skip over institutional buyers to target teachers and students, investors have steadily warmed to the sector, including K-12 education. The blog cites data from GSV Advisors, a Chicago-based investment firm that specializes in education, who says that transactions in K-12 education climbed from just $13 million in 2005 to $389 million in 2011. Funding has been so strong that some have already started asking the inevitable question about whether an ed tech bubble is brewing.

The author offers a few takeaways from the video.

Bypass traditional K12 sales channelsConsumer tech offers plenty of models for freemium ed tech startups -The venture capitalist gave several examples in which consumer startups with a free service eventually found a path to profitability after years of venture backing, including Dropbox and Twitter. In those examples, he said, venture capital played a key role in helping them reach the scale that would make a freemium model work.  As the ed tech market expands, he expects models of all kinds – from those supported by advertising to those with enterprise licensing models – to emerge. Both Dropbox and Twitter are problematic to an enterprise network.

  • Someone PLEASE give me a long-term educational reason to give students on-network access to Twitter that out-weighs the distraction and cheating factors.
  • Dropbox is a potential data theft tool if allowed. We have seen 600 – 800 Mb of Dropbox space on users shares, then they complain when they can’t save their work to the network. Dropbox’s network behavior is annoying. Dropbox wants to check in with the mother-ship thousands of times a day. On our network we block file sharing with the content filter. When a users installs a Dropbox client on their workstation (don’t get me going about local admins) we have seen 60,000 attempts to connect to the Dropbox mother-ship over the course of a week. Dropbox could improve their product by throttling their checking in the long it doesn’t connect throttle down their phone-homes.

Work around the IT folksSell to the learner first, not the institution – Mr. Wilson says that ed tech firms should bypass traditional education sales channels. “We should compete with the existing education system as opposed to sell to it,” Wilson said. He thinks that entrepreneurs can make faster progress by bringing their tools straight to the learners and the teachers providing instruction. That’s the way Edmodo has gained its strong traction and the approach Codecademy has taken with its after-school program targeting students in schools without computer science instruction. As students and teachers adopt new platforms, Wilson said, the institutions will come around.

Gee I don’t know, sell to the end-user and then force the entire enterprise to change to accommodate a new toy, how very Apple of him. But VC’s don’t have to do the work. Maybe if he had to make AppleTV work on a network or get iMac‘s to regularly login to Active Directory.

Vendor lock-inVendor exclusivity is a bad thing - As more companies turn their attention to online learning and digital education, Wilson said universities shouldn’t standardize with just one vendor but support the range of tools that faculty members choose. Exclusivity, he said, makes vendors “fat and happy” and less incentivized to innovate.  “I don’t think there’s any benefit anyone would get by standardizing on one platform,” he said.

I agree with him here, the perfect example is Blackboard. They don’t seem to want to make our life easier. The restore process is stupid. Bring on Moodle.

Other areas of opportunity in ed tech – The VC says that his firm also thinks there are ed tech opportunities include:

  • Credentialing (Grades) Now that plenty of platforms offer courses and instruction, the next step is figuring out whether students are actually mastering the skills and knowledge that they’re setting out to learn.
  • He also said he thinks there are opportunities in peer-to-peer platforms, which leverage online communities to reduce the cost of creating curriculum and learning content,
  • Vertically focused startups, such as those similar to Codecademy and Duolingo.

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Shell gameIt’s not only my opinion that the freemium model is a bait and switch scam that sucks users into a product and then does a switch at some time in the future to a pay model. But that is a VC’s take on Ed Tech, what is your?

 

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Category: K12 | Tags: , , , , ,
| September 1, 2012
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Is Cisco buying Twitter followers for CSO?

Social mediaBrad Reese at BradReese.com writes that it seems ailing network giant Cisco (CSCO) has bought Twitter followers for Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior. Mr. Reese asks if Cisco purposely violate the Twitter rules that forbid the purchasing of accounts to gain followers?

Mr. Reese points to information from TwitterAudit which exposes Twitter fraud is reporting: Approximately half-a-million (509,426) of the Twitter followers of the network gear maker’s Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior, are fake Twitter accounts.

“Each audit takes a random sample of 50Cisco CSO Twitter accounts00 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”

Mr. Reese writes he ran the following Status People check on the 1.4 million Twitter followers of Cisco Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior:

Padmasree Warrior Twitter accounts

The practice of buying Twitter followers to boost your reputation in an online network seems to be mainstream business, as any Google search on the topic will show. It has also been covered by the New York Times, “Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame” Network World, “Inside the real economy behind fake Twitter accounts” and even mentioned on NPR

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I signed up to follow the networking business’s CSO to see what competitive insights I could gain from the CSO. The tweets coming out of the Cisco Chief Strategy Officer was were often so pointless that they seemed to be coming from a 16-year-old and not a key business person in the IT world.

The tweets were so pointless I just ignored them, now I am going to expend the effort to actually unfollow Warrior …..

Done – So now Cisco you will have to buy another Twitter followers to follow pointless tweets for your business leaders – Now get back to making great network gear.

 

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Category: Business, Networking | Tags: , ,
| June 26, 2012
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Credit Agency to Trawl Facebook

FlounderGigaOm has an article that documents the efforts by Schufa, the largest credit ratings firm in Germany to mine data from the Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD) and Twitter accounts of its customers. cites documents leaked to German media, that the firm whose slogan is “We Build Confidence” would use the information “to identify and evaluate opportunities for and threats to the company.”

Facebook (FB)“It cannot be that social networks are systematically scoured for sensitive data, resulting in credit ratings of customers,” said consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner.

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Get over it.

I wrote about firms like RapLeaf mining social networks for employers and banks back in 2010. What is surprising to me and Mr. Meyer is that this latest social network mining operation comes out of Europe and especially Germany, a country where most people are very conscious of data protection concerns.

This goes back to the internet-age old issue of privacy. Where is the line between public and private is it different for some groups than others? Do the NSA, CIA, MI5 and who ever else is listening get different access to data than Rapleaf, ApGet over itple (AAPL), Facebook, Twitter?

Just because the info is out there, public by default do they have the right to use it?

On the other hand users of Facebook and Foursquare happily tie their credit cards to these accounts, post status updates and check-in to places for the world to see.  

Maybe we are just getting what we deserve.

Category: Security, Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| May 15, 2012
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Internet of Things

Council imagines the Internet of Things as a world where everything can be both analog and digitally approached. It reformulate our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves.  Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.

The Machines Are Talking a Lot

Machine ti machine communication Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016 reports that Internet traffic continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Cisco says that the second leading source of internet traffic will be machines.

The networking giant says the source will be from machine-to-machine communications, or “M2M.” Brian Bergstein at MIT‘s Technology Review says to think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to Macnine to machine communicationseach other and to centralized computers what they’re detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. Cisco says M2M will grow, on average, 86 percent a year, reaching 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes by 2016 .

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Here comes a hot new chip for Internet of things

ARM ARM (ARMH), the semiconductor company whose chip technology powers most modern smartphones, has come up with a chip for the Internet of things (IoT). Om Malik at GigaOM reports that the Cortex-M0+ is an energy-efficient chip, optimized for use in everything from connected lighting to power controls to other home appliances. In a press release, the company explains:

The 32-bit Cortex-M0+ processor … consumes just 9µA/MHz … around one-third of the energy of any 8 or 16-bit processor available today, while delivering significantly higher performance …[to] enable the creation of smart, low-power microcontrollers to provide … wirelessly connected devices, a concept known as the ‘Internet of Things.’

At GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 event ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky said that “ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools and low-volume sales channels create an innovation ecosystem that is the foundation for an Internet of things.”

GigaOM says Freescale and NXP (NXPI), both are major suppliers to the automotive and home automation industries have signed up for the new ARM chip technology. Freescale and NXP have locations in the Farmington Hills, MI area.

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And another new chip for smart homes & appliances

Qualcomm Atheros Internet of Things at GigaOm recently noted that Atheros, a division of Qualcomm (QCOM) launched a new very low power consuming Wi-Fi chip, AR4100P, focused on the “Internet of Things.” He predicts that soon, there might be Wi-Fi in everything around us, including Samsung’s (005930) Wi-Fi enabled washing machines, which Malik wrote about earlier.

According to the blog, the new “highly integrated 802.11n single-stream Wi-Fi system-in-package with integrated dual IPv4 IPv6 networking stack” is focused on smart home and building controls and appliances. Atheros and other chip companies such as ARM are betting that the Internet of Things will prove to be a new giant market opportunity.

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The new Atheros chip also includes an IPv6 stack as well as 802.11n to give end-to-end control of your home appliances.

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The Web Connected Smelly Robot

Olly The web connected smelly robotThe Internet of Things now has smell-o-vision from Olly. Olly takes services on the Internet and delivers their pings as smell according to his web-site. Whether it’s tweets, a like on Instagram, Olly will be sure to let your nose know about it. Mint Foundry, a graduate design lab at Mint Digital dedicated to exploring the potential of web-connected objects developed Olly.

It is possible to change Olly’s smells in an instant. It has a removable section in the back which can be filled with any smell you like. It could be essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner’s perfume or even a drop of gin.

Olly is stackable, so if you have more than one, you can assign each one to a different service with a different smell. Connect one to Twitter and another to your calendar. Before you know it, you’ll have a networked Internet smell center claims the web-site.
Olly is not yet in production, but Mint is glad to offer the source files to anyone who’s got a 3D printer and a nose for adventure.
Category: Internet of Things | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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