Inside a technology boom where the lifestyle is as a sweet as the payoff--and more certain. In part one of our two-part series, meet 24-year-old Canadian Ilya Brotzky who dreams of fleeing Toronto's endless winters for the beaches, women, and hot-wired innovation of Brazil.
“It all started with a Brazilian girl,” says Ilya Brotzky, a 24-year-old Canadian in one of Rio de Janiero’s top startup incubators. “She told me about the beaches in Floripa, how the girls there kiss you so easily. You can imagine how I felt: This was in the middle of winter in Ithaca.”
Like many young ex-pats here, Brotzky was interested in startups, but demo-days back home were beginning to look less like the American Dream and more like the cut-throat world of American Idol. He imagined China would be too industrial and India too "unsanitary."
“I thought, Brazil is cool for your personal life, and the economy seems to be blowing up--there has to be something there for me.”
Blowing up, indeed. In only 18 months, Brazil has developed a social Web that took the United States almost a decade. Now, 40% of the 200 million people here have broadband, 40% are on Facebook, which they affectionately pronounce “Facey-booky,” and there are already 50 million smartphones and 255 million 3G devices in use. Brazilians are second only behind Americans when it comes to the amount of time citizens spend on Facebook, second in time spent on Twitter, and also second on Tumblr.
But Brazil is years behind the entrepreneurial spirit of the United States, where colleges produce students like Brotzky: an Applied Economics and Management major with a focus on social entrepreneurship, and a fellowship at StartingBloc, Cornell's on-campus networking group for students building community-driven ventures. (See his Cornell TEDx talk here.) There are about 5.5 million small companies in Brazil, not many for a country of 200 million--the U.S. has over 23 million--and venture capital is a new concept there.
“The way that the companies in Brazil used to be financed would be by retail banks--debt investment,” says Ricardo Asse, the founder of a private equity and consulting firm here called Centria Partners. He advises large corporations here like McKinsey about the capital markets, and was retained by the Brazilian government to write its new national IT and innovation policy, which begins rollout this year. “Today the entrepreneurs and the CEOs and the owners are finding professional investors--it’s becoming a more mature market. That means that for the first time, technology is becoming important here.” It’s a boom both economic and spiritual for this country as it prepares for the World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 summer Olympics.
Ilya Brotzky
Brotzky is one of a handful of gutsy ex-pats I spoke to in Brazil who have fled North America for Brazil's biggest cities. There they’ve found found gung-ho investors and real problems to solve--but so far scant proof that any of it will work. But for many young entrepreneurs that's okay, because what Brazil lacks in financial security, it more than makes up for in quality of life.
Post-grad Americans might identify with Brazil because they're at the same stage of life. “In technology, I would say Brazil is finishing university,” says Asse. “If you look at the American technology sector, which is most successful in the world today, it's very open--Russians, Chinese, Indians, Americans participate. Today this is a vision our government has now.”
Already having visions of his own, the 24-year-old Brotzky decided to check out Brazil for himself. Through his university, Cornell, he started going on community service trips to cities like Rio and Belo Horizonte, which are technology hubs here, as is Floripa, the city of kissable girls that first allured him. Others include Recife, Campinas, and Sao Paolo, the country’s financial capital, all anchored by excellent federal universities.
Brotzky found a program that let him volunteer in Mungueira, one of the 12 favelas of carnival, and spent the weekend hanging out in Ilha Grande, an island off the coast of Rio not unlike Nantucket. “In the favelas, there were kids in the street smoking weed with guns in their belts, proud of their gunshot scars," says Brotzky. "I was totally seduced by it. I became irrational about my decisions. I thought: I have to come back here no matter what.”
Brazilians in their twenties are sharing the country's coming-out party. “These are the children of a conservative generation,” says Marcelo Sales, the founder of Rio’s 21212 incubator. “Their parents are government employees, and they push their children into safe jobs, but this is beginning to change.” Most young Brazilians live with their families until they’re married, which, as in the U.S., is an increasingly delayed event. (To wit: in a recent issue of Men’s Health in Brazil this month, one of the top sex tips was, “Don’t ask her to split the motel bill.”)
“Startups here compete with government, oil gas, and private equity companies that pay huge bonuses to engineers,” says Sales. "I go to all the top universities, and I give talks to show these talents that they can choose to become employee or they can choose entrepreneurship. In a few years it will be Russia or India, but the right market for this is Brazil now. So I tell them: 'If you are geek, if you want to become a millionaire, come with me.'"
When Brotzky returned to Canada after graduation, he became depressed. He worked for eight months at Vale, a large Brazilian mining conglomerate which was integrating a Canadian acquisition. It wasn't going well for Brotzky or the merger.
“Everything I was happy about was gone. The food sucked, the girls sucked--my time in Toronto was meaningless. I would spend the whole time at work on chat, talking to my friends from Brazil." He was getting paid well in Canada, he had security and a small group of friends, but he started going to Brazilian parties and dating Brazilian women. “I was so bored at work, and so alive outside of work. I started paying more attention to signs in my life--something to show me this is real.”
Brazilians, similarly, are looking for signs that their tech boom is real. In a country where the government is so bloated, following the money behind some startups often leads back to bureaucratic initiatives that have little to do with the marketplace.
Still, major venture funds are beginning to pay attention, if tepidly. Bessemer's Brian Feinstein, Sequoia's David Velez, Redpoint's Anderson Thees and 500Startups Bedy Yang are just some of the names you hear a lot since the venture boom here. But the real ringleader here may be Monashees Capital, which invests between $250,000 and $2.5 million in early stage companies and holds sway over 10 of the large funds here.
Liquidity events are rare in Brazil, even if they appear to be increasing. According to a dealbook given to me by Brazilian tech blogger Diego Gomes, who founded ReadWriteWeb’s Latin America bureau and the major tech blog here, Webholic, there were 11 startups funded or acquired in 2009, 23 in 2010, and 82 in 2011. This year is on track to be about the same as last.
Simon Olsen, Google’s head of new business development and an ex-pat American here for 10 years, isn’t convinced by all this “Silicon Beach” talk. “I’m afraid investors here will get burned on startups that are more flash than substance, and they won’t invest again,” he says. Even for the substantive online businesses, he says the incubator or venture model may not translate.
“In the U.S., they’re going for grand slams, big liquid exits that pay the investors back for the rest of their portfolio. There are no grand slams here, and there might never be. The big companies have no incentive to acquire these guys. We’re at the top of a bubble, and if the world economy goes bad, it could come crashing down.” Tomorrow, find out if Brotzky is able to get back to Brazil--and why that might be a good idea.
[Photos courtesy of: Ilya Brotzky, Chris Dannen, and Guto Azevedo]
The inside story of Hipstamatic’s losing struggle to keep pace with Instagram, Facebook, and others in the white-hot photo-sharing space. In the third and final chapter of the series, Hipstamatic searches unsuccessfully for capital, and founder Lucas Buick and ex-employees ponder the future of the business.
Lucas Buick, the CEO of Hipstamatic, failed to define his startup’s mission over the past year. But several of his ex-employees seem to have no problem nailing precisely what set it apart. “Whereas Instagram was a social network that had a camera, Hipstamatic was the camera that shared to any other social network,” says one former staffer. “It was very clearly distinguished.”
To outsiders, the distinction may seem insignificant, even pointless. But inside the company, some felt it was Hipstamatic’s golden ticket, a chance to become the go-to smartphone camera for sharing with social giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Instead, the opportunity was squandered when the company lost its focus.
Since Buick launched Hipstamatic in late 2009, the service, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, has undergone relatively little change. It didn’t need to. The startup attracted millions of users and millions of dollars in revenue by selling in-app digital lenses and films that effectively turn your iPhone into an old-school instant camera.
If it’s common wisdom for founders to heed the call of social, then Hipstamatic proves that every founder should be wary of conventional Silicon Valley wisdom. Social for Hipstamatic was a siren song, and its turbulent journey over the last year only demonstrates the oft-overlooked dangers of pivots, especially ill-conceived ones that damage a startup’s core business so deeply that no amount of venture capital can repair it.
Throughout the summer of 2012, Buick says he and his cofounders took meetings with investors, hoping to raise the company's first round of funding. But the team could never find the right terms, Buick says, partly because of Facebook's bungled IPO. "We went down this path one other time, and the term sheets have gotten worse since the Facebook IPO, just from what we've seen," Buick says.
The other issue, ironically, was Hipstamatic's bottom-line, Buick says. While startups with no revenue can often drum up seemingly arbitrarily high valuations, Hipstamatic was plagued by its own market success. Instagram had generated no revenue since it launched, yet sold at a market valuation of roughly $1 billion. Hipstamatic didn't have the same “advantage.” According to Inc. magazine, the self-funded startup pulled in $10 million last year, and was on track to more than double its revenue in 2012. "For us, raising money was always super awkward because we made money," Buick says. "It fucked everything up and we'd get a different valuation. Like, 'Oh you have numbers? Well, I'm going to put the X here and the Y here, and this is what you're worth.' It's like, 'No, no, no, we don't make money! I lied!'"
"They thought raising VC money would be really easy--that they'd basically be picking money off trees," says Jonathan Wight, a former engineer at the company. "Every few weeks we'd get an update, and it would be, 'Oh it's a lot harder than we thought,' or, 'The terms aren't what we want.' Blah blah blah."
Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked at the company. Two of the VCs surmised the startup would have a very difficult time raising money after the Instagram acquisition. “Another billion-dollar photo-sharing exit is hard to imagine. The category is over and done with, and I’d be surprised if they can even raise,” says one of the topflight VCs.
The investor agrees that general market sentiment for social media investments is down because of Zynga’s and Facebook’s declining market caps. However, the VC disagrees with Buick’s argument that having revenue would hurt its chances to raise funding. “The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal,” the investor says. “Having revenue absolutely won’t hurt; if anything, it helps, though the idea and market size matter much more.”
At that point, however, Hipstamatic's biggest problem was finding the right idea, regardless of the size of its market or revenue. And its development team back in San Francisco felt completely disconnected from whatever the founders were planning. "They were gone for weeks and were impossible to reach," says one former employee. "Apparently they were meeting with VCs, but I don't know. We were just trying to ship this new product that was already behind. The original goal was to ship it when the new iPhone came out, but there was no fucking way we could do it. All we had was what we hacked together for them to demo to VCs." (Hipstamatic denies that its cofounders were impossible to reach during this time.)
By the time the “Wolfpack,” the self-appointed nickname for the company founders, decided to offer other members of the team stock in the company, many had already lost faith, multiple sources say. “All of us were like, ‘Dude, you’re never going to IPO,’” recalls Stuart Norrie, then a designer at Hipstamatic.
In late July, Buick and his cofounders went to New York, which Wight says felt like the “last chance to get VC money." (Hipstamatic denies that it was the company’s last chance for VC funding. It’s also worth noting that I had met with the team during their visit, and none of the products herein described were mentioned at that meeting. Buick was focused more then on ways to work Hipstamatic into third-party services.) When the team returned, however, there was no news of a round being raised. "Nothing was said. It was like, 'Well, I guess we didn't get any money,'" Wight recalls. "I confronted Lucas about it and he said, 'Yeah, we didn't find any terms that we liked, but we have something in China.' It was kind of obvious then that they weren't going to get VC funding."
Wight also says he pressed Buick on whether they could still go ahead with the social product without raising capital. "Lucas said, 'Yeah, we're going to mortgage [Hipstamatic's] building if we need to,'" Wight recalls. "He actually said, 'Our backup plan is to mortgage the building.' At that point, all my alarm bells went off. It was obvious that something crazy was going on. As far as I could tell, they were running out of money. That was about a week or two before the layoffs."
Hipstamatic says that it’s simply not true that the company considered mortgaging the building as an option. Hipstamatic also denies that anyone ever indicated the company was prepared to go forward with the social product without raising a round of funding.
If Hipstamatic’s product roadmap seemed slapdash, the rapidly evolving landscape of the photography space was only making its business even more chaotic. By mid-August, Instagram was racing toward 100 million users, in part due to the app’s successful launch on Android. Viddy, arguably the model for CS9, Hipstamatic’s squashed video product, had raised a $30 million round at a reported $370 million valuation. Path, Dave Morin’s private social network, had raised $40 million at a reported $250 million valuation. Camera+, its camera app competitor, was nearing 9 million users, more than double Hipstamatic’s user base, and would soon launch on the iPad. And Tumblr, Pinterest, and any number of other white-hot startups, which arguably served as inspiration for Hipstamatic’s social products, were flying into the upper-echelon of Silicon Valley superstardom.
But even in such a hectic time for the company, Buick was starting consider yet another pivot for Hipstamatic. Pivots, Eric Ries’ term for a change in company direction, are usually reserved to describe companies that have made successful shift in focus: Instagram, for example, is famous for pivoting away from its unsuccessful, complicated earlier iteration, called Burbn, which included a host of random features, such as game mechanics and future check-ins. Pivots are also used to designate startups that have lost focus, as was the case with Color, the proximity based photo-sharing app, which has become a punch line in the Valley for a startup desperately spiraling in all different directions.
But Hipstamatic never truly pivoted. If anything, it lurched. The startup performed a series of missteps throughout 2012 that snowballed and left the company stagnant by the summer’s end.
In further violation of Ries’s revered business principles, Hipstamatic seemed almost incapable of putting out a minimum viable product: most every prototype product was either killed or not given the attention it needed to get to market.
Worse yet, the company was not run like a lean startup. The company's headquarters, for example, a wide brick building on Langton Street in SOMA called the "Haus of Hipstamatic," cost roughly $1 million. Additionally, the cofounders decided to renovate the building's rooftop with deck and minibar, an upgrade that cost at least $800,000, explains Sam Soffes, a former engineer, who says he saw an invoice for the construction. “Lucas told me the stain for the deck had been imported from Belgium, and I was like, 'Dude, there's a Home Depot in Daly City--we could’ve just gotten it for way less than you paid to have that shit imported form Belgium!'" recalls Norrie. (Hipstamatic confirmed the cost of the building, but declined to confirm the cost of rooftop construction.)
Inside the $1 million "Haus of Hipstamatic" Parties at company headquarters were frequent. As Buick once told me, "Our entire lifestyle is built on the philosophy that work and play are one."
"It felt like a bloody frat house," says Wight, who says he was told the company's alcohol budget was $20,000. "I've never worked at a startup with an alcohol budget. People would be getting drunk at night and end up sleeping on the floor of the company. I think Lucas wanted a certain amount of rock n' roll there."
(Buick denies that the company had an alcohol budget, though he adds, “I mean, if we did have one, I’d be curious what it would be.” Buick also clarifies that, with all parties thrown--for product launches, say, or app updates--he always considered whether they’d generate short-term income or long-term revenue. Molli Sullivan, Hipstamatic's director of communications, says that much of the money spent on parties and other “fun events” was designed for team building.)
"We had a ton of parties--maybe that's what they meant by having a 'lifestyle brand,'" says one former developer, referring to Buick's company motto.
So while Hipstamatic was still generating revenue, it's perhaps no surprise why some employees started to wonder if the company was speeding toward bankruptcy. Employees were not privy to the startup's earnings; they only knew of revenue figures that had been reported by the press. When it became clear the company was not going to raise a round of funding, some started to think the worst. "I inferred that they were running out of money--that they had just gone through money way too quickly," says the former employee. "You've seen the office--it's really expensive. They all have really lavish lifestyles. I figured they were seeking out funding because they needed more runway to keep the ship afloat."
The truth according to Buick is, by mid-August, the company had several different options. Buick could've continued down the path toward social and raised a round of funding at less-than-pleasing terms. He also could've sold the company. ("We can't comment on who [we could’ve sold to], but it just seemed like a shitty option--it felt like giving up to cash in a check and buy a boat," Buick says.) Or he could've pivoted backward, scaled down the company's ambitions, and refocused on Hipstamatic's original photo app.
After much deliberation, Buick says he went with the last option. (Also in early August, one of the company’s iOS developers quit voluntarily, which helped reinforce Buick’s decision, he acknowledges.)
Over dinner in mid-August, Buick presented the plan of scaling back to several other founding members of the startup. "From the time we decided to pull the trigger to the time we executed was about 48 hours," Buick says.
On Aug. 16, the company began laying off employees, either in the office, over the phone, or over coffee. Employees were (not surprisingly) unhappy when they were told the news. "Yeah, I got my pink slip, or plaid slip, whatever hipster term you want to call it," says the former employee.
At the Mondrian Soho in mid-September, over dinner and drinks, Buick appears genuinely unfazed by the internal drama at Hipstamatic and the way it negatively spilled into the press after employees were let go. Later, when I ask Buick whether Hipstamatic is going bankrupt, he immediately responds, “No, we are not.” And even when I press him about the startup’s runway and burn-rate, he retorts with a giggle, “You're using startup terms that we've never internally used. I mean, I've heard burn-rate and runway, but let me say this: I have no idea what our burn rate is. I have no idea how long our runway is.”
Throughout our dinner, Buick’s general nonchalance gave the impression that the layoffs were not a financial decision, regardless of whether they actually were or not. (Molli Sullivan, the company’s spokesperson, says the company is not running out of money, and explains the layoffs had nothing to do with “paying the bills.”)
"The honest truth is I took a lot of bad advice and started building stuff we weren’t passionate about," he says. "That whole product development was all about how to make money and maximize users, and we were focusing on the shit that we didn't really care about. We started focusing on money and talking to a whole different scene, and we started to lose touch with our community--the photographers, for example, who totally got ignored for a year. I don't know what the trigger was but the honest truth was we hadn't shipped anything, and that drove me nuts. And what we were building was still so far away from being available that I didn't even like coming to work.”
Ex-employees can’t speak fast enough to list off the many problems that plagued the company: a lack of transparency, an incoherent product roadmap, and so forth. Almost every source I spoke was offended that Buick would say the layoffs were due to not shipping products—the ex-employees chalk up the dearth of shipped products to the company’s poor leadership. And many sources place the blame on the ever-mounting disconnect between the cofounders and new hires, who say they were not given the agency to push new developments forward. (At least three sources I spoke with said the cofounders had a “death grip” on the original Hipstamatic app, for example, and only gave developers read-only access to the service for much of their time at the company.)
While one could certainly argue Hipstamatic had many original ideas, Hipstamatic’s central problem was execution—and it was a problem that worsened as the team’s cohesion deteriorated. The startup could not act as a functional whole.
When I ask Buick what went wrong, he reflects for a moment, and answers, "I think we totally got caught up in the San Francisco bubble. If you don't leave enough, you forget that not everyone has an iPhone, and not everyone reads TechCrunch. The rest of the world doesn't care about that stuff. The San Francisco bubble is a sounding board for the same idea heard over and over in a thousand different ways. We fell into that, and it led to a lot of frustration and wasted time and resources. So we took a left turn."
Adds Buick, "We should coin this the unpivot."
Stuart Norrie, the former designer, summarizes the company’s issues most eloquently: “In this industry, it’s inevitable that you’re going to pivot. You should be expected to be switching direction at a moment’s notice. But not weekly--not changing direction completely every week. They were trying to become Camera+ and Instagram, and that’s a losing battle. It’s suicide to take them on. And if you focus too much on your competitors, you’re going to lose sight of your own business, and that’s what really happened.”
He continues, “The biggest problem with Hipstamatic is that [Lucas] didn’t focus on Hipstamatic. What did Instagram do when lightning struck? They did nothing but focus on Instagram. What happened when Hipstamatic got successful? They made [separate products such as] Swankolab, Incredibooth, D Series, Family Album, Snap Magazine, and splintered off in so many different directions. They lost sight from the very beginning, and it still makes me sad because it was a golden opportunity to make something really amazing.”
Other members of the team echo Norrie’s sentiment. Says one former employee, "The people I worked with at Hipstamatic were the best people I've ever worked with."
Buick agrees. "It sucked," he says. "We've let people go before but it was always justified because they weren't doing their work. This had nothing to do with that. They were all really awesome and talented. What we did was build a Ferrari and we didn't know how to drive stick. So we had this awesome machine that wasn't able to perform like it should. We built the wrong type of team to solve the wrong kind of problem.”
Finishing up his second or third old-fashioned at the Mondrian Soho, Buick transitions away from the past to talk about Hipstamatic's future. As he takes me through the roadmap, I can't help but be intrigued by what he and the company might have to offer--if the surviving team can even pull it off. All the while, a song by a French pop band blares over the restaurant's sound system. Then, later, another song by the same group. Then a third in the course of an hour. The band is Phoenix, the name for the mythical firebird that rises from its own ashes--not that anyone catches the heavy-handed, trite symbolism. Says Buick, "This fall we're launching a bunch of stuff…"
That's Daniel Dae Kim, lead actor of CBS' hit TV series Hawaii Five-0, during an early episode in which he casually suggests to his partner that she "Bing" a query rather than "Google" it.
To many, the scene wasn't jarring so much for its egregious product placement but for Kim's laughably unrealistic dialogue. After all, few if, say they are going to "Bing" anything. Unlike Google, a brand and word synonymous with search, Microsoft's rival engine has yet to enter our lexicon as a verb, despite CEO Steve Ballmer's hope that it would. That Bing is not a verb reflects the huge challenge Microsoft faces in the space--the service has yet to make significant gains on king Google, which owns two-thirds of the US search market. And now, it appears as if Microsoft has even given up trying to make "Bing" a verb that's as much a part of our web-surfing habits as it is our vernacular.
"We don't have an explicit strategy to go chase the verbiness," says Adam Sohn, general manager of influencer marketing at Bing. "We don't have that as a goal--like we're not spending money [on it]. We've never tried to verb it."
Of course, it'd be hard for Sohn to deny that Microsoft would love for "Bing" to be a verb just like "Google" is. The company has clearly spent money in the past on Bing product placement. Ballmer has said that he loves Bing's potential "to verb up." And even the tagline of its big new marketing campaign--"Bing It On," a sort of Pepsi challenge for search--uses "Bing" as a verb, albeit as a pun.
Traditionally, companies have fought against what's called 'genericide' or 'generification,' an industry term for when a brand name becomes so commoditized that it loses association with the company that first created it. Think: Aspirin, Band-aid, Xerox, Frisbee. As Graeme Diamond, principal editor for new words at the Oxford English Dictionary, once told me, “Some companies aggressively resist generification...We don’t much care since we reflect language as it’s actually used—not as executives wish it were.”
But in the tech industry, most executives are happy to have their brands become verbs: to Google, to Facebook, to Netflix. And Bing higher-ups, which refer to Google as "the Kleenex of the search category," have come to accept the fact that the verb "to Google" is here to stay. "I think we're conflicted but happy if someone said 'Google it' but they were going to Bing and giving us the query," says Sohn, who believes there is some benefit of Google's genericide. "The thing about Kleenex is once you pull it out of the box, it looks exactly the same, whereas with online products, the brands are a bit more forward. So if you say, 'I'm going to Google it,' and you go to Bing--cause that's what you have set as the default--over time, you're going to understand the brand that you are using."
Even internally, the verb "to Bing" is not standard. "Some people say the verb--sometime they say, 'Hey, Bing this,'" explains Mike Nichols, corporate VP and chief marketing officer of Bing. "But it's rare."
In the coming months, Microsoft and its partners will begin to push out its new Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems, a big marketing effort that is likely to garner Bing some more attention. The company is also looking to strike more deals with third parties to include its search engine on their platforms, such as with the Kindle Fire HD, Amazon's new flagship tablet, which will come with Bing by default instead of Google search.
Nichols says it's still early in Bing's life, at least too early to try to make Bing into a verb. "I don't think we're even ready to set it as an objective he says.
But one thing is for certain. In Redmond, Nichols says, "Nobody ever uses 'Google it.'"
A new security feature is being investigated by Stanford and Northwestern researchers where test subjects are unwittingly taught a series of keystrokes that can be uniquely identified when repeated during a laptop or mobile device login.
Subjects are trained to make keystrokes that coincide with a moving visual cue, a disk falling past a line on the screen, for example. The pattern repeats, and the test subjects learn the pattern that can then be repeated more easily.
Researchers call it serial interception sequence learning, and it's kind of like playing a game or even learning to ride a bicycle. But the point is, scientists are using this type of training to see if the process could be used to improve login security over the popular but flawed password feature.
Password Alternate
Passwords are handy because people understand how they work and they are inexpensive to set up. For companies like Dropbox, Skype, LinkedIn and Pinterest, there are obvious drawbacks as recent hacking attempts have made clear.
While enterprises like Bit9 are investing in IT security applications, people still have to enter in a password on the front end. Too often, those passwords are of the weak four digit variety or are shared with too many other people.
Researchers from the above study are investigating sequence learning because it would be hard to steal from someone. In other words, even if someone where to try and force you to give them your passcode, it would be hard to explain because it's not just a series of letters and numbers.
The laptop or mobile device that had the sequence learning security feature installed would be able to tell if the person entering the keystrokes was the authorized person or not based on how precisely they duplicated the correct keystrokes.
Next Generation Security Features
Sequence learning might not be a great password alternate for say, checking email, but other new security features are constantly being tested. Apple bought a company called AuthenTec Inc recently, and the technology purchased in that deal could yield a fingerprint security offering for iPhones and iPads.
Furthermore, Rutgers university researchers are experimenting with a biometric security feature in the form of a ring that can transmit data through human skin. Facial recognition still holds promise despite the obvious drawback of simply holding up someone's picture to fool the camera.
One other possibily we are intrigued by is the as yet unreleased Leap sensor from LeapMotion. It looks to be the most sensitive motion control device yet availible, and the company is rumored to be working on security features based on gestures. One commentor on the website Gizmag even went so far as to claim he had been a flatmate of the Leap founders, and had seen the device up close. The rumor is the sensor can detect a person's pulse. Tell us in the comments if you use two step authentication for your Google accounts or if you use other programs to keep track of your passwords.
August is over and with it goes our SharePoint focus. But we ended the month with a bang, finishing up the series that gave us a 35,000 foot view of SharePoint 2013, looking at SharePoint governance from a few angles and returned to a question asked earlier in the month: SharePoint and WCM, perfect together?
Our contributors gave us a cheat sheet for recognizing an internet charlatan (print it up before your next interview), a look at new Federal records management requirements that apply to the public sector but will reverberate throughout the records management world and one more attempt to figure out who's in charge of metadata. Poor metadata, always pushed around.
Jennifer Mason (@jennifermason): Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Tweetjam about SharePoint. One of the topics that came up was the importance of Governance. In this article I want to dive deeper into this topic and stress how important governance is within your environment.
Rich Blank (@pmpinsights):When it comes to information worker tools, it’s rare I hear someone from IT say “we walk a day in the life of our end users and start backwards from there.” Seldom do they ask “how do our people want to work?” or “what tools and information do our workers need exactly?”
Ian Truscott (@iantruscott): There are a lot of opinions about Microsoft Office SharePoint, some favorable and others less so, but no matter the camp you sit in, there is no denying it’s ubiquity in our organizations.
According to a recent AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management professionals) Industry Watch Report “The SharePoint Puzzle,” that ubiquity is here to stay.
Brian Alderman (@brianalderman):This is the last article of a four-part 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. What's in store for the end user?
Frederik Leksell (@letstalkgov): You can't run a SharePoint project and expect it to be maintenance free. You need to have an organization, both during and after the project.
Barb Mosher Zinck (@bmosherzinck): When you think about Microsoft partners, one of the first that comes to mind is NewsGator. A successful third party integrator to Microsoft SharePoint, NewsGator Social Sites has over 4 million paid seats and is Microsoft's premier partner for social software integration. And while this last little while has seen a number of interesting events happen for NewsGator: Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, a new version of Social Sites, a new version of SharePoint and a new CEO, it only spells good news for the social software company. Here we offer some of J.B. Holston's (now the former CEO of NewsGator) views on these topics.
Sheila Mackay: An employee, excited about a new product the company is developing, mentions it on Facebook. Due to his privacy settings, a competitor gets wind of potential trade secret information. In another situation, a disgruntled employee sends a negative Tweet about his company to hundreds of followers, including company shareholders.
Cheryl McKinnon (@cherylmckinnon):When was the last time a definition of records management left a person feeling inspired? August 24, 2012 just might be that time.
Virginia Backaitis: Content Management from its earliest days has been about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. This was long before there were laptops, before email, before the web, before smartphones, before e-Readers, before tablet computers, before whatever comes next.
Chris Bucholtz (@bucholtz): With the social era in full swing, we hear on a near daily basis about all the benefits a social media and social CRM strategy can bring. Tactically, they can help sales with potential leads, give service a new window into building customer satisfaction and provide marketing with fresh opportunities to engage and entice new customers. Strategically, they can help you avoid becoming obsolete and irrelevant as customers increasingly go social.
Late last week, Twitter announced a series of API changes that it plans to launch in the upcoming weeks. The changes covered several different areas including changes to authentication requirements, changes to number of calls an end-point can make to Twitter in an hour (both up and down) and creating a series of binding agreements that developers and applications must adhere to. While the API will be released shortly, developers will have a migration period of 6 months before the old API is retired.
We Are The Knights Who Say Tweet!
While the individual changes themselves are indeed interesting, the fun stuff lies just beyond the surface in what the changes mean to both Twitter's business strategy and to its overall approach to product strategy and development as well. These changes are not random demands for "shrubberies" but rather a fully acknowledged attempt to encourage and discourage specific partner and developer behaviors when integrating with and leveraging Twitter's platform. In other words, Twitter has fully embraced the idea that its API is a product to be designed for a specific set of consumers along with a specific strategy in mind (something predicted in these pages earlier this year).
Twitter is still in the throes of figuring out how to fully monetize its immensely popular micro-blogging platform and has made these changes with an eye towards furthering its profitability goals. By throttling smaller apps and unleashing larger ones, twitter has furthered its ability to charge enterprise media partners for access to the firehose of tweets in search results and also for trending topics.
The authentication, partnering and rate limiting changes will directly go after data scrapers in two ways (also predicted in these pages earlier this year):
The lower rate limit (more than five times less than its current amount) will make it harder to do mass scraping and will force any programmatic scrapers to identify themselves with a license key.
The upper rate limit (just over twice the currently supported amount) will give scrapers a legitimate opportunity to abandon scraping and legitimize their use of twitter data.
No One Expects The Twitter Inquisition!
Another big shift is Twitter's move from display guidelines to display requirements along with a certification requirement for certain Twitter apps. Twitter will now require its developers to adhere to a specific set of rules to standardize appearance and functionality. Twitter has justified this change by citing that it will give a better, and more standard, interface to its end users and has reserved the right to revoke license keys from any non-conformists. Some developers have cried foul citing that this will limit the individual Twitter-client developers ability to differentiate their user experience and their overall ability to make money. Well duh! Twitter basically said that in its blog post by specifically saying that it was trying to discourage developers from making new differentiated client apps for consumers.
In case it is not obvious to the solo developer community, Twitter really does not care whether you make money. Twitter cares whether Twitter makes money. In order for Twitter to make money, Twitter needs consumers to engage with Twitter on the Twitter site as much as possible. Twitter's value prop to developers is a free, functional and highly available micro-bloging platform that can easily be integrated into your site. If that is not good enough, build and market your own platform and see how much money that makes you.
Our SharePointpalooza continued this week with the debut of a new series on SharePoint governance, a few perspectives on what SharePoint 2013 holds in store and something anyone contemplating the switch to the latest version can relate to: the SharePoint upgrade headache.
We also heard further reports from the archival front and were asked if your workplace was a circus, who would you be?
Jennifer Mason (@jennifermason): With each new release of SharePoint I become like a kid in a candy shop, ready to find all the new and exciting goodies that have been made available. SharePoint 2013 has been no exception.
Since the release of the Customer Preview I have been anxiously digging in and trying to find what new and exciting things have been added. What I have found so far has been a pleasant surprise, and not quite what I expected.
Frederik Leksell (@letstalkgov): Many portals, intranets, public websites and other solutions fail to deliver objectives and ROI within 6 months to a year because no one governs the solution. This series will share my high level SharePoint Business Governance strategy to help your company turn those success rates around.
Martin White (@intranetfocus): With SharePoint, it really can be 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014 all at the same time.
Over the years I’ve been faced with some very challenging intranet projects but none of them come close to the challenges of upgrading software on the office computer.
This is the second in a four part series that provides a 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. With this piece we will dive into what will be new for developers.
The series covers these changes as they relate to administrators, developers, designers and end users.
Kevin Conroy (@seattlerooster): I always like to put events into a solid sports analogy and SharePoint lends itself to this in a unique way. SharePoint is somewhat akin to the New York Yankee teams of the past couple decades: this product has been a consistent leader, though it has had some ups and downs in the enterprise collaboration space, and continues to hold its place in the echelon of enterprise productivity tools that will continue to lead well into the next many “seasons” to come.
This is the second in a four part series that provides a 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. With this piece we will dive into what will be new for developers.
The series covers these changes as they relate to administrators, developers, designers and end users.
What’s New for Developers?
There are lots of changes coming to SharePoint 2013 that developers will need to know about.
Visual Studio 2012
SharePoint 2013 will include enhanced Visual Studio functionality. These enhancements include new Project/Feature/Package Properties, as well as new deployment options. Visual Studio 2012 also includes New Item Templates designed to work with SharePoint 2013, including SharePoint Applications (SPApps).
SharePoint Applications
SharePoint 2013 introduces a corporate catalog and a public marketplace, which is essentially an app store. Developers can now write applications that extend SharePoint sites using the new SharePoint App Model. In SharePoint 2013, SPApps can be SharePoint hosted using a client web part, Azure-hosted (auto-provisioned or on premises), or developer-hosted using Chrome Control or OAuth.
SharePoint REST (Representational State Transfer)
SharePoint REST is a new service in SharePoint 2013 that allows you to interact with SharePoint artifacts. It provides support for CRUD (create, update, delete) operations from SharePoint Apps, solutions, and client applications using standard OData and REST web technologies.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
SharePoint 2013 has made External Content Types (ECT) from external lists accessible via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services or OData. This helps users more easily consume and interact with external data sources located outside of SharePoint. External List Event Receivers and alerts are also now available in SharePoint 2013 along with filtering, sorting, and support for REST (Representational State Transfer).
Remote Event Receivers
In the past, Event Receivers ran imperative logic on the SharePoint server, but in SharePoint 2013 Remote Event Receivers handle events that occur on a list item, a list or a web in a SPApp. In addition, SPApp Event Receivers handle events involving the app itself, such as when it's installed or deleted. Remote Event Receivers can be created using the Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and the JavaScript Object Model (JSOM).
Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and JavaScript Object Model (JSOM)
SharePoint 2013 is all about hosting external application functionality in a SharePoint context. Those external applications (SPApps) will often need to interact with the SharePoint environment. In SharePoint 2013 CSOM has been greatly expanded to include the ability to access the query object model for online, on-premises and mobile development of search along with improvements in other areas. When it comes to JSOM, SharePoint 2013 includes support for JavaScript contexts, cross-domain queries and application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the workflow object model.
Workflows
SharePoint 2013 will include Windows Azure Workflow (WAW) Services, which is built on Windows Workflow Foundation 4. Don’t worry. The 3.x legacy is still there for backwards compatibility, which isolates logic into a service that is independent of SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 also includes the AppFabric Workflow Model, which provides a lot more flexibility on the scalability of workflows.
NAPA
SharePoint 2013 features NAPA, which is a browser-based environment that allows developers to build apps for the new cloud environment. It is an online companion to Visual Studio and can be used to create applications before fully migrating to Visual Studio.
Many portals, intranets, public websites and other solutions fail to deliver objectives and ROI within 6 months to a year because no one governs the solution. This series will share my high level SharePoint Business Governance strategy to help your company turn those success rates around.
The series will include: Introduction and Governance Strategy Overview, Governance Documents, Human Forces (Organization) and Project Governance. I will follow up with an additional post on Automated Governance and "From Strategy to Business Value.”
Introduction
In the SharePoint business there is a lot of buzz around governance today. Most of it is technical and involves how to automate governance with scripts and 3rd party applications. You can often read about how to script setups, manage sites, databases and security, etc.
Suppliers often say that they have a governance strategy to help your organization with governance planning, but what they really mean is that they can help you manage the solution they provide. Most often you get left all alone with a new “space shuttle” and a service contract to help out when the fire starts.
In the past 16 years I have worked in global organizations and had many roles where I have set requirements for projects and ordered solutions. I have too many times seen IT projects fail the organization's requirements, goals and objectives because of bad IT management. I have asked myself why we don’t learn from our mistakes, instead we make the same mistakes again and again.
Many products fail because a solution goes live before it is completed: that results in bad user adoption and usage. The end users get frustrated and IT tries to rescue the project by pumping in enormous amounts of recourses. This often ends up in the purchase of a new system.
Whatever it is that makes the projects fail, there is very seldom a supplier who can help the customer rescue a project or an already running solution. My belief is that many projects could have been saved if a supplier had intervened to help the organizations with knowledge, skills and experience.
To many, the word governance is the same as manage, but that’s not how I see it.
The word governance derives from the Greek verb κυβερνάω [kubernáo] which means to steer. To put it in context with SharePoint — it is about how one steers to reach one’s goals and objectives year after year, time and again. Business value should be the focus and the technology should be there to support that.
Governance is continuous in an organization, new needs and objectives will come along the way. The governance begins when the first thought/idea of a new solution arrives and it ends when that solution no longer helps you to reach business goals, or delivers a return of investment.
To govern a SharePoint solution requires organization, not only “Automated governance” but also human forces working together to reach common goals and objectives to deliver business value.
You are doomed to fail if you don’t have both. This is not easy in any way, but a very complex task. That is the reason I take on this challenge to help organizations reach their goals and objectives. Not as a one time occurrence, but continuously.
SharePoint Business Governance Strategy
Governance models often have the same name, but the content and the strategy within are very much different.
Based on my 16 years of experience in IT governance and many months of research I have put together a SharePoint Governance strategy that works.
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