Small business defense against cybercrime
Small businesses can innocently expose themselves to cybercrime when an employee opens an email that appears to be from the CEO, not updating the anti-virus program or having a laptop lost or stolen.
Eduard Goodman, Chief Privacy Officer for Identity Theft 911 has seen an increase in small businesses being targeted for cybercrime within the last five to seven years. Highly desirable data include customer information lists and personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, dates of birth and account numbers.
A recent survey by Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance shows 85 percent of small business owners believe their company is safe from hackers, viruses, malware or a cyber-security breach. Sixty-nine percent rely on Internet security for their business’s success.
Yet, the same survey shows 77 percent don’t have a formal Internet security policy for employees and 49 percent don’t even have an informal policy.
So how can small businesses protect themselves?
Ensuring your business has the latest anti-virus, spyware and firewall programs is one method of protection, according to Goodman. Training on how to recognize phishing emails is essential as fraudsters will send emails from someone like the CEO of a company so employees think they have to open the email.
“Question what you’re clicking on, question where it’s coming from,” says Goodman. Have an awareness to take that extra 10 seconds to ask ‘Hey did you send me something? Is it legit?’”
Startup BitGym aims to inspire geeks to work out with iPads, iPhones
– Alastair Goldfisher is a contributor for PE Hub and acting Editor-in-Charge at Venture Capital Journal, both Thomson Reuters publications. This article originally appeared here. Any views expressed are his own. –
With more and more VC-backed personal health and fitness companies targeting the hardcore exercise fanatic, it was only a matter of time before a startup emerged to go after the less enthusiastic cardio burner.
Witness BitGym, a startup being launched out of the Rock Health accelerator in San Francisco that says it has raised “some” seed funding.
The aim of the company’s technology is to make exercise seem more like a video game rather than a workout. “Running sucks now. That’s where we come in,” the company says on its website.
Users put their iPhone or iPad on the rack of any treadmill, elliptical machine or stationary bike and the BitGym app syncs with the machine to portray, for instance, a car driving on a race track. With a forward-facing camera, the BitGym app could track the eye so that the user can steer the game with head movements.
When I told the co-founders how much I run and bike and that I don’t use treadmills, they said I’m not part of the target market.
from MediaFile:
Confused about media and ad technologies? There’s a Lab for that.
Between the bazillion ad technology companies all claiming to revolutionize online advertising and an explosion of devices and services that promise to deliver movies straight from the Internet to the TV, it's a full time job keeping tabs on what can do what.
That's why Interpublic Group's Mediabrands launched Media Lab last Thursday, a 5,000 square foot space dedicated to learning and figuring out which end is up with various technologies available to marketers.
IPG vets technology before it can even make it to the front door of the Lab -- meaning just because it's out there doesn't mean it makes the cut for testing. More than 500 companies are in its database and the Lab keeps in radio contact with venture capital firms and emerging media and tech related companies both large and small to stay on top of trends.
During a recent tour of the Lab in mid-town Manhattan -- it targets high level chief marketing officers who usually make the rounds in a four hour stint -- this reporter was greeted by a television screen that switched its programming based on gender facial recognition.
There was the room with a nice comfy sofa in front of several flat screen TVs that had just about every kind of over-the-top service, including Google TV and its one very confusing remote. There was a mock retail store that showed off technology that helped clerks stock popular items (and those less popular). And a mock store-front window that showed off the latest collections inside and allowed people to order clothes right off the window -- even if the shop was closed for the day.
The Lab isn't just there to show off. It's also expected to pull its weight within IPG and help make money for the colossal ad holding company, Matt Seiler, global CEO of Mediabrands, explained. For instance, the Lab is very much a VAR (tech parlance for "value added retailer') selling the technology to marketers as a third party vendor. It also makes money by consulting with brands.
from MediaFile:
Online education site raises $3 mil in a round led by Groupon founders
Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell have invested in online educational site (with one complicate name) Udemy through their venture capital fund Lightbank. Udemy just announced a $3 million Series A round of financing led by Lightbank that also includes funding from MHS Capital and 500 Startups.
Udemy plans to use the money for hiring and marketing and biz development.
Udemy "the academy of you" offers 6,000 courses covering all sorts of hobby-related subjects like social marketing, how to build a iPhone app, and Art 100 in addition to more traditional topics like intro to psychology. About 90 percent of Udemy's courses are free.
Online education is a pretty hot sector now -- just go ask the Washington Post and its Kaplan division which for the most part has been the driver of growth behind the company synoumous with Watergate and newspapers . Even News Corp is getting in on the act and set up an education unit focused on technology last year.
The $3 million round follows $1 million in funding from MHS Capital, 500 Startups, and several other individual investors.
from Environment Forum:
Steve Jurvetson on clean tech innovation that will change the world
(This article by Felicity Carus first appeared on Clean Energy Connection and has been edited for length. Any opinions expressed are her own.)
What venture capitalists really think and what they say aren’t always the same thing.
Steve Jurvetson, from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, last week gave his overview of disruptive innovation in clean tech at the Always On Going Green conference in San Francisco.
The man who famously invested $300,000 for a 30 percent stake in Hotmail and made $250 million for his VC firm when Microsoft bought the company two years later says there is an “explosion of possibilities” of synthetic genetics in clean tech.
In August, one of Jurvetson’s portfolio companies, Genomatica, filed an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company uses computerized biotechnology modeling to design high-volume chemicals from renewable sources such as cellulosic biomass.
DFJ joined a consortium of investors including VantagePoint in raising $84 million to finance Genomatica. Tate & Lyle and Mitsubishi are among its partners.
Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?
– Chris Dixon is the co-founder of Hunch and of seed fund Founder Collective. This blog originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –
“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” – Steve Jobs
I sometimes wish that instead of working on Internet and software projects, I worked on cleantech or biotech projects. That way, when I came home at night, I’d know that I had literally spent my day trying to cure cancer or prevent global warming. But information technology is what I know, and it’s probably too late for me to learn a new field from scratch.
That doesn’t mean information technology can’t improve people’s lives. Google’s search engine helps people find information, which, for example, makes cancer and cleantech researchers more productive. Skype (Dixon is an investor) allows companies to collaborate remotely, and connects people with friends and family around the world. In the area of information technology, we create infrastructure and hope that people use it for more good than bad.
That said, the best entrepreneurs seem to follow a path of increasing gravitas. Scott Heiferman started out selling online ads and is now creating new communities. Jack Dorsey created Twitter and is now democratizing payments so sole proprietors can compete on a level playing field with large companies. Elon Musk started with online payments and is now developing electric cars and space programs.
Founders of large companies sometimes also follow the path of increasing gravitas. Google is developing new energy technologies, self-driving cars and other world-changing technologies. Bill Gates devotes almost all of his time and money to charity.
The tech press is preoccupied with investments, trends, exits, and other “inside baseball” topics. But these are all means to an end. Investments provide fuel for entrepreneurs to convert ideas into products. Trends shape the terrain that entrepreneurs navigate. Exits provide financial incentives for investors and entrepreneurs.
Technology has not change the world. It makes everything worse. We consume more electricity than ever before and we still use coal to power up most of our gadgets. Coal emission is on the rise. So did they make a difference?
Silicon Valley recruiter on tech hiring frenzy: “Everyone’s desperate”
Robert Greene, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based GreeneSearch Inc, specializes in recruiting hands-on talent for technology-focused companies, primarily startups. He provided his perspective on the current boom in technology hiring.
Q: How would you characterize the tech hiring market now? A: It’s very competitive right now. It’s been like that for a while; it’s probably heated up even more of late. You have the bigger companies – Groupon, Zynga, Google, LinkedIn, companies that have been proven and successful – and then you have all these startups. The supply doesn’t meet the demand.
Q: Is there an advantage to being a small company? A: The advantage they have over those (big) companies is that they can move really quickly. They’ll do everything in a day and make an offer and hope that person will accept right away before they get into the bigger companies. Those are their selling points. They have to move quickly, they have to be agile, have to have the compelling story, have to give equity, along with competitive salaries.
Q: Do you think we’re heading toward another tech bubble like we saw in 2000? A: I’ve been recruiting for seven years. I know back in the boom companies were offering cars and huge bonuses and stuff to attract engineers, and that’s not happening. I’m seeing real money – I’ve heard that Google is making huge counter offers, real money.
Q: How many offers are your top engineers getting? A: I had a guy out of Amazon in Seattle who had three offers. We’re seeing multiple offers. I had one instance where an offer was signed and Google countered and made him a huge offer back and he stayed at Google.
Q: Are you seeing companies looking less at top-tier schools? A: No, I’m not seeing them sacrifice the quality. Everyone’s desperate, trying to figure it out. I don’t know if there’s any simple solution other than move quickly, have a compelling story.
Q: How long do you think this boom will last? A: I hope it lasts for a while. Usually it goes in cycles. It’s been reported on more recently – but it’s been happening for a while. The news is on this now because of the LinkedIn IPO. Now there’s some real exits and big exits. We’re not going to have a time like we had in 2000 where companies didn’t have business plans or revenues and were going public. I’ve been hearing the B (bubble) word a lot – but I think it’s more realistic.
Exactly what are they looking for? More MBAs? Salesmen? Certainly not engineers.
“Lean Startup” evangelist Eric Ries is just getting started
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
“Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time,” Eric Reis told me. “If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.”
Ries speaks with confidence, likely because people seem to listen. In fact, he’s become one of Silicon Valley’s best salesmen, largely by preaching what seems to be common sense: in order to maximize resources, companies need to find out what customers want as quickly as possible and capitalize on those findings.
Just one indicator of Ries’s power: entrepreneurs from 100 countries watched his sold-out, second-annual “Startup Lessons Learned” conference streamed live recently from San Francisco. (Its aim? “To unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup,” said Ries.) Another indicator: Ries’s new book, “The Lean Startup”, doesn’t come out until September, but is already the 11th-most popular book in the business and investing section of Amazon.
Ries, 32, never expected he would make his mark as a tech evangelist. A Yale grad who studied computer science, he began his career as an entrepreneur while still in school. (He now calls his short-lived startup, Catalyst Recruiting, “a footnote to a footnote.”) But even then he found himself “considered not only an expert in programming but in startups” by local incubators and two venture firms who asked him to be an adviser.
He’s quick to note the absurdity of the situation. “We spent all (of Catalyst’s) money on marketing, thinking there would always be more. Based on what I was reading in magazines at the time, I thought the rules for entrepreneurship meant being at the right place at the right time, working hard, breaking all the rules, having great perseverance, then pounding the keyboard some more and having a beer.”
A broader network of people began listening to Ries in 2008, after he began espousing lessons he’d learned as the CTO and co-founder of the 3D virtual world IMVU. Many of those lessons centered on figuring out what works as quickly as possible through constant iteration and customer feedback. (IMVU, which Ries left four years after its 2004 founding, used to toss fresh code into its production cycle 50 times a day, he said.)
Chicago incubator hopes to SPARK startups
Think you can form a technology company from scratch in just a week? That’s the idea behind SPARK, a new incubator program launched by a group of Chicago-area entrepreneurs.
The program is aimed at seeding viable ideas for Web-based and mobile applications during an upcoming startup competition that runs from July 22 to 27 in the Windy City.
“SPARK is about doing, not talking,” said 29-year-old Maliha Mustafa, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur and SPARK co-founder. “What we’d like to do is actually execute.”
Toward that end, Mustafa and her fellow co-founders, including Seth Kravitz – who started a Web design company from his dorm room at Ohio State that later grew into a 55-person operation – are winnowing down contest applications to 60 participants.
During the six-day competition, the chosen candidates will form teams, decide on business models, build working prototypes and present their elevator pitches in front of angel investors and venture capitalists.
“What makes an organization, what makes a startup successful? We want to give them every fighting chance,” said Mustafa, noting there is no entry fee.
In the end, three final teams will face off, with the winner receiving a cash grant of $10,000 or more. The fledgling companies will also receive donated mentorship services in marketing and development.
from MediaFile:
Tech Summit Q&A, day 3: “Unsexy” tech companies
The third day of the 2011 Reuters Global Technology Summit saw a lot of discussion about the valuation and potential of "sexy" social networks and lesser known startups.
Saad Khan, Partner at CMEA Capital, talked about investing in LiveOps and Pixazza, two companies the former which he called "unsexy", and how they "stitch together the world's labor force."
One could say that Real Networks Chairman Rob Glaser, who saw his company's Real Player go from being the standard used in streaming media on the Web to a bit-player, is familiar with what is and isn't "sexy". Here he is talking about revamping his company around phenomena:
And Google Ventures Managing Partner Bill Maris questioned the value of social media startups:
"Are our smartest people working on our most difficult problems?"
It is not just small businesses, but also small charities, churches and non-profit organisations, as they tend to be more open to communications (including emails) from others.
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