austinpreneur

We need new security questions - obscurity is no defense in the long tail of social networking

Everyone knows that financial institutions are behind the times with technology and are way too paranoid to participate in social media. But it seems like they aren't paying enough attention to social media and the trend to publish more and more information publicly that use to be private.

If you're friends with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn and troll through their Twitter and Flickr feeds, you'll find that you can answer most of the typical "security questions" for financial institutions. They picked obscure questions such as, "What was the name of your first pet?" and "What street did you live on in your first house?" thinking that they would be difficult for someone other than you to figure out. But these days most of the questions are pretty easy to figure out for a social media sleuth.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger. With hundreds of millions of people using social networking it is clear that its not just a fad. The generation of tomorrow will grow up without many of inhibitions that we have about sharing information about ourselves publicly. Today your photos, your day to day activities and your relationships with others are available to the world through Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The trend is to share more not less, so what else will be shared tomorrow?

I think this is a real concern! This is ripe for abuse and needs to be addressed proactively by financial institutions before clever social media criminals expose this common vulnerability for rampant identity theft.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Lie. Come up with alternate answers to the common security questions such as "what is your home town?" and always use the fake answer that only you know (after all, you've always wanted to be from the Bronx, haven't you?). That way even your mom can't figure out your security questions. 

I want an eye.fi card that works in reverse (thanks @egoh)

This morning I was tweeting about how much I love the digital picture frame in my office. 

 

The reason I'm loving it is because I just put new pictures on it. The problem is that it's hard to get pictures onto the digital picture frame - it has an SD card that I need to pop out, take home, copy new photos onto, and bring back.

What I really want is a picture frame that downloads new pictures wirelessly from my Facebook account - including my own pictures as well as those of my friends (similar to what Chirp does on my desktop). There is a Y Combinator company called PicWing that does this, but I'm hesitant to get tied into a proprietary platform.

Eric Goh had the great suggestion of trying to use an Eye-Fi in reverse. An Eye-Fi is an SD card with a wireless chip in it so that it can upload pictures to your computer or the Internet wirelessly (the good ones geotag the photos with GPS too). What I really want is one that works in reverse, downloading pictures automatically to whatever picture frame I put the SD card into.

Man seeks Entrepreneur

(I'm reposting this message for a friend and fellow entrepreneur, Barry Thornton)

Hello co-Brainiacs, I am engaged in a search for an Entrepreneur and though you might have some leads.

 

A couple of months ago I invented a device that does a very good job of converting wind or water into electricity.  I did the patent search and reached the conclusion that it is mine (of course filing a patent helped).  Built a rough prototype to verify that it works, it does.  It is very simple and low cost in nature, efficient, has very low manufacturing tolerances (low precision, it will work in dusty and dirty environments, even underwater,  with very little maintenance or skill (the old AK47 idea)), and can be mostly built from typically indigenous materials (wood, bamboo, local cloth, etc).  Only high-tech stuff is some simple magnets, copper wire, and very common/simple electronic parts (although the performance goes up a lot with a bit more real high tech parts).

 

I came up with it while thinking about energy in third world countries.  The economic model was to license the technology for local fabrication and sale.  I later realized that employing Seth Godin's Tribe model would work well for selling finished units in First World countries such as ours, and that the generator part of it will work well on things like small water wheels etc. so there are several products to offer.

 

It is ideal for a bootstrap entrepreneur; I will provide the product development, engineering, and documentation.  I will also work this the marketing and collaterals.  I have contacts in India and Pakistan and can get relationships in China.  I know how to get relationships for licensing and fabrication set up there.  I am working on a pilot program in Pakistan to verify the veracity of the indigenous part of the claims I have made.

 

What I don't have the time to build and run the company to do it.

 

I contacted Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap fame (I really like his group) but after some interviews realized that they are on a discover journey and I need someone with moxie and experience to take advantage of this.  

 

The relationship I am looking for puts me in a minority position, that is I want someone else to assume helm, the run the show, and thus earn the big rewards but behind the scenes I can help make it all work and will certainly do much of the evangelism needed.

 

Thus I put my need to you.  Any ideas?

You can reach Barry at barrythornton1 [at] gmail.com

Noise canceling cell phone

Did you ever notice that people on cell phones talk really loud but people on landlines often whisper into the phone? I've heard that the reason is because you can actually hear your own voice in the speaker on a landline but you can't on a cell phone, and without that feedback we make our voices louder. Another theory I've heard is that when people can't hear the other party well, they instinctively talk louder.

Regardless of why it happens, it definitely happens. And if you're not the one on the phone, its really annoying. I was riding a train in Boston a few months ago and even though I was sitting at one end of the train car I could hear a woman gabbing away on her cell phone at the other end of the train car and it was so annoying that I moved to a different train car. And these are big train cars! Can you imagine how bad its going to be when you can use a cell phone on a plane?

One approach is to try and get people to talk without making any sound but I think that's unlikely to catch on (I saw this demo of a band you where on your neck that senses the impulses of speech without you actually having to make noise - can't find the link to it right now).

What we need is some sort of noise canceling cell phone that would pick up your voice for transmission but would cancel it out from spreading to those around you. That cell phone would sell faster than iPhones... 3G is great but imagine the privacy of being able to talk without everyone around you listening? This would be viral in that you have an incentive to get everyone else to use it (so they don't bother you!).

Will somebody please invent this? Bose maybe?

I need an iPhone application that times how much I use each other app

A recent New York Times article about a dispute over whether checking your email on a blackberry should be counted towards overtime pay made me think about the benefits of tracking usage of specific apps on your iPhone or Blackberry.

I wish it would send me a daily or weekly email report showing how much time I spent talking on the phone, checking my email, text messaging and browsing the mobile web. For simplicity it could just break it down by application. Ideally I could drill down on a particular day and see my usage pattern of certain applications over the day. Or maybe it would just give me an iCal feed I could subscribe to that showed my activity.

If they went the iCal feed route, you could then pipe that into your contact management software to log phone calls and text messaging or into your time tracking software for logging hours spent doing email at the pool.

We need Twitter and IRC integration for PowerPoint

A recent story on CNN talks about the real-time backchatter that is often happening at conferences and presentations. While the panelists are up on stage talking, the audience is having their own conversation on Twitter, Meebo and in chat rooms. I was in the crowd at Mark Zuckerberg's notorious SXSW interview this year which was probably one of the highest profile examples so far.

I was impressed to read how Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester was able to use this to his advantage and change the course of his presentation mid-stream based on feedback over Twitter. Smart presenters are going to pay attention and smart entrepreneurs will find ways to turn this into an advantage.

At some of the geekiest conferences that I attend, they have put up an IRC chat window on a projector so that participants inside the room and outside the room could interact.

We're now starting to see a new generation of web 2.0 presentation software from companies like SlideRocket and Google - where the slides can incorporate real-time data from the web, video, flash and other interactive components. But this is all focused outward on what the viewers see.

PowerPoint or Keynote show a presenter view if you have 2 monitors in use that includes the current slide, next slide, time elapsed, time remaining, current time and your slide notes. A great opportunity for this new generation is to provide a real-time presenter view that brings in this other real-time information. So in addition to the slide notes and timers, there would a twitter feed, Meebo client and IRC client so that each presenter can monitor the online audience in addition to the one sitting in front of them.