It will become easier for digital designers to create their publications with a new tool from WoodWing. The company has created SmartDPS which will work with Adobe’s InDesign program.
WoodWing started by making plug-ins’ for Adobe products over 10 years ago. Even though they have moved onto an enterprise web publishing and DAM based company, they still work with Adobe to improve and enhance their products.
SmartDPS is designed to assist InDesign users by making their work faster, easier and more efficient, as the program works directly with InDesign’s file system.
“Users of our publishing system love the Digital Publishing Tools — plug-ins for InDesign that help to quickly add all sorts of interactivity to tablet and mobile publications,” said Erik Schut, President of WoodWing Software. “By introducing SmartDPS, we offer the same benefits to anyone who is using Adobe DPS, and not just users of WoodWing Enterprise.”
What's in SmartDPS
Additions that the SmartDPS program gives to InDesign includes: scrollable areas, hotspots and widgets. No additional training in code or other technical skills are needed to work with these features. The SmartDPS website has brief introduction videos to show how they work.
The scrollable areas function works like a traditional scroll bar. Content can be moved vertically or horizontally within the page.
A Hotspot, a touch sensitive area of a publication, is a way for users to show information that isn’t initially seen in their publication. Information is showed in columns and can be linked to other informational hotspots.
Widgets are found in the online library features that can add an extra level of interaction to a publication Some of these examples include Google Maps, Twitter and captioned slideshows.
SmartDPS is currently available as a free trial, once a user signs up with the site. Those who download the program have a limited access to all of the aforementioned features. When the full version is available additional features will be added, such as being able to convert pdf’s into .foilo files.
There will be a variety of paid subscriptions available in the full version, but details haven't been released yet.
Got a knack for hacking and a desire to save the world? The NSA has a college program just for you. Cynthia Irvine, chair of the Cyber Academic Group at the Naval Postgraduate School, helped shape a curriculum that will prepare students for government cybersecurity jobs. | PHOTO BY DRU DONOVAN
Hey, hackers: The NSA is out to get you. If you're an American who can code malware to infiltrate a network, or snoop on SMS messages, or stop a distributed denial-of-service attack in your sleep, you're a person of interest. Age is of little consequence. Location likewise. The NSA's mission is simple: It's trying to identify formidable hackers. But not to arrest them. To recruit them.
Despite all of the United States' spending on defense, many experts say the country is still in a vulnerable position--to cyberattacks. According to General Keith Alexander of U.S. Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense, attacks on U.S. computer networks increased seventeen-fold between 2009 and 2011. To counter that threat, the U.S. is seeking cybersecurity experts with the chops to neutralize would-be online invaders. But rather than wait for hackers to reach out via LinkedIn, the NSA is being proactive: This fall, four universities--Dakota State, Northeastern, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and Tulsa--are launching NSA-designated cyber-operations curricula intended to fast-track students into security jobs. The goal is to create a pipeline of government-vetted talent and with it, a robust line of virtual national defense.
There's no questioning, or avoiding, the growing danger posed by hackers. In 2012 alone, hackers have stolen hundreds of thousands of credit-card numbers from American banks. In all, estimates put the cost of cybercrime to businesses and government agencies at more than $100 billion annually--and that sum isn't likely to shrink in the coming years. "We can do things to make it more costly to hack into our systems... but [security experts] didn't say we can stop them," Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee in March 2012. Explains Cynthia Irvine, chair of the Cyber Academic Group at the NPS, "There is a mission-critical need for cyberwarriors."
Starting in the 2012-13 school year, Irvine and her counterparts at the other universities will have the chance to train those soldiers. The pilot schools were selected from a pool of applicants based on their existing cyber-operations course offerings, which were then expanded to meet NSA requirements. "We've had these programs for years," says Sujeet Shenoi, a professor of computer science at Tulsa, "but this is the first time a government agency has formalized it."
Though credit and degree requirements for the NSA-designated programs vary from school to school, standard courses include such crowd-pleasers as malware analysis, cloud security, and electronic eavesdropping alongside core subjects like cryptography, network infrastructure, and programming. Beyond that, the schools do as they please. At Tulsa, students in Shenoi's "cyberninja" curriculum will be trained to dumpster-dive for evidence, reconstruct destroyed phones, and develop a Stuxnet-type worm. NPS students, meanwhile, participate in simulated war games played over 11 weeks.
The NSA program is open to both undergraduate and graduate students, who will apply for government security clearances while in school. Scholarships are available to further incentivize the spy-minded: Like ROTC, candidates can get government subsidies that offer free tuition, room and board, a stipend, and a paid internship at a security agency; in exchange, the students are required to work in a federal job for at least two years after graduation. There will be more than 170 newly minted cyberwarriors available to join the NSA and other agencies in 2013 after completing the program--a total that won't come close to meeting demand.
"[Even before the NSA program], agencies came all the time to recruit students," says Irvine, who cited the CIA, the Naval Research Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and NCIS as organizations clamoring for graduates. "If we had the funding, we could increase the size of the program." In the meantime, the participating universities are helping other institutions develop the classes and coursework necessary to meet the NSA's cyber-operations benchmarks.
There's one slight caveat hackers may want to consider: If they've broken the law--or rather, if they've been caught breaking the law--they'll be ineligible for admission to the program. So while the NSA wants young hackers possessed of a working knowledge of menacing web tactics, it doesn't want those who have sharpened those skills illegally. That's a deal-breaker. The agency draws a harder line than countries such as China, Russia, and Israel, which will tolerate a few youthful indiscretions as they troll for talent.
"Although the NSA has an interest in identifying students that have offensive security and hacking abilities," notes Dakota State University program chair Josh Pauli, "the agency is adamant about only using those offensive capabilities to defend the nation." That's understandable--but if the kids are going to hack, wouldn't it be nice to have them hacking for the right team?
Twitter is rolling out a Certified Products Program that offers Twitter-based products and services from third-party developers and partners to businesses. The program is launching with three verticals — engagement products, analytics products and data reseller products.
Twitter Seeks Engagement, Analytics, Data Resale
Twitter is aligning its three initial certified products verticals as follows:
Engagement Products — Helping brands keep in touch with their customers. This includes activities such as providing workflow or advanced sorting, delegation and assignment of replies, as well as alerting users to high-priority events or tweets requiring immediate action. Developers must make Twitter and Twitter account management and network engagement part of the core product experience and offering.
Analytics Products — Helping businesses learn from their customers on Twitter. Examples include historical analytics of how previous campaigns unfolded on Twitter and industry-specific analytics that tie activity on Twitter to success metrics. Developers are required to encourage further engagement with Twitter, clearly attribute Twitter as a data source and make Twitter a core part of the product experience.
Data Reseller Products — Platforms for innovation on top of large numbers of tweets. These include APIs that allow analytics companies to study past conversations and with customers' private data to tie activity on Twitter to proprietary business processes. Developers need to offer API features that are significantly differentiated from Twitter's own, actively encourage customers to build products which drive engagement with Twitter and staff a sales and support organization to meet enterprise customer service expectations.
Twitter Incentivizes API Development
As reported by CMSWire, earlier this month Twitter publicized plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients.
Twitter said these restrictions and requirements are intended to prevent “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API. However, many observers have been skeptical about how altruistic Twitter’s intentions really are. According to VentureBeat, the Certified Products Program is a good start to Twitter’s new API policies.
“For some time now, in private meeting rooms and on public stages, Twitter has urged developers to make these kinds of products — noncompetitive products that would give their makers a real business opportunity,” stated a VentureBeat posting. The article went on to say it is “somewhat encouraging to see Twitter creating incentives for building the right kind of Twitter apps, not just punishments for building the wrong kind.”
Twitter is launching the Certified Products Program with 12 initial partners: Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, DataSift, ExactTarget, Grip, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, Social Flow and Topsy.
Marketing automation provider Act-On Software is launching a partner program, bringing together partners and customers.
The Beaverton, Oregon-based company said that the new Act-On Partner Exchange (APEX) offers a resource for its customers, which currently number about 1000 and which are constantly looking for new products and services from Act-On partners for their online marketing.
Three Act-On Partner Types
Act-On said its partners fall into three categories. There are Technology Partners, whose product integrates with Act-On’s marketing automation platform. Agency Partners can extend the Act-On platform with their expertise in marketing and creative services, and Referral Partners offer specialized marketing services while referring customers to Act-On for online marketing.
As an example of a Referral Partner, the company pointed to Portland, Oregon-based Albertson Performance Group. CEO Eric Albertson said in a statement that, with his company’s expertise in “helping technology marketers design and execute campaigns to get more leads with better quality,” the Albertson Performance Group can help Act-On’s customers “get the most out of their investment in marketing automation.”
Other partners include Cisco WebEx, Pipedream, Estuate and Port25.
Act-On Chief Revenue Officer Shawn Naggiar told news media that there has already been “an exponential increase” in customers working with APEX partners, since the program is designed to be a “simple and effective” way for partners to join the Act-On ecosystem and for customers to find products and services.
Marketing Automation for the Mid-Sized Org
Act-On was founded in 2008 by CEO Raghu Raghavan with the intent of providing what it called “an equalizer” for small- and mid-sized companies. Its cloud-based platform offers an email engine with one-click integration to web conferencing and CRM, as well as tools for website visitor tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing and social media prospecting, and design tools for web forms, landing pages and emails.
The company’s platform is designed to enable those companies, which it calls the Fortune 5,000,000, to “easily and swiftly create and execute” multi-channel integrated marketing campaigns, find and nurture qualified leads, and conduct analytics.
While the company said its focus is on smaller businesses, it noted that its platform is also used by divisions of some large companies, including Motorola, Progressive, IBM, Associated Bank, InsideSales.com and Liberty Tax Service.
