Summertime is the season for traveling circuses and local fairs, so I shouldn't be surprised that this carnival atmosphere has spread to security. A company named Permanent Privacy just announced a $1 million prize to the person who can crack its algorithm and uncover the underlying encryption keys.
Now I realize there is some history here. In January 1999, a group of academics cracked the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard in just over 22 hours and won a prize of $10,000. That said, I am not a big fan of security showmanship like this from unknown security start-ups.
Why? First of all, this "challenge" isn't really a challenge at all. Permanent Privacy technology is based upon the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm and since no one has cracked AES, it's highly unlikely that anyone will crack AES with an additional proprietary security wrapper . Furthermore, information security is no longer an academic playground for brainiacs at Berkeley and MIT. Rather, it's serious business that impacts everything we do. Given this level of criticality, I'd rather see things like Common Criteria or FIPS certification than a publicity gimmick.
As a start-up, I understand that Permanent Privacy needs to generate buzz and all PR is good PR. Heck, I did the same thing as VP of marketing at a misguided CLEC during the boom. Security isn't like other technologies however, it's more about law, order, and safety. Oracle was dragged through the mud when it advertised its database as "unbreakable." Perhaps it's just me, but I think Permanent Privacy deserves a similar treatment in the market.
Have you founded a tech company?
Chances are, if you're a U.S. entrepreneur, you're about 39 years old and hold a bachelor's degree, and there's a good chance your company was started in the same state where you received your education, according to a study released Thursday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers from Duke and Harvard universities.
Based on a study of U.S. entrepreneurs who started their companies between 1995 and 2005, the findings show the median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 years old, with only 1 percent launching their company as teenagers. For those in their 50s, there's still hope--twice as many folks in this age group founded a tech company than those in their early 20s, according to the study.
The report also noted that 92 percent of U.S. entrepreneurs surveyed received a bachelor's degree, 31 percent a master's degree, and 10 percent a Ph.D. And then, you have folks like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard in his junior year and, nonetheless, built a tech empire.
"Because entrepreneurship is an indicator of economic vitality in regions and across the country, this study raises important policy questions about how to foster greater tech entrepreneurship to boost economic growth," Robert Litan, the Kauffman Foundation's research and policy vice president, said in a statement.
Graduates with an MBA degree founded tech companies within 13 years after getting their certificate, compared with folks with Ph.D.s, who generally waited 21 years to venture out as a tech entrepreneur. Maybe those with Ph.D.s wanted more time to research the notion of becoming an entrepreneur, before sticking their neck out.
The study also found that 45 percent of tech entrepreneurs started their venture in the same state where they received their education.
And here's a little bit of quick math to consider when selecting a university to get a higher-education degree: Start-ups in 2005 averaged sales revenue of $5.7 million and employed an average of 42 workers. Tech founders with advanced Ivy League degrees had companies that averaged sales of $6.7 million with 55 workers.
So, if you're going to attend college with the idea of starting a tech company later, consider an Ivy League school in a state where the cost of living is low because chances are good you'll remain in the area upon graduating, and employees often are the greatest expense to operations. That'll help with the profit margins, since going to an Ivy League school may mean your revenue will be higher.
There was a time when working at a start-up meant scrimping and saving one's way to untold wealth...or simply a self-inflicted pink slip. No more.
With all the VC money washing entrepreneurs' cars these days, it's hard to find much frugality in the Silicon Valley start-up.
As it turns out, however, there are great ways to save money without being an obnoxious miser, and Jason Calacanis, CEO of Maholo, has listed 18 of them. Here are a few of my favorites:
1. Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department....
16. Don't waste money on recruiters. Get inside of LinkedIn and Facebook and start looking for people--it works better anyway...
18. Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don't live in a $4,000 one-bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt--hire them!
The other tips are good, too, but I find these three above highly pertinent to my own experience managing Alfresco's U.S. operations. We're a highly distributed bunch, and so the only way to measure success is through actual productivity, not face time or the number of e-mails sent back and forth. We don't have office space, though we're thinking of getting some here in the "near shoring" capital of the world, Utah--want to sublet some space to us?). We don't have a phone system. We don't have a coffee machine. Well, I don't. :-).
With all that we don't have, we're forced to, well, work. Since we spend a lot of time working, we get the best machines for people (Macs, of course, tricked out) and good mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.).
I guess this is what I'd add to Jason's list:
19. Don't bother trying to hire everyone in the same place. Hire the best people you can find...wherever you happen to find them. Development is no longer something that has to be done within the same office. In fact, there are plenty of reasons to disperse developers. (It tends to lead to more modular architectures, for one.) And open source is a classic demonstration of the power of distributed development. The rest is sales and marketing, which should be as close to the customer as possible.
What are your top tips to add to Jason's list?
CORK, Ireland--A radiation detector initially created to protect orbiting satellites has found a new purpose inside cancer patients.
The Tyndall National Institute--a scientific research institute and graduate school in Cork, Ireland--has come up with a radiation detector that fits inside an implantable medical device that measures how well radiation therapy is working. The FDA approved the use of the DVS (Dose Verification System) from North Carolina's Sicel Technologies last August for breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, said Brendan O'Neill, head of the central fabrication facility at Tyndall.
The DVS collects information about patients and then transmits the data to an outside system. It also gets its power externally via its antenna. The device is designed to last as long as the treatment. Two detectors go into each DVS, said O'Neill. Sicel also makes an external version that is applied to the skin, called OneDose, that measures radiation from the most immediate dose of radiation.
The radiation detector module was originally created for the European Space Agency (ESA) to protect satellites from radiation, said O'Neill. The aerospace market, however, consists of only a few big customers so Tyndall decided to refashion its chips, reduce the size, and cut the costs to fit into another market.
It's part of an effort by the Irish government to create a homegrown tech industry. For the past few decades, multinational companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have come to the country to take advantage of a low 12.5 percent corporate percent tax rate. That's far lower than the usual E.U. tax rate, which can range in the 30 percent range, according to Gerard O'Brien, senior development adviser for Enterprise Ireland, a government organization charged with building local industries.
Initially, the multinationals primarily built fabrication and assembly facilities, but over the years have begun to increasingly locate design centers, research labs, European headquarters, and other so-called higher value facilities.
But the rapid evolution of the tech industry in Asia prompted a change in tech policy about five years ago. Now, the government is actively trying to get entrepreneurs to form indigenous start-ups and is priming the process by funding research, investing in venture funds that will invest in Irish companies, and trying to encourage more tech education. Tyndall, for instance, was created in 2004 out of an earlier organization, and one of its primary goals revolves around commercializing laboratory research locked inside the nation's universities and technical institutes. (The other major goal revolves around producing more PhDs, who the government hopes will stay in the country.)
The effort is in the early stages and the results of these programs likely won't be known for a while. "We haven't seen a high level of activity yet, but it has only been five years that we have been pumping money into research at this scale," said Michael Grufferty, the director of industry and innovation at Tyndall.
Still, there have been a few interesting things cropping up. Last year, Motorola invested in Anam, which has created an application for conducting money transfers via cell phones over international borders. It is targeted at the growing immigrant community here. Galway's Porto Media, meanwhile, is coming out with a kiosk that lets you download movies onto a flash memory key. (In the biggest tech deal here in a while, Ireland's Airtricity, which specializes in wind power, got bought by a Scottish utility for over $1 billion earlier this year.)
Other interesting projects at Tyndall:
• Paul Galvin is working on a handheld microelectricalmechanical system that can rapidly scan a person's DNA for susceptibility to different diseases.
• An array of silicon micro-needles that can penetrate a person's skin, but not hit the nerves. The result is, ideally, painless shots.
• High frequency diodes that will be used on the ESA's mission to study the planet Mercury in 2013. It may be possible to integrate cheaper, similar versions of these diodes into solar panels, according to Donagh O'Mahony, a research scientist at Tyndall.
Before I was a big-shot executive, the end of a year meant rest and relaxation. Now it's crunching fourth-quarter numbers and budgeting for 2008.
A friend in Japan read my fortune and told me that 2007 was my year of "turbulence," that 2008 is my year of "reunion," and that 2009 is my year of "wealth." Supposedly, 2010 will be "peace and stabilized," but at the rate I am going I can only hope to make it that far.
One full calendar year later, I am still happy that my company (MuleSource) gives software consumers a choice about the technology they use and ultimately, we, like the rest of the open-source vendors, bet on the fact that adoption eventually equals dollars. Having been a software consumer that felt burdened by proprietary products for most of my career, I retain a strong desire to flip the software industry on its head.
There is an inevitable flow of events in which software companies will either get on the path or be left behind. If you start a software company today that is not SaaS or open source you are betting that the market will somehow revert to 1999. And I think we all remember what happened in 2001 here in the valley.
Two years after founding this company I believe more than ever that open source is a question of when, not if.
... Read morePierre Ayotte, noted in a press release to be a "friendly upcoming Internet opportunist"--i.e. not The Devil Himself, just to be clear--would like to rent your soul for 10 bucks a week.
It's a new twist on an old nonprofit business model. He's gambling that the soul-leasing business will earn enough to keep him afloat from the charities that pay weekly to advertise on his site, RentYourSoul.com.
Ayotte swears he's not working for Beelzebub. He'll pay you $10--via PayPal, check, or bank note--and also donate $10 to the charity of your choice, selected from the nonprofits posting to RentYourSoul.
If you've ever been tempted to trade your soul for fame, fortune, or other significant gains, you're in good company: Homer and Bart Simpson, Dr. Faustus, Charlie Daniels' violin-wielding "Johnny," and any number of blues players have risked perdition with the Prince of Darkness. One CNET News.com staffer claims to have sold her soul in exchange for her almost supernatural Guitar Hero skillz.
Instead of skirting the fiery pit of eternal damnation, why not simply lease your soul for a good cause? It only takes a few minutes to post a photo of yourself, and if Ayotte displays it on the home page, you're soul-free for a week and 10 dollars richer afterward. No, you can't have hordes of dancing girls and wealth beyond your wildest dreams in exchange. But you can have the satisfaction of a deed well done for the good of others.
What's the risk? It's an asset almost all of us possess, and chances are, you're not using yours anyway.
The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.
Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.
There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo Crawler on your computer, and it will crawl the entire network, looking for computers, installed applications, devices, such as BlackBerrys, and information about users. That data is then uploaded to Paglo's secure servers and loaded into your personal Search Index.
Once all of this data is online, you can access it from any Web browser, so your access is not limited to only when you are at work. Maybe network admins can finally get some vacation time and still stay up to date with what's going on.
Paglo's UI basically works by allowing you to search for key terms you are curious about within your network. It can also, for example, allow you to find the e-mail address for any user on the network if there is a problem with his or her system. The real value of Paglo, in my opinion, however, is its Dashboard feature.
Paglo's Dashboard can be compared to a customizable home page, with space for widgets that show you different data about your network. So, if you want to save your search for computers with Office installed, you can put that data on your Dashboard, in graph form, for quick reference.
When I talked with Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, one of the things that they were the most excited with is the ability to share search queries with the Paglo community. If one IT pro comes up with an extremely useful, but complicated, search query, you can just grab that query and put it on your Dashboard, instead of having to come up with it yourself. This, in combination with Paglo's open API, creates a great opportunity for a variety of mashups and dashboard widgets.
Paglo is concentrating on delivering a quality, free product for now but will most likely be adding additional premium functionality in the future for a price. It's nice to see Paglo bringing IT into the Web 2.0 realm. Hopefully it will gain enough traction to grow into an essential tool.
Paula Abdul doesn't have anything on Marissa Mayer.
Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, will be on a panel of expert judges for YouBeTheVC.com, where people vie for venture capital funding though an online contest. The contest is something like American Idol meets The Apprentice.
Would-be entrepreneurs submit their business ideas online and the judges give them report cards. Members of the public then choose the winners from semifinalists picked by the judges.
"We're really excited about this contest because we really like the idea of being able to see what's new and where the innovations going to come from," Mayer said in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box program.
Asked what secrets to success there might be for start-ups, Mayer said businesses should focus on the user, have strong founders and build technology that can be deployed "in a bunch of different ways," like Google ads, which first appeared on search results but now appear on sites across the Web.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Another line of start-ups made their case at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit here on Thursday. A mix of more established and fairly new companies with services that are in beta--some that have already had one or two rounds of funding but are now seeking investors' attention again.
Here is a chunk of the start-ups:
Technology enablers
• Flock is a Web browser that lets you add tools and applications to share media and interact online. We have mentioned it before and the last version of the social browser is now up for beta before its official launch later this summer.
• Nextrials is in the Life Science space and has a software solution for clinical research. The company started in 1999 and the CEO James Rogers says their software is already used on 850 sites. Their product manages inventory, patient randomization and brings data together to lower costs and bring products to the market faster. Nextrials is focused on the middle market of biopharmaceutical and medical devices companies.
• Genius.com provides sales companies with a platform to track clients browsing on a company Web site. The company found that many sales representatives send tons of e-mails but there wasn't a way to track them. So they created "Genius e-mail," allowing them to follow customers' page-by-page visits to see "who's hot and who's not," said the CEO David Thompson.
• EffectiveUI is a company using rich Internet applications to provide interface solutions for clients like Adobe Systems, eBay and Discovery Channel. Its eBay platform, which is now in beta, is intended to give eBay customers tools to search and compare companies and products. It has a function that sorts pictures of a product one after another like it's done by hand. But users are accustomed to having the buttons where they've always been so it's a challenge. One admirable thing EffectiveUI did with Discovery Channel is an interactive platform for a cancer collage, where survivors of cancer tell their stories.
• Infopia is a platform where companies can manage transactions, inventory and customers. It feeds Web sites with information and keeps track of orders and market output. CEO Bjorn Espenes says the company has 350 customers and is partnering with companies like eBay and Salesforce.
Web services and collaboration
• Mindtouch provides a wiki platform for online media and brands. It pitched its Nexus--a white-label version publishing platform that can be implemented and customized in a company's own style.
• Box.net offers Web-based online file storage and sharing. This was one of the more straight-forward and clear presentations of the day, but what they're doing is not unique. They have been online for a while and claim to have more than 1 million users who share 700,000 files per day. What is new is a plug-in on Facebook to help share files with friends.
• Leads360 is targeted to the mortgage industry to streamline leads and turn them into customers. CEO Jeff Solomon says they have 10,000 subscribers and 500 clients using their software to get return on their investment on their leads.
• LongJump is offering companies an online platform for secure solutions of their catalog of applications and sharing information with colleagues and partners. They have a drag-and-drop interface where each application can be customized by the users.
• Forterra Systems supplies a virtual world applied to business applications. They want companies to start doing business in a virtual 3D environment with avatars while conducting real tasks like training, collaboration and real-time meetings. Pity though that the sound didn't work during the presentation, so we couldn't see the demo.
• Collarity wants to help companies monetize products online. Its tool is intended to help users to find good stuff. Many sales are lost because visitors can't easily find the products. Through search on what customers are looking for, Collarity generates recommendations such as "customers who liked this also liked this." This is also done by others, such as Cleverset and Aggregate Knowledge.
Mobile and wireless
• Nuvoiz is a Japanese-American company enabling voice over IP with a soft phone through Wi-Fi for small and medium-size businesses. Nuvoiz claims to be "the Skype for the enterprises".
• Azaire Networks is providing a broadband mobility infrastructure. Still it has not reached the U.S. market yet even though it is an American company. It mainly has customers in Europe using the 3G technology. CEO Bill Howe wants to "free my phone" and get more U.S. carriers than T-Mobile to support Wi-Fi.
• Digislide is an Australian company developing video projecting technologies. The device the company demonstrated projected a video from a laptop, but was big and boxy. Its latest project is Digismart Miniature Projection, which is expected to be launched in early 2008, where a projector as small as a finger can be integrated in to a cell phone or a laptop. You can also chose between different resolutions and you get an hour viewing time from a cell phone. Among the competitors are Nokia, Samsung and Light Blue Optics.
• GoWare provides what it calls DoMo--a do more platform, first launched at DEMO in February, with an open API allowing users to create a personalized homepage on your PC that is formatted to be used on your cell phone. The company also showed off plug-ins for World of Warcraft in which users can take their characters to their phone. GoWare is partnering with 4Info for personal ads put into the content.
Time and time again you hear the same maxim: it's the people, not the technology or the products, that determine whether a company sinks or swims.
Intel's growth over the last four decades, or Oracle's relentless expansion in software, are pretty good examples of how leadership and management decisions can greatly impact a company's history.
But how do you identify the buffoons and poseurs? The guys who are lucky to be there and probably destined to slip?
One clue is if the company displays its current stock price on a screen in the lobby or on a terminal on the CEO's desk, said Michael Moe, founder of
"If you see a stock quote on a CEO's desk, run for the hills," he told a breakfast audience at presentation held by the Churchill Club this week. "And when you have the CEO talk about the stock price instead of the business, it's not a good sign."
Another warning sign: too many "yes" men. "It's good to see if they have a balance, and do not surround themselves with princes that will do their whim."
Moe said he had a good feeling the first time he visited Starbucks several years ago. The company only had outlets in Seattle and Chicago, but it seemed focused and energetic. He became one of the first analysts to identify the company as a growing threat (which he chronicled in his book Finding the Next Starbucks).
Another bit of advice Moe offered the crowd is to watch demographics: a surge of old people or youth will create markets. Bond guru Mike Millken focuses on them relentlessly, he added.
