Video streaming, file sharing — bad for network security, good for security business
Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, that modernized the firewall with its web application inspection took a look at what people do at work by analyzing Internet traffic in over 2,000 organizations.
Seems a lot of people watch videos.
In fact, Palo Alto’s semi-annual application usage and risk report says the bandwidth used by streaming video more than tripled to 13 percent from 4 percent in December 2011.
And that’s before the Euro 2012 Soccer Championship, the 2012 Olympics and the U.S. elections.
Apart from productivity issues and more money spent — a third of every dollar — on enterprise bandwidth for streaming video or filesharing — it opens the door for security breaches.
What has been dubbed ‘likejacking’ is essentially when a piece of malware gets downloaded as a user clicks to watch a video link forwarded by a friend.
“The risk of video as bait is more significant than ever before because of the elevated level of trust that social networking has established,” the report showed.
Blue Jeans Network’s chipping away at Cisco with video technology
Blue Jeans Network, a small rival of network equipment giant Cisco, is taking John Chambers by his word.
Cisco CEO Chambers’ mantra that video is the new voice all depends on how easy and simple it is to start a video call.
Blue Jeans, which claims it is the leader in making video services work together, says its new browser access technology does just that. (http://bluejeans.com/works-with/browser.)
All it takes is a browser and camera to join video meetings or audio connections thus allowing technology, which is often proprietary, to work with services that are often not compatible, its CEO Krish Ramakrishnan said.
So callers on Skype can hook up with people using Polycom for example
Video calls and meetings have yet to see widespread adoption beyond the corporate boardroom but new services and software are enabling a high-speed Internet connection and a standard desktop computer, smartphone or tablet can provide quality similar to expensive systems.
Blue Jeans says it connects everyone regardless of the systems used.
Online video service Chill snags $8 million funding round
Do consumers want a more social side to video? Some $8 milllion to Chill, an online-only video service that works via Facebook, says they do. The cash comes from venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talent firm William Morris Endeavor, and others.
Blue Jeans Network wants video meetings to be commonplace
One year after its launch, Blue Jeans Network has expanded the reach of its interoperable videoconferencing service and secured a third round of funding worth $25 million.
The company’s goal: making video meetings as functional as a pair of blue jeans.
Users of the service can access a meeting through Skype, Google, Microsoft Lync, Polycom, Cisco, traditional phone and now directly through their web browser. My interview with the Blue Jeans Network executives was a perfect test of Blue Jeans’ interoperability, with the four members of the conference on Skype, Polycom, a web browser and a landline phone.
Blue Jeans’ recent launch of a web browser platform increases the number of people who can join video meetings by more than 2.3 billion, its executives said. Access now requires only a webcam and Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Installing necessary plugins takes about 20 to 30 seconds, chief commercial officer Stu Aaron said.
Blue Jeans Network has also expanded its partnerships to include Cisco Jabber, Cisco TelePresence Systems and native SIP support. Aaron said the company’s approach to developing its platform has been “client-agnostic” so that users have the most options possible.
The videoconferencing platform allows for screensharing of presentations and documents in a user-controlled layout.
Because it is a cloud-based platform, Blue Jeans Network does not require heavy installation of hardware. It transcodes the video input from different services to allow them to work together.
from Paul Smalera:
Brad Feld’s four ingredients for thriving startup cities
BOULDER, Colo. -- One of the most resonant talks I heard at last week's Big Boulder conference was also one of the shortest. In about twenty minutes, Brad Feld, who is without exaggeration the godfather to the Boulder startup community, explained exactly why it is that Boulder feels like a town on the verge, and why it's teeming with startups. A lot of it has to do with Feld himself.
It's not just that Feld is a co-founder of Techstars, the nationwide startup incubator that got its start in Boulder, or that the college kids -- and lately, mid to late twenties startup veterans -- flock to Boulder in hopes of getting a few minutes of his time to discuss their ideas. It's not just that Feld's Foundry Group scored big with an exit on Zynga, though that credibility certainly helps. And it's not just that he picked Boulder as some magical perfect place to be a startup Mecca. In fact when I asked him why he moved there from Boston, he said, laughingly, it was because, "my wife told me she was moving to Boulder." He figured he had better go along.
"Happy warrior" is usually a phrase reserved for politicians on futile crusades, but the four principles that Feld talked about that make Boulder a burgeoning startup locale are ones that he seems to embody, not just talk about. And as to my earlier post, wondering where and whether Boulder needed a billion dollar startup (or founder) to justify itself, Feld more or less shrugged it off. If that outcome is a natural result of the principles Feld sees as key to keeping Boulder a great place to found a company, then great. If it's not, I get the sense no one, he least of all, would mind very much.
Brad Feld's four ingredients for thriving startup cities:
1. The startup community has to be led by entrepreneurs.
Everyone who's not an entrepreneur, says Feld, "is a feeder." Feeders can be useful, indeed even essential. Lawyers, bankers, shared workspace providers, venture capitalists, business services, city hall, even incubators, are all essential components. But if one of those groups get into the position of calling the shots on what the community should be, Feld thinks it won't work.
2. Take a very long term view of success; a twenty year view at least.
Freshplum takes data-driven approach to online pricing
Palo Alto start-up Freshplum hopes to take the guesswork out of digital commerce by using analytics software, data science and math to help companies make decisions like how to price merchandise.
After a month under wraps, Freshplum announced Tuesday that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures, as well as a number of current and former executives from Facebook, Google and PayPal.
The company was co-founded by Sam Odio, who formerly worked at Facebook after his photo-sharing start-up Divvyshot was acquired by the social networking giant. The other co-founders are Nick Alexander and Michael Yuan.
Freshplum will target small- to medium-sized online sellers with revenue but without the time to hire an analytics team. Odio said Freshplum will be able to handle data analysis for these businesses.
“Selling goods and services online continues to be more art than science,” said Odio. “Eighty-two percent of the companies we talk to price their products on a ‘hunch’ because they lack the tools necessary to dive deep into the data.”
AOL expected to dole out patent money in buyback- report
AOL has finally decided how to distribute the pile of cash it received from Microsoft when it sold the software titan the majority of its patent portfolio for more than $1 billion, according to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, who reported its will be in the form of a buyback. The announcement is expected later this week, Swisher said.
An AOL spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The patent sale was one of the big sticking points for the activist hedge fund Starboard, which failed in its attempt to gain seats on the AOL board during a proxy fight that played out in mid-June. One battle of many was over who first had the idea of selling the patents–Starboard or AOL. Throughout the spring both sides made their case: AOL had said it was already in the process of auctioning off its patents way before Starboard starting amassing a stake in the troubled Internet company. Starboard alleged it pushed AOL to liquidate the majority of its patents.
Either way, shareholders win.
Swisher cited sources close to the matter that said AOL ultimately went with the buyback after talking with shareholders and because it made the most sense from a tax perspective.
from Paul Smalera:
The platform problem in social media
The two speakers from Twitter -- Ryan Sarver and Doug Williams -- had just left the stage at Big Boulder, a data conference I'm attending in Colorado, when Twitter, the service, went down Thursday. Neither of them have anything to do with keeping the service up and running, but the restless audience probably still would've thrown the hotel-provided notepads and candies at them if they could've. Such was the level of dissatisfaction about the Twitter platform's outage yesterday -- and let's face it, any day a service we rely on goes out, even when the crowd in question doesn't consist of users and consumers of social big data, and the odd journalist.
The outage may have been poorly timed for Sarver and Williams, but the incident speaks to a larger problem the companies represented in this room are facing: building on top of social platforms.
Consider Zynga. The high flying gaming company, built primarily on top of Facebook's Open Graph, has faced record lows in its stock as investors have lost some confidence in the company's ability to continue growing. Or consider just about any other company, social or not, that is trying to reach its fans and customers in the social media world.
Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea walked me through the gently sloping path to hell many of these companies are facing:
"Marketers got [their companies or brands] a Twitter handle and a Facebook Fan Page. Then they went to their interactive digital agency to make the Fan Page look like the brand. Then they went to Buddy Media or Vitrue to run a contest to get fans or followers. Then they got Radian 6 and got a [social media] listening platform. Now they say, 'I'm analyzing.' Now what? There's a huge gap to their in-house [customer database] system they spent $2 billion to create."
Lea's company promises to help bridge that gap and be an "open door" between the social web and companies' internal systems, but read her words out of the context of commerce for a moment and it becomes easy to see that the problem she describes affects our entire social lives online. Just as marketers are now discovering -- building on top of platforms like Facebook have locked their customers into the Facebook experience -- our personal online data sets are held hostage by the platforms whose tools we use when we create them.
Many of the people in the room I'm in are either paying for or selling the data that we -- all of us who use social media -- are creating for free. That's not inherently a bad thing. Over the course of today I've heard how that data is sliced a thousand ways to make our online lives incrementally easier to live every day. Suggestions get better, advertising becomes more useful, information becomes easier to find, communities become more meaningful and frictionless. And that's just scratching the surface. But it all stems from the platforms all this data streams from. If users abandon them, or the apps built on them -- the firehoses of data grow weak, and so does the intelligence flowing from them.
Swipp looks to quantify your comments
Silicon Valley start-up Swipp says it has raised $3.5 million in funding from venture firm Old Willow Partners, an early investors in Groupon. It will use the cash to develop and launch its first products sometime in late fall. On the subject of what exactly those products will be, Chief Executive and co-founder Don Thorson was cagey. But it seems like he’s aiming to create a social network where it would be easier for consumers and merchants to analyze or make money from data than on say Twitter or Facebook.
“With (so many) people connected we should be able to do so much more than just tell each other where we’re having lunch,” said the executive, adding that conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter are “pretty cool stuff but not meaningful data. The bigger the network gets the smarter it should get.”
A basic Twitter search of a particular hot topic like a service price increase or a new product can already give a snapshot of how people are reacting, But that’s not enough for Thorston “We think that’s just a really 1.0 way of being able to extract information,” he said. With Swipp “you’ll have quantifiable data on that topic.” For example, it could figure out what percentage of comments were complaints and what percentage were positive.
So is it like tripadvisor.com but on a broader scale? Thorson would not be drawn much further on the subject except to say that he does not expect to use data from comments on existing networks, but rather from Swipp. It could take some time to build up a network , he acknowledged.
Thorson himself is no stranger to start-ups. He was chief marketing officer of Web telephony company Jajah, which was sold to Telefonica in 2010. Another start-up Ribbit was sold to British Telecom in 2008.
MinoMonsters releases new version, takes aim at Pokemon fans
By Mauro Whiteman
Apple iOS gamers who miss the Pokemon monster-battling adventures of their childhoods may come one step closer to fulfillment today with the release of an updated version of MinoMonsters.
While Pokemon’s console-based games aren’t available on the Apple operating system, plenty of imitators are. MinoMonsters, also the name of the company that develops the game, wants to become the clear leader of that group, says CEO Josh Buckley. So far, he’s raised more than $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists.
The updated title includes gameplay that brings it closer to the game it aimed to emulate by adding evolution of monsters, new boss encounters and more monsters. Pokemon, the wildly popular videogame franchise for Nintendo’s Game Boy and other platforms, boasts more than 600 different monsters with the challenge for gamers to “catch ‘em all.” “Millions of gamers have been waiting for a Pokemon-like title to hit iOS, and we believe this release brings us much closer to that hit,” Buckley said. Now 20, he was the youngest graduate of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that has spawned companies like accomodation service Airbnb and file-sharing service Dropbox.
Catch ‘em if you can, Nintendo.
