Its time for the weekly roundup again. In the spirit of Guy Kawasaki, I’m doing this from 30k feet coming back from Vegas.
The “All Things Web 2.0” post by Bob Stumple is wonderful. When they say “all things” , they really mean it. The list breaks some services/products down into categories for easy discovery, but the list does not do the companies represented justice. The descriptions are a bit too brief. For example, Zimbra, and potential MS Exchange competitor, gets a measly three words to describe it.
Many of the products/services mentioned are based on mobile access to data, RSS feeds, sharing info, and online collaboration of a sort. I’m sure many of these will not go anywhere, but a few have been snatched up by large companies or are large companies themselves. When reviewing these companies and their services, keep in mind that some of the existing software you or your firm use may add similar features. For example, PHPBB (a popular forum system) may have tagging and RSS feeds built into a future release or there may be a free third party add-on. Switching to any of the Web 2.0 forum systems may or may not be a good idea since PHPBB is a very stable and solid system with lots of support.
Remember: cool features do not make a product or a company.
I hope that the Scheduling 2.0 category has a winner that will help me publish my free/busy times online so people outside our companies can see the available times for project meetings and con calls. That would be a godsend.
Next article: “Social Engineering Reloaded”
This is a two page article on the use of social engineering to break into computer systems or device other sensitive company information. The article is not overly technical so non-IT people should find it digestible.
Social engineering is the term used when a person uses trust to gain access to systems or sensitive information. For example, if I know that your boss is out of town on vacation and I called your company and said, “I’m with Company X, your IT support firm, and there’s a new virus infiltrating through unpatched routers. I need to update the routers with new security firmware. Can you remind me what the login and password are? We handle so many updates in a day, I cannot keep track of them in my head.” What would you do? The boss is away and you don’t want to put the company at risk, do you? If you give me the login info, then I’ve just taken the first step in hacking your network.
Take a look at the article — it’ll give you some perspective on what today’s companies need to do to protect your assets.
Next… Google Finance
There’s not much there, but its true they’ve gotten into the finance content business. I’m sure we’ll be able to look up stocks like we can at a thousand other sites. What else will they offer? From what I understand, they will have blogs from finance-oriented folks, too. So, how does this fit in with just cataloging the world’s info? Capturing and redistributing info from other sources is one thing, but having writers produce content is a shift for Google. Will they start doing this in other areas?
Check out Silicon Beat for commentary.
Next…Techcrunch Reports that Riya Launches
Riya is a facial recognition service site backed by some major VCs. The idea is that one can upload photos and the people in the photos can be recognized by the Riya service. I cannot wait to try this out and find out if any privacy freaks are worried about security. Someone hacking into this system could get a lot of inf on a person and take a photo to make an ID like a drivers license. This will be an interesting one to watch.
