Software product manager, husband, father, and resident of San Francisco.
+1 415 742 1430 cell
Live Blogroll
John Dvorak speculates on Google’s future plans, including a Google Browser, a Google Internet-based OS, and even a Google PC. Might be more than speculation, given that Google is working on a $100 PC, along with other partners including AMD.
Good to see that Windows users are using Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle as a reason to switch to Apple products. Ths will only create more competition in the PC software industry.
But Apple needs to make it easier to move one’s personal data — contacts, calendar, tasks, memos, whitelists, buddy lists, photos, browser bookmarks and history, etc. — over to Mac.
Take a look at Apple’s .Mac site: nothing is mentioned about Windows to Mac personal data migration. Until this happens, I bet that Apple will be disappointed by the number of people who switch from Windows.
It takes more than great hardware to remove switching costs that have maintained the Windows monopoly; you need great software as well.
CNN has an interesting story on how Asian countries have failed to come to an agreement over how to setup data flow for the Indian ocean tsunami alert system. It’s interesting how the most logical system — one that replicates tsunami warning data to all countries — hasn’t gained traction.
Plenty has been written about the new Sony iPod wannabe. Here’s Mossberg’s review. Aside from product issues, there are naming issues with this product.
Who is the person responsible for naming products within Sony’s consumer division? And how on earth did they convince people that the following are good product names?
Did anyone ask, "we’re competing with a product elegantly named iPod — what’s an equally elegant name?" Did anyone ask, "we want to promote a new, proprietary music encoding standard that people will choose over the open standard MP3 — to have any hope of doing this, we need to convince people that the standard has higher quality for a lower file size — what’s a name that conveys these attributes?"
Nope. Sony chose the name "ATRAC3", which connotes the defunct 70′s format called 8-trac. And they chose "NW-HD1", which sounds vaguely like the lubricant WD-40.
Incredibly cool product: Splashpower provides power to devices without wires. You know that rat’s nest of cables connecting and powering all your devices and computers? Splashpower helps you get rid of it.
Imagine it your desk covered with a large Splashpower mat, all devices — iPod, phone, PDA, printer, mouse, keyboard, monitor, printer, still camera, video camera, etc. etc. — all communicating with each other wirelessly. That rat’s nest of cables: gone!
I would not be surprised at all if Apple, a couple of years from now, launches a new iPod, wireless mouse, and wireless keyboard that all powered by a Splashpower mat. Huge cool factor there.
Interesting discussion of the Wiki War, and two distinct business strategies by SocialText and Jot. The most interesting quote, IMHO, is below:
If we look at real growth curves, they are painfully flat for a long time until the "tip". Sam [Walton, founder of Wal*Mart] had only 20 stores after 20 years. Howard [Schultz, leader of Starbucks] only 8 outlets after 10. I know of no breakthrough that did not have this curve.
It takes a long time to build a business, sometimes longer than VC’s are willing, or able, to wait.
I’m catching up a bit. Below are some notes from the presentation on how to do initial product versions right, by Allen Blue, VP of Products at LinkedIn, given to the SVPMA (Silicon Valley Product Management Association) on January 5, 2005. I took these notes on my Treo, so they’re admittedly very terse. Still, these notes give the general gist of what was covered.
—
Focus on your strategic information assets – what are they, what are the dependencies, who generates them, which need to maximized? Out of this you can pick your target user and target scenario, and build to those.
GUR: growth, usage, revenue – these things must come in that order .
viral growth – how to setup? The product itself does the marketing, it’s cheap but you do not have control over it .
Plan on spending some time refining a feature once it has been built . LinkedIn PM team sets explicit quantitative goals for what a feature should do, and refine the feature until it hits those goals . They also refine a feature when the results from that feature drop off.
Two week trains. 9 engineers, 30 people.
Innovation versus interation: going from v0 to v1, let strategic information asset generation/dependencies guide you. Different from v1 on, where you listen more to customers.
Linkedin has self-imposed blindness, because they don’t yet reach their eventual customers. They market only to early to adopters. This will change eventually once their user base becomes more mainstream.
Hire the minimum number of specialists (developers, product designers), and have everyone else be a generalist. They have one product manager for every 3 engineers.
Quick to market is a key mantra for them.
Focus on early adopters helped them. The fact that they are based in Silicon Valley, which has lots of early adopters, helped them grow their network faster than a competitor that was based in LA and marketed to Hollywood folks, who were not typically early adopters.
Think of which use cases and distribution methods your competitors do, and which ones you will do, as a means to differentiate and generate revenue.
Think of when you deliver value to each constituency.
The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper is trying to reposition themselves as the "Bay Area’s LEADING Information Source":
I have two thoughts on this. First, the Chron deserves credit for realizing that their content won’t be printed on paper forever, and that they need to promote themselves as something other than a newspaper.
But, trying to position yourself as the LEADING information source of a region that’s home to Yahoo, Google, eBay, Ask Jeeves, and Craig’s List?! Sorry, guys, but you are not the leader of that group of companies. You would be lucky to be considered in the same league as these guys; they have much bigger repositories of information than you.
Do you really think your readers are so stupid to not to know this?
The Chronicle’s positioning is the marketing equivalent of Dan Qualye’s comparison of himself to Jack Kennedy during the 1988 vice-presidential debates. Here’s the snippet from Dan’s foot-in-mouth moment:
Quayle: "I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency."
Bentsen:
"Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy
was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy."(Omaha,
Nebraska, October 5, 1988)
Positioning has to be credible…
…described in this post on Bombay: Maximum City.
The Logitech Cordless 2.4 GHz Presenter looks like a nice product for anyone that presenters. Advancing and backtracking through slides during a presentation without having to constantly scurry back to the podium is a great thing in theory. So is having a countdown timer in the palm of your hand (checking your watch is an awkward movement).
But take a look at the picture on Amazon: this isn’t something that is completely hidden in the palm of your hand. It’s big. It’s a bulky, conspicuous device that people will notice, which will take their attention away from the presentation and points you are trying to make.
Good technology products enable a task, without getting in the way. iPod’s let you play music, without extra features that get in the way. Blog software lets people make posts quickly and easily.
The Logitech Presenter looks like it will only get in the way. If they could only make it smaller — and perhaps move the F5/Fade to Black buttons to a position where they are less likely to get pushed by accident when trying to advance or backtrack through slides — Logitech would have a winner on its hands.
What’s up with Logtech and making almost-great products that fail by being too bulky?
Their IO Digital Pen is another example of a great idea that is hamstrung by large size. I bought one of these to take meeting notes. I got sick of people asking me about the pen in meetings — and the overwhelming geekiness of the pen — I eventually stopped using it.
Why is Google hiring the technical lead for Firefox?
One idea: helping Firefox enables Google to keep more pressure on Microsoft, which directs engineering resources towards IE and away from MSN Search, which competes directly with Google. But could there be another reason?
I believe there is. Personalization. Searches that are personalized yield better results. For example, If a user is browsing wedding sites, a search for "usher"
should yield different results than the same search by a user has been
browsing the website of the musician "Usher".
But how to get the information required to personalize? Not through manual entry of interests, as Google does today. Personalization should be automatic. One way is by uploading browsing history and bookmarks to one’s search servers — with the user’s permission, of course. How to build this upload capability into the browser? Hire the lead engineer for Firefox.
Common Icon Representations article discusses how icons that are commonly used across web apps enhance usability, due to their familiarity.
With all the emphasis on standards and open source in the developer community, perhaps there eventually will be copyright-free icons that can be used, at no charge, in any web app.
Think of it this way: why should the concept of "open source" (i.e., freely available intellectual property) apply just to source code? Why not include icons and other visual assets?
Microsoft is moving towards a subscription model for Outlook, called Outlook Live, detailed here. Given all the issues that IT shops have with keeping Microsoft Exchange up, running, and virus-free, will Outlook Live work reliably enough for customers?
Interesting explanation of why simple standards prevail in Adam Bosworth’s Weblog: ISCOC04 Talk and in this post by Jonathan Schwartz.
In Michael Efford :: {Digital Designer} :: Journal there are some additional examples of how RSS can be used:
Blogs, news, mailing lists, weather reports, reviews, schedules, events – they’re all going to be (or already are) in RSS.
Michael also points out that his most requested file is his RSS feed, and raises an interesting question: if RSS becomes a prevalent form of web data, does design still matter?
RSSCalendar.com demonstrates another use for RSS: easily shared calendars for families, clubs, companies, and other groups.
Rafe Needleman discusses using RSS feeds as a marketing channel in Release 1.0 / Fresh Produce / RSS: Beyond the Blog. An example of one of the new generation of RSS-powered applications I mentioned in this post.
RSS has a chance to establish itself as a "polite" marketing channel that users can easily opt-into — and more important, opt out of. Given a choice between an email subscription — going to a clogged inbox, with no real guarantee that your email address won’t be sold or that you will be able to unsubscribe — and RSS, where you have total control over the feed, I believe consumers will increasingly choose RSS. Especially once the "add feed" usability issues get worked out.
IBM gives patent access: Other motives seen in open-source boost — to me, this looks like a shrewd way for IBM to do engineering and business development on the cheap, while at the same time reducing development risk.
You can think of these patents as "seed capital" — intellectual capital, not the green stuff — that IBM is giving to entrepreneurial developer community, so they can build startups. IBM can later acquire the best of the bunch, and sell their products through IBM’s global sales force.
In this sense, IBM is outsourcing some of their innovation, just as Cisco successfully did in the late 90s when they funded numerous startups, and subsequently acquired the most promising.
This is a good use for patents that might otherwise gather dust. At Xerox PARC, we had a lot of great technologies and patents that were never successfully productized. IBM’s move reduces the odds of their repeating that scenario.
IBM gives patent access: Other motives seen in open-source boost — to me, this looks like a shrewd way for IBM to do engineering and business development on the cheap, while at the same time reducing development risk.
You can think of these patents as "seed capital" — intellectual capital, not the green stuff — that IBM is giving to entrepreneurial developer community, so they can build startups. IBM can later acquire the best of the bunch, and sell their products through IBM’s global sales force.
In this sense, IBM is outsourcing some of their innovation, just as Cisco successfully did in the late 90s when they funded numerous startups, and subsequently acquired the most promising.
This is a good use for patents that might otherwise gather dust. At Xerox PARC, we had a lot of great technologies and patents that were never successfully productized. IBM’s move reduces the odds of their repeating that scenario.
Interesting account of Apple’s competitors in the MP3 player market try to position their products against the new iPod Shuffle in MacCentral: Digital audio vendors not afraid of iPod shuffle. We PM’s call this "tap dancing" because it involves a number of quickly invoked arguments against a competitive product, and because it’s hard to pull off.
Below is pretty good tap dancing that might get some users thinking about what the iPod Shuffle is missing (a screen).
"We have two reactions," said Dan Torres, vice-president of product
marketing for Rio, the first company to ship a mp3 player and still one
of the biggest players in the market. "First, we welcome Apple to the
flash space that we’ve been in for quite some time. I think it will be
good for the market. Our second feeling is something of a
disappointment. Apple shipped a somewhat neutered product.""A blind user interface [UI] or even a single line UI isn’t popular
with consumers. Ultimately consumers want a multi-line UI.
Historically, these types of products just don’t do very well."
My own iPod experience is that I only look at the screen to check the
title of a song I don’t recognize; if I only have 120 songs loaded,
they’ll likely be my favorites and I will recognize them without a
screen. It would be interesting to know what Apple’s market research indicates.
Below is unsuccessful tap dancing, which 1) talks about features that few people care about; then 2) muddies the water with an irrelevant argument:
"Ours have tons of features, like an FM tuner and recorder that you can
even schedule recordings to wake up, record something, and go back to
sleep. If you go to CES, there’s a flash player like every ten feet…."
Consumers’ dissatisfaction with FM radio is one driver of MP3 player growth. So why invoke an FM record/playback capability as a differentiator? Consumers in this area probably just want simplicity, which is what Apple is giving them with iPod Shuffle.
The best tap dancing is buried in the following quote:
"There isn’t a comparable flash player in our line. The closest
thing is the original MuVo we released four years ago. The iPod shuffle
does not have an LCD screen, which is something consumers definitely
want. If you consider the capacity of the iPod Shuffle to a Creative
flash player, we hold about double the amount of files in the 512MB or
1GB player," said Creative’s Vacante, referring to the smaller Windows
Media format that Creative and other players support but Apple does not."The [Creative] MuVo Micro has a built-in FM radio, FM recording,
line-in recording, and I think the iPod Shuffle just can’t compete. If
you look at battery life, it can’t compete there, either. Our battery
life ranged from 15-18 hours. Some players do have a rechargeable
battery, such as the MuVo Slim," which Vacante notes also comes in an
array of colors.
Number of files, battery life, and file formats — from my slightly informed perspective, that’s what Apple’s competitors’ positioning should focus. Because they all facilitate simplicity. More files means you don’t have to choice; just load up all your files. More file formats means you can use any tool to rip your songs, worry-free. More battery life means you don’t have to hunt down an outlet for every few hours of play.
Apple has performed the MP3 player chess game very well. It just closed one beach head for competitors to develop, the low-end space. However, there is at least one more beach head it can capture: support for Windows Media and Ogg Vorbis. Doing this would eliminate one of the few remaining meaningful points of differentiation available to Apple’s competitors.
In particular, Ogg support would encourage music codec innovation outside Microsoft, and reduce the likelihood that Microsoft comes out with a radically better music format that it can then leverage to extend its influence in digital music.
To Blog or Not to Blog : article on enterprise blogging to enhance intranet content.
Nice that someone has built a utility for Speeding Up Acrobat Reader‘s startup. Now if only Adobe could build faster startup functionality into Acrobat itself…
Blog Business Summit mentions how a popular blogger (Robert Scoble) gets more traffic, web mentions, etc. than major PR firms. IMHO, the post is inconclusive as to whether blogging is more or less effective than traditional PR for generating awareness — but it’s certainly in the same ballpark. Given blogging’s short history, that in itself is a victory.
With all the stories about people being fired for posting to a blog, it’s good to know that Sun has a Policy on Public Discourse to delineate company policy. Interestingly, none of the "blog-caused firing" stories I’ve seen mentions a published company policy regarding employee blogs. Such policies will come eventually, just as they did with email.
I stumbled upon Linkify – power tools for distributed teams — interesting approach, but IMHO, collaboration software companies need to position their products as blog tools first, and collaboration tools second. Why? Because blogs are increasingly becoming the standard for collaboration. Whatever collaboration tool one builds, a prospective customer will always compare the tool to what they already know that is somewhat similar — in this case, Blogger or Typepad. I believe that all collaboration software firms that do well will have some credible positioning around blogs.
Netflix recently revised their site and now has rss feeds of one’s queue, rental activity, and recommendations.
The benefit: you can now view your queue in whatevery is your aggregation application of choice — My Yahoo, Feedster, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever — without having to visit and login to the Netflix website.
The implementation is fairly secure, since each user’s RSS URL contains a unique, long alphanumeric string that serves the same purpose as a password. Transporting RSS over HTTPS/SSL would make the implementation secure enough for other applications, such as reporting financial transactions. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This is the first time I’ve seen an *application* — not just a news source — provide an RSS feed to provide custom reports for each user. Netflix’s RSS feeds represent a subtle but important inflection point for the application development. How long until banks start providing customers with feeds of their recent transactions? Or until airlines provide feeds of frequently flier activity? Until hotels provide feeds of room charges? Feeds of package tracking activity from Fedex and Amazon? Feeds of job listings from Monster? Enterprise application reports? The list of possibilities is long indeed…
RSS is now where HTML was a decade ago. Back then, the central question was: how to we take our existing application, built on client-server or mainframe terminal emulation, and make it run in a browser? The goal was to eliminate the costs associated with client application distribution and maintenance.
Today the question is, how do we take our web apps, and break off chunks that can securely be provided via RSS? The goal now is to eliminate the costs associated with application integration. These costs can consume as much as 50% of an enterprise IT department’s budget.
To clarify: RSS output will not replace HTML apps — it will simply coexist with HTML apps, to make a majority of integration tasks that are trivial to solve. So that IT departments can focus on the hard integration problems.
How to RSS our app? This is a question can be asked by any company that builds web applications… which is just about any company that builds software or has an IT department.
Given the size of the opportunity, it will be interesting to see who, if anyone, can monetize the RSS trend, to easily build RSS feeds that are flexible, secure, manageable, reliable, and scalable — just as BEA did for HTML apps a decade ago.
Hi, Al. You’ve seen Findory’s personalized RSS feeds, right?
They are unique to each reader. Very unusual. And they change based on the articles you read through them.
Netflix’s RSS feeds are pretty cool. They are another good example of RSS feeds unique to a specific user.
I thought Amazon Wishlist RSS feeds were a third example, but those are provided through a third party using the Amazon Web Services API, not directly by Amazon.
Hi Greg,
Good point. Yes, I have seen Findory’s personalized RSS feeds, have imported them into My Yahoo, and read them every day. Very useful feature.
Regarding Amazon’s wishlists being available only as web services: I agree, they should be additionally available as RSS.
In fact, I see RSS as stealing some of web services’ thunder, since they provide a simpler means for end users, without programming skills, to incorporate third party data into their RSS readers. RSS is usable by a large majority of web users; web services (WSDL/SOAP/XML) are very flexible but usable by only a small minority of users with the appropriate skill set.
Seeing this, web marketing managers for banks, airlines, hotels, etc. will typically direct their teams to build per-user RSS feeds before building web services.
Because of this, RSS will push out the point of mass adoption of web services a couple of years — but at the same time, will provide many useful examples of why companies need to open up access to their systems using SOA technologies.
MySQL is getting better: Two Open-Source Databases Add Enterprise Appeal. How long until MySQL starts to erode Oracle revenues, as JBoss has done to BEA? It won’t be immediate: as part of my day job, I’ve surveyed enterprise software customers and have found that fewer than 2% have any desire to use MySQL.
This is surprising: in the web world, MySQL is accepted as the standard database platform. Heck, even Google uses it — they got a bit more data than the typical Fortune 500 customer. Oracle’s database does continue to improve and add new features — but fewer and fewer customers really understand what these new features actually do. (I’ve been there, presenting Oracle, and have seen customers’ eyes glaze over when shown ever more obscure improvements.)
Given that the vast majority of Oracle’s revenues come from database sales, MySQL — not Microsoft — could well be Oracle’s biggest threat. This puts Oracle’s acquisition of Peoplesoft into perspective — as a way to climb up the technology stack and diversify revenues away from databases, which are slowly being commoditized. It won’t happen overnight, it might take a decade, but it will happen.
Interesting story: IBM Buys Identity Company to Nail Down Who’s Who. Wonder what they’ve done to prevent abuse, for instance, to aid identify theft.
Interesting review by Business Week about Collapse, a book exploring the connection between business activity, economics, ecology, and historical cycles.
Good post on why I hate PDF.
PDF is such a frustrating format. It takes too long to load, is a memory hog, and provides few benefits over HTML. The only benefit over well-crafted HTML (no frames, liquid width, etc.) is the ability to specify page breaks. That’s great for the 0.1% of documents I print — but not for the vast majority that I only view online.
As a marketing guy, I wonder: how is it that Adobe has convinced about 50% of web users to download the Adobe reader add-inn to view PDF’s in IE? This is a truly amazing feat of technology propagation.
Apple has filed a patent for a WiFi ipod.
Funny to look back on this post five years on… a WiFi iPod is basically an iPod Touch.
Apple has filed a patent for a WiFi ipod.
This blog is meant to focus on technology products, but this new brand of beer from Budweiser, called Bud Extra, looks too awful to ignore. It’s beer with caffeine, guarana, ginseng, and "natural flavor". Sound appetizing? I don’t think so.
As a marketing guy, I wonder how on earth the Bud brand managers came up with this. People drink beer to relax with friends. Caffeine, guarana, and ginseng don’t t help with that — they are stimulants. On the other hand, when do people have drinks with caffeine, guarana, and ginseng? When they want to recharge, say, before going back to snowboarding. Why on earth would you want to drink something alcoholic that slows you down, impedes your coordination, and makes you more likely to wipe out on the slopes?
Business Week has a negative review of iPod Photo titled, "playing music is enough". I disagree — displaying photos on an iPod solves addresses a common use case for some of us. But I agree with author Stephen Wildsrom‘s comments about why the iPod fails in its task.
Displaying photos on an iPod is great for new parents that want to show a "brag book" of baby pictures. A book of photos is yet another thing to carry in a diaper bag, and can only show a couple of dozen pictures. The promise of a photo iPod is that you can show all your pictures, in a very small package.
Unfortunately, Apple didn’t quite get it right: the screen itself is too small, as is the screen resolution, to clearly view pictures. Try it for yourself at an Apple Store.
The Apple store staff may suggest that, as a workaround, you display iPod pictures on a TV — that’s not an acceptable workaround. Carrying extra cables removes one of the advantage of iPod Photo — a small package. And who wants to interrupt a picture about one’s kids to go find a TV with the appropriate input jacks?
Please Apple: give us a bigger screen, better resolution, and power management software to keep this bigger screen from burning up too much battery life when all we are doing is playing music.
For Christmas I got an xm2go player, a handheld device that
can play XM radio. While I appreciate the generosity behind the gift, I don’t
like the xm2go player. In fact, I’m down on the whole XM radio concept.
Why is that, given that XM has millions of subscribers and
lots of favorable press?
XM is indeed better than FM, the current radio incumbent. XM
has about 130 music stations, ad-free, while FM has maybe a dozen or so clear
channels (pun intended) interrupted continually by ads. In other words, XM
captures more of the long tail than FM does. The long tail is described here
and here.
But for someone who’s hooked on an iPod and Internet radio, XM
is frustratingly constrained. 130 channels are pretty generic stuff – basically
what you would find on FM, without ads. Another 100 or so are local news and
weather. For any given place, you will only care about 1 or 2 of these
stations. There only one reggae channel, nothing in terms of world beat,
electronica, drums & base, and other music genres I listen to.
This pales to what I have on my iPod: one month of total listening
hours, of my favorite bands, organized into my own custom playlists, playable
anywhere, no antennae required. If I want to discover new music, I can visit the
literally thousands of Internet radio stations available in iTunes, Live 365, and other places.
These options capture much, much more of the long tail than XM does. Here’s someone else who agrees with me.
But, Internet radio yet cannot be played on the go, say, in a
car or on a plane. Whoever marries the vast selection of Internet radio with the
portability of an iPod will do very well. How is this likely to happen?
It’s possible that an MP3 manufacturer – Apple, Creative, or
someone else – will realize that to achieve the next level of differentiation,
they need to create the ability to record and playback Internet radio
broadcasts. Essentially, Tivo to Go for music.
Differentiation is critical – it won’t be that long before competitors are able to make something almost as good as an iPod, at a lower cost. Apple cannot afford this kind of cost-based competition — just look what happened to it in the PC business. It needs to figure out the next point of differentiation.
How would iPod radio work from a user perspective? Imagine a future version of iTunes that
lets you specify which Internet radio stations to include on your iPod, and an
iPod with built-in WiFi. This next-gen iPod would, when a WiFi connection was
available, continually record each of your favorite Internet radio stations,
keeping a cache of the past several hours broadcast. You could play these radio
stations when your iPod was docked, or when you were carrying it with you.
If Apple can partner with, and/or replicate, the vast amount of Internet radio stations on Live365 and establish a workable subscription-based, ad-free business model, it can have an offering much more difficult to replicate than its current crop of iPods. Just as no one — not Yahoo, not Amazon — can replicate Ebay’s scope of online auctions, a network of thousands of Internet radio stations created by music enthusiasts would give Apple an asset that no one else — perhaps not even Microsoft — could replicate. If Apple can do this, it can deliver on the promise of becoming entrenched as "The Microsoft of Music".
There’s lots of discussions about iPods and radio… the creative juices are flowing in this area… it’s
only a matter of time before Apple — or someone else — seizes the next level in the portable music player business.
SilkRoad Technnology claimed last February to be working on an enterprise blogging tool but they have not yet followed through. They have a content management system — but that’s not the same as a streamlined blogging tool. Less is more.
Phishers are getting better and better at their trade. The other day I got an email, supposedly from Washington Mutual bank, that asked me to visit the site personalwamu.com. After careful examination, I’m pretty sure that it’s a phishing site. But I shouldn’t have to guess — I should be able to leverage the collective knowledge of other web users to have my browser or email reader tell me when I’m looking at an email or a website that is known to be part of a phishing scam.
I’ve searched to see if there is some kind of publicly available blacklist of phishing sites, but none seems to be available. This article points to a lack of a phish blacklist. Given the prevalence of phishing, the costs of associated fraud, the potentially very high cost of associated lawsuits against companies that fail to prevent phishing (think HIPAA), it’s surprising that neither the technology, financial services, nor health care industries are working together to create a such a directory of phishing sites.
Is a phish blacklist out there?
Phishers are getting better and better at their trade. The other day I got an email, supposedly from Washington Mutual bank, that asked me to visit the site personalwamu.com. After careful examination, I’m pretty sure that it’s a phishing site. But I shouldn’t have to guess — I should be able to leverage the collective knowledge of other web users to have my browser or email reader tell me when I’m looking at an email or a website that is known to be part of a phishing scam.
I’ve searched to see if there is some kind of publicly available blacklist of phishing sites, but none seems to be available. This article points to a lack of a phish blacklist. Given the prevalence of phishing, the costs of associated fraud, the potentially very high cost of associated lawsuits against companies that fail to prevent phishing (think HIPAA), it’s surprising that neither the technology, financial services, nor health care industries are working together to create a such a directory of phishing sites.
Is a phish blacklist out there?
Synopsis: Enterprise communication is broken. A new kind of blogs — enterprise blogs — can improve communication within corporations. Traditional enterprise software companies are unlikely to capitalize on the need for corporate blogs. The most likely beneficiaries are consumer blogging firms like SixApart and Pyra/Google.
In my job as a product manager, it’s critical to efficiently communicate real-time with as many people as possible. When you have globally distributed engineering, sales, marketing, consulting, support, and education teams consisting collectively of thousands of people, this is extremely difficult. It’s even harder when you throw in customers dispersed across 40,000 companies.
I’m not alone. Enterprises everywhere have people who need to communicate across organizational and geographic lines. Yet the tools enterprises typically provide to address this need — email, intranets, webex, and conference calling — are incredibly insufficient. Here’s why:
What’s needed? Enterprise blogging. The ability for knowledge workers within organizations to easily publish their messages, and for colleagues, customers, and suppliers to easily assimilate those messages.
Enterprise blogging is not the same as everday blogs. With a typical blog, one person writes a post that the whole world can see; security is not an issue. With an enterprise blog, one person writes a post intended only for a limited pool of co-workers to see; security is critical. With a typical blog, the author is working in the medium of the web — commenting on something they’ve read online. With an enterprise blog, the author is often summarizing on a piece of work — document, powerpoint, software application, etc. — that they have produced and wish to distribute. A typical blog is the voice of an individual; associating your blog with others ("blogrolls") is nice to have but not critical. With an enterprise blog, it’s important to know who else in the organization is blogging so in order to be as informed as possible, and to search across all accessible blogs in your company.
What we are talking about is taking the features of a consumer blogging system such as Blogger or Typepad, and adding the following:
This is an initial feature list. I’m sure as this space is explored, more feature ideas will be generated. What would the benefits be of an enterprise blog?
Fast publishing, rich collection, efficient organization. If you make it easy for people to publish, they will. That’s why we have 8 million consumer blogs. Often the employees with the most knowledge are te busiest. Why? Gathering information takes time. And people want to speak to those in the know. If you make it easy for them to publish — literally, typing remote@typepad.com — you make it very easy. This will in turn lead to their knowledge being online, where it can be tapped by all appropriate co-workers.
Just-in-time knowledge. People are busy. Organizations are typically quarterly-focused. Few people have time for training. People need the ability to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis. By providing a rich collection of corporate knowledge — not a dead intranet site — enterprise blogs support the way people actually work. This is a huge market. Today there are 8 million bloggers. There might be 50 million in 5 years. Get each one paying $10 a month, or $100 per year, to publish — a very reasonable amount compared against other components of employee overhead (expenses), and you are talking about a untapped five billion dollar market. How many of those can you find in the software industry?
Existing corporate portals will not be able to re-engineer their products in time to compete with an existing blog company, such as Pyra or SixApart — who goes after the enterprise blogging market. Why not? Enterprise software companies typically have the following in their corporate DNA:
What’s the timeframe for enterprise blogging? Very soon. Pyra and SixApart could probably meet the user needs outlined above within one or two major releases — that is, one or two years. Plus they have large bases of consumer bloggers — many of whom can use enterprise blogs in their day jobs.
Welcome to the eight millionth blog onthe Internet. Why am I adding to the cacaphony of the blogosphere?
Let’s begin…
Sree is discussing. 
I do not like PDF because
1) It takes long time to open up from web sites and usually freezes up the internet explorer
2)Hard to read. Unable to copy text.
3) Lot of forms are in PDF and it doesnt support editing. Have ended up filling too many forms by hand just because it is PDF!