Joe Hackman — Page 26

3 Survivor Panel on Blog Talk Radio March 23rd

March 17, 2011 by Joe Hackman 2 Comments

If you are a fan of Survivor you need to mark your calendars on March 23rd for a 3 Survivor panel on Blog Talk Radio. I have arranged a panel that includes courageous cancer survivor Sonja Christopher from the first season, “Chess Grandmaster” Marty Piombo from the last complete season as well as one of the fan favorite and two time participant Yau-Man Chan. They will be live answering your questions and discussing past and present CBS Survivor series. You can follow the link above to the episode or just call 917-889-7887 at 7PM PDT on 3/23/2011.

: Marty Piombo

: Sonja Christopher

: Yau-Man Chan

Here are the panelists that will be speaking live with me and answering your questions on the air:

Sonja Christopher – Borneo

Sonja Eve Christopher was born and raised in Olympia, Washington. Her studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, the University of Oslo in , the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California, Berkeley, produced a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology, along with a teaching credential.

In December of 1997, Sonja was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. She underwent pre-surgical chemotherapy, followed by lumpectomy and radiation and has resumed a full, healthy life.

(Source – Survivor Wiki)

Sonja was the first person voted off Survivor losing to a 4-3-1 vote.

Yau-Man Chan – Fiji – Micronesia

Yau-Man Chan (born August 26, 1952) was the fourth place finisher in the reality television series Survivor: Fiji. He returned to the show in Survivor: Micronesia, where he was the third contestant to be ousted. He was born in Hong Kong to ethnic Chinese parents and raised in Sabah, North Borneo, Malaysia.

He is the Chief Technology Officer for Computing Services, Network Services, and Telecommunications at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and a champion table tennis player. Chan was also the 2005-06 Northern California Division Director for the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association. He has a Bachelor of Science (physics) from MIT and a Masters from UC Santa Barbara.

In the polling at the official Survivor website, Chan was voted as being the favorite survivor of the Fiji season, with a 65.5% popularity rating. The second-most-popular, Earl, only had 10%.

Jeff Probst called Chan an “unlikely hero.” There are just some people who have a way about them – instantly charming – that makes you want to pull for them.”

(Source – Wikipedia)

Marty Piombo – Nicaragua

Marty was a contestant, and Jury member on Survivor Nicaragua. Originally from Argentina, with the exception of his two sisters, Marty’s entire family still lives there. As a kid Marty travelled extensively due to his father’s work as an international engineer. After moving 16 times before high school, Marty attended boarding school in Connecticut while his parents remained in Argentina. Following high school Marty attended Swarthmore College, and later earned his MBA at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles while working full time for 3M Company. For the past 14 years Marty has concentrated his work in High Tech, working for companies like Excite@Home and Yahoo!.

Marty lived in LA for 9 years before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides with his wife Kathy and three kids – Sebastian 17, Sofia 8, and Cristian 6. Marty is an avid outdoorsman – enjoys winter mountain climbing, rock climbing, biking and swimming. Anything that contains a competitive element is what turns him on.

(Source – Marty Piombo)

Access the Episode Page

Do you have any questions for the panel? Call in and ask live or leave them in the comments.

Quoras Two Greatest Challenges

March 10, 2011 by Joe Hackman 6 Comments

This was my guest post on @Ginidietrich Spinsucks Blog on 2/15/2011.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’ve probably at least heard of Quora it has been particular hot among technophiles in recent months. When I joined I noticed that within my Gmail address book it found only two technology startup CEOs. Both of them had interaction on their accounts and knowing and respecting their level of tech/business savvy, it meant to me that Quora was something I should not ignore. So I played for a short time then proceeded to ignore it anyway, for several months anyway.

Why are we really there?

Amidst all the flurry of activity I started posting again on Quora, why? In addition to considering it my business to know and understand any new relevant tool I didn’t want to miss the boat. I actually think that this has more to do with why people are flocking to Quora right now. I also think it is probably going to be the very thing that ruins it. Vivek Wadhwa recently wrote a piece “Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype” and he made some great points. One sentence that invoked one of those “captain obvious” moments for me:

The quality of answers will decline.

Vivek also goes on to suggest a very different future:

What is more likely to happen and makes far more sense is that a new generation of private, gated communities will grow and evolve. This is where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas.

Anecdotal evidence that Wadhwa is right about Gated Communities

If any of you were present on IRC networks back in the 1990’s you will understand what Vivek was driving towards in his piece. In the mid to late 90’s I participated on EFNET where a lot of IT geeks asked and answered questions about technology. When I joined it was relatively civil and by the time I left it was like a warzone with servers frequently disconnecting, getting attacked and channels being taken over. Where did we go next? We relocated with a small group to a private channel on a much smaller network that lives on to this day 10+ years later! Which reminds us all:

Gated communities have longevity.

Voting Issues

You can find abundant questions about the number of upvotes on Quora having to do with everything from how good looking someone is to how famous they are. There is plenty of evidence that simple voting is not the best way to determine the best answers. To find out some insights on this I reached out to Hutch Carpenter at Spigit and he provided me with these insights about voting “weight” and community involvement:

Properly involving the crowd to identify top contributions is critical to a successful innovation community. If you only apply simple vote counts to identify top ideas, innovation is little more than a popularity contest. People earn reputations via peer responses to their contributions in the Spigit platform, which are used to weight their up-votes and down-votes. These weighted approval ratings go deeper than simple vote count, and help surface the best ideas which don’t necessarily have the top number of votes. This fosters an innovation meritocracy and ensures that top ideas don’t get overlooked.

As it sits today Quora is lacking this functionality and it will take time and great effort to produce better quality. They will of course have to achieve this while their system is being scaled up, challenged and gamed by users.

I will still visit Quora, particularly if I have a question to ask. It is one more place I can go in addition to LinkedIn answers or social sourcing via Twitter, Amplify, Facebook or my blog.

Photo Credit Dean Terry

Tools for Social Media 10 Minute Presentation

March 8, 2011 by Joe Hackman Leave a Comment

I was asked to give some tips in ten minutes to my Rotary Club on how to use Social Media more effectively. The average member might access Facebook casually and has limited time for Social Media involvement. After looking at their situation I came up with this presentation and delivered it this morning. It is a quick read but the suggestions I made could easily be applied to any business or cause.

Tools for social media

View more presentations from hackmanj.

The Era of Mobile Security has begun

February 17, 2011 by Joe Hackman 1 Comment

The era of mobile security has begun officially this February 2011. Some downright outrageous security flaws are being exposed for our growing fleet of mobile electronic devices such as Smart Phones and iPads. For the first time ever we posted two articles about security issues with substantial mobile security implications on our Facebook page:

Mobile Security Related Posts

Either one of those articles by themselves would have huge implications in the security of mobile devices, but the startling thing is that there are others popping up in the last 24 hours as well, and that is what compelled me to write this article for the Managed Solutions blog.

HongTouTou Android Trojan

A Chinese localized (targeting Chinese language users) Trojan emerged for the Android platform this week. The Trojan rode onto unsuspecting users via Android App marketplaces and forums.

$2,000 worth of equipment can extract Crypto Keys from Mobile Device Signals

Threatpost did an amazing job of describing a problem with how Cryptography is implemented on mobile devices. The problem results in the ability to actually capture and mimic the cryptographic key that could be for say your mobile phones payment system. This is particularly important because a lot of people see mobile as having a bright future in the payment arena.

iPhone Hacked and Passwords Stolen in Six Minutes

Fraunhofer has a video and press release demonstrating the ability to hack an iPhone and recover passwords in just 6 minutes. You don’t have to be an information security professional to realize that this is not good news for iPhone or iPad users that store anything of sensitive nature on their devices. Here is the video if you’re interested:

Thanks for the Wakeup calls today and kudos to Threatpost, Ben Jun, Cryptography Research and Fraunhofer.

Hyperalerts provides a hint of monetization strategy

February 17, 2011 by Joe Hackman 5 Comments

This morning I saw something new in a Hyper Alert notice that provided a hint of a potential monetization strategy:

The “We are hiring” portion of this alert is new, and could just as easily have been a paid advertisement for a product or service. This is both brilliant and appropriate as long as the ads don’t get more and more annoying and disruptive. If Hyper Interaktiv were to ask me my opinion about monetizing their service, here are some tips I would give them:

Limit the ads to one very small ad at the very top and any additional ads after all of the alert content.
Bend over backwards to protect the privacy of your users.
Build a community around your application and enlist the support and ideas of that community to keep your product viable.

Limiting Ads

The big concern with advertisements would be cramming too many of them in-line and ruining the clean and easy to read alerts that your system produces. A very small advertisement at the top of the page would be easy enough to read or skip over and one larger ad after all alert content could be easily ignored or read/clicked if they had interest. If ads were included in the alert stream itself it would disrupt the value of the alert messages.

Privacy is of utmost importance

Your users are already feeling pinched on privacy, there is a vacuum for leadership in this area from the provider side. Too few companies take the high road with this, the temptation is evidently too great to opt people in to features that they are not fully aware of these days. One classic example here in the USA is how we have to mail, call or fill out a form to opt out of our information being shared by our creditors.

Community Involvement

Too few companies fail to really engage and enlist the support and ideas of their users, or they do it too late. There seems to be great opportunity in this area to build a much stronger community and product/service by really listening and engaging the audience that is ready to be heard and to participate. @Ginidietrich really nailed this issue in a recent comment on my post about Headup closing shop:

See…we’re all becoming social companies yet so few actually engage their users. Sad. – Gini Dietrich, Arment Dietrich

It is evident to me that this is an example where a more robust community could have taken up the charge to help the product become viable and be a commercial success.

Hyper Interaktiv Weigh’s In

I contacted Are Sundnes to find out the official company position on this feature. He indicated to me that right now quality of the service has been the top priority:

This is all in a very early stage, and our main focus now is to make the service as good as possible. -Are Sundnes, Hyper Interaktiv

When I queried him more directly about any plans to monetize the service he said only:

We don’t know where Hyper Alerts will take us, but as for now we’re not trying to monetize. -Are Sundnes, Hyper Interaktiv

So what do you think, do you like my advice?